Henry flattened himself against a windowpane, trying to create space between himself and the other men crammed into the passageway of the train car. He knew he smelled horrible. His blond hair was dark with grease. He hadn’t properly washed since sailing out of Baltimore. The restaurateur had apologized, but coal was in such short supply, he had just enough to heat hot water for baths every third day. That morning was not the day.
He also couldn’t prepare much of a breakfast for Henry. “One egg can cost thirty francs,” he said with a sigh. “I could not cook them for you if I had them. Electricity is rationed aussi. It is turned on for only one hour midday so we may cook dinner.” Instead he had given Henry a hunk of bread and cold coffee—the worst tasting coffee Henry had ever tasted. Thinking of the crow soup, Henry didn’t ask of what the coffee was made.
He kicked himself for not sticking a can of instant coffee into his bag before leaving home. He could have made a small fortune off that, he bet. The thought shamed him. But the price of eggs panicked Henry. GIs were getting 50 francs to the dollar, a great exchange rate for Americans. But that still meant the price of an egg could be a whopping 60¢. Back home the Richmond grocer who sold their eggs charged customers 58¢ for a dozen. Henry only had $196 with him—$150 from taking care of the livestock, $5 from working the short sail from Trieste to Marseille, and $41 from the tin can of “mad money” that Lilly painstakingly saved a penny, a nickel at a time. How long would that last him if he had to pay for a single egg what a dozen should cost?
Henry’s stomach rumbled loudly. So did that of the man squashed next to him.
Henry was in a pickle, for sure. It wasn’t like he could just find work here in France. All its people were desperately trying to make do, laboring for centimes. The café owner’s little girl had left at dawn to work as a queutière, a placeholder. There was a rumor that a poultry shipment was due into town sometime in the next few days. Women were already queuing at butcher shops, counting out their ration points. The café owner’s daughter would stand in line all day for someone else to earn a penny.
Thank goodness Henry hadn’t had to pay for his train ticket. The café owner had whispered into the conductor’s ear and pressed three packs of Camels into his hand and Henry was waved into line. Henry wouldn’t have to buy a ticket, he explained, out of respect for the late President Roosevelt. Henry wondered how far the French deference for FDR and lust for American tobacco would get him.
Henry was glad to have the windowpane to lean against. Many of the train’s travelers were forced to stand, swaying with its rocking, keeping upright mainly because of the press of so many bodies. The train from Marseille to Lyon to Paris was one of the few running. Half the rail lines still weren’t open, bombed by the Allies or cut by the maquis the previous June to make it impossible for Hitler to reinforce his troops fighting on the Normandy beaches after D-day with fresh soldiers from Germany. The Resistance had blown up thousands of locomotives and train cars and torn apart miles of tracks.
Inside the sitting compartment, wooden benches that typically held three or four were crammed with six. But the French were so thin, they easily packed themselves like sardines. Sadly, Henry noted how quiet they were. There was a grayness to their faces. Their clothes showed signs of multiple mendings. They didn’t look like a liberated people. But that would come, wouldn’t it? Once Hitler surrendered?
The trip dragged as the train limped along slowly on diesel instead of coal-fueled steam. It chugged away from Marseille, passing marshes and white beaches to the west. The sight of them triggered memories of the truck ride he and Billy had taken toward the Pyrenees—the vast mountains bordering Spain they had to cross to freedom—where everything had gone wrong.
Now there was something he had meant to do—write Billy’s mother and sisters in Philadelphia and tell them how brave Billy had been in the end. He needn’t let on what a pain in the neck Billy’d been before that. How much he’d whined about food when the maquis fed them what little they had. Well, there’d be time for that, Henry reassured himself. Nothing would change the fact that poor Billy was dead. His family could use a few good words about him whenever, maybe even more so after the war ended and American boys who had survived came home in droves.
Henry’s hands began to shake. Would Billy’s family believe him when he told them how hard he’d tried to bring Billy home? Should he have done more? Instantly, he was on the storm-wracked mountaintop, struggling to drag a bleeding Billy away from the German patrol.
“Hurry, Billy, they’re coming!”
“Heir entlang!” Rat-tat-tat-tat.
“I’m hit, Hank. Oh, God. Hank, help me!”
“I’ll pull you, Billy. Hang on to me.”
“Heir entlang!”
“Let go of me, Hank. Leave me. I’m dying.”
“No. We’re both going home, Billy. I can carry you. Put your arm around my neck.”
“Hank, go on. You can’t help me now. Get home to that pretty girl of yours.”
Remembering the sight of Billy’s brown eyes going glassy, Henry covered his face and whispered, “She doesn’t want me, Billy. Maybe you should have lived instead of me.”
“Pardon, monsieur?”
Henry snapped back to the train. He cleared his throat, coughed, and waved his hand as if he had simply choked on something. He tried to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible and focused on the French dialogue around him to keep his mind clear of memories.
His understanding of the language was improved a bit from having spent so many months last year with the maquis. But it was still pretty bare-boned. As before, Henry caught a few words here, a phrase there. It was like working a cryptogram or trying to find the hidden meaning in an acrostic poem. At least this time, he wasn’t having to assess whether the person in front of him was going to save him or sell him. What a nightmare it had been last year to catch the words Allemand for German, soldat for soldier, frontière for border, and argent for money and wonder whether the speaker planned to gather money to bribe German soldiers to get Henry across the border safely, or to lure Henry to the border and turn him over for a good price to the Nazis waiting there. That was precisely what happened to him in the Pyrenees, and what had happened to Billy.
Henry shuddered. This trip was already bringing back all sorts of things he had managed to bury. If anything, the flashbacks were becoming more frequent. Maybe exposing himself to all this wasn’t such a great idea after all.
One of the train travelers clutched a long baguette. His friend asked how much the bread had cost. The answer made the questioner curse and speculate that pretty soon he’d have to sell his house to feed his family.
“Au moins t’as toujours ta maison, mon ami.”
The man nodded. “Oui, c’est vrai.” At least his house, unlike his friend’s, was still standing.
“Les américains donnent des oranges aux prisonniers allemands.”
“Des oranges!” Grimly, the man joked that for one of the oranges the American army was feeding the German POWs he would give up not only his house but also his entire village. His son’s muscles ached, and he was weak, his teeth were loose. He worried about scurvy. His son needed oranges to prevent the disease—more than a Nazi murderer.
It took a moment for Henry to piece together what the men were saying. When he translated why they resented American troops feeding German POWs well, Henry felt his face burn with embarrassment. He turned to the window to avoid being recognized as an American. What a tragedy, he thought, that the United States treating POWs decently would make the French bitter. But far worse was the fact French children were suffering so from lack of food. Hunger was clearly the next enemy facing U.S. troops.
Henry kept his gaze out the window as the train ran along the wide, wild currents of the Rhône. It passed a dozen bridges blown on their eastern edge, beams and cable still dangling into the water, bricks strewn hundreds of yards from the blast of plastique explosives. The maquis had been very thorough in their work. Or perhaps it was the handiwork of retreating Germans.
The landscape reflected Henry’s state of mind—all the basics were there, but the things that made everyday life and getting back to normal possible were broken, disconnected. He wondered how the French would rebuild. Could they repair what remained, or would they have to tear it all down and begin anew? Which was better—reconstruction that openly contained scars from the past, or brand-new architecture that wiped clean a painful history? Which was stronger, more quickly accomplished? If the second method were chosen, what hole would be deep enough to bury all that rubble? Or all that pain?
In early afternoon, the train chugged into Montélimar. One more stop to Valence. The train jostled with people getting on and off. Their shoes—still soled with wood instead of rubber, which had been requisitioned for tires during the Occupation—clacked loudly on the iron-grate stairs.
A pretty young woman stepped into Henry’s train car. He noticed her at first because she didn’t seem half-starved like everyone else. She had a healthy voluptuousness that made him blush a bit. Her face was round, her nose long and straight, her eyes large and almond-shaped. She had that idiosyncratic French beauty about her that Henry had first come to appreciate in Claudette, the young, fiery Resistant who took him in after he escaped the Gestapo. He winced, remembering how he met Claudette—stealing fruit from her orchard, starving, broken. Her yellow-green, catlike eyes had looked at him with such disdain.
As the girl neared, Henry noticed bruising around her cheekbones. She nervously tugged on the colorful silk scarf she’d tied round her head.
“La femme au turban,” a man beside Henry hissed.
Henry glanced at him in surprise. The man had been silent, his eyes half closed the whole trip. It was like a giant snake had awakened. He nudged the man next to him, repeating the phrase “turban woman” and adding collabo horizontale.
That man passed the nudge and the words: la femme au turban. Instantly all the men were on alert, sneering.
The young woman looked at each one, defiantly at first. She turned red and then very, very pale. She backed her way out of the compartment and spent the next hour clinging to the hand bar of the platform linking the cars, her skirt whipping around her in the wind. At one point her scarf was blown loose. She caught it before it flew away. She was bald.
Now Henry understood. She’d been shaven. Her scarf, her “turban,” was like the scarlet letter in that Hawthorne novel he’d read in high school. It was the clear marker that the girl had had a romance with a German soldier. Until her hair grew back, she’d be shunned—or worse.
Claudette had threatened to stab a teenager accused of such dalliances. Claudette’s passions—loyalty, love, and hatred alike—ran hot. That trait both attracted and repulsed Henry. In many ways, Claudette reminded him of Patsy—a Patsy who was boiled down, distilled. If Patsy had been faced with the same kind of dangers and tragedies Claudette endured, she might have condensed into the same fury.
Henry’s thoughts went to a recent conversation with Patsy—a painful one. “Sometimes when you kiss me it feels like you’re searching for something, Henry,” she’d whispered, uncharacteristically unsure of herself. “Almost like your mind is elsewhere, on something—on someone—else. Henry,” her voice grew hoarse as she asked, “was there someone else in France?”
No, Pats. That kiss with Claudette, that night by the Morvan pond—that was searching for you.
He should have told her that, but he’d just fibbed instead, saying no, there wasn’t. Truth be known, he did think often of Claudette. He’d stopped her from attacking the accused girl and sacrificed himself to save Claudette from being captured, and these were the only actions he was proud of during his run for freedom. Had Claudette knifed the girl, Claudette would have become as pitiless as the Gestapo—she’d be ruined. Henry thought back to the old German sergeant who had let him go. That kind of mercy, that kind of respect for life, was needed now to restore peace, to rebuild.
But maybe that was easier said than done here, where people had been tormented daily, starved, and set upon one another by the Nazis like in a cockfight—neighbors denouncing one another for revenge, for bread, to save their own skin, to be rid of people they thought troublesome or annoying or racially inferior. Given the suspicions, the residual and justified anger still smoldering in France, it would take real courage to stand up to a mob bent on revenge. Henry could see that their hatred would easily turn on anyone disagreeing or arguing against them.
At Valence, the turbaned girl jumped to the ground before the train pulled to a complete stop. She hurried through the station. Henry was glad to see her slip away safely. No one noticed her because there was a huge commotion along the tracks. People had surrounded a horse-drawn grocery wagon. They were waving sticks, brooms, umbrellas, and shouting.
“Du beurre!” a man from the crowd called into the train. The cart had butter in it. The food ministry had ordered it shipped to Paris, to be sold there. The mob was trying to stop it. “C’est notre beurre! Venez! Aidez-nous!”
The man’s cries sparked a small riot. Henry was knocked about by passengers shouting and pushing to the exit. They rushed to the butter cart, shrieking at the driver to sell the butter to them, rather than loading it onto the train for Paris.
“Moi!” They shoved and elbowed one another to be first. “Moi d’abord!” There was a madness among the people, a desperation that sickened Henry.
For butter.
He waded through the crowd and hurried to the edge of the train station to get his bearings. Far in the distance, on the eastern horizon, rose a long jagged shadow, the purple-gray outline of the Vercors’s mountains and the pre-Alps behind them. Henry caught his breath with relief. Toward the hills, there would be space. Toward the hills, he would be free of the smells, the panic bred by hungry people crammed too close together, squabbling over the same scrap of food.
Henry had faith in the countryside, faith in good land providing hope and sustenance, faith that a people fed would be more merciful to one another, faith that in the hills that kissed the clouds, he would find Pierre.
Henry shouldered his bag and walked away from the chaos the war had left in its wake.