Another fall when I had returned to France, I made my way to a large square walled by buildings. This was the side of the Marais I knew best, the side where my hotel, Saint Paul le Marais, was located. I followed Rue de Jarente into a large square, its perimeter lined with cafés and outdoor tables under awnings. Always, there were pots with geranium, ivy and impatiens. At Café Saint Catherine, Valerie waited at a corner table. As usual, she was early, and I was a few minutes late. We greeted each other with the customary kisses. “There is a table inside,” she said. Remembering our first meeting and an upstairs table, I dutifully followed.
Time after time as Valerie and I rode the Metro to visit with Germaine and Yvonne, then sat in cafés or at dinner afterwards, speaking of what we’d learned, I slowly realized that Valerie, too, had a story to tell. Whenever I asked, she would put me off, saying she did not want to talk about herself or her family. Was she shy? Was she hiding something? I understood these stories were like bruises, tender to the touch. I had hoped our continuing friendship would increase her trust in me, and yes, today, she said, she would speak. “Until the fifties, we had ration tickets,” Valerie said. “Clothes came from America, coats, shoes, raincoats. In 1961, I was still dressed in a raincoat given by the Americans. I loved this raincoat. Very military, but good quality.” She looked past my shoulder and into the empty restaurant.
“Often, you have asked about my mother,” Valerie said. “Now, I will tell you.”
During the war, Valerie’s mother, a Catholic, was married to a Catholic man. He died of peritonitis in 1943. After the war, her mother married a Jew, and Valerie took on her father’s religion and his identity.
“When her first husband died, my mother had a baby, six months old,” Valerie said. “Her father-in-law had a house in the country about fifteen kilometers east of Paris. Often, she went there with the baby. This man was a director of a large cosmetics company and received German dignitaries in his home. He was a collaborator. Of course, my mother did not know this. In September of 1944, he flew to Spain.”
What she didn’t say was that most likely he was escaping reprisal. The summer before, French soldiers, resistance fighters, and the Allies had fought their way to Paris and liberated the city. Soon after, the Allies headed for Germany, and French resistance fighters executed collaborators without trials. Rule of law did not apply.
“The odd thing was,” Valerie said, “my mother’s father was working with the Resistance. My mother did not know this, either. She was in the countryside when she heard Paris was free. She put her baby in the carriage and set off.”
Valerie’s mother trudged for miles. She stopped to rest beside the road, lifted her baby from the carriage, offered her breast. Paris was ten miles from her father-in-law’s house.
“My mother entered the Bois de Vincennes at dusk. Resistance fighters, German soldiers, and French militiamen were firing. Not all of the city was yet free. My mother kept walking. A truck stopped.” Valerie gestured.
She wanted me to name the truck. “An army truck?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, quickly. “This man said to her, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said to him, ‘I came back to Paris.’ He lifted her up into the truck.”
“The baby and the carriage?”
“Yes, yes, everything. So, my mother entered Paris with the army of the liberation. She was twenty years old.”
A family legend. A daring young woman walks into danger and winds up riding triumphantly into her city. But there were no cheering crowds, no tricolors waving. Swastikas had not yet been taken down. The streets were full of snipers, bands of resistance fighters, and pockets of German soldiers — all still at war.
Had Valerie’s mother suspected her father-in-law’s collusion? Was that why she had left his house so quickly? Was she afraid she might be implicated, or was she simply an impulsive twenty-year-old racing for home?
Valerie laced her hands on the table. “When you don’t face the truth, the truth comes back to you like a boomerang.”
Days later, at the Montparnasse train station, I hurried along a platform. I was leaving Paris and traveling to Valence d’Agen, then on to Auvillar where I was renting a room from Priscilla. My train was two trains, certain cars uncoupling and going in one direction, the rest of the train heading in another. Both my car and my seat were assigned. With my ticket in hand and my terrible French, I asked and found my way to the first train. I wrestled my suitcase up the steps. A conductor was standing nearby, but did not offer a hand. My umbrella, attached to the outside of my suitcase, broke free and tumbled down to the tracks.
Once on the train, I settled into my seat and looked out at cement walls and tracks. On a recent visit, Yvonne told me this story. One day in a café, she and a friend spoke of the war years. This was unusual; her friend wasn’t Jewish, and although they’d known eachother for years, neither had mentioned the war to the other. Silence had prevailed. Over coffee, this friend — I’ll call her M. — shared a childhood memory. M. and her mother were standing on a platform at this very station, leaving Occupied Paris and traveling to her grandparents’ home in the countryside. The child heard screams coming from a sealed box car. She asked her mother, “Why are those people crying?”
“Oh, those people are sick,” her mother said. “You must not worry. They will be fine.”
Was this M.’s atonement? confession? apology?
My train slipped from the station, its motion so smooth I barely noticed we were moving until the platform disappeared. We passed through a tunnel and into light. The usual low industrial buildings dominated the landscape. Soon we were south of Paris, passing through villages, then farmland, fields and orchards, vineyards. We were heading for Bordeaux, then on to Agen where I would board a local train and arrive in Valence d’Agen, the closest station to Auvillar.
At Priscilla’s River House, my second-floor bedroom was large and sparsely furnished. Thirty years ago, when the Garonne flooded, this house flooded, too, water rising midway to the first-floor windows and spilling into the living room, the kitchen, and halfway up the stairs. When it receded, the water left a damp river smell that oozed through my bedroom walls. I could still smell the musky odor.
I sat at my computer in jeans, a long-sleeved jersey, a sweater, a hat, and fingerless gloves. Priscilla was in Paris. We’d overlapped for a day, met for a visit at the Museum Guimet, and then dinner, but each of us had our own agenda. I was visiting memorial sites, one on the Boulevard de Grenelle, honoring victims who either died or were deported from the Vel d’hiv, the nickname for the infamous cycling stadium Vel D’hiver, now demolished, where French police had housed thousands of Jews — men, women and children — before transporting them to Drancy, the internment camp outside of Paris, then east to their deaths. This memorial was a small, fenced, grassy plot, full of weeds. A crumpled piece of paper rested beside a clump of dandelions. Silently, I recited the first five words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, because those were the only words I knew.
Now, I was alone in Priscilla’s house following her rules. In Paris, she’d been clear. If I turned on the heat, she’d charge me more. How much more, she didn’t know. She’d agreed to share her bicycle, but then said I’d need to buy her a new lock and chain. I didn’t want to argue about money. I hated to argue about money. I also disliked ambiguity. I closed my computer and looked out the window at the red-tiled roof of the house next door. I remembered our walk on the Chemin. Even then, I’d felt used. Priscilla had asked me to secure our ride. She’d sent me to the pharmacy to buy sunscreen and bug repellent, both expensive items. Now, I was cold, but I didn’t turn on the heat.
I told myself that in spite of my discomfort, I was pleased to be back in my beloved village of Auvillar and falling again into its rhythm. I was at ease flying alone across the sea, touring Paris, riding the Metro, and settling into life in this village. I loved hanging my wash outside on a line, climbing the hill to the centre-ville and picking figs along the way. Perhaps, my friendship with Priscilla wasn’t as mutual as I would like. Perhaps, I was being petty. With the new lock and chain in the front basket, I wheeled the bicycle from the garage. I was en route to the Peugeot dealer’s, the only nearby source of a rental car. With Germaine and Valerie’s help, I’d planned a trip to Beaulieu sur Dordogne, where Monsieur Le Hech, a local historian and friend of Germaine’s, would speak with me and show me la colonie. I couldn’t believe I’d come this far with my miserable French — a planned visit to la colonie, a place of mystery and awe. Priscilla had agreed to navigate and translate.
Riding Priscilla’s bicycle, I followed a roundabout and chose a safer, less traveled route to Valence d’Agen, passing fields of sorghum and sunflowers gone to seed. The road was narrow and flanked by ditches. No shoulder. Still, a driver sped past, leaving me little space. I held tight to the handlebars and stiffened my resolve. Keep the wheel steady. Do not swerve. The back of the car disappeared. I was alone, sitting up high on this old-fashioned bike, passing peach and apple orchards, the apple crop heavy and ready for picking. I remembered our walk on the Chemin, Priscilla telling me about France’s fertile soil, a nearly perfect PH. That was what had made France strong, Priscilla had said. France fed her laborers as they built the grand châteaux along the Loire. She fed her soldiers as they fought her wars. In France, food was not only sustenance, it was abundance and beauty. Those laborers and soldiers had eaten well.
I crossed a bridge and climbed a short hill into the center of Valence d’Agen. I passed the fountains with colored water, passed the railroad station, and followed a road I’d never taken.
At the Peugeot dealer’s, I leaned Priscilla’s bicycle against the side of the showroom window. No way to lock it. Priscilla would not have approved. At a high counter, I waited patiently for my turn. Only one man behind the counter. I quickly discerned he was the owner. “Yes, yes,” he said to me, “I have two cars that I rent. Both are normal.” He pronounced the word the French way, accent on the second syllable.
“Nor-mal?”
He made shifting motions with his hand.
The last time I had driven a stick-shift was my red Datsun in the ‘70s. Before that I had an MG, also red, a sporty car Dick and I bought shortly after our marriage, that I drove while pregnant with my first son. By the end of my pregnancy, I couldn’t fit my belly under the steering wheel. Dick drove me to the hospital and when I left, my newborn in my arms, Dick was at the wheel of our brand new black Ford Falcon station wagon, and that, I joked, was the metaphor for my life, MG to Ford, sporty car to station wagon.
The summer after my sophomore year in college, I drove a Hillman Minx with a column-mounted gear shift, and although I had paid for the car with money I’d earned, my father was the one who found it and negotiated the deal for me. I’d never heard of a Hillman Minx. No one had. And for good reason. The thing kept throwing fan belts. Late at night driving home from the Jersey Shore, I’d break down and telephone from an all-night gas station, “Dad, I’m stuck again.”
Surprisingly, he didn’t yell, simply said, “Do what you have to do.”
The Peugeot dealer waited for my answer. He was a man in his mid-forties, tall and broad with wavy dark hair, younger than any of my three sons. “Oui,” I said. “No problème.”
Leaving his parking lot and Priscilla’s bicycle, which he assured me would be fine, we went for a test run. I gripped the steering wheel of the black Peugeot with two fists. A stream of oncoming traffic flowed past. I eased in, riding the clutch, and immediately approached a roundabout. I shifted. The car stuttered, then settled into second. Now third. I was okay on a straight stretch. I downshifted, rode the clutch, turned right. Another straight stretch in third. I never did get to fourth before I was back in the dealer’s lot, turning the key and thinking: There is no way this man will rent me this car. I dropped the key into his palm. His face was kind. “You will learn. It won’t take long.”
At the house, Priscilla stood at the counter beside the sink and sliced a tomato. She’d arrived late the night before without notice. I dropped my backpack onto a kitchen chair. After finding a space heater in a closet, I’d carried it downstairs. If I couldn’t turn on central heat, I’d have warmth in the kitchen. We’d agreed to split the electric bill. I switched on the heater and sat with my back to the coils. Priscilla turned. “Now he wants me to accompany him to South America. I don’t think I want to go.”
The man she lived with — sometimes. Not the man in Boston, the Charlottesville man, the man who traveled for work and at this moment was still in Paris. This was the man for whom she’d designed the garden where birds fed, rabbits foraged, and a snake sunned, oblivious to one another.
I poured myself a glass of wine and returned to my seat in front of the heater. “Why don’t you want to go to South America?”
“Ah, cherie, it’s complicated. Maybe later.”
I sipped the local red, then paused, holding the glass mid-air. “Well, I did it. I reserved the car.”
“Ah, cherie, I’m afraid I can’t go with you after all. I must stay at home this weekend.”
I set my glass on the table. “Priscilla, we’ve had this trip planned for weeks.”
“You see, I thought we would go through Bordeaux.”
“I told you Bordeaux was nowhere near Beaulieu sur Dordogne.”
“Ah, cherie, I should have checked a map sooner. You see, I have business in Bordeaux.”
Now, I was the one who needed her. I didn’t know the roads. I couldn’t drive and read a map at the same time. My French was lousy. I was bad at nor-mal. Still, I had to do this. “So, Monsieur Le Hech speaks English?” Priscilla said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m wondering how you will manage.”
Without answering, I stood and shouldered my backpack.
“Going out?” she asked.
“For a bit.”
At Moulin à Nef, John and I pored over a map. He charted my route. I would stick to country roads and avoid the AutoRoute. Prettier and less stressful. According to Valerie, Monsieur Le Hech spoke a little English, but she would email my questions to him in French, just in case.
John folded the map and handed it back. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “People do this all the time. Trust me. You’ll make it.”
At the River House, the kitchen was empty. I prepared my supper, an omelet with cèpes — small brown flavorful mushrooms — fresh green beans and hunks of baguette. I sipped the wine I’d left earlier. Priscilla entered the kitchen and eyed my plate. “I thought perhaps you’d gone out for supper.”
I shook my head, refilled my glass. Priscilla poured from my bottle. “If you don’t mind. I’ll pay you back.” She leaned her back against the counter. “I suppose I should have told you sooner.”
I slid a slice of my omelet onto my fork. “I’m all set.”
“But you’re not going?”
“Of course, I’m going.”
“Cherie, how can you with your French?”
My eyebrows pinched. “Actually,” I said, drawing the syllables long, “I’m looking forward to the challenge.”