IN THE MORNING, the internee whose job it was to clean the room would sprinkle water on the floor from an empty jam tin in which small holes had been pierced. A brush was provided, but for the dustpan he had to use a piece of card, from which the sweepings would then be thrown into a pail by the door. There were only two buckets for the use of the hundred or so occupants of the room; the other one was for food.
Levade was told by the head of the room that he would be on fatigues like everyone else. The most likely task would be the peeling of vegetables, which took place every morning in a room on the ground floor, not far from the main gate. It was tedious work, the man explained, but some people liked it because they could supplement their rations by secretly eating the potato peel when the gendarmes were not looking.
Levade felt lucky that illness had robbed him of his appetite. He heard the complaints of empty stomachs all day long, and witnessed a desperate bartering of half-carrots or small slices of bread for cigarettes. Since no communication was permitted with the outside world, the main source of tobacco – the only hard currency in Drancy – was the gendarmes.
A doctor on another staircase had advised those in a developed state of hunger and weakness that they could best conserve energy by lying all day on their beds. Word of this advice had reached Levade’s room, and many of those not on fatigues would pass the long hours between roll calls immobile on their wooden bunks.
The doctor himself, it was noted, had been seen by the gendarmes rooting through a dustbin near the Red Castle, looking for scraps of potato peel from which he would scrupulously clean the cindery dust of the courtyard and other waste or slime before furtively consuming them. He had been a gynaecologist with a large practice in the Opéra district of Paris, but this made no impression on the camp authorities, who decided that his scavenging should be punished by deportation on the next transport.
Hartmann managed to find a German paediatrician called Levi, who came to visit Levade one afternoon as it was growing dark. Levade was asleep when he arrived and was roused by his touch. He looked up to see two men staring down with concerned expressions, Levi and Hartmann, one on either side of the bunk.
Levi spoke good French, though with the pronounced accent of his own country. With no instruments, it was hard for him to diagnose Levade with any accuracy: he felt his forehead, took his pulse and inspected his throat; then he put his ear against his chest and made him cough into a cloth, where he examined what he brought up. He asked him how long he had been ill, how much weight he had lost and when he had last eaten.
‘You must at least try to drink,’ Levi said. ‘You have a cup? Get someone to bring you water from the pipe – there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m going to see if I can find a place for you in the infirmary. It’s difficult because there’s dysentery at the moment among the little ones. But you need to be in bed.’
‘What’s the matter with me?’
‘I think you have pneumonia. Your lungs are very full.’
‘And what happens?’
‘Nothing. Normally there’s a crisis, a big fever, and then either you survive or not. There’s no certain cure, even in the proper world.’
Levade looked at the German’s serious face, its dark features shadowed by fatigue. Clearly, he had not had the strength to pretend. Levade put his hand on the doctor’s. ‘Did you fight in the war?’
‘Not this one,’ said Levi. ‘The last one.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘We were considered proper Germans then. I resisted for as long as possible. I was making my way as a children’s doctor in Hamburg. In the end I had to go. I was in France for two years. My brother Joseph was killed in a tunnel just before the end. But I survived. And you?’
Levade was smiling. ‘I was there.’ He squeezed Levi’s hand. ‘We’re old enemies.’
Hartmann said, ‘When did you come to France?’
‘In 1940,’ said Levi. ‘My wife and children left for the United States, but I stayed to work in the hospital for as long as possible. Then I went to Paris, where I was safe for a time, until that big round-up in July. I managed to get down to Toulouse, but I was arrested there and sent to a camp. I was brought up here a month ago.’
‘And now?’ said Levade.
‘And now . . . When the trains start again, I’ll go where everyone goes.’
Hartmann said, ‘The wireless in London has said there’s no work at the other end. They say we just get killed. Exterminated by the thousand.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Levi with a twitch of German pride. ‘There are always such rumours.’
‘And do you believe it?’ said Levade.
Hartmann shrugged. ‘Yes, I think I do. I’ve been told the trains are starting again any day. They’re making a list now.’
Levade began to cough and the other two men pulled over him such covers as there were.
Late that night Levade was awoken by the sound of screaming. A woman had thrown herself from a fourth floor window and had landed on the narrow flat roof that sheltered the walkway along the inside of the rectangle. She had learned that her name was on the list of those due to be deported when the transports resumed on Thursday.
‘Stupid bitch,’ said the man in the next bed to Levade. ‘Now someone else’ll have to go instead.’
There was no sympathy for the dead woman or for the two men who died in the same way the next day.
That evening, at roll call, Levade leaned as usual for support on his neighbour, a young Rumanian who felt himself lucky to double his daily food ration in return for this slight service.
After an hour in the freezing evening Levade began to feel light-headed. He was aware of a Parisian accent barking names, but his connection with reality seemed slender. He could see that the lights had come on in the rooms inside the buildings, and they reminded him of the lit houses he used to see when, on winter evenings in the small suburban town where he had grown up, his father Max Rutkowski brought him home from school on the handlebars of his bicycle.
The air was so cold that he could barely breathe it in, yet he felt that what made him faint was not so much the thinness of the atmosphere as the thinness of time, as though he was at a great altitude – not of space, but of exhausted years.
He slumped down into the arms of the Rumanian, who laid him on the ground as gently as he could. He answered Levade’s name for him, and, when roll call was finally over, promised half his extra share of bread to a friend if he would help him carry the old man up to the room.
Later that night, before the lights were turned out, Hartmann brought Levade some soup he had saved and forced him to drink it. A dribble of the cold broth ran through the grey stubble of his chin. Hartmann kept a distance while Levade gurgled and spat, as though he did not wish to stand close to a man who, after all, had been too ill to wash for several weeks.
Hartmann took the empty cup and said, ‘I’ve got some news for you. They’ve put up the list of names for Thursday’s transport and they’ve also put up a list of reserves. They always do this. It’s about fifty extra names, in case of suicide or last-minute changes, or in case they find more room. I’m sorry to tell you that your name’s on the reserve list.’
Levade, for all his feverish detachment, felt the cells of his body violently protest.
Hartmann said, ‘If I can get you to the infirmary, they’ll probably take you off the list.’
Levade was still fighting what felt like waves of freezing vertigo. When he could speak again he said, ‘It makes no difference. Leave my name on.’
Charlotte was once more on a train. Her bundle of French francs was now almost at an end, but G Section’s generous forethought would be enough to see her through at least until she made contact with the name in the rue Villaret de Joyeuse in Paris that Zozo had given her. She had not had time to re-dye her hair before leaving, and there were traces of her own colour showing through at the roots. There was just enough dye left in the bottle Antoinette had given her in Ussel, and that night she would for the last time eliminate the gold and strawberry and barley shades that for the moment were concealed beneath Dominique’s felt hat.
Quite how she would manage to find and speak to Levade, she was not sure. Presumably detention camps had facilities for visitors: she would simply go to the entrance and make her request. Doubtless, there would be some form-filling and delay. It was likely there would be set times to visit, or even particular days of the week, but since even criminals in prison were allowed to be visited, she could not imagine that an innocent man would be denied such a modest favour.
Charlotte took out of her suitcase a sandwich made with fresh goose-liver paté that Zozo had pressed on her as she left.
When the war was over, she would return and she would visit all the people who had so unquestioningly helped her – Antoinette, Sylvie Cariteau, Zozo and little Anne-Marie.
And Julien, of course. For the rest of their lives, when each was mired in slack middle-age, they would make the inconvenient journey to the other’s country, despite the protests of their respective children. They would continue to laugh at one another and to indulge their love of what they had fought to protect. Their spouses would know nothing of the night they had spent together and they themselves would not refer to it, because it meant little compared to the joy of their companionship.
Her destiny was still with Peter Gregory. Nothing that had happened in her life had changed that conviction. For herself, she had no doubts: it depended only on him, on whether he had changed, on whether he still loved her and, most of all, she reluctantly conceded, on whether he was still alive.
She believed he was; or at least she would not let herself imagine otherwise. Perhaps, on reflection, it was not quite belief, it was more like faith. The difference, she explained to herself, as the train slowed for its arrival at Tours, was that belief was a logical conviction, while faith, because it admitted doubt, required emotional effort.
It was that effort that made her weary, that took so much of her strength, but the rewards of keeping the faith were high. She had seen the people of Limoges protesting their hatred of the English and the Jews, but she had refused to believe that they were typical, and that same night she had, at the time of the drop, been repaid by the sight of those men stumbling about their dangerous business in the fields. She had seen the eyes of Claude Benech that narrowed as he smirked over the long table in the Domaine, but she had also witnessed Sylvie Cariteau’s unquestioning efficiency and César’s boyish rapture. It was almost as though it was her faith that kept them going; she could not bear to look away.
Charlotte glanced up as the train came into the station at Tours. She was surprised to find the four other people in the carriage looking at her. Had she been talking to herself out loud? An elderly man opposite with a white moustache and a grey Homburg was staring at her lap, in which lay a piece of waxed paper with the remains of her sandwich. She looked round the carriage and smiled. Now she came to think of it, the aroma of brandy and garlic that had come off the fresh pâté was of a peace-time pungency.
‘Excuse me,’ Charlotte said, and reached up to her suitcase in the luggage rack, where she took out the paper bag that contained the rest of the picnic Zozo had given her. She had had the best part herself, but there was some brawn, some slices of rye bread and a little jar of potted goose which she offered to her companions. ‘My brother’s a butcher,’ she lied happily, with what she hoped was a charming smile. ‘Some people have all the luck.’
Two women were getting off at Tours and declined her offer, but the old man in the hat and a small woman with a headscarf helped themselves with incredulous murmurs of appreciation. It was the fattiness of the goose that obviously appealed to people who had been so long deprived of oil or butter. Julien had told her he knew a man in Lavaurette so desperate he had drunk half a litre of motor oil. To Charlotte’s dismay, her two companions felt they should pay for their early supper by making conversation.
Having given herself a butcher as a brother, Charlotte felt a hysterical urge to fabricate more, and more bizarre, relations – a family tree of jazz singers, rich industrialists or institutionalised lunatics. How tired my long, long caution has made me, she thought. But she forced herself, for what she hoped would be the last time, to be reticent: my father . . . my husband . . . since 1940 . . . She heard the words, bland and discouraging, then turned the questions on the others.
As the woman chattered on about her family, Charlotte allowed her mind to wander behind her fixed, indulgent smile. She thought of Gregory, of what her first words to him would be.
She was aware that it was now the man who was speaking, telling her of how regularly he took this train, but her reverie remained unbroken until she heard him say, ‘But after we’ve been through Châteaudun the SS always join the train before Paris. They drive up through Illiers and generally get on at Chartres. It’s such a nuisance with all their inspections and—’
‘What?’ said Charlotte. It was the word Illiers, taking her back to reading Proust’s novel in Monsieur Loiseau’s garden, that had snagged her daydream, but then she let the earlier words replay in her mind. ‘The SS?’
‘Yes, always. They’re such brutes. They know me perfectly well by now, but still they take me into the corridor and search me.’
‘I see.’ Charlotte licked her lips, then resumed her lighter manner. ‘Well, good luck with them. It won’t affect me. I shall be getting off at Châteaudun.’