The Best of Our Spies (48 page)

That night was the fourth in a row in which she had endured an interrogation by the British in a dank basement, insisting that she regretted what she had done and had been looking for an opportunity to tell them, but please let me rest now.

That night she was chased down the Avenue Foch; she knew that when she reached the Place d’Étoile she would be safe, but the faster she ran the further the enormous arch slipped into the distance.

That night she told Owen that she loved him and begged for his forgiveness, over and over again, but his face faded away as he began to speak and she never heard his reply.

That night stretched over three days and two nights.

She woke bathed in sweat with an elderly man and a middle-aged woman at each shoulder, both looking anxiously at her. As far as she could tell, she was in large dark room, with a high, beamed ceiling and no windows but the sun leaking in through a part open door. There was an earthy smell about and outside the noise of a farm. She tried to get up, but the man held her down. His touch was firm, but not harsh.

‘Lay still. A moment, please.’

He spoke French, with a heavy accent she couldn’t place. He had a kindly face, with deep wrinkles, silver eyebrows that gave him an owl-like appearance and just a few wisps of white hair. Her head was spinning. The woman wiped her brow while the man placed a stethoscope on her chest and told her to relax. He moved the stethoscope around her chest, placing it in different positions, listening carefully.

‘Good. You’re strong,’ he said after a while. He was holding the pulse on her wrist as he spoke to her.

‘My baby?’

He patted her stomach. ‘Strong too. But you must rest. You were found just in time. Drink.’

The woman held a flask of water to her lips. The water was cold and she drank the whole flask quickly before slumping back on the pillow.

‘What happened to me?’

‘The priest found you collapsed by the road – collapsing to be more precise. He brought you here. We are about five miles east of the village you stopped in. The priest saw you in the square there. He is a good man and has been keeping an eye on us. You have a fever and exhaustion. I gave you a dose of sodium barbiturate and you’ve been asleep for two days, nearly three, in fact.' ‘

He spoke to the woman in what sounded like a strange dialect of German. She nodded and went away.

‘We’ll get you something to eat, but you must be careful. Not too much for now.’

‘What about the baby?’

‘Don’t worry. The baby is getting all the nutrition it needs from you. It’s you we need to worry about. For now, you must rest. You will stay here with us. When are you due?’

‘Maybe a month? I’m not sure. Soon.’

He moved his hands from her wrist and held them around her stomach.

‘It could be sooner. Have you been healthy throughout the pregnancy?’

She nodded.

‘And active?’

She laughed. ‘I think that you could say that I’ve been active.’

‘Well, now it is time to rest. I’m a doctor by the way, in case you were wondering.’ He lifted up his stethoscope and dangled it. He was smiling, his eyebrows dancing as he spoke.

‘What kind?’

‘Before the war I was a cardiologist in Kraków. In Poland. I studied in Paris for a while.’

‘And during the war?’

The smile dropped and his long fingers drummed on the side of her bed. ‘You don’t want to know, not now. Here, some soup and bread. Thank you, Rachel. Sit up and drink it, then we’ll talk.’

The woman helped her drink the soup and spoke to the doctor in the German dialect.

‘
Ask her about
’ the woman seemed to be saying.

‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I meant to ask you. Who is Owen?’

‘What?’

‘You kept shouting it out in your sleep. You were delirious. It sounded like you were calling the name of someone.’

She shook her head, doing her best to look puzzled. ‘It’s not a name I know,’ she reassured them.

ooo000ooo

It was four days before she was well enough to get up and only then did the doctor tell her how ill she had been.

‘Another hour and I think you would have lost the baby. You were very sick. The fever was strong, but the priest found you in time. He was pleased. It helps confirm his beliefs. They were quite challenged after he met us.’

They were sitting around a large table in the dining room of the farmhouse. The top floor of the house had been destroyed by either a bomb or a shell, but the ground floor was functioning, despite the lack of windows and long cracks down the walls. The atmosphere was heavy with dust. The barn and another out-building alongside the main farmhouse had been made habitable and now she was learning who else was in the odd community she had ended up in.

The doctor was sitting across the table from her.

‘Do you want to tell me about yourself?’

She hesitated. ‘I’m French – a refugee. I was working in the north. Now I’m heading home… south.’ She felt the tears welling again.

‘Don’t worry. In time. Everyone here has a story too big to tell. That’s the story of Europe now. Let me tell you who we are.’

Before he started talking he walked into the kitchen and came back with two apples, handing one to her. ‘Eat, it’s from the orchard. You need to eat more.’

There was a pause while he ate his apple, including the core and the stem.

‘Imagine, four years I went without fruit,’ said the doctor, shaking his head. Another pause.

‘Let me tell you about your new companions. The girl who looks after the animals. Elisabette. This is her farm, or her family’s. Her parents and brothers were killed when it got caught in tank fire. A shell took out the top floor when they were all asleep. She was the only one who survived.

‘The rest of us, we had been inmates at a German camp near the village of Natzweiler, which is further into Alsace. The camp is about fifty kilometres south west of Strasbourg. Until 1943 they kept mainly political prisoners and resistance fighters there. You see Hans and Ludwig over there?’ He was pointing at the two Germans, both sitting on a low wall, surveying the surrounding countryside. ‘Both socialists who refused to help with the war effort in Germany. They were sent to the camp in 1940. It shows. They’re both insane now. It’s probably how they survived this long.’

The doctor got up and stood at the glass-less window, his back to her.

‘The rest of us, well we were taken to the camp from Poland over the past few months. You know about me. The woman who was nursing you, she’s called Rachel. From a city called Łódź. The four boys, they were all in the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish ghetto. Last year there was an uprising in the ghetto which the Germans crushed. These boys were found in a sewer weeks later. All six of us were at a camp in the south of Poland called Auschwitz. It’s near Kraków. If you imagine hell on earth, you won’t even come close to what happens there. Not even close to it. We’re all Jewish, you probably gathered that.’

She nodded, though she was not sure that she had gathered that.

‘The two women, the mother and daughter. They’re Roma – Gypsies. The Nazis hate them as much as they hate us. They were also in this camp in Poland.’

‘So how come you’re now in France?’

‘The Germans did not bring us to France for a holiday; I can assure you of that. It was not for the mountain air. When I arrived and they found out that I was a doctor, I was sent to work in the camp hospital at Natzweiler. From working there, I discovered why people had been sent to Alsace from Auschwitz.’

‘A German doctor was – still is, as far as I know – running an Institute of Anatomy at the University of Strasbourg. He’s a proper Nazi, this doctor. His work is to help prove that people like the Jews and the Gypsies are a sub-human race: inferior to the Aryans. You have heard that theory, of course.’

Her eyes were wide open and she nodded just once. Of course, she had heard those theories. It was not that long ago that...

‘What this so-called doctor was doing, I am told, was conducting experiments on the bodies of Jews and others to try to provide medical evidence for the Nazis. But he needed his bodies to be fresh, if you understand what I mean. So the Nazis arranged for people to be brought alive from Auschwitz in small groups, thirty or forty at a time. They were then kept at the camp and when their bodies were required, they were killed and taken to Strasbourg to be experimented upon.’

‘How were they killed?’

‘One day, maybe everyone in Europe will know. Maybe not. The Germans do not like to waste bullets so they have devised this method of killing a lot of people at the same time. It’s called a gas chamber. They force a group of people into a large, sealed room and then pour lethal gas in. They suffocate within minutes. They didn’t have a gas chamber at this camp, so they converted a nearby building. I don’t know how many people died there altogether. What I do know is that we were next. Then one day a few weeks ago the Germans evacuated the camp. With no warning. Some of us just wandered out. Prisoners were heading in every direction. The French ones wanted to head for their homes, the Germans were heading for anywhere but home. And us...we somehow randomly came together as a group and just walked. I didn’t think we would survive; the Germans still controlled the area, but near a small town called Raon-l’Etape a farmer hid us in his cart and put some distance between us and the Germans. We then carried on walking and came across this place. We should really head towards the Americans, I suppose. We’ll be treated as refugees. If it was just me, I would. Rachel too, I imagine, and the Roma women. But the boys, they are terrified. I think if they saw another person with a gun, it would finish them. At the moment, they would not be able to distinguish between Germans and Americans. They would only see men in uniform. They trust me, so I’m trying to make them understand what is happening. They may be ready to move on in a few weeks. That is my hope. Maybe they are young enough to recover. They are the main reason we are staying here, for the time being.’

‘And the Germans?’

‘Look at them.’ Hans and Ludwig had climbed on–to the roof of the barn now and were scouting the sky with their hands turned into the shape of binoculars.

‘I don’t what their countrymen have done to them, but it has an effect on their minds, you understand? The taller one, Ludwig, he was an architect before the war, apparently. A very intelligent man. In his sane moments, he will talk passionately about Bauhaus. Now he tells me that the owls have been sent to spy on us. He passes on to me confidential messages from the chickens.’

She did not know what to say and was not certain she was able to speak, her throat felt tight. She was staring down at the table, drawing patterns on it with her fingers. Between them, she noticed through blurred visions that the light surface of the table was darkening with her tears.

She felt guilty. If she told the doctor the truth now, would he believe her? And if he did, would he then forgive her? It was not as if she had no idea. As much as she would like to believe that she had made one mistake, that there had been a misunderstanding, that she was not aware of what the Nazis were really like, she knew that was not true.

The doctor was sitting opposite her again, his soft hands gently placed on top of hers.

‘Don’t be upset. The people of France are not to blame. You look so guilty! It’s not your fault. You look like a good person to me.’

Later that night she was sitting in the barn with the doctor and Rachel. The Roma women were in the house, the sound of the folk tune they were humming floating across the farmyard. The Germans were asleep and the four boys were cautiously walking around the farm, their heads looking every direction.

‘What happened to your families?’ she asked them.

There was a long silence. Eventually, the doctor translated her question for Rachel. His translation lasted a long time and then a conversation between the two of them followed.

‘We don’t know.’

More silence.

‘No idea at all?’

Another long pause as the doctor carefully straightened his shirtsleeves.

‘When a transport arrived at Auschwitz, people were separated. The old, the young and the sick – they were sent to these gas chambers straight away. People who looked fit and who had a skill, they would be spared, for a time. I was with my wife and my son. When we came off the train, it was chaos. I have no idea what happened. I just don’t think about it. Rachel, she had five children. She has decided in her mind that at least one of them must have survived, but she can hardly bring herself to think about it. Your question was a difficult one for us to answer.’

‘How old was your son?’

‘Twelve.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I keep telling you, you don’t need to be. You’re not to blame. And what about you? Do you have family?’

So far, he had not asked where she came from, or where she was going or what she did and she had told them as little as possible. They knew her as Hélène and had no idea that she was a nurse or that she spoke English and some German.

‘My mother...’ She could not say much more. Rachel spoke to the doctor, who replied at length.

‘She asks about your husband, your baby’s father. Where is he, is he alive?’

She gazed through the open door of the barn where the moon had lit up the farmyard, casting a silvery glow on the four boys as they silently walked round in a circle, one behind the other.

‘I hope so.’

The night before she gave birth she was woken by a commotion in the farmyard. Autumn was in full grip and outside the warmth of the barn a frost had already taken hold. She gathered a blanket around her and went out. Rachel beckoned her to stay back but she pushed past her.

At the end of the yard was a gate, beyond which was the farm track which in turn lead up to the road. Some twenty yards on the other side of the gate, standing on the uneven track were three men. They were all tall, standing stock still in the shadow of the night so it was not possible to make out any features. The two Germans were at the gate, pointing excitedly at them. The four boys were petrified, cowering in the middle of the farmyard. The doctor walked towards the gate.