The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [102]
“ ‘Yes,’ Maman said. ‘Don’t worry.’
“Monique had the address book of all the aviateurs we had helped—about fifty of them. We had been prepared, and she knew what to do. She had hidden the little book in the clothing of her doll. Your address was in there. I thought about all of you a great deal after our detainment. I hoped that you would arrive home and that after the war you would have a good life. We were arrested long before the BBC would send its coded message that you had arrived safely.
“There in the prison cell I was frightened for Monique, and for Robert and my father and the priest. And the two Americans we barely knew. I remembered their new false names better than I remembered their actual names.
“Father Jean, who was very courageous, had been recruiting students for the réseau Bourgogne.” She paused. Her hands unfolded and fluttered up beside her ears like birds at a window. “Robert had been a student of Father Jean’s, but he didn’t have a heart for the priesthood. He was too worldly. The life of the escape line was for him irresistible. Everyone thought so highly of Robert. He was handsome, courteous, vivacious …”
Annette faltered then. Marshall waited quietly for her to continue. The summer light was fading, and bats were beginning to flicker above the courtyard. He had told her that he wouldn’t probe her with questions. He didn’t want to say something insensitive. He hadn’t known before that Robert had also been arrested, and now he realized that Robert had probably been sent to the concentration camp too—and that Caroline perhaps did not know. His view of Robert Lebeau kept shifting, like light and shadow flitting across the face of a mountain.
Annette sipped her wine and continued. “My mother and I never again saw the men who were arrested with us. We were told no news of them.
“In the middle of the night we were transferred to a large stone prison called Fresnes, south of Paris, and there we stayed in an overcrowded cell with three other women. We were all French, all arrested for résistance. The other women had left their children, all small children, I think, and they were frantic with worry. My mother commiserated with them, but she would not give up her belief that Monique was safe with our friends. ‘She had her instructions,’ Maman would say. ‘She knew where to go.’ The image of Monique and her poupée would not leave me. Eventually we managed to exchange messages with her, and the other women received messages smuggled in from friends, along with some small parcels of food, which they shared with us. We formed a bond then, after an uneasy start. Yvonne, Marcelle, and Jacqueline—three women we began to know intimately. In prison, the bonds become very strong. You have no one else, do you see?
“We maintained our dignity despite the closeness of our quarters. Yvonne began to withdraw, working herself into a ball and moaning now and then. One morning my mother ordered her to straighten herself. ‘You can’t wash yourself if you stay rolled up like that,’ she said. We had managed to create some privacy by hanging up a bed-sheet in a corner by the toilettes—if you could call it that. Well, never mind. Marcelle told us again and again about her three children who were at her mother’s when she was arrested, how she was innocent of any political activity. She was confused with someone else, she insisted, although her insistence began to break down eventually, and we never knew if she was truly not résistante, or if she had come to believe she was, weakening out of fear.
“Three times Maman and I were taken from the prison in an armored truck to the Gestapo headquarters on the rue de Saussaies for questioning. That was a frightful place. We had to wait for hours in a damp cell, where they had kept horses. The stone floor was covered with filthy straw, and there were no chairs. One day, about the third time we were taken there, I was waiting in the cell while my mother was being questioned, and when she returned, she was smiling. She whispered under her breath, ‘Robert left a sign that