The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [111]
“It wasn’t until some days later, when we had resettled into our old lives in this stunted way, that I permitted myself to let go. Or maybe I didn’t permit myself—it took hold of me and I had no choice. The grief was true, and I could no longer contain it. I cried and raged until I ached.”
She stopped and sighed deeply. Marshall expected her to cry now, but she did not.
“Marshall, I am so grateful that you will listen. When we returned to that forlorn apartment, where our ‘boys’ had hidden, where they had helped us with the daily affairs, they seemed like ghosts there. We kept waiting for Papa to return from his office, or for Robert to arrive at the door. There were vacancies in our home. Nothing could be quite right again.”
She stood, went to a sideboard, and poured something from a bottle into two glasses. The room was warm and dark; only a small lamp burned. She gave Marshall a tiny glass of cognac. The brandy hit him like fire. She sat beside him again.
“We wanted to see Robert, but he was slippery. He did not want to see us. We could not understand. He had been in the habit of calling my mother tante, a term of affection, but now he would not answer our calls. We were very anxious. We wanted for him to give us details of Papa. Monique kept advising us that perhaps we did not want to know. It was clear that she did not want to know. We realized that Monique had had to be strong while we were away—living daily with uncertainty and fear and no news at all. Maman and I, who had seen everything, thought we could not be shocked. But we became distressed for dear Monique and Robert.”
She leaned lightly against Marshall. “Telling about coming home is for me as hard as telling what happened in the war.”
“Do you want to save the rest for another time?”
“No.” She smiled, sitting erect again and sipping her cognac. “If you live in Cognac, you must drink cognac. Or so they tell me. Is it well with you?”
“It has an after-burn!”
Bernard moved from his bed in the corner, circled in front of them, then threw himself down on the rug. Annette bent forward to pat his head. Then she resumed.
“When we returned to Paris, it was an anticlimax. We had been taken away ten days before the liberation of the city. Paris was happy. It had celebrated! De Gaulle had marched down the Champs-Elysées to Notre Dame. Even though the war continued through the winter and spring, Paris was free of the dreadful Nazis. And now the war was truly over, everywhere. Most of the déportés had already returned some weeks before we arrived, and we felt that we had been passed by. It was as if the déportés—and the awful knowledge that was beginning to surface about what had really happened—had disrupted the way of life for everyone else. Paris didn’t want to know what we had been through. They did not want to hear about us. Since then, all my friends have been the déportés and those who were in the Résistance. There is a deep bond. We don’t have to speak of the deportation because we know. There is that bond of memory.
“We had to resume our lives. We had very few resources, and it was two years before we received anything from the government. Maman returned to teaching, and she cared for Monique and me. She was strong again. Something in her was destroyed—do not misunderstand. She never overcame the loss of my father. But she went forward. Of course, what else was there to do?
“As for me, I attended special classes for the déportés and the Jews who had been hidden. I passed the bac, then studied at the Sorbonne, and then I met Maurice! And here I am now.”
She turned to Marshall and smiled.
“There is not a day when I don’t rejoice,” she said. “It’s the small things that give me most pleasure. I can see a butterfly on the window and think I’m in heaven. And yet … I don’t know how to explain. I know I am never quite myself ever again. I am not her.” She gestured at a portrait on the far wall. “I am not the woman she would have been,