The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [125]
She sipped her wine. “We were betrayed by someone who gossiped—a waiter at a café. He knew us and he made a careless remark to the wrong person. You never knew whom you could trust. The collabos were despicable!” She quavered. “There’s nothing more to be said about that.” She paused and drank from her glass. “Father Jean had lovely brown eyes and a ringing voice like the church bells. I can hear it now. When I go along the rue Saint-Honoré, I stop at the church where he was abbé, but there is no remembrance of him there, nothing on the walls. I notice that, and I wonder if Robert would be better if Father Jean had survived.”
She was quiet then, as though she were finished.
Marshall tried to pull his thoughts together. He said, “I hadn’t realized how precarious the Bourgogne network was, how much it depended on trust.”
“Yes, of course. You knew this.”
“I never really thought about it.”
“It was not necessary for you to know our difficulties or the real dangers you faced. There were Résistance agents arrested right here in Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the spring of 1944, when you crossed the mountains. But the Bourgogne was very successful, very tightly organized.”
Marshall asked, “The guy who ran the thing—did you know him?”
“Georges Broussine—yes. In fact we knew him, and the abbé, but we were not supposed to know anyone else. Georges had a genius for building a network of trust. When the Comète line was infiltrated, the Bourgogne had to take over, and that is why you had to wait so long in Paris. There were so many pilots waiting it was hard to find enough safe houses for them.” She smiled and shook her head. “Today Georges is reserved—perhaps too much so. Few knew of him then, and few know now what he did in the war. He trained in London with the Free French, you know. And he parachuted into France with radio equipment to start the Bourgogne. He made many escapades!”
Marshall wanted to ask if she had named her son after Broussine, but the waiter interrupted then, and after some exchanges over a con-fit of some kind, she resumed.
“When my mother and I returned from Poland, we were anxious to find Robert. Why did he not search for us? As soon as Maman felt well enough, she went to see him. I did not go. I did not know what I would say to him, and I sensed that he would feel the same toward me. We were both in a state of shock, I believe, and each of us in our own way had retreated. My mother had at Koenigsberg exhausted herself in her protection of me, and when she was so sick I had exhausted myself in my care for her. ‘Why does he not come to see us?’ she would say, agitated. He would not even speak to us on the telephone.
“Anyway, she was strong enough of spirit to go to see him first. She returned in tears. ‘He used to call me tante,’ she said. ‘They have destroyed him.’ He told her a little about Papa, only a little. Robert was apologetic and tormented with guilt. He had the guilt to be the survivor.
“Robert said to Maman, ‘The avis, the posters on the streets, promised to shoot the men who aided the Allies. Why didn’t they just shoot us upon arrest? It would have been better.’
“Robert told her he had been tortured at the rue des Saussaies in Paris before he was sent to Buchenwald. Fragile though he was, he would endure torture rather than reveal any of the safe houses or betray anyone in the network. He wouldn’t tell Maman what the Gestapo did to him, but I knew that they beat their prisoners with a whip made of woven rattan. The heavy stone walls muffled the sounds. I wasn’t tortured when I was there, but I know about the instruments of torture. On the fifth floor where they made the interrogations, there was a bathtub like a coffin, with a lid.”
She hid her face in her hands for a moment, then went on. “Maman was terrified that I might be tortured, and I was terrified that she would be, but we knew so little. We knew not to betray Robert or the priest or Papa.”
“Or Broussine,” Marshall said.
“Bien sûr.” She lowered her voice.
“After Maman’s visit, I