The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [45]
“I will never forget that night,” said Gisèle. “That’s when we tried to protect Nicolas, and not let him see.”
“I was at his funeral,” Nicolas said. “I saw him dead. I knew what happened.”
Marshall pictured the barn. And Claude. And the cat. Félix.
NICOLAS AND ANGELINE offered to take Marshall to his train. As they prepared to leave the house, Nicolas handed the flight jacket to Marshall.
“For you.”
“Oh, no. It’s yours.”
“But I kept it for you, that you may have it again one day.”
“But I gave it to you, and your wife likes it! I have no use for it. I really want you to have it.”
Angeline seemed pleased, and Marshall was glad to relinquish the jacket again, but he thought later he might have misunderstood Nicolas’s offer. Damn my French, Marshall thought.
HE BOARDED AN EARLY-EVENING train at Chauny, and watched out the window as the growing twilight gradually dimmed the gray-green fields. The train paused at Noyon and Compiègne, stations he couldn’t recall. When he was on that train to Paris in 1944, he had been given precise instructions, but riding as a French worker had been difficult. He was wary and hesitant. Another flyer, the bombardier Delancey, was being sent with him, but they did not sit together. Marshall didn’t know the ordinary behaviors of French people on their daily business. Some women in mesh head wraps were laughing, but the rest of the car was quiet. At Compiègne a rush of people boarded the train, and a gray-haired man in a dark jacket sat by him, mumbling a question—probably “Is this seat taken?” Marshall thought his one-word reply had a scared-rabbit tone. He was sure he would be found out when he stood up, over six feet tall among the modestly sized Frenchmen. He was aware that the train could be bombed at any moment—bombs from the Allies, bombs from the Underground.
The particulars of experience often escaped him, but the outlines and the shapes of landscapes and skyscapes lingered in his mind. It was a discipline gained from flying, in always knowing where the North Star was, where the horizon lurked, which way was up. He had learned the outlines of airfields, the configurations of runways, the placement of hangars, the skylines of cities, the gentle curve of the ocean horizon, the wheeling constellations overhead.
From his seat on the train now, he watched as the farm fields yielded to ragged outskirts, which melted into factory buildings, which gave way to the switching yards of the Gare du Nord. It had been a long time since he had wanted to spend a day talking and laughing with a group of people. His stay with the Alberts in 1944 overlapped his visit now, as if he had jumped over time and might still be hiding behind an armoire or in a haystack with a cat. The shadowy figures of the brave people who had saved his life—in barns, in hidden rooms, on bicycles—were coming clearer, almost reachable. He welcomed them. After the ease and pleasure of returning to Chauny, he could almost believe that the girl in the blue beret would be waiting when the train pulled in to the station.
17.
BACK IN HIS PARIS HOTEL, ALTERNATING BETWEEN INSOMNIA and waking dreams, he could hear Annette Vallon’s singsong French, her playful teasing. During those three weeks in 1944 he thought he saw the soft baby fat of her cheeks grow thinner. Her mother insisted on giving him the largest portions of food. “You are large, monsieur,” Mme Vallon told him. “We do not need so much.”
“I don’t want this,” Annette said, moving a carrot on her plate. “You may have it.”
Perhaps she still needed the nourishment of milk, he thought. She needed meat. The milk ration, for children only, was for her younger sister, Monique. Food had been more plentiful in the country, on the farms and in Chauny with the Alberts.
He remembered the way Annette and her mother hugged so casually. He could see in them a happiness that persisted despite the hardships of wartime. Mme Vallon had embraced him too. She was small, and she had