• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1338 0

school identified on their placard. His habit had always been to walk unresponsively past sidewalk acts and beggars. Now he wavered. He made a resolution. If he listened for more than a minute, then he owed them something. He scattered his change onto the square of dark velvet in front of the musicians. A twenty-franc piece jumped the edge, and he stooped to retrieve it. The trumpet started then, blasting Marshall’s ears. He recognized the song now—“Night and Day,” from the forties. Then, as the trumpet soared, it occurred to him that when he arrived here at the Gare du Nord—scared, wearing a Frenchman’s ill-fitting work outfit—his first sight of Annette had formed his chief impression of her, the one that stayed with him. It was her confidence, the way she strode across the crowded station, gliding past German soldiers. It was her carriage, the way she sported her beret as if it were high fashion, not a mundane piece of a school uniform. It was her liveliness, her self-assurance. And yet she was so young. He had immediately felt that he should protect her, not vice versa.

From the Gare du Nord, he took the Métro, changing at Châtelet for the #1 train. He wasn’t certain, but he thought the stop he wanted was the Palais Royal-Louvre. After emerging at the large square, he made his way to the colonnaded shops along the rue de Rivoli.

There had been a photomaton among those shops. One day Annette had guided him there. It was a cubbyhole on a balcony within a department store. He remembered Annette speaking to the woman there. He had practiced his mug shot, in his French dress clothes, and learned “regardez-moi.” The woman placed him against a white wall and aimed the camera at him. “Regardez-moi,” she said. Then, nervously, she packaged his photos in a cellophane sleeve and added a receipt, handwritten elaborately, with several notations. Marshall was eager to leave, but Annette was in no rush. Self-possessed, she exchanged a burble of French jabber with the clerk. Marshall admired Annette’s nonchalance. Finally, with a cheery “Merci, au revoir,” she left the shop ahead of him. He was to walk along the Colonnade, then cross the street and find the bench where she would be waiting in the Tuileries.

Outside, he remembered now, the sun was shining so brightly that the sandy surface of the winter garden, with its bare shrubs and twisted tree limbs, hurt his eyes. He had worn a suit of M. Vallon’s for the occasion. Even though it was tight, he had felt comfortable in the suit jacket, knowing the Germans would not expect an American to wear a French suit coat and tie. He had combed his hair at the photomaton. His photo was rakish, he decided later.

As he approached the bench, she stood and made her way, sans souci, toward the Métro.

At the flat later that day, Annette and her mother worked with the photos, creating a fake ID card for Marshall. Their equipment was kept in a carpetbag, which they were prepared to toss out the rear window in an emergency. The bag contained numerous stamps and specially printed forms to produce work-identity cards. They changed Marshall’s age so that he would be too old for the obligatory work service—the labor camps in Germany.

“It’s hard to think of so many new names,” Annette said with a sigh, as she pored over the telephone directory. “How about François Baudouin? No, there is a François Baudouin. There’s no Julien Baudouin, though.”

“It will be good for a stonemason,” said her mother. “You are a stonemason!”

“HOW DID IT GO at the photomaton?” asked M. Vallon when he returned that day.

“It went well,” Annette said quickly before Marshall could speak. “The photo is handsome. He is a true Frenchman!”

M. Vallon was a fastidious man, well dressed, calm. Marshall had noticed how he brushed his suit every morning before leaving for work, and he carried an umbrella on rain-threatening days.

M. Vallon said, “I was on the rue de Rivoli this morning, before you were there. It was just before noon. There was an unusual quietness, but then in the distance I could hear the German soldiers begin their