The Last Time I Saw Paris - Lynn Sheene [21]
Laurent . . . She grabbed his name like a lifeline and scrambled to her feet. Running for the door, she grabbed a coat and slipped on her shoes. She half fell through the bedroom door and charged down the stairs, one hand in her coat sleeve, the other hugging the curved stone stairwell. Another explosion and the building shuddered. Claire caught her heel, landed hard and bumped down another two steps before she wedged sideways in the small passage.
The walls reverberated around her. Her back was jammed against the cold stone wall, her coat bunched up against one shoulder and her feet pressed awkwardly against the opposite wall. A curse tore from her throat as she slammed the wall behind her with a fist. The world might be ending, but she couldn’t—wouldn’t—crawl to Laurent. Not this way.
Claire tasted blood and her lip stung fiercely. She glared into the darkness, wiping a hand over her mouth, the image of her mother’s cracked lips, clenched tight against food or water, burning in her mind. “You think I’m scared of you? You don’t know what bad dying looks like.” She pulled herself up the stairs and limped back to the balcony. She sat amongst the flowers and watched fires burn until the sun rose.
There was a certain look. A tight half smile, a nearly imperceptible tilt of the shoulder. Sometimes words. C’est la vie. That’s life. More often nothing was said. The weary eyes said it all. Claire recognized the look now. It was purely French. The way she read it, it meant, “Well, we survived that, so we may as well hold on. This is Paris, after all.” There had been many thats to be survived.
She first saw that look the morning after the bombing. She learned from Madame the Nazis targeted the Renault and Citroën factories in the darkness and dropped thousands of bombs in southwest neighborhoods in Paris. Nearly a thousand dead. And yet at ten in the morning, a man came in to buy flowers for his wedding anniversary. Thirty years married, a day worth celebrating. He was almost apologetic as he picked out the bouquets. But the look, a shrug. This was Paris. Life goes on.
A week later, June 11, and the air was thick with a heavy smoke that hung over the city like a shroud. The dingy sky smelled of dirty fires. No one wanted to think about what burned. Some said it marked the end of the world. Claire and Madame spent the day indoors reorganizing the back room, a wet rag stuffed into the crack between the front door and the floor.
The next morning dawned and they found they still lived. A mother came in for a large order of flowers for a fête that night for her daughter’s fifteenth birthday. The harried woman rushed to pull together all the details, making up for lost time after shops closed the day before. The greatest inconvenience, however—the government had abandoned Paris two days previous. Many invitees were bureaucrats and their families—the departure played havoc with the party’s seating arrangements. “C’est vraiment terrible.” The look again. Her daughter was only this age once. What could one do? This was Paris.
News got worse. The German army plowed through the last of the French troops to the north. The Nazis would be here any second. The Luftwaffe had bombed the heart of Rotterdam into the ground less than a month ago to guarantee a Dutch surrender. What might they do to Paris?
Claire took her first paycheck and bought a thin summer dress. It was the deep blue of a clear evening sky and swished playfully around her hips. She sprang for a little felt pillbox hat, dark grey with a ribbon in matching blue. She wore it that Sunday when she walked alone around the Left Bank. The city was nearly deserted but enchanting still. She rested on a park bench near the foot of the Eiffel Tower, craning her head back to see the rise of the massive spires. A handsome Frenchman sat beside her, smoking a Gauloises and unabashedly drinking her with his eyes.