Sisters of night and fog, p.18
Sisters of Night and Fog, page 18
While Jessie-Ann fetches a vase for the flowers, Paul invites Philippe to the bar. Virginia walks over to the babies. The newborn in the bassinet is wrapped in a white blanket and wears a pink cap. She has puffy eyes and sleeps heavily. The toddler clutches the edge of the playpen. When Jessie-Ann joins them, the toddler reaches for her mother. Jessie-Ann lifts her out and allows the little one to explore along the oval coffee table in the living room, where the women settle.
Watching Jessie-Ann and her daughters, Virginia feels a pang, but she holds no envy or bitterness, only the quiet sadness to which she and Philippe have resigned themselves. In truth, Virginia can’t help but feel a measure of terror for this woman, having two such little girls during such an excruciating time. Virginia’s own mother’s letters no longer get through, but the last were full of anguish for her daughter. Virginia wants to assure Mother she’s well, but that opportunity is not likely to come anytime soon.
“It’s good to meet another American,” says Virginia. “To speak English.”
“Yes,” says Jessie-Ann, pouring them both a glass of champagne from the bucket on the table. “I thought I was the only one of us reckless enough to stay. Paul begged me to return to Minnesota, but how could I leave him? Then I started having babies. I spend half the day on my knees in thanks for the girls and half wondering what kind of mother I am to have brought them into life in Nazi-occupied France. But I’m glad I stayed here with Paul. And the girls give us hope and something to fight for. Though I can hardly call living this way ‘fighting.’”
“Yes, Philippe also wanted me to go, but I couldn’t. We belong together and we’re in this together, whatever we do, whatever end that brings.”
“That’s exactly where we’ve arrived,” says Jessie-Ann. “Paul kept worrying about me. But hiding, keeping our heads down, has taken a toll. We thought we were preserving our lives, but we realized it was eroding us. If we can’t be proud of ourselves, what kind of life are we living?”
The women look over at Paul and Philippe, whose dark heads are bent together.
“It looks like the men have made fast friends,” says Virginia.
“Like us,” says Jessie-Ann with a smile. “We feel a rising urgency to contribute to the cause.”
“We also feel that urgency. We’re speaking of resistance, yes?”
Virginia surprises herself by uttering the word so plainly, but with Michelle’s recommendation, and the ease with which the couples have fallen in with each other, Virginia doesn’t feel the need to proceed delicately.
“We are,” says Jessie-Ann.
The toddler has worked her way around the table and now looks up at Virginia, touching her legs and smiling. Virginia takes the girl’s hands and helps her to step carefully over the plush rug as she finishes her short journey back to her mother. Virginia touches the girl’s downy blonde hair, and a prayer rises in her heart for the child’s well-being.
“When this is all over,” says Jessie-Ann, “I want my girls to look up to me, not feel ashamed that I didn’t do anything while others were being destroyed by evil.”
Virginia reaches for her glass of champagne. “I’ll drink to that.”
27
KNOYDART, SCOTLAND
VIOLETTE
VIOLETTE COULD USE a drink.
“Just a wee dram?” she asks, putting on a thick Scottish accent.
Though the giant at the bow of the boat doesn’t reply, she sees the corner of the large man’s mouth twitch. The surly, grumbly Scotsman now in charge of her ever-shrinking team of SOE recruits pretends to be exasperated with her, but she knows she’ll win him over.
She and her peers—two women and six men, total—row through the darkness of the Loch Nevis to the Knoydart peninsula. Though autumn has just begun, the predawn air is frigid. The lodge where they’ll stay can only be reached by boat, and they set out from Mallaig an hour ago, with three other boats full of recruits promoted to the next round of training. Violette’s hands sting with blisters, and the damp coldness reaches her bones, but in spite of the unpleasant conditions and knowing how much worse they’re about to get, Violette feels exhilarated. After years of pacing around a figurative cage, escape into her new world happened in a flash.
Once Violette received her security clearance, and got Vera Maidment to agree to Tania’s continued care, Violette began training. Her cover is that she’s enlisted with the FANYs—First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. FANY allows women uniform, rank, and pay, and serves as a front for female SOE agents. When Violette called her mother to share the news, it was harder than she’d imagined to keep the secret. Violette still hasn’t reconciled with her father, but it would be hard to keep it from him, too. She thinks he’d be proud of her if he knew.
For the first round of SOE training, Violette spent several weeks at Winterfold, a requisitioned country house in Surrey. Since her group was destined for F Section, the four women and fifteen men had to speak French at all times and underwent intelligence, psychological, and physical tests that acted as a screening for further eligibility. Like her schoolgirl days, Violette found the time in the classroom setting grueling, but she, along with seven others, passed the tests and had been sent on to paramilitary training in Scotland. If she succeeds, it will be on to the next phase, whatever that is. If she fails, she’ll have to report to “the cooler”—an estate in remote Scotland under the guard of the Cameron Highlanders, where she’ll be exiled until she forgets everything she’s learned, or until the intelligence becomes outdated enough for her to return to civilian life.
She’s determined that will not be her outcome.
Violette soon spots the lodge of their destination: a solitary white dwelling nestled amid mountains, rolling and rising as far as the eye can see. It’s a simple and lonely place, wild and weathered, but it looks solid, like a sturdy boat on a tumultuous sea. Violette feels a kinship with it.
I’ll come here with Tania, after the war, Violette thinks. I’ll show her all the places her mother learned to be a soldier.
The thought gives her such joy, it takes her a moment to master the sudden rise of emotion she feels.
In the weeks while she waited to hear if she could advance, Violette spent every waking moment with Tania. Violette was astounded at how changed the child was after such a short while. Now a year old, Tania chatters like a little bird, adding new words daily. Lively and inquisitive, Tania reminds Violette very much of herself, but without the edge that so curses her. Whether it was Violette’s father who gave her that edge—inherited or learned—she doesn’t know, only that she won’t allow Tania to get it. Maybe Tania will have enough of Étienne in her to subdue that restless-tiger nature Violette has wrestled her entire life.
One area that continues to worry Violette is Tania’s care in the event of Violette’s death. Miss Atkins said the child would get a pension equal to that of Violette’s service rank of ensign, section leader, but she has nothing in writing. Miss Atkins promises she’ll obtain it if Violette makes it through training.
“Glaschoille,” the instructor growls as they beach the boat. “Bordered by Loch Nevis, which ye’ve just navigated, and Loch Hourn, which ye’ll see later. Hourn means ‘hell,’ which is an apt name for the waters along your home for the next month, where we’ll separate the boys from the men. We keep a cemetery round back for the ones who don’t survive the training.”
Violette grins as nervous laughter rises from the group. The recruits climb out of the boat, tying it to a post and lining up as the other vessels in the fleet do the same. It’s impossible to see the men and women in the predawn light, but she doesn’t miss the flash on the spectacles of the man leading a swarm of Scotsmen in camouflage and kilts coming toward them.
“Major Sykes,” says Violette’s instructor. “He’ll be taking ye off my hands. Don’t be fooled by his kind face. He’s the deadliest man I know. And ye don’t need to know the name of the men who’ll shadow him. Only that they’re of the legions of hell, in charge of your torture.”
With that, her instructor strides toward the lodge. After having so quickly taken to him, Violette is sad to see him go, and sadder at the look he gives her when he passes. The stern set of his forehead relaxes, becoming one of worry. Doesn’t he believe she’ll make it? She thinks she’ll find him later, at mealtime. She’ll convince him that she was made for this.
“Did ye not hear your command?” a tall, dark Scotsman shouts in her face. “Fall out!”
Disoriented, Violette realizes she missed the order, and stumbles to catch up, last in the group, cursing herself for her inattention. She’s being evaluated and scrutinized at every moment, and now she’s in the hole.
Quite literally.
All morning long, in and out of filthy holes, her team jumps and crawls. Muscles burning from exertion, as the sun rises over the recruits, she thinks she might not make it through this after all, especially when she realizes they haven’t been fed in twenty-four hours. Dirt in her eyes and her teeth, she joins the formations told to spread out at the edge of the loch. The recruits’ breath is ragged, and there’s a general groan when they’re told to swim out to the little island across the way—fully clothed, including boots—touch the flag there, and swim back, touching the flag here. It’s a race.
The moment the gun is fired, Violette darts forward, flying into a diving leap that plunges her into the icy water, taking her breath away. Fully awake, she strokes and kicks with all her might the hundred or so yards out to the island. Once her boots hit the opposite shore, she darts up the hill toward the red flag, aware of a man who has emerged parallel to her and determined to beat him, which she does. But her step falters when she hears a voice she recognizes say, “Good job, Vi!”
The moment of her hesitation and recognition of Henri’s friend Jack—her young dance hall partner—costs her the lead, and she curses as she races to catch up. Just after him, Violette leaps into the loch and swims with everything she has in her, invigorated by the confirmation of what she suspected: Jack and Henri are in the SOE.
No longer tired or hungry, Violette feels like a sea sprite, like a woman reborn. She and Jack emerge on the other shore, neck and neck. They race forward, laughing, gasping, shouting at each other, until Violette sticks out her foot to trip him, taking the lead and reaching the flag first.
The scowling Scotsman waiting at the flag shows no emotion. She only gets applause from Jack, the close second, while he collapses next to her on the sand. They can’t catch their breath from being so spent and laughing so hard at the absurdity of meeting there. When they finally do, Violette pushes up on one elbow and looks down at Jack.
“It was you and Henri who recommended me, wasn’t it?” she asks.
He gives her a boyish smile but doesn’t speak. It’s all the answer she needs.
* * *
—
VIOLETTE’S ELATION AT seeing Jack is short-lived. They’re largely kept apart, especially after their successful sneak raid.
On Major Sykes’s whisky stash.
Their punishment was running up and down the mountain until they vomited, a consequence Violette does not want to repeat.
The recruits aren’t staying in the lodge and given downtime at the cozy fireplaces as Violette would have hoped. They sleep in tents made from parachutes, under scratchy wool blankets that have never seen the washtub. They’re worked to the bone and must eat salmon and trout they have to catch themselves in the loch. They rise before the sun they never see fully, only glimpse through billowing clouds, fog, and stinging rain in the world of green, gray, and brown they inhabit. They crawl through buggy marshes and muddy peat bogs, hoist themselves up sharp cliffs, march, run, and hike until dusk. When they can barely stand from exhaustion, they’re given rudimentary Morse training.
Unlike Jack, Violette has not been tapped for proficiency in operating a wireless transceiver—the sole communication of their networks with London once behind enemy lines. She’ll be a courier or saboteur, but she still has to learn the basic skills. Wireless operators only have a life expectancy of six weeks in the field, so the others have to be ready to tap out at least a crude message to HQ if their operator gets burned.
Somewhere along the line—as the days blur into nights, her body covered in bruises, her stomach empty—Violette forgets the brief joy of seeing a friend. She forgets why she’s there. She forgets everyone and everything, except her assigned task at hand. Whether it’s a mock raid, wiring a temporary structure for demolition, an exercise in silent killing, or a thirty-kilometer hike in the rain, all she knows is that she must accomplish her mission, and she must do it better than those around her.
She doesn’t always succeed.
Among the staff of trainers and evaluators, she feels the tension of those who are rooting for her, and those who want to weed her out. Though they all have faces of stone, Violette catches the looks among them, the disappointed shakes of the head, the whispers through clenched teeth that precede furiously scribbled notes. She’s seen their eyes light up for other recruits but not yet for her.
Further distressing are the extremes of emotion she’s having difficulty controlling, which she knows a lack of sleep is exacerbating. The recruits are awakened around the clock by their hellish commanders and forced to wade through icy streams without adequate dress and memorize area maps under nearly impossible time constraints. In Violette’s mind, she knows the torture of commando training is not personal—it’s designed to break the weak so only the toughest remain—but in the nights, she loses all reason and becomes paranoid. Miss Atkins told Violette to expect discrimination. Many of the men, even in their own rebellious ranks, don’t approve of women in training, and they certainly don’t want pretty young widows with children. Especially when those widows beat them at shooting.
It’s on a morning after a failed raid—Violette turned left instead of right at a boulder and ended up getting lost, having to be found—and a long, painful night being tormented by self-loathing that she rises before the others, before the sun, before the wake-up call, and walks to the edge of the loch wrapped in her scratchy blanket. A sea eagle screams above her, and she imagines she’s the eagle looking down on herself: a lonely, broken woman, impossibly small against the large, uncaring world. She thinks back to that day on the quay, when she and Dickie were trying to get out of France. How small they must have looked from the gulls’ height, from the bombers’, from God’s.
She’s furious at God. Étienne taken from her. An opportunity of a lifetime, slipping through her fingers like water from the loch. She tastes the salt of her tears, running in her mouth, and turns her fury from God to herself, to her weakness. How could she ever think someone as unimportant as she is could make a difference? Maybe she shouldn’t go to war. She isn’t cool and calm like the rest of them. Her passions rise and fall like mercury in a thermometer.
Despondent, she turns back for the tent, thinking maybe today she’ll tell Major Sykes to send her to the cooler—at least she’ll have a bed and a hot meal—but a panting sound stops her. Through the dissipating fog, a stag appears. It’s regal in bearing. Its chest is puffed, its coat is thick, and it has a rack of antlers worthy of a king’s wall. The stag watches her for a moment before stomping its foot and releasing a deep bellow. Then it nods its head and thunders up the hill.
Étienne comes to Violette’s mind. He arrives so suddenly and so wholly she feels as if her blanket falls away and it’s his arms wrapped around her.
Courage, he says.
28
NESLES-LA-VALLÉE
VIRGINIA
VIRGINIA STANDS ON the terrace, wrapped in a blanket, staring out through the moonlit night at a stag. The thought of venison chili makes her stomach growl—she’s tired of eating rabbit—but she doesn’t know if she could kill a creature as majestic and substantial as a deer. Though the Germans required all firearms to be turned over to them, Philippe kept one of his guns. It’s stashed in the piano bench under a pile of Reich-approved sheet music, including Bruckner’s Adagio of the Seventh Symphony and selections from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Yes, she thinks. I could kill the stag. I’m hungry enough.
The sound of a gunshot, however, would call forth the German officer—a tall, bald man with a linebacker’s build—who has requisitioned a room for use on the weekends at Madame Fleury’s home. He hunts whenever he’s here, and his presence casts a heavy shadow over their sanctuary. Worse, Nan is becoming used to him because Madame Fleury keeps Nan when Virginia and Philippe travel to Paris. When Nan sees the German pass by, she leaps forward with greetings instead of growls, and he never fails to pet her and give her a meat treat from his pocket.
The stag sees Virginia watching it and stomps its foot at her.
That soldier will kill you, Virginia thinks. Will he kill all of us? Will he move in on me the way the one at Cancaval did all those years ago?
She sometimes thinks of that officer and his men. Mum and Grandmère have heard from Cancaval neighbors that the house and area remain overrun, but recent upticks in Resistance sabotage have created trouble for the Nazis there, who are already uneasy, aware that their extended holiday will eventually come to an end, if the Allies ever invade the coast like the rumors say.
Invasion can’t come soon enough. It’s the autumn of 1943 and, like a cancer, the Nazis have infiltrated every cavity of France’s marrow. German patrols have even started in their sleepy village, and French betrayers and collaborators are joining the ranks of the milice, the French militia, to be extra eyes and ears for the Nazis, to help ferret out the growing Resistance.
