“Not the same thing anymore. And as for dying, that’s a shame. But people die. There’s a lot of it about at the moment. He must have been—what? Sixty? Seventy? It happens.”
“So why lock up old men?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Julien. Those people in these camps are lucky. They get housed and fed free of charge, all their wants and desires looked after. And they’re hardly under arrest. It’s for their own safety, you know. Feelings are running pretty high about people like that. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner people like him leave the country the better.”
“He won’t be leaving now, will he?”
“Evidently not. And as I say, I’m sorry. But it is not in my area, and I didn’t know he’d been taken in. So don’t get angry with me. He was your friend, I know. And if I can do anything practical to help, just ask. But don’t ask me to mourn someone I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have liked even if I had.”
“In that case can you find out what happened to Julia? She was meant to be meeting him in Marseille. They were going to leave together.”
Marcel’s eyes narrowed as he thought. Favors were currency, to be hoarded and used with care. Julien, for the first time, felt like a petitioner.
Eventually he nodded. “I’ll make inquiries. All right? Can I go to work now?”
BUT AT LEAST when he made a promise, he delivered. A week later news came through. Julia was living in a pension near the docks in Marseille, trying to get all the exit visas she needed to leave the country. She had been there for four months and was likely to remain there, for it was daily getting more difficult to get out.
Julien could not work out whether he was more hurt or angry that she had not contacted him; in any case both emotions were overwhelmed by worry for her. It was getting difficult to travel, but the trains still ran sporadically; as soon as he could he went to Marseille himself to get her.
The reality was much less bad than his imaginings of squalid hotels, prostitutes, and the poverty of hunger; she was living in a tiny little hotel hard up by the docks, along with a dozen others in a similar situation. The owner was irrepressibly cheerful, remarkably so as it seemed that the chances of anyone paying her the full amount they owed was small. “That is war,” she said philosophically as she took Julien up to her room. “But what can I do? If I throw them out then I get others who cannot pay either.”
Julien knocked and walked in. She was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette, disheveled and with dark shadows under her eyes. She leaned forward onto herself when she saw who it was. She looked dreadful; tired and very frightened. He went to comfort her, but she waved him away. “Get out, Julien,” she said.
“What?”
“Five minutes. Come back in five minutes.”
He shook his head in surprise, but did as he was told. Stood outside on the narrow landing underneath a hissing gas light, until she opened the door once more and let him in. She’d put on a clean dress, combed her hair, tidied the room. The effort distressed him far more than the first sight of her; for the first time in her life she had been reduced to the conventional. His fury at her bubbled over because of it.
“Why didn’t you write to me? What are you doing here? Have you taken leave of your senses? What were you thinking about?”
She opened the window to let in some fresh air, even though it was cold outside. “I like the noise of sea gulls,” she said. “I think I’d like to live by the sea. I always enjoyed my stays in the Camargue.”
“Julia . . .”
“Sorry. But if you ask rhetorical questions you can hardly expect an answer. If you must know, I didn’t write because I couldn’t manage it, because I didn’t know where you were, and because I haven’t exactly been thinking straight since my father died. Did you know about that?”
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, of course. So am I.”
She shut the window and sat down once more on the bed.
“But I am not as destroyed by it as I thought I would be. Strange, don’t you think? I think it is, anyway; I have a sense of liberation. I am penniless, bereaved, hiding in this horrid little room. The man who looked after me selflessly all his life, who comforted me, protected me, helped me, loved me without reserve is dead, killed in a dank little prison for no reason. The world, the worthwhile part of it at least, seems to be coming to an end. And my main reaction is to feel more free than ever in my life. And at the same time I sit here transfixed like a frightened rabbit, and sooner or later someone will come and take me away as well.
“I’m a Jew, you know,” she added seriously, looking at him with an almost childlike intensity.
“I thought you might be,” he said with a faint smile.
“Well, I didn’t,” she replied. “Not really. My father always pretended we weren’t; I know nothing about it at all, but now the government says I am one, so I suppose I must be.”
“I don’t see why you’re so worried. You’re French; they’re only arresting foreigners.”
“Only foreigners,” she echoed. “That’s all right, then. Except I’m a foreigner as well. Another piece of news. I always thought I was French. I was convinced of it, in fact, but no: My mother was German, and I was born in Germany. My parents were traveling there at the time; my mother was ill, it seems, and they went to take the waters. I was born in Baden-Baden. Do you understand what that means?”
Julien nodded. “It means the sooner you get out the better.”
“It does. But I can’t get an exit permit without showing my identity card, and the moment I show that, I have my citizenship taken away and the police come round. So, I sit here thinking about my new liberty as an orphan. And, I must say, I have been drinking somewhat too much. Do you know, I’ve been drawing, after a fashion? I got some children’s crayons. Do you know what I’ve been drawing? Flowers. Vases of flowers. The world is falling to bits, people are locked in camps, I’m stuck in this place, and I have been drawing flowers.”
It was not her situation that shook Julien but her response to it, the overly dramatic way she spoke, the ill- considered gestures, the way in which she had forgotten so completely the way she was that she seemed almost a different person.
“You must get out, and you must let me help you,” he said. “I’ve come with money and the names of people who might help. Will you let me?”
She looked at him blankly, and nodded.
JULIEN WAS NOT certain how many laws he broke over the next five days; certainly there were quite a few. He derived no pleasure from it, but had no fear either. No alternative ever crossed his mind. Her safety was the only thing of concern. It was a strange transformation in him as well; up to that point he had scarcely even walked on the grass in a park before; throughout that period most people who were arrested and sent to camps were caught because they could not bring themselves to break laws that they knew to be cruel, even though they knew obeying would lead to disaster. The habit of order was not easily broken; once it was, it was not easily repaired either.
By this stage he was no longer wealthy, as one effect of the war had been to destroy much of the value of investments and savings. Even the money he nominally possessed was hard to obtain; when he heard of Julia’s whereabouts, he had reverted to old habits last employed in Rome. He went to a dealer in Avignon and sold him his precious Cézanne. Not for very much, but he knew enough to realize that he was given as much as the dealer was likely to get for it himself. Again a favor, he knew the man well, had taught his son. Such things kept civilization going.
The money he received was just enough for the bribes, the tickets, the payments required to get all the bits of paper Julia needed in the time available. There were those who could help, those who would do so if prodded with a little gift, and those who could be persuaded to turn a blind eye by overstressing his connections to people of importance. He took risks, got everything she required except for the precious exit visa. This she provided for herself.
She was brought back to life by his activity on her behalf, and disappeared one morning at dawn, coming back only as dusk fell once more. Julien spent a day in terror, convinced she had been arrested; he made inquiries but no one had seen her. So he sat waiting; there was nothing else he could do, his fear growing at every moment. When he heard the handle turn and saw the door swing open, he felt sure it was the police, come to search the room.
It was Julia, who walked in calmly and greeted him as if nothing had happened. She threw an envelope on
