“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
“Is there something fascinating on the sidewalk, Solange?”
“No, sir.”
“Then look at me, please.”
She looked up at him.
Apologizing for his rude behavior at the brothel, he now made a direct offer. “Civilized,” he called it. She would not be a whore, but his mistress. He would provide her with a suitable apartment, a budget for clothing and some luxuries, and appropriate – really quite generous – gifts from time to time. In exchange, she would… well, certainly she knew what she would provide in exchange, certainly they didn’t have to go into such details, did they?
Solange slapped him.
Hoeger had not been slapped since he was a boy and he actually glanced around the square to see if anyone had noticed, then remembered himself and said, “You are very rude.”
“As opposed to yourself- sir – who has just made an immoral proposition to a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“You are free to go.”
“Bon apres-midi.”
“Bon apres-midi.”
Solange was home before she gave in to her terror. She trembled for a good ten minutes, made a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to compose herself. Louis came over, but she told him nothing of the encounter, lest he do something foolishly gallant.
Two days later, Louis was arrested.
“It was a week from a Zola novel,” Solange told Nicholai now, lying with her head in the crook of his arm. “One of the bad ones.”
She said it ironically, dismissing the possibility of self-pity, but Nicholai heard the deeply buried hurt in her voice as she continued her story.
They caught Louis red-handed – stopped him on his bicycle and found the coded messages in his anatomy text. They hauled him to the cellar of Gestapo headquarters, where Hoeger went to work on him. The handsome boy was quickly handsome no longer. Unfortunately for Louis, he was brave, loyal, and committed, and would not reveal names.
Solange heard about it that afternoon. She went to her room and sobbed, then washed her face, combed her hair and put on the prettiest dress she owned, examined her image, and undid the top two buttons to reveal a deep decolletage. Sitting in front of the mirror in her mother’s bedroom, she applied makeup the way she had seen the whores do it.
Then she walked to Gestapo headquarters and asked to see Colonel Hoeger.
Shown into his office, she stood in front of his desk, made herself look him in the eyes, and said, “If you release Louis Duchesne, I will give myself to you. Now and anytime that you wish. In any way.”
Hoeger looked at her and blinked.
Solange said, “I know that you want me.”
He burst into laughter.
Hoeger laughed until tears ran down his fleshy cheeks, and then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and got up. “Get out of my office. The nerve of you. Do you think I would risk my career, betray my country, just for the honor of breaking your cherry for you?”
Solange stood her ground. “Can I see him?”
“Certainly,” Hoeger answered. “You can see him hanged. Thursday noon.”
In the square around the gallows where five ropes dangled from the crossbeam, a crowd formed and stood in sullen silence until a German army truck pulled up. Soldiers jumped out the back first, then hauled out a group of prisoners, five in all, who had been sentenced to death.
Louis was the last taken out.
There was nothing romantic about it, nothing heroic. Louis looked badly beaten, limp and in shock, his hands tied behind him as they dragged him up to the gallows. Standing there in just a bloodstained white shirt and dirty brown trousers, he peered out at the crowd uncomprehendingly, and Solange wondered if he was looking for her.
I should have given myself to him, she thought. I should have loved him completely. I should have taken him inside me, wrapped myself around him, and never let him loose.
A soldier went down the line. He finally came to Louis, jerked his head back roughly, put the noose around his neck, then bent down and tied his ankles together. At the colonel’s orders, they put no hoods over the condemned heads.
Louis looked terrified.
Other soldiers formed a line between the crowd and the gallows, lest anyone try to interfere or run up and pull on the legs of the hanged to break their necks and abbreviate their agony.
Solange forced herself to watch.
An officer shouted an order.
There was a crack of metal and wood and Louis dropped.
His neck jerked and he bounced. Then he hung there twisting – his legs kicking, his eyes bulging, his tongue obscenely thrust out of his mouth – as his face turned red and then blue.
Finally – it seemed like forever – he was still.
Solange walked away through the crowd.
She heard a man’s voice say, “He was a hero.”
“What?”
It was Patrice Reynaud, a railway conductor who had been a friend of Louis. Patrice kept walking, but repeated, “He was a hero, your Louis.”
“Your Louis,” Solange thought. If only I had let him be my Louis.
That night she walked over to La Maison de Madame Sette and went into the woman’s little office.
“I am ready to begin work,” she said.
Madame looked at her skeptically. “Why now, cherie?”
“Why not now, madame?” Solange answered. “Why delay the reality of life?”
“Your mother will not like it.”
Marie didn’t. She yelled, she lectured, she wept. “I didn’t want this kind of life for you. I wanted something better for you.”
So did I, Solange thought.
Life decided otherwise.
Madame Sette, of course, was delighted and decided to make an event of it. She spent an entire week promoting the auctioning off of Solange’s virginity. The girl would fetch a very high price.
“I will give you half,” Madame told her. “That is more than I usually give.”
“Half is fine,” Solange answered.
Put it away, don’t squander it, Madame advised her. Put your savings in the bank, work hard, and someday you can open up a little shop of your own. A woman should have her own money in this world, her own business.
“Yes, madame.”
The big night arrived, and the parlor was packed with German officers. Most of the local Frenchmen would have nothing to do with this, and those that would had been intimidated by word from the Resistance that it would not treat gently any man who bid for the virtue of a martyr’s girl.
Solange let Madame dress her for the occasion.
A crude mockery of wedding garb, the white diaphanous gown concealed little, her white lace headpiece was set gently on her hair that fell freely and shining down her back, adding to the image of virginity. Her makeup was slight and subtle, a little pencil to widen her already beautiful eyes, and just a shade of blush appropriate to a young bride.
Solange felt disgust.
Disgust when Madame insisted on examining her to verify her purity, disgust when she was being dressed up for the ceremonial travesty, disgust as she sat in the “bridal suite” and prepared herself for the event, disgust when
