and different from the fear that she had experienced at home when the doorbell rang. It was more like an uncontrollable eruption. A reckless sensation that caused her to scream, coarse and loud, with a voice that did not resemble her own in the least.
“Fascistes! Fils de pute!”
The rebuke was heard loud and clear, in perfect French. That’s exactly what she said. There were five of them. All were wearing leather jackets and high boots, like cocks with their spurs. But where the hell was her self-assurance and sangfroid? She had her regrets when it was already too late. An older man exiting the door from the post office looked her up and down with disapproval. The French, always so restrained.
The tallest one of the group became defiant and began walking toward her, taking big strides. She could have found safe haven in a store, café, or in the very post office, but she didn’t. It did not occur to her. She simply changed direction, cutting the corner onto a narrow street with balconies looming above. She walked, trying not to accelerate the pace, instinctively protecting herself by holding her handbag tightly over her abdomen. Aware of the footsteps behind her. Cautious. Without turning around to look. When she had barely made it around the entire block, she was able to perfectly hear, word for word, what the individual on her trail had directed at her. A voice as cutting as a handsaw. And that’s when she started running. As fast as she could. Without caring about where she was going, as if her running had nothing to do with the threat she’d just heard but with another reason. Something inside, blocking her, as if she were being held captive in a labyrinth. And she was. Her mouth was dry, and she felt a pang of shame and humiliation heading up her esophagus, like the time when she was a child at school and her classmates poked fun at her customs. She went back to being that little girl in a white blouse and plaid skirt, forbidden to touch coins during the Sabbath. Someone who, deep down in her soul and with all her might, hated being Jewish, because it made her vulnerable. Being Jewish was a blue scarf speckled with snow in a doorway of a spice shop, her mother crouched over and keeping her head low. Now she was dodging the passersby she was brusquely meeting head-on, making them do a double-take: a young woman in such a rush could only be trying to escape herself. She took a quick left onto a passageway with gray mansard roofs and a smell of cauliflower soup that turned her stomach. And there she had no choice but to stop. At a corner, she grabbed onto a lead gutter and vomited all the tea from breakfast.
It was after twelve when she finally arrived at Le Dôme Café. Her skin moist with sweat, her hair wet and pushed back.
“What on earth happened to you?” asked Ruth.
With shoulders hunched, Gerta sank her hands into her pockets and made herself comfortable in one of the wicker chairs without responding. Or if she had, it was done in an elusive manner.
“I want to go to Chez Capoulade tonight” was all she offered. “If you want to join me, fine. If not, I’ll go alone.”
Her friend’s expression grew serious. Her eyes appeared to be busy forming opinions, jumping to their own conclusions. She knew Gerta all too well.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
That could mean a number of things, thought Ruth. And one of them meant going back to the beginning. Winding up in the same place they thought they had escaped. But she kept quiet. She understood Gerta. How could she not? If she herself wanted to curl up and die each time she was at the Center for Refugees’ section 4, where she worked, and was obliged to turn the newly arrived away, to other neighborhoods, where it was known that they’d also be rejected because there was no longer a way to offer shelter and food to everyone? The largest flood of refugees had arrived at the worst moment, just as unemployment was at its highest. The majority of the French believed they’d take the bread right out of their mouths; that’s why there were more anti-Semitic protests in the streets. It was a bandwagon that had started in Germany and that was dangerously spreading everywhere.
Most of the refugees had to pass around the same 1,000-franc bill to present to the French customs authorities to prove their income and be granted entrance permission. But Gerta and Ruth were never as defenseless. Both were young and attractive, they had friends, spoke languages, and they knew what to do in order to get by.
“What you need is a real easygoing guy,” said Ruth, lighting a cigarette and making it clear she wanted to change the subject. “Maybe that way you’ll be less likely to complicate your life. Face it, Gerta, you don’t know how to be alone. You come up with the most absurd ideas.”
“I’m not alone. I have Georg.”
“Georg is too far away.”
Ruth directed her gaze at Gerta again, and this time with a look of disapproval. She always wound up playing the nurse, not because she was a few years older but because that’s how things had always been between them. It worried Ruth that Gerta would get into trouble again, and she tried her best to help Gerta avoid it, unaware that sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you’re busy escaping the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf. The unexpected always arrives without any signs announcing it, in a casual manner, the same way it could simply choose to never arrive. Like a first date or a letter. They all eventually arrive. Even death arrives, but with this, you have to know how to wait.
“Today, I met a semi-crazy Hungarian,” Ruth added with a complicit wink. “He wants to photograph me. He said he needs a blonde for an advertisement series he’s working on. Imagine, some Swiss life insurance company…” she said, and then her face lit up with a smile that was part mocking, part mild vanity.
The reality was, anyone could have imagined her in one of those ads. Her face was the picture of health, rosy and framed by a blond bob parted to the left, with a patch of waves over her forehead that gave her the air of a film actress. Next to her, Gerta was undeniably a strange beauty with her gamin haircut, her severe cheekbones and slightly malicious eyes with flecks of green and yellow.
Now the two were laughing out loud, slouching in their wicker chairs. That’s what Gerta liked most about her friend: the ability to always find the funny side to things, take her out of the darkest corners of her mind.
“How much is he going to pay you?” she asked in all pragmatism, never forgetting that however appealing the idea was to them, they were still trying to survive. And it wasn’t the first time that modeling had paid a few days’ rent or at least a meal out, for them.
Ruth shook her head, as if she truly felt bad dashing her friend’s hopes like that.
“He’s one of us,” she said. “A Jew from Budapest. He doesn’t have a franc.”
“Too bad!” Gerta said, deliberately smacking her lips in a theatrical manner. “Is he at least handsome then?” she mused.
She had gone back to being the happy and frivolous girl from the tennis club in Waldau. But it was only a distant reflex. Or maybe not. Perhaps there were two women trapped inside her. The Jewish adolescent who wanted to be Greta Garbo, who adored etiquette, expensive dresses, and the classic poems she knew by heart. And the activist, tough, who dreamed of changing the world. Greta or Gerta. That very night, the latter was going to gain territory.
Chez Capoulade was located in a windowless basement on 63 Boulevard Saint-Michel. For months, leftist militants from all over Europe had started gathering there. Many of them were German and a few were from the Leipzig group, like Willi Chardack. The place was dimly lit, no brighter than a cave, and at the last minute everyone would show up: the impatient ones, the hard-core ones, the severe ones, those in favor of direct action, the ones that could be trusted. Impassioned looks, irritated
