who loved her, whom she loved, who would father splendid children to bear his name, who would fight for her and kill for her and for whom she would be an adoring helpmate. A whore in his bed, a great cook in his kitchen, a charming hostess in his living room … a man who would kill a son of a bitch like Ron Peterson for daring to bring her to this tacky, degrading room. Her pants fell to the floor. Catherine opened her eyes.
Ron was staring at her, his face filled with admiration. ‘My God, Cathy, you’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ He bent down and kissed her breast. She caught a glimpse in the dressing-table mirror. It looked like a French farce, sordid and dirty. Everything inside her except the hot pain in her groin told her that this was dreary and ugly and wrong, but there was no way to stop it now. Ron was whipping off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, his face flushed. He undid his belt and stripped down to his shorts, then sat down on the bed and started to take off his shoes and socks. ‘I mean it, Catherine,’ he said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘You’re the most beautiful goddamn thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.’
His words only increased Catherine’s panic. Ron stood up, a broad, anticipatory grin on his face, and let his shorts drop to the floor. His male organ was standing out stiffly, like an enormous, inflated salami with hair around it. It was the largest, most incredible thing Catherine had ever seen in her life.
‘How do you like that?’ he said, looking down at it proudly.
Without thinking, Catherine said, ‘Sliced on rye. Hold the mustard and lettuce.’
And she stood there, watching it go down.
In Catherine’s sophomore year there was a change in the atmosphere of the campus.
For the first time there was a growing concern about what was happening in Europe and an increasing feeling that America was going to get involved. Hitler’s dream of the thousand-year rule of the Third Reich was on its way to becoming a reality. The Nazis had occupied Denmark and invaded Norway.
Over the past six months the talk on campuses across the country had shifted from sex and clothes and proms to the ROTC and the draught and lend-lease. More and more college boys were appearing in army and navy uniforms.
One day Susie Roberts, a classmate from Senn, stopped Catherine in the corridor. ‘I want to say good-bye, Cathy. I’m leaving.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘The Klondike.’
‘The Klondike?’
‘Washington, D.C. All the girls are striking gold there. They say for every girl there are at least a hundred men. I like those odds.’ She looked at Catherine. ‘What do you want to stick around this place for? School’s a drag. There’s a whole big world waiting out there.’
‘I can’t leave just now,’ Catherine said. She was not sure why: She had no real ties in Chicago. She corresponded regularly with her father in Omaha and talked to him on the telephone once or twice a month and each time he sounded as though he were in prison.
Catherine was on her own now. The more she thought about Washington, the more exciting it seemed. That evening she phoned her father and told him she wanted to quit school and go to work in Washington. He asked her if she would like to come to Omaha, but Catherine could sense the reluctance in his voice. He did not want her to be trapped, as he had been.
The next morning Catherine went to the dean of women and informed her she was quitting school. Catherine sent a telegram to Susie Roberts and the next day she was on a train to Washington, D.C.
Noelle
Paris: 1940
On Saturday, June 14, 1940, the German Fifth Army marched into a stunned Paris. The Maginot Line had turned out to be the biggest fiasco in the history of warfare and France lay defenceless before one of the most powerful military machines the world had ever known.
The day had begun with a strange grey pall that lay over the city, a terrifying cloud of unknown origin. For the last forty-eight hours sounds of intermittent gunfire had broken the unnatural, frightened silence of Paris. The roar of the cannons was outside the city, but the echoes reverberated into the heart of Paris. There had been a flood of rumours carried like a tidal wave over the radio, in newspapers and by word of mouth. The Boche were invading the French coast … London had been destroyed … Hitler had reached an accord with the British government … The Germans were going to wipe out Paris with a deadly new bomb. At first each rumour had been taken as gospel, creating its own panic, but constant crises finally exert a soporific affect, as though the mind and body, unable to absorb any further terror, retreat into a protective shell of apathy. Now the rumour mills had ground to a complete halt, newspaper presses had stopped printing and radio stations had stopped broadcasting. Human instinct had taken over from the machines, and the Parisians sensed that this was a day of decision. The grey cloud was an omen.
And then the German locusts began to swarm in.
Suddenly Paris was a city filled with foreign uniforms and alien people, speaking a strange, guttural tongue, speeding down the wide, tree-lined avenues in large Mercedes limousines flying Nazi flags or pushing their way along the sidewalks that now belonged to them. They were truly the über Mensch, and it was their destiny to conquer and rule the world.
Within two weeks an amazing transformation had taken place. Signs in German appeared everywhere. Statues of French heroes had been knocked down and the swastika flew from all state buildings. German efforts to eradicate everything Gallic reached ridiculous proportions. The markings on hot and cold water taps were changed from chaud and froid to heiss and kalt. The place de Broglie in Strasbourg became Adolf Hitler Platz. Statues of Lafayette, Ney and Kleber were dynamited by squadrons of Nazis. Inscriptions on the monuments for the dead were replaced by ‘GEFALLEN FUR DEUTSCHLAND.’
The German occupation troops were enjoying themselves. While French food was too rich and covered with too many sauces, it was still a pleasant change from war rations. The soldiers neither knew nor cared that Paris was the city of Baudelaire, Dumas and Molière. To them Paris was a garish, eager, overpainted whore with her skirts pulled up over her hips and they raped her, each in his own way. The Storm-troopers forced young French girls to go to bed with them, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, while their leaders like Goering and Himmler raped the Louvre and the rich private estates they greedily confiscated from the newly created enemies of the Reich.
If French corruption and opportunism rose to the surface in the time of France’s crisis, so did the heroism. One of the underground’s secret weapons was the Pompiers, the fire department, which in France is under the jurisdiction of the army. The Germans had confiscated dozens of buildings for the use of the army, the Gestapo and various ministries, and the location of these buildings was of course no secret. At an underground resistance headquarters in St Remy resistance leaders pored over large maps detailing the location of each building. Experts were then assigned their targets, and the following day a speeding car or an innocent-looking bicyclist would pass by one of the buildings and fling a homemade bomb through the window. Up to that point the damage was slight. The ingenuity of the plan lay in what followed next.
The Germans
