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Nineteen forty-seven was hell for little bony girls like me who couldn’t wear the New Look. Then again, 1947 was hell for any girl who would rather work calculus problems than read Vogue, any girl who would rather listen to Edith Piaf than Artie Shaw, and any girl with an empty ring finger but a rounding belly.
C’est bon!”
It's good
I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for.
I’d been so focused on getting here, I hadn’t thought how exactly I should begin. Two girls times eleven summers, divided by one ocean and one war . . .
Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.
Oh, Rosie, I thought miserably, staring after the girl anyway. You left your family and went to Limoges; how in God’s name did you do it? No one lets girls do anything at all. Not spend our own money, sell our own things, or plan our own lives.
a long stream of smoke. “To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that’s why women are good at it. Our lives are already boring. We jump at Uncle Edward’s offer because we can’t stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there’s the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It’s still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we’re going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound
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“Maybe they won’t come back,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like me.”
But when people meet our brothers, they don’t just comment on their looks, they ask, ‘How do you do in school?’ or ‘Do you play football?’ No one ever does that with us.”
“Our parents would never have left the boys behind. Boys always come first.” “So?” That was just the way things were, not something to resent or even think about very much. My parents laughed indulgently whenever James pulled my hair, or dunked me in the stream until I was crying. Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.
I might be a failure at a lot of things, but I was good at hope.
Any civilian, including the civilian staff of the French government, who helps troops who are enemies of Germany, or who acts in a way injurious to Germany and her allies, will be punished by death.
Eve both wondered if her superior was a little mad, and admired her violently.
I wasn’t sure I could have borne to write her about my Little Problem, even if I’d had an address. Face-to-face I could have cried it into her shoulder, but putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.
It’s very serious business, serving la belle France against her enemies, but it is also such fun. There is no job that gives satisfaction like spying. Mothers will tell you children are the most satisfying of all vocations, but merde,” Lili said frankly, “they’re too dulled by never-ending routine to know better. I will take the risk of bullets over the certainty of soiled nappies any day.”
If your conscience troubles you over a little thing like adultery, give it ten minutes in the confessional and a few Paternosters.” “You kn-know, we Protestants believe in feeling our guilt and not just paying it off with a few routine prayers.” “This is why the English are too guilty to make good lovers,” Lili declared. “Except in times of war, since war gives even the English an excuse to enjoy themselves. When life could end at any moment on the point of a German bayonet, never allow middle-class morality to get in the way of a good romp with a married ex-convict in tweed.”
“How terrible was it, Eve?” “Oh, you know. German boots stamping on the necks of the starving, people shot in alleys. Bad.” So this was what fueled her nightmares.
“The good ones never survive. They die in ditches and before firing squads and on squalid prison cots for sins they never committed. They always die. It’s the wicked who go merrily on.”
The petty small things she saw every day drove her far closer to the brink than the large. Eve didn’t mind that the Germans had the right to shoot her nearly as much as she minded having them walk into her room and steal her curtains.
Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”
“Poetry is like passion—it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.
“It’s a very French thing, making obscenity elegant. The Germans try, and they are merely vulgar.”
That was a bit of math all women understood: how a wedding ring plus a premature baby still magically equaled respectability.
Why did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway?
“Don’t we want to watch our figures?” Maman patted her own waist, making a wry smile. “One must suffer to be beautiful, after all.”
“Didn’t believe we’d seen the last of you in any event.” Eve, surprisingly, sounded more approving than irritated. “Americans are harder to scrape off than barnacles.”
“I know I’ll be caught one day, but who cares? I shall at least have served. So let’s hurry, and do great things while there is yet time.”
And really, in the life she led was there anything else besides now? Seeing Captain Cameron in two days—the kaiser’s arrival in ten—it all existed in the same gray area. There was the past and the now. Nothing else was certain. Nothing else was real.
“Marguerite, Lili, and Violette.” He smiled, and the worry in his eyes bordered on agony. “My flowers.” “Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”
“Eventually, Marguerite, I’ll teach you to be indifferent to what people think. It’s very freeing, to care for no one’s opinion but your own.”
It will not be that easy, she told herself. Wars were vast machines; they didn’t grind to an instant halt when one man died, even if that man was a king. But even if the war didn’t end, the world would still be a vastly different place.
“Listen to me. I am older than you, and considerably wiser. Believe me when I say it is entirely possible to despise a man and still enjoy him between the sheets. Merde, sometimes it’s even better that way. Disgust adds a certain intensity—‘spasms of love, spasms of hate, it is all the same.’
petite mort
Little death
This job has few enough pleasures. The food is terrible, the liquor is almost nonexistent, the cigarettes are getting scarcer, and the clothes are appalling. We have nightmares and complexions like ashtrays and we live in constant expectation of getting arrested. So don’t feel guilty for the little bit of pleasure you get, from whatever source. Take it.”
Church bells rang outside, sounding evening mass. Did anyone go? Who thought prayer did any good in this place?
You think there are no idiots in the intelligence business, that your superiors are all brilliant men who understand the game?”
that feeling very well.” “If I were a man you’d be calling me patriotic for wishing to continue in my duty to my country.” Eve folded her arms. “A woman wants the same thing and she’s suicidal.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it’s worth. Which is nothing, when a friend’s g-gone. Sorry isn’t worth anything, but I still am.”
“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
“I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arrested with. But I will tell you this, René Bordelon. You’re a gullible fool. You’re a terrible lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”
Do not forgive me, she wanted to cry. Please, do not forgive me! Forgiveness hurt so much more than hatred.
You didn’t go to the infirmary to be treated; you went there to die. The Germans didn’t need to waste bullets killing their female prisoners when neglect and disease could do it for them. A sound strategy, Eve thought remotely. Women dying in hospital beds resulted in far less international outcry than women dying before firing squads.
“I cannot pray for you,” Eve whispered. “I do not believe in God anymore.”
We lingered inside our fragile bubble of happiness, the kind of happiness that sits on top of melancholy as easily as icing on a cake.
“Retirement kills people like us, Eve. It’s how we die if the bullets don’t get there first.” He smiled bitterly. “Bullets, boredom, or brandy—that’s how people like us go, because God knows we aren’t made for peace.”
“Welcome to real spy work,” Eve said outside Les Trois Cloches, transforming before my eyes as she straightened from her old-lady hobble. “Mostly tedious, occasionally exhilarating.”
