Chapter Text
They tell you the war will soon be over. They say it again and again, tomorrow and tomorrow, so many times that the words lose their meaning. You stop believing them, and do not start believing in anything again until one day you wake up, look out the window of your rented room in Paris, and find the Germans gone.
Simply vanished, just like when they disappeared from Bussy, leaving hardly a whisper of dust in their wake.
On that day you say quietly into your pillow, the war is over, and you think it might be true.
The months that follow, with the whole world watching Germany spasm towards surrender, do not feel victorious. They feel paralyzing, and you wander around dazed, wondering what to do next. There is no one left to tell you. Madame Angellier died in the spring of 1944, a heart attack you think may have been merciful – she never learned the news that eventually trickled back to you of Gaston’s death in a German prison camp in 1942.
Benoit Labarie returns to his farm, reuniting with Madeleine on the outskirts of what remains of Bussy. You can’t really picture it, him going right back to the life he led before. Hasn’t it changed him, what he did in the war? It has changed you.
You suppose this is what people do, and have done, for as long as there have been people – for as long as there have been wars. They take their war-selves off like coats that don’t fit anymore, and they go on living.
But still. You, Lucile Angellier, you do not ever want to go back to Bussy.
You pack up your things and everything fits into one small leather suitcase: the old, fine clothes that hang off your frame now, your books, Madame Angellier’s will, and a little parcel of rolled-up sheet music that is more precious to you than anything else you own. You park yourself at a café with an atlas and look for someplace far away, somewhere warm and untouched and free.
You pick Argentina mostly because once, a lifetime ago now, you heard Carlos Gardel singing on your father’s radio. You didn’t understand the lyrics then, and you think perhaps you’d like to. The song sounded… it sounded the way you thought being in love must feel, back before you had really loved anyone.
So you will go to Buenos Aires, find a little stucco house on the edge of the city with roses climbing up the walls, and play tango records until you feel human again. But first (and it takes a few glasses of wine to make the decision, but you won’t go back on it), you have a stop to make.
When you arrive in Germany, you almost immediately decide that you will travel to South America by car, train, boat, or absolutely any other kind of vehicle as long as you never, ever have to get in an airplane.
It should have been beautiful, flying. Maybe it was, once upon a time. When that first person made it all the way up to the clouds and looked down upon the great heaving earth, maybe he or she saw the masses below looking up, gazing on in wonder and delight.
In Berlin they don’t look up at the airplanes anymore. They shudder and bury their heads beneath jacketed arms, struggle to go about their business because they know – they know – these planes, now, don’t carry any bombs. But they can’t stop knowing that other planes did.
You never want to be a part of making anybody feel like that.
Everyone in the city seems to be looking for someone. Your story, if anyone asks, is not a unique one: your husband died in a prison camp, and you would like to know where he is buried. You’re not really lying. After all, you do think you want to go looking for Gaston, one day, if you ever make it back to Germany. Anyway, no one cares enough to ask why you are there, or why you think you might find your husband’s grave at one of the various properties around the city formerly owned by members of the von Falk family.
The first address you try sends you to a bombed-out street in the British sector, nothing left but an old man with a skinny dog trotting at his heels. He tells you (or you’re pretty sure he does – your German is cobbled together from an old phrase book and lessons from a friendly Alsatian partisan you met in ’43) that the woman who once lived in the house you are looking for was married to an officer who disappeared, somewhere in Russia, maybe.
You take a deep breath, because disappeared is not dead, not yet, and try to feign interest when he says the officer’s wife ran off with an Englishman not long after they took the city.
The next place is harder to find, deep in the Soviet sector, but you aren’t afraid. You’ve gotten good at passing unnoticed over the last few years. The elder von Falks’ home is still standing, although you’re not sure how, seeing as half the façade has been torn away and much of the second floor is smashed to bits. The house next door suffered less damage, and appears to be inhabited, so you knock.
The woman who answers cannot be much older than you, but there is far more gray in her hair. She is frighteningly thin, except for a small, slightly protruding belly, which she covers protectively with one hand.
“Guten tag,” you say, and you hesitate, because she looks so very tired, this woman. “Do you know – the house?” You point. “Um – Family? Bruno von Falk?”
Her eyes narrow suspiciously.
“Why?” she asks, and you look back at her helplessly. There are too many answers to that question.
“I would like – find him. Please. Bitte.”
She flicks a glance at your abdomen, gestures between it and her own rounded one.
“Are you…?”
You shake your head, no. She gives you a long, thoughtful look. If she thinks you are judging her, you are not. You are the last person in the world who would.
“You are French?” she says finally, switching to a heavily accented version of your own native language. You feel your shoulders sag in relief.
“I am.” She nods.
“The von Falks were my cousins,” she tells you. “The parents died when that bomb hit their house. Two sons are also dead. Karl, the youngest, he is alive, but he is a French prisoner. Something to do with Africa, I think. Bruno…” She shrugs. “I don’t know. He was in Russia, last anyone heard. His wife says dead, but she would.”
Her face sours at that, and she fists her hand in her gown over her stomach.
“Russians did this,” she says, bitterly, her expression far away and haunted. “I don’t – I don’t know which one.”
Oh. You don’t know what to say. You want to take her hand, comfort her in some way, you want to – but Bruno’s cousin is lifting her chin at you, angry pride in the set of her mouth.
“My name is Lucile,” you blurt. “What is yours?”
Her chin drops. Surprised, she replies: “My name is Maria.”
This is something. You can remind her of her name, and that she has one. She is still a real person, even if the world around her has turned into an absurd, terrible dream. No matter what she did in the war, or what will happen to her now that it is over, she once helped a French woman named Lucile, and that is something.
You dig your letter out of your purse, feeling a strange kind of faith that you have felt nowhere else in Berlin.
“If Bruno comes back,” you say, pressing the envelope into her hands, “if you see him, can you please – please give him this.”
Maria takes it, watching you curiously, saying nothing.
“Danke schön,” you murmur, and turn to leave. You take two steps and then you hear her call you back.
“Lucile!” Maria’s eyes are bright and sad. You notice for the first time how beautiful she is. Her features are sharp and spare, but handsome, arresting in their animation.
“They had a country house,” she says quickly. “South of here, near Lübbenau. Bruno always liked it better than in Berlin. If it’s still – ” Maria stops and bites her lower lip.
“You should try there."
The proprietress of your dilapidated little hotel in the French sector is thrilled to provide you with a map. She has been thrilled to provide you with anything and everything you could possibly want, actually – you are her first and only guest in over a year. She is also thrilled, of course, that your people have occupied the city and finally got rid of those awful Nazis – she was never a Nazi, nobody she knew was a Nazi, nobody in Germany, apparently, ever supported the Nazi party and she knew from the beginning that Hitler was a crazy man.
Charitably, you do not mention the swastika flag you discovered stuffed in the back of the closet on your first day in Berlin.
You also do not tell her how the map breaks your heart. There is no way you can go to Lübbenau. None of these railroads exist anymore – the Allies bombed them all to hell. You cannot afford a car for that distance, and even if you could, you doubt you could bluff your way through all the checkpoints you know are littering the eastern half of the country. Your search is over. And maybe it would have been better if you had never started, never had any hopes at all. He is probably dead, long dead in some frozen Russian field, but now... now you’re stuck always wondering if the whole time, he was somewhere in the forests south of Berlin, just out of your reach.
Your hands are trembling. You ask your hostess if the hotel has a piano. She says no, there is no piano here, she doesn’t think anyone in the whole neighborhood has a piano, and to your horror, she begins to cry.
“Oh, no, Frau Berger, no, no problem. Please, it is all right.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop the tears. “We never had a piano, I just – I just want you to have a good stay in my hotel – ” Her German is difficult to follow as she hiccups and sobs her way through an explanation. You pat her gently on the back, feeling utterly useless, not to mention cross, because to top it all off there is no piano.
Berlin is grotesque, Frau Berger is pathetic, and for a moment you allow yourself to hate them, all of them, this whole stupid country, including Maria and Bruno. They can bury their flags and pretend they are innocent, but they are not. And neither are you.
It is time to go to Argentina.