The Children of Freedom

I nod. Boris must have noticed that for the space of an instant my mind is elsewhere. I’m thinking about my little brother; he’s going to sulk when he finds out he’s been sidelined. And I can’t even admit to him that it relieves me to know that, this morning, his life won’t be in danger.

The thing that doubly reassures me is that Boris is a third-year medical student, so if I’m wounded in the operation he may be able to save me, even if that’s completely idiotic, because, in an operation, the greatest risk isn’t being wounded but quite simply being arrested or killed, which in the end comes to the same thing in most cases.

All that being said, I must admit that Boris wasn’t wrong. My mind was perhaps slightly elsewhere while he was speaking; but to be honest, I’ve always had an annoying penchant for daydreaming; at school, my teachers said I had a ‘distracted’ nature. That was before the head of the school sent me home on the day I turned up for the baccalaureate examinations. With my name, it really wasn’t possible to take the diploma.

Right, I’m focused now on the operation to come; if not, at best I’m going to be ticked off by comrade Boris, who is taking the trouble to explain how things are going to proceed, and at worst, he’ll remove me from the mission for not paying attention.

‘Are you listening to me?’ he says.

‘Yes, yes, of course!’

‘As soon as we’ve spotted our target, you will check that the revolver’s safety catch is definitely off. We’ve already seen friends have serious disappointments by thinking that their weapon was jammed, when they’d stupidly forgotten to take off the security catch.’

I did indeed think that this was idiotic, but when you’re afraid, really afraid, you’re much less skilful; do believe what I say. The important thing was not to interrupt Boris and to concentrate on what he was saying.

‘It must be an officer, we don’t kill ordinary soldiers. Did you get that? We’ll follow him at a distance, neither too close, nor too far. I will deal with the neighbouring perimeter. You approach the guy, you empty your magazine and you count the shots carefully so that you have one bullet left. That’s very important for the getaway – you could need it, you never know. I will be covering the getaway. You think only of pedalling. If people try to step in front of you, I’ll intervene to protect you. Whatever happens, don’t turn back. You pedal and you pedal hard, do you understand me?’

I tried to say yes, but my mouth was so dry that my tongue was stuck to it. Boris concluded that I was in agreement and went on.

‘When you’re quite a long way away, slow down and mess around like any lad on a bike. Except you’re going to ride around for a long time. If anyone has followed you, you must be aware of it and never run the risk of leading him to your address. Go around the docks, and stop frequently, to check if you recognise a face you’ve encountered more than once. Don’t trust coincidences; in our lives there never are any. If you’re certain that you’re safe, and only then, you can head back.

I had lost all desire to be distracted and I knew my lesson by heart, well almost: the one thing I didn’t know at all was how to shoot at a man.

Charles came back from his workshop with my bicycle, which had undergone some serious transformations. The important thing, he said, is that the pedals and chain were reliable. Boris signalled to me that it was time to leave. Claude was still sleeping. I wondered if I ought to wake him. In the event that something happened to me, he might sulk again because I hadn’t even said goodbye to him before I died. But I decided to leave him sleeping; when he awoke, he would be famished, with nothing to eat. Each hour of sleep was the same amount of time gained over the gnawing pangs of hunger. I asked why Emile wasn’t coming with us. ‘Drop it!’ Boris muttered to me. Yesterday, Emile had had his bike stolen. That idiot had left it in the corridor of his apartment building without locking it up. It was all the more regrettable that it had been a rather fine model with leather grips, exactly like the one I’d nicked! While we were in action, he’d have to go and pinch another one. Boris added that Emile had hit the roof over the matter!

The mission proceeded as Boris had described. Well, almost. The Nazi officer we had spotted was coming down the ten steps of a street staircase, which led to a small square where a vespasienne sat imposingly. This was the name given to the green urinals that were found in the town. We called them cups, because of the shape. But as they had been invented by a Roman emperor who answered to the name of Vespasian, that’s what they’d been christened. In the end, I might perhaps have got my baccalaureate, if I hadn’t made the mistake of being Jewish during the June 1941 exams.

Boris signalled to me that the place was ideal. The little square was below the level of the street and there was no one around. I followed the German, who suspected nothing. To him, I was just someone with whom – although we looked different, with him in his impeccable green uniform and me rather shabbily turned out – he shared the same desire. As the vespasienne was equipped with two compartments, there was no reason for him to object to my walking down the same staircase as he was.

So I found myself in a urinal, in the company of a Nazi officer into whom I was going to empty my revolver (less one bullet, as Boris had specified). I had carefully taken off the security catch, when a real problem of conscience passed through my mind. Could one be a decent member of the Resistance, with all the nobility that represented, and kill a guy who had his flies undone and was in such an inglorious posture?

It was impossible to ask comrade Boris for his advice; he was waiting for me with the two bikes at the top of the steps, to ensure a safe getaway. I was alone and I had to make the decision.

I didn’t fire, it was inconceivable. I couldn’t accept the idea that the first enemy I was going to kill was in the middle of taking a piss as I carried out my heroic action. If I could have talked to Boris about it, he would probably have reminded me that the enemy in question belonged to an army that didn’t ask itself any questions when it shot children in the back of the neck, when it machine-gunned kids on the corners of our streets, and even less so when it was exterminating countless people in the death camps. And Boris wouldn’t have been wrong. But there you go, I dreamed of being a pilot in a Royal Air Force squadron; well, I might not have a plane, but my honour was safe. I waited until my officer had restored himself to a condition fit to be shot. I didn’t allow myself to be distracted by his sidelong smile when he left the urinal and he paid me no further attention when I followed him back to the staircase. The urinal was at the end of a blind alley, and there was only one exit from it.

In the absence of any shots, Boris must have been wondering what I was doing for all that time. But my officer was climbing the steps in front of me and I certainly wasn’t going to shoot him in the back. The only way of getting him to turn around was to call him, which wasn’t all that easy if one considers that my grasp of German was limited to two words: ja and nein. Which was unfortunate, since in a few seconds he would reach the street again and the whole thing would be a failure. Having taken all these risks to be found wanting at the last moment would have been too stupid. I filled my lungs and yelled Ja with all my strength. The officer must have realised that I was addressing him, because he immediately turned around and I took advantage of this to shoot five bullets into his chest, that is, face-on. What ensued was relatively faithful to the instructions Boris had given. I stuck the revolver in my trouser belt, burning myself in the process on the barrel, which had just fired five bullets at a speed that my level of mathematics didn’t enable me to estimate.

Once at the top of the staircase, I mounted my bike and lost my pistol, which slipped out of my belt. I put my feet on the ground to pick up my weapon but Boris’s voice shouting at me: ‘For God’s sake get the hell out of here!’ brought me back to the reality of the present moment. I pedalled at breakneck speed, weaving in between the passers-by, who were already running towards the place where the shots had come from.

As I pedalled, I thought constantly about the pistol I had lost. Weapons were rare in the brigade. Unlike the Maquis, we didn’t benefit from parachute drops from London; which was really unfair, for the Maquis members didn’t do a great deal with the boxes they were sent, apart from storing them in hiding places in preparation for a future Allied landing, which apparently wasn’t imminent. For us, the only means of procuring weapons was to get them from the enemy; in rare cases, by undertaking extremely dangerous missions. Not only had I not had the presence of mind to take the Mauser the officer was carrying in his belt, to make things worse, I’d lost my own revolver. I think I thought especially about that to try and forget that in the end, even though everything had happened the way Boris had said, I’d still just killed a man.

Someone knocked at the door. Claude was lying on the bed. His eyes fixed on the ceiling, he behaved as if he hadn’t heard anything; anyone would have thought he was listening to music, but since the room was silent I deduced from this that he was sulking.

As a security measure, Boris walked towards the window and gently lifted the curtain to glance outside. The street was quiet. I opened the door and let Robert in. His real name was Lorenzi, but among ourselves we were content to call him Robert; sometimes we also called him ‘Death-Cheater’ and this nickname was in no way pejorative. It was simply that Lorenzi had accumulated a certain number of qualities. First, his accuracy with a gun; it was unequalled. I wouldn’t have liked to find myself in Robert’s line of fire, since our comrade’s margin for error was in the region of zero. He had obtained permission from Jan to keep his revolver permanently on him, whereas we – because of the brigade’s shortage of weapons – had to give them back when the operation was over, so that someone else could have the benefit of them. However strange it may seem, everyone had their own weekly diary, containing, for example, a crane to be blown up on the canal, an army lorry to be set on fire somewhere, a train to be derailed, a garrison post to attack – the list is long. I shall take advantage of this to add that as the months passed, Jan imposed an ever-faster pace upon us. Rest days became rare, to the point where we were exhausted.

It’s generally said of trigger-happy types that they’re excitable, even to an excessive degree; it was quite the opposite with Robert – he was calm and level-headed. Much admired by the others, with a warm personality, he always had a friendly, comforting word, which was rare in those times. And also, Robert was someone who always brought back his men from a mission, so having him covering you was really reassuring.

One day, I would meet him in a bar on place Jeanne-d’Arc, where we often went to eat vetch, a vegetable that resembles lentils and which is given to livestock; we made do with the resemblance. It’s crazy what your imagination can dream up when you’re hungry.

Robert dined opposite Sophie and, from the way they were looking at each other I could have sworn that they too were in love. But I must have been wrong since Jan had said that partisans didn’t have the right to fall in love, because it was too dangerous for security. When I think back to the number of friends who, the night before their execution, must have hated themselves for respecting this rule, it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

That evening, Robert sat down on the end of the bed and Claude didn’t move. One day I shall have to have a word with my little brother about his character. Robert took no notice and stretched out a hand to me, congratulating me on a mission accomplished. I said nothing, torn by contradictory feelings, which, on account of my absent-minded nature, as my teachers said, instantly plunged me into the total silence of deep reflection.

And while Robert stayed there, right in front of me, I mused that I had entered the Resistance with three dreams in my head: to join Général de Gaulle in London, to join the Royal Air Force and to kill an enemy before I died.

Fully comprehending that the first two dreams would remain out of reach, the fact that I had at least been able to fulfil the third ought to have filled me with joy, particularly since I was still not dead, while the operation was now several hours earlier. In reality it was quite the opposite. It gave me no satisfaction to imagine my German officer who, at that time, for the needs of the investigation, was still in the position where I had left him, stretched out on the ground, arms at right angles to his body on the steps of the staircase, with a view downwards to a public urinal.

Boris gave a little cough. Robert wasn’t holding out his hand to me in order to shake it – although I am certain he would have had nothing against it, with his natural warmth – but by all accounts he wanted his weapon back. The barrel revolver I had lost was his!

I didn’t know that Jan had sent him as a second line of protection, anticipating the risks linked to my inexperience at the moment of the killing and the getaway that was to follow. As I said, Robert always brought his men back. What touched me was that Robert had entrusted his weapon to Charles the previous evening so that he could give it to me, when I had scarcely paid attention to him during dinner, far too absorbed as I was by my share of the omelette. And if Robert, who was responsible for my rear and Boris’s, had made such a generous gesture, it was because he wanted me to have the use of a revolver that never jams, unlike automatic weapons.

But Robert mustn’t have seen the end of the operation, nor probably the fact that his burning pistol had slipped out of my belt and landed on the road, just before Boris ordered me to get the hell out of there.

As Robert’s gaze was becoming persistent, Boris stood up and opened the drawer of the room’s sole piece of furniture. From a rustic wardrobe he removed the long-awaited pistol and immediately handed it back to its owner, without a word.

Robert put it back in its proper place and I took advantage of this to learn the correct way to slip the barrel under the belt buckle, to avoid burning the inner thigh and having to deal with the ensuing consequences.

Jan was happy with our operation; we were now accepted into the brigade. A new mission awaited us.

A guy from the Maquis had had a drink with Jan. During the conversation, he had committed an involuntary indiscretion, revealing among other details the existence of a farm where a few weapons parachuted in by the English were stored. It drove us crazy that people were stocking weapons with a view to the Allied landings, when we went short of them every day. So apologies to the Maquis colleagues, but Jan had taken the decision to go and help himself from their stocks. To avoid creating pointless quarrels, and to avert any blunders, we would leave unarmed. I don’t say there weren’t a few rivalries between the Gaullist movements and our brigade, but there was no question of risking wounding a ‘cousin’ partisan, even if family relations could sometimes be a bit strained. Instructions were therefore given not to resort to force. If we blundered we’d clear off, and that was that.

The mission was to be conducted with artistry and savoir-faire. What’s more, if the plan Jan had devised worked without a hitch, I defied the Gaullists to report what had happened to them to London, at the risk of coming across as real twits and drying up their source of supply.

While Robert was explaining how to proceed, my little brother behaved as if he didn’t give a damn, but I could see that he wasn’t missing a single word of the conversation. We were to report to this farm, a few kilometres west of the town, explain to the people there that we had come on behalf of a guy called Louis, that the Germans suspected the hiding place and would soon turn up; we had come to help them move the goods and the farmers were supposed to hand us the few cases of grenades and submachine guns they had stored there. Once these were loaded onto the little trailers attached to our bikes, we’d do a bunk and the whole thing was in the bag.

‘We’ll need six people for it to work,’ said Robert.

I knew quite well that I hadn’t been wrong about Claude, because he sat up on his bed, as if his siesta had just come to an abrupt end, there and then, just by chance.

‘Do you want to take part?’ Robert asked my brother.

‘With the experience I have now in bicycle theft, I suppose I’m also qualified to nick weapons. I must have the face of a thief for people to think of me automatically for this kind of mission.’

‘It’s quite the opposite. You have the face of an honest lad and that’s why you’re particularly well qualified. You don’t arouse suspicion.’

I don’t know if Claude took that as a compliment or if he was simply pleased that Robert had addressed him directly, offering him the consideration he seemed to lack, but his features instantly relaxed. I think I even saw him smile. It’s crazy how the fact of receiving recognition, however tiny it may be, can hearten a person. In the end, feeling anonymous among the people you’re with is a much greater pain than people realise; it’s as if you’re invisible.

It’s probably also because of this that we suffered so much from living clandestinely, and for that reason also that in the brigade, we rediscovered a sort of family, a society where every one of us had an existence. And that meant a lot to each of us.

Claude said, ‘I’m in.’ With Robert, Boris and me, we were still two short. Alonso and Emile would join us.

The six members of the mission must go at the earliest opportunity to Loubers, where little trailers would be attached to their bikes. Charles had asked that we should take turns; not because of the modest size of his workshop, but to avoid a procession of bikes attracting the neighbours’ attention. We were to meet up at around six o’clock on the way out of the village, heading for the countryside and the place called the ‘Côte Pavée’.

5 (#ulink_3bc606c0-61c9-5430-8ec8-a45404a4ac61)

It was Claude who was first to introduce himself to the farmer. He followed to the letter the instructions Jan had obtained from his contact with the Maquis.

‘We’re here on behalf of Louis. He told me to tell you that tonight, the tide will be low.’