Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Kristina

Nice, November 1942

‘It’s like a dream,’ whispered Gretel, one of the refugees Kristina was sheltering at the villa. They were carrying their baskets of black-market potatoes and leeks from the Gambetta district.

Kristina understood what she meant. The Promenade des Anglais had been renamed the ‘Avenue de la Victoire’ by the occupying Italians, but exactly whose ‘victory’ was being referred to wasn’t quite certain. They passed people who only a few months ago had been forced to wear a yellow star, but were now lounging in deckchairs and enjoying the view of the Mediterranean. The cafés too were full of Jewish refugees. Children in Judaic school uniforms walked freely in the street and a new cultural centre had been opened. The Jewish community in Nice was flourishing again, while in every other part of France it was being annihilated.

‘Yesterday, I went to the synagogue with Ruth,’ Gretel continued. ‘And there were Carabinieri outside of it. I froze, thinking we were about to be arrested, but they were there to make sure nobody harassed us .’

‘Well, we have something to thank Mussolini for,’ Kristina said. ‘If we’re going to be occupied by one of the Axis countries, then let it be the Italians.’

They turned a corner and nearly ran into a bridal party on their way to a wedding.

‘ Mazel Tov ,’ Gretel said, wishing the bride good luck. Then she turned to Kristina. ‘The Italians are even marrying Jewish girls. Hitler must be fuming.’

A loud wolf-whistle sounded in Kristina’s direction. She turned to see a group of Italian soldiers eyeballing her. ‘ Sei bellissima! ’ one of them shouted. ‘ Are you free tonight?’

She turned away and she and Gretel walked on. ‘They are like undisciplined schoolboys,’ Kristina said. ‘With those smooth olive complexions and big dark eyes, they should be at home with their mamas, not fighting a war. When I need to bribe one of them to look the other way, I only have to offer him a bottle of perfume. They must bathe themselves in the stuff. The whole city smells of Pour Un Homme de Caron.’

‘Perhaps Ruth and I should stay,’ Gretel said. ‘We have already fled one country. Why should we flee another?’

Kristina stopped and looked at Gretel firmly. ‘Hitler let Mussolini have Nice on the condition he enforce anti-Jewish laws, which the Italians have not done. Now the success of the Allies changes everything. Mussolini will side with whoever he thinks is going to win, and if Italy changes sides, the Germans will swarm in with a vengeance. This situation is unstable and we need to get you both to Switzerland as soon as we can.’

Gretel’s face pinched at the harshness of her tone, but Kristina couldn’t allow her to be lulled into a false sense of security. She didn’t tell her that the Italians were no angels – there was a dark side to their occupation too. The OVRA was as brutal as the German Gestapo. She’d heard through her contacts at the mayor’s office that the British and de Gaulle had been sending in agents to train the French Maquis in sabotage. The railway lines and stations on the Cote d’Azur were constantly being blown up by the Resistance. The Italians hunted the agents down and tortured them. Outside their interrogation centre hung a sign with an ominous quote from Dante’s Inferno : Abandon all hope ye who enter .

They reached Moira’s café and took their baskets to the kitchen. Moira eagerly turned them upside down to divide the produce between the three safe houses she was helping.

‘Is this all you could get?’ she asked, disappointed. ‘Those bottom-pinching macaronis might be helping us smuggle people out but they aren’t doing anything to prevent us from starving. They stole my tomatoes, those bastardi ! I went out to the vegetable garden this morning and the vines have been stripped bare!’

‘I’m going to the countryside tomorrow to try and get some olives and beans,’ Kristina told her.

Gretel sighed. ‘After this war is over, I’m never going to eat another turnip.’

Kristina sat down in a chair feeling like a withered flower. She spent so much of her life looking for food, she even dreamed about it. It was true they had a powerful man in Nice helping with their operation – a dynamic Italian Jewish businessman named Angelo Donati. But while he could help with bribes, transport and forged papers, he couldn’t produce food where there was none to be had.

‘The night we heard on the BBC that the Allies had taken North Africa, I thought, at last there will be food!’ said Moira. ‘I didn’t realise it meant we would be cut off from wheat and vegetable oil and just about everything else.’

‘The quality of French bread has plummeted to the point where if I wasn’t starving, I wouldn’t touch it,’ Gretel said. ‘It is being filled out with who-knows-what and smells like a swamp. If you buy it in the morning it’s putrid by the afternoon.’

‘I miss Russian Borodinsky bread,’ Kristina sighed, remembering the malty rye dough sweet with molasses and coriander. ‘If we had a loaf of that we could survive for a week on it.’

Moira looked her up and down. ‘Kristina, you are too thin. Are you not eating at all? How is your mother?’

Kristina’s heart pinched. Yelena was dying. Her doctor had warned her to prepare herself.

‘She fades a little more every day, but helping the Jewish people gives her an interest in life. Every so often she perks up and seems like her old self again. Sometimes I find her at the stove trying to create something edible out of the few ingredients we have, or reading to the Jewish orphans we’re sheltering.’ Kristina’s voice caught in her throat. ‘In those moments I can almost convince myself that my mother is going to live forever.’

Gretel rubbed Kristina’s arm. She had been a nurse in the Great War and helped Kristina bathe her mother when Yelena didn’t have the strength to do it for herself.

‘It’s life, my dear,’ said Moira, patting Kristina’s hand. ‘You still have your daughters.’

Kristina blinked away her tears. ‘At least the “sweet little mouse” still comes to visit,’ she said. ‘This time she left malt syrup on my doorstep.’

For the past few months, weekly packages of vitamin supplements and cans of food – impossible to get in France – had been placed on the doorstep of the villa.

‘I wonder who it is,’ said Moira. ‘A friend of your mother’s?’

Kristina shook her head. ‘If it was a friend, why not simply give it to me? The maple syrup was from England and a brand you can’t get in France. Besides, whoever it is, they are scaling the gate to put it on the doorstep.’

‘It must be someone who knows all that you are doing to help people and that your mother is dying,’ said Gretel. ‘A member of the British Resistance perhaps?’

She thought about that sign outside the OVRA interrogation centre. Abandon all hope ye who enter .

‘I hope not,’ she said. ‘That would put us all in grave danger.’

*

Gretel stayed to help Moira, and Kristina returned to the villa. She was surprised to find a black car parked out the front with a chauffeur leaning against it. Who had a car, let alone a chauffeur these days? Although the Italian occupation reduced the chances of Vichy raids, they still weren’t unheard of. Kristina raced into the house and was relieved to find it calm and quiet. That meant all their ‘guests’ had gone into hiding. She walked into the drawing room, and to her surprise saw Serge sitting there with a woman dressed in an elegant silk suit.

Serge rose from his chair when he saw her. ‘Kristina, look who’s here.’

The woman stood, and Kristina blinked. It was Sonia. Her skin was luminous with none of the pallor of someone suffering wartime deprivations. She was more beautiful than she had ever been.

‘Sonia!’

They embraced. Sonia smelled like a bouquet of iris. On the table was a tray of tea that emitted such a delectable aroma that Kristina assumed Sonia must have brought it with her.

‘Look at you,’ Kristina said as they sat down on the sofa together. ‘You look marvellous!’

Sonia smiled and reached into a bag beside her, producing a presentation set of Chanel perfumes for Kristina. ‘And I brought these for Ginette and Nadia,’ she said, opening up some packages wrapped in tissue paper and holding them out. They were undervests made of such fine wool they felt like silk to touch.

‘These are beautiful. Thank you,’ Kristina said, before the realisation came to her. Sonia must have kept her Paris store open – that meant she was trading with the Germans. Her stomach tied itself in knots. Of course, that explained how well she looked and her beautiful clothes. Kristina quickly put down the gifts on the table in front of her.

Sonia noticed but didn’t remark on it. ‘I saw that the gallery has been sold and I had to come and see you. I didn’t expect to find Serge here as well. He tells me that you haven’t heard anything from Max.’

Sonia’s voice conveyed genuine concern, but Kristina couldn’t meet her eyes. They used to be such good companions when they were younger, in those days when every evening started with drinks at La Rotonde. But something in the pit of Kristina’s stomach told her she could not trust her friend now.

Sonia was watching her carefully. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Why didn’t you expect to see Serge?’ Kristina asked.

‘Because she thought I’d be in New York to avoid... all the trouble ,’ Serge said lightly. ‘But I told Sonia that I promised to look after you and the girls and that’s why I’m here.’

Kristina realised that he sensed something was wrong too, but he was playing the game better than her.

‘How are édouard and Beatrice Fould?’ Sonia asked her.

‘Like everyone else. Under strain,’ Kristina replied.

‘They’ll have to sell their art collection, of course.’

Kristina knew that Sonia had never liked the Foulds. Was she gloating – or was there something else behind her question? ‘You mean before it’s stolen by the Germans?’ she said, irritably. ‘Like the paintings in our gallery were?’

Serge sent Kristina a warning look. But she was tired and hungry, and worried about her family. She had no patience for whatever game Sonia was playing.

Sonia’s mouth pinched. ‘You are judging me, aren’t you, Kristina? You think less of me because I’m still doing business in Paris. You forget that I employ fifty women in my company who might otherwise be left destitute if I closed. Do you think I should toss them out to earn money as prostitutes? I have my own mother to take care of, and quite frankly I refuse to throw away everything I’ve worked for simply because the French government opened the doors for the Germans to occupy the country.’

‘I don’t judge you,’ Kristina lied. ‘I think we’re all doing the best we can.’

‘Kristina’s tired,’ said Serge. ‘Yelena hasn’t been well, and the strain of not knowing where Max is has taken its toll on her. Of course, there is no harm in selling furniture and home decorations to the Germans. For goodness sake, you’re not peddling weapons or spying for the occupiers.’

He laughed warmly and, after a moment’s hesitation, Sonia did too.

‘Well, I’d better get going,’ she said. ‘I’ve borrowed the chauffeur and car from a client who wants me to do up her holiday house. But I wanted to take the opportunity to see you first.’

‘We are glad you came,’ said Serge.

Sonia turned to Kristina and her voice had a slight edge to it. ‘I haven’t forgotten that your father was generous to my mother and me for many years,’ she said. ‘You can always come to me for help if you need it.’

Kristina needed help. But not from Sonia.

Seeing that Kristina was on the verge of saying something that would inflame the situation, Serge took Sonia by the arm. ‘It’s been wonderful to see you again,’ he said.

After Sonia drove away, Kristina turned to Serge. ‘You think she was spying on us with those questions about Max?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, but I think on this occasion it might have been just as well that we don’t have a clue where he is.’

*

‘Mama!’

Kristina blinked open her eyes. Nadia was standing next to her bed, the winter morning light giving her skin a silvery glow. The burgundy silk-velvet opera coat she was wearing accentuated her willowy elegance. For a fleeting moment, Kristina thought she was Snegurka , the snow-maiden of the fairy tales her mother used to read to her when she was a child.

‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, struggling to raise herself.

Without enough fuel for heating, the villa was icy cold. The unusually bitter winter was taking everyone who did not have the strength to resist it. The funeral parlours in Nice were churning out coffins in all sizes. The smallest ones were displayed in the windows as if they were gift boxes. The refugees staying at the villa went about in cushion covers, tablecloths, even Afghan blankets that had formerly been wall hangings. When everyone wandered down to the dining room for meals, they resembled a bizarre fantasy play where the household furnishings had come to life.

Kristina peered more closely at Nadia through the gloom. Her trembling lips and wide eyes could mean only one thing.

‘Grandmama?’ she asked, her voice catching.

Nadia nodded, and the panic that ran through Kristina gave her the strength to free herself from the igloo of cushions she used to insulate herself. ‘Is she still breathing?’ she asked, standing up.

‘Just.’

Serge and Nadia had taken turns with Kristina in watching over Yelena during the night for the past few weeks, ever since she had lost the use of her legs and become bedridden. They had been warned another stroke could be imminent. For weeks, Kristina had known this moment was coming. Gretel had explained the death process to her before she’d left for Switzerland. Kristina thought she was prepared. She was sure that God would give her the strength to face it. But now her legs were like jelly as she followed Nadia down the hallway to her mother’s room.

Lying in her bed, Yelena was swaddled like an Egyptian mummy. Despite her illness her face was regal and beautiful. Kristina sat down next to the bed and tenderly touched her mother’s forehead. Nadia was right, her breathing was faint, and for a moment Kristina thought she’d already expired.

‘Mama?’

Yelena’s eyes fluttered open and she turned to her. Kristina knew it was selfish, but she needed to be alone with her mother. She touched the hot water bottle by Yelena’s feet.

‘Could you boil some more hot water for Grandmama, darling?’ she asked Nadia.

When Nadia went to complete the task, Kristina took her mother’s bony hand from under the coverings and gently caressed it.

‘My beautiful daughter,’ Yelena whispered, her voice full of infinite love. ‘There is something I want to tell you.’

‘Yes, Mama?’

‘Max might not come back, and he would understand if you and Serge were to be married. He’d make a good husband and a good father. Life is too hard to bear it all alone.’

Kristina lowered her eyes. Why was her mother saying this now? It seemed everyone had assumed there was more between her and Serge than friendship, even her own mother.

‘Mama... she started to say, but Yelena took a sudden deep breath. A flash of anguish crossed her face and a rattling sound rose in her throat. Kristina squeezed her hand tightly. There had been many times when she had wished her mother’s suffering might be shortened, but now the moment of farewell was imminent, she had an urge to beg her not to go. The sound stopped and Yelena’s chest collapsed as the air – and her life – rushed out of her. She sank into utter stillness, her eyes halfclosed as if she were dreaming.

‘I love you, Mama,’ Kristina said, closing her mother’s eyes gently. She stared at her mother’s peaceful face, feeling too bereft and exhausted to even cry.

*

They buried Yelena next to Mikhail in the Russian Orthodox cemetery on the hill of Caucade. Kristina clung to her shawl as it flapped about her in the strong sea breeze, sounding like a sail in her ears. Ginette looked up at her. Her daughter’s baby face was gone; her expression was fixed and serious. Kristina glanced at Nadia and recalled her beautiful voice when she had sung at the service. It was angelic, like the heavens had opened. When had Nadia learned to sing so exquisitely? Kristina had been so busy finding food for everyone, obtaining papers and caring for her ailing mother, that she had failed to notice her own daughters were changing. Yelena had been there for them the past year far more often than she had. Now Yelena was gone, Kristina knew she would have to be a better mother, but had no idea where she would find the strength.

As the priest sang prayers and waved his incense burner over the grave, her eyes travelled to the view of the Mediterranean and the city below, so quiet from this height. From a few metres away, she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She squinted. A man in a dark suit stood half-hidden behind an olive tree. It couldn’t be!

‘Max!’ she gasped.

Serge glanced at her, as if he thought she had uttered her husband’s name out of grief. He wrapped his arm around hers to give her comfort.

‘It’s Max, over there, can’t you see?’ she whispered.

She broke away from him and went running in the direction of the olive tree, but Max disappeared like a mirage. She surveyed the cemetery, peering at the crumbling headstones with their Orthodox crosses and statues of angels. There were so many places to disappear into the shadows behind the mausoleums and orange tree groves.

‘Max!’ she called.

For a moment she thought she was hallucinating. Then she heard footsteps on gravel.

‘Max! Why are you hiding from me?’

She spun around but there were no more sounds, only the wail of the wind and Serge’s footsteps as he caught up to her.

‘Kristina,’ he said, his voice full of concern.

‘It was Max. I’m telling you,’ she said. ‘He was here, watching us.’

*

At the wake, people handed Kristina cups of mint tea and whispered among themselves about the strain she had been under. But she knew her own husband when she saw him.

‘Maybe it was Max... or his spirit at least,’ suggested Moira when the mourners were gone and she and Kristina were alone cleaning the dishes in the kitchen together. ‘Sometimes the dead visit when they sense we need them. I felt my husband get into bed and curl up beside me for many years after he died.’

Max wasn’t dead, Kristina was certain of that now. She wondered how long he had been watching them. He’d come to the funeral to pay his respects. She was also sure now that it had been Max leaving the parcels on the doorstep when Yelena was ill. She also believed she knew the reason the French government had stopped paying her army wives’ allowance. Max had escaped the prisoner-of-war camp and gone to London to join de Gaulle with the other Frenchmen who had refused to accept the armistice. But he was back in France now at the same time as the Allies were stepping up their sabotage activities, and the Italians were cracking down mercilessly on them.

Oh god, Max please be careful , she thought.

*

After that day at the cemetery, Kristina looked for Max everywhere. There were times when she thought she’d spotted him slipping out the back door of a café just as she arrived, or vanishing into a crowd a few metres in front of her. Once she thought he’d brushed past her when she was waiting in line for ration stamps. Max! She’d lost the place she’d been holding for two hours to run after him. She turned the corner where he had gone only to discover an empty laneway. She dreamed of him too. She’d see him up ahead of her on the Promenade and would run up to him and touch his shoulder. He’d turn and smile when he recognised her, reaching for her and telling her that he loved her and that they’d be together – a proper family again – as soon as the wretched war was over. When she woke up after those dreams, she was filled with two contradictory feelings – peace and uneasiness.

She left a letter for him on the doorstep each night in the same place where the packages for Yelena had appeared. She’d rush downstairs at the break of light to see if it had been collected, and her heart would shatter all over again when she saw that it was still there.

‘I believe you, Kristina, when you say you saw Max,’ Serge told her one morning when he found her holding her letter in the garden and crying. ‘But you must stop waiting for him. He has important work to do and so do you. If he hasn’t revealed himself to us, then there is a reason for it.’

She took Serge’s hand, and they sat together on the garden bench.

‘I feel a terrible dread in my stomach,’ she told him. ‘Bastille Day was such a show of strength by the Ni?oise. But things with the Italians have turned grim.’

On Bastille Day a crowd of people, including young children, had marched to Place Masséna, singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and waving tricoloured flags. It was a carnivallike atmosphere not seen since before the war. People fearlessly shouted ‘Vive de Gaulle’ and ‘Down with Vichy and Hitler’. The Italian soldiers were armed but did little to restore public order. Kristina had felt that the war was petering out then and she had allowed herself to feel hopeful again.

‘What’s happened?’ Serge asked. ‘What have you heard?’

She winced as she told him. ‘Moira sent word that the mayor has been forced to stand down and hundreds of resisters have been rounded up.’

Serge’s face fell. ‘It’s a disaster. We must be very careful then,’ he said.

‘There is more,’ she told him. ‘According to the underground, four men acting as spies for de Gaulle and the British have been arrested by OVRA. What if Max is one of them?’ she asked, squeezing his hand tighter. ‘I can’t bear to think what he might be suffering.’

*

With the raids and arrests, it would have been wiser to have stayed at home. Kristina didn’t dare ring Moira in case the telephone had been tapped. But she couldn’t settle her racing mind. Finally, she took an old bicycle from the garage and rode towards town. She was taking her life into her hands riding the rusty contraption downhill. The tyres had been repaired so many times, they had more puncture patches on them than rubber. But before she could reach the outskirts of the city, she was stopped by an Italian soldier.

‘Papers please, signora.’

She hardly ever got asked for her papers, but she promptly produced them. While the soldier perused them, she looked past him to see that the streets had been barricaded. A transport of long-range guns was moving through and there were soldiers unrolling barbed wire on the beach. She knew better than to show too much curiosity about what was happening.

But after the soldier gave her papers back and waved her towards a detour, a woman bumped into her shoulder. ‘ Pardon ,’ she said, and then whispered, ‘The Resistance blew up the railway depot. The Germans can’t move their troops.’

The war, which had been kept away from Nice for almost a year, was coming close again. With the tension in the air, Kristina decided it wasn’t worth taking the risk of drawing attention to Moira. She went to the Russian Orthodox church instead. It was a little piece of Russia on French soil, with its six gilded domes and coloured ceramics. Her parents had helped fund its construction. Inside the carved wooden interior, with its icons and flower frescoes, she felt serene, which was unexpected because she’d been feeling so fraught only a few moments earlier. She lit a candle for Max and then prayed with all her heart.

Please bring my husband, and my children’s father, safely home to me.

*

Moira warned Kristina not to become attached to the people who she sheltered at the villa, but that was impossible for her, especially the children. One evening the following summer as she and the others sat together in the dining room, the doors and windows shut despite the stifling heat, she found herself looking at the refugee children with a deep sense of love. There was Hermine and Joséphine, the ten-year-old twins whose mother had never come home from work; Herschel, who had been smuggled by an escape line to Nice after his German-Jewish parents had been rounded up in Paris; and the youngest, six-year-old Aline from Belgium, who often asked Kristina when her mother was coming to collect her. They were all brave children but if one of them started crying from homesickness, then it brought a waterfall of tears from the others, which Serge, Nadia and Kristina would do their best to comfort.

But sometimes, after they had settled the children down, they themselves would have to retreat to various corners of the villa to weep. How could humans be capable of inflicting such horror on each other? Kristina wanted to wrap each of the children in her arms and keep them safe forever, but she knew the day would come when she would have to entrust them to others further along the escape line so they would have some chance at survival. Just as with the others who had stayed at the villa, they would have to leave, and she wouldn’t hear any more news of them. Then more children — and perhaps some adults – would be sent and Kristina would become attached to those new ones as well, and the cycle of worry and loss would begin again.

They had just finished their dessert – an unusual treat of cream of wheat with raisins – when a massive boom sounded in the sky followed by a series of crackles.

‘What was that?’ asked Nadia, her eyes wide with fear.

Serge ran to peer out the blackout curtain, while everyone else looked to Kristina for the command. She had been drilling the children for weeks. ‘Police!’ meant they were to scatter and disappear behind the secret walls Serge had installed. ‘Air raid!’ meant everybody had to run to the cellar where the walls had been reinforced with sandbags. But the sound coming from outside was neither the police nor an air raid. It sounded like firecrackers and flares.

‘The Italians!’ said Serge. ‘They are celebrating.’

Kristina’s mind raced, wondering what they were celebrating. An Italian holiday? The end of the war? What?

‘Go to the observatory,’ she said to the children, including Ginette, whose eyes were bright with excitement at the idea of fireworks. ‘You can watch from the windows. But you must do everything Nadia tells you to.’

Kristina and Serge ran to the garage. At an exorbitant price, they’d managed to buy an old Peugeot with a charcoal gasifier fixed to it now gasoline was impossible to obtain. It was slow but when they had to move people about, it was faster than going on foot. As they drove into the city, they could see the bars and cafés were full of Italian soldiers. A group of them crossed their path, dancing the tarantella, while another stood on the side of the road singing ‘O Sole Mio’.

Kristina wound down the window and called to him. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Mussolini e finito! Mussolini has been voted out by the Grand Council.’

‘What does that mean?’ she asked him. ‘Are the Italians going to continue fighting with a different leader?’

But the soldier only shrugged his shoulders. Serge parked the car and they got out and hurried towards the Promenade, stopping soldiers along the way to ask them whether they were staying or leaving. One of the soldiers grabbed Kristina’s waist and twirled her in a dance. ‘It means I’m going home to my wife and children! I’m going back to my village!’

Kristina looked to Serge. If they didn’t have the Germans on their doorstep, it would have been good news for everybody.

‘We’d better get back to the house,’ he said, ‘and start making plans to get the children out of Nice immediately.’