“I was waiting for the boche to leave,” he tells her now, then asks after her and Vivi. He doesn’t stay long, but she knows that, despite the nonfunctioning postal system, he will get word to her father that she and Vivi are, if not safe, then surviving.
* * *
She loses sleep over the Zweig book with the section on Freud. She and Simone both do. But no military car pulls up in front of the store, no Germans come thundering in, not even a gendarme appears. The officer, however, returns. She is in the store alone again. He asks if he may browse again. She remains silent again. Why doesn’t he frequent the stalls along the Seine? The quays are crowded with Germans trying, unsuccessfully, to saunter like Parisians, hoping to blunt their barbarism with an infusion of purloined French culture and style. Why doesn’t he take his business to the Rive-Gauche, a big slick bookstore run by a collaborationist, backed by the Occupation authorities, and stocked with German propaganda and approved French trash? But he has developed a liking for the shop. He comes in the following week and the one after that. Sometimes she is sitting behind the cash register, sometimes Simone is, sometimes they’re both there. Books and money pass between one or the other of them and the officer, but few words. Occasionally he will inquire about a book. One day he asks for Moby-Dick. Charlotte stiffens. Melville is on the Otto list. Is he trying to trap her? She explains she is forbidden to stock the book. The next time he asks for a volume of short stories by Thomas Mann, who has also been banned. When she tells him that, too, is forbidden, he buys a volume of Proust, who, strangely enough in view of his Jewish ancestry, is not. The week after that he purchases a copy of Being and Time by Heidegger. Perhaps he is not a spy, merely a man with eclectic interests.
“The boche has good taste,” Simone says after another of his visits. “That’s one more thing I hate about him and all the rest of them with literary pretensions.”
Charlotte knows she is thinking of the high-ranking official who threatened to close down Shakespeare & Company and confiscate all its stock after Sylvia Beach refused to sell him her last copy, or so she said, of Finnegans Wake. As soon as he left the shop, Sylvia sent out the call to friends and colleagues. Within two hours, they had emptied the store of all the books and even the shelves and electrical fixtures. By the time the official arrived with his men to carry out his threat, Shakespeare & Company had ceased to exist, thanks to a house painter who had obliterated the name on the front of 12 rue de l’Odéon. They never did find the shop, though they arrested Sylvia and put her in an internment camp. She was released after six months, and gossip has it that she’s in hiding here in Paris. Charlotte could swear she saw her one evening just before curfew standing in the shadows on the rue de l’Odéon, staring at number 12. She didn’t approach her.
Sylvia should have gone into hiding in the south after the incident, as Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas did, not that they’re actually in hiding. From what Charlotte has heard, they’re living safely and well at their house in the Bugey under the protection of Gertrude’s old friend Bernard Faÿ, a notorious anti-Semite who was appointed director of the Bibliotheque Nationale after a Jew was fired from the position. Stein, a Jew, is another example of literary figures playing both sides of the game. Before the war she told an American newspaper that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, but her admiration didn’t stop the censors from putting her books on the Otto list. Charlotte’s father had broken with Stein over the Hitler remark, as well as her support for Franco, though the latter hadn’t seemed to bother Stein’s friend Picasso, who plays perhaps the most dangerous double game of all. He gives money to the Resistance and has been known to harbor fugitives (or so people say; no one knows for sure, and most people don’t want to; the less you know, the safer you are), but he entertains German visitors in his studio, while instructing Françoise Gilot to follow them around to make sure they don’t plant anything. Nonetheless, artists have an easier time under the Nazi boot than writers, whose messages are more explicit.
This German officer, however, seems less dangerous. He is unfailingly polite. He tries to fit in, as much as a man in that hated gray-green uniform can fit in. He is almost successful. The other customers begin to grow accustomed to him. They no longer put down the books they’re looking at and drift out of the store when he arrives. Even the elderly teacher who has been dismissed from the Lycée Condorcet for being Jewish and frequently comes to the shop to sit in the worn leather chair in a nook and read the volumes he can no longer afford to buy ignores him, but then these days the professor seems to notice less and less. He lives in a world created by the words on the page.
One day when she is at the cash register she steals a glance at the officer, who is standing with a book in one hand, the fingers of his other hand doing some kind of intricate exercise as, she has noticed, they frequently do, but he is not looking at the book. He is staring at the clock on the back wall. It is set to French time. The Germans have decreed that all of Occupied France must now run on German time. Charlotte keeps setting it to German time. Simone keeps moving it back an hour. Damn Simone and her meaningless bravado. They need no excuse to arrest and appropriate, but still, why give them one to hide behind?
The officer looks from the clock to his watch, then back up at the clock. She drops her eyes and waits for him to speak. Except for the labored breathing of the old professor, who is not well—how could he be under the circumstances?—the shop remains silent. The officer walks to another shelf and takes down a book. She almost wishes he had said something about the clock. It is harder to hate the polite ones, the ones who seem reasonable, who let you keep time by the sun rather than by force. She does not want to begin to see this officer, any officer, any German as human. It is too dangerous.
The next time he comes, a week or ten days later—she refuses to keep track of his visits—she is alone in the shop. Simone is queueing for their rations, and there are no other customers. That is unusual these days. Despite the shortage of paper, the Occupation is turning out to be a boon for both publishers and bookshops. Between the curfew and shortages, there is little to do at night other than read or make love, and there isn’t much opportunity for the latter. Too many of the men have disappeared into POW or labor camps, fled to England or North Africa, or been killed in the fighting. She is sitting in the torn leather chair in the corner with Vivi on her lap, paging through a picture book.
“Bonjour,” he says.
She doesn’t answer.
He begins to browse. She drops her voice to a whisper as she reads the nonsensical rhymes to her daughter. When she looks up after a while, she sees he is watching them.
“How old is she?” he asks in his correct but accented French.
Charlotte does not mean to answer, but how can she resist talking about Vivi? “Eighteen months.”
The look of surprise that crosses his face is the confirmation of her worst nightmares. The lack of food is taking its toll. Vivi will be sick and stunted for life.
The next day, he returns with his wiliest ploy or most generous gesture. Who can tell? He is carrying an orange. “For the child,” he says, and puts it on the counter.
She stands looking at it. How can she look anywhere else? She doesn’t remember the last time she saw an orange. It glows as if lit from within.