He keeps browsing. She keeps pretending to read. Her silence apparently doesn’t bother him. Why should it? He’s the conqueror, the occupier, the one who has nothing to fear. But she feels the quiet as a palpable presence, almost as loud as the fretting that is mounting in the back room. She stands and starts toward the sound. She doesn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on him. Conquerors don’t steal, they appropriate. Apartments, factories, haute couture salons, publishing houses. No, they didn’t have to appropriate the publishing houses. Most of the publishers were eager to cooperate. How else could they get their hands on the necessary paper and turn a profit? And they are turning a profit. Book publishing came to a halt during the first months of the Occupation, then roared back to life, albeit an insipid spineless version of it. Henri Filipacchi at Hachette drew up a list of books to be banned. Many of his colleagues contributed to it. Bernard Grasset of Editions Grasset sent out a letter to his fellow publishers advising them to censor themselves, thereby sparing the German Propaganda Office the trouble. Most of them went along with the unholy suggestion, though some have begun to play a dangerous double game. Gaston Gallimard dines with Propaganda Office officials—the shortage of paper again—while turning a blind eye to the communists who put out their underground publication from his firm’s offices. It’s lucky her father has fled. He would not countenance a double game. He would go before a firing squad, or under the guillotine, which the Germans are using again in public executions at La Santé Prison on the rue de la Santé in Montparnasse, before he’d sell his beloved Éditions Aumont, which was his soul, to the devil. Instead, he’d closed it down. That was how Charlotte, who’d begun working there after university, had ended up running the bookstore on rue Toullier, that and the fact that her father’s old friend Étienne de la Bruyère, the owner of Librairie la Bruyère, had been called up by the military, captured by the Germans, and sent into forced labor. As a child, she’d spent blissful hours in the shop, curled up in one of the vaulted corner alcoves with all the books she could ever want while her father and Monsieur de la Bruyère discussed what her father was publishing, and Monsieur de la Bruyère was selling, and people were buying. The shop, like all of Paris, has lost some of its luster since the Germans marched in. The beautiful herringbone patterned floor is scuffed. There is no floor polish available in Occupied Paris. At least, none is available to anyone except the Occupiers and their collaborators. The old India rugs are showing wear. But the carved art deco mahogany panels still frame the sections of shelves, and she still has, if not all the books she could ever want, thanks to Nazi censorship, then more than she will ever be able to read. The point is, the browsing officer can take anything he wants, and he knows it.
She steps into the back room, lifts Vivi out of the crate she has lined with a quilt, and begins to jiggle her against her shoulder, trying to fool her out of her hunger pains. Simone has been gone for more than an hour. The queues often go on for longer. She and Simone take turns, one queueing for whatever is meagerly available that day, the other minding the store. Simone’s daughter has a J1 card that entitles children between the ages of three and six to extra rations. Charlotte has a card that permits nursing mothers, or those who claim to be still nursing—even the most efficient German does not try to determine if a woman’s milk has dried up—to go to the head of the queue. Her card is more valuable than Simone’s. Extra allocations mean nothing, when there is nothing left to allocate. A week earlier, two thousand people queued for three hundred portions of rabbit, or so the word that went down the line said. The queues are rumor mills. It’s hard to believe what people say, impossible not to.
She returns to the front of the store, still jiggling a crying Vivi against her shoulder. He is standing, with a book in one hand, beside the mahogany counter where the cash register sits. As she goes behind the register, she keeps her head down, refusing to look at him. His free hand comes into her line of vision. His fingers are long and slender. She wonders, irrelevantly, if he plays the piano. Germany wasn’t always like this. It was the land of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner, people told one another in an attempt to console themselves when the troops first marched in. But Wagner played at full volume, it turns out, is good for drowning out the cries of the tortured, or so rumors go. These days the city runs on rumors, as it used to on petrol when there were still automobiles. The hand seems to be moving toward Vivi, as if to soothe her. Charlotte stops herself from taking a step back, but she cannot help stiffening. The hand withdraws. Perhaps he is not insensitive. Perhaps he has intuited how repugnant she would find his laying an Aryan finger, even a long graceful Aryan finger, on her child. The hand returns into her line of vision. Now it is holding francs. Still refusing to look at him, she takes the bills, puts them in the cash register, counts out change, starts to hand it to him. Only then does she notice the title and author above the price on the volume he is holding. She had been too scared to before. It is Stefan Zweig’s book with a section on Freud. It is on the so-called Otto list of banned books. Works by or about Jews are forbidden, and this is both. They were supposed to turn it in to be sent to the vast warehouse where outlawed books are pulped or left to molder, but Simone took the copies they had in stock and hid them in the storeroom. Many booksellers are selling banned books under the counter, partly in defiance, partly for profit. Only this purchase is not under the counter. Simone either missed the book or left it on the shelf intentionally, another of her futile dangerous gestures. Charlotte loves Simone, like a sister they always say, but sometimes she could kill her. She supposes that’s sisterly, too.
Her hand is still hovering near his with the change. Does she hand it over and let him walk out of the store with the book? She could be arrested for less. Does she tell him it’s a mistake, that they have turned in the other copies, that they must have missed this one in their eagerness to comply? She cannot sell it to him, to anyone, she will insist. It is against the law. The explanation sickens her, but she knows she will make it to save her skin, hers and Vivi’s.
She looks up and, frightened as she is, she almost has to laugh. The joke about Hitler, the epitome of blond, blue-eyed, strong-jawed Aryanism, is standing in front of her in the flesh. This Wehrmacht officer has dark hair, black eyes set deep behind rimless glasses, and the long ascetic face of a saint. While she is staring at him, he takes the change from her hand, executes a slight bow, and starts toward the door with the contraband book. As she watches him go, she notices that he slips the volume into his tunic before he steps into the street. So he knows it’s banned.
A moment later, the two students who had fled at the sight of him return, and shortly after that the bell jingles again, and Monsieur Grassin, another friend of her father’s, comes through the door. Grassin, an ethnographer at the Palais de Chaillot, visits the shop periodically. He has promised her father to look after her as best he can. Unfortunately, he is not up to the task. A member of the Resistance, or so she suspects, he sleeps in a different place every night or two. He is not easy to find, but he has told her that if she ever needs his help, she is to put his book, Seeing and Writing Culture, in the window as a sign. “But be careful of the stampede,” he’d joked at the time. “You know how popular the subject is.”