Page 38 of The Dressmaker's Gift
Then Vivi had handed back the scissors and said, ‘Cut my hair off, too.’ She’d turned to face the rest of the hut, summoning up a smile. ‘Who else would like to join us? It’s cooler, and it’ll make it much easier to comb out the lice.’ A queue of women had formed of those who still had their hair, and afterwards they helped one another to clean their shorn heads. The differentiation between those who’d had their heads shaved and those who hadn’t was erased. And to Claire, it seemed that the stench and the degradation seemed a little less pervasive that evening, displaced by a sense of camaraderie that had flickered into life.
1944
The city froze that January. It was one of the coldest Mireille could remember, and now that supplies of food and coal were at their lowest ebb she felt that her body and her mind had frozen as well. She sleepwalked through her days in the sewing room, wrapped in a blanket as she tried to stitch together the pieces of the few items that were still being ordered. Many of the girls had left theatelier. Some – the Jewish girls and one or two others – had simply disappeared, as Claire and Vivi had done. Others had decided to go back and struggle to survive with their families in the more rural areas, where at least there was a chance to grow a little food.
The temptation to go home was strong, but Mireille knew she couldn’t leave Paris, even if she had been able to get a pass to travel. Applying for one would draw attention to herself. In any case, she had to stay, for the sake of the fugitives that she sheltered in the attic rooms in the Rue Cardinale and for the sake of her friends, Claire and Vivi. She had no idea whether or not they were still alive, but she knew she had to keep going, keep hoping that one day they would return.
She left the apartment as seldom as possible, and curled up in her blankets when the air raid sirens sounded and she heard the distant roar of the bombers overhead. She often wondered whether ‘Fréd’ was in one of the planes and tried to give herself courage by imagining that he was, that he knew she was there and that he was guiding his bombs away from Saint-Germain, keeping her safe.
Monsieur Leroux brought her news, occasionally, of the war beyond her country’s borders. The German forces were stretched thinner than ever now, and the privations that they’d inflicted on the countries they’d occupied were biting them too. The Allies were stronger than ever, making advances. Surely, he said, if the tide continued to turn like this, the war couldn’t go on much longer ...
She tried hard to hold on to his words, even though when she studied his face it was gaunt and twisted with anguish, belying his underlying sense of desperation.
She had often mulled over what he’d said that day when he’d come to tell her that Vivi and Claire had left the prison and been taken to a camp in the east. ‘I love them both, Mireille.’ What had he meant by that? What was his relationship with Vivi, and what were his feelings for Claire? Could he love them both, equally?
One evening, after she’d settled the family of refugees that she was sheltering for the night in their bedrooms, she joined him where he sat at the table in the sitting room.
For a moment they were both silent. And then she said, ‘I wonder what they are doing now.’ There was no need for her to say their names; they both knew who she was referring to.
‘I tell myself every day that they are doing what we are doing. Staying alive, keeping going, waiting for the day we can be together again. I think we have to tell ourselves that. It’s what gives us a reason to carry on.’
She tried to read the expression in his eyes, but the depth of his pain obscured everything else. ‘Vivi ...’ she began, but stopped, unable to find the right words to ask him what she wanted to know.
He studied her face for a moment. And then he said, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘Vivi is my sister.’
All at once it made sense. Their closeness. The way they smiled at each other. But also the way she’d seen him looking at Claire, sometimes. He really did love them both. But in very different ways. The pain in his eyes made sense now, too.
He’d lost his sister as well as the woman he was falling in love with. And he blamed himself.
The cold would have killed the women in the hut, its icy fingers freezing the blood in their veins, had there not been so many of them crammed on to each bunk. In winter, the fleas and lice bit less, which meant there were fewer deaths from typhus, but influenza and pneumonia stepped into the breach to continue the brutal, remorseless harvest of lives through the camp. Weakened by near-starvation and despair, few of the camp’s inmates had the resources to put up much of a fight.
One evening, when they arrived back from the factory, the hut senior drew Vivi and Claire aside. ‘They are asking for more women who can sew, to work in the reception centre. There are so many more people to process these days, they’ve brought in extra sewing machines. I’ve put your names on the list.’
‘Thank you,’ said Vivi. Over the months they’d spent in the camp, she’d told Claire to bring back any odds and ends from the factory whenever she could, to give to the senior, as Vivi herself did too, cementing them into her good books. Everything had value – a handful of buttons, a needle and thread, some scraps of material. At last the gifts had paid off, buying the two of them their places in the relative warmth and safety of the reception centre.
And so the next morning, instead of trudging along the snow-packed track to the factory, they walked a few hundred yards to the huddle of buildings beside the gates to the camp. As they went, Claire blew on her hands, trying to stop her fingers from freezing. ‘I wonder who’ll take over our jobs in the factory,’ she mused aloud.
Vivi began to speak, but the cold air caught in her lungs, making her whole body convulse as she coughed. When she found her voice again, she said, ‘Well, I hope whoever takes over my machine doesn’t discover that I set it to make the toes and heels of the socks thinner instead of reinforcing them. I reckon there’ll be quite a few German soldiers with very sore feet by now. That’s been my most recent contribution to the war effort!’ For a moment, her hazel eyes flashed with a little of their old spark, and Claire couldn’t help laughing. The sound was like music in the frozen air, a sound so unusual that it made the prisoners walking a few yards ahead of them turn and stare. In the nearest guard tower, the barrel of a machine gun swung in their direction and Claire quickly stifled her mouth with her hand.
Vivi coughed again, and her breath turned into little clouds above her head which froze into droplets of ice, weaving themselves into her halo of short, russet curls. A ray of low winter sunshine illuminated her for a moment and Claire was struck by how beautiful her friend looked in that moment, as out of place in the drab surroundings of the camp as a ruby nestling in a heap of rags.
Mireille could sense that the German grip on Paris had begun to weaken. There were fewer soldiers on leave, these days, sitting at the cafés and restaurants along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and more and more military convoys leaving the city, heading northwards.
Monsieur Leroux arrived at the apartment one evening in June, carrying a large box. He set it down on the table in the sitting room with a flourish. ‘Voilà! A present for you, Mireille.’ She opened the box to find a wireless radio set.
A year ago she might have felt a qualm of fear at having such a thing under her roof, but now it represented a small freedom.
Once he had plugged it in and positioned the aerial correctly, a voice filled the room. At first she could scarcely grasp what the announcer was saying.
‘What does he mean?’ she asked Monsieur Leroux. ‘What is this “Operation Overlord”?’
His eyes shone with a look of hope which had been absent for such a very long time. ‘The Allies have landed on the beaches of Normandy, Mireille. This is it. The big push! They are fighting on French soil.’
Every evening after that, she would hurry back upstairs from the sewing room once the working day was over and switch on the radio to listen to the latest news from the BBC and the Free French broadcaster, Radiodiffusion Nationale. The voices filled the room with bulletins announcing the latest advances as, town by town, the Allies clawed France back from German control. And as she listened, those same voices seemed to fill her heart with fresh hope. She began to let herself believe, again, that there would be an end to the war; that she would be able to see her family soon; that Claire and Vivi would come home; and that maybe – just maybe – out there somewhere the young Free French airman, whose name she whispered at night in the silence of her darkened room, was fighting his way back to free the city where she sat waiting, in limbo, for her life to begin again.
Slowly but surely a new tone of defiance crept into the voices coming through the radio, until, at last, the tide turned.
It was a hot August afternoon and Mademoiselle Vannier had sent the few remaining seamstresses home early. There was so little work these days and only one team remained, working on the increasingly sporadic orders that came in. More often than not, the salon downstairs remained closed, the blinds drawn over the plate glass windows embellished with the name Delavigne Couture.
