Page 16 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
The two of them walked in silence to the corner.
Alice paused, ready to turn for her home. “Want to meet me for dinner? The owner of the bistro across the street from my apartment had a chalk board out on the street yesterday that they have beef bourguignon.”
Katrina rolled her eyes. “Where did he get beef?”
Alice wiggled her brows. “Black market, I’d say.”
“Me, too. But I’ll pass. Thanks. I’m sleeping until I’ve got to report for my shift.”
Alice hugged her. “Bye. Sleep well. I’m off to get my hair cut.”
“You are?” Many French women were cropping their hair. Long tresses and pinned coiffures were such a bother. Shampoo was expensive and heating water in a kettle was the only way to survive a good wash. “Brave woman.”
“I’m tired of coiling it up tight as a rug. Takes too much time.”
Katrina grunted. “You said it! I bet Russell will like it short.”
Alice snorted. “Fiddle-dee-dee. He’ll find a way to criticize it. He’ll say I’m trying to look like a man.”
“Delusional fellow. Go to it! I should do it myself!”
“You can take one look at me tomorrow and decide.”
“I will!”
Alice put up her hand. “Au revoir!”
* * *
She hurried down the boulevard toward her little flat. The church on the corner tolled the hour. Eight in the morning. Grey drizzle began to fall. She had long ago given up carrying an umbrella. She didn’t care for the ash that mixed in with the precipitation but she liked the feeling of something on her skin that spoke of nature and normality. Something that touched her.
In two and half years of war, the French had become glassy-eyed, walking the streets as if they were half dead. So many French men had gone off to fight in the trenches, so many millions had been wounded or perished, that old men and young women ran the economy of the ravaged land. They tilled the fields. They fished the coast and the rivers. They drove the lorries into the city from the countryside and sold their produce on thePériphériquestalls or to those shopkeepers who arrived at dawn to barter for them.
Last summer, Katrina had gone one morning after her shift had ended at the hospital and watched as many went away with little for their early morning endeavor. Katrina had purchased a few potatoes and fresh spinach, a ripe tomato and a handful of parsley. But no beef or chicken was to be found. Those animals either remained at home to live for another day or they had already expired due to Army confiscation and government rationing.
With the most primal needs of food a problem, few French had the desire or opportunity to go to cabarets or music halls. Cinema theaters were mostly dark. Other entertainments did not appeal to her. A hearty supper in a bistro around the corner from her apartment on Rue Danton became her finest little pleasure. Aside from that treat, she lived a spartan life of work and sleep.
Alice was her only friend here. The other doctors, all male, at the hospital were by nature hail and hearty comrades in arms, but kept to themselves always on watch for a disapproving eye of Russell. One man in particular was more friendly to her as a colleague than the other four men on staff. A surgeon from Dallas, Texas, Edwin Browker had volunteered to work in Paris when the war began in September of ‘fourteen. Fifty-two years old, he had given up his practice and, like all doctors on staff at Neuilly, he relied mostly on his own savings. He had told her he was a widower and she had the impression he was attempting to become closer to her than a colleague. But she had discouraged him. Browker was a nice man but not for her. Plus she preferred to keep her professional relationships formal.
Their patients at Neuilly came from a mix of sources. Occasionally, when the French or British armies to the north had a drive on and their military hospitals were overcrowded, their wards would fill with wounded foreign soldiers. Russell had declared the hospital would take men who were recovering only from amputations or fractures. None were to be recovering from diseases, specifically not syphilis or gonorrhea.
Most regular patients were British or American diplomats, a few Canadians too. Most traveled without their wives or business staff and were alone in Paris. They were by nature attached in one way or another to their embassies, but came by referrals for any condition from indigestion to heart failure. They tended to be influential politically or wealthy and that meant too they were often infuriatingly fussy and demanding. Expecting to be obeyed, they were surprised to see before them a young woman of good looks and a no-nonsense disposition. She liked it that way. Her demeanor kept them at a distance.
One American, a patient who had entered the men’s ward last week, was to be discharged this morning on her orders. Robert Lewiston of Pennsylvania, negotiator for the American company Bethlehem Steel, asked to call for her in the future and take her to dinner. She’d agreed. He was pleasant and she longed for good company. Something different. Mister Lewiston was not Nate, but the prospect of friendly conversation with laughter and news of home appealed to her.
The best company of all would be Nate’s. But she’d given up hope he’d be able to get across the Channel. Only his short letters came. Though they were dated once a week or so, they came all at once usually. They were quick, impersonal. Each note ended with a promise to see her soon, though he could not promise when. That vagueness, she knew was to escape the censors who read everything that crossed the Channel. Fear of any leak of information about troops, supplies or conditions in either Britain or France and the greater continent drove the censors to use heavy black redactions from any correspondence.
She’d resigned herself to accepting that, but it brought her little peace. Memories of Nate, his sweetness to her when she was in trouble and needed a friend, put sad smiles on her face when she longed for a friendly arm around her shoulders and a hug.
This morning, Katrina wanted only to crawl into her bed and sleep. She’d been assigned the night shift by Russell upon arrival last May. For the most part, she didn’t mind it. She did dislike the fact that she had little to do. In fact, she was more like a nurse. But she’d be damned if she’d complain to him. Paris suffered in this hellish war and she did not mind that she had little opportunity to see it during the day. Since September when the days grew short and the nights too filled with cannon sounds, she could not sleep well, day or night. Street lamps in Paris, once called the City of Light, were now dim. The air, whether warm or chilly, was littered with dust and dirt and ash from the continual fires burning everywhere. Fuel was limited. People burned their newspapers, their old clothes, their furniture, whatever they owned into an open fire to keep warm. Remnants of everything danced in the air, like ghosts of their own pasts come to haunt those who trudged the litter-filled streets.
Taxis were few. Driven by old men and sometimes by women, they often broke down. Whether because of old parts, lack of them or petrol, the once jaunty red taxis of Paris were falling apart, many left on the side of the streets, abandoned.
To transport others, the Metro ran. But on limited and unreliable schedules, the trains were not a useful means to get someone somewhere at a certain time. Katrina learned that painfully when she originally rented an apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain on the Left Bank. She loved the elegant furnishings that conveyed with the rental and the fine airy kitchen where she could cook in grand style. More, she adored the decor of plastered scrollwork on the high ceilings, huge walled mirrors and high polished wooden floors of the Belle Epoque. But she had to walk to work across the Seine and north for more than two miles because the trains ran whenever they could which was not often.
She moved north to Rue Danton, only a few blocks from the hospital. She gave up her lovely flat, and moved to her three room apartment. She bought a massive oak bed big enough for three, and a comfortable but sagging old sofa she found in a consignment shop. The sofa reminded her of her German Opa’s in Chicago, an old filigreed walnut-laced piece that seated four. But with a table and two chairs and a kitchen her mother would laugh at for its postage stamp size, Katrina made do.
The one bit that unnerved her was the sound of Big Bertha. The huge anti-aircraft gun was positioned by the French army somewhere north of Paris. No one said precisely where, for obvious reasons. Though speculation abounded. All were warned constantly by statements of the French government not to discuss such things, as spies, it was said, were everywhere. One was not to nurture them with any speculations. Indeed, caught at this by a French gendarme, one could be taken to the local precinct and questioned.
