Preview of The Paris Showroom by Juliet Blackwell
Preview of The Paris Showroom by Juliet Blackwell
Capucine
Winter 1944
Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, tenth arrondissement, Paris
IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S generation, twirling a fan in one’s left hand meant: We are watched.
As far as I knew, our captors did not understand the arcane language of fans. Still, when Isedore, the young woman who slept on the cot next to mine, picked up a fan and toyed with it, I glanced over at the guards just in case. The two men seemed absorbed in their game of cards, which they played upon a marble-topped and gilded Louis XIV side table, so I returned my attention to my proj- ect, keeping my movements small.
I doubted I would be noticed, shielded as I was by a blanket hung for privacy and by a well-placed trunk. The guards seldom paid us much mind. Most of the captives were Jews married to Ary- ans, or the wives of prisoners of war, though a handful were “anti- socials,” like me. By and large, we did as we were told. The alternative was deportation.
There were far worse places to be held prisoner by the Nazis.
I pressed another pleat into the sheet of heavy drawing paper that I had slipped into my work smock yesterday as I sorted through a shipment of goods from an artist’s ransacked atelier. The artist signed his pieces “Michel Gainsbourg”; apparently his name was Jewish enough to prompt his arrest but not sufficiently well-known that the Nazi elite vied to possess his artwork. Some of Gains- bourg’s dreamy watercolors and elegant sketches might be dis- played on the showroom floor below, while the rest would be loaded onto trains bound for Germany. There, they might grace the resi- dences of the loyal Herrenvolk who had lost their homes in the Al- lied bombings, or adorn the walls of those who simply wanted something new and pretty to spruce things up. It was an enduring mystery to me how the Nazis could so revile the Jews yet covet their art, their furniture, their clothing. Even their ordinary kitchen utensils.
But then, not much that happened in the Lévitan department store made sense.
Truckload after never-ending truckload, the looted household goods arrived nestled in straw-filled wooden crates, as though packed by loving hands. We prisoners sorted and cleaned and re- paired the items, some of which would be displayed in the down- stairs showrooms, as though there was nothing at all unusual about where they had come from. As though the store’s rightful owner, Monsieur Lévitan, had not been forced to flee to the south of France, just steps ahead of the secret police.
Once we had arranged the stolen items in tasteful displays on the department store counters, Nazi officials and their wives—or, more often, their French mistresses—would wander the aisles like plump, greedy children let loose in a candy store. Their avaricious
eyes gleamed as they snatched up family heirlooms as well as every- day items: valuable cloisonné vases and old desk lamps, centuries- old grandfather clocks and ancient pianos, fine bone china and well-used cast-iron skillets.
The Nazis called their project Möbel Aktion, or Operation Fur- niture. It was a special branch of the Organisation Todt, an organiza- tion of forced-labor camps that supported the war efforts of the Third Reich. The goal of Operation Furniture was simple: to strip the Jews’ homes and businesses of all they possessed so that the Nazis and their followers might live more comfortably.
And so that the Jews would have nothing to return to—if they returned at all.
Stiff with cold, my fingers moved slowly. Muscle memory soon found the right place to force the fold so that the fan would snap open properly, and as my hands settled into the familiar rhythm, my mind was free to wander. Madame Schreyer’s fever had spiked last night, and the other prisoners in her pod were attempting to hide her illness from the guards, lest she be deported to wherever it was they sent us when we were no longer useful: back to Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, or more likely to camps in Germany and, beyond, in Poland. Madame Schreyer was pale and wan, her coffee brown eyes appeared sunken, and her hands trembled. For now, at least, only her fellow prisoners knew just how weak she had become. Af- ter all, none of us was looking our best.
Folding a fan is akin to the Japanese art of orikami, creating something magical, even miraculous, from an ordinary sheet of pa- per. The delicate watercolor sketch of a shepherdess with her flock meant the finished fan would be not only useful but also lovely, just as a proper fan should be. Back in our shop—in my father’s shop, La Maison Benoît—we created works of art from silk and peacock
feathers, with carved ivory stays gilded in gold. Before the war, our fans had been in demand by the finest fashion houses. Before the war, I spent my nights in the jazz clubs of Montmartre, reveling in the knowledge that we were the lucky ones. We had survived the War of 1914 and freed ourselves from the suffocating weight of tradition, and were creating a new society filled with art and music and openness. Before the war, Charles and I had exulted in wine and song and each other, secure in the belief that the worst days were behind us and that beauty and joy lay ahead.
Charles. I felt the familiar pang deep in my belly but continued with the methodical pleating of the paper, doing my best to ignore the ache.
“Are you all right, Capu?” Isedore was fine boned and olive skinned, with huge near-black eyes that seemed unable to keep from betraying every emotion that passed through her heart. “Ça va?”
“Oui, ça va.” I was fine, I said, though we both knew it was a lie. None of us was fine, could possibly be fine, given our circumstances. Isedore was not much younger than my daughter, Mathilde, who was just turning twenty-one. Two years older than I had been when
I gave birth to her.
Just before my arrest, I had made Mathilde a special birthday gift: a fan with carved ivory monture, inlaid with tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl chinoiserie ornament, silk painted with the scene of a ballerina dancing on a seashore, and topped with a line of bril- liantly hued ostrich and peacock feathers. It was an outrageous work of art, the likes of which were rarely seen anymore and for which, I was sure, my daughter had absolutely no use.
But it was all I could do.
I had poured my maternal love, inadequate though it was, into that fan, and had tucked it into one of La Maison Benoît’s signature
leather-covered boxes along with a key to the “language of fans.” As a small child, Mathilde had excelled at the subtle unspoken lan- guage, flitting around the shop and gesturing with the grace of a five-year-old coquette in the making.
My father and I used to laugh so hard we cried.
Did she remember? Or did Mathilde now simply say what was on her mind, giving voice to the thoughts so many of us found dis- tressing to utter? It was hard to imagine; my daughter had been a secretive child, quiet, polite, and obedient—so unlike me. Such traits had helped Mathilde to fit in with her father’s conservative parents, and over the years they had blossomed under her mami and papi’s stewardship.
Our estrangement had saved her. Her grandparents were good, stolid French Catholics who would keep her safe. If the price of that safety was Mathilde’s disdain for me, I was more than happy to pay it.
I was startled from my thoughts by the sound of a shout, as the younger guard crowed over a winning hand while the other guard complained loudly and riffled through the cards, implying some- thing shady had occurred. I took advantage of their distraction to get to my feet and edge over toward one of the huge arched attic windows.
We had been ordered to stay away from the windows, and the guards had piled crates in front of them to block our access. But by subtly angling the crates a bit this way and that a little at a time, we prisoners had created an inconspicuous path through the obstacles so that occasionally one of us dared to peek outside, hoping to spy an Aryan wife or mother, in-laws or perhaps a brave neighbor or two loitering on the sidewalk below. The other day a young man named Jérôme had managed to drop a note to his girlfriend without
being spotted, but most often the prize was a mere glimpse of a loved one, a furtive wave of a hand. The locking of eyes. The crucial, precious recognition that one had not been forgotten.
I peered through the smudged glass to the street below, though I knew it was fruitless. Mathilde would not come looking for me. She had no reason to seek out the mother who had abandoned her.
But . . . if she had been there and had tilted her face to gaze up at the department store’s attic windows, and if she remembered the language of fans that we had once shared, I knew what I would have done.
I would have drawn the fan across my eyes: I am sorry.
Preview of The Paris Showroom by Juliet Blackwell
