39.

ANNETTE HAD GIVEN HIM EXPLICIT DIRECTIONS TO THE VARIOUS places where she had guided the aviators, and now in his new hiking boots, he set off to find them. First, he went to Saint-Mandé to see where the Vallons had lived. He had been entirely wrong about the location. The building, made of handsome pale stone blocks, seemed less familiar than the one he had found on his recent walk. Yet there was a vaguely recognizable outline and shape to the neighborhood. Standing across the street, he let himself turn back in time. The entry. The bicycles. The stairs. He identified the window of the room where he had slept, facing the small side street. He remembered waiting hours alone, trying to keep warm by doing jumping jacks—in his socks. The window on the corner was the sitting room, which had a large ornate stove that burned coal, delivered through a chute to the basement. He spotted the chute now. Annette, Monique, and their parents had slept in two rooms on the other side of the sitting room, and when there were additional airmen visiting, the girls moved into their parents’ room. On the street, staring up at the dining room window, he remembered the kitchen beyond it, where Mme Vallon miraculously concocted splendid meals from meager rations. He remembered the goose, the feathers flying.

After studying the building for a while, he had readjusted his memory. It seemed odd to him that memory was so malleable, that what he had thought was true could be revised, like a flight plan.

To break in his hiking boots, he walked toward the Jardin des Plantes, keeping up a good stride along the Seine, passing a variety of scenes—fishermen, industries, laundry. The weather was good, not too hot. The long botanical garden stretched out in front of the Museum of Natural History.

“Go straight past the garden to the grove of Christmas trees,” she had told him just two days earlier.

He passed the statue, Rodin’s Thinker. The guy was still thinking. Marshall recognized the general layout and the area where among the evergreens she had assembled airmen before sending them across the street to the Gare d’Austerlitz. He wandered around through the trees. The path meandered. On a bench by some bushes, an aged man sat reading Le Monde. Marshall sat on another bench to tighten his bootlace. He dimly recalled that Annette had escorted him and a B-17 waist gunner to some benches amidst public shrubbery. Later, she had distributed their train tickets surreptitiously, without speaking. The last time Marshall saw her, she was hurrying away down the broad avenue of plane trees. He had thought he remembered how the sunshine dappled teasingly through the great trees lining the promenades. It was spring. But now he realized he must have been here near dusk. He had taken the night train to Toulouse.

The Gare d’Austerlitz was across the street from the Jardin des Plantes. Marshall made his way there, passing the Métro stairs and entering the massive building. The high glass-and-wrought-iron ceiling was so distinctive that he did not see how he could have forgotten the station. He could almost locate in his spatial memory the exact quai where he had boarded the train. Robert had entered the car without glancing at him. So many memories were crashing through Marshall’s head that reliving them made him exultant—the fear then, the relief now.

On the way out of the station, he remembered what Nicolas had said about the Gare d’Austerlitz. The Jews were deported from this spot. Marshall was glad the Dirty Lily had dropped at least a few bombs. If he hadn’t been shot down, maybe he could have helped shorten the war. If, if only. You couldn’t revise history with conditional clauses.

He pictured the blithe young man he had been—reckless but scared, overconfident, out of his element, filled with longings, strangely detached from home, walking tentatively in a foreign country. He reflected upon his youthful brazenness, his naïveté. He wondered if Annette found her youth embarrassing too. Maybe the primary difference between youth and adulthood was the capacity for embarrassment.