those Paris summer days, but Claire talked about working in the textile factory and the sewing room in the camp’s reception centre, and she remembered how Vivi had never stopped finding ways to resist, in spite of the beatings and the torture, the starvation and the cold. When others around them had been deprived of the last scraps of their humanity, Vivi had refused to relinquish hers. It was those memories, more than anything else, that helped Claire to begin to heal.
Mireille was cycling back from Neuilly one Sunday evening when she reached the Pont Neuf. She dismounted and propped her bike against the wall, then slipped down the steps on to the island in the middle of the Seine. The willow tree was still there, on the point at the end of the Île de la Cité, a survivor of the battle to liberate Paris. She crept in beneath its branches to sit for a while, and think of home and watch the river flow past. She heard the sound of footsteps hastening along the cobbles of the quayside behind her, but thought nothing of it, assuming it would be one of the boatmen going about his business, returning to his vessel in the golden light of the summer’s evening.
The footsteps stopped. Then she heard a voice, softly calling her name.
She scrambled to her feet, steadying herself against the solid trunk of the tree. And there, parting the languid greenery and ducking his head beneath the willow’s branches was a man in a French army uniform. He set down his heavy kit bag and as he reached her side he put out a hand, tentatively, to touch her face, as if making sure she was real, not some vision from a long-lost dream, standing there beside the river as it turned to gold in the evening light.
‘I was coming to find you in the Rue Cardinale. I saw you from the bridge. At least, I thought it was you, with those curls, so I had to come and check,’ he said. ‘Mireille Martin. How I have missed you.’
And she lifted her hand to cover his and spoke the name that she’d kept a secret for so long, the name of the man she’d fallen in love with.
‘Philippe Thibault. How I have missed you, too.’
When they’d made the journey from Dachau to the hospital in Paris, it had felt like a dream to Claire. How could it have taken so long for the train that she and Vivi had travelled on to reach the camps when the Red Cross ambulance taking her back was just one long day’s drive? She had been that close, all along, and yet she had been worlds away from her home in the city.
It had taken a few days to arrange the transport and during that time Monsieur Leroux had scarcely left her bedside. Although now she knew he wasn’t ‘Monsieur Leroux’ at all.
The first thing he’d asked, as he sat holding her hand, was whether she knew where Vivi was. She’d looked at him in numbed silence at first, still seeing shadows of her friend’s eyes in his. Her head felt heavy and sore in the aftermath of the fever, and she was confused by the sight of him here at Dachau, struggling to understand what she was seeing and hearing. The sound of Vivi’s name, spoken aloud by him, was a shock.
Her lips were dry and cracked and he had to lean close to make out her reply. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ she whispered. ‘I tried. She saved me, but I couldn’t save her.’ Then the tears began to fall, soaking the parched, drawn skin of her face like rain falling after a drought, and he gathered her frail body into his arms and held her as she cried.
In the days that followed, while they waited for her to be strong enough to make the journey back to Paris and he made the arrangements with the American Hospital, he was a constant presence at her bedside. He fed her the nutritious soup, which was all her starved body could digest at first, a few spoonfuls at a time, filling her shrunken stomach. He made sure she drank the bitter-tasting tonic and he gently massaged ointment into her hands and feet, soothing and mending the broken, scarred skin. He refused to leave, even when night fell, and she would awaken from her nightmares to find him there, holding her hand, soothing her as Vivi