April in Paris (26 page)

“You can’t take her away with you, and you can’t stay here yourself. It’s not possible.”

I looked at the hill. “How far is it to the sea?”

He gazed at my leg. “Too far for you.”

“I’d still like to see it.”

He wiped his forehead. “Yes, fine,” he said in a friendlier voice.

“Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.”

The next day, I took Antoinette for one last walk in the fields.

I talked to her and told her about her mother. We fell asleep in the grass. She woke up agitated; her crying was smothered and soundless. I picked her up, stroked her back, and began to sing.

About the girl I fell in love with, in the city, in April. I didn’t know the right words, and soon I fell silent. Antoinette looked at me attentively. I told her I had to go now, and that it would be better for her to forget me. I said it for my own sake. Afterward, I gave the child back to Jeanne and received a bundle of provisions from the old woman and a pair of boots from Joffo. No more was said about the trip to the seashore.

I left in the gray light of dawn, no less an outsider than on the day I’d arrived. I took with me the dagger Chantal had used to defend herself. Many kilometers beyond Balleroy, ships were emerging from the early-morning fog; the first troops were landing, trying to gain a foothold. It was the sixth of June. I knew nothing about that. I was on the road.

AFTERWORD

Readers often ask me how the story of
April in Paris
originated and what sort of research I did into the historical background of the time.

The origin of my tale is quickly told. A few years ago, while hiking along a cliff on the Normandy coast, I realized I’d over-estimated my strength and clambered out too far. I could neither advance nor retreat, and then it started to rain. Stuck on a ledge in the middle of a storm, I spotted the ruins of one of the German Wehrmacht’s defensive bunkers on a tongue of land opposite me. And there on that ledge, I had the idea for
April in Paris
: the story of a young German soldier, all alone in a foreign land, striving to stay out of the conflicts of his day but unable to disengage himself from the inhumanity of the occupation regime.

From that beginning, the entire constellation of an impossible love story developed.

For the portrayal of the historical background and the evoca-tion of “everyday life” in occupied Paris, I have drawn on many sources, from historical city maps to reference books and contemporary literary accounts. I’m particularly indebted to two authors 248 . A F T E R W O R D

and two books. The first is Arthur Koestler, whose work I greatly admire, and whose novel
Darkness at Noon
, first published in 1940, provided me with authoritative insight into prison conditions and interrogation methods in totalitarian countries. It was from Koestler’s book that I first learned of the quadratic tapping alphabet, which my Corporal Roth also uses in his cell. The second author is Felix Hartlaub, a German soldier who was posted in Paris, among other places, during World War II. He died under murky circumstances in 1945, in the last days of the conflict.

I learned a great deal about the soldiers’ jargon of the time from his posthumously published book,
In den eigenen Umriss gebannt:
Kriegsaufzeichnungen, literarische Fragmente und Briefe aus den
Jahren 1939 bis 1945
(
In the Restricted Zone: Notes from the Second World War
), which was first published in 1955. Hartlaub was a rarity—an uncompromising and discerning witness. In a letter from Paris, he wrote about the atmosphere in the occupied city:

“The typical climate here is arctic. I see so many examples of pro-gressive dehumanization, hair-raising egoism, and cold-blooded apathy that I constantly have to defend myself against invasions from these inner regions.” Perhaps Corporal Roth would have seen things in more or less the same way.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Wallner is an actor and screenwriter. He

lives in Germany and divides his time between Berlin and the Black Forest.

A NOTE ABOUT THE T YPE

This book is set in Adobe Garamond. Designed by

Robert Slimbach in 1989, this contemporary digital

font is drawn from two sixteenth-century sources: the roman typefaces of Claude Garamond and the italic

types of Robert Granjon.

• Cover
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Contents
  
  • Chapter 1
    
  • Chapter 2
    
  • Chapter 3
    
  • Chapter 4
    
  • Chapter 5
    
  • Chapter 6
    
  • Chapter 7
    
  • Chapter 8
    
  • Chapter 9
    
  • Chapter 10
    
  • Chapter 11
    
  • Chapter 12
    
  • Chapter 13
    
  • Chapter 14
    
  • Chapter 15
    
  • Chapter 16
    
  • Chapter 17
    
  • Chapter 18
    
  • Chapter 19
    
  • Chapter 20
    
  • Chapter 21
    
  • Chapter 22
    
  • Chapter 23
    
  • Chapter 24
    
  • Chapter 25
    
  • Chapter 26
    
  • Chapter 27
    
  • Chapter 28
    
  • Chapter 29
    
  • Chapter 30
    
  • Chapter 31
    
  • Chapter 32
    
  • Chapter 33
    
• Afterword
  
• A Note About the Author
  
• A Note About the Type