The Girl With No Name

by Reine Andrieu

Genres: World War II; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

'Read it in one sitting!' ***** Madeleine, Amazon reviewer

She may not remember her name, but her body knows

1940. When a French family is forced to house a German soldier in their spare room, young Noemie finds herself drawn to the enemy living under the family roof. A forbidden romance unfolds with unforeseeable consequences.

1946. In the aftermath of the war, a little girl is found sitting on a bench with no memory of who she is - not even her own name. Justin, a young gendarme, takes her under his wing. He is desperate to unravel the mystery surrounding her sudden appearance - and the truth he discovers is spine-chilling.

But one question remains: who is she to Noemie?

Release date: July 29, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

FOREWORD

Mid-May 1946

My laces are undone. They must have come undone in the forest. I’ve been running. For a long time. I found this bench to sit on in the middle of a village square. I don’t know where I am, but what does it matter anyway? I’m glad to sit down and rest a while. My socks are full of earth. I fell over several times in the forest. My legs and arms are covered in scratches. I think I even fell into a hole. I woke up freezing cold, at the bottom of a . . . yes, it must have been a big hole, not that deep but quite wide. I’m covered in dirt from head to toe. I’m all smelly and itchy. Especially my head. I haven’t washed for days. For . . . for I don’t know how long. I just can’t remember. And when I touch my head, I can feel something sticky. My hands are red. Did I hurt my head? Maybe it was when I fell into the ditch . . . Some children walk past and stare at me looking puzzled. They even stop a little way off to get a better look at me. A slight breeze blows dust up from the ground. I’m lucky it’s not raining. But I can see lots of big clouds. If it rains, I’ll go inside the church. No harm can come to me in a church. It’s late. It’ll soon be dark. I sit on the bench and wait. What else can I do? I don’t know this village or the people I can see in the distance. Two ladies are talking and looking straight at me. One is nodding as if to say ‘yes’ to the other. A man comes up to me. He’s filthy and wearing a huge coat. He smells awful too. Worse than me. He asks me if I want to see something interesting, something I’ve never seen before. I shake my head. I want him to leave me alone. He tells me to look at him, saying he’ll tell my parents if . . . He stops suddenly and bolts when he sees the two ladies in the distance walking in my direction. Soon they are right beside me.

“Hello. Are you waiting for your mummy?” asks one of them, bending down towards me.

“No.”

“Or your daddy?”

“No.”

The war has left many children orphaned. The lady sits down next to me.

“If you have no mummy or daddy, who looks after you then?” she asks.

I shrug. I wish I could answer. She asks if I live here in Bournelin. I shake my head. I tell her I’ve been running. She asks where. In the forest, I say. I show them my dirty socks. They don’t seem to understand why I’m sat here on this bench.

“Where are your parents?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

I rack my brain trying to remember.

“I don’t know.”

“How old are you?”

I try again, but my mind is blank.

“I don’t know any more . . .”

They say I’m very young to be outside on my own at this time of day and ask me why I don’t go home. They offer to walk back with me. I look at them in a daze, and this time it’s me who doesn’t understand. I tell them I don’t know where home is.

“Don’t you live with someone?” they ask.

I shake my head.

“Don’t you know anyone in Bournelin?”

I shake my head.

“Where did you arrive from?”

I point to the street I had followed to the square.

“I came from the forest.”

They look puzzled. “What do you mean ‘from the forest’? There is no forest here, only fields . . . the forest is much further away.”

Why do they keep asking me the same thing? It’s perfectly simple.

“From the forest where I was running,” I say with a shrug. “And I hurt myself too.”

I show them my scratches. They ask what I was doing in the forest. Do they not understand anything?

“I WAS RUN-NING!”

“But you don’t run like that for no reason!”

I look at them but find nothing to say. I shrug again. All I know is that I’m here. And I’m very thirsty. And hungry too.

1

Solveig, 12th September 2011

I haven’t slept a wink. The images engraved in my mind were haunting me the whole night. I kept seeing those planes flying into the twin towers like a scene from an apocalyptic film . . . People jumping out of windows. Whether to escape the inferno in the crazy hope that some supernatural force or divine intervention would save them or to hasten their death, I couldn’t tell. I don’t know which is worse . . . Choice or chance. Just what goes through the mind of someone who sees a Boeing heading straight for the ninety-fifth floor, right there where they are sitting? Yesterday was the commem­oration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The images we had all already seen a thousand times relentlessly invaded our screens once again. Disbelief grips me each time and the absurd nature of the images intrigues me. Who would have imagined that one day two planes would deliberately crash into twin skyscrapers, literally within minutes of each other? Two swipes of the sword. Two blows of the club. But what astounds me the most is what we don’t see: the plan in the making, behind the scenes. That a human brain can conceive of such an idea, propagate it and have it endorsed by other human brains is beyond me. By human I mean biologically speaking, as there is nothing human in devising a plan of this nature. It’s simply monstrous, heinous, egregious . . . But if you look closely, the expression of human violence has always been monstrous, it is putrefaction incarnate, stinking and lurking in a corner, regularly emerging to taunt ­humanity as if to say: “You see, I’m still here!” A dormant volcano that erupts when you least expect it. I’m thinking of the massacre of the Native Americans, religious wars, the victims of Stalin and Mao, and the Shoah of course . . . Unfortunately, the list just goes on and on.

I am what we call, with a hint of condescension, an old lady. That’s how they refer to the Eiffel Tower and the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. It makes me smile. Yes, I’m an old lady and proud of it. I’m happy to have made it this far. After all, aging means you have been lucky; lucky not to have died young. So how can you complain about that? Though it was inconceivable that I would have the misfortune to witness the event that happened ten years ago. The century I’ve lived through has been marked by bitter, violent, and barbaric events, all with one thing in common: they were all master­minded by fellow human beings. And for no reason other than a mere thirst for hegemony or expansionism, or in the name of religion, or other ideologies, which in my book do not justify the death of tens of millions of people. Isn’t that what it’s all about? And I continue to ask myself what lessons have been learned from all this, as humans keep repeating the same errors ad infinitum. Not all humans, I should add. Just a select few, those who decide for others. And those who find accomplices for their murderous delirium. As I said, this is nothing new. From the beginning of civilization man has always waged war on others. And he hasn’t become more civilized since. Yes, he cultivated his land and raised his animals for food, but that is precisely when the trouble started. He wanted more than the others. And to dominate the others. For what? Just to satisfy an inflated ego? I’ll just go ahead and say it: humans are either completely idiotic or crazy, or worst of all, full of hatred. I’m talking about so-called “civilized” human beings, of course, because the tribes who live in the remote corners of Africa or the Amazon are more civilized than the rest of us put together. They don’t destroy other people or the environment. Hitler was insane or sick, so they say. Okay, fair enough. But he didn’t act alone. The Nazi officials who carried out his orders weren’t insane or sick. They were simply fuelled by hatred. The Armenian genocide. The Hutu and the Tutsi. Fuelled by hate.

I’ve got enough on my plate coping with my own demons without watching humanity shooting itself in the foot yet again. I’m seventy-five years old and have stumbled through life’s trials and tribulations. I’ve been married and have two children who are grown up now. My husband and I were devoted to each other. We were in love even, though you’re not meant to say that at our age are you? I can’t stand society’s obsession with youth . . . Can you still be in love when you’re over seventy? I’ll answer that. Yes! You can. Well we were at least. I know what you’re thinking. Sorry to disappoint you but no, our relationship wasn’t just based on the platonic tenderness that is supposed to keep old couples together and make sure they look after each other no matter what. My husband and I had more than that. We made love right until the end. In our own way and without shame. I won’t dwell on it. I know it can make some people uncomfortable. Or make them laugh. Nothing wrong with laughing about it, that’s not the problem, though it depends how and with whom. We used to laugh as we romped. Then as we got older, we learned to laugh at ourselves.

He was older than me and when he passed away in 2008 I thought I would die too. My children were immensely supportive, but his absence was unbearable at first. My way of filling the void was not to let a void take hold. My beloved is still there with me. I talk to him. My children graciously tease me, calling me Granny Bonkers, but if it helps me cope, then I don’t see any harm in it. They think it’ll stall the grieving process if I carry on. “Mum, you’re just setting yourself up for more pain!” they say. But it’s actually the opposite. You see by talking to him, I can process my loss. I don’t ask him questions for example, to prove that I’m not crazy. But it terrifies me to think he is no longer there beside me. My children were distraught at first, but now they join in and sometimes even say a cheery “Hello, Dad!” when they get home. So as not to feel like they are speaking to the wall, they have hung a framed picture of him in the entrance hall and talk to his portrait.

I am so fortunate, he has been my rock all my life. I was on the brink and he appeared. That’s how life is. It takes from you with one hand and gives with the other.

I live in Toulouse. I didn’t grow up here though. I spent my childhood near Bordeaux. My parents and I lived in a magnificent manor house on the outskirts of a small market town called Lignon. My father, Armand Lenoir, was a doctor. His own father had invested in the metal industry and had made a fortune thanks to the rapid expansion of the railways. As a result, my father received a generous inheritance. My mother, Noemie, who came from a more modest background, managed the house and the staff. My brother was born three years after me. He was born sickly and weak so he immediately got all my mother’s attention. This meant I was quickly left to my own devices, but it didn’t bother me. I was an independent, carefree, and resourceful child. Although that didn’t last long.

For the three years that I’ve been without my husband, I have managed to forge a different kind of life for myself, different, but not unpleasant shall we say. For starters, I adopted another cat. I love cats. I already had one called Amadeus. He is a big, handsome, lumbering tomcat; more interested in his food bowl than being stroked.

He looks like the cat I had when I was a child and he stands out because pearl grey is an unusual colour. Then, one day, as I was walking near my house, I saw a black kitten roaming around and looking famished. I took it in and named it Freddie after the singer of a rock band I love. My Freddie has a magnificent moustache too. When I’m feeling down, I put on a CD and sing along with my idol. The high notes are a bit difficult, but I let myself get carried away. It’s a great tonic. His voice is superb, like velvet. I assume he is still alive, otherwise my spirits will take a nosedive again. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy listening to a fine rendition of a Beet­hoven symphony or a Schubert piano impromptu. I was brought up with the classics; you don’t forget. And when my parents discovered jazz and swing, they were won over straight away, as was I. And to think that the Nazis described this music as degenerate! Because of course killing six million people in cold blood is a far nobler pastime . . .

2

Noemie, September 1940

I am a woman of principle. At least I was. I am a practising Catholic. My life and that of my family are lived according to specific codes of conduct. Such codes have an under­-lying moral philosophy based on good and evil, that no doubt stems from religion. My free will protects me from all excesses. But I must admit that in the last few weeks I have lost my footing somewhat and my carefree existence as a provincial bourgeois housewife—to call a spade a spade—has become dangerously precarious.

It all started a little over two months ago, one afternoon in early July. For several weeks, the German army hadn’t given the French troops any respite. They invaded Belgium and Holland, and France’s roads were overflowing with people trying to flee the shelling. Meanwhile German troops continued to advance. Even the Paris region suffered a terrible onslaught. We followed all this from home, near Bordeaux, which had been spared from the fighting, but the atmosphere was very morose. We all wondered what the outcome of this relentless enemy advance would be. The answer to our questions was not long in coming, as Marshal Pétain, newly appointed as President of the Council, announced in a quavering voice that the fighting had to cease. In other words, France should accept defeat. Anger and bitterness took centre stage in people’s minds. Was France really so weak as to let itself be swallowed up by the Third Reich? Since the end of the Great War, the country was convinced it had the best army in the world. At least that was what the propaganda circulated at the beginning of the war would have us believe. Then Bordeaux, which became the provisional capital of France after the government’s retreat, was bombed by the German air force just before the signing of the armistice. War now lingers on our doorstep, but I think we would have preferred to see it continue on our soil rather than witness our country capitulate in this way. The fighting is still in range. War is indeed here. We suffer the effects of it every day and in a variety of ways.

Since the armistice, we have had to live under the yoke of the invaders. The Germans control our country to the north of a line, whose trajectory appears random but has in fact been skilfully calculated, and the French institutions have no choice but to yield and submit to the will of the occupying power. How humiliating for a country whose national motto begins with the word “liberté”! Or former national motto, I should say, because since the government moved to Vichy, the official line is now “work, family, Fatherland”. How wonderful.

The occupied zone is now living on borrowed time, in every sense of the word. On 1st July, the clock of the Saint-André cathedral in Bordeaux was put forward an hour to German time. Our watches too. This is ludicrous, given that Lignon has a border with the southern zone which remains on French time. So in the village of Polignac, over the border, just three miles from our home, people are living an hour behind us. How ridiculous! You can’t even write or call between the two zones. I wonder how families who live on either side of the frontier communicate.

Many support The Old Marshal and believe that the armis­tice is a ruse and that he has something up his sleeve. But, in my humble opinion, if he really had something up his sleeve, he would have revealed it by now. Others support the Vichy regime and cheer on the invader with a big smile. They imagine that the armistice will rid France of Bolshevism when the left-wing Popular Front fails. But they don’t understand a thing: it was Nazi Germany that signed a non-aggression pact with the Russians!

We own a large property in the Vaillant district; a manor house that Armand inherited from his family. It was late afternoon when two German military officers came to our door in their well-ironed green-grey uniforms to explain that we were under obligation to take in one of their soldiers. Our maid was out shopping to find what provisions she could, given the food shortages that were beginning to make life difficult, so it was I who opened the door. My two children, one and a half and four years old, were clinging to my skirt and my first thought was to push them gently behind me, so that they wouldn’t witness the scene. I feared that Sol-veig, my eldest, would make one of her controversial re-marks, something she did regularly despite her young age. The German officers looked fairly young, maybe twenty-five or thirty years old. They were fluent in French, but the elder of the two had a strong accent. In that moment, I loathed their aggressive-sounding diction—it reminded me of the war we were in the process of losing and conjured up tangled images of defeat, deprivation, misfortune, confusion, enemies, hat­red and death.

The public authorities may have no choice but to submit to our German occupiers, but we, the population, do have a choice. I’m talking about people like us, who don’t support Pétain and prefer placing our hopes in a certain brigadier, a former member of the Raynaud cabinet who fled to London to lead the fight for France to the bitter end with whomever will follow him. It remains to be seen just how he will achieve this. All this is still very hypothetical. Marshal Pétain may be a hero of Verdun, but not everyone supports him, far from it . . . we certainly don’t in our house. So, naturally, we didn’t welcome this young Wehrmacht officer with open arms.

My husband, who is a doctor, was with a patient at the time. So they informed me that part of our house would be requisitioned to accommodate Sergeant Kohler. Nothing more, nothing less. I had no say in the matter. There was no “please,” no “thank you” from the elder of the two officers. These were more or less his exact words as he pointed to his young colleague: “Your house has been chosen to accommodate Feldwebel Gunther Kohler of the Wehrmacht, here present.”

I sought to appear confident so that they wouldn’t think they were intimidating me. They can be so horribly hard and unpleasant that I had to make a huge effort to hide my emotional state. In reality, everyone fears them. They are often very brutal. And more importantly, they call all the shots in the occupied zone. So if they come knocking on your door, you have every reason to panic.

“For how long?” I asked.

“As long as it takes, Mrs Lenoir. We don’t know that yet.”

“I suppose we have no choice in the matter?”

“You suppose right, Mrs Lenoir.”

Their obsequiousness fills me with horror. They smarmily use “Mrs this” or “Mrs that” in every sentence, as if to make the pill of their ghastly domination slightly less bitter to swallow. He handed me a typed sheet of paper that I didn’t bother to read. I guessed it was a written requisition order. It wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

“Come back tomorrow, I’ll ask the maid to prepare the room,” I said.

“No, you’ve misunderstood, it takes effect right away, Mrs Lenoir.”

Seeing that I was obliged to comply, I moved aside with the children behind me to let them pass. I pointed out the stairs to Sergeant Kohler to show him the way to his new accommodation. The officer who had spoken to me had already left in the direction of the village. Before climbing the stairs, Kohler stopped for a few seconds to look at the entrance hall of our house. He observed every detail: the parquet floor, the wood panelling, the furniture, the ceiling, the windows, the doors, the stairs and the carpet covering them, and the framed pictures on the walls. He appeared to be assessing the standard of his new lodgings and looked like the cat who got the cream. This didn’t surprise me, because, as I mentioned before, we live in a beautiful family home which is both spacious and comfortable. I haven’t rubbed shoulders with many Germans before, but the few times I have, I worked out that the less you say, the less likely you are to get yourself in a quandary. So I took the soldier up to his room on the second floor and left him there. The children’s rooms are on the first floor and though there is a spare bedroom there, I didn’t want him sharing a landing with them. Our maid Ernestine’s room is on the second floor. They will be neighbours. There is a room in the attic, but it has no washbasin. That’s why I chose the room on the second floor, although I later came to regret it.

While the unwelcome addition to the household was settling in, I went to go and find Ernestine, who was back by now, and asked her to make up his bed and give him some towels. Luckily he had the presence of mind to go in the garden while she was preparing his room. Even though the bedrooms are large, the thought of him watching Ernestine hovering around the bed disconcerted me. I spied on him from the window, annoyed yet curious at the same time. He was smoking a cigarette and bore the self-confidence typical of all the Germans I had had the misfortune to come across. He was rather tall and lean, displaying his youthfulness in supple, almost graceful movements. What surprised me most was the colour of his eyes. They were unusually black. Not brown but black. The pupil seemed to take up all the space normally given to the iris. Though I hadn’t looked him dir­ectly in the eye, I could sense something other than the steely cold stare which had pierced me when I had opened the door and been confronted with the metallic blue eyes of his commanding officer.

At that moment, I knew it would be complicated having the enemy living under our roof. In fact, I didn’t know just how complicated it would be, but not for the reasons I had imagined.

When my husband had seen his last patient and I informed him of our new lodger, he frowned, but managed to remain calm. Armand never loses his composure. He doesn’t get angry and unless you can detect certain subtle facial expressions, you have to be very perceptive to guess what’s going on inside his head. He doesn’t reveal his emotions. Unlike me. I panic easily and quickly, and have to get a strong grip on myself so that I don’t let anything show. He asked me if I had made the necessary arrangements to accommodate the Kraut—or the uninvited guest or ‘UG’ as we would come to call him.

A strange period of cohabitation thus began. It was as if we had a permanent houseguest, one who we couldn’t ask politely to leave, and his presence weighed heavily upon us. For the first few days, he was very discreet. He was polite and respectful and even made an effort with the children. But the fact remained he was still German, and our days of carefree games and idle chatting with the children were over, at least for a while.

Sergeant Kohler sometimes came back to the house accompanied by his German colleagues. These men came and went as they pleased, and thought nothing of occupying the vestibule for long periods, although their presence seemed to make him uncomfortable.

Armand and I are part of the Anti-German France, the France that refuses to give up its independence. We have an utter loathing for all citizens of the enemy nation. Each and every one of them. We see them as a single block, a mass entity that we must liberate ourselves from as soon as possible. So this intrusion into our daily life, into our home, inside our own four walls, was unbearable. We experienced it as a violation, an attack, an invasion. They were like a tick on an animal, sucking out all of the joie de vivre we were trying so hard to cultivate for the children’s sake. Not to mention the comments from neighbours and patients, who, like us, loathed the enemy. My stomach was permanently in knots. I could feel my pent-up irritation rise if by chance I ran into one of the Germans lingering in our house, whether it be in the vestibule, on the stairs or on the UG’s landing. Heartburn gnawed away at me constantly, and Armand had a hard time relieving it.

One day, in the late afternoon, I was busy in the garden. The park is beautiful in the summer. It is very green and the flowerbeds provide a splendid array of colours. I like to take care of them myself and I find tending to them therapeutic. We also have a gardener called Germain, who looks after the grounds. There is always a lot to do regardless of the season, between pruning, mowing, hedge trimming, maintaining the vegetable garden and so on. But the flowers are my domain. He knows that I like to take care of them, watering them, weeding them and dead-heading as their blooms fade. Towards the end of that particular day, I was trimming the wilted flowers from a climbing rose that was growing up one of the columns of our small garden pavilion. I noticed the UG, dressed in civilian clothes, approach and sit down. He obviously hadn’t noticed me there. I discreetly moved away. Such was my rejection of all that he represented, I could not bear to be physically near him.

Nevertheless, that day I loitered, surprised to see him in the pavilion. He had been living with us for a month by then and my curiosity began to get the better of me. I was torn between feelings of repulsion and a strange attraction towards him. Since he has been living in our home, his compatriots’ selfish behaviour aside, I have no complaints about him. On the contrary, he is pleasant and generous. He regularly brings us food, tobacco and other rationed commodities that we can no longer find at the market or in the shops, and he is kind to the children when he bumps into them in the hallway. What’s more, he praises Cosima’s cooking and is extremely courteous to Ernestine, who isn’t exactly gracious to him in return.

As I watched, he took a book out of his trouser pocket and began to read. It was an extremely hot day, and the heat had released a heady mix of fragrances from the flowerbeds. The weather was perfect, and the heavily scented air was a reminder that, despite the war,. . .