Free One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, Christiana Hills Page B

since Mireille was born.
    “The worst is behind us,” the doctor said to her.
    “I’m fine,” Robert said to her.
    And when she was concerned to find him thinner:
    “Well, you’re thinner, too,” he observed.
    She told him, in a few minutes, about her two years of life with Mireille in Clermont-Ferrand. He also had news for her.
    “Doctor Meyerbeer was seized in a roundup of Jews, taken to Drancy, then deported to a camp in eastern Germany, or maybe Poland,” he explained to his sister. “But it’s over, the war’s going to end,” he, too, added. “And he’s going to come back,” he said. “Or maybe not.”
    In October, it rained almost every day. Mireille’s mother went back to her job teaching high school at the Lycée Chaptal. On the first day, an actor read a Resistance poem called “The NightWatchman of Pont-au-Change” during the tribute to the former students who had been killed by the Germans. Its author, Robert Desnos, was still in captivity somewhere. The bugle calls, the minutes of silence, and the memorial wreaths marked the start to the new school year.
    In the Jardin du Luxembourg, which Mireille could see through her bedroom window, the wet paths were covered in dead leaves. Torrents of water fell on the day the news came that Athens had been liberated. And then, a week later, the Allies entered Aix-la-Chapelle, finally, a German city, the first one. Like everyone else, Mireille and her mother were listening to the news on the radio and the remarks people made while waiting in line to buy food. And like everyone else, they were moving around little flags on maps of Europe. A mass of happiness and hope had irrupted in August, from which no one could completely escape.
    On November 11th, Churchill and de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées together, to the cheering of an innumerable crowd. Mireille and her mother were there, too, with some rediscovered friends. And it was the first day of classes at the universities. At Clermont-Ferrand, Mireille had started studying German literature. When she enrolled in classes at the Sorbonne, she added Dante and Petrarch to Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. The professors, at least all those who were in Paris, returned to teaching. Many among them had just been reinstated to their teaching positions after being previously dismissed by Vichy. Several had been detained in stalags or oflags, others had been arrested, some had even been shot while working for the Resistance. Two orthree collaborators had been subjected to the purge, but in a quite merciful way—a few weeks of suspension that were already over. Some had been sentenced to prison, but they would be out soon. To have possibly loved a German was more objectionable than having definitely loved the Greater German Reich. And besides, for its reconstruction, France needed all the help it could get.
    At the end of November, the news finally came that the 2nd Armored Division had liberated Strasbourg. Two days later, in Paris, during the formal ceremony marking the beginning of the new academic year at the Sorbonne, Mireille heard a reading of the “Song of the University of Strasbourg,” a poem Aragon had written the previous year. But the professors and students from Strasbourg who had been arrested were still being held in Germany. It’s over, the Silberbergs are going to come home, thought Mireille as she moved one of her little flags, I’m going to write to Clara. But she didn’t.
    In December, the German army regained the offensive in the Ardennes. On the map, the space occupied by Nazi flags wasn’t shrinking very much. Maybe it wasn’t really over. After the dead leaves, after the rain, Mireille spent hours watching the snow fall from the top of her windows onto the deserted paths of the Luxembourg gardens. The fog was freezing onto the windowpanes. She would examine the delicate forms of the tiny frost crystals, trying to imagine what André would have said if he had been there to look