An episode from the time of the German occupation of Paris

that morning, a number of girls had come to the lycée. They asked if the exams were being held. They were prepared. The teachers and staff, however, had already been transported off to one of the southern départments. An ill-informed caretaker told them as much as he could.

Gilberte, returning home with nothing accomplished and, as it were, without her official discharge into life, found the parental flat deserted. The Métro was running very nearly on time. The city was supplied with electric light. A note in the kitchen informed her that her mother and brothers, at the behest of her father, an artillery officer on the southeast front, had fled south via Vincennes. She was told either to await developments or to follow them. No address was given.

That same evening, Gilberte, quite as if she were an adult, found herself involved in an affair with an officer in the engineer corps of the German occupying forces, which had taken the city of Paris in the course of the day. The man had struck up a conversation with her, and it continued for two days. Gilberte found herself the lover of a “fascinating stranger.” She had read novels—the required reading of the two top classes at the lycée. But she had hardly been prepared in any other way for this bewildering experience. The man’s arms, throat, face, and legs were tanned; his body was as white as a maggot. The conversation wrapped them both up in a cocoon. It was conducted in scraps of German and French, and muted every impression; it represented the wish to talk rather than actual comprehension; she was nervous, the man was seven years older.

They met alternately in room at the staff quarters, on a mattress, and in the empty parental flat, slipping past the concierge; the agenda they followed was one with passages blacked out, an agenda headed amour passion: state of emergency—a general dispensation from everyday life, from the unrealistic reality of Paris. What this program meant to her foreign lover was unclear to Gilberte. Often he struggled with conflicting emotions, and made an attempt to start a new life. Gert Schwennicke of the engineers was a married man. After just four weeks of this affair, which he had not calculated into his life plan, he was convinced he could never put an end to it. He himself could not take French citizenship. His marriage prevented him from inviting Gilberte to Germany. And so he summoned his wife from a garrison town in northern Germany to Paris. In one of St. Germain’s great cafés, the three principals sat together round the same table.

Henriette, Gert’s wife, who was two years older than her husband, was a modern woman, and relished the practicalities of the drama. If her husband were to return from the war, she saw that the heated emotions that had inaugurated their married life would be a thing of the past. The Parisian affair confirmed as much. An additional consideration was the care of their child, and possibly a second. Such matters called for predictability, not unilateralism. In that case, she asked, why should a three-way arrangement not remain an option, since any other solution was a guarantee of grief and deprivation? This proposal did not fit in with Gilberte’s amour passion agenda at all, and seemed likewise to be remote from Gert’s setting sail for new shores. Yet while they sat there amid the bustle of a Saturday afternoon in Paris, dissociated from each other, they nonetheless remained together, putting down roots in the evening spent together. For practical reasons, Gert and Gilberte drew closer to the program proposed by the modern German woman.

After Henriette had departed, Gert’s posting to Paris remained a fixed fact of life, and the drama continued to take its course without any definitive resolution. Far below the mental and emotional strife, their spirits and bodies had accommodated themselves to the way things were in reality. Even Gert’s leave passed without crisis. Henriette, an experienced woman (albeit without experience in an entanglement of this particular sort rarely found even in romances or biographies), was sufficiently self-possessed not to make a big thing out of certain deficiencies in the predictability department. By Christmas she was pregnant.

Gert, who had originally been an aircraft engineer and was now involved in naval inspections throughout the western sector, was the object of wide-ranging endeavors on the part of the enemy. A Résistance network (“reseau”) sought to recruit Gilberte to spy on Gert. She for her part did not dare to spurn this patriotic overture entirely. But Gert left no papers lying around in the rooms where she met him. The threat evaporated.

It would be impossible to say that any one of the three, though they were pursuing opposed agendas, had behaved dishonestly toward either their rivals or themselves. On one occasion, Gilberte traveled to see Henriette and consult with her. They got along better now.

The course of the war put an end to the triangle. Gert returned to the territory of the Reich in November 1944. At this point, Gilberte had already joined her family in southern France. At the time of the capitulation, Henriette was in the Alps, that fortress. In May man and wife were reunited in their house, which had survived intact.

Had the agendas of these three, in respect to love, come any closer? No. Not even in regard to the practicalities. Did they talk over their experience at a later date? Did they describe to each other what they had felt during that state of emergency? No. They talked neither with each other nor with third parties. They did take some pains, and changed trains several times, in order to meet in Bad Kreuznach, in 1957. The meeting brought nothing new. They felt their lives had taken separate paths.

But when they looked within themselves, each believed that he or she had nothing to regret, and indeed was guarding a precious treasure that could only be damaged if expressed in words.