He began writing: Every self-respecting Frenchman must think that the Heil Hitler salute is ludicrous. Yet, they will have to put up with it, perhaps for a long time.”
The words for a long time froze his hand, and he wondered if it would be forever. He thought about his observations of the German occupation of Paris. Yes, the German soldiers were disciplined, correct, polite. He had heard of no looting, no raping. The Germans paid for their purchases, and they purchased everything. There was a catch. The occupation money was grossly inflated. They paid, but they paid next to nothing for the goods they took. He would tell that. He would tell also the story of an invisible army of occupation. Many, perhaps even most, Parisians acted as it they did not see the German soldiers, as if they were not there. Then he would have to write about the slow return of Paris’s refugees and the way daily life got back to some sort of economic routine. People trying to get through a frightening present into an even more uncertain future. But quite simply, people had to eat; to eat they had to work; to work they to acknowledge the Germans, even while pretending not to see them. He pondered what he had seen, drawing whatever lessons he thought valid from the swirl of confused impressions, avoiding the temptation to guess at the future. Word by word, sentence by sentence, slowly, with careful attention and with much revision, he put his article down on paper. And all the while in the back of his head were jumbled the words for a long time and forever.
* * *
The Jerries go away toward dawn. They won’t come back until evening. We are happy it’s over for another night. I go down off my building, out into the streets of London as the first daylight goes peeking into the dark corners of our latest ruins. This great wounded city is stretching and yawning. Buses are finding new routes along the stricken streets. Workers, men and women, are picking their way through the new rubble to jobs in factories and shops and offices. What must it be like for them to go to work day after day following night after night of sleepless horror? I pass a book shop, its front blown away. Inside, a man is browsing through a book he picked off a shelf. A man in work clothes shuffles toward me, haggard, worn, deep-set eyes, stubble of a beard. Poor man. As we pass, he lifts his hand and his thumb juts straight up to heaven. There’s a huge grin on his Cockney face. “It’s all right, mate,” he says to me. I give him as big a grin and my thumb is just as defiant as his. I had to come directly home to tell you.
