THE ROSE PERFUME

Chapter 37

My name is Louise Moreau. I grew up here in Paris, on Rue des etoiles de mer street, in my family's cottage. The neighbor's chickens were always in our yard dropping eggs and our house was always filled with sunshine and music. With all of the curtains pulled back, my mother, Mireille, was always in the living room with students teaching piano and the violin. My sister and I would run through the house after school and take the snacks my mom put out for us in the kitchen into the backyard where the purple roses grow and talk about how Emmeline Montalivet, the great French-American actress, was born in this house. The neighbors knew and loved us like one of their own and there was a safe peaceful calm settled in around the city. Our father worked late as an accountant for a wealthy Jewish merchant and we did not eat supper until he got home.

Then on June fourteenth, nineteen forty, the Germans rolled into Paris and started making new rules. Now, occupied by hundreds of foreign soldiers, each family had to make room in their homes for new house guests and we were no exception. Ours is a blond-haired, green-eyed man a few years older than Aimee and I, named Greg Vogel who polished his shiny black boots every night.

The Germans implemented rationing on the food, tobacco, and coal and took over the newspapers and radio shows for German interests. Articles are now written in German with small summaries in French down at the bottom. All Jewish citizens were told to wear the yellow star of David on their clothes and on the seventeenth of June they were all taken to camps.

Both of our parents were brought in for questioning and never returned. Many of our neighbors closed up their shops and moved to the provinces. Aimee and I have survived these last three years on our own. We study a book and radio show that comes on at ten every morning on techniques for rations and even planted a garden. But the chickens do not come around anymore and leave eggs. Protein is scarce and we do not want to raise guinea pigs for meat as our neighbors are doing. Both of us are so thin our clothes hang on our bodies.

On January twentieth, nineteen forty-three, the rainiest season of the year, Aimee and I interviewed for jobs at the Cafe on Rue commercante street, a place our mother told us never to go because it was full of ungodly rich snobs and she wanted more for us. But the war and the Occupation changed us and we are not the same girls we used to be. They hired Aimee as a vocalist immediately, but she told them she would not take the job unless they hired me too. And so they did. As their new waitress.