Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland

as yet by the ticking time bomb just over the border—continue to bloom in her own youthful rhythm. Her attention as a teenager was focused on her circle of friends and on a single, special new interest. Having heard Yvette read Roland’s letters aloud all that fall and having seen him in person at Christmas, she was, above all, eager to meet him. Love, like “the light of the heart,” as Balzac described its effect on a provincial young girl, kindled a fresh sense of wonder. The memories are hers.

    One spring afternoon in 1939, as Janine and Yvette strolled after school on the rue du Sauvage, they spotted a group of young men on the corner. “ Regarde! C’est lui! Roland! Il est rentré ,” Yvette whispered to Janine, indicating the tallest among them. Roland had returned. As the two girls approached, he noticed and stiffened, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as he rested lightly on a long, furled umbrella, in the style that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had made chic for the moment. Unaware that Roland had bitterly learned of her sharing and mocking his letters with friends, Yvette chattered gaily, coquettish, oblivious of his tepid response. But as the two talked, Janine indulged in studying him, as if some glorious mythological being had suddenly alighted to earth in her path. His slim face had high cheekbones and a sensitive mouth, and his velvet brown eyes shone with gentleness. She blushed when he turned and caught her staring at him, like the maiden Psyche stealing forbidden glimpses of the sleeping Cupid, her lover, by candlelight.

    Roland Arcieri, photographed in Mulhouse, 1945 (photo credit 5.3)
    This time, Yvette introduced them, and Roland quickly endeared himself further by praising the very thing that always embarrassed Janine most, so often casting her as an outsider in her own estimation that she tended toward silence. “What a delightful accent you have!” he observed with a beckoning smile. To Janine, it suddenly seemed as if her family’s migration from Freiburg had been uniquely designed to deposit her on that corner in France at that precise moment. It was predestined, she told herself, and she vowed with urgent resolve she had not felt before to do whatever it took to make a permanent place for herself in the life of this man whose poetic expressions of love, although addressed to somebody else, had already managed to win her heart.
    That summer, more than a month before Hitler stunned Europe by announcing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets, storks folded their spindly legs to nest in the bell towers of Mulhouse, red geraniums danced in window boxes, and printers laid patterns of ink on new bolts of cotton fabric, as they had done for centuries. Trudi left on a vacation visit to cousins from Düsseldorf who resettled in Belgium, and Yvette was setting off on holiday too. But she had grown intrigued by Roland once again, her interest whetted by his strange indifference when they met at Easter time, and calculating that he would soon come back from school in Nancy, Yvette bemoaned to her friends that she could not be home to welcome him there.
    “Do me a favor,” Yvette asked Janine, who ever after remembered this conversation that made her feel as sneaky as a thief in the night. “Keep an eye on him for me. Make sure he doesn’t find someone else before I get back to town.”
    When, soon after Yvette’s departure, Roland found Janine, it eased her conscience to think that fate was to blame, as her good fortune in catching his eye began with a game of spin the bottle. Janine and Norbert had just discovered the game at a party earlier that summer and were quick to appreciate the face-saving factors that have long ensured its popularity as a facilitator of first sexual contact: how the random selection of partners for kissing so easily reduces fears of rejection, commitment, baring one’s feelings, or going too far. Still, the challenge remains to hide any reaction as the