| HOME Go to  Homepage
GENERAL |
| needed. Yes, he
said, he had been caught with tracts, and he had a date tonight with his
girlfriend, who would be terribly worried if he did not show up for the
rendezvous. Touched by the confidence, the older cop promised that
he would walk by her house and give her the news, as soon as his shift
was over, about midnight. Jean gave him, gleefully, the address of
one of the female theology students, who lived not far from the seminary
and whom he had met once or twice at meetings. Jacqueline, aged twenty,
was certainly not his girl friend. But he knew that even at that
late hour she would alert us to the danger.
Shortly after midnight Jacqueline and her roommate were awakened by the doorbell from below. Leaning out of the window and seeing the policeman, she believed her final hour had come. But the friendly policeman merely delivered his message, and was amused when it became evident that the name of Jean did not mean much to her and that he had to describe her boyfriend in detail to elicit recognition: Women with many dates, he must have thought, could be fickle. Finally, Jacqueline understood who "Jean" was. She also understood that he was in a cell at the police station, arrested for something she did not know about. She also understood that the message brought by the policeman was not intended for her, but for us at the seminary. Throwing a dressing gown over her nightshirt, she raced over to the seminary, where everybody was fast asleep. She pounded on the door until a number of us awoke. Though the regulations strictly forbade visits by the girls after eight o'clock, we let her in. Totally out of breath, unable to even whisper a word, Jacqueline sat in an armchair attempting to collect her wits while everybody gathered around her, expecting to hear some terrible news. When she finally was able to speak, she blurted out that Jean had been arrested and that the cops could raid us any minute. Every trace of evidence of any underground activity had to disappear immediately. Tracts had to be burned and blank identity cards had to join the stamps and other paraphernalia in the bee hives. Everyone was responsible for his own room; the cleaning was thorough and quick. Suddenly it dawned on us that the room of Jacques Soulier, who was on a mission, could possibly contain some damaging evidence, and we all raced there in anticipation of the worst. We were right! Jacques, whose name by
now was Philippe Ollier, had accumulated a veritable collection of "souvenirs,"
of which any one could get him put into jail and every one of us into hot
water. There were false identity cards galore, some of the fountain
pens used by the courier, some documents written in invisible ink.
There were some of our codes, in plain view, and Philippe Ollier's laundry,
plainly marked "J.S." And on the shelves were his books, with "Jacques
Soulier" on each fly leaf. Furious at all this evidence of our friend's
negligence, we went at his books and his socks with a vengeance, cutting
out whatever betrayed his identity. When after two hours our job
was still only half done, with only part of his books mutilated and some
holes in the laundry because of the sturdy monograms sewn by his mother,
we finally gave up and threw all the rest of his things into some wooden
crates, nailed |
