The Lyon Resistance by Richard Wake

Author:Richard Wake [Wake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manor and State, LLC
Published: 2019-02-24T22:00:00+00:00

30

I woke up with a hangover. It wasn’t an alcohol hangover because I hadn’t been drinking. It was either a slept-too-long hangover or a didn’t-sleep-enough hangover, not that it mattered. I needed to get up and make some decisions. First, though, I needed to eat something.

It was technically illegal to barter your ration coupons for money or goods or anything, but everybody did it. Few were willing to trade away their staples, their meager allowances of meat or fat or bread, but most everything else was negotiable, especially two things: wine and cigarettes.

I didn’t smoke, which gave me an enormous advantage. The ration was two packs of cigarettes every 10 days, but only for men. The ration for wine was one bottle every 10 days, for men and women. Because the cigarettes weren’t nearly enough for those with the addiction — four smokes per day barely kept their hands busy for an hour, and that was if they didn’t share with their wives — those people were an easy target. The typical arrangement was for a drunk to trade his cigarette coupon for a wine coupon. Nobody was happy with the situation, but it was how you got by.

I typically traded my cigarettes for wine, too, although I liked to think I wasn’t a drunk. But this time, I needed food. I had the cigarette coupon and I had cash. The biggest black market was way up by the Hotel de Ville. It moved around a bit, away from the shadow of the enormous fountain featuring the enormous woman with the enormous breasts, and the Gestapo sometimes raided the area. But I didn’t want to go up there.

There were smaller black markets in every neighborhood, near the municipal buildings where you signed up for the ration cards and picked them up every month. I had seen the Saint-Fons building the previous day on my walk, and when I got there, the furtive knots of desperate men, talking and then walking into an alley to make the coupon exchange, were plentiful. The Gestapo could have scooped up a handful at any time if they so desired. It was just one more indication that the farther away you got from the center of the city, the less likely you were to find trouble.

I joined the first group of men I encountered and said I needed food for a cigarette coupon, but nobody was interested. You had to be a special kind of addicted to the smokes to make that kind of deal, given that they said the ration cards would give you 1,300 calories a day, but most people thought it was more like 1,000, and everybody’s clothes were hanging off them. But I found a guy and we struck a bargain which we consummated in the alley: my cigarette coupon in exchange for a cabbage, a few grams of meat — likely two pieces of bacon — a baguette, and a bit of coffee.

Back in the flat, I fried up half of the cabbage and one of the pieces of bacon.

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