Raul had been a police man for most of his life, since the age of nineteen. He was now fifty-six. His first arrest was a thief, an old man who had stolen a neighbours cow. He had since thrown trade unionist into prison, had beaten starving wives as they begged for bread while their husbands picketed. France in the 1930s changed government as regular as the seasons, with it laws came and went. Raul and his fellow police men obeyed them all. He was not political, even if all laws were. When the socialists were in, he enforced for them, the nationalists, for them, and so on.
Then came the war, Raul would round up young men to be thrown into uniform. Many of them killed or wounded, mishandled by geriatric minds still fighting the last war. Others surrendered in droves to a fast moving enemy, they fought brave, though ran short of supplies. Police men like Raul made sure that the bodies filled the uniforms and any that did not ended in shackles.
Paris fell. Raul remained a police man. The German’s needed the police to administer their new laws, and once a Vichy government was formed, they would also need an apparatus. Especially the police. Raul found himself rounding up those who rejected the Vichy and German occupations. Partisan terrorists. Or, the resistance. Raul arrested anyone with anarchist pamphlets, as he would under each government past and future, he had handcuffed them for the crime of their thinking. Raul insisted he was not political, only a man of the law.
One evening Raul and his fellow officers broke down a door, inside were illegal persons by race or faith. Jews, they were to be taken in and the German authorities would determine, how Jewish they were and thus what their fates would be. According to the laws. Raul was aware most would endure labour camps, many would die. The Roma, or Gypsies, homosexuals, libertarians, dissenters and anyone with a dangerous outlook all were to be handcuffed, processed and handed over the German authorities, or to be punished accordingly by the Vichy government, per their laws.
Raul participated in anti-partisan raids, hunting down the resistance. Terrorists. Their families and any who had collaborated were to be captured, questioned, tortured and even executed. Raul had shot a fourteen year old partisan boy, and broke both of his brothers legs during one such skirmish. The law did not tolerate law-breakers. Raul slept well at night. The law was the law.
He soon learned about the growing rumours of death camps. It was an open secret, perhaps lies spreading discontent about the Germans and their allies. As far as Raul was concerned, if the legal authority had determined such a thing was legal, then so be it. It was for him to serve the law as a police man and not to question it. He was not a law maker, only an enforcer. On and on, Raul would insist, openly and internally.
On one dreary morning, small girl wept inside of Raul’ arms while he carried her to the back of a lorry. There her parents sat silently. He pushed the child onto the wooden seat, she stared at him, and asked him, why he was doing this.
“It’s my job,” he smiled as he handed her a small doll. He patted her gently on the leg, before the lorry departed.
It was his job. He did it well.
As a matter of fact, Raul had never read the law, not any version of it. He was only told what to enforce by his superiors, who in turn had not read the law themselves but were required to administer the abstract notions of the laws, according to the political will of the government. Which ever government was in power, at that time.
The war was not going well for Germany. The allies invaded, and the French re-took Paris. As far as Raul was concerned, the French were already in Paris and a legal government had been ruling it, alongside the Germans. Once the ‘Free French’ took over, Raul and his fellow policemen were required to enforce the new laws and serve the next legal authority.
He sipped coffee one afternoon as young women begged and pleaded, while their hair was cut from their heads. Shaved and bald heads as punishment to reveal them as collaborators. Raul did not agree with the disorder of the mob, he and the other policemen had been told to allow it to occur. A prostitute he had frequented clenched her fists and spat before a soldiers rifle butt smashed her mouth. Her name was Clarissa. She had been a poet. The crowd cheered. She had been sleeping with the Germans, and men like Raul. Now, he kept the crowd in place, while the new legal authority and it’s supporters exacted revenge.
Clarissa glared with defiance while her face was held tight, the scissors hacking her hair from scalp. Raul had recalled a conversation with her late one night, the pair shared a cigarette on the soiled sheets of a hotel bed.
“Do you have any morals?” she sucked the smoke into her lungs.
“My morality is the law.”
“That is no morality, it’s cowardice.”
Raul now watched the mob spit and hiss at Clarissa. The blonde hair which he had run his fingers through, spilled across the road in broken strands. Clarissa looked through the crowd and saw him, their eyes locked, she whispered, “no morals, just cowardice.”
Later that evening, Clarissa and the other women would be taken by soldiers, as retribution. Raul had declined the offer to join in.
After the war, Raul and his fellow police men rounded up fascists and any one who was a Nazi. He helped collect material that was about the Hitlerian sciences, to be burned. And, soon after he would do the same for anything communist related. Or, libertarian and anarchist orientated. Occasionally he would participate in raids on those selling and ingesting narcotics, he reported one of his fellow officers for opium use. The police man claimed that he was racked with guilt for what he had done during the war years. He should not feel guilt, he had been following orders, enforcing the law.
Raul had arrested men for singing The Internationale, others for pushing out the fascist salute, thrown people into cells for painting the tricolour of France on a wall, and others for burning that very same flag. The law changes. The job of a police man does not.
He had done his job.
One evening as he climbed the stairs to his apartment, Raul was greeted by a young woman, he nodded to her with the polite courtesy of a gentleman and police officer.
“You do not remember me?” she asked.
“I regret that I do not,” he replied.
“I was a little girl when you sent my family and I to a death camp.”
Raul thought back, and drew a blank. He had rounded up countless families for the authorities.
She went on, “my parents died. I barely survived. I want you to have this doll, I don’t know why. But, you handing it to me before we were deported was the last kind thing a man in uniform ever did for me, I suspect you were not even being kind.”
“I was just doing my job,” he answered with sobering clarity as he took the doll.
“I know you were. And that’s all you will ever have,” she walked away, leaving Raul with a stained doll.
Raul unlocked his door, placed the doll on his table. He looked at it, around him an empty apartment, minimal items, the only photos were of him in uniform. Graduation, his first posting, on a push bike, near the Belgian frontier, with German soldiers, with American soldiers, in each photograph his uniform had barely changed, nor had his expression. Only his rank and the masters he served.
He fondled the doll, the fabric bitter, coarse in spots, soft elsewhere. It was real. A tangible thing, not a black and white memory. The doll had been soaked from the tears of a little girl who had now grown into a woman, she had spent her last tear. As he held the doll, Raul wept. The doll was real. The little girl was real. The law was real because he made it so.
In his decades of service, countless lives had been ruined because it was his job to do so. The law, was the law. Right or wrong, it existed and men like Raul would kill and break bones for it.
Raul retired a few years later. A generous pension. Albums filled with photographed memories, invitations to reunions. Whether he had a family or not, would not have changed his story. He was a good cop.
