Flame in the Night Read online

  The passeur motioned them down, and Julien went flat on his belly. Too soon. The man scanned the length of the heights with his field glasses, then beckoned and led them on without a word. The hawk called once, shrilly, piercing Julien’s heart with longing. They walked on, the passeur stopping every few minutes to scan the far passes. The fourth time, crouching on a flat rock, he swore softly.

  “Someone’s there,” he murmured. “Could be nothing. I can’t tell.” He stuffed the glasses in his pack. “This way.” He moved off downward.

  They avoided the heights now, taking pathless ways among clumps of grass and jutting rocks, the ground rising so steeply on one side that they could lean and touch it as they walked, and dropping just as sharply on the other side. They walked in tight single file; Julien brought up the rear. Once Marie stumbled; Jean caught her as she fell to her knees. Julien kept his eyes on Benjamin’s feet, his muscles tense, hands ready.

  It didn’t matter, when it came.

  High above in the blue, the hawk screamed again. There was a swift movement in the corner of his eye, a crunch of rock on rock, and a short sharp cry.

  And Benjamin was gone.

  It happened so fast. It happened so agonizingly slow. Julien saw the rock fall from the slope above, the moment before it struck the side of Benjamin’s foot; he saw Benjamin’s heel struck out from under him, his body falling sideways, and knew that in a moment it would be too late, he would be gone. And in a moment he was, and the whole terrible story had been nothing but a split second, and Julien was only beginning to reach out his hand. It closed on air. A scream came from below.

  Benjamin was tumbling down the slope. Julien cried out, staring down at the drop-off, the fathoms of air; he saw his friend strike a spur of rock, saw the angle of his foot go suddenly wrong, heard Benjamin scream again, true agony this time.

  Saw him stop, splayed against the rock.

  “Wait here.” It was the passeur. “Wait.” He was looping a rope round a rock, testing its fastness, then off down the slope within seconds, scrambling in a swift, careful zigzag to the place where Benjamin lay. Julien crouched useless by the fallen stone—it was still there, the stone that had done this—and prayed, gathering up the shattered promise with hot hands, a child insisting shards meant nothing, time meant nothing, the beloved thing could be fixed. Oh God, the promised land. Oh God, I watched him fall.

  The passeur began the climb back up. Alone.

  The man’s face was pale as he reached Julien. “Broken ankle. We can’t bring him up.” He gestured to the Polish couple who crouched watching him. “I have to take them on.”

  Julien nodded. His head seemed no longer to belong to him, floating somewhere in the cold, sunny air.

  “I’ve anchored him to the rock and put three blankets on him. I’ll tell you where to go and who to ask for. Listen.” The man’s voice lowered, and for the first time he looked Julien directly in the eye. “You have to come back for him no matter what happens. You get caught, you tell them where he is. He won’t live the night on this mountain. They’re predicting snow.”

  Julien nodded mutely.

  The passeur gave him landmarks, distances, names. He repeated every word twice. “Clément. Ask for Clément.” Then the young man looked him in the eyes again and said, “It’s my fault. I chose bad terrain.”

  Julien looked at him, at Jean and Marie. “I hope you make it.”

  “Same to you,” said the passeur. He beckoned the others, and they stood. The passeur raised a hand to him and led them away, upward.

  Julien looked down at his friend’s white face and raised one fist: Hold on. Please. Please hold on. It was all he could give him.

  Then he turned back and took the downward path, away from the promised land.

  Chapter 10

  THE HOUSE OF LIFE

  ELISA STOOD BY the head of La Roche’s table, a match in her hand. The white tablecloth glowed rosy in the sunset light; thirty young men turned their faces to her where she stood behind the two tall candles. Chaim Maslowitz, former rabbinical student from Prague, nodded respectfully to her to begin as Karl watched him admiringly. She struck her match, a small, fierce flare, and lit one candle, then the other, looking up to meet Tova’s steady gaze. Elisa drew her hands three times over the candles, laid them over her eyes, and said the blessing her mother had said before her, in Heidelberg, in Lyon, every week of her life, faithful as the sunrise. Mama. “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe …” In the deep hush that followed, the time for silent prayer, her mind emptied out into darkness: Oh God, help those in danger. Help them. The afterimage of the two small flames trembled against her eyelids. She opened her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Good Shabbos,” she said.

  Madame Ferron set a huge tureen of soup on the table, and threw Elisa a wink. The painfully thin young man beside Tova—Joseph, was it?—stared at the soup with his face working. Tova, who hadn’t seen him, began to tell Elisa about a carnival planned by her dorm and the skits her friends were writing. She had too many friends to keep track of now, including one sweet girl from Lithuania who had sworn to be her best friend forever. Tova took the bowl that was passed to her, still talking, then broke off when she saw Joseph’s face.

  “Would you like some of mine?” she said softly. “I’m not very hungry.”

  “No!” He shook his head vehemently. “No. Thank you. I—I’m not sure I can even eat this. Day before yesterday I vomited what I ate. I couldn’t stand to waste this, this …” Tears were in his eyes. Tova almost put a hand on his arm.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Did you just get here?”

  “I was in the Rivesaltes internment camp till last week.” Everyone was listening now; Joseph lifted his head and spoke clearer, unembarrassed tears still in his eyes. “So was Rudy.” He nodded at the young man sitting opposite him. “We were out hiking during the roundup in Grenoble. When we found out, we took a train for Saint-Gingolph by the border, we knew some people there. But the French border guards were waiting for us on the Swiss side, I still don’t know why. They sent us straight to Rivesaltes. There was hardly anything to eat and what they did give us was rotten. People were being deported every day.” He kept shaking his head.

  “We’re lucky to be alive,” said Rudy in a deep voice. His soup lay untouched in his bowl.

  Elisa’s eyes went to Tova, to Karl. She closed them. Then opened them again to the circle of faces, solemn and candlelit, and to the flames reflected in the windows, shutting out the dark.

  Julien crouched behind pine branches, still as a rabbit in cover, watching the patrol.

  Three uniformed men, one with a fresh scrape across his face, cradling his wrist, another supporting him, the third dressing him down in a disgusted undertone as they went: “Of all the stupidity I’ve ever witnessed in this job, that was—”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “You’ll be sorrier when I’ve told Perraud, you unspeakable moron …”

  Julien forced himself not to shiver in the freezing air as they moved away. Help me. As their voices faded he pulled his coat around him. He closed his eyes and counted to sixty: sixty times the rock from nowhere, sixty times Benjamin’s scream. We would be at the pass by now. No sound but the cold wind rising in the pines. They’re predicting snow. Julien stood.

  He stayed off the path, moving fast, listening. He came to the landmark, the rock with letters etched in the lichen: M D. He took the turn and found the little green valley spread below him, and the cluster of stone houses. He stopped.

  Far down on the path to the nearest house were three uniformed men.

  He hissed almost soundlessly and slipped back behind the rock. The sun was gone; a thin band of bright turquoise sky glowed above the mountains ahead. Clouds massed in the east, gold now in the slanting light and deadly.

  He stepped out and scanned the valley again.

  At the tree line near the road, a man put an axe to a pine. Down in the hamle
t a man and woman stood at their door speaking to the patrol. In the green beyond the houses, small white-and-brown figures of goats clustered, a lanky child walking behind them, herding them with a stick. If he skirted the valley and kept to the trees …

  The patrol vanished into a house, and he ran. He kept in cover, branches slapping his face, fox-colored needles blurring beneath him, twisted roots standing out to his leaping feet. He froze, gasping, gripping a tree, looking down at the stretch of open grass in the evening light that lay between him and his hope. The herder boy stood by a stone trough, watching his beasts jostle each other for a drink, now and then giving one of their rumps a little sting with the stick. “Bad girl,” he said, his words carried clear and small through the thin air. Julien drew in a breath and whistled like a blackbird.

  The boy looked up sharply. You don’t have blackbirds up here, do you? Heart pounding, Julien whistled again, and let his face show for a moment between the trees. Here. Here I am.

  When the boy came into the forest, Julien was kneeling on the pine needles waiting, sick with hope. The young goatherd gave him one swift look like a bird turning its head, sharp and canny.

  “Clément,” Julien whispered.

  “He’s away. Bergers are home. You need help?”

  “I have to get someone off the mountain with a broken ankle. And hide him.”

  The boy’s lips shaped a silent whistle. “You wait. I’ll get ’em.”

  An hour later the western sky flamed scarlet and rose, the zenith a deep royal blue above Julien where he stood on the grassy uplands again. Below, Benjamin’s face showed ghostly in the gathering dusk. “Wait here,” said Jeannette Berger as she and her brother Maurice clipped onto their lines and started down. Julien knelt gripping the scrubby grass, listening. Oh God, he prayed. Oh God. He found no other words.

  The sky was still lit when they reached him, Benjamin strapped down on a homemade stretcher, swathed in blankets, tears shining in his eyes under the bloody sky. Julien bent to him. “They’re allies,” he murmured. “They’re passeurs. You’re safe.” The tears spilled over and streamed down Benjamin’s face, reflecting rose-red streaks of light. He opened his mouth, but his teeth chattered too hard for him to speak.

  The Bergers coiled their ropes and stood, lit ruddy in the last light of that endless day. Him with his squashed and broken nose; her with her figure broad and ungraceful in thick men’s trousers, her neck and chin and smiling mouth too big. He had never seen such beautiful people. They knelt and took the handles of the stretcher. “You walk beside us on the downhill side,” Maurice said. “Steady him.”

  Jeannette grinned at him. “You also get to be the cushion if we fall.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Benjamin asked.

  “To my mother’s house,” said Jeannette, and smiled.

  It was a hard walk back, but not so hard as Julien feared. In the dying light they didn’t try to hide, but walked the crests of the gentlest hills, on dry dirt paths between the rocks and heather. And the last of the light died very slowly, held by the great snowy peaks that glowed a warm rose against the fading sky. The line of shadow crept slowly upward, till only the highest summits were lit; the light winked out, and the world darkened, and still they could see the path. Nothing in the world but the pale ghost of the path before them, the warm, dark, breathing bulk of each other, and the peaks, still the peaks, now glowing an unearthly ice-blue. Julien walked beside his friend, his eyes watchful, his heart stunned into silence. Somewhere deep in a valley the promise lay shattered on the rocks; in another a goatherd boy went home whistling, swinging his stick; within Julien’s reach his friend lay breathing in the impossible light. God, God, the word sang itself in his head. What is this? What is this? The Alps stood sentinel around them, guarding and lighting them, the Alps that had nearly killed Benjamin, and they did not answer.

  They descended into forest darkness, down and down, Julien straining to keep watch. They came out onto the short soft grass, the stars overhead, above the eastern peaks a silver half moon showing bright-edged against the black. Ahead of them the cluster of stone houses, their windows golden; in one of them a red blanket hung, lamplight behind it making it glow like a living heart, the signal: all clear. Before they could knock, a wrinkled woman in an apron threw the door wide. Inside was warmth, and a scarred pine table, a worn brown sofa by the old stone fireplace, and a blazing fire.

  Julien followed the Bergers as they carried Benjamin into the house of life.

  Julien opened the attic shutters the next morning to find the sun high and fresh snow on the ground. Benjamin slept deep as a child, breathing evenly, the fresh-made cast showing bulky under the blanket. Soft voices floated up from downstairs as Julien felt his friend’s cool forehead. Then a sudden shout of laughter, and loud shushing. He came down the attic stairs in his socks.

  A fire danced in the stone hearth; Maurice and Jeannette and a stranger sat around the pine table with mugs, Jeannette shuffling a pack of cards. She smiled at him. “You’re awake! Join us, have some coffee. It’s fake, but it’s hot. And there’s milk. And tell us what you’re called, so I don’t have to call you ‘you’ anymore. Officially, of course.” She fluttered her fingers in a you-know gesture.

  Julien smiled. “I’m Julien. Officially.”

  Jeannette poured him a cup from a dented coffeepot and added milk from a stoneware jug. She pointed with her chin at the stranger. “This’s Clément. He’s very curious who you were crossing with, but you won’t know that.”

  Julien warmed his hands on his mug. “He was young … had a beard …”

  Jeannette grinned at Clément. “I win.”

  “I didn’t really think—” began Clément.

  “Then why on earth d’you take my bet?”

  “Because bragging rights look so good on you.”

  Jeannette threw back her head and roared with laughter. Both the men grinned.

  “We’ll find out,” said Clément. “Has to be someone we know.”

  “That, or your reputation’s getting out of hand.”

  “How’s your friend, Julien?”

  “No fever. And he has more color now.”

  “Poor boy,” said Maurice. “He looked half dead. Listen, you are both welcome here for as long—”

  “But you are in a border zone,” said Clément, “so don’t leave the house, and my recommendation—”

  “Jean-Baptiste said two weeks, Clem.” Jeannette leaned over the table. “At least two weeks.”

  “The doctor?” said Julien. He tried to recall last night. Benjamin laid out on the table, a bottle of something, a young man in a black coat. In the morning light it all seemed like a firelit dream.

  Jeannette threw her head back and laughed again. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You tell him.”

  Maurice gave her a patient look and turned to Julien. “He knows what he’s doing. And he’s safe. The doctor—well, the doctor’s down in Argentière anyhow, we just sent that patroller down to him.” He rubbed his chin. “Jean-Baptiste is a, uh, very experienced vet.”

  Julien didn’t know just what kind of look crossed his face. But Jeannette, naturally, laughed at it.

  The beams in the Bergers’ house were rough pine, blackened with woodsmoke; the walls were granite outside, plaster inside, and cold. The faces were warm and open as the fire in the open hearth, filling the house with light and life. The past and the future stayed outside with the wind and the snow. For those few days there was peace.

  Long slow mornings waking and dozing again, feeling his friend’s warmth beside him under the blankets, sliding back into the blessed soft darkness where it was enough to be alive. The song of enough sang its rich harmonies all through his body; when he felt the questions behind him, he did not turn, and in the end they went away.

  Long slow mornings in the attic; quiet afternoons downstairs by the fire, bringing tea up to Benjamin. His friend slept and slept, woke and watched the slow dance of du
st in the slanting sunlight with a strange calm on his face. It was three days before they spoke of anything more than food, or tea, or whether Benjamin was warm enough or in pain. Till the day Julien came up to find his friend propped against the wall with tears slipping silently down his face. He froze, but Benjamin turned.

  “Julien, do you think there’s anything I could do to help your father?”

  Julien gaped.

  “I know I’m not good at much.” The wet brown eyes were steady. “But if I could do anything at all?”

  Julien gathered his wits. “Translate. You speak Yiddish and French and German.”

  “You think that would help?”

  “Of course.”

  The tears slid down again. “Why didn’t he ever ask?” Benjamin whispered. “No. I know why he didn’t ask. I was never that kind of person. Julien, I thought, out there on the mountain, I thought—”

  “Look—”

  “I was always going to be someone different. Later. It wasn’t all stupid, I had reasons, I wasn’t made for this, Julien. You know. I was made for a lab somewhere, running experiments with particles while someone else keeps the animals out. Not like you—when I see you do this stuff—it’s like seeing one of them.”

  Julien frowned. “Who?”

  “I don’t mean … That hawk, did you see it, yesterday? It was up there for hours. This perfect circle over and over, I could see every feather on its wings when the light hit it from the side and it was so—smooth, all this … precisely applied power, like, like I don’t know what. Like you. Climbing something.” He wiped his tears with the back of his hand. “It’s no use even envying that, you know? I’ve got to be a man in my own way. Do something for my neighbor. Not—not give in.”

  “Benjamin …”

  “I was angry. Because I can never, ever pay you back. As if that was any good. I’m making some changes. Do you know, I really believe? I didn’t have reasons for not doing the things I’m supposed to, I just didn’t do them. That’s no way to live. If I make it back to Tanieux I’m getting my prayer book back from Damien, and I’m going to keep the Sabbath, and I’m writing to my mother, and … Well.” He fell silent.