Flame in the Night Page 13

  The click of Benjamin’s crutches was like the tick of a clock, fast, automatic, dead. The railroad worker let them into a packed passenger car where people sat silent, some of them weeping, all staring out the windows. Someone stood to give Benjamin a seat; he managed to whisper his thanks. Shouts were coming from outside the train, an argument. A loud string of curses.

  They felt their train car vibrate as the engine roared to life.

  The sensation of escaping through the jaws of a trap, Julien reminded himself all through the journey home, was an illusion. They were fish swimming away from the net at blind and desperate speed. Away and away, inward and inward, because they could not swim out.

  “They won’t come to Tanieux,” he whispered once to Benjamin, after they changed at Dunières to the plateau train, and in his heart he cursed himself for being a liar. They would not come with tanks. It didn’t matter.

  They would come with a list.

  Snow lay on the Vivarais mountains as the train climbed to the plateau, snow on the hills around Tanieux, the whole land hushed and gentle. Gentle and helpless.

  He could not bear to look at his friend as the train pulled into Tanieux.

  Chapter 12

  THE HUNTER

  IT WAS TWO days before Christmas, walking out into the crystalline air on a sentry roster errand, that Julien saw his first Gestapo in Tanieux.

  He hadn’t dreamed it would take so long. He had watched hard, almost glad to have his old duties back and to leave the troop in Sylvain’s hands. What mattered now, after all, but standing watch—with the sheltering forest deep and hushed with snow, a tracker’s dream, and a cast on Benjamin’s leg? Yet the snow was not their enemy, lying in great drifts over the roads down off the plateau. It was the wall of a city under siege. There had been one raid only, during a thaw.

  And they’d had warning.

  A voice on Pastor Alexandre’s telephone: Watch out! Watch out tomorrow! Then silence. They had a friend, it seemed. The police—the French police—came the next day, and found no one. But Julien had not relaxed his vigilance.

  And still they came when he did not expect them.

  Snow blew over the frozen river, settling into little curves and ridges with the eddies of the snow-wind they called the burle; he hunched down into his patched coat as he crossed the stone bridge. Along the narrow-dug path up the street into town a Scout came in sight and hailed him urgently. Julien ran to meet him.

  Benjamin was out there, at some unknown house, translating some nameless person’s instructions: Follow your guide twenty meters behind. Remember you don’t know him. It was his third translation this week. He’d begged to go.

  “Soft alert,” murmured the Scout. “Two Gestapo off the train a couple minutes ago, headed for the place du centre.” He walked off singing “A La Volette.”

  Julien threaded the streets toward his assigned route, singing it too.

  Benjamin was who knew where. Élise was at her dorm. Right on the Rue de la Gare, the Gestapo would pass by it, why had she moved into town? Julien stopped at Gilles’s house to pass on the alert, then took a route that would take him past Élise’s dorm to start his own streets. “The branch was dry and it broke,” he sang, and saw faces turn to him from behind a window, and a young girl retreat from the room. “My little bird, where are you hurt?” he sang, remembering the one and only time—till yesterday—that Élise had set foot inside his house. She came with others from school to hear Benjamin’s full story in private; Julien made a fool of himself, asking her why she wouldn’t drink the tea. The next day on Benjamin’s advice he had gone down to La Roche to ask a rabbinical student known as Jacques Marlot how to make a teacup kosher, then ransacked the attic for his old tin cup, rejected it twice as too ugly, and brought it down to be boiled fully immersed at a rolling boil. And looked away when Mama called him a considerate young man, trying to silence the mocking voice in his mind: Why don’t you boil yourself at a rolling boil, stupid? Still won’t make you kosher. Why don’t you just stop?

  He had tried to stop. He couldn’t. His first day back at school after returning from the Alps, she had walked in and seen him and Benjamin, taken them in with the slightest widening of her eyes, and stood perfectly still a few seconds, breathing carefully. It was clear she had understood everything. How could a mere moment’s pause, a slow, careful step, have such heartbreaking courage shining through them like a lamp? She had lost so much. She stood to lose everything. And yet she moved through the world with such self-possession. Those attentive eyes, that mind behind them poised and watchful as a hunting cat. Hunting and hunted. She was so young. Was everyone’s soul that beautiful? Was he seeing reality as it was for the very first time?

  Or was he losing his mind?

  It was her face he saw, and only her face, as he climbed the streets, as he came to the intersection. Her face, and the hard light in her eyes, and the softening of it as she held out her hands to take the steaming cup from Mama, his cup, just yesterday. Her face, and still her face, as he walked out into the place du centre singing, within sudden sight of the enemy. Her face, and the high black boots, the black coats and blood-red armbands bearing their twisted cross. Her face, and the proud eyes sizing up the quiet people like cattle too thin to buy.

  “You, boy!” A black-clad arm beckoned.

  Julien forced his gaze upward, past the impossibly broad chest of the blond man to the chiseled face of the other, the one who had spoken, with his straight, sure shoulders, his bright cold eyes. He thought of the word noble, the word warrior. Anyone would have thought of them. He felt sick.

  “Do you know where the pastors live?”

  Julien cursed the s in that question, his face like stone, still as old gray-white ice. He nodded.

  “Tell them they’re wanted at the mairie.” The man turned on his heel and walked on.

  Julien did as he was told.

  He kept singing. He passed the alert to Philippe; he sent a boy to find Pastor Alexandre. He thought of the hiding place they’d made in the attic for Benjamin. He thought of Mama. He took the way to his own street.

  He delivered his message, looking past his parents to the kitchen window. Papa stood without a word. Mama closed her eyes.

  Julien turned away. “I have to finish the alert.”

  “Sit down, Mama.” Magali’s flat voice came from behind him as he watched his father walk down the stairs to go where he’d been summoned. “I’ll make you some tea.”

  Two hours later Julien climbed up to the landing, stripping off his gloves, put his chilled hands under his armpits for a minute to warm them, and opened the door. Papa sat at the kitchen table drinking warmed-over mélisse tea, its lemon scent spreading faintly through the air. Mama was wiping the same spot on the table over and over. Before Julien could speak she lifted her head and said to Papa, “And what would make you?”

  “If it became clear it was what God wanted …”

  Mama squeezed out the dishrag hard and splashed fresh water onto it.

  Julien closed the door. “What happened?”

  “It was a warning,” said Papa. A look passed between him and Mama. “That fellow wanted to … introduce himself. Kriminalkomissar Haas. He’s the regional head based in Le Puy. He came to let us know we’re in his jurisdiction.”

  Mama turned a steady, slightly chilly gaze on her husband. “And what else did he say?”

  Papa sighed. “He said, ‘The French police have done excellent service, and are still handling most matters, as you may have noticed. We don’t wish this to make you forget we are here. Anger us, and we will jog your memory.’”

  Mama turned fully away, wiping at the clean edge of the sink, her head high and her back very straight. You almost couldn’t see her shake.

  They held their quiet Christmas—a young pine hung with candles, a hushed service in the candlelit church. A hand-knit sweater for each of them, made from the yarn unraveled from their old ones. Papa read the Christmas story aloud; at the
quote “Get up, take your wife and the child, and flee to Egypt,” Mama turned her face for a moment toward the wall.

  On the twenty-sixth they invited Élise and her siblings. For tea, and sweet wrinkled apples from Grandpa’s root cellar; for a chance at Élise’s rare smile. For the sober way she talked to Papa, like a woman grown and older than Julien already; for the way she stood behind her sister’s chair, that silent watchfulness in her eyes and hands. He could see how she would look, how she would watch, with a child of her own. He escaped into the bathroom and pressed his hands against his eyes until they hurt, until he saw red and white in the dark behind his lids. Stop. Stop. There’s nothing in this for you but pain.

  He couldn’t stop.

  He started spending breaks in the hotel dining room, where students daunted by the plateau’s cold kept to one side away from the hotel’s handful of winter guests. Élise sat with Nicole, their dark heads bent low together, talking quietly. They cast a wary eye now and then at the hotel guests.

  Except the new guest, who came the second week of January. He rated a long, slow, covert stare. Julien saw both their mouths open, breathing him in, and his own mouth tightened.

  He tried to see what they were seeing. Soft, wavy brown hair, he supposed. Broad shoulders and strong arms, and a catlike sureness in the man’s body as he sauntered up to the bar. In his smile, in his bright brown eyes glancing about the room. Who did he think he was?

  The young man ordered, tapped a cigarette out of a full pack on the bar, returned the pack to his fine shirt’s pocket, and lit up. A rich guy. No one smoked anymore, especially brand-new cigarettes, except Germans and black-market fat cats. And which are you?

  The girls whispered together, and turned their chairs a little inward, toward the wall.

  “I know what he is,” Pierre said at Scouts. “Antoine Duval. He’s an informer.”

  “What?” breathed Julien.

  His friend’s face was stony, that boastful Pierre grin nowhere to be seen. “Or an inspector or something. Monsieur Pérac thinks he’s actually police himself.” He lowered his voice. “He offered the Péracs eight hundred francs and ten extra ration tickets if they’d point him to one foreign Jew. A thousand five hundred for a résistant, two thousand if a weapon was found during the arrest.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “They said no,” said Pierre.

  Sylvain made a small rough sound in his throat. “Nobody would. Not in Tanieux.”

  “Never,” said Julien, but his stomach tightened. You could buy a heifer with that kind of money. People were hungry. Not in Tanieux.

  The man was everywhere. In the street, the bookstore, the café. In the post office, mailing a fat package to some police address in Vichy, in front of God and everybody, returning an easy, courteous nod to the postmistress’s grim stare. Everywhere, but especially in the hotel dining room. Smiling. Leaning back in his chair and lighting up with smooth, leisured grace. Élise and Nicole weren’t there anymore for those bright eyes to light on; Julien had told them the instant he knew. He’d told everyone what the man was. A traitor to his nation in the pay of Vichy, a sniffing hound for the Nazis. Every stitch he put on his self-sure shoulders bought with blood.

  On a bitter night in late January Julien walked past his parents’ bedroom door and saw Mama sitting on the bed with her hand pressed against her mouth, tears running down her face. An open suitcase lay beside her. Her other hand clutched one of Papa’s shirts.

  Julien froze. She turned away from him. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, making to go.

  But he couldn’t tear his eyes off that shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mama. “I should have—”

  “Did something—is there—?”

  “He packed it. In case. In case they—” A sharp sob shook her, and she covered her mouth again. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’ve tried, Julien, so hard. He deserves for me to support him—all he’s doing, all he’s done—he packed it himself to spare me. He forgot to pack socks. I’ve tried so hard, but …” She raised her eyes, red around the edges, coal-black in the center, and her voice went low and hard. “I’m done.”

  Julien opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “I’m sorry.” She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “Parents are supposed to be strong.” She laid the shirt down on the bed and refolded it carefully, smoothing out the wrinkles she had made. She put it in the suitcase, her movements neat and controlled, and he almost jumped when the next words out of her mouth, in that dark voice again, were, “Parents die like anyone else when they’re shot.”

  Mama. He couldn’t get the word out. Mama, what? Mama, stop.

  “And so do heroes.” She closed the suitcase. Tears were streaming down her face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You should go.”

  He tried one more time to find his voice; then he turned, and went.

  Chapter 13

  ANYONE ELSE

  ON A BLACK night in late January Benjamin came home staring, limping worse than he had since he’d had his cast off. “It’s nothing. Slipped on some ice. Really Julien, it’s nothing at all. Listen. Listen to me.” Benjamin’s pupils were wide. “I … The police. I got the police—interested in me.” He sank onto the couch.

  “Interested?” Julien said. Papa came out of his study and nodded at Benjamin to go on.

  “I got called away from translating. They needed me at the train station right away—two young guys, they were getting agitated in German and wouldn’t go with their guide. One of them had lost his papers on the train. There was nothing we could do, the train was gone, I said he had to come away. Then we heard an engine, it didn’t sound like Monsieur Faure’s auto, so F—the guide had me hide them in a shed. There wasn’t room for us. There wasn’t any time to run. We just walked down the alley like we were supposed to be there, right into the headlights. They checked our papers. They were checking everyone.”

  Julien chewed on a knuckle.

  “They looked at mine a long time.” Benjamin’s voice was dropping. “They said I wasn’t on their list but my status was very ‘unclear.’”

  Julien hissed through his teeth.

  Papa stared at the fire. “We’ll have to move you.”

  Benjamin sat up straight. “What do you mean?”

  “Likely to a very isolated farm. Not my father’s place, I think. I could delegate Madame Thiers so that we truthfully won’t know where—”

  “No.”

  Papa looked up.

  “I can’t stop working. Protecting me isn’t the only thing. I saved two people’s lives tonight!”

  “Benjamin, there are other interpreters—”

  “And why do you call on me so often if there’s so many?”

  Papa sighed. “Because you are young, and the young are more often ignored. And because I believed your French citizenship protected you.”

  “If I am still a citizen.”

  “Indeed.”

  There was a brief silence. Benjamin looked up at Papa with dark eyes, his breath coming fast. “Let me keep working, Monsieur Losier. Please.”

  “Benjamin …” Papa raked a hand through his hair, eyes uncertain.

  “I’m not a child anymore. This is my choice. If it’s a bad choice, I’ll be responsible. Only me.”

  “That is not how your parents will approach the matter.”

  “I’ll tell them I defied you and wouldn’t go. I already defied them.”

  “You put so much in your letters, Benjamin?”

  “We have a code. We worked it out in one of the letters you sent the safe way. Bad dream means a raid—Marseille means Switzerland. Monsieur …” Benjamin looked Papa in the eye for a long, intent moment. “You know, Monsieur Losier. You’re staying too.”

  Papa covered his face with one hand. A log in the fire cracked loud in the silence.

  After a while Papa nodded.

  The gray-white cold of February set in. The cold of death.

  Pe
ople huddled deep into their coats, walking between walls of crusted snow, between drifts the burle swirled into dunelike curves, dry glittering snow dancing like knives in the air. Julien worked after school with the other Scouts, delivering emergency firewood to the households that needed it most. The cold touched exposed skin like an enemy, moment by moment stealing more warmth. More life. It seeped in through the cracks, relentless, through the thin window-panes, gathering, waiting for the fire’s blaze to falter. In the mornings it was a presence in Julien’s room, watching with cold eyes as he fled down the stairs to where Mama built up the fire.

  Mama moved through the days with steady hands and lost eyes: wood on the fire, sheets on the beds, potatoes in the pot, all done without seeming to look at them. There was a silence between her and Papa, at mealtimes, that made Julien shiver and Magali hunch in on herself.

  Papa took his shortwave radio out of the attic and sent Julien to hide it at Grandpa’s farm. Julien put it in the root cellar under a heavy stack of potato crates, wrapped in a burlap sack. Then he loaded his sled with turnips and trudged home.

  The next day he saw the Gestapo again.

  Not the same men. Two new ones, striding through the bright cold air in their black coats and high black boots. Julien watched them, heart pounding. They turned away from the place, toward the train station.

  He got to school early and walked straight into Élise’s classroom, to the corner where she and Magali sat.

  Magali looked up as he came in. “I saw them too.”

  “They went to the café and the mairie.” said Élise. “Louis told us. Then they watched the people get off the train and asked the stationmaster questions. They didn’t arrest anybody.”

  “And Monsieur Bernard told them he was sure he would have noticed anything illegal going on in his station,” said Magali, her eyes lit.

  “Louis says they laughed,” added Élise.

  Through the open classroom door they heard a shout. A flurry of voices, exclamations. Magali sprang to her feet, but at that moment Mademoiselle Combe strode through the door, stripping off her gloves, face flushed and eyes shining.