Flame in the Night Page 8

  The fire hissed and flared as boiling water splashed over the edges of the cookie tin. The wind moaned outside. All three Schulmanns were staring.

  “They caught no one?” Elisa breathed. “That’s why—when Paquerette said the police—they’ve been doing the same thing here as in Lyon and they’ve arrested no one?”

  Magali was nodding.

  “I guess so,” murmured Julien.

  There was a strange, cold sensation in Elisa’s scalp as her wet hair tried to stand on end. The darkness behind her in the cave seemed suddenly huge. “How?” she whispered. “How is that possible?”

  “We had warning. We stood watch …”

  “And what? And people just hid their neighbors? Everyone?”

  “Yeah,” said Magali. “They’re mostly boarders or houseguests anyway.”

  Tova’s hand found Elisa’s. Even Karl was staring. “God brought us here,” Elisa breathed in German. “Blessed is His name.” She cleared her thick throat and said again in French, “God brought us here. Your father is a righteous man.”

  Magali’s face, looking to the cave mouth, slowly hardened in the firelight. “This isn’t a job for heroes,” she whispered. “Heroes get themselves killed. Keeping people safe is the only important thing.”

  “That’s why he couldn’t run, Magali,” said Julien.

  “Because he’s so important?”

  Elisa thought she saw anger flash in Julien’s eyes, but he bent to tend the fire instead of responding. Magali’s shoulders slumped. Outside the rain slacked suddenly. The strange white glare of daylight brightened beyond the cave mouth, dimming the fire to a small red glow. They all looked out at it, blinking as if waking from a dream. Elisa tested one of the potatoes with a careful fingernail where it rose above the boiling water. Almost done.

  “We should still go home,” said Magali quietly. “Mama will be alone.”

  Julien’s eyes flicked up in protest, then went to the cave mouth, the fire, the bag of food, and the two water bottles stashed against the wall. He nodded. “I have to show one of you the way to the stream. That water’ll be gone before tomorrow. And do you know how to tend a fire? Or make one?”

  “I do,” said Elisa. “In a stove.”

  “We’ll bring you food. Julien will. Raw things, eggs—you can eat eggs, right? Grandpa has chickens—we’ll find ways—”

  “Can you bring a knife? I can boil it to kosher it. We don’t have anything at all …” She was searching through her bag for the oldest piece of clothing, something to grasp the hot tin with. “These will be ready soon. Maybe you should eat what you brought. You’ll need your strength.”

  Magali nodded, her eyes on the entrance. She shook her head, just barely, her face for a moment as naked as her brother’s had been. He shifted over toward her till their shoulders touched. They crouched there in the cave mouth, dark and still against the white light of day.

  “We’ll pray,” said Elisa. “We’ll pray for your parents every day.”

  “And for ours,” said Karl fiercely.

  Elisa closed her eyes, and nodded.

  Julien and Magali walked down the road in silence, eating cheese. They did not watch the horizon anymore, nor listen for any distant sounds. They went steadily. The truth would come when it came. They had to walk toward it. But they couldn’t—not even for Mama’s sake—run.

  The wind rose as they walked, and tore the last of the ragged rain clouds to pieces; the sun broke white and blinding through the clouds, and they blinked and lowered their heads against its glare. They entered Tanieux by the bridge, over brown swirling water, and took the street upward toward home. The place was empty, the black automobile and the mud-flecked motorcycles parked and silent. Magali’s pace quickened as she passed them, her face set like stone.

  They climbed the steep street to the Rue Emmanuel. It was getting harder to breathe. Please beat like a pulse in Julien’s chest. Look what he’s done for You. He pushed open the heavy door and they walked down the dark downstairs hallway together, hearing the brief, sharp echo of their footsteps. Magali took Julien’s hand as they started up the stone stairs.

  They climbed the last steps to the landing. Julien saw in his mind the empty apartment behind that door, how it would echo as they walked in. Magali put a leaden hand on the doorknob and turned it.

  The door opened. There at the table, with mugs of tea in their hands, sat their mother and father.

  Chapter 7

  OUT

  “YOU’RE HERE,” SAID Julien. His voice stuck thickly in his throat. His father rose and let him come to him, took him by the shoulders, and kissed him formally twice on each cheek. Julien could feel Papa’s hands shaking as he held him. Magali flew into Papa’s arms, and he gave her four kisses as well.

  “My brave children,” he said.

  Mama stood suddenly, the first motion she made. Julien caught one glimpse of her blank face, like a field of snow, before she turned away to put the kettle on for tea.

  Elisa Schulmann turned sixteen in a cave high on the Vivarais plateau, and no one noticed except herself. She did not tell Karl or Tova. She was too tired.

  Between waking in a sweat of terror in the night, sure she heard someone coming for them, and waking to Karl screaming and screaming in his deepest sleep; between holding Tova while she cried, feeling her own face grow taut and dry with brittle grief, and shaming Karl painfully into a solemn oath never to leave her sight—not even when Tova was crying—she had nothing. She had nothing left to give.

  It seemed she could feel every cell in her body trembling. She barely slept. When she did, she dreamed. She saw her parents, their backs to her, following Julie Altman across a barren plain, never turning as she called and called. She never saw their faces. She woke and crawled out onto the ledge, the stars spread above her like a river of diamonds, indestructible and holy. She lay on her side, pain in her throat, pain in her chest and belly, and could not weep.

  She went in, turned the wet sides of the drying sweaters toward the banked fire, and crawled in between Tova and Karl again.

  The motions of survival guided her into each new day—that and the prayer book. Washing clothing in the tiny stream, gathering firewood, praying the three daily services on the ledge. Saying the prayer of supplication with Karl and Tova: Let us fall into the hand of God. Seeing faces in her mind, face after lost face, till the darkness behind them grew alive like a beast; then walking into it, sweeping the cave, and laying a fire. She cooked every night after sundown in the cookie tin, a thick soup and a precious egg or two to last all the next day. She had forbidden fires in the daytime. She had forbidden drying clothes outside. They lived in the scent of smoke and wet wool.

  She saw herself in her mind sometimes, a cave woman crouched by her cook-fire in the smoky red light. She saw other things: their apartment in Lyon, emptied, dresser drawers dumped out on the stripped beds, kitchen cabinets gaping like mouths. Herself in that same kitchen beside Mama, slicing potatoes for Shabbos dinner; the light from the south window, the scent of frying onions, the quiet joy ringing through the house.

  She pressed her forehead against the cave wall until it hurt, but still she could not weep.

  Julien came with potatoes, cabbages, carrots, news: The police were still searching. No one had been arrested. His father was spared. Julien came with new papers for them, expertly made; the names beside their pictures were Élise, Brigitte, and Charles Fournier. French citizens. Julien promised them school, promised them a host family who would let them cook their own food. She ran her fingers lightly over her new name and her old picture, listening to him explain that the school had no building of its own, that her class would meet in the Bellevue Hotel, that school had started today, and she tried to imagine herself openly walking down the street in this country ever again.

  She counted the days to know when Rosh Hashanah fell, and led Karl and Tova in all the prayers she could remember from the machzor. “May you be signed and sealed for a good yea
r,” she murmured through dry lips, and Karl said, “I’m sorry I said I hated you,” and began to weep. She took his hand.

  They prayed together every morning; every morning Karl prayed harder. Elisa turned when they were done and went into the dark to sweep out the cave and the fire ring on her knees. Seeing Mama scrubbing dust from between the living-room floorboards, her face intent and peaceful in spite of the world outside, Mama doing what she could do.

  It was a housekeeping Elisa hadn’t imagined, in that smelly alley in Lyon where she’d thought herself poor, but it was what she could do. The work her mother had taught her, reduced to its bare and smoky essentials: Fire. Food. Water.

  Life.

  In the firelight each evening she watched Tova and Karl breathe. Their chests rose and fell, their hearts beat with a rhythm she could feel in her belly. Her own heart a small, quick pulsing, a thin living flame between them and the dark. Depths moved under her, the roots of the mountain, the depths out of which one cried to God.

  She watched, and counted again the days since the world shattered, trying to be sure of the date for Yom Kippur; it was then that she realized she was sixteen years old today. She stirred tomorrow’s potatoes in the fire, and remembered her ninth birthday, when Papa had given her a garnet necklace. And her tenth, when they had ridden from Mannheim to Lyon in a third-class carriage, ten hours, lain down on bare mattresses in an empty apartment, and thanked God they were out. They had thought they were out.

  Her throat closed, thinking of all they had given, all they had done. For this. This smoky cave, these beating hearts. Karl stirred and looked up at her; she saw the firelight in his eyes. She saw herself in a kitchen somewhere, years from now, a young girl in a blue dress standing beside her, saw herself slicing potatoes in the afternoon light. Saying Your grandmother. Your grandfather. Saying Never forget.

  She laid one last branch over the coals to see it catch and flare, to see the shadows retreat. The cave grew bright, the cave mouth darker. She sat watching the flames a long time before she slept.

  Julien had no lack of witnesses to tell him what Sunday had been like in Tanieux—especially once school started—but his family did not speak of it. He could imagine Mama, standing by Papa as person after person clasped his hand after the service and held back tears—Mama trying to stand up straight and play the part she had been given, trying. Looking back over her shoulder through the wide church doors for the police. I hope you can forgive me this, Maria. Julien hadn’t heard her sing since that day. Not once. The silence in the house made his shoulders hurt.

  The Scouts clapped him on the back and said how glad they were. His friends at school—when he could find them in the sea of new faces crowding the hotel patio where they spent break—told him just how sure they’d been that his father would be arrested, or that he wouldn’t. They sat on the patio tables and told each other that if the Germans took Stalingrad, they’d have Russia. That they wouldn’t take Stalingrad—that they would. They burned and shouted about the new law that young Frenchmen could be drafted to work in German factories, and wondered with cold in their bellies whether it would touch them someday. Magali confessed to Julien that she’d been asked to accompany Marek on a border crossing, and did he think Mama would say yes? “They won’t put him on any aid group’s hands without me, even the Cimade.”

  Julien suggested she wait a little.

  Papa came home from the office late and weary, and disappeared into his study. Julien stayed up reading homework by lamplight till the moon was high in the sky. Papa came out, rubbing his lined face, and smiled at Julien. “You want some tea? Chamomile?”

  Julien hated chamomile. “Sure.”

  Papa came back with Mama’s steaming teapot, almost wetting Julien’s textbook when he set it down. “Sorry. Aah. That’s hot. Can’t sleep without it when I work this late. What’re you reading about?”

  “Great War. The Christmas truce.”

  “Ah.” Papa’s eyes softened as he sank into his chair. “Do they tell how it started?”

  “No. It’s just a paragraph.”

  Papa made a rueful noise in his throat. “A blip. An aberration. They certainly made sure it never happened again.” Julien looked up and stared when he heard the thickness in his voice. “They heard each other singing ‘Silent Night.’” Papa blinked hard and reached for the teapot. “I’m working too much. It’s unstringing me.” He poured, the steam rising up in a white cloud.

  “Papa,” said Julien, then stopped as Papa looked up, his mind going blank. “I … I’m glad you’re all right.”

  Papa filled Julien’s cup. “It was kind of you,” he said finally. “To want me to hide.”

  Julien shook his head. He touched the cup but it was burning hot. He remembered his father’s eyes. Not the eyes of a man who had seen kindness. “Asking you to run away?”

  “To be safe. You didn’t see it as my calling, to be in church that morning. It’s only natural you would advise the sensible thing.”

  Julien looked down at his textbook: the trenches, no-man’s-land, a corpse tangled in barbed wire.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Julien. Marcel”—Julien glanced up sharply—“is leaving town soon, perhaps for a good while. Your troop will need a new leader. Would you be willing to take it on?”

  Julien put both hands around his cup and held them there till they stung. “They want me?”

  “Monsieur Astier thinks you’re the best choice. With Sylvain as your second—you’d pass the sentry-duty roster on to him. Are you interested?”

  “Well, yeah—yeah, of course.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s become a much heavier responsibility, I would never assume—”

  “I want to,” said Julien. Papa nodded, watching the steam rise in white ribbons from his cup, then lifting his bright brown eyes to Julien. “I want to,” said Julien again, and Papa smiled.

  The police left at midmorning on their fifth day of school. Their teachers let them out of class. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the hotel patio between the little green-painted tables; the people of Tanieux all along the street stood quiet on their stoops, watching the enemy go.

  Julien got the message from Marcel within minutes: Wait till tomorrow to give the all clear.

  Mama made an omelet that night to celebrate. But she did not sing. After dark, upstairs in their bedrooms, Julien and Magali heard her muffled sobs coming up from below.

  The next day Julien went down to the Rostins’ farm to fetch Benjamin home. Benjamin was alone, and looked moodily at Julien, his hands in his pockets. “Are you assigned to this road now, or are you here to get me?”

  “I already did my road. And then that family in the cave—you should’ve seen it, she’d made a broom out of genêts and she was cooking in a—”

  “I’ll get my things.”

  They walked up the road between pinewoods in silence, shafts of sunlight shattering down through the boughs. Benjamin kept his eyes on the road, even when he finally spoke.

  “You might as well know. I’ll be trying to cross the border in a month.”

  Julien opened his mouth. It closed again when he met his friend’s eyes.

  “My visa’s on its way.”

  “You’ll make it,” said Julien softly. “America …”

  “I told her no, get Papa out first. She told me it’s already on its way. I know she’s spent all her money on it.”

  “You wanted—?”

  “He’s been in prison almost two years, Julien. They both keep telling me how safe Spain is, and meanwhile no one can offer any credible proof that place is any better than the internment camps here, you know, you’ve heard Magali’s stories. He won’t give me a direct answer, what he eats, how often people get sick, he just tells me to stop worrying that maybe a fascist dictatorship might not have nice clean prisons where no one ever dies of typhoid. So there we are.” He thrust his hands hard into his pockets. “I’m going to America. Or somewhere anyway.”


  Julien grabbed his friend’s arm. “America. I’m telling you.” Benjamin’s eyes avoided his. Pull yourself together. Don’t you come from people who took a footpath through the sea? “You think about America. It’s like jumping over a stream. You look at the other bank—if you look at the water you’ll f—”

  Benjamin jerked his arm away. “Shut up,” he whispered. “Shut up, would you?”

  “But—”

  “You want to tell me again what’ll happen if I get too scared?”

  Julien shut his mouth.

  “Yeah,” said Benjamin softly.

  Then he turned and walked on between the patches of splintered sunlight, and Julien followed him.

  Chapter 8

  THROUGH THE SEA

  ELISA’S BROTHER HADN’T lived two weeks at the Thibauds’ farmhouse before he announced he wanted to move into a dorm.

  “Shh,” she hissed at him, drawing the doors of the ancient cupboard-bed they shared more tightly closed. The other shuttered bed, shared by the whole Thibaud family now that the Schulmanns had moved in, was only meters away.

  “But Elisa, they’d be happy if we moved out! Have you seen how she looks when you—”

  “Shh!” Of course she’d seen Madame Thibaud wincing as Elisa served her siblings their separate and—she’d admit it—inferior food. She cooked beside the woman. Those anxious, bird-bright eyes, those good intentions. The light of her goodwill always shining, like a flashlight in your face.

  “And I could eat at the dorm—I won’t be a bar mitzvah till after the school year’s done, and Pastor Losier said we could live there, and Jean-Baptiste says they play soccer every night before supper and—I just …”

  Elisa’s heart tightened, but she didn’t speak. In the dark she could hear his breath come quick.