Flame in the Night Page 9

  “It’s just—it’s so hard.”

  Hard? She’d seen the gentle way young Roland Thibaud and his father went about teaching Karl to hoe, and pitch hay. And shovel manure. It wasn’t what any of them were used to, this ancient stone farmhouse, its heavy slate roof sheltering people and livestock separated only by a single interior wall. You could hear the mice skittering overhead in the hayloft, hear the cows shift in their stalls. Do you understand how much worse we could have it? She had heard stories already at school.

  Tova stirred. “Elisa? What Pastor Losier said, about Switzerland … ?”

  Elisa shook her head. “Too dangerous.” They’d have to go separately, the pastor had said; the Cimade wouldn’t take a sixteen-year-old. The vision was always in her mind: arriving safe on the other side and waiting for her siblings—then hearing the terrible news. In the night, every night, she heard her father whisper, I chose France. “It’s a good place here. We can make it work.” She felt Karl’s gesture in the dark; she started up on one elbow and said through her teeth, “I am not risking your life on a border because you don’t like farmwork and you feel awkward at the table. That’s final.”

  She heard Tova’s indrawn breath, the quiver in it. She lay feeling her heart beat, hearing tiny feet scratch on the pine boards overhead.

  “I’ll see what I can do about the dorm,” she whispered.

  It meant talking to men. But she could do it.

  She had only just learned the trick she needed for it from her new school friend Nadine. Nadine, whose real name she still didn’t know, who had led her and her family on Yom Kippur to a house where a tiny new congregation met in secret, who had fasted and prayed with them all that holy day. Nadine had taught her how to give the bise, the greeting kiss on both cheeks, to a boy or a man without actually touching him. School breaks had been so awkward till she’d learned that. She was sure she’d offended Julien no matter what Magali said—he had to have seen her avoiding him. And in spite of it all she had made friends somehow—her, Elisa Schulmann, making friends at school—and some of them not even Jews …

  It had made her dizzy, the first day. The crowd spread out over the slate-tiled hotel patio, boys sitting on the chairs and the little green tables, talking, laughing, arguing. A girl with an accent she couldn’t quite place, making a mixed group laugh out loud. Boys debating Christian theology with a hauntingly familiar enthusiasm while someone behind her—she never found out who—hummed a bar of a tune she knew from synagogue. Then someone else, as she turned, speaking to another girl about Mozart, giving the z its true German sound.

  And Magali bubbling up to her to offer herself as guide. “Oh, Élise, this is so great. Did you know there’s four times as many students as two years ago? I didn’t go to school last year because of—hey, have you met Charlotte? This is Élise. She plays the piano too. Twice as many teachers too, it’s the war of course, did you know Mademoiselle Schenk used to teach in an acting school? She’s holding auditions for our first play next week. Lucie! Hey Lucie! This is Élise!”

  And so she lived between the lichen-crusted farmhouse and this strange, frighteningly lovely school where not a single person had yet made fun of her face. Where Czech expatriates taught physics, where she could sit at a patio table with Charlotte from Berlin arguing deliciously all through break about which was Bach’s best work, where the silent conversation went on and on—expressions, gestures, the hint of an accent, eyes meeting for just an instant in acknowledgment—her people finding each other one by one. Nadine, Nicole, Jules, Sylvie, Eva, Damien. She wondered what their real names were. She wondered if she would ever have a chance to ask Nicole in private if it was true what Magali said, that she’d walked here from Austria on her crutches. She wondered what they talked about late at night in the dorm.

  She understood why Karl and Tova wanted to live in the dorm.

  She went to Pastor Losier. She pretended to kiss him on both cheeks. He listened gravely and told her that separate cooking in a dormitory kitchen would be extremely conspicuous. Wasn’t there a provision in Jewish law for not risking life? She said there was. It didn’t apply; they could stay at the farm, both safe and kosher. She knew of no provision for not risking embarrassment. He said he’d heard one place was going kosher, but it was a boardinghouse for young men—La Roche, down past the south edge of town. The cook there was having a difficult time, the director had told him, with only men to consult. He smiled. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more, but I suppose, if you know kosher cooking, I could direct you toward a chance to do an act of kindness.”

  Elisa sat up straight, her head high. “Thank you, Pastor,” she said.

  “But where are you going, Marcel?” asked Pierre with his arms crossed. The Scouts leaned in.

  “To the Haute-Savoie. Now a word from your new troop leader. Guys!” He hushed them, palms down. “No more questions. Julien?”

  Julien cleared his throat. “I don’t have a lot to say. I’m grateful for the honor. I’ll do my best. We have more important work than Scouts are usually entrusted with, and I’m proud to be with a troop that takes its work seriously. Some of you have missed class for sentry duty. Some of you have missed threshing and haying. I don’t underestimate either of those sacrifices and I didn’t ask for them lightly. We’re the first line of defense for Tanieux and that line must not break. They’re coming back. We don’t know when. But we will never mistake silence for safety, and we will never let down our guard. They are coming back.” The room finally came into focus and he faltered a moment at the wide eyes around him, then made the Scout salute. “Wolf troop holds fast!”

  “Wolf troop! Wolf troop!” The room was full of eyes, of saluting hands, of young, deep voices. The Scout pledge, hand on his pounding heart. Pierre slapping him on the back and calling him “General,” Sylvain taking the sentry-duty roster from him with shining eyes. Outside there was finally more air. He shook the guys’ hands, the hands of the best troop in Tanieux, and walked home blinking in the light.

  He saw Marcel off at the train station the next day; then September claimed him, school and harvest. The last cutting of hay, gotten in just ahead of the storms, Grandpa’s seamed face watching the sky every minute. Hay dust sticking to Julien’s aching limbs, blue clouds building in the west, the taste of ice-cold mint tisane in Grandpa’s kitchen afterward, the scent of raindrops in the dust.

  It poured. Julien slept and slept. The first night after the haying, he went to bed before the sun went down, and woke in the depths of night. He went down the stairs in his socks in the silent house, and stopped in the kitchen doorway staring. His parents stood by the sink in the dark, kissing: pressed together, her face upturned to his, her hand behind his head. They hadn’t seen him. He backed away without a sound, and lay a long time in his bed, looking up into the dark.

  The rain went on for days. He walked to school crammed under one umbrella with Benjamin and Magali; he spent break indoors with Sylvain and the other Scouts, with Magali, even with Élise, who seemed to be willing to talk to him now. Two of the new students disappeared; everyone seemed to know all about it, but quietly. “Switzerland,” Magali whispered, and Julien gave her a quelling frown. Then he turned to Élise.

  “Have you thought about it?” Magali asked her.

  “Too risky.” The calm in her eyes unsettled him. She glanced across the hotel dining room, then looked down at her homework. “Benjamin, did I plot this curve right?”

  Benjamin took a sharp breath and bent over her notebook.

  “A job?” said Magali, one hip perched on a patio table, staring at Elisa. “Cooking?”

  “I worked before. I helped pay our rent.” And she had never in her life worked for someone who thanked her. All the rules and none of the recipes, that’s what I’d have without you, girl, Madame Ferron had told her, and men looking over my shoulder all the time. Then she’d thrown up her hands at Elisa’s instructions on how to kosher a cooking pot, gone and found a blacksmith, and gotten i
t done. Elisa dropped her voice. “Charles and Brigitte will eat at La Roche with me. This way we can move into the dorms. I talked to your father. Brigitte and I will be in Les Aigles with Eva and Nicole.”

  “That’s great! And you talked him into letting you come to school part-time?”

  Elisa shrugged. “He said yes.”

  “Boy, if I’d ever asked for … Well, I guess they did let me—Élise, what’s wrong?”

  Elisa froze like a deer as the voice of the man across the patio penetrated her mind. Two hotel guests talking to each other, one on crutches: “… ambushed our division on the road to Leningrad. I took shrapnel in my leg, my kneecap was shattered, and I was bleeding like a pig …”

  In purest Bavarian German.

  Elisa turned, her eyes meeting Nadine’s beside her. She wasn’t sure, afterward, if she would have reacted as she did if Nadine hadn’t told her just the night before, while picking at a sore on her arm, her story of fleeing Warsaw ahead of German troops. But she was sure of the fire that shot through her at the sight of Nadine’s face. A moment later she had her friend by the arm and was walking her fast toward the classroom door.

  She heard Magali’s high-pitched “What?” and the click of Nicole’s crutches, but she didn’t slack her pace. She gave the others a few seconds to follow them in and closed the door firmly behind them, thanking God that Karl’s and Tova’s classrooms were not hotels.

  “They’re just convalescents,” Magali started, “they’re billeted here—”

  “I’ve got eyes,” Elisa snapped.

  “They have never done us any harm,” said Nicole to Nadine. “They are only hurt soldiers. Not Gestapo. They are not here to hunt anyone.”

  “Have you ever seen that man before?” Elisa asked Nicole.

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know what harm he does or doesn’t do. You don’t know what he’s here for or who he hunts. You don’t know if he’s just a soldier or if he’s a card-carrying Nazi and an SS. He’s not in uniform. You don’t know a thing about him. I know more about him than you do.” She put a hand on Nadine’s shoulder and felt her trembling.

  Magali had paled. “What was he saying?”

  “How he got injured invading Russia.”

  Magali recovered. “Oh, then—”

  “You think that never happens to Nazis? Why didn’t anyone tell us about this?” She turned to Nicole, who leaned on one crutch and wrinkled her brows worriedly at Nadine.

  “I did not think to. We have gotten used to them. I’m sorry. But truly, Élise, they are only here to—”

  “How long are those two staying? Does anybody know?”

  “They never stay the winter,” Magali put in. “Nobody wants our winter.”

  Elisa said to Nadine, “If you like, I’ll spend break in here with you till they leave.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Nadine. “I’m afraid of Germans.”

  Magali and Nicole looked at each other. Magali said gently, “She’s German, Nadine.”

  “I was German,” said Elisa. Heat was rising in her, a dark wave up her neck to the roots of her hair. “We were as German as anybody, for years, for generations, until they decided we weren’t. They robbed us of everything and forced us out, and then they turned around and hunted us. They got my parents.” She lifted a finger toward Magali. “When they get—”

  She stopped herself just in time. She watched the words she had not said, When they get your parents, strike the other three girls like a wave. Magali first. She turned white, then red. But she said nothing.

  “Your parents?” murmured Nicole. “When?”

  “Just before I came here,” said Elisa very low.

  “You never said.” Nicole turned to Magali. “You never said.”

  “That stuff is private,” said Magali in a thick voice. Nicole’s eyebrows went up.

  Elisa gripped the table edge, light-headed, her mind shocked into darkness, dark as the barracks in Vénissieux. She sat suddenly and reached for her schoolbag, rummaged blindly and brought out a book, opened it and stared until the image resolved itself into a tangent graph. She could feel the others looking at her. She tried her voice, and found that she could only whisper. “Those men out there are men who shoot people on their orders. That’s all I was trying to say.”

  Nadine nodded. After a moment Nicole and Magali nodded too.

  October came in with high, cold winds, and Julien’s mother grew silent. Magali’s trip with Marek was planned for the fifth. The rain fell hard, the first real storm of autumn, touching the hills with fingers of lightning, splashing up cold clouds of water from the slate rooftops of Tanieux. Julien watched from Benjamin’s little window under the eaves, his back propped against the wall beside his friend in the emptied-out bedroom. Benjamin’s books and clothes would go to friends, quietly. He couldn’t take a thing except the clothes on his back. And his life.

  “Remember when we found the honey tree?” Benjamin said suddenly.

  Julien almost laughed. “You found the honey tree.”

  “Does it count, though, when you don’t know what it is?”

  “You got nine stings getting that honey. And you never dropped your bucket. I was so proud.”

  Benjamin half smiled. “Julien—”

  “Hey, it’s—”

  “No, listen. You were right. I mean, you’re always right, that’s what I hate about you, but I’ve been thinking about America.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. New York. Skyscrapers. Henry Ford, ‘History is bunk’—did you know he said that? Your father wouldn’t like it, but look at it from my point of view.”

  Julien made a soft noise in his throat.

  “There’s Jewish scientists there. Geniuses. I could do real work there, no one would care where I come from. Do you know how much I’d like to take my life up till now and flush it down the toilet? Except for my family, and—well. Well. And you all of course—we want to send you money after Papa’s out, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I mean—you know.” Benjamin shoved himself upward against the wall and looked down at his chemistry book. “I thought you’d like to know how right you were, I know you like that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Julien, punching his friend on the arm, as the rain poured down outside the window, and the joyful earth drank deep.

  Magali left for her trip on a high, blue, windy day. Papa walked Mama home, her thin hand clasped in his, his other hand reaching out to smooth her hair. Julien led his first real Scout meeting, then went down to the farm and dug potatoes out of the damp earth. Potatoes, leeks, and carrots; beets and turnips and rutabagas in great mounds. Cartloads to the train station, basket after basket into the root cellar. Bright rust and yellow flamed here and there on the hills against the green of the pines, and the sky was the high, deep blue of autumn; Grandpa’s eyes drank it in, always on the horizon, where the black migrating flocks turned on the wind. Mama did her work silently, and met the train each day till Magali finally came home.

  Magali’s face was puffy when Mama brought her in, eyes blurred with weariness. She collapsed into a chair as Mama hurried to make tea.

  “Safe?” said Julien.

  Magali nodded. “It was horrible.”

  “The crossing?”

  She dropped her face in her hands. Then lifted her head and threw up her hands as if asking God why. “He didn’t tell us! He didn’t say a word! We said, ‘Can you go through a tunnel?’ and he said, ‘Yes!’” She smacked a hand on the table. “He told me once that he saw soldiers kill his father. That’s the only thing I know. Well guess what I just found out happened right before that?” She looked around, eyes wide and wild. “His father hid him in a sewer.”

  Mama’s hand went to her mouth.

  “So we get to the drainpipe—this long drainpipe under a hill and the other end is in Switzerland—and they send him in first. Get it over with, right? I get worried. He just looked a little off, y’know? So I’m arguing with the C
imade lady under my breath, and then there’s this noise like a rusty hinge again and again and it’s Marek having hysterics, right there in the pipe! The Cimade lady goes the color of old cheese and gestures me in, and I crawl into the pipe going, ‘Marek, Marek,’ and the whole thing is echoing and I can only imagine who’s hearing it and I put my hand on his ankle and go, ‘Marek. Be quiet and you’ll live.’”

  Nobody breathed.

  “He goes quiet. But I can feel him still having some kind of spasms. Then another kid comes up behind me because the noise stopped and the Cimade people thought it was all right. She starts to ask what’s happening and I shush her, ‘Just follow us when you can.’ And I start coaxing Marek. ‘It’s all right, you’ll be all right, just crawl a little. Crawl a little more.’ I swear. We spent over an hour getting through a forty-meter pipe.” She fell back hard in her chair.

  “Everybody made it?” said Julien.

  “Everybody. I went with them all the way to the safe house. That’s where he told me about the sewer. I think that must be where he watched … watched them kill his father from.” She shook her head, and the wildness and weariness and frustration fell from her face and left bare sorrow. “If anyone’s got a right to hysterics, it’s him.”

  There was a long silence around the table. “We’re a little short on rights just now,” said Benjamin.

  “Well now Marek’s—” Magali broke off. Clattering feet were coming up the stairs. Papa threw open the door, breathing hard.

  “Benjamin,” he said. “In my study please.”

  “What is it?” said Julien before he could stop himself.

  “What is it?” Benjamin echoed in a fast, colorless voice.

  Papa passed his eyes over the family. “There’s a problem at the border,” he said carefully. “It won’t be possible to pass you in the Geneva area. If we don’t want to let your visa expire”—he drew a breath—“it’ll have to be the Alps.”

  It was like watching someone turn to stone. Julien was seized with a terrible impulse to jump up and slap Benjamin, strike the light back into his eyes. Now? Now of all times? Are You playing with us?