The last was obviously something he'd heard adults saying. The rest made no sense. Lisette stooped down also, shoulder to shoulder with Gerard. "Etienne, hush, quiet now. What are you saying?"
"When the Germans came to my house." He was still shouting, though not quite so loudly.
"What happened when the Germans came to your house?" Lisette asked. "Shh. Quietly now."
Etienne wiped his hand across his nose. "We hid in the attic," he said. "In the clothes chest. Me and Maman and my baby brother that we hadn't had a chance to name yet."
Lisette put her fingers to her lips and Etienne's voice dropped to a normal level. "We could hear the Germans coming up the stairs and the baby started to cry. Maman said, 'Hush, little baby; hush, little baby,' but he kept crying and the Germans kept coming, and Maman put her hand over his mouth so they couldn't hear him crying, but he kept crying and we knew the Germans would hear him, so Maman held him real tight to her"—Etienne put both hands up to his chest to show how—"and the baby didn't know how to hold his breath."
For a long moment they just stayed there, looking at each other, listening to Etienne cry. Then Lisette pulled him in for a hug, being careful not to hold him too tight. She could see Gerard over Etienne's head.
"We'll go another way," Gerard said.
They had to go back part of the way, to one of the other tunnels that they had passed. And as they went back, they heard the approaching sound of hobnailed boots on the stone floor.
Gerard motioned for quiet, but everybody had heard already and they were walking on tiptoes and breathing as quietly as they could. Lisette was holding Rachel, and Rachel seemed to enjoy the moving around. For the moment.
Gerard ducked into a tunnel they had to crawl through.
It was difficult to crawl while holding Rachel, but the tunnel was short, and as soon as Gerard got to the end, he turned back around to take the baby from her arms long enough so she could get through the last, narrowest bit.
Once they were all through, Gerard motioned for them to sit. He pointed at the flashlights Etienne and Louis Jerome were now holding, and the boys turned off the switches.
In the total darkness, Lisette felt that the stone walls and ceiling were closing in on her. She thought of the hugeness of the hills and she thought of all that rock collapsing on her, smothering her, crushing the air out of her till she slowly died. Or it might happen so fast she wouldn't even know it. She could be dead in less than an instant. Something touched her shoulder and she jumped, but it was only Gerard. He put his mouth to her ear and whispered, "Breathe through your nose."
She realized how loud she'd been and she put her hand over her mouth to make sure she didn't forget again. She stretched her legs out to feel the wall and sat tall so that her head touched the ceiling. Not that that would keep the stone from crushing her, but at least she would know it was coming.
And all the while there was the echoing sound of the boots, and then she could hear voices, closer and closer. She didn't understand German, but she could recognize the note of complaint in the voice that muttered constantly; and the other one—that obey-me-I'm-the-one-in-charge voice that was barking short orders: "Look here. Check there," she imagined.
The boots and the voices must be on the other side of their tunnel, but there were two sharp angles, so they couldn't see the Germans' light. Rachel started to squirm, not liking the dark and the stillness and Lisette's tight grasp.
Don't cry, Lisette mentally begged, frantically rocking her. Please don't cry. She imagined Etienne and his mother and his baby brother huddled in the clothes chest, except that in her mind his mother looked like her mother, and the baby was her brother, François. She leaned forward to give Rachel's face desperate, distracting kisses. Don't cry.
It must have taken the Germans all of five minutes to pass by and then move out of hearing, but it felt like forever.
After the last echoes of their passing had died away, Gerard whispered, "Do the lights come back on?"
There were two flares of brightness.
The walls, Lisette was happy to see, were exactly where they were supposed to be, and Rachel was contentedly sucking on a strand of Lisette's hair.
Gerard was already on his feet. "Careful," he warned. "There's a drop."
Just beyond where they had stopped, the floor ended as abruptly as though it had been cut off. Etienne pointed his flashlight over the edge.
Gerard leapt down before Lisette had a chance to see the bottom. He skidded but didn't fall on the stones underfoot. He'd jumped about twice his height. One by one, they got the children down, the older ones going last to help the smaller ones. Lisette was the very last. She sat on the edge with her legs dangling. Gerard reached up as she reached down, and she felt, all in all, that it was a fairly elegant jump. She looked into his eyes and thought what a terrible thing it would be to die at this point in her life.
Eventually, after many choices and turns and climbs and drops, with Cecile complaining that Rachel's diaper had begun to leak, Gerard called a stop. By then he was carrying Anne, and Lisette was carrying Emma, who was getting heavier with every step. They were in a small cavern through which a stream of water trickled down from a small hole in the wall, over a lip of rock so that it was a tiny waterfall at just the right height to drink from, and across the floor to disappear into a crack.
"If we hear them coming, we can continue this way," Gerard said, indicating another hole only large enough for crawling. "But I doubt they'll get this far."
"What if the flashlights burn out?" Louis Jerome asked. "How will we get back?"
"Why don't you turn yours off?" Lisette said, aware that she wasn't answering his question. "We only need one."
"What if the Germans keep looking for us and looking for us?" he asked.
"Stop asking so many questions." She closed her eyes and tried to rest.
But she couldn't get his questions out of her head.
She sat leaning her back against Gerard's, which gave her the chance to talk to him quietly, so the others couldn't hear. "They will, you know," she told him. "They'll keep looking. They know we're here. They know we have something to hide."
He nodded.
She didn't like feeling helpless. She remembered the Jewish family on the train and remembered how helpless she had felt then, and she felt just as helpless now.
"They know I'm here," she corrected herself. "I'm the only one they saw."
He craned his neck to look at her.
"If there was some way I could convince them that I had some good reason to be here..." she said. "I could say that I didn't see them at the house, that I wasn't running away from them, but just exploring the caves, me alone, by myself..."
"You want to go back?" Gerard asked.
"No," she admitted.
But after a while she asked, "What are good reasons for going into caves?"
Gerard sighed. "They wouldn't believe you, no matter what you said."
"Probably not," she agreed.
But then she said, "The longer I'm here, the less likely they are to believe me."
"Lisette," Gerard said.
"And the lights will go out,"—she realized he had no way of knowing that—"they won't last the day."
He shook his head. "What would you do?"
She thought back to when they were first entering the caves, how she'd been startled by Mimi. "I'll tell them I was looking for my cat. That she ran away and I know she sometimes comes here."
"Lisette," Gerard said, as though this was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard. And maybe it was.
"If not," she said, "it's exactly where we were before: with them knowing and arresting Aunt Josephine when she comes back, and eventually finding us and arresting us." She didn't finish the thought: and sending us to a work camp that doesn't exist. "What do you think?" she asked.
Gerard sighed and wouldn't meet her eyes.
"Gerard?"
He did, at last, look directly at her. "Lisette," he s
aid. He started again. "I died once. I don't want to die again." He shook his head. "Not after one day. I don't know if I will cease to exist when I once again reach my twenty-seventh year. But I want more than a day."
She stood and, turning around, saw that while she and Gerard had talked, all the others had gathered in and been listening.
"I'm not expecting you to come back with me," she told him, and it was true. "In fact, it would be better if you didn't; how would I explain you?"
"You're throwing your life away," he whispered.
"I should have confessed," he had told her earlier. "I accomplished nothing."
She couldn't ask him to do that again. "I have to go," she told him. "I have no choice. Just bring me back to where I can find my way—or to where the Germans are."
He got up without arguing, without saying anything.
It was Lisette who had to tell the children, "We'll need both flashlights: I need to get to the entrance to the cave, and Gerard will need to come back here." She didn't know if he'd really return. He probably knew a back way out. At the very least, he knew these caves well enough to circle around the Germans. And she couldn't blame him if he did; he didn't know these children, and he didn't believe they could escape the Germans. How many times could someone be expected to die for nothing?
Etienne handed her his lit flashlight then leaned over to pick up the other one.
"I'll come back to get you when the Germans are gone," she told them.
Gerard didn't correct her. He didn't say, "I'll be back before then."
Etienne turned on the second flashlight and saluted her with it before handing it to Gerard.
"I'm sorry you'll have to wait in the dark," she said, remembering how afraid she'd been when they'd been without light for that short while. But she owed Gerard at least a chance.
"Don't go," Emma said, the only one to say anything.
"It will be safer here," Lisette said. "And it shouldn't be too long." She had a sudden mental image of her parents telling her much the same thing in much the same cheerful and perky tone. She remembered her mother, turning her face away at the last moment to tend to baby François, and Lisette knew if she had a baby to hold now, she also could have pretended to be preoccupied with it so no one would see how deeply worried she was.
Gerard led her back and back through the caves until they reached the place where he'd made that one jump and then helped them all down. Coming this way, there were indentations on the surface that made very easy handholds and footholds. Still, he clasped his hands and gave her a boost.
She scrambled up onto the higher level. Lying down to reach to help him, she heard faint voices. German voices. "I can make it from here," she whispered down to him.
He said the first thing since he'd told her, back in the cavern with the children, that she was throwing her life away. He said, "God go with you," which sounded much more final than "Good luck."
But she said, "Thank you," and headed toward where the Germans were searching for her, and she didn't look back again.
22.
Thursday, September 5, 1940
The last thing she wanted, Lisette decided, was to have the Germans think she was sneaking around. So she called, tentatively at first because her voice wouldn't cooperate, but then louder, "Mimi. Here, Mimi. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." She made cat-summoning sounds. "Here, kitty."
And suddenly there was a blaze of light right up in her face. A hand took hold of her arm roughly so that she almost dropped her own flashlight, and an angry voice demanded something of her in German.
Lisette couldn't have been more frightened, but she tried to act more confused than she really was. They must have heard her coming and had turned off their own lights until she was close enough to grab— which, hopefully, meant that they had heard her calling the cat. "Who are you?" she asked, squinting into the lights. "Where's my cat? What have you done to my cat?"
A different voice said something that sounded just as angry as the first, but the one who was holding the flashlight closest to her eyes took a step back.
Lisette blinked the red and yellow spots away. Five soldiers—including the lieutenant who had been flirting with Aunt Josephine. But she was relieved to see that his companion, the captain who had blown kisses to her was not there. She remembered what Cecile had said, about how they'd threatened Madame Maurice. She tried to sound more surprised than frightened. "You're German soldiers," she said to the man who still gripped her arm.
"What are you doing here?" one of the men she didn't recognize asked in an accent so thick, it wasn't until he finished speaking that she realized it had been French. On his collar were the twin lightning bolt S's that identified him as a member of the SS, the Nazi secret police.
"I'm looking for my cat," she said. "She ran away and—"
"Schweige," the man said, which must have meant "Quiet!" Or maybe "Liar." "Where are the others?"
She assumed he was bluffing, that he hadn't seen anybody besides her. "What others? Do you mean other cats? There's only one. Her name is Mimi and—"
The man holding her shook her. This time her flashlight did fall out of her hand. It hit the ground and the glass broke and the light went out.
"Stop this nonsense about a cat!" shouted the SS officer.
"You broke my flashlight," Lisette said. "How am I ever going to find my cat without a flashlight?"
The lieutenant she'd seen in Sibourne snorted in amusement and said something in German. The other two men grinned. "Katze," one of them said, a repetition of part of what the lieutenant had said. Probably cat.
"Cats are not cave dwellers, I think," the lieutenant said. "Even in France."
The SS officer—he must be the one in charge—snapped something in German. Everything sounded angry in German, but this must have been a reprimand because it wiped the smiles off everybody's faces. "How many Jews are there?" he demanded of Lisette. "And where have you hidden them?"
"Please," Lisette said, "I don't know anything about Jews." He was going to hit her, she could tell. She cringed against the soldier holding her. "Look at my arms," she cried.
It must have sounded bizarre enough that it intrigued them. The man holding her arm twisted it so that the underside was showing, with all the scratches she'd gotten from Mimi the past several days. The ones from when Mimi had jumped on her at the cave entrance were dramatically puffy and beaded and smeared with blood.
The Sibourne lieutenant stepped forward for a closer look. He gave a low whistle. "That's some cat you have," he told her.
"She's a stray," Lisette said. "I'm trying to tame her, but she ran away. There's a dish outside our back door where we feed her—if you want, I can show you. I was trying to coax her to come into the house." To herself, she added, Where she can lurk under tables and attack unwanted visitors.
The SS officer said something that sounded as though it had the word "stray" in it, but she couldn't make out any of the rest of it.
The lieutenant answered, in German, which may have meant that he was translating "stray." Or they may have been discussing the likelihood of what she claimed.
The SS officer looked at her arm again. Lisette was expecting sympathy, but he grabbed her hair at the back of the neck. "We shall see," he said. "We shall see exactly what the others have discovered back at the house. You will be sorry if you're lying."
The one behind gave her a shove, and the Germans led her back the way they'd come.
They'd used stones to scratch marks on the walls and floor of the cave to keep track of where they'd been, which was a good thing because they didn't go the way Gerard had led and she lost all sense of direction after less than two minutes. If they'd asked her which way to go, they'd have quickly realized she wasn't familiar with the caves, and then they'd never believe that she'd come in here looking for a cat.
The Germans' way was more roundabout than Gerard's, but eventually they got back to where they'd started. Outside, she saw that the sun was west of center�
��past noon. Don't let her be home, she prayed, meaning Aunt Josephine. That would only complicate things. Let the weather last night have been too bad for Uncle Raymond's drop, so that she won't come back until tomorrow. By tomorrow, things would have settled, one way or the other.
The soldiers were neither particularly rough nor gentle with her as they went through the woods and down the hill.
"See," Lisette said, pointing to the cat's bowl by the back door.
"Schweige," the one in charge said again.
There were two Germans sitting in the kitchen; one was the captain from Sibourne, the other must have been the one assigned to search through the basement room where the coal was kept, for he was filthy with black dust. They stood at attention as the group from the caves entered, which proved that the SS officer was in charge, but it was obvious they'd been taking it easy, their feet up on the chairs, glasses of wine in front of them. One of them—the soldier, not the captain—had been looking through a book, Uncle Raymond's book that she'd left in the barn, Chivalry in the Middle Ages.
The SS officer disapproved. Lisette suspected he disapproved of everything. He yelled at the two before giving them a chance to talk. When they spoke, they gestured, indicating the house, the barn, the chrysanthemum field. Describing their search, Lisette realized.
She didn't think they'd found anything definite, for the SS officer didn't confront her with any evidence. Instead, he demanded, "Where is your mother?"
"My aunt," Lisette corrected. "She and my cousin went to visit a neighbor."
"Which neighbor?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" Obviously he didn't believe that.
"I don't live here," she explained. "I just arrived Sunday from Paris. She told me the woman's name, but I can't remember. She said she'd be back in time to prepare supper." If the Germans were still here at suppertime, it would be because they didn't believe her anyway. "It's the woman who has arthritis," Lisette said. "And the husband is either dead or blind or has bad kidneys or something."
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