by Margi Preus
“Why do you people do this? Is it pure belligerence?” Perdant raved on. “Do you enjoy defying the law—and common sense? Does everybody want to risk their lives? Does nobody realize how much they put themselves and their families at risk? Or are they too stupid to know?”
By that time they were driving about two miles an hour down a wooded lane filled with potholes “big enough to sink an elephant,” Perdant complained.
“I bet your crazy pacifist pastor talked everyone into it,” he said. “Is that it?”
Jules stared at him for a moment, then said, “Maybe people just do what they believe is right.”
“How do they think lawlessness is right?”
“Maybe the law is wrong,” Jules suggested.
“You can’t pick and choose the laws you like or don’t like, just willy-nilly.” Perdant had been weaving the car around the biggest potholes but couldn’t avoid them all, and with a heavy thunk, the car’s front wheels sank up to their axle in mud.
Perdant tried driving it out of the mudhole and got nowhere. He tried gunning it. He tried rocking it. He tried backing up. Nothing worked. The car stayed stuck. He rested his head on the steering wheel for a moment.
“I didn’t say like or not like.” Jules continued his argument as if they were parked on a shady lane to have a conversation. “I said right or wrong. Everybody knows what is wrong, but some people are too afraid to say or do anything. And some people manage to do a lot of twisty turns in their minds because they wish it to be right. But you can’t make it right by wanting it to be right.”
“You know how to drive . . . right?” Perdant said.
Jules knew how to drive a team of horses hitched to a hay wagon. He’d never driven a car. But he’d been watching Perdant drive for more than an hour. How hard could it be?
While Perdant got out and went around the back, Jules climbed into the driver’s seat and studied the situation. There were some pedals on the floor and a stick he’d seen Perdant jerking around. Jules yanked on the stick—it made an unpleasant grinding sound.
“You have to put the clutch in when you shift!” Perdant yelled from behind the car.
“Clutch,” Jules murmured, looking down at the pedals. Is one of these the clutch? he wondered.
“You know what is the trouble with you people?” Perdant said.
“What?” Jules said, giving each of the pedals a tap with a foot.
“You care more about foreigners than you care about your own countrymen. You’d let Frenchmen, Frenchwomen, and French children suffer just to help out some hapless foreigners who do not have our country’s interests at heart.”
“How does helping others make French people suffer?” Jules said.
“Well,” Perdant explained, “there are many reasons, most you probably wouldn’t understand. But I bet you understand food. You’d let Frenchmen starve so you could feed foreigners—foreigners generally up to no good, I might add.”
“Nobody’s starving,” Jules said, though his stomach was making the same kind of grinding noise the shifter stick had when he moved it. “At least not around here.” He was hungry all the time. And at that moment he was as hungry as he’d ever been—he would have eaten pretty much anything right then. Still, he wasn’t about to die of hunger.
Perdant let out an exasperated puff of air and turned his attention to getting the car unstuck. He hollered at Jules to go forward, backward, rock it, gun it. Once Jules had figured out the pedals and shifter, he tried all those things, sometimes all at once.
The tires spun; mud spattered. The sound of aimlessly spinning tires reminded Perdant of winter, when his car was frequently stuck in the snow.
As he leaned his weight against the car, he could no more stop the thoughts and memories that flung themselves at him than he could stop the mud from spattering his trousers—or the snow that had fallen relentlessly all that winter . . .
What he couldn’t help thinking about were his failed arrests. Like that Anton Smelyansky, whom he’d waited for while the cook had offered him a cup of coffee. Waited and waited, and the fellow had never shown up—he must have climbed out a window while Perdant was in the kitchen. While he was waiting, he thought the gendarmes were out arresting people, but later he’d heard that those same gendarmes had talked loudly as they strolled the country roads—shouting back and forth about whom they were going to arrest. Or they told the suspects to pack a bag—they’d be back in a half hour. Of course no one was there when the gendarmes returned.
The bus meant to carry away all the criminals had driven away that day with only two people inside—the brothers Perdant had arrested at the carpentry shop. All the others were like those small, darting trout in the stream one of the boys was able to catch with his bare hands. They slipped out of his grasp, over and over again.
CÉLESTE MEETS UP WITH JEAN-PAUL
Céleste heard Jean-Paul’s jingly, rattly bike before she saw him wheeling it up the long hill to the Mousset farm. She joined him, pushing her own bike alongside.
“Are you ever going to fix that?” she asked.
“Fix what?”
“That rattly jingle,” she said. “Or maybe it’s a jingly rattle.”
“No,” Jean-Paul said with a laugh. “I think it frightens Perdant.”
“Really?” Céleste asked. “Why?”
Jean-Paul shrugged.
“Where have you been, anyway?” she asked as Jean-Paul held the gate open for her.
“You know better than to ask that,” he said.
“I know you weren’t on a mission,” she guessed.
“Fine.” Jean-Paul paused to park his bike outside his room. “I was at the university.”
“The university?” Céleste struggled with her kickstand before giving up and leaning her bike against his. “What were you doing there?”
Before Jean-Paul could answer, Mme Mousset called from the house, “Come and get something to eat! Both of you!”
Céleste and Jean-Paul went inside the farmhouse and into the aroma of cooking food and smoked meat. Salamis and hams hung from the ceiling and drying mushrooms dangled from strings like Christmas decorations.
Céleste whispered to Jean-Paul, “What were you doing at the university?”
“Sit! Sit!” Mme Mousset said, standing with two steaming bowls of soup in her hands.
The two of them sat. Mme Mousset set the soup in front of them and pulled up a chair.
“Going to medical school,” Jean-Paul said.
Céleste’s spoon clattered against her bowl. “Medical school? But . . .”
“Yes, I know,” Jean-Paul said. “I made myself a student identity card.”
“You enrolled in medical school? But isn’t that . . .” Céleste exclaimed, “That’s so dangerous!”
“Look,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m forbidden to exist, so what difference does it make if I go to forbidden school or not? Or if I forge illegal documents? What should I be afraid of? The risk is the same if I do nothing.”
Céleste closed her eyes for a moment at the injustice of it.
“I heard about the raid,” Jean-Paul said. “People at the station were talking about it.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Céleste said.
She was about to go on when Monsieur Mousset came into the room. He took off his beret and smoothed the thin threads of his hair with his sunbrowned hand. His face was brown, too, right up to where his cap ended, and his pale, mostly bald head glowed in the dim light.
“Perdant came the other day,” M. Mousset said, pulling out a chair from the table and sitting down.
Jean-Paul put down his spoon. “And . . . ?” he said.
“It seemed he was looking for something,” the farmer went on.
“Did he find what he was looking for?” Jean-Paul asked, although from the twinkle in his friend’s eye, he was quite sure the policeman had not.
“No.” M. Mousset chuckled. “Though he looked everywhere. The house, your room, the barn, in the stalls, threw t
he hay around, turned over stones in the garden, hunted all over. Finally, he took a good, long look at the beehives, until I was certain he would stick his hand right inside one of them. But he thought better of it.”
“The beehives . . . ?” Céleste wondered.
“There are two that aren’t occupied,” M. Mousset explained.
“At least not by bees,” Madame Mousset added.
“Well, that’s the second close call I’ve had recently,” Jean-Paul said.
“What was the other one?” Céleste asked.
Jean-Paul leaned over his bowl and let the steam clear his nasal passages. The aroma was so rich, he could smell it through his clogged nose. “I nearly got caught with the papers,” he said.
“What?” Céleste said. A spoonful of soup teetered by her mouth, untasted. “Why did you have them with you? You should have dropped them off before you went.”
“I know! I know!” Jean-Paul coughed. “Long story.”
“Out with it,” Céleste said.
Jean-Paul told them the whole story, including being saved by the lozenges. “So you see,” he finished, “it was probably good that I stopped at the pharmacy.” He pulled out the small tin and set it on the table and tapped the lid with his fingernail. “Those lozenges saved my hide.”
“This?” Céleste said, giving the tin a little shake.
Jean-Paul’s breath quickened at the sound of it. His heart raced.
“It sounds like cartridges,” Céleste said.
“Yeah.” Jean-Paul pocketed the tin.
Madame Mousset patted him on the shoulder.
“You’ve had a good scare,” Céleste said, “and I hate to ask, but can you get some identity cards done on the double? Like tonight?” She explained that some of the boys had escaped the raid.
Jean-Paul blew his nose and said, “Where’s Jules?”
“Nobody knows.” Céleste shrugged.
“He was with Perdant the other day,” M. Mousset said.
Céleste and Jean-Paul looked at each other. “Uh-oh,” they said simultaneously. “That can’t be good.”
“When do you have school again?” Céleste asked.
“Not going back,” Jean-Paul answered.
“Today was bad luck,” Céleste said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t go back to school. Just don’t bring forged papers with you next time!”
“My student ID is a forged paper!” Jean-Paul protested. Then his shoulders slumped. “It’s a risk I don’t have to take. And anyway, I have enough work to keep me busy here.”
Céleste stared into her bowl. “I’m sorry.”
Jean-Paul tipped his head over his soup, letting the steam fog up his glasses. His eyes started to water, and he had to dig in his pocket for his hanky to wipe his nose.
“I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” Céleste said. “I’m afraid you’ve made yourself sick working so hard.”
“It’s just a cold,” Jean-Paul muttered. He knew it wasn’t just the cold that had him dabbing at his welling eyes. The stress and fatigue of the long day had taken its toll, but it was also his friend’s concern for him, and the kindness of this simple farm family who shared their food, sheltered him, took risks on his behalf, yet asked no questions, expected nothing in return.
After their meal, Jean-Paul and Céleste stepped out of the warm farmhouse into the cool night. Jean-Paul handed over the documents for Max he’d had tucked in his jacket sleeves and said if Jules didn’t show up, he’d ride his bike out to the château to deliver the new papers for the others himself.
“I’ll get to work on them right now,” he said. “I guess it was stupid to try to go to medical school. I’ve just always wanted to be a doctor.”
“Why do you want to be a doctor?” Céleste asked him.
“To save lives!” Jean-Paul said. “Why else do you become a doctor?”
“But, Jean-Paul,” Céleste protested. “You are saving lives! In that little surgery of yours with your pens and engraving tools laid out like knives and scalpels. You’re saving lives every day. And tomorrow it will be Henni’s friend Max and the other fellows who need to get out.”
“And without any degree at all!” he said with a rueful chuckle.
Maybe in some almost unimaginable future he’d go back to medical school. But for the time being his surgery was right here, and there were a lot of very needy patients.
OUT OF THE MUD
The car lurched out of the mud and onto the dry road, and Perdant’s memory, as if released by the snows of winter, skipped to spring.
“I made some arrests,” he said to Jules once the car was bumping along again.
“What?” Jules said. “Just now?” He looked behind them, as if he’d missed a crime scene maybe.
“No, this spring,” Perdant said, trying to wipe the worst of the mud off the front of his trousers.
“You brought a whole bus,” Jules said. “Why a whole bus?”
“We would have needed it if I could have emptied the school of students. If I could have had them all assemble in the town hall and taken a good look at them and their papers. But how do you empty a school when there isn’t one? When the classrooms are scattered all over town? Word would quickly spread, and the students would disappear as they seem so good at doing. You need the element of surprise for something like that.”
Jules didn’t disagree. This was true.
The element of surprise was something Perdant could never seem to get. Somehow the villagers seemed to know what he was going to do before he did it. Before he even knew he was going to do it.
“But I got the brothers,” Perdant said.
“Why? What was the point of that?”
“I didn’t make the list,” Perdant said. “I was just following orders. It’s not that I enjoy arresting teenagers.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Somebody has to uphold the law. What if everybody just went around disobeying laws and there was no consequence for it?”
“What law were they breaking? What were they doing wrong?” Jules said.
“You have to obey the law!” Perdant insisted again. He carefully maneuvered through the ruts and potholes until they were back on an actual road.
“They weren’t doing anything wrong!” Jules cried.
Perdant didn’t really have an answer to that, because the truth was, he’d been fulfilling a quota. After two German officers were killed in Paris, Hitler demanded two thousand French Jews in retribution. The two brothers were part of the quota.
“I’m not a bad person, you know,” Perdant said. “I’m just a regular guy. But I have a job. It requires me to do certain things.”
“Maybe you should get a different job.”
“Ha!” Perdant scoffed. “Like what? Anyway, it’s just a job. It’s not who I am.”
“You are what you do,” Jules said.
Perdant looked at Jules, imagining whiskers twitching on his little ferret face. “Who says that?” Perdant grumbled. “You are what you do.”
“Nobody has to say it. It just is.”
“Always with the smart mouth,” Perdant said, hoping to shut him up. He was hoping to at last remember one of his successful arrests. He wanted to remember the methodical approach he took in finding the brothers and catching them. He wanted to focus on his triumphant entry into the woodworking shop, the look of fear on the boys’ faces. He wanted to think about the moment he burst into the shop and said the line he’d practiced several times in the mirror: “At last, I’ve got you!”
But what his mind flew to was the clean scent of wood shavings, the sweet smell of sawdust. And the crowd surrounding the bus parked outside the woodworking shop. The two Jewish boys had sat on the bus while other young people came and handed them little gifts. One young boy went onto the bus to give the brothers a rare and precious gift of chocolate.
Why was this what he remembered? And why was it that what stuck in his mind was the song the other students sang:
&nb
sp; Must we take leave of one another without hope
Without hope of return?
Must we take leave of one another
Without hope of meeting again one day?
Why was he remembering the teenagers who had laid down in the street in an attempt to prevent the bus from taking the boys away? Why did he remember the sound of the young people’s voices singing?
No, we shall meet again, my brothers
It is only a goodbye!
Yes, we shall meet one another again one day
It is only a goodbye.
Why did this, which should seem like a rare success for him, now feel like his biggest failure?
MAX IN THE HAYLOFT
In the hayloft where he’d stayed these last weeks, Max was contemplating hay. As a child he’d loved the barn at his uncle’s farm in the German countryside. The smell had meant playing in the hayloft with cousins; it had meant milk fresh from the cow, and brown bread spread with creamy butter. There was a stream nearby with a little waterfall where they swam and bathed, and somehow he had come to associate the sweet, grassy smell of hay even with that.
But later, when he’d been forced to work as unpaid farm labor in one of Hitler’s programs in Germany, harvesting hay by day and sleeping in it by night, the stuff got into his hair and clothes, poking and scratching, as unpleasant as the people he’d worked for, until he hoped to never see a stalk of it again.
But when he’d come to Les Lauzes, where had he been hidden? In a hayloft. The smell had come to mean a good night’s sleep—not worried that the farmer would turn him in the next day; it meant a bowl of soup in the evening and a soft-boiled egg brought to him by the farmer’s kids in the morning. Here his love of hay had been restored, and so had his faith in humanity. Even the dog was on his side, warning him when any stranger came into the farmyard—
As the dog was doing now, in fact—plaintive yowls punctuated by sharp, staccato yips. Max sat up. He eyed the ladder. Would it be best to dash out now? Or wait? He strained to hear past the barking. There was no sound of a car or motorcycle. When the barking stopped, Max heard only the ticking of bicycle wheels, the crunch of footsteps, and a young woman’s voice calling to the farmer. “Hello!” she called out. “It’s Céleste!”