Defy the Night

by Heather Munn

  It came out of my mouth. The thing I’d held back for so long. “I don’t even want to go to lycée.”

  I tore my eyes from the books and looked at my parents. Papa wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking at Mama, whose face streamed with tears.

  I stood. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Forget I said anything. Forget I asked.”

  I turned, and fled up the stairs.

  I DON’T want to be like my mother.

  I sat cross-legged on my bed, trying to stop crying. Never. Never. I’ll never be her.

  She let life break her. I don’t even know what it was. She never told me and she probably never will. But something in her, it’s like Nina’s twisted leg.

  When we thought the Germans were coming here, during the invasion, Mama hid the silver and the radio in the attic and ordered me to stay inside. Then she took me up into the attic and made me hide in the space between the insulation boards and the roof to see if I fit. It was hot and itchy and made me sneeze, and she told me not to sneeze, as angry as if she was telling me not to curse. When I told her I wasn’t afraid of the Germans she called me a fool and grabbed my arm so hard it left a bruise. I didn’t let anyone see the bruise. It made me ashamed.

  I hate that white face. Those tears. The way she hasn’t even got the guts to tell her own daughter what happened to make her like this, the way she doesn’t fight. She isn’t even angry. It’s like you have to lie down and let life walk all over you. Or hide. Those are the options. Fighting back, forget about it. That’s for men. “You know, Magali, women just have to accept certain limitations.” She said that to me, those exact words. Women stay home and cook and clean and wipe babies’ bottoms, that’s what women are for. Saving lives, fighting Vichy, well, no. You have to accept certain limitations.

  Her and Nina. I rocked back and forth, trying to control my sobbing breath. Her and Nina both.

  Nina—afraid, after more than a year, to face Monsieur Bernard. Overjoyed at the chance to do homework and dishes. Nina, grateful and scared, Mama’s ideal girl. And Rosa too, shy and sweet the way the boys like, burping babies and helping her parents and never thinking of more till I made her.

  There are two kinds of people in the world, I thought. People like them. And people like me.

  There are people who do things, and people who have things done to them. People who say, “What can I do?” and people who say, “Oh no, who will save me?” It never occurred to my mother to wonder if I might be the first kind—if I might actually save someone. Because for her, the definition of a girl is someone who gets rescued. Or not.

  I calmed my breath. I looked out the window, up at the moon in the cold sky, and thought, no.

  No, Mama, I’m not doing that. I’m not hiding in the attic where I’m protected, while other people die. Let Rosa burp the babies, she’s good at it. Paquerette asked me to save them. I thought of her face, that quick calculation—can I rely on this person?—and the answer yes, the confidence in me that I’d seen in her clear gray eyes. A tightness was growing in my throat. Mama and Papa had never looked at me that way.

  You’re just a girl. A stupid little girl from a conquered country. What do you think you can do against the men who sit in Vichy and plan, against the men who stand in guard towers with their guns? Who do you think you are? I heard that voice. The voice of the things I hated, the voice of the silence and the night.

  Well, down with the night.

  Limitations? Forget limitations. You couldn’t put a man on a train with four kids and a baby and expect them to get where they were going in one piece. Paquerette was a woman, a real one, and she knew exactly what kind of lion’s den she was walking into, and she kept walking. Because there were kids who needed to be saved, and there was nobody else to do it. Except me.

  And I couldn’t go.

  So much for being Joan of Arc’s assistant, I thought as I sat in the dark. So much for being anything at all. Besides safe. That’s what Mama wants me to be. Safe.

  Even if I’m never anything else.

  I COULD hardly look at my parents the next morning. Mama’s eyes were red. When I came home from school she’d cleaned my room as if I was a little kid. She called me in to help her with supper. I helped. Didn’t talk, didn’t look at her. I knew whose fault all this was, even if she let Papa do her talking for her.

  I lay awake in bed while the moon traveled down the sky. Finally I slept. I woke up in my cold room, in a cold house, in a cold world where Paquerette was alone in some train station, waking up on a cold hard floor, where kids in camps were opening their eyes in the stinking dark wondering why, where Benjamin’s mother was hidden in somebody’s basement somewhere, struggling to breathe. And there was nothing I could do.

  There had to be something I could do.

  “DON’T LOOK at me like that. I’m on your side, you know.”

  I looked at Julien where he stood leaning on my doorframe and wondered what had possessed me to ask for his help. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. But you’re shooting yourself in the foot. What you want to do is act cool and mature, like you kinda agree with them about what a serious thing it is—”

  “But that’s—”

  “Magali, if you want advice then listen to it. I’m serious. You want to know what they’re talking about? ‘Is she mature enough?’ That’s it. So if you stop—sulking …”

  I am not sulking! I swallowed. “What do you mean, ‘talking about’? I thought it was over.”

  Julien shook his head. “Definitely talking about it. Last night while you were out.”

  I jumped up and grabbed my brother around the neck and hugged him. He stared at me.

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  I TRIED Papa, alone in his study. He seemed like a better bet. I sat down, cleared my throat a couple of times, and reminded myself to act mature. And then I asked him if he’d be willing to talk with Paquerette.

  He gave me an odd little smile and said he expected that was a good idea. But when I went down to l’Espoir after school to ask her, she was gone.

  I had to wait almost a week.

  She finally came in on Saturday, with three kids from Gurs. Nina and I took them over from her. We didn’t get a chance to talk. I saw her the next morning in church. In the afternoon my parents walked down to l’Espoir.

  They came back and sat me down in the study and told me I could go to Rivesaltes at Easter.

  Then, while my heart hammered, they took turns explaining to me just how much of a trial run this was, and that as far as they were concerned they were giving permission for one trip only, and … and … My blood was beating in my ears, my whole body was alive with it. They expected maturity from me, they were saying. I was to take my cues from Paquerette and do everything exactly as she said, especially in the camp itself. I was to be as cautious and circumspect as she was. If she reported that I was not, I could expect never to travel with her again.

  I wasn’t sure what circumspect meant. But I was going with Paquerette.

  I had to wait two more weeks. Then Paquerette came and spent Easter with us, and the next morning we boarded a train to Rivesaltes.

  Chapter 4

  The Place That Should Not Exist

  AS WE were waiting for the train, I heard my mother behind me say in a low voice to Paquerette, “You’ll take care of my daughter?”

  And Paquerette answered in the same low voice, “Madame, protecting children is my life.”

  I didn’t turn around.

  I’d only ridden la Galoche a handful of times. My heart beat fast as I climbed into the passenger car behind Paquerette and settled myself on one of the long wooden benches. There’s a reason Tanieux people talk about la Galoche as if she were a person, and it’s not just because she brings us supplies. That train is a daredevil.

  For the first half-hour, from Tanieux southeast to Saint-Agrève, she just steams between the same rolling hills that are all around Tanieux—nice, friendly, walkable hills with
snow-patched pastures and scrubby genêts and pine woods. Then at Saint-Agrève she takes a sharp right turn to follow the Eyrieux River, and starts coming down off the plateau.

  Down, down. I twisted around on my bench to stare out the window at the depths that opened up below us. The river was dropping fast into a gorge between steep slopes of pine and rock, deeper and deeper as I watched; through the window across from me you could see nothing but bare, dark pine-tree trunks whipping past. The track is set right into the mountainside. And it goes down too.

  She was starting to pick up speed. The whistle sounded once, sharply, and then we all felt the scrape as the driver put on the brake. It hardly slowed us down at all. I felt the rattle of the train beneath me and I looked at all that air down there, all the way down to the white flowing water, and I wanted to whoop.

  “You like mountains?” murmured Paquerette. There was a light in her gray eyes. “So do I.”

  We stayed glued to the windows as la Galoche ran down the gorge with the brake on, all the way to le Cheylard, twisting and turning, going through tunnels, over high stone bridges, sometimes high above the water, sometimes near enough to hear it foaming. Sometimes you could see the whole valley in front of you for half a kilometer, the air blue and hazy with distance—tall pines and snow on the slopes, pale winter pastures and a huddle of slate roofs beside the swift river. But always down, down, and the scrape of the brake, and the speed.

  You forget, living up on the plateau, sometimes. You forget you’re in the mountains at all.

  WE CAME out of the mountains at la Voulte-sur-Rhône. I caught one glimpse of the wide, flat Rhône Valley stretched out beside its big river, and then we were among houses, and the train was braking to a halt. End of la Galoche‘s line.

  In la Voulte we had to wait three hours for a train to Montpellier. It’s a little station and not all the trains stop there. We sat on a bench in the pale April sunlight and Paquerette unwrapped the lunch Mama had packed—a couple of baked potatoes and some hard cheese. We ate with our fingers, quickly. Paquerette wiped hers carefully on a handkerchief, and looked around.

  “It’s warmer here.”

  “Yeah.” I breathed in. “And the … the air’s different, somehow.”

  She nodded. “Thicker. I always notice it. I love how clear the air is, up in Tanieux.” She turned to me. “So, Magali. I hear you used to live in Paris. Do you miss it?”

  Oh. I get to talk to you. A smile spread across my face.

  I SUPPOSE I talked her ear off. I told her about Paris, about moving, about how we didn’t hear from Uncle Giovanni and Aunt Nadine for months after the invasion. I told her about Benjamin and his parents. On the train she asked me something about my parents, and I ended up telling her, as we watched freshly plowed fields roll by on either side, about Mama during the invasion. How she broke down, or whatever you might call it. Paquerette listened with serious eyes, and nodded a few times, and then asked me where Mama grew up.

  I told her what I knew. It doesn’t add up to much. Then she asked me if I thought my father really felt the same way as my mother, about my traveling with her.

  “Oh,” I said. “I … I don’t know. You mean what would he say if it was just him?”

  She nodded. I tried to remember.

  “Well, he asked if you knew what you were up against.”

  She let out a short laugh. “Ah, yes.” She looked out at the broad brown landscape, then turned back to me. “You know, we take a lot of precautions in the CIMADE. The false names for some of us. The way we keep records.” She lowered her voice, even though we were alone in our car. “Some of my coworkers think it’s foolish, a spy game, and too much trouble, but our office manager makes them do it anyway. I think she’s right, and so is your father. You should listen to your parents, Magali. They’ve seen a lot of life.”

  I blinked. Right? Both my parents?

  “Even my father knows a thing or two,” she continued, her voice growing dry. “And he says we’re children playing in the trenches.”

  I looked at her. “Your parents didn’t want you to go?”

  She gave me a glance out of those inscrutable gray eyes. “No,” she said. “As a matter of fact they didn’t.”

  I asked her some questions about her family. There were things she wouldn’t tell me, like where they lived, even. She showed me a drawing of her house instead, a pen-and-ink drawing she kept in her purse. She drew, sometimes, when she was alone on the trains, she said. She’d drawn the house from far away, in a deep valley; the mountains filled the picture, rising steep on either side. There was a little stream at the bottom, going past the house and barn. There were even some living figures, tiny but so precisely drawn that you could see it was an older woman beside the barn holding a pail, you could see the eagerness of the goats running toward her. It was all just black-and-white lines but I could almost see the sunlight and smell the clear cold air. “It’s beautiful,” I said. She thanked me, and put it carefully away, and looked out the window at the brown tilled fields lined with tiny shoots of green.

  It was late and dark when the train pulled into Montpellier. Paquerette knew people there who would have put us up, but she said it was too late, and we’d better sleep in the station.

  We found ourselves a spot by the wall. The benches were already taken. A family camped beside us, their clothes looking like they hadn’t washed them for weeks, their luggage tied together with string. I remembered how Gustav and Nina had been camped in a train station when Samuel found them. Paquerette put up her suitcase like a wall between us and them, spread out a blanket from her bag, and settled on it, lying on her side, pillowing her head in the crook of her arm. She stretched once, like a cat, looked at me and patted the space beside her. I lay down too.

  The station floor was rock-hard through the thin blanket. The dim electric light above me buzzed. I turned over on my other side, but it was just as hard. A baby started to cry somewhere in our camp of huddled families. Paquerette did this all the time. This was what I was asking for, to do it with her. I looked over at her.

  She was asleep.

  I’d heard some people could do that. Soldiers, mostly, or hunters out in the woods. Go to sleep instantly. Wake at the slightest sound. I wondered if I’d ever be able to.

  I turned and turned, as the quiet deepened with the night. I think it must have been hours before I slept.

  PAQUERETTE WAS shaking me. My eyelids were stuck together and my head was full of gravel. “Magali, wake up. We’ve got a train to catch.”

  Horror shot through me. She had to wake me. I was just another burden, another child. I sat bolt upright, jumped to my feet and started folding up the blanket. She smiled. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  We washed our faces in the women’s bathroom and went to the platform. We ate breakfast, a chewy hunk of yesterday’s bread, while we waited. The train came, and as soon as we were settled in I fell asleep.

  She woke me for lunch—bread and more cheese. There was green outside the windows now, green living grass, and orchards, row on row of short graceful trees reaching their limbs out wide like dancers, covered with pink blossom. We were in the real south now. The houses were pale stucco, with red tile roofs. Passing out of a town we saw a huge, old cherry tree in bloom, dazzling white against the blue southern sky.

  I turned to Paquerette, and stopped. There were tears in her eyes.

  My heart beat hard, but I dared. “Paquerette? Are you all right?”

  She gave me a moment’s smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She wiped them with her sleeve, and shrugged. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “And it’s the same world.”

  I opened my mouth, slowly. She turned and looked at me. Drew herself up a little, Joan of Arc again. “Magali,” she said quietly, “you’re going to see some very bad things today. I have a phrase that goes through my head sometimes—‘the knowledge that is poison.’ It … it gets into your soul, when you see these things every week.” She
looked out the window, and the tears welled up again. She wiped them, and shook her head. She turned to me. “Listen. I want this clear now. I won’t be able to talk about these things with you. The times when I’m free of them, I need to leave them behind. So you and me, we don’t talk about evil. You may need to speak to someone about it, but I’m sorry—I’m not able.”

  “Of course,” I whispered. “I won’t.”

  She gave me a sad smile. “Thank you for coming with me, Magali,” she said.

  RIVESALTES IS the name of a town, a lovely little town of sandstone houses and red-tile roofs, flowers in the window boxes, vineyards all around the town. Camp Joffre is the real name of the camp. It was early afternoon by the time we pulled into Rivesaltes village and got off the train. I followed Paquerette through the town, and we set out down the road to the camp.

  It took us an hour and a half. We walked between vineyards, rows and rows of gnarled brown vines covered in shiny, pale-green new leaves. There were low humped hills on the horizon, but where we walked it was flat. The wind gusted and kicked up road dust in our faces. We walked, and the land got poorer as we went. First the poorer vineyards—more brown and less green. Then the scrub—bunchy grass, thirsty bushes, brambles and stones. The wind got much worse across the open dusty ground; grit got in my eyes and nose and mouth. Paquerette stopped, and we took a drink from her water bottle. She took out a handkerchief and tied it over her nose and mouth, and handed me one too. Her eyes were watering and so were mine.

  “It’s the tramontane,” she said, raising her voice above the sound of the wind. “I hoped it wouldn’t be blowing today.”

  The tramontane. I’d heard of it. They’ve got a name for the wind. Watch out.