by Heather Munn
The guard stood by the gate with his back to me when I reached him. The internees were looking at me. “Uh … excusez-moi, Monsieur?” My voice came out high, and when he turned around I could see the disbelief in his red eyes. Shame and anger flooded me, and suddenly I wished I had a gun too. Wished I didn’t have to stand there and play along with this poisonous game. I swallowed. “Excuse me, Monsieur,” I said, and my voice hardly even shook. “I’m with that lady—from the CIMADE. I have a release for this baby. Could, um …”
He held out a hand. I gave him the papers, and he leafed through them with one hand while the other held his rifle, keeping one eye on the people in line. He glanced up at me. “They’ve got kids doing this stuff now?”
I felt my face flush hot. “I’m a lot older than some of the kids you’ve got in here.”
When it was out of my mouth I could not believe I had said it. Standing there with the gate of the camp still closed in front of me. To a man with a gun. I could see the danger growing in his eyes, and it froze my feet to the ground.
He thrust the papers back at me, his eyes hard and cold. “You shouldn’t be touching them. Now take your Jewish baby and get out.”
For a moment I just stood there blinking. Léon’s Jewish? Then the guard jerked the gate open and gestured at me with his rifle, and I moved. I got out that gate before I could swallow against the anger rising in my throat. Paquerette stood a few feet away, wary eyes on the guard.
“Merci, Monsieur,” she said. I stared at her. Thank you. Yes, thank you for letting one child leave your unbelievable pigsty and go to a decent home. She gave me a sharp frown.
“Get in the truck,” she said.
WE SAT in the truckbed, leaning against the high wooden sides that blocked out everything but the white dust that boiled up over them and the choking black fumes of the gazogène engine—one of those charcoal-burning engines that someone came up with when gasoline became worth its weight in blood. I could hardly hear Léon crying above the roar of the motor and the jolting and creaking of the truck. I tried to shield him with my body from the dust. Zvi lay in Paquerette’s arms, motionless, his eyes half open. Two black-haired girls and a little boy huddled in the back corner, looking at me with dark eyes. I could see the calluses on the undersides of their dirty bare feet. A boy of maybe ten with matted blond hair sat in the other corner, not looking at anybody. In the front were Hania, Kurt, and Eva. Hania sat slumped and sweating, her head back against the wood with her brown braids hanging down; Kurt and Eva crouched down beside her.
Then Eva stood, holding on to the side of the truck, and let the wind blow in her face and stream her tangled hair back. Kurt stood up too. I caught a glimpse of his face as he did it, and the smile on it made a sudden little joy jump up in me, in spite of everything, and I saw that dusty, wasted plain for a moment the way he must be seeing it: freedom, freedom, freedom.
Through the seams between the boards I could see the camp away behind us, the people small as ants again, the barbed wire just a scribble across the low gray blocks of barracks. Rivesaltes. I had been inside it. It was almost hard to believe. I looked and looked at it, that stain on the face of the earth, that rabbit hutch for human beings. But Kurt and Eva didn’t look back. Not even once.
WE GOT down out of that banging, roaring truck in the middle of Perpignan, and the silence was loud in my ears. There we were on a street corner among red-roofed, stuccoed houses: a clot of scared, filthy children and teenagers with their eyes on the ground. People were staring. I stared back.
“We have a half-hour’s walk to the guesthouse,” Paquerette said. “Vladek—you follow me. Magali, you’re in charge of the Spanish kids. That’s Carmela, this is Manola, and the little one’s Adrián. They don’t speak French. Watch them closely now.” I nodded.
We walked. People stared. Others looked the other way. Hania limped. Eva walked with her eyes on the ground, her tangled hair hanging around her face. The three Spanish kids cast huge, scared eyes around, ready to bolt. I watched them, walking scared. If they ran I didn’t know what I’d do. When Paquerette finally stopped at a townhouse door and rang the bell, I was already blinking with weariness.
A black-haired woman in an apron let us in, gave Paquerette the bise as if they knew each other, as if ragged, feral children were all in a day’s work. Paquerette called her Madame Alençon. She announced that there was hot water, and that we could go straight back to our rooms. Paquerette gripped her hand for a moment, her eyes bright with gratitude; then led us in. We tracked in quite a lot of dirt.
Then, baths.
Paquerette took Léon. I ended up shut in a bathroom with the Spanish kids. Because when I took Adrián the others screamed and wouldn’t let him out of their sight. He struggled as I stripped off his filthy shirt. Crusted dirt dropped on the bathmat. I went on ruthlessly. He screamed and struggled again as I picked him up to put him in the tub under the warm shower.
“Can’t you help me?” I shouted at his sisters, and they stared back at me with their black eyes. Spoke in Spanish. The boy flailed, flinging dirty water on my face and blouse. “STOP!” I screamed, and he cringed away from me and whimpered. I set him down in the bathtub, my heart banging stupidly in my chest. “I’m just trying to bathe you,” I whispered, feeling weakness wash over me.
He sat with tears trickling down his face as I worked up a lather in a washcloth and started to soap him down. “It’s all right,” I murmured, “it’s all right.” Old sweat and grime was crusted into his skin; it felt like scrubbing a floor. He gave a high scream when I reached his feet. I pulled back; the suds were pink. There were deep cracks in his heels, that had been hidden under the dirt; they’d opened up red and bleeding. I bit my lips, trying to control my breathing, and my wish to hit someone.
It was like three kinds of nightmare all at once. Their poor feet. The sores and scabs on the girls’ bodies when they finally stripped down. The way they cried when the water got too hot, and I didn’t know what they were crying about. The way they flung dirt around like they didn’t see it, and I had to wash their brother’s feet again. The way they looked at me like I was the enemy and fought me every step of the way. Pressure built up in my head like steam. When Paquerette finally knocked on the door and passed in the clean donated clothes for them, and they ripped them out of my hands like they thought there wasn’t enough for everyone, and the oldest girl ended up with the smallest shirt, and wouldn’t let go of it, I was within a heartbeat of slapping her face. I grabbed both her poor, bony wrists in one hand and held them hard, and I got up in her face and said, “Let. Go.” And the fear in that child’s eyes; I still remember it.
Finally they were dressed, and I was leaning against the gritty, filthy tub with a vague, awful feeling that I was supposed to wash it now; then a knock, and Paquerette’s voice.
“Magali? Do you feel up to feeding Léon?”
I FED Léon. There was no way, on my first day, that I was going to let Paquerette see me fold.
I couldn’t focus. My mind drifted like a person half asleep, stumbling in the road. When Madame Alençon called us all to supper I stayed where I was, mechanically jiggling Léon awake to drink a little more.
“Magali?” said Paquerette. I looked up, and suddenly realized I’d never eaten lunch.
I wolfed down Madame Alençon’s thick, spicy bean soup, but the Rivesaltes kids ate like refugees: even faster. They drank their soup in long, hard gulps; didn’t touch their silverware, didn’t put anything down on their plates. The little ones took two pieces each from the bread basket, one for each hand. Then two more.
After supper I tucked the Spanish kids in bed, wet matted hair on their pillows. Adrián cried for Mama; the others started to cry too. Sh, sh, it’s all right, your Mama is coming soon. I couldn’t say it. I can’t lie to kids, even in a language they don’t speak. Sh, sh, I whispered. You’re safe now.
The next thing I remember is jerking awake. I’d nodded off over the crying kids. I’m sorry; I
really had. Manola was dry-sobbing now, quietly, and Adrián was asleep. With the last of my strength I stood, and slipped into my own bed, by Léon. I don’t even remember my head touching the pillow.
I WOKE up with a jerk. Léon was crying. It was dead dark.
He wailed and whimpered. No one else woke. I had to stumble around in the dark for the baby-bottle bag. Then creep down and find the kitchen, and boil the bottle and mix the formula, which I’d never done, and then he kept on sniveling and wouldn’t suck. I banged the bottle down on the counter and started to cry. He wailed. I got a whiff from his stinky diaper and pinched my own arm, savagely, for being so stupid.
So it was back up to find the diapers, and then changing him on a bathroom floor, with a headache starting up like an ice-pick through my temples. And then he still wouldn’t sleep, so I gave him the bottle, and then time to burp him, and he didn’t know how, just like Grigory, and after a while I started crying again, a little. When he finally calmed down I went back to bed and took him with me, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake with my head pounding and in less than an hour I saw the sky outside the window begin to pale with dawn. A few minutes after that, I heard a whisper from Paquerette’s bed.
“Ready to face the day?”
I swallowed. “Ready,” I breathed.
KIDS NEEDING this, kids needing that. Kids sneaking bread into their pockets from the breakfast table, while I barely had time to take a bite. Kids needing the bathroom in a language I didn’t speak, halfway to the train station. Léon starting to cry again while I was in charge of the group and Paquerette was off buying train tickets. Zvi never crying at all.
You’d think sitting on a train would be the easy part of the trip, but there’s this about kids, ex-internees or not: they don’t sit. So it was Paquerette running down the train aisle after Carmela, or me finding Adrián hiding under his seat; it was one thing and another, for hours, and Léon crying, needing to be fed, needing to be changed in the cramped, smelly train bathroom where if you lifted the toilet lid you could see the tracks racing by underneath. I’d do everything I could think of for him and still he’d cry, his little face screwed-up and red, like a living, breathing proof of my incompetence. When Paquerette got out bread and cheese for lunch, I was walking the aisle with him, over and over. So I ate mine Rivesaltes-style like the others: grip it tight in one hand and gnaw.
When Léon finally fell asleep, Adrián and Manola were asleep, too, and finally the train car was quiet. I rested my head against my seat and let my exhausted mind drift.
“Magali?” A whisper. I opened my eyes. It was Eva, her hair washed and combed now, her eyes still red. “I wanted to ask you. You live in Tanieux?”
I nodded.
“Where did you come from, before that?”
“Paris.”
“Oh.” She hesitated. “And … before that?”
“Nowhere. I was born in Paris.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.” She looked down. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, kind of intensely, her face expressionless. “I thought … you look Italian.”
“Well I am. Half. My mother came from there after the war. You don’t have to be sorry.”
She looked up at me, looking like she didn’t believe what I’d said. “Really you are not angry?” she asked kind of flatly. “That I thought you were a refugee?”
“No. Why would I be?”
She shrugged, and her eyes turned down again. “I probably would be,” she said.
I stared at her. In my arms Léon woke, and started bawling.
LÉON FUSSING, Léon crying, Carmela and Manola screaming at each other and needing to be separated; people turning their heads and muttering about us; us ragtag refugees, disturbing the peace. Paquerette trying to feed Zvi, who sucked weakly and didn’t open his eyes; the lines in her face growing worried and strained. Paquerette looking at her watch every time we pulled into a station. Finally she leaned over to me.
“Magali, our connection in Avignon is going to be very, very tight.” She’d explained this to me: we had to switch from the express to a train that made local stops, to be able to get off at la Voulte. If we couldn’t get the local in time to catch la Galoche, it meant an extra night and more travel: continuing north to Valence where there were people who’d put us up, and doubling back down to la Voulte on the next day’s local. “If we miss this one, we’re spending the night in Valence. I’ll need your best efforts.”
I nodded. The motion brought back a twinge of yesterday’s headache. “Yes, Paquerette.”
I organized. I put Eva in charge of Carmela and Adrián. I was ready. We had to walk down along the train we’d gotten off and cross the tracks behind it to get to the platform we needed. Everyone was together, we were speed-walking. A train whistle sounded. We broke into a jog. Kurt caught his leg on his suitcase and stumbled. I saw it all happen as if in slow motion.
Kurt stumbled. Hania, leaning on him, lurched, her white face scared, her hand opening to break her fall. Eva let go of the kids and caught her.
And Adrián took to his heels, off across the platform, his little legs pumping like pistons.
There’s this thing that happens to me. That’s the moment I found out about it for sure.
It’s like a different mind inside me, a new person who takes over. She has all this energy. She knows what to do. I felt fear flash through my body; and suddenly she was there.
“Take her!” I yelled to Paquerette, shoving Manola’s hand into hers. Because that was what it said to do, the instinct; then I had Léon pressed against my shoulder with one hand and I was running faster than I thought I could run. Adrián was half a meter from the edge when I caught him by the wrist and lifted him clean off the ground, swinging him back behind the painted danger line to safety. He screamed. I stood gripping his wrist and panting, my heart hammering. The wheels on the train began to churn.
I caught up the screaming Adrián onto my hip and walked back to the group, light-headed, as the train we’d come in on whistled and began to pull past us. We could see the other platform now, and the local train to la Voulte, pulling out too.
Paquerette’s face was pale. “Good work, Magali,” she said in a strangled voice. “Let’s all sit down.”
WE TOOK the next express north, and got off at Valence, and walked our desperate little band to a place Paquerette knew, an office where two ladies ran an agency to help war widows. They laid out thin mattresses for us on their office floor and made us tea in their tiny kitchen for us to drink with the loaf of bread Paquerette had bought on the way. We sat cross-legged on our mattresses and ate and drank Rivesaltes-style. I changed and fed Léon. I don’t remember anything else, really, but clean sheets, and sinking like a stone into sleep.
In the dead of night, someone crawled into my bed, jolting me awake. It was Adrián, and he was crying. I rubbed his back, and after a long time he fell asleep. After a much longer time, I did too. Léon woke me at dawn, and I changed and fed him. When we set out for the station, my head felt heavy, and my eyes burned. Strange, bad feelings washed through my body, deeper than a muscle ache, as if my bones were groaning: you need to stop.
Someone lost the bag of baby bottles. We never found out who. Léon cried his lungs out from le Cheylard all the way up the Eyrieux gorge, as the train puffed and labored her slow, slow way up the incline, and nice farmers’ wives leaned over to give me free advice on babies, and I tried not to scream. Then, finally, Saint-Agrève—la Galoche picking up to a decent speed—every minute like an hour as we drew closer. And then the familiar curves of the hills around Tanieux—that ridge you go past before the town appears—the houses!—our house, I could see our house, my bed, my own bed without any crying kids who needed me, oh please … and the station and Monsieur Bernard in his kepi and I’d never have believed I’d be so glad to see his face—and Mama, Mama!—her face lit up with joy, looking at me from the platform, and Rosa and Nina with her.
And getting the children out—one last headcount, al
l of them off the train—all three Spanish kids were there, thank God …
“Rosa!” I’d never been so glad to see her in my life. “Rosa, these kids, will you take them, they’re from Spain, just don’t let them out of your sight!” and I heard her voice speaking Spanish and felt the weight lift off my shoulders, turned blindly, and shoved the baby at Eva. She took him.
And then I flung myself into Mama’s arms and cried.
Chapter 6
No Promises
I REALLY shouldn’t have done that.
For one thing I had turned into a huge sobbing mess and my work wasn’t even done. I still had a baby to hand over. But worse than that, Mama started to cry on me too.
She didn’t sob or anything. She just held me tight and did that weepy, silent crying, murmuring my name. She swayed us both back and forth. I couldn’t move my arms. My head was pinned against her shoulder. I finally got my hands against her and wrenched myself loose.
My head hurt and my throat hurt and my heart hurt, and it wasn’t quitting time. Mama’s eyes were red and had dark circles under them, and her cheeks were shiny with tears. Everyone was staring at us, everyone, even Monsieur Bernard. Léon was still crying. I turned back to Eva, and I took him.
“I promised his mother I’d get him to Madame Sabatier,” I said.
Mama smiled at me through her tears.
NINA TOOK Kurt and Eva and Hania. Rosa took the Spanish kids. Paquerette and I carried Léon and Zvi to l’Espoir, and Mama walked beside us until the Rue Chambert, and then stopped and said, “I’m sorry, Magali—I need to meet you at home. You’ll come home?”
“Sure.”
She hugged me again, long, till I couldn’t breathe. Then she left us. Paquerette and I walked in silence. She looked as wasted as I felt, and I felt terrible. Like a headache through my whole body. Like I’d never feel okay again.
We gave the babies to Madame Sabatier. She fussed much more over Zvi than Léon, and asked Paquerette questions about his eating and his stools. I gave Léon to Madeleine and sank down on the couch, looking blurrily into the fire. I kept my promise, Madame … Suzanne … whoever you are …