Defy the Night

by Heather Munn

  “Magali. Will you come over and see me tomorrow?” said Paquerette. “Afternoon,” she added, rubbing her face. “It was a hard one.”

  I looked at her. “Yeah,” I said.

  I WALKED home slowly, breathing the clear Tanieux air deep into my lungs. Alone. No one hungry, no one crying, no one running into the path of a train. Just me, with the dust of Rivesaltes still on my skin. I was going to go home and take a shower. But lunch first. I could eat a horse. And then I’d go to bed, my own bed. And then at supper I’d tell them all about it. I imagined the pride in Papa’s eyes.

  I walked up the stone stairs, imagining all that, but my bed most of all. I opened the door and walked in.

  The house was quiet. There was a sickly burnt smell to the place, like charred flesh. The floor was gritty with dust and the fireplace was full of ashes. On the table there were two dirty plates, and a clean one with two pieces of bread on it, and a piece of cheese. The smell came from the kitchen. The gray food spills on the counter looked like nothing anyone would eat even in Rivesaltes. Our biggest stewpot sat in the sink with black crusty things floating in it. Also beans. I reached into the cold, slimy, ashy water and felt one. It was rock-hard.

  “What happened here?” I said out loud. I stepped out into the dining room. “Mama?” No answer. Muffled voices from the bedroom. I stood there, the past springing up vivid in my mind: Mama and Papa shut up in the bedroom at mealtime, and me left alone. The day Hitler invaded Poland.

  Papa came out, and shut the door carefully. He beamed at me. “Magali,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re home.” He glanced back at the bedroom door and quit beaming. “Your mother has a headache.”

  I blinked. “So do I.”

  He frowned. “She’s had it since you left.”

  I stood there for a moment in the filthy kitchen, looking at my father. “Well. I’m back.”

  “I was wondering, Magali, if, uh … if you might be willing …” He made this little gesture, with his hand. Sort of gesturing around. At the kitchen.

  There was a hollow echoing feeling in my head. No. No. He must have seen it on my face—he started to frown again—and I shattered like a hand-grenade.

  “Do you have any idea where I’ve been?” I screamed it. It might have woken the dead.

  “Magali! Quiet!”

  “No! No!” I started to sob. I hate it. I hate crying when I’m angry. “I just got home from Rivesaltes and you want me to clean up your mess? No!”

  He grabbed my arm. “Magali, be quiet and listen to me! Your mother is in—”

  I yanked my arm back from him. I was sobbing so hard now I couldn’t have yelled again if I’d tried. My chest hurt so bad and my head was killing me. “You … you …” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I turned and ran out the stairwell door and slammed it shut behind me. I flew up the steps and down the upstairs hallway; Benjamin jumped back as I almost ran into him. I slammed my own door behind me and threw myself on the bed and cried.

  I DON’T know how long I cried. At some point I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I remember is waking up in the dark, hearing a soft voice by my ear. “Magali?” It was Papa. My eyes felt crusty and my body felt even worse than before. Aching and heavy. “Mmm,” I mumbled.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I didn’t feel like I had the strength to sit up, but I was hungry. Always. “Mm.” I didn’t think I could get down the stairs.

  “Is it all right if I turn the light on?”

  “Mm.” I managed to pull myself up to a sitting position. A white flood of light stabbed my eyes and I closed them. I blinked, and blinked, and finally looked around.

  There was a tray on the desk. The same bread and cheese and a glass of goat milk. My father had brought me food. In bed.

  “Wha—where—”

  “Your mother’s still in bed. She has a migraine headache, Magali. It’s very, very bad. She’s in a lot of pain. She’s spent most of her time in bed for several days.”

  She’d seemed all right. Except for the whole crying thing. I took a big bite of bread so I wouldn’t have to say anything. It was good.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to clean the kitchen, Magali.” He took a breath. “I was going to ask you to make supper. You should not have shouted at me, Magali, especially after I had told you your mother had a headache. But”—he held up a hand—“I also wish that I had not asked you to do work right as soon as you got home from Rivesaltes. I imagine it was a, ah—difficult journey?”

  I nodded. I could still hear Léon’s crying in my head. I could hear my own scream, too. I could see the barbed wire and the face of the guard with the gun when I’d sassed him. I felt the tears starting to come back.

  He turned away. “So I’m sorry I asked you to do that,” he said, looking at my desk. “I’ll admit to you, I was desperate. But you deserved some rest. I hope you slept well. I wasn’t sure about waking you, but I thought you might need to eat.”

  I nodded. The tears were calming back down. “You, uh … did you have bread for lunch too?”

  He nodded.

  “What did you eat while I was gone?”

  He got the funniest look on his face. “Magali … I think you saw what we ate. Wasn’t the pot still in the sink …?”

  “You ate that stuff?”

  “We couldn’t waste food.”

  “What was it, anyway?”

  “Stew. We boiled some water and put in potatoes and carrots. And then, uh, beans.”

  “You mean dry beans? After the potatoes and carrots?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did you soak them or anything?”

  “Well, no.”

  I gaped at him. Men. “Wow,” I said slowly. “Is Mama … d’you think she’ll get better?”

  “I don’t know, Magali. She … she used to get headaches when I met her, but she hasn’t had them in years and I’ve never seen it this bad. I was counting on her feeling better when you came back. And then …” He shrugged sort of helplessly. He looked different, somehow, from usual. Like he didn’t know everything after all. I couldn’t really remember him ever apologizing to me before.

  “I’m sorry I yelled, Papa. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s all right, Magali.” He put his hand on mine and squeezed a little. Then he picked up the tray with the empty plate on it. “How do you feel? Think you’ll be able to go back to sleep?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  He shut the door carefully as he went out, almost as carefully as he had with Mama.

  IT WAS nice, Papa apologizing. It was especially nice given that Mama was still not out of bed at six o’clock, and he came up to knock softly on my door and ask if I had any ideas for supper. I’d taken a bath by then, and I felt a little better, but not much. I opened the door and just stood there and looked at him, and he added that just telling him what to do would work. I told him how to stew lentils, which have the advantage of not needing to soak for twenty-four hours. He thanked me.

  Nothing in my body or my head felt all right until I woke, slowly, the next morning, with light pouring in my window. No one had woken me. That was nice.

  When I came down there was bread and lukewarm mint tea waiting for me at the table and Dr. Reynaud was in the bedroom with Mama and Papa. Apparently the verdict was that yes, it was a severe migraine headache, and had any new source of stress come into Mama’s life lately?

  In other words: it was my fault.

  Nobody said that. Not exactly. Papa just told Dr. Reynaud yes and then started asking him all these questions, and went around looking down in the mouth for an hour afterward.

  It didn’t make sense. She hadn’t gotten migraines when we thought the Germans were going to show up on our doorstep with tanks. Obviously she was scared, she measured me for a hole in the attic and all, but she never quit cooking. She scrubbed under the stove for Pete’s sake, she acted like work was the only thing that could save her.

  But I go on a leg
al, supervised visit to an internment camp and pow. She’s in bed pale as a sheet with pain lines and her eyes shut tight like the light burns them … I just couldn’t understand it.

  So Papa asked me to make lunch, and I made it. Theoretically, I guess, it was the least I could do. And if you think cooking is hard, try cooking with this: Beans. Lentils. Potatoes. A handful of onions and garlic. And a few canned tomatoes from last summer, and wrinkly turnips and carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary. That’s it. Goat milk and butter? Those are for Sunday dinner.

  Well, I made lentil and tomato soup. You should have seen the looks on those guys’ faces when I served it up. They all said I was amazing, and how grateful they were that I was back. I noticed that, actually. They thanked me for being back. Not for cooking.

  Men are so funny. I think they think we’re magic. We make good food appear on the table and—poof—make the house all clean, in some mysterious way, just by being women. I know it sounds dumb, but that’s really how they act. It’s just work! That’s all it is! And of course they talk like they could never learn how to do it in a million years, and then, in the same breath, like their work is way more important. Well. At least they weren’t talking like that today.

  Mama came out of her room to eat lunch. She smiled at me a lot, but the pain lines didn’t go away. She asked me about the trip. I made sure to tell her I’d just cried because I was so tired. I told her about Léon’s mother giving him to me, and her eyes filled with tears. Within another minute she closed them like it just hurt too much, and Papa helped her back to the bedroom.

  After lunch I went down to see Paquerette.

  There was a fire in the fireplace at l’Espoir, and the babies were sleeping. Paquerette sat on the sofa with a cup of tea in her hands, and smiled at me as I came over to give her the bise. “Sit down,” she said, patting the sofa. “And tell me how your first trip was.” My heart skipped a beat on the word first.

  “Oh,” I said, not even thinking about whether it was truth or lie, “all right.”

  Paquerette’s eyebrows rose. “Really.”

  I sat. We talked, or maybe I talked. We said all the things we hadn’t had time to say to each other. About the camp, about Marylise, and Léon’s mother. About Madame Alençon, and bathing the Spanish kids, and how hard it was when the kids didn’t speak French. I told her how Adrián had gotten in bed with me. She sobered.

  “You showed quick thinking, Magali, there on the platform at la Voulte. That was very well done.”

  Something warmed in me. Deeper than praise. The eyes of Joan of Arc, saying I choose you, you’re just what I need.

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  She nodded, and looked into the fire for a moment. “What did you say to the guard at the gate?” she asked abruptly.

  “Um. I …” I swallowed. You don’t pretend to Joan of Arc that you don’t know what she means. When you do. “He called me a kid, and I said I was older than a lot of the kids in the camp.”

  “Is that exactly what you said, Magali?”

  “Uh, I … I think I said ‘the kids you’ve got in this camp.’”

  “Mmm.” Paquerette’s lips thinned. “And you said this why?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She looked into the fire and drew a breath. “Magali, that was a very dangerous thing you did.” She shook her head. “God in heaven knows we have reasons to be angry. But we are not in the business of satisfying our anger. We are getting children to safety and that is the only priority.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “Magali, I need you to learn this: you never try to have the last word with a man holding a gun.”

  “Yes, Paquerette.”

  “If you’re ever going to travel with me again, I need you to promise me that you will never show defiance to anyone in power. No matter how contemptible they are, you will follow my lead, act polite, act submissive if you have to and then you get out of there with the children we came to save. Promise me this.”

  I looked up at her eyes—firelight on steel. “I promise,” I whispered.

  She gave me a firm nod. “As long as you can do that,” she said quietly, “you’ll do well. Now, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about. How did your parents respond, when you came home?”

  I swallowed and opened my mouth to answer. My stomach tied up in a knot.

  “MAGALI?” SAID Papa. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Mama was down again. She’d had two good days and I’d thought it was over, I’d prayed it was over. And now it was back. Papa was beckoning me into his study for, I supposed, a Talk.

  “Your mother’s having a difficult time, Magali,” he informed me as I sat down on one of his straight-backed chairs. You think so? “We may need to do some thinking about this.”

  I just nodded. You don’t interrupt Papa when he’s starting a speech, even if he says we.

  “I know how important it feels to you to do important work in the outside world. And Paquerette has informed me that you’ve proven yourself very competent at it.” My heart started beating faster. I didn’t quite dare look at him.

  Then he said “but.”

  “But there’s an order to the maturing process, Magali. An adult is someone who does what needs to be done, even when they don’t want to, and doing what needs to be done for your family is where that starts. It’s how you prove that you are ready to do greater things. And”—he glanced away and sighed—“it looks as though you may have a real chance to mature here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, Magali. Dr. Reynaud says migraines are very unpredictable, but even on his first visit he didn’t think it likely that this would just go away. We may need to make some, ah, adjustments to our life. Magali, I want you to know I don’t blame you for any of this. You couldn’t have known.”

  I sat back and stared at him, my stomach churning. He didn’t blame me? He was about to ask me to make “adjustments,” not himself. But at least he was generous enough not to blame me.

  “But I do think I have the right to ask for your help.”

  I started to read the titles of the books behind his head. Watch it, Magali. Do not try to have the last word. I breathed slowly, carefully.

  “So I am asking, Magali, from now until you take your troisième-year exams, that you be an adult. I know it’s a lot to ask. But you need to pass your exams, and your mother needs your help very much, and together those add up to adult-sized responsibilities.” From now until the exams. Until school let out. I stared at those books, seeing it all with a hard, hot clarity: this was a test. If I passed … when school let out …

  “So I’m asking that as well as studying as hard as you can, you also take responsibility for the essentials of your mother’s work when she’s not able to. I will make sure you have help, but you will be the one with the responsibility and that is always difficult. It’s a difficult time for all of us. But I believe you can do it. I believe you have the makings of a very mature young woman.” And if you prove me right, I’ll know that you are ready for “greater things.” He didn’t say it. But I heard it.

  Loud and clear.

  Promises to parents can be cheap. As a kid I used to make them by the dozen. Yes, I’d do the dishes right away, I’d get my homework done, yes, I’d come home from Julie’s house as soon as the church bells rang six. It doesn’t matter how hard or how often you promise. What matters is what you do.

  I was making no promises today. But I was going to travel with Paquerette. And to that end, from now until the exams, I was going to be an adult.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said quietly, looking my father in the eye.

  And my new life began.

  I HAD never worked so hard in my life, or for so little reward.

  Papa gave me his alarm clock. He said he didn’t need it, that he woke at six out of habit, and maybe I’d learn too. I tried not to think about that as I wound the clock. Then I saw Paquerette’s face as she shook me awake in the train station. Paquere
tte can do that.

  Maybe I’d learn.

  I learned to flip out of bed the moment it rang, run downstairs, and check on Mama. I learned how cold it is in our house before someone lays a fire in the fireplace. I learned to lay a supply of wood and kindling on the hearth every night; two trips down the icy stairs in my fraying slippers at dawn were enough.

  I learned harder things. How to go back up to my room—if it turned out Mama was down there putting water on the kitchen stove and singing—and wrap my blanket around myself and get out my trigonometry and spend the hour between six and seven trying to understand what a cosine was. I’d never have done it for anything less. I’d never have thought that I could do it. But I did.

  I learned to light the kitchen stove fire and have fake coffee and tea ready when Papa came home with the bread. I learned to think ahead and lay out my lunch ingredients ready for when I came home from school. I learned to put beans in to soak every evening. I learned to make big pots of soup that I could reheat at noon on a roaring fire and not have to wait for coals. I learned to throw down my school bag and build a fire, light-headed with hunger—quick, stoke the fire, put the soup pot on, set the table. Snap at Julien when he asks what time lunch is and set him to slicing bread. Get the stuff dished up and bring it out to where the guys are waiting, and Mama with her pale face, saying in a weak voice that this is the best soup she ever tasted. Which is ridiculous, really. Nothing can be the best soup you ever tasted if it doesn’t contain bacon.

  I learned what it means to be tied down.

  I’d never understood it before. The difference between being someone who stands in the kitchen and peels what they’re told to peel and doesn’t have to think about it, and being the person who has to think about it all day. Who flubs questions in history class because she just realized she forgot to put the beans in to soak. The one who has to run straight home after school to get supper on the stove. Making crazy jokes with Lucy, or sitting on the café stools with Rosa kicking our feet against the bar and talking about nothing—those were as long gone now as the free hot chocolate Madame Santoro used to give us before the war. I saw Rosa at l’Espoir. I saw Lucy at school. She said I was taking this a little far. “I cook for Auntie every day and that doesn’t mean I can’t ever see my friends!”