by Heather Munn
Papa nodded. “I think that’s probably true.”
Mama turned to me, her face very solemn. “Magali—you’ll be careful, won’t you? Promise you’ll be careful, with men like that.”
“I was very careful, Mama.”
“I’m not sure you know how dangerous they are.” Her eyes were intense, staring into mine. “Some men, Magali … when they think they can get away with things …” No. I could see it all coming again—see her huge eyes, in the attic during the invasion—disgust rose in me. Men, it was always men. Sure I hated Erich Müller’s guts and I had a right to, but he hadn’t looked at me that way, nor his friend, not even once. She didn’t even know what she was talking about.
I lowered my head. Control yourself, Magali. I took a deep breath and raised my face to her, very serious. “Yes, Mama,” I said in a low voice. “You’re right. I need to be very careful.”
Mama nodded. Convinced.
AFTER LUNCH I went down to les Chênes.
The les Chênes kitchen was full of kids and noise and sunshine. I stopped in the doorway and watched Carmela, whose bleeding feet I had washed months ago, hand a plate from the sink to a boy with a dishtowel and laugh at something he said. Her long black hair was combed and soft. Her arms weren’t stick-skinny anymore, and there was color in her face. The boy turned toward me. I saw a scar on his right cheek.
“Oh hi, Magali!” called out Claudine. “You bringing us another?”
“No, I, uh—”
“Magali!” Manola came running to me and hugged me round the waist. I stared down at her in my arms. After a moment she looked up shyly. “Hi.”
“You speak French now …”
“This fall I’ll go to school!”
“You remember Carmela and Manola I guess. D’you remember Stepan and Chanah? You brought them yourself too, I think.”
The boy with the scar turned to me again and I remembered seeing a bandage there, months ago on a cold winter day. A girl who was wiping the long, scarred pine table looked up at me under brown bangs. She had collapsed in the snow in hysterics that day because some kid on skis surprised her. She smiled shyly at me.
I swallowed through the tightness in my throat. “Yeah. I remember them.” I remembered praying for them. Turning back and looking at the two huge oaks, and hoping they’d be happy here. I turned to Claudine. “Do you all here need any … you know … help?”
Her eyebrows went straight up and her mouth twitched like she was trying to keep from laughing. “Well, if you have any idea what to do with that boy you all sent us this morning, that might help. Seeing he’s locked himself in his room.” Julie, the other les Chênes counselor, nodded vigorously. “You go on up. Tell Papa Thiély we sent you.”
Monsieur Thiély glanced up at me from where he knelt by Marek’s door, screwdriver in hand, his friendly young face looking weary and intent. “Stand back.”
The door startled to topple, and I darted forward and helped him catch it. He gave me a raised eyebrow. We looked inside.
The bed was pushed up against the window. On it stood Marek, trying to crank the window open, his bruised face red.
“Marek!”
He looked up at me. His eyes changed. It did my heart good to see it. He looked at Monsieur Thiély and pulled back. Monsieur Thiély looked at him for a long moment, and at me, and stepped behind the doorframe.
I swallowed. “Marek,” I said, in my most cheerful, confident voice. “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.” I added, with a glance at Monsieur Thiély, “Outside.” Monsieur Thiély nodded: okay.
He followed me. I didn’t try to take his hand this time, or even touch him. I beckoned and he followed me down the hall and down the stairs, through the living room where an older girl was playing on the piano, and out the back door. He followed me along the edge of the sprawling vegetable garden, where a group of kids were on their knees weeding a long line of cabbages. “Hey, it’s the new kid!” “Hi, new kid!” “D’you remember his name, Aurélie?”
Marek glanced at them quickly, then away. I led him through the back gate into a goat pasture, where a trace of a footpath in the grass led to a winding line of pine trees. Sure sign of a stream. I took him there.
It felt sheltered under the pines, quiet. No sound but the soft happy chatter of running water. Marek’s eyes were as wild and unreadable as those of a fox in the woods. “C’mon, Marek,” I said, taking my shoes off. “Get in.”
We stayed out there for an hour and a half. I talked to him, told him about les Chênes. I sat on the bank and watched while he tried to catch minnows. I splashed him once, but he flinched, and didn’t splash me back.
There was this about Marek: yes, he was like a fox in the woods, with his fierceness and his wanting to be free. A creature who’d chew his own leg off if it was caught in a trap; you could see it in his eyes, and I think that’s what I loved about him. But there was this too: he wasn’t just someone who would chew his own leg off. He was someone who already had.
That night I went down to l’Espoir and talked to Madame Sabatier. She listened and nodded, and Paquerette nodded too. Madame Sabatier told me Sonia was coming every day now that school was over, and so was Madeleine’s cousin. She could spare me this week, and she could go on sparing me if necessary. Paquerette gave a half smile, and said Monsieur Thiély was a smart man. I stroked Léon’s downy hair, and in my mind I said, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you’ll be all right—you won’t even remember me—and there’s something I have to do. And it would take a long time, I knew that too. Grandpa’s told me before how you tame a wild fox, or a deer, or any wild thing really. It takes day after day after day.
But I had to. I had to make Marek stop chewing.
THERE WERE four teams, at les Chênes. They switched off each week on their chores: dishes, cooking, cleaning, gardening. The Squirrels were on kitchen duty that week. It was Wolves, Hawks, Owls, and Squirrels; don’t ask me how that happened. Carmela and Manola and Stepan and Chanah were the Squirrels, and by the next day, Marek was one too. I was there to help him “integrate.”
I handed him a broom and he held it as if he thought it was a weapon but wasn’t quite sure how it worked. He started knocking it against the counters. I took it from him and showed him how to sweep, but he wasn’t looking, and he just started knocking it against the counters again. I told him he better sweep. He didn’t look like he’d heard me. I could see Stepan, who was waiting to mop, heating up. Then he lost it.
“Sweep, stupid! I don’t have all day!”
I could see his point. Marek, on the other hand …
Well, Marek hit him with the broom.
Claudine grabbed him by the collar. I was glad she was there. “Marek, you’re not allowed to hit. Because you hit Stepan you can’t come to singing time tonight.”
I saw Marek’s face fall. He tried to control it but I saw it. Interesting.
I had to see this singing time.
“HE’S A Squirrel?” Lucy laughed out loud.
It was so great to be with Lucy. I hated to think of her leaving. Only three weeks. I wanted to sit cross-legged on her bed forever, with her slanted attic-bedroom ceiling over us, laughing. She took just the right attitude to the Erich Müller story, of course.
“And you totally fooled them?”
“They said France was ‘more hospitable than they thought.’” I imitated Erich Müller’s overly polite tones, and Lucy rewarded me with a snort.
“Man, I wish I could’ve done that. Magali … can you keep a secret?”
My heart beat a little faster. “Yeah.”
“I … I know what I could do, now. Who I could help, for the, you know … the Resistance. Auntie knows someone who—oh, I really shouldn’t tell.”
“Oh, c’mon! You got me all curious and then you chicken out?”
She leaned in very close and breathed one word. “Forgery.”
“You mean—?”
She laid a finger on her lips, her eye
s bright. Then they clouded. Then she took that finger and made it part of a fist, and hit her bedroom wall. Hard.
“Three weeks,” she said. “Three. Stupid. Weeks.”
“Man. Lucy. I’m sorry.” What else could you say?
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
IT WAS its own world, les Chênes. The Squirrels sitting in the kitchen singing “Savez-Vous Planter Les Choux” while they peeled potatoes. Game time, everyone in one big circle on the grass, their eyes shut tight while the “fox” went round. Singing time after supper with Papa Thiély at the piano, all those child voices rising together in a round: fresh morning wind, lifting the tops of the tall pines, joy of the passing wind, they sang, and I saw the joy on their faces, in their flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Joy of the singing circle. That was les Chênes—a little happy world of working and playing and singing, all together in one circle; and outside it, Marek. They didn’t want him to be; he just was.
He didn’t talk. He didn’t sing. He peeled potatoes like a convict sentenced to hard labor. At meals they put him at the end of the table, because he hit kids who got their hands too close to his food. He stood on the edge of circle games with sad wariness in his eyes, and I took him away again to the stream. I took off my shoes and we walked downstream in the shallow water together, all the way to the river. He climbed a tree barefoot and jumped from it into the river, with all his clothes on, without even warning me. I saw his face as he came up. He was grinning.
On Friday night he was allowed to come to singing time; he’d gone a whole day without hitting anyone. He sat at the edge of the living room, silent while I sang and clapped along with the kids, his dark eyes taking everything in. I thought I saw less fear in them now. More longing. Wondering if maybe he did want to be a part of this little world of work and play and music.
Or maybe I just thought that’s what I saw, because I was wondering that myself.
“YOU’RE SERIOUS about this, Magali?”
“Yes, sir. I thought I should ask now. So you have time to think about it.”
“And what do you think could convince us that this is a wise course?”
I lowered my eyes, and raised them to Papa’s. If I could keep my cool through this whole conversation …
“Well, Papa, the work I’m doing at the children’s home is useful. They want me to stay. And the work I do with Paquerette as well. It’s, it’s worth doing. And I’ve passed my troisième-year exams now, and I can still go to lycée—I can start a year from now. When I’m more ready and mature.” I took a breath. “And it’ll save the family money.”
Papa’s eyebrows went up at that last one. But Mama sat silent in her chair. She wasn’t turning pale this time. Her eyes were on the ground.
“Well,” said Papa.
“We can’t make you care, can we?” said Mama. “We can send you to school but … in the end …”
Can’t you see how much I care? But yeah. Not about that. Why did she care? She didn’t even have an education herself. She didn’t even know what it was like.
She didn’t know what it was like.
I saw her, for a moment. My age. Working in a field because she didn’t have any other choices. A farm girl. Poor. Mama, this is different. Someone called you stupid, didn’t they, I thought. A stupid little girl from a conquered country. Mama, I’m sorry they did that. I wish you hadn’t believed.
“Mama …” I lifted my head, my breath coming ragged, and looked into her dark eyes. “Mama … aren’t you glad I’m helping kids?”
Tears welled in her eyes. They almost came to mine too. “Yes,” she whispered.
I waited.
Mama sat silent. Papa put a hand on hers. “We will consider your request, Magali,” he said.
I bent my head.
PAQUERETTE CAME in on Monday. I missed her. Sonia came in to les Chênes by herself, trailing one Spanish ten-year-old named Tonio, with a fiery look in his eye. I met them on my way home.
I had to do the dishes that night, and it was late by the time I was free to go to l’Espoir. If it’d been a bad trip, Paquerette might be in bed by now, I realized as I walked down.
I’d just check.
I pushed the heavy door open—we don’t knock at l’Espoir—and stood listening. There was a faint sound of voices from upstairs. I could at least go up and greet her.
I started up the stairs, then stopped. The voices were from her room. I listened.
“But you know, Rosa did think she had reason. It didn’t seem like such a large risk,” Paquerette said. “She does know how to handle herself, you know.”
“You did not see her, Mademoiselle. She did not understand what she was doing. I—she was flirting with them.”
I froze.
The voice was Nina’s. Unmistakable. Flirting with them? What did she mean?
What else could she mean?
“Nina, I don’t think Magali would flirt with Germans. Really.”
“Not because she likes them, Mademoiselle. Ah, how can I say? Perhaps not flirting. She was … enjoying. She thought that she had … what is the word … control. You must believe me. I see this.” She was getting agitated, louder. “I know. Once, I was like this. I trust, I think I will not fail. She is not wise, Mademoiselle. I am afraid she will be hurt. This work, it is for adults.”
I couldn’t move.
“I know she’s not fully mature, Nina, but she’s growing up very fast, and I can’t tell you what a help she’s been to me. Besides, do you mean to say Rosa is unsuitable too?”
There was a silence.
“That is different, Mademoiselle.”
Another silence. And the awful sound of Paquerette, not contradicting.
Then a loud scrape of wood, of a chair on the bedroom floor. She’s getting up, she’s coming down, she’ll know—I moved. I have never been so swift and silent in my life. The huge door swung shut without a whisper. The only sound was my mind. Screaming.
I don’t even know which way I ran.
Chapter 11
The Voices
IT’S NOT the kind of secret you can tell somebody, not this.
It’s the kind of secret you keep in your heart, shifting it around from one spot to another because it burns. Because if it burns through something might begin to leak in. You’re just a girl. A girl from a conquered country. Who do you think you are? The voices will leak in, the voices you hate.
So you shift, and you shift, because you can’t get it out. And because they can’t be right about you. They can’t.
I lay on my bed facedown on the pillow, for hours, shaking, my whole body wanting to hit her, to hit Nina the poor crippled girl and knock her off her crutches onto the ground— No. Wanting her to be strong, so I could fight her. Grapple hand to hand and do something with all the wild helpless angry strength that ran through me. Nina, the crippled girl, the one you’re supposed to feel sorry for, Nina going behind my back like that, going to Paquerette and saying I wasn’t fit—
Paquerette wouldn’t listen, would she? She knew me. I knew her. The look in her eyes, the confidence in me, she knew!
I know she’s not fully mature.
Do you mean to say Rosa is unsuitable too?
That is different, Mademoiselle.
And that silence. That silence.
The words stabbed through me again and again; but the silence, that burned. The back of my throat filled with the taste of betrayal. Nina—Nina had never worked with her, not the real work. Nina had never exchanged that glance with her that said I’ve got your back, and then made good on the promise. I had.
And yet she could sit there listening to Nina say Rosa was fit for the work and I wasn’t—and not say a word to contradict? Nina who was so scared of Monsieur Bernard after almost two whole years that she still stayed behind the stationhouse when we met the train—what did she know? Nina had never saved a child’s life. I had. I’d saved Marek. If I hadn’t been there Paquerette couldn’t have taken him—not him. If I ha
dn’t stood up to those policemen and gotten him back, he’d have gone back to Rivesaltes, or worse. And I knew now how a kid as scared as him had gotten himself hit with a gun butt—he was too scared. Too scared to do as he was told. To do anything but run or fight.
He wouldn’t have lasted much longer in that camp.
And I had gotten him out, and kept him safe, and this was what I got. Paquerette listening to a scared girl whispering that I took risks. As if Paquerette didn’t walk into a lion’s den every week to take his prey.
There were two kinds of people in the world. And I knew which kind Paquerette needed, if Nina didn’t.
She would see.
PAQUERETTE LEFT again the next day. I didn’t even get to see her.
I didn’t go to les Chênes. I couldn’t. I went to the farm with Julien and Benjamin, and hoed turnips. Chopping at the earth again and again numbed my mind, a little. Nina’s voice played in my head in an endless loop. I felt sick to my stomach. I lay down beside my hoe, between the rows of turnip greens, with my arms around myself and my face practically in the dirt. I didn’t know what to do to make it stop. Make it stop! I kept swallowing. I felt strange.
“Magali?” I sat up fast. Grandpa was peering over the plants at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
He looked at me. “Are you sure?”
But this wasn’t the kind of secret you can tell someone, not this. Someone I don’t even respect thinks I’m a little fool who flirts with German soldiers, Grandpa, and it’s killing me. She said so to Paquerette, and it’s killing me.
Why is it so terrible, Magali? You don’t think Paquerette would listen? You don’t think she’s right?
Do you?
“I’m fine.”
Grandpa nodded slowly, and turned away.
THE NEXT day I pulled myself together and went to les Chênes. They asked me where I’d been. Marek had a black eye, and Tonio had a split lip and fresh scratches on his face. They’d both been sent to bed with only bread for supper, the night before. Apparently Tonio really had tried to steal food from Marek’s plate. I was secretly impressed with Marek; Tonio was pretty big.