Defy the Night

by Heather Munn

  We took them to the river during afternoon free time. I walked behind the others with Marek, trying not to think about Nina. I watched him run on the grass, his legs already sturdier, that terrible Rivesaltes dryness gone, now, from his skin. I felt a twinge deep inside me. Isn’t that worth something? Isn’t it? But when he turned his face toward me—the faded, yellowing bruise on his left cheek and the fresh black eye on his right—I felt guilt. I hadn’t been there to stop it. Keep them apart, calm him down. There they were, getting too close to each other again. I tensed as Tonio swaggered toward Marek. I stood poised and staring, as Marek got out of his way.

  “Well.” Papa Thiély stood behind me, smiling a little ruefully. “Now we have two of them, eh?”

  They’re not alike. Tonio’s just mean— I shut my teeth on that. Tonio’d been in Rivesaltes too. Yeah. One of those kids in Rivesaltes who steal from the younger ones—

  “I wanted you to know, Magali, that I’m putting Tonio with the Squirrels.”

  I stared at him. “You are?”

  “I’m afraid it’s time for extreme measures. Marek has gotten into ten fights this week. In an ordinary situation I would consider sending him home at this point. Of course this is an extraordinary situation …” He raised his eyebrows and looked out at the kids. The girls had gotten some kind of dancing game going. I heard them clapping and singing, “Allons passe, passe, passe, allons passe donc …”

  Papa Thiély turned to me and said, “I hope you understand how important it is, that he learn to trust us and obey. We don’t know what is coming.”

  A little chill went down my back. I nodded.

  The next day we put Marek on sweeping the floor and Tonio on mopping.

  Marek swept.

  I TURNED over and over in bed at night, trying not to think of Nina and Paquerette. Trying. I couldn’t stand it.

  Finally I got my courage up and told Lucy.

  Lucy told me not to worry, Paquerette wasn’t going to fire me for that—she’d probably just tell me to be careful or something. I imagined Paquerette telling me to be careful. On Nina’s say-so. I shuddered. I looked at Lucy.

  She was looking out the window, west, toward the sea.

  ON SATURDAY I met the train. I wasn’t going to skip that.

  I had to walk down there with Nina, and listen to her and Rosa talking about the summer tutoring Nina was doing with Mademoiselle Pinatel. Learning dead languages while the live world around her burned.

  “Magali,” Rosa said suddenly, “when is Lucy leaving?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  “Is it true,” said Nina, “that she does not wish to go to America?”

  I turned round. “That’s right.” Want her visa? “She wants to stay and help.”

  “She was helping?” Rosa asked.

  “She never got the chance but she knew something she could do. Only it’s a secret.”

  Nina’s brows drew down. “What did she tell to you?”

  “Well I can’t tell you.”

  “And she?” Her long over-serious face looked like an old lady’s. “Was she permitted, to tell you?”

  “She barely told me anything. And she’s leaving. And I’m not telling anyone either. Not even you.”

  “You promise this?”

  “What’s it got to do with you?”

  She was frowning deeply now, her eyes smoldering. A very un-Nina look, really. I remembered when she’d been scared to ever displease anyone. “I know how it is to almost die. This is not a game. There are men who will kill us.”

  “I know,” I snapped. I turned and kept walking. I didn’t look back.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence. I stood and watched Nina hide in her alley, wondering how even she could expect me to listen to someone who acted like that. She didn’t meet my eyes.

  PAQUERETTE BROUGHT a group of teens from Gurs. They were all bound for les Aigles and Nina’s dorm, so Nina took them. They walked off speaking German to each other, and Paquerette turned an utterly weary face to us and said she’d better get to l’Espoir. I carried her suitcase.

  She said nothing about what Nina had told her that night, nor the next day. I didn’t ask about our next trip. She talked about Gurs, and I talked about les Chênes, and the singing and the skits they put on every Saturday night. She smiled, and said not every man could do with children what Monsieur Thiély could.

  She left for Rivesaltes the next day. She took Rosa. Because she was scheduled to take her, it was her turn. I told myself it would be all right. I worked long hours at les Chênes that week, came home and helped Mama with the dishes. That made me tired enough to go to sleep, and not lie there thinking in the dark. Most nights.

  LUCY LEFT. On Thursday, a hot, still day with a thin layer of damp cloud over the sky like a lid. We all sweated, walking her to the train. I carried one of her suitcases. I wished I were leaving too. Not for America, God forbid. Just Rivesaltes. Just Rivesaltes, where the barracks would be like ovens right now, dark and stinking with sweat. A little knot of fear lay still and heavy in my belly, fear that I would never see that terrible place again. Life is too strange. Sometimes you can’t even try to understand it.

  I hugged Lucy, Irish-style, and when I let her go I caught her wiping her eyes. I told her I’d write her letters. I could see in her eyes that she remembered the censors at the same moment I did. Her face twisted up into the oddest grin and laugh I’d ever seen on her.

  “Just make sure you write Vive la résistance on every one, okay?”

  “Oh yeah. I promise.”

  Her grin straightened a little. Better. My last Lucy grin, to remember her by.

  The long high whistle of the train as it pulled out was like a far-off scream.

  PAQUERETTE CAME back. She asked if she could take me on the next trip. I almost died of relief.

  Then Mama got a migraine. Her first since I’d come home with Marek. I had to miss a couple of days at les Chênes, filling in for her. Nina and Gustav were invited one of those nights. I made potatoes and cabbage. It wasn’t very good, but what do you expect? With me chopping cabbage and onions and stoking the fire, hearing Mama and Nina’s muffled voices from the bedroom, while Gustav leaned on the counter and cracked jokes at me. I put a knife in his hand and told him to peel potatoes or get out. His black eyebrows shot up into his hairline. He peeled. And kept the jokes coming. Eventually I even started to laugh.

  Marek only hit Stepan once while I was gone, but he did disappear for an afternoon. They found him wading in the creek, almost down to the river. Apparently Stepan had told him he wasn’t a Squirrel and he wished he’d go away, and Marek hit him. Papa Thiély gave them each a Serious Talk, after. Maybe it helped.

  Manola and Chanah ran up and hugged me when I got there. The Squirrels were on weeding duty. Carmela was showing Marek that you could eat the chickweed, but Marek was too busy yanking up the big pigweeds—just ripping them out of the ground. I caught Tonio watching him. Then Tonio started doing it too, trying to go even faster. I almost laughed.

  In the afternoons we took them swimming. I only went with the girls of course. I taught Manola how to dog-paddle. Complimented Hanne on how far she could swim underwater. They splashed me and I splashed them back. It was amazing, really, in the middle of everything that was happening; to be in the middle of a group of laughing girls, in the water, in the sun.

  LUCY WAS right. On the way to Rivesaltes, Paquerette told me to be careful.

  She asked me questions. First about the police in Valence, then the soldiers. I wasn’t supposed to notice I was being interrogated, I guess. Then she took a deep breath, and I braced.

  “Magali,” she asked, looking in my eyes, “were you afraid of these men?”

  I blinked. I had absolutely no idea what to say.

  “I … I guess so. At first. I don’t know, I mostly thought about what to do. Like keeping Marek away from them. He was drawing way too much attention to himself. He’s got to learn not to be so scared, i
t puts him in more danger.”

  “Mm.” Paquerette looked out the train window. We were deep in the south by then, riding past lavender fields, line after line of deep purple. It was hot. “Fear isn’t a bad thing, though, Magali. In right measure.”

  My heart sank. I’d given her the wrong answer.

  “Marek, for instance. I would guess he has excellent reasons to be afraid of German soldiers. Our convalescents here may have no intention in the world of doing us harm, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to treat them as safe. I’d say Marek is just as afraid of them as he needs to be. But he does need to learn to hide rather than run.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I see.”

  She turned to me. “You know, people are always saying, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ That may have been good advice once, but not now. When there’s really something to fear it’s foolish not to. I don’t stifle my fear, Magali. It makes me think of all the possibilities, before I make a decision.”

  I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were dark.

  “I’m afraid all the time, Magali,” she said in a lower voice. “I’m afraid every time I walk into a camp, and more when I walk out with the children. I am afraid of being arrested. I am afraid of being shot. I am horribly, deathly afraid of one of the children under my care being arrested and taken back. Or deported. Or worse.”

  Neither of us spoke. The train went clack-clack over its rails. Clack-clack, clack-clack. The fields ran by outside the window: purple, green, green, purple, gold. The gold was colza in bloom; they grow it for oil. I thought of the oil bottle at home, of pouring a little into the frying pan and chopping up an onion—one more weary day, one more meal for my family, in the exhausted days before the spring had come. I thought of what people don’t know about each other. How easy it is to think someone’s a child, when you haven’t seen their real life. I thought about how I was sitting on a train listening to Paquerette praise fear. After standing at the foot of the l’Espoir stairs listening to Nina do the exact same thing.

  So they were going to make me prove myself a second time. Fine. I gritted my teeth, and looked out at the fields, and vowed to be a quiet, gray little mouse. Like Nina.

  I hated Nina.

  WHEN I walked in the gates of Rivesaltes for the third time, I bent my head submissively to the armed guard, and murmured, “Merci, Monsieur” as he clanged the gate behind us. I did what I was told. I walked into dark, hot, stinking barracks and walked out of them with children who should never have had to see them, and at the block gate I was polite to the man with the gun.

  We got a ride into the village behind a tractor. We had to share the wagon with another group—a woman taking five kids to some children’s home run by a Jewish organization. We scrambled up into the dusty wagon bed littered with cabbage leaves, and the kids didn’t miss a beat. When the engine roared into life and we jolted away from Rivesaltes, they were all chewing.

  We sat huddled together, our sweaty clothes sticking to the wagon sides and to each other. I had two little girls in my care, and a boy who limped from a cut foot. Paquerette had two more kids plus three Polish fifteen-year-olds. Just barely making it out. They won’t release boys older than that—no matter where they’re from—in case they go join the German army. I have to wonder what goes through those people’s heads.

  Halfway there the engine coughed and thumped and died. We heard clanging and a few unprintable words from up front, and then a hand banging on the high wooden sides of our wagon. “Can I get some help out here?” We all looked at each other, then at the boys. The boys looked at each other. Paquerette looked at me. I sighed, and got out.

  The farmer frowned at me, then shrugged. “Hold up the hood,” he said. “Here, use this rag, the metal’s hot.” It was heavy. He rummaged inside the engine, then in a toolbox, muttering to himself “I should know better” and “Don’t know how long I can keep running this thing.” He had a thick Provençal accent. Finally he glanced at me. “Young lady, I don’t suppose …” Then he froze, his eyes on the road. A cloud of dust was approaching. An open-topped automobile, with two uniformed men in it.

  The farmer spat on the ground. “Les boches,” he said.

  “Here?” My voice came out too high.

  “They inspect that camp. That camp was for foreigners and Communists and enemy sympathizers, that’s what they told us. Now we got the boches themselves inspecting it. It smells.”

  I glanced at his tractor. He followed my gaze. “They have to eat, don’t they?” he snapped.

  The German automobile slowed. My heart sped up. It stopped, and the man in the passenger seat snapped out, “Was ist los?”

  Yeah. We were supposed to know German now.

  “Well, Monsieur, I just made a delivery to Camp Joffre there, and my tractor’s broken down. I don’t suppose you might have—”

  The man lifted a hand. “Stop. Repeat. Slower.”

  I saw his eyes flash a little, but he tried. Provençal people aren’t really good at talking slow, I’ve noticed. The German frowned. I looked at the long, hot, dusty road ahead and I thought of Joseph with the cut foot and—

  “Excuse me, Monsieur.” Shut up, stupid! screamed my mind. “Maybe I can explain?”

  The German gave me a little smile. “And from where have you come, mein schönes Mädchen?”

  I’m not your pretty girl. I’m an idiot. There are ten Jewish kids in that wagon. They’re legal. Legal. I didn’t look at the wagon. I waved my hand toward a dusty side road. “I live that way. My mother has sent me into town. This man asked for help, and so I am helping him.”

  “Ah, and so perhaps he will give you a ride? Yes? You will give this young lady a ride?”

  “Sure, Monsieur.”

  “So now.” The man smiled at me again. He was tall and blond and he looked at me like I was put on earth for him to look at. I didn’t like him. “What does he need?”

  He needed a rope or a strip of canvas. To replace the fan belt. I told them that in slow, simple French. They found a piece of tough cord in the back of his automobile that lit the farmer’s eyes right up. “Merci, Messieurs, now that’ll do.”

  “No need to thank me, it is only for la jolie fille here.” He looked at me expectantly.

  I made myself look him in the eye, and smile. “Thank you very much, Monsieur.”

  He winked at me.

  I held the hood up for the farmer while he fixed the engine. Then I walked back to the wagon to meet my fate.

  IT DIDN’T come till the next day. It was a tough evening. Almost all the kids were sick. One of the girls threw up her supper. Joseph’s foot was infected, which honestly we had expected; I washed it and helped Madame Alençon press out and disinfect the cut and put on a clean bandage. One of the girls had an infection that made her yell with pain whenever she used the bathroom. Another kid wet the bed. I pulled the wet sheets off and balled them up in the corner to sit till morning, and went groggily back to my bed. The next day was basically more of the same. I can still see that tiny train bathroom; I saw it so many times.

  It wasn’t till Montélimar, when we’d settled the group down on a couple of benches for two hours’ wait for the local train to la Voulte, that Paquerette had time for the Talk.

  “Magali, why did you speak to those soldiers?”

  I swallowed. “I was already out there. I just thought it … it would help.” I motioned toward Joseph. He would’ve had to walk. Oh Paquerette, you won’t fire me for helping, will you? “I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

  She blinked. “You’re sorry?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. It was stupid. I won’t do it again.”

  “Not stupid, but rather incautious. I’m concerned about the pattern I’m seeing here.” A chill went down my spine. “Don’t trust your cleverness with these men, Magali. They are the masters of this country, and they are very dangerous. With them you are never in control.”

  I turned away so she wouldn’t see the word control go through me like a knife.


  Joan of Arc was speaking to me, and all I could hear was Nina. Nina’s words. It was a terrible feeling, like a void opening up beneath my feet; a cold voice whispering, You will lose everything. I swallowed. The words came to me instantly, without thought.

  “It’s true, Paquerette. I know. I was really scared.”

  I watched her face; it opened. Her eyebrows slightly rising, her serious gray eyes growing just a shade wider. You do understand. I’ve misjudged you, said the look on Paquerette’s face, as I watched her believe my lie.

  THE LOCAL train never showed up; we had to take the late express to Valence. Madame Moulin and Madame Chalmette gave us supper, and two of the kids threw up again. The whole milk was too rich for their starved stomachs. Joseph woke up crying in the night when someone rolled over onto his bad foot. We waited all morning in the train station with our sick kids. The local got there at noon. Problems with the track, they said.

  At least there were no Germans on la Galoche, on the last leg home.

  Mama met us. She hugged me, and took the littlest girl—still sick and subdued—from my arms and kissed her. “What’s her name?”

  “Sarah,” I whispered. My legs felt shaky.

  “Go home and lie down, Magali,” my mother said. “Rosa and I will take them.”

  I went home and lay down.

  WHEN I woke I had no idea what time it was. Bright slices of light came in through the chinks in my closed shutters. I got up and went downstairs. Mama was doing the breakfast dishes. I stood blinking in the morning light.

  “I didn’t wake you for supper. You looked so tired. You slept fifteen hours.”

  She sat me down and practically hand-fed me. She spread real butter on my bread, and real, precious raspberry jam. She watched me drink my glass of milk, her forehead furrowed with worry. It was very good milk. She poured me another. “Mama—”

  “Drink it,” she said.

  “Mama, did you have any headaches? While I was gone?”

  “Of course I had a headache,” she said almost roughly. “How do you feel? Are you still hungry? There’s more milk.”