by Heather Munn
“Mama, I can’t just drink three—”
“You can and you will.” She grabbed the half-full glass from me and went to the icebox to fill it up. Her hands shook. She put the glass in front of me and then suddenly she had me in her arms, my head against her belly, shaking. “My daughter,” she whispered. “My daughter.”
I didn’t fight her. She was holding me so hard. I remembered clutching Léon to my chest in the l’Espoir nursery, just that hard, as I heard a cry from the next room. I remembered Zvi’s gasping breaths. My heart turned over inside me. “Mama,” I whispered. I didn’t know how to say what I felt. Mama, I know.
“My daughter,” my mother said softly. “I am so proud of you.”
I SPENT the morning lying on the sofa and reading. I was that tired. When I walked down to l’Espoir in the afternoon, Paquerette was barely awake. She said she wanted to talk to me. She said she needed to get out of the house. She drank a last gulp of her tea, rubbed her face, and took me outside, down toward the path by the river. We didn’t speak for a while. Then she turned to me.
“Would your parents let you travel to Marseille? If you went with Eva and Pastor Alex?”
“Marseille?”
She nodded. “There’s news. Léon’s mother is free, and she wants him. She and her husband have visas to Brazil.”
I stopped and stared at her. “Free?” I couldn’t help myself; I grabbed her and hugged her. “Brazil? Really? Free?”
She hugged me back and then put me at arm’s length, laughing. Her eyes were bright. “You’re good for my heart, Magali,” she said. She blinked. I realized the brightness was tears. A strange lump rose in my throat.
We were at the footpath by the river now. Paquerette sat down on a bench, rubbed her hands hard against her face. “I’m going home,” she said.
“Home?”
“My director’s making me. For two weeks.” Her voice lowered. “I haven’t seen my parents in almost a year.”
I stared at her. “A year?”
She made a jerky, half-finished gesture. “We … I don’t know if we’re on good terms.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “The last time I saw them, my father made a last attempt to … dissuade me. From my work. He told me we were fools and children playing in the trenches. Oh yes, and that Pétain was an honorable man. And then I raised my voice to him for the first time in my life and my mother started to cry. And then I walked out, and went to the barn to cry, myself, and talk to the cow.” She gave me a sideways glance. “Paquerette. I named myself after her.”
I pictured her—Paquerette, Joan of Arc—leaning against a barn wall in the dark, crying.
“That wasn’t the very last time I saw them. But close.” She took a long, deep breath, and let it out slowly. “My father’s a retired officer. He served under Marshal Pétain in the last war. It gives him a certain point of view on things, you see. But they’re good people, for all of that. They’ve always given me the best they had.”
I looked at her.
“I’m afraid, Magali.” She said it very low. “I’m afraid to go.”
The sun came out, and glanced blindingly off the water. I had no idea what to say.
“I’m at the end of my strength,” said Paquerette. “It’s been so long since I’ve felt … all right. They’ll see that. They’ll see how much I need them. They’ll say, ‘Stay.’ Because they want to give me the best they have. And I. Can’t. Stay.” She turned her eyes on me fierce as a hawk’s.
I would have done anything for her. My Joan of Arc.
But I had no idea what to do.
I wanted to say, You are strong. She was everything I knew about strength, this woman with the deep, quick gray eyes and the spine of steel. She was always ready, always. From the day I met her, she was always ready, no matter how weary she was, to stand up straight and do what had to be done.
But I looked at her, at the dark circles around her fierce eyes and I thought, Everybody breaks sometime. I thought. She’s not God. I looked down at my empty hands.
She sat looking out at the running water. There were tears in her eyes.
A breeze rose, sending us cool air from over the water. Strands of hair blew around Paquerette’s face. She breathed it in, deep, deep, and slowly she straightened. She sat perfectly still for a moment. Then she turned to me with her gray Paquerette eyes: kindness and irony and sorrow and strength. Just like always. I don’t know how she did it.
“Well,” she said. “Let’s go see if your parents will let you start Léon on his journey to Brazil.”
IT WAS all arranged. I’d leave for Marseille in a week. I’d travel down with Pastor Alex and with Eva, who was going to see her French aunt in Aix-en-Provence. She’d actually sent Eva her French cousin’s papers to travel on so she’d be safe. They had a family for me stay with, too—the same American that Lucy was still staying with. Lucy.
I would also see Benjamin’s parents. This American we’d be staying with worked for the American Friends Service Committee, getting people visas to leave the country. Trying to get hundreds of people out. Benjamin’s parents were on the list.
Benjamin got jumpier than ever when he heard we were going to see them. My parents suggested I could take them a letter from him, and he nodded and then he just shut down. Looking at nothing. Every now and then for the rest of the day he would look at me—stare at me—then turn suddenly away.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The night before I left we got terrible news. Papa heard it from Pastor Alex. There’d been a round-up in Paris—police going round the city specifically to arrest Jewish men. Foreign Jewish men, Papa said. “That seems to be the line they are drawing. As if they believe the French people won’t resist as long as their own aren’t threatened.” He ran his hand through his hair. It shook. “I hope to God they’re wrong.”
Benjamin just turned and walked out.
It was past eleven that same night—I was still packing—when I heard a quiet knock on my door. It was him. Benjamin. His face was pale and his eyes were red and he had that intense look of his—I almost couldn’t look. “Magali,” he said. He was breathing hard. “I need you to do something for me. I need you to promise.”
I swallowed. “What?”
“When you see my parents—well, give them this letter.” He pulled out a sealed envelope. “But that’s not the favor. I … you know my mother’s sick.”
I nodded.
“I—” He was forcing his words out, visibly straining. They came in a rush. “I think they’re lying to me. About how bad she is. When you see my mother, Magali, find out. Find out how badly she’s sick and then come home and tell me the truth. Please. Please promise me, Magali.” Tears were streaming down his face.
I swallowed. Nodded. My heart was beating fast. “Yeah. Yeah, Benjamin—I promise.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. He turned around and walked out, closing my door quietly. I heard his footsteps, unsteady, as he walked down the hall.
I put the letter in my bag.
Chapter 12
Control
EVA LOOKED so different now. Clean, calm, her skin and eyes healthy, her hair in a neat braid. I’d barely seen her since Rivesaltes, where her eyes had been red and running. On the train she took turns holding Léon, while Pastor Alex read. It wasn’t till Avignon, where we spent the night, that we got a chance to talk.
Pastor Alex took us on a walk around the city after supper. Through the medieval part of town, the streets winding and narrow with the last light of sunset above them. Léon lay asleep in my arms. We walked through a turreted gate in the old city walls, to the edge of the wide Rhône River, flowing like a dark, smooth ribbon in the dusk. The most amazing ancient stone bridge stood over half of it, with a tiny chapel perched on one of its pilings near one end, the rest of the bridge sweeping its long stone arches across the river until the half-way point where it suddenly cut off short. A flood, Pastor Alex said. No
one had crossed that bridge in three hundred years. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, like a boy, and wandered off down the bank.
“Gives me the creeps,” said Eva after a moment.
“What does?”
She gestured at the broken bridge. “You ever think about how things can just break like that? The world can just … break.”
“It must not have been built right.”
“Neither’s the world.”
“Eva?”
“Mm?”
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“Mannheim.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“We didn’t. They shipped us out. Arrested us and shoved us into a train, fifty to a car. I was with my grandmother. We were locked in there four days, no one told us anything. Then they open it up, and there’s Gurs.”
“You were on one of those trains?”
She shrugged and nodded, looking at the water.
“They told us—Vichy tried to send them back—they just left them sitting there for days …”
“At least my grandmother got out of Gurs. In a coffin.”
I looked at her. “You mean—”
Her mouth twitched a little. “My aunt bribed the guards who were carrying out the coffins. My grandmother’s fine. She’s in Aix with my aunt now. I was lucky,” she said evenly, looking at the ruined bridge. “A lot of the old people on that train died.”
I shivered in the warm night wind.
THE NEXT morning Lucy met us in Marseille, with a tall American who shook my hand as if I were a boy. Lucy! The same old Lucy with her grin and her sudden laugh. We sat in the back of Monsieur Lawrence’s automobile and laughed and shouted over the roar of the gazogène engine. “Lucy!” I yelled. “You want to come with me to look for Madame Blocher?”
“Sure!” she shouted back, but I had to read her lips because the engine roared up even louder than before and Léon finally cracked and started screaming at the top of his lungs. We both started giggling helplessly, looking at each other, wiping tears out of our eyes, each of us not even hearing the other laugh.
MARSEILLE HAD even twistier streets than Avignon, some of them, and near the old port they smelled like fish, fish, fish. Tanned men swabbing the decks of fishing boats or mending nets; seagulls crying and diving, people calling in twanging Marseillais accents. Lucy and I walked for two hours trying to find the address Paquerette had given us. Lucy was jittery. Said she wanted to show me something later, then clammed up. Léon was whiny, squirming in my arms. Brazil, kid. You’re going to Brazil. I’d never see him take his first step now. He’d take it on another continent.
A woman was running toward us along the quay, shouting and crying. Suzanne Blocher, her braid flying behind her and her face lit with joy. I held out Léon, and she grabbed him to her breast.
Léon started to cry.
Madame Blocher’s face fell. Léon held out his arms to me. I started talking fast.
“It’s only that he didn’t have his nap, Madame, he’s been fussy this whole afternoon—every time one of us picked him up he wanted the other.” Lucy, who hadn’t carried him even once, gave me a look.
Madame Blocher straightened, and looked at me. “It’s been five months,” she said quietly. “He doesn’t remember me. I should have known.” She stroked the silky top of her son’s head as his crying died down to a whimper, her eyes bleak. All her joy gone. “Sh, sh, mon bébé. Thank you,” she said to me. “I don’t remember your name.”
“Magali.”
“Thank you, Magali. Will you thank the people who cared for him?”
I nodded.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispered. “He’s gained so much weight.”
I pulled a folded photograph out of my pocket and held it out to her. “I thought you’d want this back,” I said. She took it, swallowed, and nodded.
Lucy held out the bag she’d been carrying. “There’s a bottle in here, and a few diapers and stuff. You should take it,” she added. “It’s donated, and I’m not carrying it for another minute, so if you don’t want it I’m giving it to a sailor.”
Suzanne Blocher laughed, and took it. Léon started to cry again. She kissed him on the forehead. She said goodbye, and we watched her walk away down the quay, carrying her crying son.
AFTER SUPPER at the Lawrences’ Lucy showed me up to her little guestroom under the eaves. She lay down on her bed and I flopped down on the sleeping pallet they’d made me on the floor with blankets and pillows, and she said, “Magali, I don’t want to go to America.”
“Um, wow. Earth-shattering new revelation.”
She picked up a piece of paper and sailed it at me. “No. For real. Did you ever think of just … doing what you want to do? No matter what they say?”
“You mean like my trips? I couldn’t.” I glanced at the paper. “Lucy … This is in English!”
“Oh,” she huffed, and took it back. “Okay: ‘Dear Lucy, I decided to drag you to America to live with me, but it turns out you can’t, because they just kicked me up to front-line war correspondent and I’m leaving for Egypt a couple of weeks after you arrive. But hey, I already got you a visa and anyway adults hate to ever back down so I found an American family you never met in your life for you to live with instead. Too bad, so sad, your dad.’”
“It doesn’t say that!”
“Yeah it does. A lot more nicely. But pretty much that.”
“Egypt?”
“Yeah. He’s wanted this since forever. So that’s great. Except for the whole living with strangers thing. And Magali—look at this.”
VISA, I read. “What am I looking at?” Name Lucy Irene Fitzgerald, nationality Irish, date of birth 1901—
“Hey, Lucy.”
“Yeah.”
“How come it says you’re forty?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Can you even use this?”
“Well, do I look like I’m forty?” After just the slightest pause she added, “Don’t answer that,” and my laughter came out in a loud snort and for the next half minute or so we were rolling around on our blankets laughing. It was so darned good to be with Lucy.
“So what’re you gonna do?” I finally asked.
“I have the craziest idea.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll—I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
I rolled my eyes.
THE NEXT day Benjamin’s parents came to visit. The Kellers. I’d only met them once. All I really remembered was that they were short and plump.
Well, they were still short.
Madame Keller looked … withered. Pale, with dark circles around her sunken eyes. She spoke in a near-whisper, and went into spasms of coughing, so hard she lost her voice for a while. Bad, helpless coughing, like there was stuff in her chest she couldn’t get out.
Benjamin was right. It came out gradually: their apartment was drafty and cold and the winter had been awful for her, and Monsieur Keller was worried sick. They couldn’t get a better place—no money, no job—it was too dangerous. They couldn’t come back to Tanieux with us, that was too dangerous too, their papers could get checked on the train. They’d had a close call last time they’d dared to go to a hospital. They were scared. If she got worse, they’d have to decide again which thing to risk: dying in an internment camp or dying at home.
Seriously.
Just because they weren’t citizens. Like Suzanne Blocher. Just because what Vichy wanted from anyone who wasn’t a citizen and had the gall to be Jewish on top of that was to clear out of the country or else come with us, Monsieur, Madame, don’t mind the barbed wire.
And they were trying to clear out of the country. They were trying real hard.
But all this came out gradually. What they really wanted to talk about was Benjamin. I gave them his letter. Told them he was top of his class and stuff. I said he was worried about Madame Keller, which I shouldn’t have, because it made her cry.
And then we end
ed up talking about visas. Visas, visas, what everyone in Marseille wanted. Monsieur Keller’s shoulders sagged just talking about it. Monsieur Lawrence sighed a lot. I asked if they had tried Brazil, and they said yes. And then Lucy started asking questions.
She asked Monsieur Lawrence what papers you needed to show with your visa when you traveled. He said your passport. She asked what would happen if your carte d’identité didn’t match your passport. He raised his eyebrows and explained carefully that all of a person’s papers needed to match. Any other way was much too risky.
I looked at her, and she had this look. This look like a taut bowstring. Ready to fly.
“WHAT ON earth was that about?”
Lucy sat at the desk in our little attic room, chewing on the end of a pen as if she was planning to swallow. She made a note instead of answering me. A fierce light was in her eyes. “What do you think, Magali? Think she can pass for forty?”
The light dawned. The crazy, crazy light. “You’re insane.”
“Toldja you’d laugh.”
But I wasn’t laughing. “D’you think she could?” Oh, Benjamin.
“How old is she for real?”
“I don’t know. She has a seventeen-year-old kid.”
“So maybe forty. She looks old. But who doesn’t these days? I think she’ll pass. But she needs the full set. Birth certificate, ration card, carte d’identité, passport—can you think of anything else?”
“Where’re you gonna get those?”
She turned and looked at me with that light in her eye. “I don’t know, Magali. But I’ll bet you fifty American dollars that Monsieur Lawrence does.”
MONSIEUR LAWRENCE looked at Lucy, then at me. “Well,” he said.
We sat in his office on lumpy chairs, between file cabinets, among piles and piles of forms. Monsieur Lawrence had been a refugee from the north a year ago, on the roads being shot at with everyone else. Now he was the head of the Society of Friends’ aid office in Marseille, and getting refugees out of the country was what he did.