by Heather Munn
It was Nina.
It was Nina and her eyes were wide with shock and anger. It was Nina staring at the guilt in my eyes and throwing back rage so hard it hit me like a fist. She swept me aside with her crutch and lunged past me to the door of the white room. She knew already. From my eyes.
She turned back to me in the doorway of the white room on her crutches, her green eyes blazing. “You,” she hissed. “You little sneak.”
I felt dizzy.
“If you tell anyone,” said Nina very quietly, “I will find a way to hurt you. This is a promise.”
I swallowed. Took a shallow breath. Not enough. Another. “You don’t need to promise that,” I said. I heard pleading in my voice. “I won’t tell. I’d never tell.”
Her eyes were cold on me. “You will say to yourself ‘I must never tell.’ Then one day you will want to look good to your friend. You will say, ‘I have a secret.’ She will say, ‘Oh, oh, please tell.’”
Forgery, Lucy had whispered in my ear.
“I … I’m so sorry, Nina.”
“Sorry does not save me.”
Her. It really was her. Dizzily for a moment my days in Marseille came back to me, the excitement and the sense of secrecy, the brave and secret people doing, at night behind locked doors, work that could get them shot. Nina. The world shifted around me. You really just don’t get it, do you, Magali? said a scornful voice inside me. It was the voice I hated.
It was right.
I swallowed. “You’re right. It doesn’t. But I am sorry. I came to give this to Mademoiselle Pinatel.” I held out the envelope, and the suspicion in her eyes was so unbearable I snapped. “I haven’t read it!” I took a breath. “I shouldn’t have looked. I don’t want to put you in danger. I’ll forget everything I saw. I promise. I … I swear. If I ever tell anyone, I … I hope God gets me arrested and shot.”
She was still staring at me. That anger and suspicion, that coldness, in her eyes. That un-Nina look, I would have called it months ago. But I didn’t know anything about Nina. I understood that now.
After a moment she said coolly, “Did you know about this before?”
“Before?”
“This summer. You said that your friend Lucy had told you a secret. Was it this?”
I swallowed. “Lucy told me someone was doing forgery. She didn’t say who.”
“Mademoiselle Fitzgerald,” Nina said bitterly. “Even her. You people, you think it is a game! You tell your friends, you tell your families! Magali, my brother does not know what I do. Do you understand? No one should know. No one. Now instead we have—” She started to count on her fingers and broke off with an angry gesture, as if flinging something away from her. She sagged on her crutch and looked at me wide-eyed. “Do you people not understand that we could die? That these children could die? You think they are safe because they are here?” She flung a hand at the window. “Do you see French tanks out there to defend us?”
I just looked at her. No. I don’t.
“That is why I cannot take back my promise,” she said quietly. “I am sorry. I cannot.”
I nodded. My stomach and chest felt tight, tight. My throat burned. “Threat,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s called a threat. When you promise to hurt someone.”
She looked at me, and didn’t say anything. She held out her hand, finally, for the envelope. I gave it to her.
“Well,” I said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
I turned and walked down the stairs. Above me I heard the door shut and lock.
I WENT home. What else could I do? I helped Mama make lunch, and I ate, and went to my room.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to go down to les Chênes and make sure Marek was okay. I wanted to go find that place by the river where God had talked to me in the wind and the grass. It seemed so far away already. It was too much. In the space of just two days. She’d threatened me. Nina. I couldn’t take it in. It’s not fair, God. This, now. I just started trying to be a better person. Yesterday. This morning. I just started. I lay sprawled on my bed, crying silently, tears slipping down onto the pillow. Words came into my head: I want to go home. It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t mean Paris. Not really.
I wanted to go home to the Time Before. The time when I couldn’t remember who was Chancellor of Germany and didn’t care. The time when you could trust the police, when secrets didn’t kill, when doing your best was good enough. When there were French tanks defending us …
I was like a child. I didn’t care. I wanted to be a child. Let someone else take the blame.
You think they’re safe because they’re here? Do you see French tanks out there defending us? No. I didn’t. No. No, I hadn’t saved those children’s lives. My work, our work, wasn’t done. Oh, Marek, Marek. Tell me you want a new name. I needed Nina. We all needed each other. If we didn’t do our work right, I hadn’t saved those children’s lives. I had only delayed their deaths.
I felt so tired.
Voices downstairs. Footsteps on the stairs up to the third floor, light feet down the hallway. A knock on my door.
I sat up cross-legged on the bed. Wiped my eyes as thoroughly as I could. “Come in.”
Rosa opened the door and stood in it, hesitating, her dark eyes meeting mine. She held a baby pressed against her chest. It was tiny, an infant, I’d never seen it before.
“Hi, Magali,” she whispered.
“Hi.” I looked at her, at the child. My stomach squeezed tight. It was like seeing her holding Zvi.
“You’re not a rotten friend,” Rosa whispered, and started crying. Tears running down her face, one hand behind the baby’s head, shaking a little. No. No. Rosa, stop crying. Don’t apologize to me, Rosa. Don’t … knuckle under. I didn’t know how to tell her. That no matter how much it hurt, what she’d done had made me respect her. That taking it back would be even worse.
After a moment I cleared my throat. “Um, yeah I am.”
Rosa laughed through her tears, hard. She wiped her face with her sleeve. I could see her smile flash out from behind it. Yeah. Yeah, like that.
“Is that the baby you brought home?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Yeah. I brought her to meet you.”
I put out a hand and stroked the fine, downy black hair. Her head was warm and soft under my fingers. She was deep asleep. “What’s her name?”
“Rosa.”
“Really?” I lifted my eyes. She looked happy. So happy.
“It’s spelled with a ‘z’.”
“Roza. Wow. She’s … beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
“Here, sit down. You … you want to go downstairs and have, you know, tea or anything?”
She shook her head. We sat on my bedspread, side by side. She rocked Roza. The child stirred, and her little lips made a sucking motion. So tiny. Live, child.
“Hey Rosa …” If you promised someone you’d never ever do something, and they didn’t trust you to never do it …
“Yeah?”
Then you never do it. That’s all. And she keeps believing every day that you’ll do it tomorrow. Quit kidding yourself, Magali.
“Nothing. I mean … I mean thanks for coming over.”
“Of course.”
Quit kidding yourself. Maybe that’s the way to be a better person.
Oh man. That doesn’t sound fun.
“Are you all right, Magali?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”
Chapter 15
The Thing That Had to Be Done
THEN CAME the winter. The winter of 1941.
It was worse than the winter of 1940. Which had been the worst in living memory. I don’t even know how to talk about it. Life changed. I thought it had changed before. And it had. But you don’t know, you just don’t know until it happens to you.
There was one thing, though. I knew what I was living for.
It was work and more work. Life becomes simple: keep everyone a
live. Warmth and food. They were scarce now. It was our job to make them last till spring.
Hauling firewood, hauling milk. Digging the last turnips and carrots. Grandpa let me eat the small misshapen ones—oh, the sweet cold crunch of them between my teeth, the sharp pain in my thawing fingers by the fire. Gutting chickens, pulling out the raw livers and feeling only hunger. Stoking fires, cooking bean soup with chicken bones in it, teaching Hanne and Aurélie how to mend their clothes, how to layer for warmth. Warmth and food.
Bringing children back from Rivesaltes.
There was a new desperation at the camp. Winter was coming. There was no heat in those awful barracks, no insulation. The rain poured in, ice-cold water pooled in and between the barracks, people walked in it in broken shoes or bare feet blue with cold. Hopeful eyes followed us; and desperate. Mothers put their thin children into my arms with nothing in their faces but relief. They felt heavy. Heavy with the weight of the unknown, of what Nina had said. We’ll try, Madame. I promise we’ll try.
Up on the plateau the cold bit deep, and deeper. The snow came up to my knees. My boot started to break, right where Madame Minkowski had mended it. Mending only goes so far, I guess.
Mending was all we had.
Mama lined the broken part of my boots with canvas. There wasn’t anything else. We sat by the radio all evening, me unraveling old sweaters and her knitting them into hats and scarves. Listening to censored war news, every night pulling our chairs closer to our little fire as the cold grew fiercer. Papa’d tell us the real news when Mama was in bed.
Grandpa gave me a sled, to get to les Chênes faster. I worked all day there—they gave me lunch for my pay. And good pay too; they had milk, and eggs. Sometimes even chocolate. Those Swiss were doing all right. The kids had energy, they ran and laughed, they threw snowballs. Even Marek, his black eyes intent on his aim. He was better, he was worse. He hadn’t spoken again. If you pushed him to, he’d withdraw, a fox disappearing into the thicket of himself; the spark would go out of those beautiful fierce black eyes of his, and he’d start kicking the furniture. My Marek. He still woke up screaming sometimes. Once he disappeared and I found him behind the toolshed crying in the snow. Just crying. I watched, out of sight, till he went back in.
I helped him with homework. He could write simple French now. I wrote him questions in the margins of his papers. Easy ones. Which do you like better, jam or chocolate? What’s your favorite game? Do you want to be the lion, in our skit this week?
Chocolate. Soccer. Yes.
THE DAYS got shorter. The cold deepened. It got worse, worse. The kids we brought out of Rivesaltes were thinner than ever, swollen bellies, dry skin, bleeding lips and sores. They took weeks to recover. Most of them went to the new homes that were opening up one by one—le Terrier, or Sous les Pins. At les Chênes we were full.
Paquerette came home to l’Espoir with her eyes burning, and said the police had come to CIMADE headquarters. Asking for addresses.
“Whose?”
“The addresses we’ve taken the children to.” Paquerette put a hand up at Madame Sabatier’s sharp intake of breath. “They didn’t get them. They went through the files for hours. My colleague foresaw it and worked out a secret record-keeping system. Thank God for her. Those men …” She swallowed. “They called our children ‘germs.’ Polluting the French countryside. I pretended not to understand, I said we give them baths.” She put her head in her hands. “I wanted to say some very unchristian things.”
“It’s not unchristian to be angry at this,” said Madame Sabatier quietly.
“No. But I can’t afford anger. It distracts.”
It was always the work, for Paquerette. Just get the kids home safe. Just do it.
Again and again and again.
Madeleine said slowly, “What do you think they wanted the addresses for?”
“I don’t know,” said Paquerette. “Nothing good.”
ROSA WAS my friend again. Nina wasn’t. Nina came for supper like before, and we pretended. Rosa came to see me when she could, and we sat by the fire and talked. No one sat on anyone’s bed anymore. No one sat any further from a fire than they could help. I finally asked her about Benjamin. She said she thought maybe he liked her, but she wasn’t sure she liked him back enough. She said she’d wished so bad that she could help him, and that she was glad about Lucy and the visa. I looked quickly at her, and she looked down.
“It took me a little while,” she whispered.
I squeezed her hand.
There was war news in December, news that made Papa run down from the attic where he hid his short-wave radio and call out to us. It was 36 degrees below zero in Moscow, he told us, his eyes bright as coals, and the Russians were true to form. They’d been burning their crops as the Germans advanced, they’d led them into a trap. Tough people, the Russians. The Germans were pinned down in front of Moscow, learning the hard way that history repeats itself. “I suppose they thought Napoleon failed because he was French,” said my father with a fierce grin.
Maybe there was hope.
I was tired all the time. Everyone was. The cold wears you out. At night I sat with my feet almost in the fire, till they were warm enough to crawl into my cold bed with. It took me longer and longer to get warm enough to fall asleep. I wore a wool hat to bed, made out of old sweaters. The same hat I wore everywhere else. There was a time I’d have thought that was embarrassing. That it made me look poor. I’d seen Rivesaltes five times since then.
Besides, we were all poor now.
More news. Papa pounded down the stairs while we were making supper, shouting that the Japanese had bombed America. I put down my knife and stared at him. America?
“Their biggest naval base. On the island of Hawaii. No warning—a massive attack—”
“Why?” said Julien.
“Well, it looks like they might want to start a war with them,” Papa said dryly.
I almost laughed.
“Isn’t Japan allied with Germany?” Julien said slowly.
“Yes,” said Papa quietly, but with such intensity my heart sped up.
“America’ll fight,” I breathed.
“Yeah.” It was Benjamin, his voice so bitter I jumped. “They’ll fight Japan. A world away. Someone just bombed the other side of the world, Magali. When it’s midnight there it’s noon here. That’s not hope. That’s nothing to do with us. The Americans won’t help us, they’ll defend themselves. Like everybody does.”
“You think the Russians defending themselves doesn’t help us?” said Julien.
“Lucy says the American president wants to help us,” I put in. “But most Americans didn’t want to get involved. They’re involved now.”
Papa gestured for quiet. “I think you’re right,” he said, “Julien, Magali. That’s why I came down to tell you. The Russians are draining Germany’s resources. The British have held out against them. And now the Americans, as you say, are involved. Remember this, Benjamin: this war is not over yet.”
“The Russians and the Brits and the Americans,” said Julien. “What’re we doing?”
There was a time I would’ve told Julien what I was doing. But I was trying to be a better person. I shut up.
THE AMERICANS declared war on Japan the next day. A few days later Germany declared war on the U.S.
The day after that, we heard Benjamin’s father was in Spain. In jail. Benjamin took it pretty well. He said better Spain than the Nazis any day.
Us? We went on trying to survive.
THE TRAIN was always crowded now. Ragged people, rich people, all those scared, hopeful eyes. It wasn’t strange, anymore, to hear Polish or German in the street. They came by ones and twos, or by families; they knew where they were going, or they were met; or they asked the way to the pastor’s house. Lucy was with us often at the station; she and Rosa stood beside each other, almost like friends. Lucy was there to report to Madame Alex on who was coming to her door, and to be sent round town to look for rooms
for them. She liked knocking on doors, she said, she liked talking to new people. She never said a word about forgery. Neither did I.
It got colder, and colder. It never stopped. Our December trip to Rivesaltes was like a trip into Hell.
Yes, it was south of us. But those barracks, people might as well have been sleeping outside. Oh, I can’t even talk about it. It makes me want to curse. The parents and kids huddling together under old blankets, making little fires in the barracks with roots and scraps of wood. The tramontane howling through the camp so hard people could hardly walk. Children out in it with bare legs and rags tied round their feet with string.
A woman sat in Marylise’s office and told me two kids in her barrack had died that week, and thanked me for taking her daughter and called me Mademoiselle, while I sat there feeling sick to my stomach. We took ten kids on that trip. I didn’t complain about my feet after that, or the hunger, or the beans and the bad bread day after day. I’d met people who’d kill for a plateful of beans and barley bread. Maybe literally. I’m not sure I would have blamed them.
We went on. We washed children and fed them and carried them and bandaged the places where they bled. I watched Paquerette’s gray eyes grow blank and weary and full of pain. I watched them snap open when a child cried or wandered, I watched her give what she didn’t have left to give. I did what I could. Sometimes when I got home I cried; I was so tired and my feet hurt so bad with the cold.
One day in church a strange thing happened. I was nodding off; it’s warm there, with so many bodies close together, and I get sleepy. We were doing communion. We don’t do it often, in the Reformed church. I’d never taken it since my confirmation; Papa told me not to unless I knew what it meant. So I didn’t. I closed my eyes and listened to Pastor Alex’s deep voice. I was so tired.
And then Pastor Alex said, “This is my body, broken for you,” and I started to cry.
I didn’t understand why. But it made me think of Paquerette. It made me think of the time I saw her cry. Of sleeping on a train station floor. Of her weary, weary eyes. It made me think of going on, and beans for lunch and beans for supper, and broken boots and the pain in your feet when you warm them by the fire, and the brightness in Marek’s dark eyes. I wiped my cheeks and looked straight ahead of me, hoping no one noticed. Words came into my mind: Is it really? Is it? I almost went up with the others. But it was too late. They had gone.