by Heather Munn
“And then?” I whispered, afraid.
He lifted his eyes. “That’s the end of the bad part. I think she might want to tell you the rest herself.”
“Herself?”
“She wants to see you. She’ll be here till Monday.”
“And then …”
“She’s going home.”
Home. It was like the world slowed down around me. I was still shaking. A weight like a stone was in my stomach. “Is she quitting?” I whispered.
My father looked at me as if he wondered what on earth went through my head. “Of course she is,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“Now don’t go bothering her tomorrow morning before eight o’clock, all right?”
“I won’t,” I said. I barely heard him. My stomach was already balling itself into a steel-hard knot.
I didn’t go to sleep until three in the morning.
I WOKE before dawn. Wide awake. I dressed silently, got my coat, and slipped outside.
Everything was quiet. It was cold, the streets were muddy. I walked down to the edge of town, to the Tanne. It was lower now, still deep, but the water was clear in the faint starlight. I shivered. There’s a little chapel there by the river, that Grandpa says is as old as this town: four hundred years. I pushed the door open and went in.
It was pitch dark inside. I groped and hit a stone bench. But I couldn’t sit down. After a moment I lay down full-length on the stone floor. It was cold and hard against my face and body. I pressed my forehead into it as hard as I could. I wanted to scream. I wanted to die. I wanted to be someone else, someone who’d never held such power in her hands as I’d held in mine. I wanted to scream that they hadn’t told me, they hadn’t told me I could try to do so much good and do so much harm; but they had. I knew they had.
I put my hands behind me, wrists crossed as if they were tied. I lay with my face against the stone floor, the mass of cold rock seeping warmth from my body. It didn’t hurt enough. I pressed my cheek against the stone till the raw scrape under the bandage pulsed with pain. I told God he could do what he wanted to me, I didn’t care. He didn’t need to forgive me. I didn’t deserve it. I wasn’t even sure what good it would be if he did.
My arms started to ache. My teeth chattered from the cold, and I clenched my jaw. I felt numbness, and a strange drifting feeling.
Then I think I went to sleep.
When I woke, my arms were flat beside me on the floor, and there was light outside. Dawn light. I got up and went outside, and walked down the riverbank to get warm. The river was clear, throwing back the pale blue of the sky. Smooth now and pretty, hiding the depths underneath. But that river, I knew it now. Last fall it had spoken, joined in the voice of the whole world around, and said God didn’t hate me. And this spring that same river had risen up and tried to kill.
God never promised any of us would make it, I thought. I should’ve known that with Zvi.
God never promised my mistakes would never hurt anyone I loved, either. God never promised any of that.
He hadn’t promised Paquerette would come back. He hadn’t even promised she would live.
But she was there, up that hill, probably in l’Espoir kitchen right now finishing breakfast. She was there up that hill, the person I admired most in the world, the person I owed a debt to that I could never repay. And not one of those nice debts. A debt in blood.
I stood looking out at the clear, lovely, treacherous river, watching the sunlight strengthen on it, watching the little ripples shine as if nothing was wrong. Life does that to you. It shines, like that, on a spring morning, it lets you imagine God’s promised that stuff. Your parents do it to you too, sometimes, I think. Mama didn’t want me to see the camps. Didn’t want me to know that that existed, in the world.
I regret a lot of stuff. But I don’t regret seeing those camps.
I stood there looking at the Tanne, and behind me I could feel a pull. Paquerette was there, up that hill. Alive. Healing.
Waiting for me.
I turned and started up the hill.
SHE WAS sitting in the Sabatiers’ living room. My stomach was a tight hard ball. I was glad I hadn’t eaten anything. She rose to greet me, gave me a bise with her hands holding my shoulders. I couldn’t look at her. She offered me tea. I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. A child’s wail came from the nursery.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
There’s this way Rosa walks into a room if she’s afraid she’s not wanted there. It always drove me nuts. That’s how I walked into Paquerette’s room. I almost couldn’t go in at all. She offered me a chair. I just stood there.
“Magali,” she said. Just that, and she looked at me. I couldn’t force my voice through my clogged throat. “Magali,” she said again. “Are you all right?”
I shook my head. I swallowed hard, and then my head snapped up and the words came out. “I’m so sorry, Paquerette. I’m so, so sorry. I wish I’d never done it. I wish they’d arrested me instead.”
“Do you really wish that?” Her voice was quiet and hard. I saw myself being handcuffed. I saw myself being strapped to a pole. I shuddered. I saw the still, longsuffering face of that quiet, quiet baby in my arms.
“Not with Trina,” I whispered. “I know, I know I put her in danger and you were right to do it but you shouldn’t have had to suffer for me. You shouldn’t have had to get …” My eyes went down to her feet again. I forced the word through my throat in a whisper. “Tortured.”
I felt her step close to me, put her hands on my shoulders. “Look at me,” she said. I couldn’t look at her eyes for more than a moment. Like the sun. “Magali,” she said, “I forgive you.”
I’d like to tell you I felt better then. I’d like to say I started crying tears of release. I didn’t.
Paquerette was a good person. The best person I knew. Of course she forgave me. What I’d been afraid of was something else, something as inevitable as the sun.
It didn’t change anything about what had happened. What I’d done.
“Magali, look at me.” I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it. “Magali, what’s wrong?”
“It’s over,” I whispered. “Isn’t it?”
Her grip on my shoulders grew stronger. I looked up. There were tears in her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “It is over.”
I started crying too. Hopelessly. “I ruined everything,” I whispered. “It’s all my fault.” A sob caught me in the chest and brought me up short. I couldn’t treat her to the kind of craziness that had come over me at Lucy’s house. It wouldn’t be fair. I made myself breathe.
“Did your father tell you, then …?”
“What?”
“That I’m wanted?”
Fear stabbed through me. “You are?”
“Oh, they don’t want me very much.” The briefest flash of an ironic smile. “But … officially …”
It was worse than I’d thought. “They didn’t release you? Are you—in danger?”
“They’re not looking for me. But I’ve been advised never to go back to Valence.”
“What … are you going to do?”
“Do?” She let out a hard breath. “Magali, I’m not going to be able to do anything, for a while. I’m going home.”
“Oh.” I bent my head.
“I suppose I needed a rest,” she said quietly. I could hear the undercurrent in her voice.
“I’m so sorry.” My voice was raw. The tears started to flow again.
“Magali,” she whispered. “Magali.” She put an arm round my shoulder. Her having to comfort me, for what I had done to her. “Magali,” she said again, “I forgive you.”
I started to sob.
There was nothing, nothing that would ever make this all right. There were children waiting for her in Rivesaltes and she would never come. Babies losing weight like Zvi had. People might die for what I’d done.
And she held me, while I cried for that.
You can only cry for so long. Your body quits, after a while. This time was shorter than the time before. There wasn’t any relief or anything. I just stopped.
Paquerette still had her arm around my shoulder. “Magali,” she said softly. “Did your father tell you what happened to me in there?”
“He told me they … they …”
“I mean after that.”
I shook my head.
And so she told me.
Chapter 20
Hard Bread
THE DAY after the belts and the coat tree—Saturday—Paquerette woke when someone shook her by the shoulder. She screamed with the pain. A huge dark silhouette stood over her. She tried to crawl away from him with her hands still bound behind her. She fell, and started to cry with wild wrenching sobs. It was going to start all over again.
He turned on the light. It was the night guard. He’d brought breakfast.
It took her awhile to calm down. He soothed her. He swore under his breath when he saw she was still tied—the only thing he ever said against the other police. He cut her ropes and massaged her numb hands. He gave her hot, sweet tea and hot cereal, chatting pleasantly to her as if he were a nurse. He brought her a comb and a piece of mirror to fix her hair.
She cried, telling me that. She’d spent two days being treated like a piece of furniture to be pushed around, and he was treating her like a woman. Someone with feelings, who cared what she looked like. Who could decide for herself when she felt strong enough to stand.
He rubbed balm on her wrists and ankles. She asked questions. She’d kept two teams busy for an eight-hour shift each, he said. No, they wouldn’t come to work on a Saturday. She had the day off. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t talked. She didn’t seem like someone with secrets. But she must know her own business, he said.
The day off.
She slept. Someone brought her lunch, and then she slept some more. When she woke, she lay there just enjoying being free, able to move her body. Then she started to think about tomorrow.
She wasn’t free. They would come again. And again. And again …
She was crying a little when the next policeman came in. He was very young. He stood there frozen and awkward, a tray in his hands. She wiped her eyes and took it from him. It was bread and hot milk. She asked if it was supper. No, he said, a snack. He stood and looked at the wall till she was done.
A snack? To a prisoner under interrogation? Were they building her up to break her down again? She thought of flies in spiders’ webs, calves being fattened. She cried some more.
She was sitting with her head on her knees, thinking of nothing, when the voice came. It was dark by then, with only a line of light under her door.
The voice said: Paquerette, what are you afraid of?
It was a voice in her head, I guess. A voice like the one I heard that one time. Only in the dark.
She looked up. There was nothing. It asked again. What are you afraid of?
So she told it. Told God, I guess.
She was afraid of not being strong enough. Of putting me and the kids in danger.
She was afraid that was exactly what she would do. She would crack. Because they had her, and she was helpless. They could keep doing this forever if they chose.
The tears came to her eyes, telling me. I cried too.
After that she slept again. The night guard took her to the kitchen at supper time. He was worried about her; the other policeman had told him she’d been crying. He asked how much pain she was in. She shook her head.
“You’ve taken very good care of me. I feel much better.”
“Then why do you cry?”
She looked at him. “In my position, would you be able to forget about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” He sounded surprised. “Mademoiselle, tomorrow’s Easter Sunday! They’re not going to do anything they don’t have to do on Easter Sunday!”
She had completely forgotten.
Back in her cell, she sat cross-legged against the wall, her head resting on it, thinking about that, in the darkness and the silence. Thinking of the darkness and the silence in that tomb, on Easter morning just before dawn. She closed her eyes. The feeling grew on her—somehow—that someone was in the cell with her. Physically.
She opened her eyes, and she saw. Like seeing something invisible, she said—seeing and not seeing. Like a thing in your mind’s eye so vivid it takes its place among real things in the world.
A slab of stone in the dark corner. A body on it wrapped in cloth. Outlined in shadow, in the dim light from under the door.
She felt shy. Like she was trespassing. She had no right to be in his tomb, it was too personal, too private.
The silent voice spoke again. No, it said, you have a right. They shut you in here, you can’t get out. You have a right.
She started to cry.
She thought of being strapped to that coatrack, how it felt. The pain, and the thing that was worse than pain: being helpless in the hands of people who don’t care about you. Who aren’t interested in your pain.
She cried, and she told him, I know. I know. The words echoed back to her in the tomb.
I know.
After a while she saw an odd change in the body. A subtle shifting of the cloth over the mouth. A slight, slow lift and fall.
She laughed, telling me this. Self-consciously. She wasn’t that type of person, she said, seeing visions and all. Maybe she’d gone off her head from the stress. But it felt so strange. So real.
A light appeared over the body. Like a candle—then it grew. It lit up the cell. She threw an arm over her eyes as it grew blinding. Something was moving, there in the corner—someone—
The cell door opened. The image vanished in the pale glare from the naked bulb in the hall.
It was quite an anticlimax, she said.
A policeman stood in the doorway. The one who had broken the rules to feed her during the interrogation, with her hands still tied. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s late.”
She almost laughed. “Come in,” she said lightly. “Do sit down.”
His mouth quirked in a sad smile. He took off his hat and sat down on the floor with her. He asked her if she knew what a stir she had caused in that police station.
She didn’t know.
No one knew what to make of her, he said. No one believed, anymore, that she was a criminal or had any ties to the young man. “But they don’t understand why you refused to talk about your work. They went pretty far with you—farther than they’re used to going, to be honest, with a woman. They couldn’t figure out who you were trying to protect. But I have an idea of my own. That girl—the one with the curly black hair …?”
I gasped.
Paquerette looked at me and nodded, her face lined. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I did. I felt sick when I realized how easily he got me to give myself away. But he didn’t tell.”
If he’d intended to tell anything he knew, he said to Paquerette, he could have done it earlier and spared her some pain. He said he didn’t know exactly what Paquerette and I did, but he knew it was good. He told Paquerette how he’d first met me. Me and Marek.
It was him. And he had seen me in the station.
He told her about the disputes the police were having over her. How the night guard thought she was innocent—intuition, he said—and he wasn’t the only one. But—he sighed—the chief interrogator wanted one more try. On Monday. He’d come to ask her which she would prefer: that, or being a fugitive from the law.
She told him if he had to ask, he must never have been on the wrong side of a cell door. He said no, he hadn’t.
He gave her a lock pick, and had her pick the lock herself while he waited in the hallway. For realism. It took her fifteen minutes. She gathered her things, stepped out of the cell and dropped the lock pick in the hall. The man said the night guard would swear to having given her breakfast at six. He recommended that she stay away from the police for a w
hile, and not come back to Valence.
“Don’t worry,” she breathed.
He touched his hat to her. And then he was gone, away down the hall. She stood blinking for a moment. He meant her to find her own way out. She looked the way he hadn’t gone.
There was a light breeze coming down the passageway.
She followed it. Found an empty office with an open window. She was on the ground floor; she climbed out, and walked through the dark streets, not bothering to feel afraid. She found the agency, and Madame Moulin working there late. Madame Moulin started crying at the sight of her. She knew, apparently. She was the one Pastor Alex had called to find out what was going on.
Madame Moulin gave her new clothes, and a wide hat to hide her face, and food and money and a rain cape and a coat. She woke a friend who had a motorcycle, and Paquerette walked with him through the dark streets to the edge of town; then he drove her across the Rhône and far into the hills west of the city. Where he left her, she walked a little while, until the stars grew pale; then she bedded down under a haystack, and slept.
She woke to rain. It was a wonderful day, she said, Easter Sunday; walking under her rain cape and drinking in God’s free, wet air, smelling the earth and the trees, hearing church bells in the distance, watching rare patches of sunlight come and go on the hills ahead. Drinking from a stream by the roadside, finding a dry shack to rest in. Even the beating of the rain was beautiful, she said, that day.
She spent that night in a barn. The farmer came in at dawn to milk his cows. It was odd, she said, how little he reacted. He brought her in to his wife, who gave her breakfast. Fresh, creamy milk and oatcakes, the best meal she’d had in years. Neither of them asked any questions. Maybe it had happened before.
She kept walking. She knew she was near le Cheylard. She had enough money for the train. She got on, and let la Galoche take her up the steep gorge onto the plateau. She got off one stop before Tanieux, and doubled round to the south and then to the west, so she wouldn’t come into town on the main road.
And when she came to the old bridge over the Tanne, there I was, and Nina, and a German soldier carrying Marek in his arms. And then I turned my back on her, and walked away.