Black Radishes

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  It was profoundly quiet. No traffic sounds, no voices. The cooing of doves, fluttering here and there around the roofs of the houses, resonated in the stillness. At the bottom of the hill, on the main street of the town, Gustave saw an old woman with a cane who was slowly starting up the hill and two younger women who stood talking to one another by the post office. But no kids. Was this a village with only grown-ups?

  Gustave turned off the main street and wandered up another hill. He walked until the houses stopped and the farm fields began. Still no children anywhere. Gustave was starting to wish that he had taken Monkey along in his pocket for company. He turned and began wandering back to the center of the village to buy the bread. The empty road stretched out ahead of him, etched with sun and shadow.

  What were Marcel and Jean-Paul doing now? Gustave felt a sharp twinge of loneliness. It was past four o’clock, so school was out. Maybe they were doing their homework together on Jean-Paul’s kitchen table. Or maybe they had finished, and now they were kicking a soccer ball around in the park. In the middle of the road was a large white stone. Gustave kicked at it aimlessly, and it skidded ahead of him. The game would be to kick the stone so that it skidded over the sunny areas and came to a stop only in the areas of shadow, he decided. He was doing well until the stone got stuck in a dent in full sunshine.

  “Interference,” Gustave said out loud. “That doesn’t count.”

  He picked up the stone and kicked it again, down the dusty road.

  The house on the right had a high, dark, bumpy wall. Gustave wondered if the white stone would write on it. He tried, and the stone scraped loudly, leaving a faint trace. Suddenly, a hand pushed open a high black metal gate on the other side of the road, and a small boy’s face peered out.

  “Hi!” Gustave called. He ran toward the boy, waving.

  “Come back here, Jean-Christophe!” a woman’s voice scolded. The boy darted inside, letting the gate slam shut behind him. The sound rang through the stillness.

  Gustave stared at the closed gate. Why wouldn’t that boy’s mother let him play? He was little, but at least he would have been someone to hang around with. Saint-Georges was so different from the cheerful, bustling streets of Paris. Didn’t anyone live here? If Gustave had walked around his neighborhood at home for half an hour, he would have run into ten or fifteen boys ready to play. He kicked the stone again, too hard, and it bounced with a clang off a rusty green metal gate. Something huge and hairy lunged at the gate from the other side, barking and snarling. His heart thudding, Gustave grabbed the stone and darted away. It was an enormous Alsatian dog, penned in the yard. It leapt, growling and slavering, trying to get its muzzle over the top. Too late, Gustave noticed the handmade sign: CHIEN MÉCHANT. Mean Dog. Many of the houses had that sign or ATTENTION: CHIENS DE GARDE. Warning: Guard Dogs. Even the animals were unfriendly here.

  Gustave shoved the rock into his pocket and ran down the road. He didn’t feel like exploring anymore. He would buy the bread and go back home.

  At least there were people in the bakery. Three stout ladies stood in front of the counter, chatting with the woman behind it. Beside one of them stood a tall, thin boy around Gustave’s age. As Gustave pushed open the door, they all turned to look at him and fell silent. After a moment, the women went back to their conversation. But the boy was still staring at Gustave. His hair was pale and his eyes were clear, almost colorless. The boy looked Gustave up and down, taking his time.

  “Are you renting from Madame Foncine?” he asked after a few minutes. “You’re those city people from Paris?” He said the word “Paris” in a mocking way, as if there were something ridiculous about it.

  “Yes,” said Gustave.

  The boy didn’t respond.

  Gustave fidgeted, rubbing the back of his neck. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Obviously the boy lived here, so there was no point in asking that.

  “Do you know Madame Foncine?” Gustave finally managed. The boy didn’t nod or answer. He just stared silently at Gustave with those peculiar clear eyes. Gustave felt himself flushing hot with anger. Why was the boy acting so strange? When Gustave’s turn came, he quickly asked for his two baguettes, paid, and went out the door, feeling the boy watching him the whole time.

  It was a relief to be outside. Gustave started back along the main street, toward the new house, stopping to look at a small fountain shaded by short, gnarled trees. In the middle, the stone figure of a dolphin waved its tail upward, while water bubbled merrily out of its mouth. Gustave put his baguettes on the wall that surrounded the fountain and leaned over to look down into it. Under the wavering water, coins shimmered on the bottom.

  “Hey, Paris kid!” a taunting voice called out. Gustave turned. The pale-eyed boy from the bakery ran at him and shoved him, hard, making him lose his balance on the fountain’s edge. The water slammed against Gustave’s head and back. He felt a shock of cold as he went under. The boy was peering over the wall of the fountain when Gustave came up, gasping.

  “Go back where you came from!” he jeered. Then his face disappeared, and Gustave heard his feet running away.

  Gustave scrabbled for a foothold on the slippery bottom of the fountain. Next to him, one of the baguettes bobbed in the water, slowly submerging. He climbed over the edge, weighed down by his wet clothes. The other baguette was teetering precariously on the edge of the fountain. He grabbed it and ran after the boy, water sloshing in his shoes.

  “What did you do that for?” he shouted. But the boy had vanished between the buildings or maybe into one of them.

  “Coward!” Gustave shouted again, but only his own voice echoed back at him. He looked around. The shadows were long on the bare road. He had no idea where the boy had gone, and Maman wanted him home before sundown. He checked the change in his pocket. Not enough money to buy a third baguette to replace the waterlogged one. Maman was going to be upset not to have the customary two loaves of bread for the Sabbath. Sloshing and shivering, Gustave slowly made his way back up the hill toward his new house.

  “I did it,” Maman was saying as Gustave opened the door. “I got us ready to have our first Shabbat in Saint-Georges.”

  She and Papa stood together by the table. While Gustave had been outside exploring, Maman had transformed the dark kitchen. Her copper-bottomed cooking pots shone warmly on the walls, and the open shutters let in the smells of spring, the soft cooing of the doves, and the glow of the late afternoon. The white tablecloth and polished silver candlesticks gleamed. Maman’s face was calm and serene, ready to welcome in the Sabbath. But when she turned to look at Gustave, her expression changed.

  “What happened?” she exclaimed. “How did you get so wet? Oh, your shoes too! And couldn’t you buy a second baguette?”

  “Sounds like an odd boy,” said Papa when Gustave had finished reluctantly telling them about the boy from the bakery. “I guess he doesn’t like strangers. Or maybe he resents city people.”

  “What did he call you, exactly?” asked Maman, twisting her fingers together. “He didn’t say ‘Jew,’ did he?”

  “No. Just ‘Paris kid.’ ” Gustave’s stomach felt hollow. “Don’t they like Jews here either?”

  “I don’t imagine that many people in Saint-Georges know any Jews,” said Papa. “It’s a small Catholic village. The families here have lived in this area for generations. Don’t worry about it, Lili,” he said to Maman. “If we only have one loaf of bread, that’s what we’ll use. Go change quickly, Gustave, and then let’s welcome in Shabbat.”

  When Gustave came down in dry clothes, Maman pulled her lace shawl over her head and struck a match to light the first candle. Then she hesitated, glancing through the open window at the road just outside.

  “Let’s close the windows and shutters first,” she said quietly. “So nobody can overhear us singing in Hebrew. It’s better if nobody here knows for sure that we’re Jewish.”

  She blew out the match, and she and Gustave and Papa closed the shutters in the
kitchen and living room and latched the windows. The rooms were suddenly dark and somber again.

  They gathered around the table, and Maman again lifted the shawl over her head, lit the candles, and closed her eyes. In her clear, high voice, she sang the Hebrew blessing over the candles. She sang more quietly than she usually did, and Gustave heard a slight quaver. Papa stood beside Maman, solid and calm. His voice was warm and rich when he and Gustave joined in to chant the Sabbath prayers. Gustave watched their faces in the glow of the candlelight, singing the blessing over the wine, singing the blessing over the bread.

  “Shabbat shalom,” said Papa and Maman and Gustave to each other when they had finished. “A Sabbath of peace.”

  But even though it was Shabbat, and despite what Papa had said earlier, Maman had two small worry lines between her eyes. A Sabbath of peace, thought Gustave, remembering Maman’s earlier words about Saint-Georges. A peaceful place. But would Saint-Georges really turn out to be a safe place, a place of peace? Looking at the shutters hiding them from the street, and remembering the snarling dog and the blank face of the boy with the pale eyes, Gustave didn’t feel sure of that. Not sure at all.

  6

  Saint-Georges, April 1940

  Gustave had been in Saint-Georges for three long weeks. Late one Tuesday afternoon in April, with his rucksack on his back, he pulled himself up into his fort in the loft of the garage and threw down the three long, sturdy sticks he was holding. Madame Foncine wouldn’t let Gustave explore the attic, but she hadn’t said anything about staying out of the garage—not that Gustave had asked her, exactly. He knew better than to do that, after what she had said about boys messing around in her attic. So Gustave slipped in and out of the garage when she wasn’t watching. The old building had once been a barn, and it had a hayloft at one end that made a perfect fort.

  Gustave looked around in satisfaction. He had spread a khaki blanket over the splintery floor and arranged three bales of hay in a triangle for seats. If Jean-Paul and Marcel came to join Gustave in Saint-Georges, the fort would be all ready for the three of them. There were two lookout windows facing in different directions.

  “Perfect for spying on the enemy,” Gustave said to himself. “If the Boches ever dare come here.”

  He took out his pocketknife and began sharpening the first of the three long sticks that he had found in the yard behind the house. When he had made three spears, one for each boy, he arranged the weapons against the wall. In his rucksack were the Y-shaped stick he had found last week and an old pair of underwear. Yesterday he had torn them so badly when they caught on a twig while he was climbing one of the hazelnut trees that Maman had said they couldn’t be mended. Now he carefully cut the elastic off with his pocketknife and attached it to the Y-shaped stick, making a perfect slingshot. He shoved it into his back pocket.

  “Just in case,” he muttered.

  In Gustave’s opinion, the fort was the best thing about Saint-Georges. Otherwise, it was lonely. Luckily, he had never run into the pale-eyed boy again, but he also hadn’t found anyone else to hang around with. He wasn’t going to school. Papa said that it didn’t make much sense to go, since the school year was nearly over, and they might not be in Saint-Georges very long. Once, at the post office, Gustave had spotted the little boy who had peered out at him from the gate that first day, and another time, Gustave had seen a group of girls about his age in the village. One girl had looked at him curiously, but it was hard just to go up and start talking to girls you didn’t know. Maman was away from home a lot now, working at a typing job she had found almost right away. She pedaled off in the mornings on an old bicycle she had bought from Madame Foncine.

  Without his store, Papa didn’t have much to do in Saint-Georges either. He listened to the radio a lot, and sometimes he and Gustave worked together, fixing things in the new house. Sometimes he walked to nearby villages and sat in cafés for hours, talking with other men about the war. The house was often empty. Gustave would never admit it to Jean-Paul, and especially not to Marcel, but these days, he usually carried Monkey around in his pocket, just to have a little company.

  Gustave climbed down from the loft and wandered into the kitchen. Maman was home from work early, and she had a box of photographs open on the table. She was sorting them into piles while dinner simmered on the stove.

  “Look, Gustave,” Maman said, smiling. “Here’s a picture of you when you were a baby. Do you remember this little tricycle you used to ride? And look—here is one of you and Marcel, eating your first ice cream cones ever!”

  Gustave looked over her shoulder and laughed. In the ice cream picture, Marcel was standing and Gustave was in a stroller. Both of them were grinning, their faces and shirts covered in chocolate.

  “Do you have a newer one of me and Marcel and Jean-Paul?” Gustave asked. “One I can put in the picture frame that’s in my room?”

  “Oh, I’m sure there’s one in there somewhere,” Maman said, getting up from her seat to check on the pot on the stove. “Go ahead and look. Just be sure to hold the photos by their edges so that you don’t get fingerprints on them.”

  Gustave went up to get the frame and came back down, rubbing the dull metal on his shirt to make it shiny. He sat at the table and shuffled through the photographs. He found one of Maman and Aunt Geraldine as teenagers, smiling astride their bicycles, and one of Papa with a much younger Gustave on his shoulders. There was Papa as a boy, standing waist-deep with his friends in a lake in Switzerland, snow-capped mountains soaring behind them.

  “Oh, look—perfect!” Gustave cried. Maman leaned over his shoulder to see a photo of Gustave, Marcel, and Jean-Paul on their winter camping trip in the mountains two years ago. Gustave and Jean-Paul were bundled up, but Marcel had stripped off his hat, jacket, and shirt for the photograph and was standing bare-chested in the snow, flexing his arm muscles to show how tough he was. The three of them were standing close together, laughing.

  The photograph fit perfectly into the frame. Holding it against his chest, Gustave walked upstairs. He put it down slowly on the night table. Maybe he would see his friends again soon. The way things were going with the war, it sounded as if they would need to come to Saint-Georges after all.

  Gustave glanced over his shoulder at the map on his wall, then quickly looked away. There was an awful lot of red on it now. A week ago, the Nazis had launched a surprise attack on Denmark and Norway, so now Denmark was red too. Denmark’s army was so small that it hadn’t even tried to fight back. Now Norway was fighting the Germans.

  When the news of Norway’s entry into the war had come, Maman had gone straight to the post office to telephone her sister. Aunt Geraldine had said that she would think again about coming to live in the countryside. She had also promised to talk to Madame Landau, Marcel’s mother, since the Landaus didn’t have a telephone.

  “We could easily find a cheap place for Geraldine to rent here,” Maman said to Papa. “And I told her to tell the Landaus that they can stay with us if they can’t afford a place of their own. Surely, now that they see what is happening, they will come soon.”

  “Since Aunt Geraldine hates outhouses, you should just tell her that some of the houses here have bathrooms,” Gustave suggested. “That way she won’t have any reason not to come.”

  Maman laughed. “I’m not sure that any of them really do have bathrooms. But it’s a good idea. I’ll tell her next time I call.”

  But whatever Maman had said to Aunt Geraldine, days passed and still Jean-Paul’s family and the Landaus did not come. And every night on the news broadcast, the radio announcer talked about the war. “Aided by the British navy, Norway fights valiantly!” the broadcaster announced, as Gustave and his parents listened to the radio that evening after dinner. “King Haakon rejects Nazi demands!”

  The radio announcer always sounded so certain that the Nazis would soon be beaten, Gustave thought as he put on his pajamas. But when was it going to happen? The Nazis had taken over so many other co
untries. What was happening now to all the people in the occupied countries, to ordinary, nice people like his family who just wanted to live their lives?

  Another thought came into Gustave’s mind, so quietly that it was like a whisper, insistent and taunting, making his temples throb. If the Nazis hated Jews so much, what was happening to the Jews in those countries that they had taken over? Were those prison camps for Jews and other people the Nazis didn’t like just in Poland, or in all the defeated countries? And when would they let the people in them out?

  Downstairs, Maman was listening to a symphony on the radio as she cleaned up the kitchen. The music, drifting up from below, suddenly sounded unbearably sad. Gustave closed his door, but he could still hear the muffled notes. He threw himself down on the bed, squeezing a pillow against each side of his head to block out the sound.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he muttered into the mattress, not sure whether he was talking to the whispers in his head or to the radio. He lay there in the dark, his head buried in the pillows, trying to sleep, but he could still hear the melancholy strains of the music. It was a long time before Maman switched the radio off.

  7

  One warm morning in May, Madame Foncine shuffled by the wide-open shutters while Gustave and his parents were eating breakfast, and a moment later she banged loudly on the front door.

  “Now, finally, we are going to start fighting back against the Boches,” she announced, her broad face flushed with excitement. “Our war has begun. The Germans have invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.”

  Gustave’s mouth felt dry. Luxembourg and Belgium were between France and Germany. That meant that now the Nazis were heading right toward France.

  Gustave’s family was quiet as Madame Foncine walked away. Then Maman leaned against Papa and sighed.