“Oh, why won’t Geraldine see that she should leave Paris?” she moaned into Papa’s chest.
“Well, at least the waiting is over,” Papa said, stroking her hair. “Now the French army can start pushing the Germans back.”
But that wasn’t what happened. On Monday evening, Papa turned on the radio after dinner. It crackled, making Gustave jump. A somber voice spoke into the room.
“German tanks have crossed the Meuse River from Belgium and penetrated France,” boomed the announcer. “There is fierce fighting in the French region of Sedan.”
Gustave felt hollowed out inside. The Nazis were in France. Was it possible? For a moment, he could hardly breathe. The room swirled around him, and a roaring sound filled his ears. When his head quieted, Maman and Papa were talking.
“When will we hear about those visas?” Maman cried, hugging herself with both arms and rocking back and forth on the sofa.
Papa paced, limping up and down the room. “Maybe we should leave for Switzerland instead of waiting to hear about emigrating to America,” he said.
“But Geraldine and her family will never be able to cross the Swiss border to meet us there,” Maman wailed. “And what if Germany decides to invade Switzerland? What should we do? Oh, what should we do?”
“Be calm, Lili chérie, be calm,” Papa said. “The Germans are only slightly over our border. General Weygand has established a second front. The second front is holding.”
But day after day, the names of the countries collapsing in front of the German army came on the news bulletins, solemn and funereal, like a church bell tolling. “Luxembourg offers no resistance.” “Holland surrenders.” When would the Nazis stop? Gustave wondered as he painted in the fallen countries on his map.
He was washing paint over Luxembourg when his hand jerked, and a smear of red slid onto the blue of France. Gustave wiped at it furiously with his handkerchief until it was clean, then clenched the brush tightly so that he wouldn’t slip and get any more red where it didn’t belong. After all, the Nazis hadn’t taken over the whole world.
France was still free.
Days passed, and the fields turned a darker shade of green. Flowers budded and opened, and, even at night, the air was soft and warm, like the fuzzy skin of a peach. One night after the news broadcast, Gustave could smell spring in the air as he walked upstairs with heavy feet. But the weather felt all wrong. How could spring come the same way it always did? Under his open bedroom window, the garden was full of flowers, and birds were singing as the sun set. But Gustave felt separated from the warm night, as if it were all happening on the other side of a wall of glass. He flipped open the metal watercolor box and looked down at his paints. He had plenty of all the other colors, but in the center of the well of red paint, he could see the metal at the bottom. And again, tonight, red was the color he needed. Belgium had surrendered to the Nazis.
Gustave swirled the wet brush around in the paint and slowly washed red over Belgium. When he was finished, he studied the map in bewilderment. Red was spreading like blood all over Europe, even along much of the French border.
And, still, the strange spring kept on coming. One hot June morning, Gustave woke up late, tangled in sticky sheets. Voices were coming from outside. He stumbled downstairs, but neither of his parents was in the house, and the front door stood open.
“Papa?” he called out. “Maman?”
Still half-asleep, he walked out into the yard. The paving stones under his bare feet were already warm, almost hot, from the sunshine. Out in the road, five or six adults he didn’t know and a few small children stood huddled in a tight group. A woman ran down the street toward them, her hair disheveled, her dress flapping around her legs, screaming. Gustave watched her lips moving. He heard the sounds, but at first the words didn’t make sense. “They’re coming! The Germans! They’re coming! The Germans!”
The woman’s husband pulled her toward him, and a small child let out a high, piercing cry.
A rush of energy swept over Gustave, leaving him sweaty, then cold an instant later. He heard a noise behind him and turned. Papa had taken the truck out. The back, still filled with stock from the Paris store, was open. Papa ran, limping unevenly, out of the garage, toward the truck, a spare can of gasoline sloshing in each hand. Light glinted off the truck and the cans of gasoline. Gustave darted toward Papa. “Are the Germans really coming?” he cried.
“Yes!” Papa shouted. “The Nazis have bombed Paris. The second front has collapsed. Help Maman grab some clothes and food. We have to get out of here. Now.”
8
The Exodus, June 1940
Gustave leaned forward in the front seat of the truck, pulling his damp shirt away from his back, bewildered by what he saw through the windshield of the truck. Papa had driven at breakneck speed through the roads leading out of the village. But now that they were on the highway, the space ahead of them was so jammed with vehicles and people, all heading in the same direction, that the truck was barely moving. Heat shimmered in the air. Cars and trucks overloaded with passengers clogged the road, honking. People shouted and horses whinnied, pulling heavy farm wagons piled high with mattresses and furniture. Men and women on bicycles wove in and out. Others walked, pushing wheelbarrows and baby carriages, some with babies and children in them, clinging to the sides, their eyes wide.
One man had fixed a strap across his own chest as if he were a donkey. Leaning forward, with sweat running down his face, step by step, he pulled a cart in which a frail, elderly woman sat, clutching a baby on her lap. People trudged along the side of the road on foot, their heads down, lugging bags and suitcases. A young woman sat on her suitcase by the side of the road, her eyes dull. Two small children with runny noses clung to her, wailing. The air was thick with dust stirred up by tires, by the feet of people, and by the hooves of horses. Exhaust fumes hung in the heavy air.
Where Gustave’s shorts ended, the rough seat of the delivery truck made his bare legs itch. They were driving so slowly that almost no breeze came in through the wide-open windows.
“Where are we going?” Gustave asked suddenly. “Are we going to Switzerland?”
“No. The Germans might cut us off before we got there,” said Papa, staring ahead at the clogged road. “We’re heading south, away from the Germans. We’re going to try to make it into Spain.”
“If they haven’t closed the border,” said Maman, who was squeezed in the middle. Her voice sounded thin, breakable. “At some point the Spaniards will say enough is enough, if mobs of people like this keep trying to get in.”
Gustave looked around the slow-moving crowd. “Are all of these people Jewish?” he asked. He hadn’t known that there were so many Jews in all of France put together.
Papa stopped trying to pass a huge, slow-moving hay wagon with eleven people, mostly children, seated against its railings, and sighed, craning his neck out the window and trying to see around the wagon.
“What did you say, Gustave?” he asked when he pulled his head back in. “Are they all Jewish? No. Maybe some of them. But anyone with any sense wants to get away from the Germans,” he added bitterly. “Everyone has heard what the Boches have done in other countries. Shootings, burning down villages—”
“Berthold!” Maman put her hand on Papa’s arm to stop him. But Gustave had heard enough. His pulse throbbed painfully in his throat. The Germans were marching through France, heading toward Paris. He couldn’t imagine it. What was happening to Marcel and Jean-Paul and their families? Had their apartment building been bombed? Were German tanks rolling through the streets? It seemed so unreal to think of soldiers with guns in front of the movie theaters and the shops full of bright flowers. Were soldiers ducking down to shoot from behind café tables and the bookstalls along the Seine? Gustave reached into his pocket and clutched Monkey. If only it were still last year instead of this one, and he and Marcel and Jean-Paul were safely together in the park in Paris, the light slanting down through the trees, as they
stood together on the stone wall, about to jump, pretending they were spies parachuting out of an airplane.
“Papa,” Gustave asked, his voice wobbly, “where do you think Marcel and Jean-Paul …?”
Papa glanced at Maman. She was staring fixedly out the window, her face white. “Enough questions, Gustave,” he said. “We’ll talk about that later.”
Gustave turned and put his arm on the open window of the truck. He rested his head on it, and in a daze, he watched the mass of people outside. What was Jean-Paul doing? Was Aunt Geraldine rushing desperately through the streets in her high heels, perfume, and an elegant dress, pushing Giselle in her baby carriage, with Jean-Paul running beside her, the gas masks swinging from his shoulder? What about Marcel and his mother? Were they running away, or crouching in their apartment, peering out the window? The images in his head came so fast that Gustave felt as if he were spinning around until the world became a sickening blur.
At lunchtime, Papa stopped to get the food out of the back. Gustave and Maman got out to stretch for a moment. Gustave stood up unsteadily. The sun beat down, hot on his head, and between the sounds of motors, he heard insects buzzing over the fields. He and Papa and Maman ate bread and cheese as the truck moved slowly back into the stream of traffic. Gustave tilted his head back and drank the last, warm swallow of water in the canteen Maman handed him.
“That is the end of our food, Berthold,” Maman said, her voice tight.
“Don’t worry,” answered Papa. “We’ll stop in the next town and buy some.”
It was late afternoon when they rolled slowly into a town. For hours, Gustave’s mouth had felt dry and sticky, and by now, his stomach ached with hunger. Maman banged on the door of two bakeries and tried a shop that sold cheese, one that sold meat and sausages, and one that sold vegetables. But the bakeries were closed, and the other shopkeepers had empty shelves.
“Nothing?” Maman asked the woman who kept the vegetable shop, her voice trembling. Her face was drawn and exhausted. “Not a single potato? Not even an onion? Not a single bouillon cube to make soup? You have nothing at all to sell?”
“Not since about noon today,” said the shopkeeper. “People have been coming through here like locusts.”
“Would you give us some water?” asked Maman, showing her the empty canteen.
The shopkeeper had a round, grandmotherly face. She nodded and went to her house behind the store. She came back with a jug of water and a tall, creamy glass of milk.
“For the young one,” she said. She wouldn’t take the money Maman offered. Gustave squirmed when the shopkeeper handed him the glass. He wasn’t so young. He was a Boy Scout, and he was supposed to help others. He gulped down one-third of the milk. It was hard to stop, but one-third was his fair share. He held out the glass to Maman. She shook her head.
“Please?” he said. “Papa?”
Neither of them would take the glass. Looking at their faces, Gustave could see that they weren’t going to change their minds. He gulped down the rest while Papa and Maman watched. Even with the milk in his stomach, he still felt painfully hungry.
As the sky over the fields grew darker, Papa started looking for somewhere where they could spend the night.
“Shouldn’t we keep on as long as we can?” asked Maman, twisting her hands in her lap.
“Oh, you think so?” Papa snapped.
Gustave looked at him, startled. Papa never got angry like that.
“How would we look from above, with our headlights on?”
“Oh. Yes.” Maman turned her head, staring back out the window.
Papa stopped the truck beside a field where many other travelers had set up camp. Some people were already sleeping on the grass or under wagons. One large family nearby was cooking soup over a camp stove. The scent of chicken, carrots, and potatoes drifted in the air. The smells made Gustave’s stomach twist painfully again. If Maman had been able to buy an onion, he could have made a campfire, and she could have prepared onion soup. Gustave wanted onion soup so badly that he could almost taste it. The glass of milk he had drunk seemed very far away. His head ached, and he rubbed his fingers over his eyebrows and into his temples, trying to press away the pain. His arms and legs felt strangely weightless, as if he might float away into the rapidly cooling air.
“I’ll go knock at some doors and see if any of the farmers around here will sell us some food,” Papa said. He walked away with the up-and-down, limping walk that Gustave would know anywhere, toward the dark shape of a farmhouse, getting smaller and smaller, silhouetted against the deep blue of the sky. When he was out of sight, Gustave shivered. The air felt thinner with Papa gone.
“Let’s set up camp,” said Maman. She was trying to be cheerful, but Gustave knew she hated camping.
Gustave pulled out the blankets and pillows Maman had thrown into the truck that morning and arranged them on the grass. Maman sat down on the red plaid blanket, pulling her sweater around her shoulders and gazing in the direction Papa had gone. All at once, Gustave was exhausted. He lay down on the green blanket with his jacket over him. The ground was cold and lumpy through the thin wool.
Overhead, in the peaceful night sky, the stars were coming out. Somewhere else in the field, a baby was crying. Gustave let his eyes close and his mind drift. It was almost like going camping with the Boy Scouts, he thought sleepily. Almost. If Jean-Paul and Marcel were lying next to him in sleeping bags. If only they really were. He imagined the three families camping together, the parents sitting by a campfire, Aunt Geraldine holding the baby, while he and his friends whispered in the shadows. It would be fun, doing that together. If they had enough food. And if they weren’t running away.
9
When Gustave opened his eyes, he blinked, confused for a moment, at the dark shapes around him and at the sky, growing lighter behind the silhouettes of the trees. He sat up, rubbing his shoulder where it was sore from pressing into the hard ground. A mosquito bite throbbed on his ankle, and then other places started itching, on his forehead, his neck, and his arm. He scratched, and the mosquito bites felt better, then burned again, itchy and hot. Maman was already sitting up on the blanket, smoothing her hair. Papa groaned and rolled over in his sleep, then sat up, awake in an instant. He stood and stretched, walked over to the truck, unlocked the front door, and pulled out a loaf of bread and some cheese he had bought from a farmer the night before.
“We waited to eat with you this morning, Gustave,” Maman said. “You were asleep when Papa got back.”
They all tore off a piece of bread, and Maman handed each of them a sliver of cheese. “We need to save some for later,” she said. “We may not be able to buy any more today.”
“Enjoy this food,” Papa said wryly. “It ought to be good. It’s the most expensive loaf of bread I’ve ever bought. That farmer charged me three times the usual price.”
Nearby, four children sat on a bed of hay in a farm wagon, sharing a long sausage. Gustave watched them while he chewed on his bread. The oldest child, a girl about Gustave’s age, ate her piece of sausage quickly and tended to a pony that was tethered nearby. First she brought him hay and water; then she brushed him. The pony was beautiful, chestnut-colored and sturdy, with a pale mane and deep brown eyes. When Gustave finished his hunk of bread and the small morsel of cheese, he got up and walked a few steps closer to watch.
The girl looked up from grooming the pony and smiled. “His name is Jacques,” she said. “He’s mine. Do you want to pet him?”
Gustave reached out and stroked the pony’s coarse mane, touching lightly at first, then wriggling his fingers in deep. The pony turned his head and nuzzled Gustave’s shoulder, tickling him with his warm, moist breath. “He’s hoping you have food for him,” said the girl.
“No. I wish I did,” said Gustave. “I’d eat it!”
The girl laughed. “Even if it was hay?”
Gustave grinned back. “Maybe. I’m almost hungry enough.”
“Gustave,” called hi
s mother. “We’re leaving! Now!”
“I have to go,” Gustave said. “Maybe I’ll see you and Jacques later on the road.” The girl nodded and went back to brushing the pony.
The highway was as crowded with people and cars and trucks and farm wagons as it had been the day before.
“Are we almost there?” Gustave asked.
Papa laughed shortly. “We only went about forty kilometers yesterday,” he said. “It’s going to take us many days at this rate.”
“Many days?” Gustave groaned. He was already fidgety from sitting still so long, and he was hungry again too. His stomach felt like an impatient animal, ravenous so soon after eating. How could they possibly go on like this for many days, especially if they couldn’t buy any more food? The air was stifling in the cab of the truck, heavy with exhaust fumes from the slow-moving traffic. Gustave’s throat was very dry. “Can I have some water?” he asked.
“Just a few sips,” said Maman, handing him the canteen Papa had refilled at the farm. “We need to save the rest for later.”
Gustave sighed. If he could fill his stomach with water, maybe it wouldn’t gnaw at him so much, but they didn’t even have enough water. It was obvious that it was going to be another long day. Gustave rubbed his mosquito bites.
“Don’t scratch,” said Papa absently. “It makes it worse.”
How was he supposed to do that? The bite on Gustave’s arm was getting red and swollen. He pressed his fingernail down over it hard one way and then the other, making an X to cross out the pain. There, that wasn’t scratching, and it made the itchiness go away, at least temporarily. A loud honking was coming closer. Gustave looked up from his itchy arm and noticed that a few of the vehicles and people were shifting over to the side of the road, although most of them stayed where they were. A French soldier strode through the slow-moving crowd, heading in the opposite direction.
“Clear the way,” he shouted impatiently. “Army vehicles coming through.”
Black Radishes Page 5