Flame in the Night

by Munn, Heather;

  Tanieux was watching too.

  Julien’s heart beat harder, higher, like a battle-drum. Give them nothing. These people knew. The enemy could stand there with their hunters’ eyes on the prey, but these people knew now. Never break the stare. Never turn your back. Never say a word. Give them nothing.

  It was almost eerie, the silence in which the people walked with them down the street away from the station. It was bare and reassuring, like a wall. It was not broken till they were on the place, most of the crowd turning off toward the parsonage with the pastor and his wife.

  Even then it was broken for no one but Julien.

  The face flashed out of the alley for the merest second, eyes on him, a look like an arrow in a hard-bent bow—then gone. Julien checked, then kept walking, watching the alley; he was already peeling off from his family with a casual nod, as if they knew what his errand was, when the face showed again, a quick hand beckoning. Julien went up into the alley without a glance at the figure pressed against the wall, till they were both out of sight of the place. Then he turned.

  It was him. “Pierre.”

  Pierre’s chest was heaving. “Alert,” he panted. “Get your alert chain going. They’re searching the farms on the south road.” He wiped a sleeve across his sweating forehead. “They’ve got your sentry in their car.”

  Manuel staggered in the La Roche kitchen door holding his side, gasping, “Raid. Raid.”

  It took Elisa a moment to understand. She dropped her pan with a bang on the stove and dashed into the common room. “Raid! Raid!”

  The room erupted. She ran to Karl, grabbed his arm, looked round frantically for Tova till she saw short-bearded Paul Maier towing her sister toward her. The doorways were packed—Rudy leapt smoothly out a window, one hand on the sill—she pulled her siblings back the way she’d come and out the kitchen door.

  They pelted through the kitchen garden, up into the woods. Boots on the path behind them—someone grabbed her sleeve. It was Édouard. “Follow me. Place. Place for them.”

  The pinewoods deepened, rocks jutting before their flying feet. Dark stones loomed ahead, gray-starred with lichen, a great hunched boulder like a sleeping bear, a crack showing black beneath it. “Under there,” Édouard panted. “Room for two.”

  She mounded pine needles against the crack once Tova and Karl were in, for camouflage and warmth. Édouard was gathering fallen pine boughs, piling them over a space between two rocks; he motioned to her. She wedged herself in, the dark rock rough and cold through her apron and sweater.

  Footsteps sounded on the path below. Then Manuel’s wheeze. Heat surged through her. Nobody helped him? She shot out, scraping her arm on the rock, and hauled him in. There was room, barely room, for three. They’d need more boughs; there were no fallen ones; she plunged into a pine and began wrenching at a half-broken branch, tearing with her fingernails at the shreds where the green wood split. She glanced back, saw Édouard go into the crack, beckoning to her, saw him hunch down under the boughs—heard boots on the trail again.

  From above.

  She froze, twigs digging into her skin. Through the lattice of green she could see the figure approaching, blond and slender, using its tall walking stick carefully to clamber down between the rocks, keeping its balance so neatly despite the right arm in a sling. Cold spread through her belly.

  She had seen the man yesterday, at the Bellevue Hotel.

  She didn’t know his name. But she knew he was one of the convalescents. She had heard him say he missed the Black Forest. And she knew the Resistance had given him that wound.

  She kept utterly still. He moved cautiously, easily down the path, singing softly to himself in German, swinging down to one knee beside a hollow stump, lifting the leaf litter out of it and breathing in the scent. A high sharp squeak; a tiny brown body darted up out of the stump and into a sheltering mound of pine needles.

  The mound at the base of the boulder.

  The world slowed around Elisa, her blood congealing in her veins, as she waited for what would come.

  A higher, panicked squeak. The wood mouse fled again. The blond German turned, eyes widening.

  Elisa stood.

  Then let herself fall to her knees, hard pine twigs gouging and scratching her, drawing a sharp cry from her throat. She crouched on all fours in her green cage, hair falling across her face, staring out at him. Look, fox. A bird with a broken wing. Leave that nest, fox. It’s not there. He had turned. His eyes met hers through the pine boughs. A bleeding girl in an apron, hiding in a pine tree. What could that possibly mean? Bitter triumph was on her tongue, and under it cold fear. Far down near the house was the sound of an engine shutting off, and voices.

  The man stared. Then stood smoothly, slowly, leaning on his stick.

  And went on down the path toward the house.

  She crouched like a mouse in a hole, watching his back, her mind racing. When he was well gone she rose and made a dash. She plunged under the skirts of another pine tree, a larger one, its branches fuller.

  She did not dare hide somewhere where she could not stand guard.

  She pinned her hair up, fast and tight. She worked a green stick off a branch, split as sharp as she could make it. The Talmud said, If a man comes to kill you, get up and kill him first. She had no hope of that. Still she might keep their eyes off that boulder—if she went for the face.

  Help me. Out of the depths I cry to You.

  O Lord, hear my voice.

  She knelt in the pine needles, eyes on the downward path, hand white around her weapon, and waited for her time.

  Julien’s side ached with running, but he didn’t slow. Three whole hours he’d been, managing frightened children separated from their handlers. Anything could have happened. Élise. Benjamin …

  At the first house at the edge of Tanieux a young girl stood behind a window. He tapped gently on the glass, and she opened it.

  “They—catch—anyone?”

  She nodded. “Papa said—”

  “How many? Who?”

  “He said they got a few people. I don’t know who.”

  He ran.

  Faces flashed through his mind. They’re getting smarter. To come today, to finger Jérémie as a sentry—could they have arrested Jérémie? They’ll find the way in one of these days. Find where the fault lines are. Crack us like a nut. Faces and faces flashed through him as he ran.

  Benjamin. Élise. Jérémie. Eva. Nicole. Samuel. Charles. Brigitte. Élise.

  He burst out onto the place and saw the bus, and Monsieur Thibaud coming up to the back window. His heart compressed. The back of the bus was filled. He ran forward looking frantically for Élise—she wasn’t there. Six, seven, eight people—strangers. An old lady with her hands over her face, a young man with his arm around her shoulder. A middle-aged man in a battered hat—Julien did know him, Monsieur Heckel, the Thibauds’ houseguest since last fall. Monsieur Heckel, tears in his eyes, taking the package Monsieur Thibaud was handing him. Luc Marceau was coming up to the window too, holding something up. A bar of imitation chocolate. As Julien saw Julie Pérac start across the place with a determined step—as he thought of the apples in the root cellar at home, and the last three little jars of honey from last year—he stopped in his tracks.

  Antoine Duval stood in the mouth of an alley, writing in a notebook.

  Julien’s heart sped up. He slipped into the narrow street nearest to him. He knew the back ways of Tanieux. In a minute he was behind Duval, walking toward him. Every nerve in his body told him to be silent, to set his wooden soles down with the slow precision of a hunting cat, but that was folly. He walked steadily, openly, watching the notebook. The man was still writing. Julien’s eyes strained: response to first arrests … several young people …

  Names. There it was: the word Pérac.

  Duval glanced up. Smiled his confident smile. “Hello.”

  “Hi.” On impulse, Julien thrust his hands into his pockets and stood looking out at the s
cene beside his enemy, as if casually. He nodded at the bus, where three more people now waited in line. “Eight people. Wonder how they did it.”

  “In the usual way. Or so I hear.”

  “While the rest of us were in town welcoming the pastors back.” He tried to keep the hard, black edge out of his voice, and failed.

  Duval said nothing. He closed his notebook around his pen, as if he’d been sketching. He gave Julien an ironic, half-smiling sidelong glance, took out a pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. Julien watched as he flicked a lighter to its tip, his own hands shaking in his coat pockets with the effort of not knocking the thing out of Duval’s fingers and into the dirty slush.

  Finally he could stand it no longer. He pointed his chin at the bus. There was a crowd around it now. “Happy?” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

  Duval inhaled and blew out a thin stream of smoke. “The sun is shining. Spring is coming. Yes, I’m happy.”

  “About that.”

  Duval pursed his lips. “Doesn’t look like they’ll lack for anything on the way.”

  You’re going to hell. He almost said it. His heart was beating wildly, currents of heat running through his body. “Why do you do it?” he bit out. “How do you sleep?”

  Duval turned fully to him this time, his eyebrows rising. “Do you sleep well?”

  Julien simply looked at him, his eyes burning.

  “It’s a hard time, my friend. A man has to survive in one way or another.” Duval opened his coat and tucked his notebook into an inside pocket. “People find ways. That’s how it has been since the world began.”

  And he turned and walked off down the alley.

  Julien stood for a long moment, watching the people of Tanieux gathered around the bus, thinking of guns, and broken rocks, and hell. He still believed that, he found: that God did justice, that there was justice in the end. It wasn’t enough. But it was something.

  Finally he turned, and walked away down the alley too.

  Jérémie was at his house. “They just asked me to get in the car,” he said, his eyes begging Julien for mercy. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could do. They’d have followed you.”

  “I was just getting on the bicycle when they got to me—”

  “Jérémie. There was nothing you could do.” Julien held Jérémie’s eyes till he nodded.

  Then he looked north toward Élise’s dorm.

  The dorm mother said Élise hadn’t come home from La Roche yet. She must be all right, she said, or they would have heard. She gave him a hard stare, as if to ask what business it was of his, and why he was running around drawing attention. Go home. The police were still in the place. He knew she was right.

  He went home.

  Magali and Mama were at the table, Magali eating her share of their cold supper. She looked up and he said, “Élise?” The name came out of his mouth like a bird taking flight: nothing he had planned, nothing he could have stopped. “Did you see her? Hear anything? She’s all right?”

  “She was at La Roche. I saw Madame Ferron. She said they searched it hard and didn’t find anybody. They had ten minutes’ warning from the Maquis guys coming up the south road.”

  Julien sank into a chair. “She must be all right then.”

  Mama gave him a long look. He turned away from her to stare out the window. Don’t you start. He was surprised at the bitterness the words took on in his mind.

  “Your father is already in bed,” said Mama. “Have some supper.”

  In the last light of the dying sunset Elisa crouched under her tree, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth clenched hard to keep them silent. Her stick was in her hand. The rocks stood like hunched old trolls in the green gloom. She blinked the fog of exhaustion from her eyes, forcing herself to keep watch. You never know. It was so cold. Tiny rustlings in the forest floor around her. A sound from down below. She froze. A voice from the road, a young man’s voice; a song rolling up through the dusk, carefree and fast.

  “Ti ti carabi, to to carabo, Compère Guilleri … te laiss’ras-tu, te laiss’ras-tu, te laiss’ras-tu mouri’?”

  “I guess not then,” murmured Elisa Schulmann, and sank to her knees.

  Chapter 19

  WHO I AM

  “I DON’T BELIEVE you,” said Édouard to Elisa. “You’re not stupid.”

  Elisa glanced round the empty street and lowered her voice. “I did cry out because I scratched my arms. I scratched them on purpose. He was about to look under the rock. Don’t tell them, all right?”

  “Now that,” said Édouard, “I believe.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. You’re those children’s mother, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes stung. She looked away.

  “I’m sorry. I think you’re very brave.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “People always have a choice. That’s what my father used to say.” Édouard squinted at the sun in the washed-out sky. “He said it all the time when I was younger. I hated it.” His mouth turned up in a sad half smile.

  She did not ask where his father was.

  A woman leaned out a window above, shaking out a sheet. Two men came round the corner, and Elisa’s breath flattened out of her; Édouard’s eyes cut swiftly to her as she froze, but she herself looked straight ahead. And yet the two figures burned themselves into her mind’s eye: the thin blond one with his arm in a sling, moving as neatly on a sidewalk as he had in the woods, his face upturned with awe as the other man spoke. The thick-chested one, some battle-scarred war hero, one side of his face an angry mess of pink and red, the familiar cadences of German on his tongue. Her feet carried her forward; there was nowhere to run.

  She felt rather than saw it—a pause in the young man’s step, his grace arrested for a split second. She did not turn. And yet she saw him clear as his eyes swept smoothly over her and into the middle distance behind her head, as he offered her—she knew it was her—a tiny, barely perceptible nod.

  She didn’t breathe. The scarred one didn’t even glance her way. She heard a single sentence of his story as they passed on the sidewalk centimeters apart: “And then we came over the hill.” Then they passed behind her, out of sight.

  She walked on, filling her lungs deep with the clear plateau air.

  When Julien woke it was raining: the first rain of spring, cold and shining. His father and mother were in their bed together, or downstairs at the kitchen table. Papa was home, home, home. Maybe if he said it enough times he would believe it. Papa was home.

  He was thinner, tired-looking. He sat at the table and smiled and smiled, and told them that he and Alex had been suddenly released, no questions asked, nothing to sign. No explanation. He met Mama’s eyes across the table, inched his chair closer to hers, took up her hand and kissed it. They smiled at each other, tears in their eyes, till Julien and Magali looked away.

  The rain came on, and the world turned to mud, slick and fresh-smelling. Élise was at school, the short dark hairs around her hairline curling with the damp. She told him how she had almost been caught. He forced himself not to touch her arm or shoulder, and asked if she would keep working at La Roche. Yes, she said. But she wouldn’t bring her siblings there anymore.

  She looked at him with those eyes so deep you could lose yourself in them, down and down to the center of the earth, and he understood that it was useless to ask if she was sure. He stood watching the rain with her, smelling the damp earth, and his fingers a few centimeters from her hand tingled with life and blood. What it would be like to touch that wrist, the sculpted curves of bone and skin and vein, the tiny soft hairs that stood out in the rain-light, the blood held close like a treasure inside. Just to put his fingers on it once, to hold it and feel the warm pulse of life, life, life within, to feel it and swear on his life and his honor and his death never to let it stop. Oh God, if only he could, if he could swear that and know that he could carry it through. Know tha
t his blood would be enough against time and chance and cold-eyed men with guns. You couldn’t go swearing things like that. Not on the little they had. The alert chain, and barns, and watchfulness, and a God who might or might not be listening. Who might or might not have freed his father. Who might or might not have sent eight people to the slaughter instead.

  Papa prayed for them after family devotions every night.

  Mama sang softly as she cooked. Papa sat at the table and told them stories of the men he had met in the camp, grizzled Communists who wanted to help the poor and spoke the word Revolution always with a capital R, who argued about Stalin and Trotsky and Karl Marx, who asked Pastor Alex whether the salvation he wanted so much to tell them about was for this world, or was it simply pie in the sky? “‘I’ve never seen Heaven.’ That’s what Alex told them. ‘But in this world I have seen the salvation of God.’”

  Julien looked at his plate and scraped up the last fragments of potato.

  Papa took him aside the next day and said it must have been very difficult for him, “how it was with your mother, in the first few days.”

  Julien looked at his hands and nodded, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth.

  “Magali says she was very grateful for your help.”

  Julien glanced up at him and then away.

  A letter came from New York. From Benjamin’s father in New York. Julien gave Papa one look over the envelope, and Papa nodded. “Go on down. I’ll tell your teachers you’re excused.”

  Julien ran most of the way.

  Benjamin flushed dark as he read the envelope, and excused himself to his room without a single word that could be understood. He came out almost half an hour later, red-eyed. Julien opened his mouth and Benjamin began to weep again. Grandpa gave them tea, and they drank together, and Julien walked home through the misting rain, rain veiling the hills and the town.