Grandpa’s clock ticked.
“I do know that,” said Benjamin quietly.
“I shouldn’t have—”
“I wrote to my mother last week and asked her to apply for me.” Julien’s head jerked up; Benjamin’s lips twisted oddly at Julien’s uncertain stare. “For another visa.”
Julien looked at him for two long heartbeats before saying, “That’s not a joke.”
“Would I joke about that?”
A painful laugh escaped him. “No.”
Benjamin took a sip. Looking at his cup, he said, very fast, “Will you come with me?”
“Anytime,” said Julien roughly.
They both watched the steam rise from the teapot. “So,” said Benjamin. “How is everybody?”
When Grandpa came in, leaving his earth-stained boots at the door, he smiled to find Benjamin explaining to Julien that milking was all in the wrist. “He’s taken it over completely while I’m planting. Julien, did you know Pierre is at home? I’d catch him quick if you want to see him.”
“Yeah,” said Benjamin. “He never stays long.”
When Julien knocked on the Rostins’ door, Monsieur Rostin opened it a crack, then flung it wide. “It’s Julien!” he called down the hall.
Pierre sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor, whittling. Short sticks and small carved cylinders lay among the shavings on the floor. He took one up and blew into it, bright eyes on Julien. A hoarse twitter came out, surprisingly like a thrush.
“My father taught me how,” Pierre told him. “Listen again.” He blew a swift pattern of twitters, three short, three long, and three short again. “Ever hear a thrush do that?”
Julien blinked at him. “Not that I’ve noticed.”
“That’s Morse code. Captain taught us. It’s our signal. You hear that, you go to the place and be ready for anything.”
Julien knelt and nodded. “Useful.”
“Want one?”
Julien’s pulse jumped slightly. “Why would I need one?” he asked carefully. Pierre just looked at him. Julien lowered his voice. “Are you actually thinking your people would shoot at the police?”
“If they’re coming here to arrest us and our friends? They’re traitors.” Pierre’s face was grim.
“They’d come back in more force.”
“You let us worry about that, Julien. Because we’re willing.” Pierre bit off the word with a snap, then met Julien’s eyes. “Look at it this way: it’s got nothing to do with you. We’re your enemies. Tell ’em that if you want, I don’t mind. They’re not gonna know what this thing is. Just”—he held out the whistle again—“take it. Please. Favor to me. I don’t want to see my friends deported any more than you do, Julien. And we’re not just going to show up shooting. Someone gets hurt, out in the woods …” he shrugged. “We can help. We patrol, y’know. You don’t see us.” He grinned suddenly. “But we’re there.”
Julien stretched out his hand.
The thing fit inside his fist, tiny; he blew the signal into it once, to Pierre’s brief, half-shy grin, then tucked it into his pocket.
“So c’mon.” Pierre brushed the shavings off a space across from him on the floor. “Tell me the news.”
He told Pierre about everything but Élise. Mama’s “spell,” Benjamin’s brush with the police. Pierre whistled through his teeth at the story of the fight in the root cellar. “I knew he was mad at you about something, but he wouldn’t say what.”
“Did you ever tell him he should go?”
“Me? No.”
The news about La Roche brought up the name Duval, at which Pierre bared his teeth so bitterly that Julien pulled back a little. “Yeah.” Pierre called Duval something unprintable. “You hear what he did to us?”
“No.”
“Last week. Two of our guys, they’d been going into town too much. Visiting some girls. Last time they went—police were waiting for them.”
“No.”
“Yeah.” Pierre’s jaw was hard, a fierce light in his eye. “No idea where they took them. Nothing. We spent all week moving our camp since then. All new signals. That’s why I’m here.” His voice dropped. “You can keep a secret now, right?”
“C’mon. I never ratted on you. Not even that time to your mother.”
Pierre’s jaw loosened into a wolf’s grin. “We were such kids. I thought I was so tough.”
“You were. I had that black eye for a month.”
Pierre laughed. The light was still in his eye. He leaned forward and said very softly, “Captain says Duval has to go.”
Julien did not move. He watched Pierre’s eyes. After a moment Pierre, looking back at him, made a small gesture with his finger across his throat.
“Thought you’d want to know,” Pierre murmured. “Benjamin told me—y’know—about the girl.”
Julien flushed hot. “Benjamin—” He snapped his mouth shut.
Pierre laughed out loud, throwing his head back.
“Does everybody know my business?” Julien growled.
Pierre gave him a rueful grin. “No, no, he didn’t even really tell me. I just got the idea.” Pierre turned one of the whistles in his palm, his face sobering. “I mean, I get it. I’ve been seeing somebody, and if she was Jewish …” He shook his head. “It’s got to be hell.”
Julien put a hand to his pocket, felt the small hard shape of the whistle. Outside the open window a blackbird sang. “So,” he said, a slow smile breaking out, slow as sunrise, and backed by almost as much light. Duval. Go. He sat back. “Seeing somebody, eh?”
Chapter 21
NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU
ELISA STOOD ON the bridge, resting the dish she carried on the stone parapet as she gazed down into the water. She was very weary.
There had been no time to think for a week. La Roche was like a kicked anthill. Édouard and Philippe sleeping in the woods, returning only for meals; Chaim due for a border crossing in a week; Joseph and Rudy and Theo wavering daily over going too. Manuel had sat outside in the sun with her after Paul Maier’s arrest and asked her with tears in his eyes whether he should go back to Spain. She’d looked at the place where she’d last seen Paul—his back against the stone wall, legs sprawled out in front of him, playing on his accordion, a jaunty, haunting tune—and said yes. “Better the devil you know, that’s what they say, eh?” said Manuel with a painful smile.
She breathed in the scent of the running water and bowed her head. The dish between her hands held only her own meal; four young men had missed supper last night, and she’d brought Tova and Karl all the leftovers. For the space of one small hour no one needed her. The sound of the water eased her a little; the grass on the bank looked soft as a bed.
She turned aside onto the riverbank. The June sun shone bright on the water, glowed green through the young leaves of a chestnut she passed under. She remembered moonlight, and a young man’s empty hands, stilled, making no claim. His open, solemn face, taking in her words like precious counted coins, nothing discarded. The gifts that had passed from hand to hand, not touching, more costly than silver, more silent than snow. There are promises not made under a canopy, she thought. There is fidelity. I don’t have words for it. It’s holy too.
From the bridge behind her came the shouts of children and high laughter. She walked on. She had told him her parents’ last words. Why had she told him? The darkness had been alive in her again since then; she could feel it move. The place inside her, at the dead center, the dark and the sheen of flashlights on straw. The place where she had left them, and walked away. She could not see them out of it, could see no faces in her mind. Only eyes looking out at her in the darkness, and a voice saying, “Go.” Her lips shaped the words Where are you? but no breath came through them. Around the dish her hands felt numb.
There were dark patches in the lush green grass, wet wads of last year’s leaves. She set down her dish and took one up, tossed it in the water. The old leaves spun and crumbled as the current carried them away.
She found her jaw clenching so tightly that it hurt. She looked down and saw the flattened grass, pale yellow, exposed now to the light. The tears that welled in her eyes shocked her, and she bent to pick up her dish again and began to walk fast. Not here. Not here where anyone could see her from a window, where voices called behind her from the road. Round the bend in the river lay a broad, deep place, sheltered from the town, where the young men sometimes swam. She heard no voices from there now. Alone. She walked in a blur of green and light. A sound made her look up. A splash in the water.
She stopped, her chest tightening, her tears cut off. She wasn’t alone. She was with some bare-chested man out there in the water, some man swimming in a river on a bright June day. Her breathing slowed, then stopped as her eyes focused in on him, as she understood what she was seeing.
He wasn’t swimming.
He was doubled over in the water, listing to one side, his legs not moving. One arm splashed up, an oddly small sound, and the half-submerged face rose fully out for a few seconds. The sound of his gasping breath came to her over the quiet water. For a moment she didn’t move.
Time became strange, in the gap between one breath and another. There seemed to be hours, and yet her body moved so slow. She had dropped the dish and was running forward at top speed, step after endless step, thinking and thinking. She couldn’t swim. There was a short, steep grassy bank here, with clusters of trees. He was a good ten meters out or more—a tree branch, was there one long enough? He lifted his face out of the water again and she froze.
It was the man with the burn. The one she’d seen in the street. The war hero.
Time stopped. She stood like stone on the bank, her hand on the tall hazel branch she’d been about to break off, watching one of them struggle with death in the water.
Watching one of them, and the fear in his eyes.
Heat rose up through her body in a swift, sharp wave. She saw faces dark with fury, chanting beneath banners. The flat eyes of the man who had entered her home with a hand on his gun. She saw herself, in the darkness of the barracks, turning and walking away.
The drowning man rose out of the water and gasped in another breath. His eyes were on her now, on her face seeking kindness. Kindness. She felt her teeth grate; the sound went down her spine like the rasp of steel on steel.
Justice. Who had he killed? Who would he kill, if he went on breathing this day? Who did he think he was, that she should help him do so? I have no idea who you are, you son of Amalek. I have no idea what you’ve done. I only know if you were ordered to, you would shoot me in the head. Her hand was white around the hazel branch, white the thin scar on her wrist where a pine branch had scratched her months ago in the cold woods. I have a right.
His eyes on her had changed now. A memory rose in her whole and alive from her childhood in Heidelberg, the eyes of a wild scarred tomcat someone had drowned in a cage. Its hair on end, spine bent, face distorted in a hissing snarl. Then the change. The pupils going wide and dark, the ears flattening utterly. The unmistakable, unendurable look of eyes that saw death. She’d been seven.
She had seen it in other eyes since then.
She stood still for a dizzying moment, within that darkness at the center of her soul.
Then she began to wrench the hazel branch back and forth.
Five strong wrenches and a long bark-stripping pull, and it parted from the tree. It wasn’t long enough. She looked up. He had drifted half a meter downstream. She ran stumblingly over the uneven ground, ran for a place where pine roots jutted from the bank. She climbed down them, the hem of her skirt trailing in the water, and stretched herself out, holding the branch out to him. With a flail of one arm he reached jerkily out to it and fell short, bobbing in the water. Not enough.
She gripped the last pine root with one hand, prayed he was not SS, and plunged in.
She drew in a hissing breath from the shock of cold; panic shot through her as her feet felt for the bottom, down and down, then found it, slippery muck. She held on to the pine root for her life, took a cautious step outward with one foot, and reached the hazel rod as far as she could toward him. His face was underwater—he wasn’t even looking. “Here!” she screamed, and he lurched upward—one last time?—his hand reaching out, not far enough.
She let go of the pine root and took another step out into the water, her foot reaching for ground she could not see.
She found the bottom, far below. The water rose to her chin. She felt a sudden tug and gripped the hazel rod hard. She prayed, a sharp, deep, silent prayer in time to the hammering of her heart, wedged her back foot as deep as she could into the mud of the bottom, and pulled very, very gently. She could feel how little force would slide her backward and down into the muck, the waters closing over her head. He was coming toward her, slow and steady. She took a careful, slow step backward, her heart in her throat. Her foot found the bottom. She reached behind her, fingertips brushing against the pine root. She reached farther, felt the deadly slide begin, and with a cry and a splash fell backward, catching the root in her right hand.
She pulled herself up out of the water again, pulled him swiftly toward her now, a strange, heavy lump in the water, still doubled up, his face gray, eyes stunned, his hand still gripping. She found firm footing in the shallows, the pine root bracing her, caught his wrist as he came near and pulled awkwardly, lifting his face fully out of the water. He was naked from the waist up, wearing black shorts, and impossibly heavy. His skin was slippery; she couldn’t get a grip under his arms; his legs seemed to be locked. She had to put one shoulder under his armpit and shove upward to lift his arms and torso up onto the bank, his legs still in the water. He clung to the grass with both hands, gasping in air, his bare back heaving. She climbed up beside him, cold, muddy water streaming from her clothes. His wet dark hair gleamed in the June sunlight. The burned side of his face lay uppermost, his mouth open, one eye on her. His face convulsed suddenly, his fingers digging into the earth, and he began to drag himself upward, turning his body to bring his locked knees up over the bank, his teeth gritted, eyes fierce. She didn’t help him. She didn’t know where on his body to put her hands. Suddenly she didn’t quite understand how she had failed to notice she was grabbing at a half-naked man. He came up and up, and fell on his side on the grass, taking huge breaths.
She was shaking. With cold, with the memory of that water lapping at her chin, with the sight of that hard light of will in his eyes. Who are you? Who are you? Oh God, who have I killed today?
“I didn’t know—it would be—so cold,” he gasped. In German.
She climbed to her feet, her eyes on him. Telling herself he was in shock, telling herself it was no deep instinct that made him address her in the right language, telling herself—Who, who, who have I killed today?
“Danke,” he breathed, and she ran.
“What,” said Mademoiselle Combe, “was the crucial wrong that sparked the miners’ riot in Germinal?”
Someone raised a hand. Julien looked aside out the classroom door. He should know this. He’d done the reading. Awful reading. Élise hadn’t come to school this afternoon—where was she? Mademoiselle Combe was listing atrocities on the board. Papa said it was all true, that Zola had been the first to write it like it was. People don’t like to face these things, he’d said.
Did that take courage? Julien wondered, staring through the doorway—and where was she? His heart jittered in his chest, and he closed his eyes, drawing in a long, bitter breath, ashamed.
He’d slept well the last three nights, and why? Because someone with a gun had decided his enemy had to go.
He’d woken before dawn this morning, his mind clear and empty. The house silent as death. He’d lain there and looked at the dim lines of light that sketched the edges of the shutters outside his window, and heard Pierre’s kind voice saying, Thought you’d want to know.
Yes. I wanted to know.
He hadn’t opened his mind to anyone in months. He couldn’t rem
ember the last time. He wasn’t at all certain what he would have said, if he had.
He leaned back in his chair and watched Mademoiselle Combe underline Deceit by mine owners, imagining, just hypothetically, what Papa would say if he joined the Maquis.
A figure flashed by the door. The silhouette, the head with its dark hair pinned back—it was Élise. He craned his neck to follow her, but she was gone. He shut his eyes and felt it spread through him like rain through the soil: Still alive. Still free.
He saw her again at break, in a tight knot with Nicole and Magali, their heads bent together. When class let out at five she came to him, catching his eye across the hotel dining room as their two classes filed out.
“Julien, would you do something for me? Does your f—” Élise inhaled sharply, her eyes sweeping the room, and pressed her lips together. She jerked her head onward and he followed her out the door and across the patio, looking straight ahead, feeling Duval’s eyes on them like the small blank eye of a rifle. Duval at his usual table, sipping coffee, idly glancing up from his paper with a small smile at the poor fools filing past.
They went down the patio steps in silence, down past two street-lamps before she turned to him. Something in her face made his heart leap, some hardness of decision. She’s going. He controlled his breathing, wrestled his mind down. “Yes?” he said.
“Could you ask your father to come down to”—her voice dropped—“La Roche? Two of my friends—have some questions. About going. But they don’t want to come into town.”
Julien swallowed and gave her the answer she wanted. “Of course. I’ll ask him to come tomorrow. If it has to be later I’ll send you a message.”
“Thank you.” She gave him a single nod. “I’ll tell them.”
His hand flashed out of its own accord; he almost touched her arm. “Have you thought about it?” he said, very low.
Her face was carven wood. “I told you. I think about it all the time.”
His eyes dropped. “I’m sorry.”
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