“Don’t be sorry.” She didn’t look at him as she said it. “For anything.” She murmured, “I need to go.” Then walked away from him, her steps not quite steady, without giving him another glance, without giving him the bise to say goodbye. Thank God. He could not have stood even the chance brush of her skin against his. Not now.
Not ever again.
He stood and watched her go. Then he took the Rue Vaillet, walking aimlessly, feeling the rush of blood in his ears, thinking of the moment he had believed. Of course she wasn’t going. He was such a fool. Don’t be sorry. For anything. He turned onto the Rue de l’Étang, looking down along its sloping length as if it were a tunnel that would lead him down and then up into some other place, some great, good land where everything happens for a reason, where there are no walls and no barbed wire, where not even animals hide from the hunter or are herded onto the slaughtering floor. A place of childhood and of hope, a place people tell their children is true because they are not strong enough yet to face the horror of the world. To face the fact that the meek are eaten and the strong survive. For one long moment he could see it, golden in the slanting afternoon light.
Then he blinked, and saw that Pierre was coming up the street at a hard jog, and that he carried a gun.
He was sure it was a gun. Not because he could see it—it was only a bulge at his right hip, under his jacket—but because of how Pierre wore it. The way his hand strayed to it as he jogged, as if to check that it was still there; the way he carried himself when he slowed, when his ranging eyes met Julien’s and brightened suddenly with purpose. Julien understood, watching him come: a man walks differently when he has a gun.
He was a few steps away now, his eyes trained on Julien, his face hard and bright. He closed the distance between them swiftly, without any greeting, and asked in a low fast voice, “Is he still at his hotel?”
Julien’s heart seemed to slow, lumping in his chest. The sun on the puddles blinded him; the lines of Monsieur Chastain’s empty hay wagon going down the street ahead of him stood out etched like a woodcut. A little girl ran into a house; a young woman with a basket greeted an old man. It was spring, and the sun was shining, and Pierre was continuing breathlessly, “I got delayed. Bicycle chain.” There was black grease on his fingers. He glanced swiftly behind him, lowered his voice. “They’ll be there any minute, I’m supposed to be there ahead. I just need to know if he’s still there, Julien. That’s all. It’s nothing to do with you.”
Please, his eyes said.
It’s everything to do with me, Julien’s eyes said back, and just as Pierre’s face began to move back away from his, narrowing into bitterness, Julien opened his mouth.
“On the patio,” he said. “Reading a paper. Right-hand side.”
Chapter 22
THE HEART OF LIFE
HE TRIED TO stay away. He couldn’t.
He was walking up the Rue des Genêts when the news reached him. He had already seen three men on bicycles go by. First a young man Pierre had once mentioned as a fellow soldier in the Maquis, then two strangers, hard, weathered faces under their cloth caps, impassive, eyes front. At the sight of them a tightness struck down through his chest: This is real. He didn’t stare after them; he turned onto a side street, and began to make his way home.
But he couldn’t.
Élise would be at her dorm by now. Everyone would be home or at the park or the café chatting with their friends, the Hotel Bellevue patio would be almost empty. He could see it so vividly: the single broad step up to the slate-tiled patio, the cast-iron railing along one end, the round green tables with their flaking paint, the steam of Duval’s coffee and his cigarette smoke mingling in the warm, sunlit air.
The four men, approaching.
He was already taking the Rue Vaillet back toward the hotel when little Frédéric Comte dashed by, shouting: “They’ve shot Duval! They just shot him!” Julien quickened his pace. At the corner of the Rue Peyrou there was a jostling on the sidewalk behind him; he stepped aside and Pastor Alexandre passed him by, almost running, limping slightly from his bad back, flanked by Frédéric and Monsieur Faure. Julien looked instinctively behind them, but his father wasn’t there. He followed, almost running himself now.
They came out of the Rue Vaillet into a small crowd that was edging backward before the fierce face and gestures of Madame Flory, the Bellevue owner. Behind her on the patio two men knelt over a prone figure. “Let them work, and mind your own business, can’t you? Can’t do an honest day’s work without people walking in and firing off revolvers in my hallway—”
“He deserved it,” a male voice growled.
“And they had to shoot him in my hotel?”
“You had to put him up in your hotel?”
Madame Flory rolled her eyes and threw up her hands as if this were the stupidest question imaginable. Pastor Alexandre reached the front of the crowd then and said something to her as he stepped up onto the patio. She lowered her hands and nodded of course, of course, ushering him past. Julien pushed his way desperately up to the patio railing, the place he had stood so many sunny days with Sylvain, with Magali, with Élise. Then along the railing on its lower side, a place where he could stand down beside the raised patio rather than on it, his face level with the tabletops. He could see Duval clearly now, in profile, gray-white, the skin and muscles of his face seeming stretched over bone, deep lines Julien had never seen before around his staring eyes. A man bent over him with some bright metal instrument, his face intent and his shirtfront wet and shockingly scarlet, the cloth’s check pattern still showing in a crisscross of dark-red lines. The man muttered a curse and shook his head. Duval’s shirt was open, the thin cloth lying heavily on the stones, slick and shiny with blood. His chest looked like lumped, half-charred sausage meat except for the blood that welled up at steady intervals, as if from a squeezed sponge, and spilled out over the stones: blood, and then pause, and then again blood. He could smell it. It smelled like slaughtering time. He remembered Monsieur Thibaud bent over a pig; Grandpa murmuring, “There, it’ll be quick now” to the old rooster as he laid his head out on a stump.
Pastor Alexandre knelt beside the man. The medic glanced at him briefly and muttered something Julien couldn’t hear.
“Monsieur Duval,” the pastor said, and Julien could hear him fine. “You have done great wrong, and you’ve paid dearly for it. God will forgive you this moment if you repent.”
The head turned slightly on its trembling neck, not toward Pastor Alexandre, but away. The white lips drew back. Duval’s eyes stared out for one last moment with a look of wounded reproach; then he closed them, slowly, his lips still twitching between pain and contempt. Julien saw Pastor Alexandre’s face fall, like a hillside slowly giving way in a flood, heard his sigh, and the medic’s muttered curse, then the pastor’s grunt of pain as he heaved himself back to his feet. Julien realized he was clinging with one hand to one of the uprights of the railing, that he was light-headed from not breathing, that he was not alone.
“Come away, Julien,” said his father, not taking his eyes off Duval.
Julien swallowed. “‘We dare not deny any man his chance at repentance.’ You said that.”
“I did.”
“They don’t want it.” His voice rasped deep in his chest.
“Some of them do.”
“Have you seen them?”
Papa said nothing. The blood was welling more slowly now from the ruin of Duval’s chest. His face no longer straining. Slack, the muscles lying beneath the skin like stretched-out elastic, a worn object, no human expression on it at all. Another smell rose from the man now, like the smell of Monsieur Rostin’s cesspit on that day so long ago. So long ago. The medic, hand spread on Duval’s chest, called up to his comrade in a flat voice: “Dead.”
Julien turned from the corpse to his father, looking him full in the face. “He was a murderer.”
“Yes.”
“They kill every day. How on earth do y
ou think we’re going to survive if we aren’t allowed to shoot one murderer?”
Papa’s voice was very quiet. “You know what I think, Julien.”
Julien looked at the deep lines in his father’s face, at his eyes like deep pools of water. Then at the patio he and his friends had stood on every day at break, the ash-colored face of the corpse lying between the little green tables, the scarlet pool staining the stones. Madame Flory came out the front door grim-faced, with a bucket and a mop.
“It’s not going to work,” Julien said heavily, and turned away from his father to begin the long walk home.
He saw it when he closed his eyes. Behind his lids there was crimson, wherever he looked. School was canceled the day after the shooting. After Papa left for La Roche, Julien walked out the door and took the road to Grandpa’s farm, and climbed the ridge north of town instead to sit on a boulder and shut his eyes and turn his face to the sun. Red pulsed around his eyes, the glow of the living blood in his body, the secret at the heart of life. A secret spilled over and over. Often enough that people should know. Wasn’t it in the Old Testament? Wasn’t that the reason the Jews weren’t supposed to eat blood?
This is life. This red stuff here. If you let it out, it doesn’t go back in.
If you dare, you can change the world forever.
With this.
He still remembered how Pierre had walked. The weight of it somehow, the gravity—you could feel the world bending around the thing at his hip. The hard purpose in his eyes, cutting like a knife through the months and years of helpless rage and fear; making a path.
Pierre, on his way to change the future.
Julien wondered what he had paid for it.
Pierre hadn’t done it himself. Julien understood that. They’d sent experienced men for that, men who had killed before. But you didn’t have to pull the trigger to be part of it. Part of taking a human being out of the world.
He understood that too.
He had almost told his father what he’d done. He’d meant to. He didn’t intend to be a coward anymore. He had looked at Papa across the supper table, between questions from Magali about what it was like and quelling looks from Mama, and he had seen the questions in Papa’s eyes. He had pictured himself going into Papa’s study with him, sitting across the desk from him, looking him in the eye.
Then his mind had run along the paths his story might take, and every single one had run headlong into Pierre.
“He just turned away and closed his eyes,” Papa told Magali soberly. “A minute later he was dead.” He glanced up at Julien. “It’s a terrible thing to watch. I’m sorry you had to see it.”
I’m not.
It was right. It was right that he’d had to see it. To see blood whenever he closed his eyes. To understand in his body that a man wasn’t so different from a chicken or a hog, not in that way—that a breathing human being could turn in the space of seconds into meat. That it could happen to him. It was right that he should see that and know that. He had been a part of it. He had chosen to.
And Duval would never betray anyone again.
“We did it,” he whispered, the rock warm against his back, the sun a crimson glow through his eyelids. “You didn’t do it, but we did. How do they know You didn’t want us to? How do they know?”
Shadows of clouds moved between him and the glow, dark red and bright in turn. The rock was rough behind his head. He had done it, and he had meant to do it. The knowledge was like a smooth stone in his hand, turned over and over in his fingers, heavy and real. It wasn’t something someone could give you, this weight. It was something you found, after searching and searching. Alone.
He bowed his head, and in the sudden darkness behind his eyes he saw Élise. She was at the piano, her wet apron lying limp on the piano bench beside her, her face hard and bright and painful with longing, the music rising up from her hands like flame. He saw her in a long black dress, her hair braided into a crown, pearls on her neck, faces in the dark beyond her watching in wonder: the same face, the same hands, the same naked joy.
He took a long, careful breath, and let himself dare to hope.
Chapter 23
A LITTLE WHILE
THE GESTAPO CAME the next day.
They marched into the mairie, kicked the mayor’s assistant out of his office, and took it over, piling up papers and tossing them onto the hallway floor. By midday the rumor was three people had gone in “for questioning” and hadn’t yet come out.
When class let out at five, the word was that they’d come out. And Pastor Alexandre and Papa had gone in.
Julien walked down to the place du centre with his school satchel still on his back. He couldn’t help it. He stood looking at the mairie, remembering Haas, the Gestapo chief: the classic profile, the eyes that owned everything they saw, the way the man had called him boy and told him to fetch his father.
He wanted to stand and stare at that door for hours, not leave till he saw his father’s face again. He wasn’t stupid.
He went home.
At home Mama and Magali moved silently around the kitchen, pulling potatoes from the pantry and greens from the icebox. “Soup,” Mama said. “We can keep it warm.” Her eyes going to the south window down into town. Silence. A clink as Mama took a knife from the drawer.
Magali drew a glass of water from the tap, put it in front of Julien’s chair. He sat. “Did Élise tell you why she was late the other day?” she said abruptly.
Julien shook his head.
“She was rescuing a boche from drowning in the river.”
“What?”
“One of those convalescents. I guess he didn’t know how cold that water is.”
“She can swim?”
Magali shook her head. “She used a long branch. It was a mess, she said. She almost got swamped herself.”
Julien’s heart beat hot. If she had … It swept through him in a wave. For one of them.
“She told me she stood there a moment and had to make up her mind.”
“Of course.”
“Not about whether she could.”
“Of course not,” he whispered.
Papa came home at eight, his share of soup still simmering on the stove. His face was gray and lined. “I’m all right,” he said, sinking into his chair. Mama put a bowl of soup in front of him, and a cup of coffee. He sipped it and looked up at her, his face weary and open. They had asked him the same questions over and over, he said. They wanted to know who had done the shooting. But he believed it was clear to them by now that the pastors simply didn’t know. Julien looked out the window.
“I’m not certain of my German but I think one of them may have shouted, They’re not lying. Very angrily, you know. As if that were truly offensive.” Papa’s lips twitched into a small smile. “Can you imagine?”
“Eat,” said Mama, pushing his spoon at him.
He ate.
The next day Papa took Julien aside and asked him if they could take a walk together before school. “I wanted to ask you,” Papa said, “whether you really meant what you said the other day, or whether it was the emotion of the moment.”
“When?”
His father turned to him, grave-eyed, and said nothing.
Julien’s jaw clenched. “I meant it.”
“You believe it was right for them to kill him?”
“I do.”
Papa studied his face. “Did someone make the case to you, or … ?”
“Yeah. He did.” It welled up out of him suddenly, whole and lightening in its truth. “Duval did.”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean.”
That’s how it has been since the world began. For a moment Julien saw paintings on dark cave walls, heard the cries of women and children, smelled campfire smoke and blood. The blood of the meek, soaking the earth. Grinning men behind them who had everything they wanted. “He got you arrested,” he said. “He almost got Benjamin arrested. He was a threat to everyone, everyone I love. For
money. And he didn’t care. If he’d ever managed to face who he really was he would’ve hanged himself. And you saw. You saw what he did with his chance at repentance. You really think witness is going to stop these people? Guns stop them. Period. You really think God wants us to die?”
Under the eaves of the slate roofs above them, mourning doves cooed. “God wants us to be willing to die,” Papa said quietly. “God does not ask less of us than the Maquis.”
“But for a reason. Not just because someone decided to kill us. Jesus said turn the other cheek. If he’d meant, ‘Let them murder you,’ maybe he would’ve said so.”
Papa stopped on the sidewalk, his face working suddenly. “He did so, Julien. He did so, and in that act the power of God was made perfect more than in any before or since—the hinge itself of history—why does no one ever understand?” His voice went high.
“Papa—are you all right?”
“They’ve emptied the St. Paul d’Eyjeaux camp,” Papa whispered. “We just heard. They deported everyone.”
“Deported? When?”
“Two weeks after they released us.” His eyes were like caverns. “All those men …”
Julien’s lips shaped words, but they didn’t come out. Two weeks.
“Just hold on to God, Julien. Please hold on to God.”
Julien looked up at his father and nodded wordlessly at the tears in his tired eyes. Papa gripped his shoulder for a moment, then let his weak hand fall.
They went on down the street in silence together, beneath the spring sun.
Elisa grunted, applying more pressure, and the chicken bone snapped between her hands. Mama had taught her long ago: for the most nourishing broth, every bone must be opened to the marrow. They needed every bit they could get. It wasn’t every week she could get two chickens, even now that she’d found a kosher slaughterer Chaim approved. She smiled, remembering Karl’s eyes when he’d seen the portion she brought him yesterday.
She put down the bone-sawing knife and picked up the short butcher knife to start on the second carcass, tested its blade, and reached into a drawer for the whetstone. She drew the blade down the stone to the rhythm of the thought that was always with her now: Who have I killed? Who have I killed? She had not told Karl what she had done. She had told Tova, who said she had done right. Tova always thought mercy was right.
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