Haas had turned and was staring at him.
“Your father?” the man said, as quietly as if they were together in a small room. He paced toward Julien, slowly and precisely, the bright eyes fixed on him. Julien stood straight now and very still. Haas’s voice dropped, speaking into Julien’s face. “You are the pastor’s son?”
Julien met his eyes, breathing shallowly. “No—Kriminalkomissar,” he got out. His lips felt like chunks of clay.
“Who is your father?”
“The assistant pastor.”
“Ah yes. The quiet one. Kahler!” he shouted, his eyes still on Julien. “Verhör. Noch keinen Drück ausüben. Stehen Sie wache.” The blond Kahler unholstered his gun and took up a watch position as Haas stepped close to Julien again, the chiseled face softening as he looked into Julien’s eyes. “Listen,” Haas said quietly. “I am sure your friend must not be here. Otherwise she would certainly have responded in order to save your life, n’est-ce pas? Or”—the eyebrows were touched with pity—“she is not so much your friend as you believe. But listen. I came here to find her. But I also came to find the answers to a few questions. Let us make an agreement. You talk to me. Some very small questions only. And Kahler here does not search. Are we agreed?”
Julien looked at him and said nothing.
“Ah. A further agreement. You tell the truth, and I ask for no names. Agreed?”
Julien said nothing, his heart knocking in his chest. Somewhere to the south, at the Thibauds’ farm perhaps, a rooster crowed.
“How did you feel,” said Haas, “when they arrested your father?”
Julien said nothing, but the tears didn’t care. They welled up in his eyes, betraying.
“Kahler,” said Haas. “Search.”
“Terrible,” Julien whispered. “I thought I’d never see him again.”
Haas made a palm-down gesture, and Kahler took up his guard position again. “They found people to take over for him and the lead pastor, I suppose, while they were gone?”
You said no names. But if he wanted those names he could find them in public records. “Yes. Some guest preachers, and an interim director for the school.”
Haas glanced away. “And for their other work?”
Julien’s breath paused. “I don’t know what you mean, Kriminalkomissar.”
Haas smiled. “Naturally. Now, the arrest of your father. I can only imagine what a difficult day that is for a young man. I want you simply to tell me about it. Begin at the beginning. What were you doing when you learned the police had come?”
“We were finishing supper. They knocked on the door.”
With a patient voice and listening eyes Haas drew the details from him, strand by strand. The gifts. The policeman’s red eyes. The policemen not knowing where they were taking him. What Papa and Mama said to each other, what Papa looked like as he turned to go. Julien did not want to let the story catch him and carry him onward; he did not want to admit he had seen Papa’s fear. He saw Haas see it anyway, felt it pass between them like a current, the German’s eyes darkening, his face suddenly, shockingly human. Julien dropped his eyes, and Haas took his chin and gently raised it. “And then?”
“He got in. They drove away. Everyone sang—sang ‘A Mighty Fortress.’”
“Did you sing?”
“No.”
“Why?” breathed Haas, looking into his eyes.
“I didn’t—believe. They were all together like that and I—I couldn’t.”
Haas’s mouth went wry. “You were the one whose father was arrested.”
“It wasn’t only that. We’ve been so … You understand, I was still a Christian. I just didn’t believe—that God would help us. That God has anything to do with this world. I thought the world belonged to …” In the tree above him a blackbird sang. The light poured down green and gold onto Julien’s handcuffed hand, onto the listening man with the gun at his hip and the swastika on his arm. “To you,” said Julien.
Haas drew back an instant. His eyes went to the handcuff, then followed Julien’s to the gun. They darkened again, and from that kind look Julien turned his face away. “You still believe that?” said Haas quietly.
The silence above him was the wind waiting. The silence above him was Élise. He did not look up, only felt it all breathe above his head: the young green leaves that brushed his aching hand, the clouds beginning to catch fire, the vast great sky above it all, the depth and depth of it beyond his sight, the hidden stars. He felt the muscles of his face shift quietly beneath his skin.
“No,” he said.
Haas looked deep into his eyes, put a hand to his belt, and drew his pistol. Julien watched it come up, its small blank eye watching him. Haas pressed it to Julien’s forehead and smiled.
“Really?” he said gently, and cocked it.
The click vibrated through his skull, down into his bones. He saw the blur of the dark barrel, Haas’s finger caressing the trigger, terribly near, the exaltation in Haas’s face as the man’s shoulders settled back and his other hand came up around the grip. Julien closed his eyes. The steel against his head was a live thing, dense with power. He could feel how it would knock him backward, how he would dangle like a rabbit in a snare. His guts shifted inside him. He could not breathe. He could not even tremble.
It came slowly, like water seeping upward in the dark. Like a spring fed by blind caves, cold and pure and shocking; like an artesian well. It went down and down: he could not find the end of it. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt.
It was joy.
He opened his eyes. The two men were outlined sharp as crystal, every leaf on the trees behind them, the etched lines of the gun. The finger on the trigger. His heart was beating faster than it ever had in his life. He looked into the bright elation of Haas’s eyes and said, “Really.”
Haas’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Verdammte Märtyrer,” he spat. His eyes blazed into Julien’s for one more moment, every hair on Julien’s head standing up, Haas’s chiseled face hardening back into stone. He pulled the gun away from Julien’s forehead and holstered it in a swift gesture, drew back his fist and, without changing expression, hit the bruised side of Julien’s face with all his strength.
The world exploded with pain. Julien staggered and fell, the handcuff cutting into his wrist; as his free hand caught the tree to pull himself up, the second blow landed on his jaw from the other side. He tasted blood. The world was red and white and green and sickening pain, and under it a strange laughter bubbling up from the core of him. The light and the air seemed alive around him, the faces of his enemies weirdly beautiful. There were brown and green flecks in Haas’s eyes. The tree beneath his clutching hand felt almost warm, the life within it pulsing like Élise’s wrist when he’d taken it in his fingers, there on the forest floor, just there … He leaned against the tree, wincing as the left side of his head touched it. Haas grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head against it.
His ears rang, and he felt the crunch of a breaking tooth. He blinked at Haas, his vision blurring, as Haas stepped up with their faces so close he could feel his breath, and kneed him with force in the groin.
Julien screamed. He doubled up reflexively and was brought up with a jerk by his wrist, sharp pain shooting down the bones of his arm. He stood in a half crouch, half hanging by the handcuff, gasping in agony. Haas squatted beside him and looked up into his face, smiling a little. After a moment the man began to speak, each word soft and precise.
“You are right,” he said. “God does not help you. But He does involve Himself in this world. Look around you, and you will see whom it is God helps.” Julien gasped, and Haas leaned in closer. “You think we are privileged, you think we were born to power. You are wrong. It is in the struggle that strength is born. You French sat on what you took from us and grew soft, while we learned what it is to be men. We learned it in fighting the Jew.” The eyes had gone gentle again. “We came here to help you. Your people still have your farms, your li
ttle pastures, your apple trees. The Jew took that from us. He will do it to you too. He is a creature who can stand on the wet earth in springtime looking at apple trees in bloom and see only firewood, and cold little coins. A creature who can see women and children turned out to slave in factories or starve and feel no pity. Do you understand? He will do it to you too, unless you let us help you. Unless you open your eyes, and place yourself on God’s side.” Haas laid a hand on his gun. “He comes to judge the earth indeed. And we come with Him.”
There was a flavorless trickle in the back of Julien’s throat. “And deport children?” he whispered, watching Haas’s hand.
The hand didn’t move. Haas gave a weary sigh, and stood. “It’s in their blood,” he said. “You’re all like children. When we have made Europe clean of them, you will see what we have done for you. But first,” he said indifferently, turning to Kahler, “you will see whom it is God helps.”
In the west the sun was red between the leaves. Night was coming. The pain throbbed upward into Julien’s body as he stood, and the core of him trembled as he saw again the darkness of those stairs. Somewhere in his belly, deep in the dark, please, please beat like a pulse; it had been there for years, beating day after terrible day. It had a counterpoint now, almost too faint to hear but solid somehow, like a sound made by roots beneath the earth.
Yes.
He knew what to do. What she’d done. Risk anything to escape. If they shot him they’d have nothing from him—
“What’s so important about that girl?” said Haas.
That girl. Above him in the green, just there where he did not look, the rising wind touching her pale face where she lay. That girl—
“She is infinitely precious to God,” he said, looking into Haas’s eyes. You will know. Someday you will know.
Haas backhanded him across the face. “Tell the truth!” he shouted as Julien cringed backward, his free hand coming up to shield his stinging eyes. Haas grabbed Julien’s chin in one hand and held it, his thumb digging into the soft flesh beneath. “What’s so important about that girl?”
That girl. Her eyes in the moonlight, her sorrow, her courage, her hands on her sister’s shoulders. Her hands on the keys, her eyes hard and bright, making, seeking, finding—the sun above the clouds—
“I love her,” he said. The tears spilled down his face. Haas let go of him with a jerk. Kahler threw his head back and roared with laughter.
“Beherrschen Sie sich,” hissed Haas, and Kahler shut up. Haas’s lip curled as if he smelled rotting meat. “Don’t you know they’re different from us?” he said. “A dog-faced little Judenweib like that. You’re an Aryan, boy. Have some self-respect.” He turned to Kahler. “Search.”
Haas and Kahler turned aside from each other, and began to search the forest floor again in the evening light. This hollow of leaves and roots, that rock. Julien stood praying, his roots in the earth, one bloody hand toward heaven. From down away from the oak he heard a shot, looked up to see Haas looking down some burrow. Haas turned from it and came toward him, and with a considering eye on Julien’s face aimed his pistol upward, into a young chestnut with branches low enough to climb, and fired. Julien’s pulse beat low and dark, the pain moving through him like water through the roots beneath the earth, the terror mute and slow as shifting rock. Haas fired into a second tree, another low one, still watching him.
Then he holstered his gun, turned away, and rejoined Kahler in the search.
At some point Kahler began to laugh again.
Before the sun touched the far hills beyond the trees, they finished and walked back to where Julien stood.
They were speaking in German. Kahler gestured at Julien, his voice going high in surprise. Haas shook his head and smiled at Julien. “Das ist nicht nötig. Ich hab’ jetzt die Lösung.”
Kahler’s eyebrows went up. Haas gestured to Julien’s handcuff. Frowning, Kahler unlocked it. Julien stared at him, his hand going unheeded to his bloody wrist, as Kahler muttered fiercely, “You stand right where you are till you can’t see us anymore. Move and I’ll shoot you.”
Julien nodded mutely.
Haas turned away. With a last dark glance at Julien, Kahler followed.
Julien stood and watched in wonder as the two men walked away through the dimming woods. His pulse beat in his ears like the sea. They walked under the treehouse oak. They walked on down the path. Every now and then Kahler glanced behind, a hand on his gun. They walked out of sight.
Julien swayed suddenly and gripped the tree for support. He leaned against it, breathing, staring into the trees.
In the distance near Les Chênes, an engine started.
Julien snapped upright, a wild strength shooting through him. He took two steps and looked up, trembling. No. He dare not. In another moment he was running as fast as his legs would take him toward Les Chênes, ignoring the pain that shot through him at each step, his feet finding the path as if they knew it in their bones. He broke out of the trees and shouted at the young woman he saw, “Did they both get in the car?”
“Julien!” It was Claudine, one of Magali’s colleagues, he saw dazedly. “What’s happened to you?”
He had a sudden vision of himself, dirty and wild-eyed and beaten bloody. “Did they both get in the car?” he shouted, his voice cracking.
“Yes!”
“Which way did they go?”
“That way!” She pointed out of town. He turned and dashed down the driveway, a high, desperate energy running through his body, drowning out the pain, drowning whatever she shouted after him. He ran on the road, openly, his lungs working like a bellows, listening with all his might to the receding sound of the engine: not stopping, not turning. Still going away. As he neared the turnoff to the Thibauds’ farm he slowed and scanned the verges of the road as far as the eye could see, searching the rocks and genêt bushes.
He was alone.
The Thibauds’ stone farmhouse stood like a humble slate-roofed fortress, a glory to see. Madame Thibaud stared at his face as Claudine had, and Monsieur Thibaud and Roland came up behind, and he didn’t hear a word they said as he gasped, “Élise. Élise Fournier. She’s in the Les Chênes treehouse.”
He begged Madame Thibaud as she daubed ointment onto his bruises—those she could see—to go get the doctor, to go get someone who knew German. “Lösung,” he said. “I need to know what it means. He says he has it. Ich hab’ jetzt means ‘I have now.’ I need to know what it means, madame, I have to—”
“Hold still,” snapped Madame Thibaud. Julien surged up from his chair and leaned on the table, tottering.
She got him paper and a pen.
The word lay coiled in his memory like a snake he did not quite recognize. He spelled it as best he could. WHAT DOES IT MEAN, he wrote, and underlined it. The black words swam before his eyes.
“Bed,” said Madame Thibaud.
She put him in a cupboard-bed, but he fought her silently when she tried to close its doors. After a few moments the farmwife huffed and left him there, propped against the wall, looking out the window to the farmyard, to the road Élise would come down.
His head was dropping with weariness, but he kept watch until they brought her in, and he saw that she was breathing.
Chapter 28
THE LAND OF THE LIVING
WHEN ELISA CAME to herself the scent of hay was in her nostrils, its soft prickle under her back. Her head throbbed and her left hip ached. The fingers of her right hand were clenched hard around something buried in the hay. She opened gluey eyes, blinked at the dim sun-shot space above her and the rough pine beams of the Thibauds’ hayloft attic, and pulled the object out. A wooden handle, the rest of the tool wrapped in rags and string.
Her knife.
Pain lanced through her skull as she shot upright. Karl. Tova. She almost leapt to her feet, but stopped, her mouth clamped tight. She was in hiding. She dared not leave her shelter. Karl. Tova. She saw in a blur the circle of faces in the light of the Shabbos
candles, the circle broken once again. She saw the man come out of the woods with the machine gun, come toward the kitchen door. She saw her friends lined up against the common room wall; she searched frantically for her brother’s and sister’s faces among them. She didn’t find them. And yet they seemed to have been with her. She had heard their voices in the dark—she could feel it beating in her still, the pull of them like a string stretched so tight it would snap, calling her, pulling her home. Home. She lay down and took a deep, slow breath, trying to still her hammering heart. Her mind threw up images, like the memory of a dream: the dark, the trees whipping past, branches striking her in her headlong flight. A fall, the rough edges of rocks against her skin, her hands and knees in shallow water. A black, wet space she slid into on her belly, cold water and thin slime beneath her fingers. The void behind her and the terror, the need to burrow and hide; the blind, frantic certainty that death was seeking her.
And before that, nothing.
There was a gap in her mind, like the space left by a missing tooth. Sitting in a crowded bus in broad daylight, meeting Chaim’s or Joseph’s bleak eyes and then looking away, her belly cramped with fear. Running through the woods in a blind panic in the night. Between the two, a space of darkness. A shudder went through her. She rose on one elbow and unwound the rags that wrapped the knife.
It was clean. Had they washed it? She felt the edge. It was dull.
She did not know what she had done.
She closed her eyes and the common room flashed in on her again, Chaim and Rudy and Édouard and Manuel lined up against the wall by armed men; her mind flinched away. She remembered Roland’s face coming up over the edge of the treehouse. His gentle voice, promising to give her knife back when she reached the bottom of the rope ladder. Telling her she was safe. She’d been carried. She had begged to know where Karl and Tova were. They would come after she slept, they’d told her. Promised her. After she slept.
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