The sound of footsteps from below; she sat up sharply. Then someone whistling a swift, high little tune: “Compère Guilleri,” all clear. The ladder—the far one, up from the living room—shifted, and a low voice said, “Élise?”
Julien. She looked down at herself, still in her blood-crusted clothes, and saw for the first time the bandages on her legs. She pinned her loosened hair up as quickly as she could, made sure her ragged skirt covered her, and called, “Come in.” More memories flooded in on her as Julien’s face came up into sight: light through green leaves overhead, rough wood beneath her cheek, the sound of Julien’s voice below, and the nightmare voice. Julien’s scream. He had two black eyes and a bandage on one cheek, and his movements spoke of pain.
“Élise.” He spoke low, his eyes searching hers. “How do you feel?” He knelt near her by the great mound of hay, slowly, with a wince. Then an uncertain glance at the ladder hole, as if he would go if she wanted.
“I’m all right.” She kept her voice low as well. “Julien, where are Karl—Charles and Brigitte? Are they all right?”
“I haven’t seen them. I—I’ve been here. Downstairs. Roland went to get them, I think they’ll come soon.” He swallowed. “Did you see the paper? Do you know what it means?”
“Paper?”
He unfolded a slip of paper and held it out to her. “This. He said this. At the end. I might have spelled it wrong—what does this word mean—Lösung?”
“It means ‘solution.’ ‘I have the solution now.’” She sat back. “He did say that. I heard it. They … Did they almost arrest you?”
Julien was staring at something she couldn’t see, his pupils wide and dark. “What have I done?” he whispered.
She shivered. She did not know what he had done. She did not know what she had done. So many of her friends in that bus, and her running through the woods alone. In the common room, when they’d finally stood her up against the wall with the others, Chaim walked over to stand beside her, holding his head high against the backhanded blow he got for it. She remembered a fierce German voice in the sunlit woods shouting “Élise Fournier!” and her slow, floating mind telling her that was not her name.
“I must have given them something—somehow,” Julien said.
Elisa swallowed and opened her mouth. “Someone said he’d shoot you if I didn’t come down. Did that happen? Was that real?”
“Yeah.”
“It feels like I dreamed it.” Her hand came to her mouth. There was another moment—like a dream—not in a bus, in an army truck with canvas sides, an armed Gestapo man at the back—Chaim … “He could have shot you.”
“He didn’t.”
Julien looked down. Dust motes moved in slow patterns in the thin sunbeams. The mound of hay behind him crouched like some waiting beast. She remembered standing very still in the La Roche kitchen, looking at the machine gun, tucking that knife into her waistband with no idea of what she meant to do.
“How did you escape?”
She shook her head, slowly. It hurt. “I still can’t remember. I remember running through the woods in the dark—walking home—I could barely see.” Had Karl’s and Tova’s voices really guided her? She must have been half delirious. How had she found her way? “I found a sign—at dawn—a sign for Tanieux, I remember that …” She put a hand into the hay and slid the knife out, scraping it against the planks. “I had this. But I don’t know how I used it. If I used it. I suppose it’s not kosher,” she murmured, “now I don’t know where it’s been.” The tears sprang to her eyes, and she turned away from him.
“I’m so sorry,” whispered Julien.
“They must have come before dawn,” she whispered. “When they knocked they already had us surrounded—Julien, they must have been there in the woods when I came in the door. I was going to make broth …” She closed her eyes. “They made me serve them food—at our own dinner table … They were taking the others into a little room—one by one.” She drew a harsh breath. “The others would barely look at me. Except some of them slipped me messages when I went past them, if the Gestapo weren’t looking. They must have thought I wasn’t going to be taken, right up to the end …”
“Why did they take you?”
“I don’t know exactly why. They asked me questions.” She opened her eyes. “You. You said they followed you. Why on earth did they follow you?”
Julien spoke fast in a hoarse whisper, not quite looking at her. “I went to them. I found the soldier you pulled out of the river and asked for his help and we went to them together to beg them to release you. He’s a major. I thought it might work.” He bowed his head; she could see the quivering tension in his neck. “They followed me back to you instead.”
Went to them. Her breath came shallow and fast. “You went to the Gestapo headquarters?”
He nodded.
“Did you see them? The others?”
He shook his head. He was very pale. “I heard people moving around—downstairs.”
She closed her eyes again and saw them. Saw them whole now, and themselves. Rudy’s bruised face and hard, frightened eyes. Édouard dashing out the La Roche door for the woods, till the man with the machine gun came out of the trees. Chaim taking the blow for her, his eyes on hers saying nothing but I’m so sorry. Joseph at the kitchen door, asking her to write to his girlfriend and tell her. Manuel’s sad smile as he said, “Better the devil you know.” She covered her face with her hands. They’re gone. Gone where her parents had gone, and Julie, and Julie’s parents, and Mischa Rosen, and all his family, and Madame Weider, and so many, so many. Gone where she had thought she was going. Chaim and Manuel, Édouard and Joseph, Rudy and Theo and Isaac. Philippe and David, Friedrich and Marc, all of them. The tears gathering behind her eyes sent sharp pain through her skull. They deserved her tears. They deserved everything. She had left them behind. They were gone, and she was here.
“I was such a fool,” Julien whispered, and she looked up. “I’m sorry. I led them to you. I thought I had to do something for you, and I made it worse.”
She shook her head. The tears were streaming down her face now. “You did something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” She heard his voice in the sunlit green, and the voice of the other, the soft German voice that made the hair stand up on her neck. He had gone to them. To tell them they owed her for what she had done. She was reaching for something, reaching within the darkness in her mind. “I don’t know how to say it.”
He looked up at the high loft window, a small square of blue. “Yeah,” he breathed. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to explain it. They can tell you what it’s like a hundred times and you’d never know.”
“What what’s like?”
He shivered. “Life. Everything. Death. The other side of the barbed wire, why did you say I understood? I didn’t.”
“You sort of did.”
He snorted.
There was a moment of silence, the hay dust dancing in the beams as slow as time, dancing as if it had eternity to dance in. “And then,” said Julien in a low voice, “there’s something more. You come to the end and there’s something more. And it’s part of the end. It’s both at once exactly, you can’t separate them, it’s like …” He grasped at the air in front of him and shook his head. “I saw a waterfall in the mountains once. There was something about it, the way it fell, I never could explain it. It fell so fast and so—slowly at the same time. No. That’s stupid. I don’t know how to say it. It just pours itself over the edge, and the whole time it’s falling to the rocks it’s like it’s floating, like it’s weightless …”
“I jumped,” said Elisa, and began to tremble.
She could feel it. She could not see it. It was in the dark. She could feel that moment, suspended—nothing else. Nothing but the strange, quiet sensation under the terror, the accepting: I am going to die. Nothing but the air around her.
“I jumped,” she whispered. “The knife
. I cut, cut the canvas.” She clasped her arms around herself as her body remembered the rattling of the truck, the guard and his gun, her arm bent painfully, hiding the knife. “We were in an army truck, with canvas sides. The bus stopped somewhere, we were there for hours, they came back with more prisoners and put some of us into a couple of those trucks. I was up near the cab, away from the guard. I cut—very slowly.” The knife lay on the rough boards beside her; her fingers shaped themselves tightly to that remembered grip. “Later,” she whispered thickly, “I started cutting very fast.” She put her head in her hands and spoke through them. “They were beating Chaim.” A bird’s wings whirred in the little window, and she parted her hands. “I remember—a flapping noise, the wind must have got into the cut—it must have been then that I jumped, or I wouldn’t be here. It’s, it’s unbelievable that I’m here.” The pressure of held-in weeping in her head was agony. The tears began to flow again. “I think,” she whispered, “I was hoping at least one of them could jump too.” For a moment there was silence. The light above her wavered like sunlight on the water, above the drowned. “They’re all gone, Julien.”
His eyes were like dark wells in the dim light. “I’m so sorry. If we had—”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He looked down, and nodded. She nodded too. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his fault. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault. If they had disbanded the house—if she’d cut faster—if Chaim had fled here, to this hayloft—if Manuel had decided two weeks sooner to go back to the devil he knew—if the canvas hadn’t flapped so loud, so loud she knew she didn’t have a second to lose …
She drew in a sharp breath, feeling it again in all her limbs. Suspended, falling toward the earth. “I had to get back to Karl and Tova. They were all I could think about. Julien, I heard them, I heard their voices telling me the way back to Tanieux. I remember it as clearly as anything.” She put a hand up to her aching temple. “I suppose I hit my head.”
Julien let out a soft breath that was very like a laugh. “I suppose so.”
“It was like you said. That’s exactly what it’s like. You’re falling and you’re flying and you know you’re going to die. And, and you’re lifted.” She looked up into the sunbeams; gold and darkness danced above her. “I don’t remember landing. It’s still like that for me, like it was when I did it.” She turned to him. “You just jump,” she said. “Into nothing.”
“Because there’s nothing else you can do,” said Julien.
“Because you have to.”
There was a long moment of silence. His eyes were on hers, his thin face utterly still. She drew a sharp breath and looked down at her hands. Somewhere in the hay they could hear a mouse scratching. Julien moved away from her a little, toward the ladder. He said quietly, looking straight in front of him, “I don’t know what else you heard up there, but you should probably forget it.”
“No,” murmured Elisa.
He turned sharply to her.
“I—I don’t …” She looked at her knees. It’s not that. She raised her head. “You don’t deserve to be forgotten.”
His eyes were wells, the dusty gold light of the loft trembling on the surface. He closed them. “Thank you,” he whispered. She could see one hand gripping the seam of his trouser leg, stretching the worn cloth. After a moment he said, “Albrecht—the man you saved. He asked me to tell you he’d like to talk with you if you’re willing. He stays down at Les Genêts.”
She shivered. “What is he, Julien?”
“A major.”
“Of what?”
“Army. He was on the eastern front.”
She let out the long breath she had been holding, then drew it in again. It doesn’t mean you didn’t kill anyone just because they’re in Russia. “And you’re sure he wasn’t SS?”
“Yeah. He said—Yeah, I’m sure.”
She sat back in the hay, filling her lungs with the scented air. A breeze was blowing in the little window under the eaves. “Julien,” she said, “when you see your father, I have a message for him. I want my siblings taken to Switzerland. And me. But they can travel without me, by the Cimade or the OSE, if he thinks it’s safer for them.” She sat up. “As soon as possible. Make sure and say that.”
“Élise,” he said after a long moment, “thank God.”
“It’s not over yet.”
“I know,” he breathed.
“I’m so afraid,” she said. “But we have to. There’s nothing else we can do.”
“You’re here,” he said. “Élise, you escaped from the Gestapo.”
She felt her mouth twist slowly into a painful smile. “I did. Didn’t I?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were warm on her, a smile creeping over his own face too.
The far sound of voices came in through the little window. Elisa sat still a moment, breathing them in. Yes. Then she was on her knees by the window, ignoring the pain and the dizziness, drinking in the sight of them down below: the dark heads of her brother and sister, Tova’s face upturned for a moment, Karl’s voice raised up in some question, then passing out of sight into the house, their bodies moving easily and whole. Julien was watching her. “They’re here,” she whispered, and he nodded.
“I’ll go.”
Then their voices already at the bottom of the ladder. Julien went for the other ladder as Tova’s face came into sight, already streaming with tears. “Elisa. I thought—”
“Shh, shh. I’m here. I’m here.” Her sister came to her arms, and she held her against her heart.
“I told you she’d come back,” said Karl’s gruff, cracking voice. Elisa opened her eyes and stared.
After a moment Julien’s voice came from the top of the far ladder: “You did?” It cracked too.
And then they were laughing, and Karl came into her arms, all of them laughing and Julien laughing too, even as he slipped quietly down out of sight, leaving her holding tight and warm to what was left of her family.
Julien climbed down the ladder into the barn side of the ancient stone farmhouse. The cow stalls stood empty, each with its trapdoor for hay above it. The air was dim, fragrant with hay and the rich, familiar stink of manure. The low sound of laughter and voices from upstairs mingled with the clucking of chickens just beyond the wall. He closed his eyes for a long moment, listening. Then he turned away.
He let himself through the door to the living room and blinked, blinded by morning light on plastered walls. Through the window he could see Roland and Monsieur Thibaud out in the near hayfield, their scythes swinging in unison. It was quiet in the house, no one there except, sitting at the table with a glass of water, the person he had known must have brought the children to Élise.
“Good morning,” he said hoarsely, and his father turned.
Papa’s eyes did not go to his bandage, or to the stiff and careful way he moved. They went to his eyes, and he nodded very slightly. “Julien,” he murmured, and stood, scraping his chair raggedly on the floor. He held out his hands for Julien’s shoulders, stared at his bandage, drew in a breath, and turned away two steps to Madame Thibaud’s kitchen, returning with a pitcher and glass. “Here. Sit. Julien.” He poured him water, overfilling it, spilling some on the pine table. Julien saw him suddenly in a barracks full of listening men, his eyes dark and calm, his upraised hand trembling a little as he said, God is my help. Saw him going to bed and waking up behind barbed wire.
“Papa,” he said. Papa handed him the glass, and he drank deep.
“Tell me,” his father said, and sat.
And so Julien sat at the Thibauds’ table, hearing the faint, glad voices in the hayloft overhead, and told his father everything, every word he could remember. Even the parts he wanted to tell no one yet, until he had gone up to the cave and stared at the stream for a while, until he had slept alone and woken alone and found at least a few words to put to the things inside him. Words that someone would understand who hadn’t lately leapt from a Gestapo truck in the dark.
But he owed Papa this.
And Papa needed to know.
He did not watch his father’s face. He looked at his hands on the table in front of him and didn’t glance up for a moment as he forced himself to say the words, “And then he put the gun to my head.” Hearing his father’s breathing change was bad enough. He did not leave out what he had said about Élise. He didn’t look up until he had repeated the German phrase and Élise’s translation. Then he looked his father in the eye.
“Do you have any guess, Papa? As to what he meant?”
Papa had one knuckle over his mouth. He straightened, not taking his eyes off Julien. He lowered his hand and said softly, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Julien gripped the table, sudden fury rising in him. “But did I do anything that will hurt someone?”
“I’m not a prophet,” said Papa with almost equal vehemence, then quieted. “But I don’t think so, Julien. I don’t see how.”
“But there was something. He smiled.”
Papa nodded soberly. “I’ll talk to Alex. There may be some way for us to find out more.” He looked Julien in the eye. “You did a very brave thing, and a good thing. I do not believe evil will come of it.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Julien.
Élise’s faint, low laughter came from above. Julien saw his father watching his face, and looked straight back at him. “She wants to go to Switzerland. She says you can send Charles and Brigitte by the Cimade or the OSE if you think that’s best.”
“She’s doing the right thing.”
Julien nodded.
“You’ve acted honorably toward her, from what I can see.”
Julien looked away. “Acting honorably hurts.”
“A great deal, sometimes,” said Papa. “Like many of the things most worth doing. It’s a clean break, Julien. It will heal well and strong.”
Julien blinked and kept his face still. His father’s brown eyes were warm and sad. For a moment neither spoke. Then Papa said, “Where would you like to go now?”
Flame in the Night Page 26