How Huge the Night

by Heather Munn

  Julien grinned too.

  Chapter 12

  Everywhere

  In Trento there was a house; and the house had a door.

  It stood in a deserted place between railroad tracks and an old factory with broken windows and weeds growing up from the foundation. Most of the roof was caved in, but the kitchen was whole and had a chimney and a door. The kitchen was where they lived.

  At first, Niko slept like the dead. Gustav came and went; Niko woke long enough to wedge the door securely shut behind him and slept again. Gustav brought matches from somewhere and made a fire with bits of broken boards; Niko hung their wet clothes on a string in front of the chimney and slept again. Gustav brought food in greasy brown paper: cold pizza he’d been given at a restaurant’s back door. Niko ate, and slept.

  And they lived. Through the long day, Niko lay on her father’s eiderdown, looking into the fire, putting on more sticks and boards when it sank down; and at evening, Gustav came with food and stories. Showing her the routine he used at the back doors of restaurants, big puppy-dog eyes and a hand on his stomach, and “Food? Food for empty belly?” It made them laugh, he said. Italians liked a laugh, even when you were begging. He liked Italians, he said. A camp of Gypsies had settled out that way, he said, in the field across the drainage ditch. He said he liked them too.

  Then they would bed down by the fire, but now Niko could not sleep. She lay awake long hours in the dark, by the dim light of the fire, wondering. Wondering what Father knew.

  Everywhere there are evil men. It was why she stayed in this house and did not go out with Gustav. Everywhere. Was Uncle Yakov right, then? she asked Father. She asked God. What is this world you made? Father had told her stories of corpses piled up in ditches, just for being Jewish. He hadn’t said what happened to the women. But she could guess. God. Why? Why do you let them? She couldn’t do it, she couldn’t lie here all day and all night with only her and the questions in her head, and a God who did not answer—she couldn’t do it. But outside, she heard voices sometimes; men’s voices, laughing. Outside, for her, there was nothing but fear.

  Then came the pain in her throat, and outside, the snow. Niko lay under the eiderdown, shivering, no matter how high the fire was, and sweating. Two, three, four days, and the fever did not go. Gustav felt her forehead, his eyes dark. “I don’t know what to do, Niko. I need to get help.”

  “Gustav, no. You can’t tell anyone I’m here. Gustav, promise. Gustav, you have to promise!”

  He promised.

  She lay staring at the fire, wandering a dark wilderness in her mind. She was in the woods on the border with Uncle Yakov—he was saying run, run, the Cossacks are coming. Father was up ahead, maybe she could catch him and Mother—Mother who ran so fast that she’d never seen her. She called out to them—wait, wait, you forgot Gustav … Don’t worry, Father called. Gustav can look after himself. He knows their language. They like a laugh. And he was gone, ahead of her in the dark woods, over the border, and she couldn’t find the gap. Father, Father come back, Gustav wants you to come back! And then Gustav was there, and a fire, he had made a fire in the woods, but the Cossacks would see it, and he was saying something, he was shouting. “No, Nina, no. I won’t let you. I won’t let you die!”

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter 13

  Weapons

  It happened exactly like Julien had expected.

  He heard the news Monday in math class from Gaston, who was telling Dominique behind him. Apparently he, Julien, was a snitch of the lowest kind who had gone straight to Pierre’s mother with a pack of lies about the fight. He heard Dominique respond to this information with a soft, shocked, “He did?”

  Benjamin turned, but Julien elbowed him. Eyes front. You can only make it worse.

  Pierre’s eyes were cold and hard as the crusted snow, as cold and hard as Henri’s. That moment they had looked each other in the eye and shaken hands was gone now. Never happened. Julien sat beside Benjamin, staring out the window. He was going to sit this one out.

  Two weeks till Christmas break.

  The road to school was gray frozen slush; the bridge over the Tanne coated with ice. He walked down it in the early morning dark, the stars overhead, and he walked back up in the dim blue evening, thinking of home and warmth and firelight. Mama would have the fire roaring, the light dancing golden-warm on the walls; he would hang his wet socks up to dry and stretch his feet out near the blaze, and the chill would melt off till he was warm all through.

  Benjamin asked if he’d like to do homework together. They sat at the table, mugs of mint tea by their books, the firelight from the living room turning their notebook pages a pale honey-gold, and Benjamin showed him how to work those equations Monsieur Vanier had them on just now. They worked together every night, and Benjamin shook his head and grinned at Julien’s complaints about how the teachers piled it on.

  “What else is there to do?” he asked wonderingly.

  “Soccer,” said Julien, rolling his eyes, then looked out the window at the blowing snow and sighed.

  Benjamin left a week early, before Christmas break, to see his family in Paris. There was a light in his eyes as Julien shook his hand goodbye at the station, in the howling burle. Julien walked to school alone, his head down against the wind.

  Back in the science room, he looked over at the circle of the class and wondered if he should try them now, with Benjamin gone, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. To have the troisième class tolerate him, was that what he wanted? He took a seat on a desk among them, closer to the fire, and no one stopped him. But he saw no friendship in their faces.

  Suddenly he hated doing his homework alone.

  The air was bright and bitter cold as Julien walked out the school gate, and his boots kicked the powdery snow into glittering clouds in the sun. He was free.

  At home, there was the roaring fire, and hot chocolate, and preparations for Christmas. It was going to be a simple one this year. Prices were up, Papa said, and there was a freeze on raises for all government employees—and he was teaching at the public school next year instead of the new one. Except for two unpaid courses he’d volunteered for, for love of Pastor Alex. More work, less money. Thanks to Julien.

  There was nothing Julien could do except pitch in and not complain and try to think of a good Christmas present with no money. Which was what he intended to do. For Papa and for Mama.

  One night, he came down to the kitchen for a cup of milk to help him sleep, and she was there. Candlelight wavering on the walls, and Mama with her little Bible in front of her, eyes closed, moving her lips in a faltering whisper, in Italian. He froze in the doorway, staring. Tears were streaming down her face. He turned and fled in silence.

  He lay awake a long time, gazing into the dark.

  He wanted to learn to carve.

  Grandpa was carving Magali a deer. It was beautiful. It was beautiful just watching the skill in his hands, taking off a shaving here and there, bringing a shape out of formless wood. There’d been a porcelain statue Mama had wanted in a Paris shop—cupped hands cradling a baby that barely filled their palms. God’s hands or something. Papa’d wanted to buy it for her, but it was too much. Julien would make it out of wood. For them both.

  “That’s a pretty advanced project, mon grand,” Grandpa told him. But he gave him wood and his second-best knife, and they sat by the fire together peeling golden shavings of wood onto the floor. For a couple of days. But Grandpa was right.

  Grandpa taught him wood-burning, and brought him and Magali in on his project: two wooden Bible covers for Papa’s big black Bible and Mama’s little Italian one. Magali did the sewing in strong canvas, Grandpa cut and planed the thin oak boards for the front and back, and Julien sanded and finished and polished them until they glowed.

  There was firelight and wood and snow; they went out to cut pine boughs and holly for the house and came home to hot mugs of tea and Grandpa’s stories after supper by the fire. A letter came f
rom Vincent. He missed Julien; their soccer games just weren’t the same; he had Madame Larron for social studies, wasn’t it awful? He’d wanted to send him a present, but he couldn’t, so he’d lit a penny candle in the church and prayed Julien would get a soccer ball. How was he, anyway?

  He was all right.

  On Christmas day, they cut a pine tree in the woods; they brought it in and tied candles to its branches. They helped Mama stuff the chicken with chestnuts Grandpa had gathered and told her it was better than turkey. They sat round the fire and read the Christmas story, with all the candles lit, and Julien got a new coat, and from Grandpa a carving of a wolf, its head thrown back howling: beautiful. And Magali liked her wood-burned tree picture, and the Bible covers glowed in the candlelight with the high shine he had put on them, and Mama and Papa glowed too. And Mama cried.

  “So, Julien,” said Grandpa. “You still want to learn to carve?”

  “Yes.” Next year he’d make them the hands.

  So Grandpa started him on his first project: a simple, stylized, round-crowned tree.

  Soon it was the only good thing left in his life.

  Benjamin came home and looked at his plate during meals and hid in his room. He gave Julien an illustrated history of soccer and offered a pale smile and a thank-you for the wood-burned Bible verse Julien had made him: The Lord is my rock and my fortress, my deliverer, in whom I take refuge. The Jews wrote the Psalms, Grandpa had insisted; but that didn’t make them Benjamin’s thing. He’d been right. He backed out of the room, away from Benjamin’s pale, unseeing face.

  They were frozen in time, all of them; frozen at the worst possible time. At school, nothing had changed, just hardened into a permanent shape like the footprints in the schoolyard that had been there since fall, frozen solid in the mud. Puddles lay in them, gray, flat, lifeless ice reflecting nothing of the sky. The circle of the class was as it had been: Henri Quatre hard and proud at its center; Pierre throwing dirty looks; the rest not seeing Julien, even Roland. Roland, who had almost been his friend. He had no friends now. He sat at his desk beside a pale, silent Benjamin, studying motionless images of soccer, and did not look up.

  But he carved.

  Every morning on the way to school, a picture of the day was in Julien’s mind, a picture of the week, like the one on his classschedule sheet, but in color. The school hours were a flat, gray collage: the dirty snow and the hard, gray puddles, the bare concrete walls and the cold faces. Everything frozen, everything numb. The evenings and Thursdays and Sundays burst into light, golden and brown, the firelight and faces around the table, Grandpa’s eyes and all the wood tones of his workshop, the golden shavings peeling off under his knife. This was not frozen; this blocky, solid piece of wood—this he could change. After the tree, he carved a fish with carefully etched scales and a lifelike bend in its tail. Grandpa said he had the touch and started him on a dolphin.

  Halfway through the third week of January, the schedule-picture in his mind was blown into a blinding whiteout, all the lines erased: blizzard. He looked out the window at the sheer aching white and praised the Lord.

  Down in the workshop, it didn’t hurt.

  Grandpa worked with him on the dolphin, trying to shape the flippers without cutting them off. It was a lot harder than a fish; fish were flat on the sides.

  On Saturday, a clear blue sky; Julien and Benjamin waded to school through knee-deep snow to find a third of the school absent. Out on the farm track, it was thigh deep or more; those farm kids knew impassable when they saw it.

  Then Jean-Pierre Reynaud, the doctor’s son, fainted in Papa’s history class, and Papa sent Julien for the doctor. It was while he was skirting close to the buildings along the place du centre, trying to stay out of the burle, that he saw disaster looking him in the face.

  Pierre. In the Santoros’s cafe.

  Julien stood riveted by the scene: Pierre lifting his cup, head tilted, a loose grin on his lips, his older friends laughing. But he was clowning, not drunk. Because before Julien could move, Pierre was giving him the death stare.

  I didn’t do it, Pierre. I’m not going to do it. Right in the Café du Centre during school hours, you moron! I’m not gonna say a word.

  And much good it’ll do me.

  “Love your enemies,” boomed Pastor Alex.

  Julien shifted on the hard, wooden pew. “‘Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.’ Why does Jesus instruct us to love our enemies? So that we may be sons of our Father in heaven.”

  Julien found himself listening. More often than he expected, when that voice rang through the stone church, he found himself listening. Our Father in heaven, Pastor Alex said, as if he were talking about his own father, as if there was nothing better in the world. The Father who made the hills and the rivers and the sea, who sent rain on the crops of the just and the unjust, whose mercy fell on all—and where would we be without that mercy? How, the pastor asked, could we turn down a chance to be sons of that Father? And Julien, listening, could hear it in his voice—the note of terror, sorrow, loss at the very thought.

  Then Pastor Alex shifted. He spoke of the training of soldiers, how it cut against the grain of human nature to look another human being in the face and shoot him dead. The heart balks, said Pastor Alex; the hand hesitates. He gave stories, statistics. Those who train soldiers, he said, know that somehow they must take away the enemy’s face for their men, train them to think sale boche and not human being. So if even ordinary regard for a fellow man is an obstacle to war, what of love? Can you love a man and look into his face and shoot him?

  “Friends,” said Pastor Alex, “you cannot.”

  Julien looked up to where the stone vault of the church curved into shadow, and remembered the night this strange war started, and his prayer: I just want to do something. He didn’t know. He bent his head.

  Then Pastor Alex spoke of evil.

  He spoke of the Nazis and the things they did. He spoke of Kristallnacht, and Julien clenched his teeth. He asked if we must sit passively by while evil overcomes good. Julien lifted his head.

  Pastor Alex leaned forward. Jesus didn’t say, “Don’t kill your enemies.” Would Jesus simply command us not to act in the face of evil, he who won the greatest victory, who conquered sin and death? No, friends, no. What did Jesus tell us to do to our enemies?

  Love them.

  “Jesus,” said Pastor Alex, and his voice almost shook. “Jesus, the only begotten Son of the Father, offers us this chance to be his brothers and his sisters and to fight as he fought; he gives us his weapons, the Father’s weapons, the weapons of the Spirit.” He sounded reverent, almost in awe. “The weapons of love,” he said. “Fearless love.”

  Julien sat straighter. Fearless love. Even if he was never a soldier. Was that what Pastor Alex was saying? He could still fight.

  “Why, Julien? I didn’t think you were that dumb!” Roland looked disappointed in him.

  “I didn’t do a thing. If you’re gonna believe everything Pierre—”

  “Look, I didn’t believe it about his mom—”

  “Roland, if you’d been in the Café du Centre in the middle of the morning when everyone’s walking by, who would you figure told on you? Huh?”

  Roland looked at him and sighed. “Yeah. Okay. But watch your step a little, okay? He’s got it in for you.”

  Julien walked into the classroom after lunch, and on his desk lay a note in block letters that disguised their origin not at all: Go back to Paris tattletale. And take your boche friend with you. Your kind isn’t welcome here.

  If only Pierre knew how much he wanted to. And his boche friend too.

  Boche again. He could take this note to the principal right now and bust Pierre—he’d given it to him in writing, the moron. To think he’d shaken hands with him—almost liked him. Now they were enemies again

  He froze, the note still in his hand. Enemies.

  No. The grandeur of th
at sermon, the rush of rightness he had felt, and for this? This stupidity? He had sat in Grandpa’s workshop thinking and thinking, digging his knife into the side of his dolphin, trying to carve flippers. Weapons of love. What weapons? How did this even work? For all his fine words, Pastor Alex had in the end left Julien with nothing but don’t fight him. Fine. He wouldn’t fight him. He wouldn’t lower himself to fight a moron like that. Why should he?

  You’re Going to find out what not welcome means.

  As Julien walked out the school gate with the new note crushed in his hand, a blow from behind sent him sprawling into a dirty snowbank. He leapt up and whirled, ready to grab Pierre by the collar. No Pierre. Nobody. Guys walking past like nothing had happened.

  His cheek stung where the crusted ice had scraped it. He stood with his fists clenched uselessly, looking at the stream of faces. They had all seen. And Pierre wasn’t there. How many friends did the guy have? Was it the whole school now?

  That evening, he knelt beside his bed, rubbing his face with his hands. He couldn’t fight Pierre. Last time had been horrible, and this time would be worse. That was Pierre’s plan, probably: make Julien start it, make Julien take the blame.

  All right. He’d do it then.

  Pastor Alex had said to look to Jesus to learn the weapons of love. He meant, Julien supposed, read the whole story and see how Jesus acted; but he didn’t have time. He looked up what Pastor Alex had read to them from Matthew 5; “love your enemies” wasn’t much use, but the next bit—“pray for those who persecute you”—he could start on that right now.

  Lord, please bless Pierre and make him willing to be my friend again. Please make Pierre understand that I never even told on him once.