How Huge the Night

by Heather Munn

  “He’s not the guy in the picture who’s shaking hands with Hitler, is he?”

  “Um …”

  Julien almost laughed out loud. Pierre was the best.

  “And he’s supposed to be this war hero?”

  “Pierre Rostin,” said Monsieur Matthias, “sit down.”

  On Tuesday Henri was there again, saluting the flag, but Julien stopped and stared across the schoolyard at him. Henri’s hand was not raised stiffly in the air like the others’.

  It was over his heart.

  There was a letter. A flimsy, preprinted postcard, and on it Uncle Gino’s handwriting:

  Dear Martin and Maria,

  All … in good health … tired … slightly, seriously ill … wounded … killed … prisoner … died … without news of … family B. K. (evacuated). The family Pirelli … is well … back to work … in need of … supplies … money. Vincent … will go back to school at … Paris … is being put up at … is going to … Best wishes … Love … Giovanni Pirelli

  Mama had tears in her eyes. Julien hugged her. They’re all right. After a moment they looked again at the postcard. “Evacuated,” Mama murmured.

  They looked at each other. Julien thought of the roads, the bombers, Régis Granjon glancing up in fear.

  “We don’t tell him,” said Papa.

  Julien nodded, slowly.

  Nina began to walk again.

  She could put her feet on the floor. She could stand. Fräulein took her bedpan away, and she hobbled to the bathroom, leaning on Gustav’s arm. He brought her crutches, scrubbed clean; she stood leaning on them, holding the handgrips her fingers knew so well. Here it was, waiting for her: her life.

  She walked between bookshelves out into a place of windows, and light. A kitchen table laid for three, a steaming bowl of potatoes. Gustav’s face lit at the sight of her; on the edge of her memory, she could see Father holding out his arms to her: Come on, herzerl! You can do it! She leaned her crutches against the table and sat at the place prepared for her. Gustav beamed.

  She walked slowly through the apartment that afternoon, her crutches clicking gently on the floor. Every wall was lined with books. French, English, German, Italian, languages she didn’t even recognize. One that looked like Hebrew. Did this woman read Hebrew? She touched the spines of the books gently as she moved down the hall. It had been so long. She wondered if Uncle Yakov had given her books to Heide as she’d asked. If she’d ever see Heide’s round friendly face again—if she’d ever see Vienna, and Uncle Yakov, and her cousins—

  “I wouldn’t start with Kant, if I were you.” She jumped and snatched her hand away from the books. It was Fräulein. “Not before you get your strength back.” Quiet amusement tinged her voice.

  “I wasn’t going to … I … I couldn’t—”

  “You certainly can and will read my books,” said Fräulein firmly. “I merely ask to be allowed to advise.” She took down a thick book from the opposite shelf. “Now this is the Torah. Should I presume you’ve read it before?”

  She hadn’t read it. She leafed through it in bed that night. She read about the Flood, about a king murdering somebody over a vineyard; she read long poetry she didn’t understand, about God punishing and forgiving, full of warriors and chariots, mountains and springs of water, mothers and babies. It sounded familiar somehow. While she read she saw Uncle Yakov’s table, and the Shabbat candles.

  The Italian woman came, the woman named Maria. Maria showed her the center of the Torah book; the psalms. She couldn’t read German, but she told Nina the number of her favorite psalm and quoted lines from it to her in Italian, her eyes closed, her face open: “When evil men come upon me to devour me, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall … Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up … I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

  Nina found the psalm in the Torah book that night when Maria was gone. She read it three times. Then she read on. “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I thank him … The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders … The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve, and strips the forests bare, and in his temple everything cries, ‘Glory!’”

  She did not believe or disbelieve the beautiful words. She read them. She heard the glory cry. She turned off the lamp and lay in the dark with her eyes closed, feeling strangely quiet, strangely open, as if someone had slipped in when she wasn’t looking and unlatched the doors of her spirit, opened them slowly, like the windows of a small and airless room.

  When she woke, the wind had blown the whole sky in.

  It was blue, bluer than any sky she had seen before, deep and filled to the brim with the sun. The curtains were a clean and brilliant white against the blue, and the sunlight rested on the edge of her bed, touching the tip of her fingers with a sure and gentle warmth. Her heart was buoyed and carried in the warm air, the strange sensation of lightness, the stone weight of fear rolled away.

  “Peace,” she whispered in surprise. “It’s peace, isn’t it.”

  She sat in Fräulein’s chair by the window with the Torah book open in her lap, drinking in the sky. Gustav paced behind her: to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the kitchen again. “You all right, Gustav?” she called, wishing it were warm enough to fling the window open. She pushed the curtains farther aside, and at the sound of rings sliding on the curtain rod, he was there. “Not so wide, please,” he begged.

  “We need more light in here! They’re always shut!”

  “Fräulein doesn’t like people looking in.”

  “It’s a beautiful day out there, Gustav. You should go out or something. When I’m strong enough—”

  Gustav swallowed and twitched the curtain just a little. “When you’re strong enough,” he said brightly, “you’ll step out the door, and all the boys in Tanieux will fall at your feet! Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

  “Oh, come off it.” But her face felt warm.

  Julien had learned to stay out of Henri’s way. I may have my hand over my heart, his eyes said, but I still wish you were dead. Two weeks now, he had lived this way, asking his mother every evening: “Any news?” “No news,” she said, and he could breathe again. And sleep, and wake, and face the school day and Henri’s burning eyes.

  Pierre still talked to Henri. Pierre, the old friend who was slow to understand the new alliances, who stayed out of the flag salute with puzzled disgust on his face and spent the rest of his break moving freely around the schoolyard—under the tree with Henri, by the wall with Julien, by the gate with Léon and Antoine. Pierre didn’t care. Julien wished he were Pierre.

  Pierre, who had cut through the National Revolution crap so instantly he still thought he could straighten Henri out.

  “I don’t get it, man,” Julien heard Pierre say, putting away his books after math class. “The guy is working with the boches. Why do you listen to a word he says?”

  Henri clapped his math book shut. “You have to learn to see past appearances, Pierre.”

  “You mean he just looked like he shook Hitler’s hand?”

  “I mean,” said Henri, slowly and with emphasis, “that he was forced to shake Hitler’s hand.”

  Gaston shot Henri a look of scorn. “Forced? You sound like Julien Losier.”

  Henri turned white. “‘You sound like Julien Losier,’” he mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “You sound like a six-year-old. Go ahead. Tell my friend here why the marshal shook Hitler’s hand,” he snarled, “and make it good.” Henri turned to Julien, who instantly looked away. “And you. Get out of here. Now.” He took a trembling breath. “By the way,” he added in a quiet, deadly voice, “I know where they are.”

  Julien’s heart stopped. Pierre’s eyes went wide. “Where what are?” asked Gaston.

  “None of your business,” said Henri.

  The farmer Gustav had wo
rked for needed his help again, Gustav said, if Nina could spare him. They were putting the garden to bed before the frost, the last big push of the season.

  “If I can spare you! You’re driving me crazy, pacing around here all day!”

  “I’ll have to be gone for a couple nights.”

  “Is it so far?”

  He shrugged. “Out of town. I think I might need to leave in the morning early. You might not see me at breakfast.”

  She lay in bed, wondering. She couldn’t sleep. Fräulein had been all strange today; she’d changed Nina’s sheets and taken all her little things off the desk—the thermometer, the water glass, the Torah book she was reading—and spent half an hour arranging boxes and tarps under the bed and practically crawling in behind them like she was playing hide-and-seek. But all without smiling. Hardly looking at Nina. It made her nervous. And Gustav—why did he have to work so far away? It didn’t make sense. She’d missed him so much while she was sick—hadn’t they known she needed him? He’d never been there, and now he always was—but pacing like an animal in a cage, twitchy, being strange about curtains … like he was …

  Hiding.

  He hadn’t left the house. Ever. In more than two weeks.

  She heard the creak of a floorboard outside her door. She breathed deep and slow as a sleeper, her heart racing, her throat tight. Heard the click of a latch, and quiet footsteps on the stairs; she leaned to the window and saw, down below, the downstairs door swing open and a dark figure slip down the street; keeping to the shadows, afraid of the faint light of the moon.

  The window was cold and hard against her forehead. None of it was true. The dark was a weight pressing on her, and the ragged moon laughed in her face, and she hardly heard her own dry whisper: Gustav, you lied to me. And everywhere there were evil men.

  “Bonjour?” A head was peering in the barn door.

  Gustav squirted the last couple streams of milk into the pail and released the goat. “Bonjour,” he said back, peering through misty dawn light. It was awfully early for anyone to be out there. Even him. But he’d missed this so much; the milking especially.

  “Where is Pierre?” The boy’s silhouette was tall and thin.

  “He sleep. I tell him I do milking today.”

  “You’re Gustav,” said the boy, stepping through the door. Brown hair and a thin face; nobody he knew.

  “Yes. You?”

  “A friend of Pierre.”

  “You look for Pierre?”

  “I thought I’d help him with the milking. I can help you if you like.”

  Gustav looked at the boy, considering. Well, he was a friend of Pierre, and he’d known where to find him at six o’clock in the morning. “You can milk?”

  “No problem.” The stranger pulled the old milking stand out of the corner, took Paquerette by one horn, and with a neat twist got her up on it. “She used to be ours,” he told Gustav, beginning with a practiced hand to shoot a hard stream of milk into the pail. “We had three, but my father sold them to the Rostins a couple years ago. Now we just have a cow. Do you like it here?”

  Gustav blinked. Nobody had asked him that. Don’t you know, friend-of-Pierre? I’m lucky to be anywhere that’s not behind barbed wire. The goat on his stand tossed her horns, and he grabbed her udder and started milking, feeling the rhythm of it in his hands. He liked this. Even on those farms in the mountains, as a raw kid just learning to work, he’d liked it.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes. I come from city, you know? My father, he made—” he gestured at his feet.

  “Shoes?”

  “Yes. But my father die, and we go. In Italy, I learn to work for farmers, and it is good. I like it. But I never can stay. Always there is danger. When we stop, we must go again … most time we are in cities, nobody know us, my sister she is very afraid. Here—I work on farm again, this is good family, I hope that now we can stay. This place, it is very, you know?” He couldn’t remember the word. “Like woman …”

  The stranger’s hands paused in their motion, and he looked at Gustav. “Beautiful?”

  “Yes. Beautiful.” There was more light now.

  “How is your sister?”

  “Better! Every day she is little bit better. I think … I think she will live.”

  “What did she have? What kind of sickness?”

  “I don’t have name. Fever, and—she need, you know, toilet all the time. Very thin. Before we come here, we are in Lyon. So many people, no food. I tried …” It hurt to even remember how he’d tried … He blinked fast and kept on milking. “In Lyon a woman beats her. Takes Nina’s stick for walking and she beats her, because she thinks we are Germans. Now she have hurt here”—he touched his side—“it breaks, you know? Maybe this make her sick. Maybe because hungry. I don’t know. Maybe because—” He released Nanette, and sat at the empty milking stand for a moment, looking into the darkness of the barn. “In Lyon—it is end. We think, now we die. She think that. How you say? I don’t know word …” He could not think how to say it. The morning sun filtered in through the cracks in the walls; it poured through the open doorway. The other boy looked away, toward the sunlit world.

  “In Lyon, she think life no more good. She—I think she want to die. But Samuel bring us here. I make her come, and now she lives. She think safe. She not know about train man. I not tell her. I want she should get better.”

  “If you tell her about the train man, she won’t get better?” The boy was sitting very straight, his hands motionless on Jaunette’s udder, his face very still. Gustav looked away.

  “I don’t know. If she afraid again …”

  The boy nodded. Abruptly, he began to milk again, harder than before. “This train man is a bad person?”

  Gustav stared at him. He was milking furiously. Why would he ask such a thing? “What you think?” he said quietly, hard.

  Jaunette bleated. “He told you to go away and die? Is that it?”

  “He give us train ticket to go back, he say, because people no want us here. Back to Lyon. In Lyon we die.” Gustav looked away, his throat growing tight.

  “I should go.” The boy untied Jaunette with a quick motion. “We are finished, no?”

  Gustav glanced down the row of goats. “Yes,” he said, shaking himself. “Yes. Thank you. You stay maybe for—”

  “My father will expect me at breakfast.”

  Gustav held out his hand. “I not know your name—”

  The boy looked at the hand for a moment and took it. “Henri,” he said. “My name is Henri.”

  Chapter 37

  Life in Their Hands

  Nina woke to fear, as she had every morning for the past year. As she always would.

  Who was he hiding from? Hiding her from? What did they mean to do? He hadn’t seen fit to tell her. None of them had. They had left her in the dark.

  In Lyon she had been ready. She remembered the hunger, and the way the hunger had faded, the still and heavy peace. Sinking toward sleep at the end of a journey, the end of a long and terrible day. And then Gustav pulling at her, shouting at her—“Live, live!” He would never know how hard it had been. But she had done it. She had fought her way back to life; she had found rest. She had found what she thought she would never taste again.

  Joy.

  She wished she had died.

  In Lyon, she had been ready. But now! Now after one last taste of freedom, one day with the stone lifted from her heart—to feel the weight of fear again and know it would never go— There was no God. And if there is. And if there is he doesn’t know what he is doing. He is stark shrieking mad. He’s been too long in the dark.

  Even this town in the hills, with its kind faces, was a place of danger. All her long-ago hope and her courage had been pretty lies, and Uncle Yakov was right. She knew this now. The world was full of thieves and soldiers who took whatever they could; even women and children had hatred in their eyes. Gustav with his desperate, fierce care had bought her one day of freedom, and this ter
rible truth. And now she had to do it all over again; to let go of peaches, and sunlight, and all the hopes she had hidden down inside herself for the things she would never have. A sweetheart. A husband. Children.

  She lay dry-eyed, looking up at the blank ceiling.

  There had been no word from the mayor, nor from Victor Bernard. It had been four days. Julien was beginning to breathe again.

  He walked out to the farm Sunday afternoon behind the rented cart to haul wood for the winter. The wild thyme in the woods this year had grown taller than Grandpa had ever seen it. “Did I ever tell you what that means, Julien?” he asked as they stacked wood.

  “No.”

  “It means a hard winter. Maybe the hardest in a very long time.”

  Julien glanced at the long woodpile, and Grandpa followed his gaze.

  “We cut a lot of wood last year, Julien. As much as we could. Beyond that we’ll have to trust God.” He looked at Julien, his eyes bright. “Julien—” He broke off and smiled and rocked the cart to see if the load would shift. “In the city,” he said quietly, “I’ve seen tarps over woodpiles. As if the rain would rot them. When the rain’s what makes them strong. Leaches the sap out, seasons the wood— it’s not worth burning till it’s been out in the storms for a year.”

  In the end of the gray log Julien was lifting were little lines. Little dents, the bites of a clumsy maul. He had split this log last year. When he was fifteen.

  “You really think we’re ready?”

  “It’s been quite a year for storms, Julien,” said Grandpa quietly.

  “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

  News was in the wind, on the radio, news of change. More refugees. Tens of thousands expelled from Lorraine for “disloyalty,” which meant, Papa said, not speaking German. A bunch of them from some Protestant boarding school in Lorraine were enrolling in the new school. A few were Jewish. Benjamin was called into the principal’s office at lunchtime and came out with a bigger grin than Julien had seen on him in months.