Every afternoon when Gustave came home, he checked the bank of mailboxes in the lobby of the apartment building. So far, there had been no answer from Nicole. Once or twice a piece of mail got put in his family’s mailbox by mistake or an advertisement came, and each time his fingers touched an envelope, Gustave felt a rush of excitement and hope. But it was never a letter from France.
One afternoon Mr. Coolidge kept Gustave after school to go over the reading from the night before. Gustave managed to answer some of Mr. Coolidge’s questions about African art. “Good!” Mr. Coolidge said. “You understand a lot! Why won’t you ever answer when I ask a question in class?”
Gustave shrugged and looked away.
By the time he got back to his apartment building, it was late and the lobby was dim, lit by just one lamp near the door. Gustave went as he always did to the bank of mailboxes, dialed the combination, and reached in. When his fingers felt an onionskin envelope, his heart skipped a beat. He pulled it out. It was pale blue, definitely airmail, though it was too dark to see more. He tore up the stairs, fumbled through his bag with cold fingers to find his key, and unlocked the door. No one else was home. He flipped on the light.
“N.M., La Chaise, Saint-Georges-sur-Cher,” it said on the back triangle of the envelope. It was from Nicole! But the envelope looked strange. Both ends had been ripped open and resealed with official tape. It had been opened on one end in France by a censor working for the Nazis. Then it had been opened again on the other end as it came into the US.
It was a disgusting feeling. A Nazi soldier had read his personal letter. Gustave felt as if he had been handed a chocolate bar, and then, just as he was taking a bite, he saw that there was a gigantic cockroach squatting on top of it.
Fighting down nausea, Gustave tugged the letter out of the envelope. As soon as he started reading, he could tell from Nicole’s wording that she had known unfriendly eyes were going to slide over her letter before he got it.
30 January, 1942
Cher Gustave,
I’m so glad you got there safely! We hear reports all the time about ships sinking while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, so I was worried. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to your question. Everyone in Saint-Georges is fine, but we heard there was an arrest yesterday in
We have a new teacher at school, Monsieur Faible, who tells us all the important things the Germans want us to know. Studying with Monsieur Faible is very educational. War, he says, is good for the character. It promotes discipline. It helps us learn new skills. He’s definitely right. I, for example, am learning to cook. I try to invent new things to do with rutabagas. The Germans don’t like them, so that’s what we French people eat. I’m so sick of rutabaga soup and mashed rutabagas. So yesterday I made rutabaga pancakes. They still have that same insipid taste, but at least they looked kind of like real pancakes. Papa ate them with enthusiasm. He said I hadn’t burned them too badly.
Papa was hungry because he works very hard. All farmers do. I didn’t think the pancakes tasted very good myself. But I’m sure you’ll be glad to know Papa has been working so much that even my rutabaga pancakes taste good to him. Because he is such a diligent worker, someday I might be able to tell you what you want to know.
Spring is on its way.
Je t’embrasse,
Nicole
Gustave read the letter over and over, hearing Nicole’s voice in the words. He could just imagine the mocking glance Nicole would give him as she told him about the “very educational” things she was learning from her new teacher, Monsieur Faible, who sounded like a mouthpiece for the Nazis. Gustave laughed out loud at the thought of Nicole’s poor father wolfing down burnt rutabaga pancakes. And Nicole was writing in a kind of code about her father working hard. He was a farmer, sure, and that was hard work, but Nicole meant his other work, for the French Resistance, fighting the Nazis, helping people escape from Occupied France. That was why his “hard work” might bring information about Marcel.
But there was no news about Marcel. And there had been an arrest Nicole was trying to tell Gustave about, but the words had been blacked out by the censor. Had Jews been arrested? Or someone in the Resistance?
“Spring is on its way,” she wrote. Even that was a kind of code. Saint-Georges was a lot warmer than New York, but she had written the letter in January, in the depths of winter. Nicole was always an optimist, and she was saying that better days were coming.
14
The next day, it sure didn’t feel as if spring was coming anytime soon. It started to snow as Gustave was walking to school, and it snowed on and off all day, feathery flakes drifting down outside the classroom windows. When he left the building at the end of the day, the snow had stopped and the sun had come out. Glaring down on the whiteness of the snow everywhere, on the cars, on the trees, on the sidewalks, the sun was almost too bright. It was Friday, so Gustave didn’t have to do his homework right away. He dropped off his schoolbag at the apartment and ran right back out again. At the front door of the building, he paused, then turned left and headed toward Central Park. Two men with carts were selling roasted sweet potatoes and chestnuts at the entrance to the park.
“Chestnuts?” one called hopefully to Gustave. They smelled delicious, steaming into the frosty air. Gustave reached into his pockets as if that could make money appear there, shook his head, and went past.
A few of the paths had been shoveled, and he wandered along one that wound between tall, snow-covered trees. A few other people were out, but not many. He passed an elderly couple sitting on a bench in the sunshine and a mother with a baby carriage, and then he turned down a narrower path that ran along the edge of the lake. It looked as if it would be a nice place to swim in the summer. Right now, the edge of the lake was frozen, although far off, toward the middle, a patch of water was clear and dotted with the dark shapes of ducks. Gustave searched idly along the edge of the lake for sticks and tossed one out onto the ice. It skittered a long way after it landed, but even that far from shore, it didn’t crash through.
Gustave started to compose a letter to Nicole in his head. He wanted to tell her about having a German music teacher, Mrs. Heine, who obviously hated either French people or Jews, or probably both. Suddenly he had an unpleasant thought. Could he even write that? Were the censors reading letters when they went into France? Probably. And he didn’t want to write anything that might get Nicole into trouble or make the Nazis pay particular attention to her and her father.
He felt a sickening powerlessness, and a rush of memory washed over him. He was watching the Nazi army march, all over again, down the dirt road in front of the house where his family had lived in Saint-Georges, the ground vibrating with the weight of the tanks. The soldiers had looked straight ahead, their faces blank, rifles on their shoulders, their shiny boots rising and falling, as the people from the village stood watching in stunned disbelief. And then the Germans had torn down all the French flags and put up their own flags in their place and installed barriers across the bridges, dividing the country. In his mind, Gustave could still hear the arrogant commands of the German soldiers who had guarded the bridge at the river near Saint-Georges. And that had been in the so-called “free” part of France, the part the Germans hadn’t occupied. Rage and misery surged up in Gustave, and he bit down fiercely, chewing his own lip, tasting his own blood.
Suddenly a military plane boomed through the New York sky. Gustave felt a jolt of terror. On the left side of the path, an enormous rock jutted out of the earth, offering no cover, but on the right side were thick, snow-covered bushes. Instinctively, Gustave dove for the ground on the right and rolled under a nearby bush. He clung desperately to a stem, pulling himself under as far as he could, oblivious to the snow in his face and the sticks jabbing him. His blood roared in his ears as he waited, head down, for the machine guns to begin.
Then his heart gave a great, almost sickening throb, and he remembered. He wasn’t in France anymore. It wasn’t a Nazi plane over
head. He was safe in America.
Heat washed over him and then dissipated, leaving him shivering in the cold air. He got on his hands and knees and crawled out from under the bush.
A voice spoke from far above, a girl’s voice, high and curious. “Gustave? Is that you? What are you doing down there?”
15
Gustave stood, brushing snow off himself, and looked up. Two faces peered at him from the top of the massive rock. One of them was September Rose, wearing her red coat and a blue hat with a pom-pom. The other was a dog—a curious-looking, small, spotted dog with lopsided ears. The faces disappeared, and Gustave heard the girl and the dog scrambling down the other side. After a moment, September Rose came around the rock through the bushes, shoving branches out of her way, with the little dog eagerly pulling ahead of her at the end of a leash.
“Were you playing a game?” she asked.
“Sort of.” Gustave squatted down. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“This is Chiquita.” At the sound of her name, the little dog’s ears shot straight up, and Gustave laughed.
September Rose beamed. “Watch! She does tricks. Cheeky, sit.” The little dog sprang up onto her hind legs, barking.
September Rose tousled her dog’s ears. “Well, we’re working on that one. So, what were you playing?”
“Nothing. If I throw the stick, will she bring it back?”
“Fetch, you mean? Hey, your English is getting lots better. Not bad after only a month!”
“Five weeks.”
“Five weeks—still pretty good! How come you never talk in class? Yeah, sometimes she’ll fetch. But I don’t want to let her off the leash right now, with all the trees around. She’s kind of an escape artist. You can walk her with me if you want to, though.”
“Sure.”
As they started down the path, Gustave looked at September Rose more carefully. There was something different about her today. She had a long string of beads looped twice around her neck, and against each cheek she had coaxed a lock of hair into a dramatic curl.
“Are you going to a party?” he asked.
September Rose ran a finger through the beads and twisted them. “Oh, these, you mean? No, I just like them. My granma won’t let me wear them to school. She won’t let me do my hair like this for school either. This is my Josephine Baker look.” She touched the curl on her cheek with her right forefinger, put her left hand on her hip, and tossed her head back in a glamorous pose. “Hey, did you ever hear Josephine Baker sing in Paris?”
The name was vaguely familiar—Gustave knew Josephine Baker was a famous Negro jazz singer who had moved from America to France. But in Paris he had never gone to the theater, except sometimes to the movies. “No. Never.”
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a singer like her. And I’m going to go to Paris. So you should tell me all about the city, so I can learn about it first, okay? Did you ever see Josephine Baker walking her pet leopard in Paris?”
“Leopard?”
“An enormous, spotted cat!” September Rose put her hands up by her face like claws and snarled, baring her teeth. Chiquita stopped abruptly and growled. She laughed. “It’s okay, Cheeky, I’m just pretending! Josephine Baker’s pet leopard is named Chiquita. That’s where I got Chiquita’s name from. Her Chiquita has a diamond collar! When I’m a rich and famous singer like her, I’ll buy one for you, Cheeky!” She squatted down and patted the little dog, then stood back up. “Josephine Baker walks the leopard through the streets of Paris. You never saw her doing that?” She sounded disappointed.
“No. Paris is big. She must live in a different quartier from me.”
“Neighborhood?”
“Yes, a different neighborhood. I never saw anyone with a leopard where I live!”
“But did you ever walk on the Champs-Élysées?” she asked eagerly. “I read that she likes to walk there.”
“Sure.”
“What’s it like?”
“Oh.” It was like a hand squeezing his heart, remembering Paris before the war. “Beautiful. Fancy shops. Fancy people. Tall trees with white flowers. But it’s not the same now, with the Nazis come.”
“Yeah, I guess. I wonder if Josephine Baker is still giving concerts. So tell me more about Paris. Do the ladies wear very elegant clothes? The girls too?”
“Before the war, yes, some of the ladies, the rich ones. Not so much girls. My father sold cloth when we lived in Paris, nice cloth.”
“Really? Like silk? I always wanted a silk dress!”
“Of course silk. Also cotton, wool. But now there is not so much new cloth in France. Most people wear old clothes. If they have lots of new, maybe they are friends with the Germans and that is why they have new clothes.”
“I never thought about that. I wonder what Josephine Baker uses for costumes for her performances.”
“Maybe old costumes.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The path curved left, past a bench where an elderly woman, her legs covered by a red plaid blanket, was eating crackers and tossing crumbs to the pigeons. Up ahead, in a spot where the path was well cleared, someone had drawn a grid in yellow chalk with numbers in the squares.
“Someone’s been playing hopscotch!” September Rose said.
Gustave stopped to look at it. The spaces were large, and there were rocks on the five, six, seven, and eight, so to jump the board successfully, you would have to make a mighty leap on one foot from four to nine.
“That looks hard,” September Rose said. “I bet no one could do it, with the stones blocking those spaces, so they never finished the game.”
“I can do it,” Gustave said. “I won this game a lot at school in France!” He jumped onto the one and two squares with both feet, hopped forward onto his left foot on the three triangle, and then hopped sideways to four. He stood there on one foot, wobbling slightly, getting ready, and then he hurled himself through the air to nine. He landed, miraculously, inside the square and fought for balance, then he hopped quickly onto the ten and turned around, getting ready for the way back.
“On your way back, pick up one of the stones,” September Rose challenged him. “Then I’ll try.”
The hop from ten to nine was easy. Gustave balanced there, thinking about which stone to scoop up. Eight and seven were closest, but if he picked up one of them, that would make the board much easier for September Rose. So he put his right leg out straight behind himself for balance, leaned down carefully, and scooped up the rock on five without falling or touching the pavement. He hopped back over the board and waved the rock triumphantly at September Rose. “Did it!”
“I never saw a boy play hopscotch before.”
“In France everybody plays. Why not?”
“Yeah, no reason. Okay, let me try.” She handed him Chiquita’s leash. “I’ll even throw this rock back onto the five, so the board is just as hard for me as it was for you.”
She tossed the rock into the five triangle. Then she started off, hopping quickly and neatly from two feet on the one and two squares to one foot on the three triangle and then the four triangle. She barely paused for an instant before she made the long hop from four to the exact center of nine and then on to ten as if it had not been difficult at all. She did the turn on one foot, hopped quickly onto the nine and stood there, smiling, her hands on her hips. “See? Easy!” she bragged.
“You pick up a rock too.”
“Of course. I’ll get the one on six.” She leaned over to scoop it up, but as she did, she wobbled and put a hand down.
“Oops! Butterfingers!” she called.
“You touched. You’re out! I win!” Gustave shouted.
“No, I said ‘butterfingers.’ ”
“So? You touched. What does ‘butterfingers’ mean?”
“That’s the rules here. Don’t you play it that way in France? If you touch and remember to say ‘butterfingers,’ you aren’t out.”
“Not in France.”
“Well, thi
s is America! When I go to France to sing for my first international audience, I’ll remember, and when I play hopscotch, I won’t call ‘butterfingers’!” She hopped rapidly onto the six and then to the four and the three, leaped triumphantly onto both feet on one and two, and then jumped off the board, whooping and wildly circling her arms.
“Did it!” she called, flushed and triumphant. “Tie!”
“It’s harder the way we play in France, with no ‘butterfingers.’ What does ‘butterfingers’ mean?” Gustave handed September Rose Chiquita’s leash.
“You say it when you drop something. I guess it’s like if you had butter on your fingers, they would be slippery. But also it’s a candy bar. You haven’t had one yet?”
“No.”
“Oh, you’ve gotta try it. Chocolate with peanuts. They’re one of my favorites. But they’re really hard to find these days. A lot of the chocolate’s going off to feed the soldiers. If I ever find one in a candy store, I’ll give you a bite. If you tell me more about Paris!”
Chiquita was straining on the leash. September Rose took a few running steps, catching up with her. “Come on!” she said over her shoulder. “Chiquita won’t stay still any longer.”
They passed a group of girls playing jump rope, and then they were next to a wide-open field.
“Can Chiquita fetch now?” Gustave asked.
“Sure.” She unsnapped the leash.
Gustave waved a stick at the little dog, then tossed it out over the snowy grass. She ran after it and trotted back proudly with it in her mouth. “Good dog, Chiquita,” he crooned. He tried to take the stick from her, but she gripped it tightly with her teeth, so he played tug-of-war with her for a while. Then Gustave wrenched the stick loose and threw it out over the field as far as he could. She raced after it, leaping over lumps of snow, but before she got to the stick, she swerved, darted off to the right, and disappeared.
Skating with the Statue of Liberty Page 7