Good Night, Maman

by Norma Fox Mazer

  We sat for a while, close to each other. Marc kept touching his nose to see if it was still bleeding. When it got dark, we set off again. It was still dark when we went down from the hills, moving cautiously past a sleeping village, to the sea. We washed in the cold water.

  When we were done, the sun was coming up, and we saw the village clearly. We saw the houses climbing the hills, each house lavished with large windows and doors. The walls were overflowing with flowers of the most fantastic size and extraordinary color. Purples and pinks, and bright oranges and reds. It was like looking at a vast flower garden, one that had somehow been transformed into houses. Flower houses.

  It took us a moment to realize that the flowers, the large windows and doors, the riotously colored walls were all painted. Trompe I’oeil. “Fool-the-eye painting.” In fact, each little cottage had just one small door and two small windows.

  12

  MARIA THERESA

  After those boys beat Marc and robbed us, I felt we had no one in the world who cared about us, except each other. One day the straps on my sandals broke. I cried. No, I wanted to cry, but I hadn’t eaten for two days and it took too much energy to make tears.

  Later that same day, a farmer gave us a ride in the back of his wagon. He fixed my sandals with twine and gave us each a sandwich. I lay back, swaying with the movement of the wagon. I saw a curving road. A horse in a field. Children playing.

  Then I was showing Maman the trompe l’oeil houses with their flowered windows, and she pointed out how the artist had painted each petal of every flower in perfect detail. “This is the secret of everything,” Maman said mysteriously. And I woke up, happy because my sandals were on my feet and my belly was full, and I’d just seen Maman.

  One night, we slept in a church cellar, where wooden benches were stored. In the morning, a young priest gave us bread and cups of hot milk. “How are you going on this day?” he said in French that was so funny we tried not to laugh. But he laughed first. Then he offered us an old battered bicycle with broken pedals. “It goes,” he said, making circling motions with his hands.

  We rode away, Marc peddling and me sitting behind him, on the fender. It was a bumpy ride, but the countryside sped by. Then, going down a hill, the brakes failed. Marc dragged his feet, but the bicycle went out of control and pitched us both off. I was flying and then I was in a ditch.

  Marc lay on the ground, his eyes shut. I staggered to my feet and called his name. “Open your eyes,” I ordered. “Marc!” He was scaring me.

  A tall, almond-eyed girl straddling a bicycle watched us from the road. She was holding her hair, which was long and black and gathered into a ponytail. A bundle was strapped to the back of her bicycle. She said something to us in Italian.

  Marc sat up, holding his head between his hands. The sleeve was torn off his shirt. He got up and examined our bicycle. “Look at this, Karin,” he said wearily. The handlebars were twisted and the chain had come off the sprocket. “Poor old bicycle. It’s dead!”

  “Poor old us,” I said.

  The girl helped us fix the bicycle. She had big, raw-looking hands. Strong. We all set off together. Her name was Maria Teresa, and she thought the way I spoke Italian was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  Maria Teresa like to talk, but mainly to Marc. He knew enough Italian to make it sound like a real conversation. She told him—and he told me—about the fishing boat she’d worked on; and about the little farm her mother owned, where she was going; and about her father, Babbo, who had died. She shared her food equally with us and didn’t seem to care that we had nothing to give in return.

  “Did you hear Maria Teresa say her mother’s a healing woman?” Marc asked. We were pushing the bicycles up a steep path. It was late in the day, and Maria Teresa was leading us higher into the hills, away from the main road. Below us, a village was already in shadows. We had heard there were Germans there.

  “A wounded soldier came to their village,” Marc said. “He was bleeding. Her mother wrapped his wound with a cloth she soaked in his urine and—”

  “That’s disgusting, Marc.”

  He smiled. “Pissed on the cloth, and the wound healed perfectly, Karin.”

  “Beautiful,” I said. We walked in silence for a while. Then I said, “Marc. Do you think Maria Teresa knows we’re Jews?”

  “Don’t twist your face like that, you look like a fish,” he said. “It’s either your face or your hands, all the time now. And don’t worry about Maria Teresa. Like Maman always said about Monsieur Taubert, she’s a good person. There are such people, you know.”

  I let myself fall behind. I wished he hadn’t mentioned Maman. I remembered how I had said with so much confidence, You’ll find us, Maman How was she going to do that? Find us where? I twisted my hands together, then caught myself and tucked them under my arms.

  Maria Teresa stayed with us all the rest of the way down the coast. Once, when we lay down to sleep on a hillside near some rocks, she screamed and scrambled to her feet, crossing herself. There was an arm laying on the ground. Then the wind blew toward us, and we could smell it.

  We left. None of us talked about it.

  Above a hillside village, where the soft rock of the cliffs was pocked with caves, Maria Teresa brought us to a small cave. “We’ll rest now,” she said, laying down her bicycle. “I’m home.”

  “Home?” I said. “This is where you live?”

  “No, silly one! This is my family’s cave. It’s where we keep our wine and olive oil, and we hide here when danger comes. Down there is our house.”

  Marc and I looked where she pointed, as if we could pick out Maria Teresa’s house from the others. We hunkered there, looking down the rocky slope of the mountain and listening to her. She hadn’t seen her mother for six months, she said, but now she was coming with money she had earned and would stay home. “I won’t leave mama now for a long time.” She was almost singing her words. She told us to sleep there by the cave, where she knew we would be safe, and she’d come back in the morning.

  For a while after she’d left, we sat outside, looking up at the sky and listening to the wind. If only we’d had a cave like this where we had been with Maman. Our own tiny place, where nobody could find us. Where nobody could hurt us.

  In the morning, Maria Teresa brought us bread, a spoon, and a pot of soup. Marc and I passed the spoon back and forth.

  She had brought clothes for us, too: a skirt and a blouse for me, and a shirt of her babbo’s for Marc. I crawled into the cave to change. I started to daydream that we’d to with Maria Teresa to the farm, stay with her and her mother—we could work and help them—and it would be there that Maman would find us.

  “Listen,” she said when I came out, “I have good news. Go to Naples.”

  “Naples?” I said. “Why?”

  “The Americans are there and they want people like you. I hear they have a big ship for you to live on. You’ll be safe.”

  She put us on the road to Naples, and in a few days we found the Americans and the ship, which was called the Henry Gibbins.

  It was July of 1944.

  Part Two

  UNITED STATES

  1944–1945

  Dearest Maman,

  I’m writing to you from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. No, I’m not in the water! (Joke, Maman.) I’m sitting on a wooden box on the deck of a troopship called the Henry Gibbins, on my way to America. Don’t worry, Maman, Marc is with me. We boarded this ship in Naples, with a thousand other people like us. There are also a thousand wounded American soldiers on this boat, plus the crew, which makes it very crowded. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally sent this boat to Italy from the United States.

  Marc says three thousand people wanted to get on, so it’s sort of a miracle that we did. Marc told the Americans about Aunt Hannah in California and that helped. Everyone, except the Americans, is like us—no homes, hardly any clothes. I’m not the only barefoot person! My sandals fell apart in Naples, M
aman, so I hop as fast as I can over the burning-hot deck.

  Jo, who sleeps in the bunk below me in the women’s quarters, lost her mother, her husband, and her three brothers. She comes from Sarajevo, in Yugoslavia, and she’s pregnant. I like to put my hand on her belly and feel the baby move. She really wants to go to America and so does everyone else here—except me! We each had to sign a paper saying that after the war is over, we will return to our own country. A lot of people were upset, but I signed gladly.

  Maman, every day the cooks throw leftover food to the gulls. They fly around the ship constantly, waiting for it. Those gulls eat better than we ever did! But now we eat two times a day, seven-thirty in the morning and five-thirty at night. Maman, American food is so strange. For breakfast, there’s a cereal called cornflakes. The flakes crunch in your mouth, but if you pour milk on them, they get soft and gooey. They also have peanut butter, which you spread on bread—American bread is very soft and white. Another American food is a red, slippery, jiggly dessert called Jell-O.

  Today, one of the soldiers gave me a “stick” of chewing gum. Maman, a riddle: What do you chew but never swallow? Chewing gum! But it’s not really a stick. It’s straight and flat and thin. Smells good. You unwrap it, put it in your mouth, and chew. Why? Because it tastes good! Like peppermint.

  I said to the soldier, “Swell! Thanks, Joe GI!” He liked that. He said, “Okay! Only it’s GI Joe, kid!” Kid is an American word for a child, either a boy or a girl. Isn’t it a nice American word, Maman? It’s easy to say. The soldiers are especially nice to us kids. They give us sweets and teach us American words like okay and swell and hubba-hubba. One of them gave me this notebook I’m writing in. His name is Steven, and he’s also Jewish. He lost a leg. He gets around on crutches with his pants leg pinned up.

  There’s an American lady on the ship named Ruth Gruber. She’s teaching us English. She was sent by President Roosevelt, too, to help all the people. She’s like a mother, because you can tell her your problems, but she looks more like a movie star! She’s really beautiful, with pale skin and blond hair and red lips. Just imagine, Maman, when she came on the Henry Gibbins in Naples, she climbed the rope ladder wearing white sailor pants and a white jacket. And then a sailor came after her and handed her her beautiful red pinwheel hat. We all just stared in awe.

  Maman, my favorite American candy is called a Mars bar. It’s delicious. Chocolate on the outside, chewy inside. I’ll bring you one when I come home.

  Because I will come home. I never wanted to go so far away from you. I didn’t want to get on this boat. But Marc said we wouldn’t be safe anywhere in Europe until the war was over, and that you would absolutely want us to do this. To go to America. To be safe. That’s why I agreed, Maman. But I’m sad about it. Every moment I’m farther away from you.

  Good night, darling Maman. I send you a million kisses.

  Your Karin

  13

  THE HENRY GIBBINS

  There were things I didn’t write in my letter to Maman. Even though there was no way I could send the letter to her; and even though she would not get to read it until the war was over; and even though, by that time, when we were all safe and together, it wouldn’t matter anymore what I wrote her now—even so, I still couldn’t bear to write things that might upset her.

  Such as, the ocean was dangerous. It was a battlefield. We might be attacked at any time by German U-boats—submarines.

  Our ship was in a convoy of ships. Everywhere I looked, in every direction, there were ships—troopships and cargo ships and sleek, fast destroyers. We had heard that two of the ships in the convoy held nothing but German prisoners. POWs. They were going to America, too. The same people who wanted to kill us because we were Jews. Sometimes I dreamed about those people. Nightmares, in which they came tramping onto the Henry Gibbins—only sometimes it was the attic room at Madame Zetain’s. Once I woke up moaning, and Jo reached up and held my hand so I could go back to sleep.

  It took seventeen days to cross the ocean, and on nearly every one of those days, there was a U-boat alert. Those submarines scared me more than anything, the way they hid in the sea like sharks. To confuse them, our ships zigzagged and poured out smoke like fog to hide us. We had guns, too, and bombs the sailors dropped over the sides of the ships.

  The third night we were at sea, I was brushing my teeth in the washroom when the alarm bells went off, clanging and clanging. I ran out into the corridor and up to the deck. Everybody was shouting and rushing around. Marc found me and we stayed together.

  Clouds of smoke rose around the ships. The sailors got the lifeboats ready. Then the all-clear bell rang.

  People were saying we’d been attacked by U-boats. No, we had gone through minefields. No, it had been a false alarm. No, there had been a fire. No, no fire; it was a smoke screen, and the destroyers had driven off the U-boats. Nobody really knew.

  Days on the deck were never quiet, either. The engines, the ocean, the wind. Nothing still. The sun burned. People made shade with an umbrella, a piece of cardboard, a bit of canvas. A soldier gave Marc a shirt that we roped up like an awning. I’d sit under it and listen to the people talking and singing in Spanish, Greek, French, Yiddish, Italian, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian. It sounded like every language in the world.

  “Eighteen languages,” Marc said. He always seemed to know facts like that. He went around listening to everyone, trying out words, trying to learn every language. He claimed he had already spoken to at least half of the people on the boat.

  Before, he had always been the quiet one, the solitary one, the one with his nose in a book. Now we had reversed places.

  I liked to sit by myself in the stern of the ship and look back toward Europe and Maman. The wind blew, it never stopped. On either side, in the distance, I saw other ships. I felt the engines working and watched the ship rise out of the waves and fall back in. Marc would come looking for me. “Why are you back here all alone? Don’t always be by yourself.”

  But I didn’t mind it. I felt different from everyone, separate from their happiness at going to America. Marc worried about me. It made me love him more, but I still went off to be by myself, to watch the wake widen and disappear behind us.

  14

  ON THE OCEAN

  The American lady, Ruth Gruber, set up a blackboard on the deck, and every day we sat in front of it to learn useful American talk, like “Where is the post office?” and “Please open the window.” I loved looking at her. She was so bright, like a painting. I tried to draw her, but the picture was no good. It didn’t resemble her at all. I ended up throwing it away.

  “Maybe I’ll never be an artist,” I said to Marc. We paced back and forth on the deck. And I thought, artist. It seemed so long ago that I’d dreamed about that, and so seriously.

  “At least you’re learning English,” Marc said.

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

  “No … I suppose not. Just something useful, I meant.” He sounded listless, not really interested. His skin was sort of greenish around his mouth.

  “Are you sick?” I said. “Getting seasick, after all this time?” I wondered if he’d gotten skinnier, even with all the food. “Chow time” was what the soldiers called meals and “chowing down” was what they called eating. Sometimes, though, neither of us ate much, because the ship was always moving and the food slid around, and you’d just lose your appetite.

  Even so, Marc had grown taller again, at least another inch. He looked older, too. He had a little mustache, but he’d had that for a while. He was fourteen, so it was no surprise. I was taller, too, and had grown little breasts. About those—it seemed as if one day I was just as usual, flat, and then the next day, there they were.

  Suddenly I had one of those frightening thoughts that entered my mind and wouldn’t leave. What if Maman didn’t recognize us when she saw us again? What if we’d changed so much she didn’t even know we were her own children?

  “Marc, is tha
t possible?”

  “What?” He looked at me blankly.

  “I was thinking … Maman, when she sees us again … I’m afraid … Will she know us?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” He was so irritable I should have stopped, but I didn’t.

  “Marc, look at us. What if we’ve changed so much that—”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Talk about something else.”

  “I don’t want to talk about something else. This is what I’m thinking about. Oh, okay,” I said in English, seeing that I was really annoying him. “Okay, okay.” Then, in French, trying to be more agreeable, I asked, “Who did you talk to today?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody? I don’t believe it. Not you.”

  He shrugged. “Just some old guy who was in Valence, too. He’s a doctor. Doesn’t have anything left, not even a pair of shoes.”

  “Valence? You met somebody who was in Valence? Did he know Monsieur Taubert—and Maman, did he know her?”

  “Hey! Take it easy!” English again. That was what the soldiers said when they wanted someone to calm down. He leaned over the railing.

  “Did you ask him about Maman?”

  “He didn’t say anything about her.”

  I stood next to him, disappointed. The sun was going down, a hot blur on the horizon. For just a moment, I had hoped there was someone here who might have seen Maman. It would have been so good. Someone who could say, Oh, yes. Your mother—she’s fine now! Monsieur is keeping her safe.

  I focused on remembering Maman—her face, her eyes, exactly how she had looked that last day, lying on the couch.