The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  In the morning it seemed he hadn’t been as well hidden as he’d hoped. The elderly couple that lived in the house peered out at him from their window. Starving, he went to knock on the back door to ask if they might need household work done in exchange for a meal.

  “You’re a carpenter?” the old gentleman who answered the door asked.

  “More or less,” Julien said.

  It was a lie but he supposed he could learn. He was hired for the price of a meal, which he wolfed down before the work had even begun. There was a hole in the roof, and although the old gentleman could still climb up the ladder that was propped against the house, he needed a helper to carry the heavy gray slate made of local rock and the bucket of tar. They worked all that afternoon with the steamy tar, their shirts off in the bright sun.

  “I won’t know if we’ve done it right until it rains,” said the old man, who introduced himself as Monsieur Bisset.

  They had dinner in the kitchen, where Madame Bisset set an extra plate, asking no questions, pleased that her ceiling would no longer leak. Their son, Alain Bisset, only twenty-two, was among those who had been lost in the Battle of France. They had lit a candle in the church, and had Father Varnier say the prayers for the dead. Perhaps this was the reason the couple allowed Julien to stay through the fall in their garden shed, where he slept among the rakes and brooms, quickly learning to ignore the mice who scuttled about at night, grateful they were mice and nothing more. He wore Alain’s winter coat, and his boots, and he sat at his place at the table. Sometimes, Madame let out a gasp when she came into the room and saw him there. With his long dark hair, and lean body, he looked like her son. But he was not, and Madame Bisset knew it. All the same, they were happy to let him stay, to let one young man live and watch him emerge into the blue morning to knock at the door, ready to attend to the chores on his list.

  Madame Bisset became ill in November; it was her son’s birthday month, and most likely she was sick with despair over his fate. There was no body to bury and no one to mourn, and she went into a decline, refusing to rise from bed or cook or even to speak. Julien and Monsieur were halfway through plastering the old crumbling walls in the house when Monsieur Bisset told Julien he was sorry, but Julien would have to go. There were no explanations, but Julien understood. It was dangerous to have him in their house and they had been through enough pain and sorrow. But in truth it was more, when Madame saw a young man working in her parlor she was overcome with longing for her son.

  On his last day with the couple, Julien found an old recipe book on a kitchen shelf and quickly set to work baking an apple cake, with fruit plucked from the spindly tree in the garden. He wondered what Ava would say if she could see him now. He’d been a spoiled boy in her eyes, and he had realized that had been true. But now he’d been forced to learn many skills: how to fix a roof, how to cook, how to steal, how to say goodbye.

  When it was time for Julien to leave, Monsieur Bisset gave him a sack of food that he could hardly spare. Bread, cheese, crackers, apples, all luxuries.

  “Do you know why we helped you?” the old man asked.

  The two had become quite close, working together as they did. The house was in far better shape now than it had been when Julien first arrived.

  Monsieur lowered his voice, as if the Germans were right outside his door. “Because we hate them.”

  Julien would miss the scent of mint that grew in the patchy garden. He would miss lying on his back in the shed, where he would talk to Lea as if she were beside him. She alone understood him, and there were times when he missed her so badly he felt twisted with emotion. Stay alive. He was a flame when he thought of the words she had whispered to him. He did not intend to disappoint her.

  The weather was still fine, and Julien could camp in the woods outside the city, like so many other boys and young men who were in hiding. He ran into them sometimes, groups from La Sixième and the French Resistance who were loyal to de Gaulle, the true leader of France, though he was in exile. One evening, Julien came upon two sisters, feral creatures of eight and ten years old who had been lost for weeks after their parents were arrested. Actually, the sisters had found him. He’d made a campsite and was eating the last of Monsieur Bisset’s food, which he’d been doling out to himself in small portions. When he looked up he saw the girls staring, their eyes on his food. They had dark hair and big, glassy eyes, and they appeared to be starving. Their parents had been sent to the terrifying Montluc Prison, where more than two thousand five hundred Jews were imprisoned by the Germans, with thousands deported and eight hundred murdered, dying from torture and neglect. Through a crack in the cupboard door they had seen the soldiers beat their father and do something to their mother that had made her scream. After their parents’ arrest, the girls had hidden in their house with nothing to eat but the peeling paint on the walls. At last, they had climbed out the window and fled into the woods. They trusted no one, but they were starving, so there they were, watching him, not saying a word.

  Julien shared his food with them as the girls crouched close by, but not too near. They wolfed down the bread. Julien had saved a crumb, which he kept in his hand. A sparrow swooped down from the tree, then lit in the palm of his hand to take the bread, eating it, unafraid. The girls laughed, shocked that they could do anything other than cry.

  Julien brought them to the Bissets’ late that night. Monsieur stared at him when he came to the back door, but when he saw the girls he understood. He summoned his wife from her bed, and when she saw how ragged and underfed the children were, she quickly gestured, willing to take them in. She let them bathe in the big old tub and had them wear her son’s childhood clothing until she could find something more suitable. It was the first time in weeks that Madame had left her bed.

  “She needed children,” Monsieur said, to explain why the girls could stay while Julien had been made to leave. They had gone out to have a smoke in the garden. It was a habit Julien had picked up from Victor. “We can take them. We’ll say they’re our own, and after a while they will be.”

  Julien nodded and watched the smoke rise into the night sky. Lea would be furious if she knew he was smoking. She’d told him her father had been a doctor, and said smoking was bad for the lungs.

  “My brother has a farm,” the old man said. “It’s a little more than three kilometers outside town. Maybe he can use the help.”

  They went there together, Monsieur driving, Julien in the space between the front and backseats, beneath a blanket. It was a small farm, and Monsieur Bisset’s brother was a brusque widower who had fields but no one to work them. Julien would stay in a borrowed canvas tent in the woods beyond the pasture until the snows came, and be given two meals each day, as long as he worked without complaint, for the hours were long, and the labor backbreaking. Julien shook hands with the first Monsieur Bisset and they wished each other luck. The food was not as good here, it was simple fare, mostly bread and eggs and cheese, but it was filling, and Julien didn’t mind living outside.

  This is what it feels like to be alone, he would have written to Lea if he could. You hear more and see more. You’re a part of the world around you. Ants under the leaves, the clouds moving by. He had begun to divide the world into sections, as his father had taught him to do; everything was a piece of the whole, he understood that now. He had no difficulty finding his way to his campsite in the dark; he did so by touching the trees as though they were a map through a forest maze. The weather grew colder and he could feel how close winter was. At night he looked into the sky and remembered the names of the constellations. There was Orion, the hunter who appears in the winter sky with his bow and his dogs, so that he could be remembered by those who loved him during his time on earth. Julien imagined that his father lay on the ground beside him, looking upward. Dear father, he said aloud.

  The nesting birds scattered at the sound of his voice. The vines had grown over his tent so quickly he sometimes thought he would disappear. Snow would fall, ice woul
d cover the canvas, and one day Monsieur Bisset’s brother would come looking for him and be unable to find him in the woods.

  Find me, he would have written to Lea if he could.

  Find me before I disappear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE DOCTOR’S HOUSE

  ARDèCHE, WINTER 1943

  AT NIGHT, ETTIE WALKED OUT through the dark trees to have dinner with the doctor, nothing fancy, usually a shared omelet and some potatoes or stewed tomatoes. Dr. Girard, who was considered a fine chess player, had patiently taught her the game, and, as it turned out, she had a real talent for it. There was little else to do while she waited for Victor’s return, although she had begun to act as Girard’s nurse when he was called upon by the Resistance, always unexpectedly, often in the middle of the night. His telephone would ring and they would go off together in his car, a beat-up Renault that groaned when it took the hills as the doctor found his way to a safe house where a patient was waiting. In only a few months Ettie had learned quite a bit, how to clean and bind a wound, how to stitch flesh with a needle and surgical thread, how to calm a distraught man or woman who was in the throes of pain. This will only take a minute, then you’ll be fine, lie still, count to one hundred. Sometimes they would be driven through the night to a remote field, then be blindfolded and led to the injured. Ettie never wavered; she was firm and calm with the patients, and the doctor had been impressed with her courage.

  “You’re a surprise,” he said, pleased to have found a worthy opponent at chess and an even worthier assistant in the field.

  “My mother used to deliver babies on our kitchen table,” Ettie told him. “I suppose I learned a thing or two from her.”

  Still, Ettie felt uncomfortable whenever she was alone with Dr. Girard. She was accustomed to the world of women and had only known the boys in her community, all of whom she seemed able to outthink and talk rings around. She had no experience with men, or maybe it was more than her lack of experience. She had tender feelings toward the doctor, especially after watching his work with wounded Resistance members and refugees. He was such a good man, measured and deliberate, allaying his patients’ fears. When their work was done, and their clothes bloodied, he would guide her back to the car with his fingers against her back, and the heat of his touch had both comforted her and enflamed her.

  Tonight, after their chess game, the doctor had unexpectedly suggested they go upstairs. Ettie had immediately felt nervous. She had fleeting thoughts of all the men who had approached her, the fellow who ran the laundry, the owner of the café. She avoided the doctor’s gaze, and had a moment of doubt as to what a man such as himself would want from her.

  All the same, she followed him to the second floor, and as it turned out Dr. Girard wasn’t after anything inappropriate. He simply went to the closet and opened the door, then turned to Ettie and motioned her forward. There were his wife Sarah’s clothes, neatly displayed on wooden hangers. She had been gone for several years, lost to cancer. The fact that her disease had been incurable was a personal affront. He was meant to cure, and could do nothing at all. Girard often imagined that Sarah was in the kitchen, making coffee or reading a book at the table as sunlight came through the window, waiting for him at the end of the day. Darling, she would say when he walked in, I’ve missed you.

  He could not save her, he could only watch her die, and so he rarely opened the closet where her clothes were still stored, for he was reminded of all he was incapable of accomplishing each time he saw anything that had belonged to her. But since Ettie’s arrival he had been thinking what a waste it was to have Sarah’s belongings locked away, when Ettie had nothing. He stood back, so that Ettie could get a good look. She had never seen more beautiful clothing. There were linen summer dresses and silk evening clothes, along with piles of sweaters in jeweled colors. At the rear of the closet there was a black coat with a fur collar.

  “My wife liked beautiful things,” Girard told Ettie. “She worked for a designer in Paris long ago. Try some of it on,” he suggested. “It’s not doing anyone any good in a closet.”

  Ettie reached for a simple shift. The soft fabric rustled in her hand.

  “No,” the doctor said. “Take something that you find to be truly beautiful.”

  So she chose a pale blue taffeta dress the color of an afternoon sky that Madame Girard had worn in Paris to an engagement party for one of the doctor’s cousins. It was chic and fashionable without being too much. The doctor left the room so Ettie could try it on. She stared at herself in the full-length mirror. She was no longer the rabbi’s daughter, but even in this glorious dress she was still the sister of a girl who had died in a yellow field. That was the one true part of her that remained. Nothing could hide that.

  She went to the hallway, where the doctor was waiting, nervous again. He was slightly taken aback by her sudden intense beauty, but he smiled when she spun around. He remembered that night in Paris with Sarah. How cold it had been as they walked to the party, how he’d kept his arm under her coat so that he could feel her heart beating.

  “It’s perfect,” Ettie said.

  “One thing is missing.”

  They went back into the bedroom and Girard took out a pair of black heels. Ettie, however, had taken note of a pair of red shoes at the rear of the closet. They were exquisite, highly polished leather. “Perhaps these.”

  “Ah.” The doctor nodded. “Her favorites.”

  The shoes were tight at the toes, but they would do. Ettie practiced walking in them out in the barn until, at last, she didn’t stumble.

  All the rest of the night, the doctor thought about the red shoes. He couldn’t sleep, and sat up thinking about Sarah. He had felt her tumor when he held her breast, but he told himself he was wrong. He had been wrong before, so why not now? But in truth he was a good diagnostician, and he had gone outside to be alone that night after his wife fell asleep. He walked in the woods and wept. He knew he was right, and yet he, who had told patients the state of their health time and time again, even when the news was bad, couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

  In the end she was the one to come to him. She had felt the lump while bathing.

  “It’s like a stone,” she told him.

  He brought her to the hospital in Lyon, where they removed her breast and a good deal of tissue surrounding it, down to her ribs. Sarah was in terrible pain after the surgery, but said nothing. She wouldn’t look at him after that, or let him see her. She locked herself in the bedroom, filled with shame. He had been her husband for nearly fifteen years, but there were things that were impossible to share with a husband, even after all that time. Her savaged beautiful body was now kept secret from him.

  There were rumbles of the war during her illness, but he didn’t hear them, he only heard her crying. She made him sleep on the couch because she couldn’t bear to have him near and not be intimate. He was a doctor, he had seen the worst wounds, the most horrible tumors, but this was different. He made up a bed on the couch in the library, but he didn’t sleep. He continued to see patients for a while, but he couldn’t stand to hear their complaints, and in time, he sent them away, to another doctor in Lyon, though it was farther for his neighbors who had so relied upon him. He could not focus and he feared his preoccupation with Sarah’s illness might cause him to make some terrible error in handling their care. He would not be able to live with himself if he made a mistake because he was more concerned with his wife than with any of them, men, women, and children alike. All the same, people from the village brought cakes and bread and stews. They left the covered platters of homemade food on the doorstep. They came at dusk so he wouldn’t see them and feel he must politely engage them. It was clear they felt there was no need for him to thank them. That was when he understood that his wife was dying.

  Finally, Sarah gave in and let him come back to their bedroom to sleep beside her. When he held her in the dark, he could feel another lump in her other breast, and another under her arm. He didn
’t have to tell her. She knew. That was why she had allowed him back. Nothing mattered anymore, not how she looked or how frail she had become. This was the only time they had, this and nothing more.

  “I’m filled with stones,” she told him, and it was true. Often a patient knew more than her doctor, especially when the doctor didn’t wish to know. When he brought her back to Lyon, her surgeon X-rayed her and discovered the cancer was in many other places, her lungs, her liver, her spine. This doctor was a younger man, and he thought because he was dealing with another doctor there was no need to mince words. “A few months at most,” he said to Girard.

  She was still his beloved wife, but she was already leaving him. Sometimes when she slept he could see an illumination, as if the light was seeping out of her. He felt worthless and helpless. The reason he became a doctor was to possess the ability to change a person’s fate, as he’d seen his father do with his patients. He wanted to heal, not to idly sit at her bedside with cups of tea and stories to read to her. Even books, which he’d always loved, seemed like silly, unimportant things. There was only one thing that mattered now. The single moment they were in.

  As a boy he had often gone to see patients with his father. At first he had been made to sit outside, but as time went on he’d been allowed into sickrooms. By the age of fourteen he’d seen more than most medical students would see in their first year. He had observed his father as he cared for those who were dying with great kindness and compassion, and afterward they would go out walking the steep paths in the Ardèche, where the air was thin and clear.