He had quickly become a great favorite at the school, especially with the boys. He wasn’t quite old enough to be a strict teacher, and he seemed more like a brother. The sun was out on the day of their waterfall holiday; it was April already. His memories of his own childhood in Paris had begun to fade, although those few memories he retained often included his brother. Today Julien told the children a story about a time when he and Victor had jumped into the Seine, which their mother had strictly forbidden. It had been a broiling hot summer day, and they had dared each other, and then, before they’d thought it through, there they were, splashing water at one another. Their mother had been furious when she found their sopping wet clothes in the kitchen. But, as usual, Marianne had been their salvation. She’d vowed she’d done the washing and had forgotten the sodden pile of laundry on the floor.
Excited by Julien’s tale of disobedience, the boys dared him to jump from the rocky ledge into the pool of cold green water at the base of the waterfall.
“Don’t be a fool,” Max advised. “You don’t want to get pneumonia.”
All the same, Julien grinned and took off his boots and his shirt. He challenged Max to make the dive with him, but unlike Victor, who always rose to a dare, Max was more cautious. He shook his head, sure of himself. “You go, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The children came round to clap and chant Jump as Julien prepared to leap. A hush fell when the blade he always carried clattered onto a rock. Julien gave it to Max for safekeeping.
“Seriously?” Max said. “A knife?”
The boys gathering around were thrilled to discover that Julien carried a weapon. He was becoming a hero, he could see it in their eyes. They thought he was something he wished to be, and so there was no backing down. It was nearly impossible to hear anything but the roar of the water, so if Max continued his warnings, Julien no longer had to listen. It was so beautiful in this woodland spot he could forget nearly everything he had witnessed. It seemed he was a boy again. Let the children see that anything was possible, that daring was the only thing that mattered, that no one could keep a person earthbound when he decided to dive off a cliff. Let them not know that he wept at night, that he hated himself for his good fortune when he thought of the fate of his parents and friends. Let them see him leap as if he were fearless.
The cold was a shock that went right through him, sharp and quick, right down to the bone. But it didn’t matter. Not one bit. He felt alive. Everything stung, his heart, his lungs, his head. In the depths of the water there were bursts of light. It was so moving to see beauty all around him, the wash of blue, the yellow shadows, the dark green flicker of a fish. He felt as if he never wanted to rise, but his lungs told him otherwise. He splashed his way to the surface, gasping, having turned quite blue in the frigid pool.
Julien pulled himself out, drenched, and shivering, to see that his audience of boys was stupefied and impressed, eyes wide. He stood and bowed and there was a burst of wild applause.
Max shook his head and clapped Julien on the back. “You’re a crazy man.”
He might be, but he was also alive, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. He enjoyed the acclaim, even though he was a hero for something as silly as leaping into a waterfall. All through dinner people were talking about him and there was a sense of cheer in the dining room. But that night Julien began to cough. He felt a tightness in his chest, as if he were still underwater.
“You’ve gotten yourself sick,” Max told him gloomily. “This is what happens when you take stupid chances. I hate to say it, but I told you so.”
Julien did feel a fool then, a boy in a man’s body trying to astound a band of ten-year-olds. To ensure that he wouldn’t infect the children, he was relegated to a lone room in the attic overlooking the orchard. He was sleeping there, with Lex on the floor beside his bed, on the morning of April 6. He indeed had pneumonia, and he still felt as though he were drowning, for there was liquid in his lungs. In his sleep the sound of mayhem filtered into a dream of being in a yellow field with Lea. When Lex began to bark, Julien was brought fully awake in a matter of seconds. He rose from bed, in a fever, but conscious enough to quickly take in what was transpiring. It was a little after nine. There were German army trucks pulled up around the large stone fountain in the courtyard. The children had already been ushered from the house and were being thrown into the trucks as if they were bales of hay. Their shouts were muffled, but some of their cries rose into the air like doves. The teachers had been dragged out as well and stood helpless on the steps. There was wailing from within the trucks, and adults were arguing with the officers. Before he could be stopped, the dog ran from the room growling, even though Julien called for him to stay.
Julien let out a string of curses, then went to the window overlooking the garden, three floors down. He was torn. Should he try to stop the arrests? Run into the fray and do his best to grab the children? Or should he escape into the garden? If he confronted the soldiers, the best he could do was kill one or possibly two with his knife before he was killed himself. His rational mind prevailed. Perhaps it was panic, or self-preservation, or perhaps cowardice drove him. Later he would come to believe his reaction had been mere survival, not a decision made due to thought or logic but a gut response, pure instinct. All you have to do is stay alive, Lea had told him.
As he had risen from the pool below the waterfall, he now felt the need to run. He was shivering and wheezing as he pulled on his pants and shirt and shoved his feet into his boots. He could hear soldiers stalking through the first floor, going from room to room. He could hear his own breathing rattling against his ribs. He did not think at all. He was far beyond such things. He went to the window and leapt.
When he jumped his heart was beating so hard he thought it might break. He closed his eyes and imagined the waterfall, his head filled with noise, the pool below him. This time his fall was broken not by water but by thorny shrubbery. He was so stunned it took an instant before he could begin to disentangle himself from the branches. He might have broken his leg; he felt a shooting pain, which he was forced to ignore. He hadn’t time to make a run for the woods—he could hear the soldiers coming around to search the garden, then he heard barking. Lex had slowed down the soldiers and given Julien time to race to the lower garden and duck into the shed where he and Max had shared a drink. He locked the door, fitting himself between some old panes of glass and a pile of metal bed frames. Then he crouched there, breathing hard, sweating through his clothes. The soldiers in the yard were laughing, pissing on the garden where the children had spent hours planting beans and herbs and tomatoes. He thought of the boys who had gathered round him at the waterfall and he began to shake, rattling the bed frames, his movements uncontrolled. He reached for the hidden bottle of Cointreau and took several deep swallows. If he was to die, he might as well be drunk. He drank until he felt dizzy, then he lay quietly, melding into the wood, disappearing. It was possible to become invisible if you were desperate enough. He slowed his breathing, and his blood barely ran in his veins. He waited for the door of the shed to open, half expecting to be spied, but in fact he was well hidden, and after a while the garden grew quiet. He fell, facedown on the floor, his heavy lidded eyes closing. The trucks were already gone, down the winding road that overlooked the blue mountains. The great milan royal kites were soaring above the fields.
When Julien awoke, sober and aching, he pushed open the door of the shed and peered outside. Nothing but shadows. No soldiers anywhere. He was soon passing across the lawn, as if he was nothing more than a shadow himself. His teeth were chattering, for his fever had risen to 104. The dog’s body was beneath the hedges. Julien stopped to see if perhaps he were still alive. The grass was slick with blood as he crouched down to stroke Lex, whose body was rigid and cold. Julien could barely breathe in the damp night air. A sharp pain shot up his leg. There was the faint trilling of frogs in the garden, but otherwise not a sound could be heard. It was over. The school ha
d opened on April 10, 1943, and now, a year later, everyone was gone. The French government had made a new proclamation declaring it was a kindness to send children to be with their parents in Auschwitz. This despicable edict must now be enforced by the French police in collaboration with the Germans. The forty-two children currently in residence were taken to Montluc Prison. The following day all were sent to Auschwitz. Not a single one survived. Six adults, educators and nurses, were arrested and murdered as well.
He went round to the front door, dazed and limping. He did not understand why he was here and not with the others. He could not make sense of anything, certainly not his own life. Strewn about the fountain were toys and clothes, as if a storm had come through. Inside, the rooms were deserted and dark, yet he could see the white sheen of windblown piles of letters, not yet handed out to the children, scattered across the floor. In the art room the air was heavy. All of the chairs were neatly in a row. Julien left, taking only some colored pencils and the drawing Teddy had made to send to his parents. A rocket ship with three people on board, a father and mother and son. They were in a blue horizon surrounded by clouds. I love you a million times had been written across a sky strewn with x’s, a million kisses given.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE OTHER SIDE
LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON, APRIL 1944
IN THE VILLAGE OF LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON winter always fell hard and stayed for a very long time. When spring came it was a joyous event, a miracle fashioned of blue and green, slowly unfolding, even when the snow was still in the shadows. It was a small town with a train station and long, sloping streets that were treacherous in winter. A deep forest of pines ringed the village of gray stone houses and shops. As soon as there was a snowfall, local boys took their sleds to the top of the hill and sledded all the way to the bottom, red-faced, shouting with joy. Now the sleds were put away; trees were greening and the birds were returning in huge flocks that nearly blacked out the sky. This was the heart of the Protestant stronghold, almost completely cut off from the rest of the world, a place known for taking in refugees, beginning with those who had been displaced in the Spanish Civil War. In houses and farms there were Jews hidden with families who had never before met someone of their faith.
The children’s home where Ava worked was made of a group of stone buildings in town with a school at the end of a steep road. She had gone directly to the kitchen, knocked on the door, and told them the only payment she needed was a place for her and Lea to stay. She had become a master baker and had no fear when the cook gave her a test. There was a stone baker’s house that hadn’t been used for some time where the stove was heated by logs. Ava was made to collect wood and fire up the old stove. Then she must bake ten tartes out of paltry ingredients: four cups of flour, ten bitter apples, sixteen chestnuts, unroasted and plucked from nearby trees. The results were stupendous and mouthwatering. The cook herself ate half a tarte in one sitting. Lea attended the school, but they were placed in the home of a local couple, as were many Jews who were hidden in town until they could be given false identification or taken to Switzerland. In all, somewhere between three and five thousand souls were saved by the village. The house they were brought to wasn’t far from the train station, on a lane off Rue Neuve.
All through the winter, they had shared an attic with an artist who’d also been taken in, a Jew from Belgium, Ahron Weitz. The couple who owned the house were Adele and Daniel. They owned a fabric shop and rarely spoke to their guests; the less they knew about one another the better in case the Milice, a paramilitary organization instituted by the Vichy regime to assist the Germans, came to question them. Ava often brought home baguettes from the school’s oven to share with their hosts, along with fruit pastries, tart due to the lack of sugar, but delicious all the same. The attic was well hidden, up two flights of winding stairs, more than ten cubits above the earth, which meant that Ava had no power at that height. She could not see into the future or hear the voices of angels or speak the language of birds while in that place. When she took a withered apple in her hand it remained so. Magic escaped her, and even when she tried to listen in to Lea’s dreams she was met by silence. She was almost an ordinary woman in this attic, one whose feet hurt at the end of the day, who was chilled by drafts and needed to pull on a sweater, who told Lea to sleep tight, and who, herself, slept for the first time, deeply and without dreams.
The painter was an older gentleman, a landscape artist, once quite famous in Belgium. Though known for his oil paintings, he now had little choice but to use watercolors, ones he made himself from crushed plants and berries mixed with a bit of oil in a cooking pot. He had been an animated, successful, rather wealthy man. His situation had so radically changed that he did not even recognize himself when he walked past a mirror. He was in his mid-sixties, but his back had been broken when a gang of Nazi sympathizers set upon him one day as he left his studio, and he now walked with a limp. What little hair he had had turned white when his son was sent to a death camp. He wasn’t sure if he had a reason to live, but some fellow artists had helped in his escape, and he felt he must stay alive in a show of gratitude. All of his paintings that had been left behind in his studio in Brussels had been stolen or burned. He knew he would not be remembered, not his work or his name, and that freed him to now do as he pleased. The attic walls were filled with small landscapes, luminous images painted in mysterious hues on plain white paper. A sky could be vermilion or crimson or indigo, an unexpected choice, yet true to nature.
The painter offered to give Lea his small bed, but she insisted she would be comfortable on the floor along with Ava. They were quiet, and didn’t bother one another, and soon enough became used to each other. Ava and Lea knew Monsieur Weitz woke up at six and made tea on the hot plate set on a bureau where they could cook, and he knew they left for the school by seven. They had dinner together, often leftovers Ava brought home from the school’s kitchen. The winter had passed in a dream, and before they knew it spring had arrived; the fields were greening and wild cabbages grew up through the frozen ground. There was soon mud everywhere, and people wore clogs or boots. They’d worn winter coats one day and shirtsleeves the next. It was the time of year when the birds began to return, clouds of greenfinches and goldfinches, pigeons and turtledoves and swifts. Each day Ava looked out with a hand over her eyes, waiting for the heron. She walked in the mountains that surrounded the village in the evenings. At last she saw him, in the distance, at dusk. Though it was April, there were still patches of snow in the forest, yet he had come back to her, returning a month before most of his kind would begin to leave their southern homes. Ava threw her arms around him and felt his beating heart against her chest. He told her where he had been, to beaches where the sand was black, where the heat turned the sun red, and the shells were as big as a human hand. Everywhere he went, he dreamed of dancing with her in the grass. They did so now, as if enchanted, as if no other time or place existed.
At last she noticed the message attached to his leg. He had carried it through the winter, to all of those faraway places. Lately, Ava had been trying to make time stop, but it was impossible to do, even for the angels. The border was a few days’ hike away, yet she had remained here, hidden in the attic. All because of time. When the locket had opened, she had seen the message; she knew what her fate was to be once she brought Lea to safety. And so she had stayed in this village, in this attic. She told herself it was because it was winter, it was because she was waiting for the heron, but now he was here, and she still wanted to stay. She had lived too long, and as golems were said to do, she had begun to make her own decisions. She wanted to change her fate.
She knew the message the heron carried was for Lea, but she took it anyway. It was slick with salt and sand, diverted by the heron’s migration. Ava unfolded the paper to find the hand-drawn blue map that led to Beehive House. She began to weep, and the heron held his wings around her. The map would lead her closer to the end of her existence. She was made to
fulfill her obligation to Hanni, but how could she let go of this world?
She told the heron he must hide, so she alone could see him, then she folded the map into her pocket. She brought Julien’s message to the attic, but rather than deliver it to its rightful owner, she hid it in a bureau drawer.
Once the weather was fine, Weitz ventured into the fields on Sundays to paint out in the air. Lea often accompanied him, after promising Ava they would not go too far. On their painting days it felt to Lea that Julien was with them. She said his name sometimes as they walked along, just to hear the way it sounded in the deep forest. She and Weitz took their lunch at the edge of the woods, usually an apple or a slice of bread cut from the loaf Ava had sent along. Then Weitz painted, and Lea lay in the grass in the sun, one hand thrown over her eyes. Through the weeks the two had grown close. People said the war would soon be ending, that they would soon be safe, and that crossing the border was easier with fewer guards to protect the crossings. Lea often thought about what her mother had commanded her to do. All things must end.
“Would you kill someone if you had to?” she asked the old man one Sunday.
He glanced at her, before returning to his painting. It was the time of year when huge migrations of birds were crossing over the mountains from the south. “What wrong did this person I’m to murder do to me?” he asked. “Did they kill my son?”
Lea turned to him, propping herself up on one elbow to study the old man. She should probably not have asked his opinion. He was painting the clouds from the inside out.
“Did they kill my wife?” he asked.
The World That We Knew Page 21