The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  “You don’t know the reason,” Lea admitted. “You are just to do as you’re told.”

  “Then I’d be a fool or a lunatic,” Weitz said.

  Or simply a girl honoring her mother.

  “Would you do it if I asked you?” she wanted to know.

  He glanced at her again. Talking about murder was a reasonable conversation in the world in which they lived.

  “No,” he said.

  Lea sat up. The sunlight was thin, perhaps that was why she shivered so. She wished she were far away from here, in some far-flung land, on some hot beach where the sand was like sugar. Ava said the heron went there when the weather changed; that he couldn’t last through winter. So far he hadn’t returned with a message from Julien, and she had no way to ask him the sorts of questions she now asked Weitz.

  “What if your son asked you to do it?”

  Weitz was finished for the day, out of precious homemade paint. He would mix more in the morning from the berries he’d had Lea gather earlier in the day. He began to pack up the brushes he had smuggled out of Belgium, his canvas seat, and what was left of their lunch. He couldn’t yet speak to answer Lea’s question. His son had been dragged off the street. He’d been a promising young artist who had joined the underground in 1941, when Flemish fascist collaborators burned down the house of the chief rabbi in Antwerp. Twenty-five thousand Belgian Jews were taken onto the trains the following year, Weitz’s son among them. There would be no one to remember him or his art once Weitz was gone.

  They walked side by side through the dusk. They always waited for this hour to return to the house, the time when they could slip through shadows on the steep streets of the village. There was some talk of Ava being Lea’s cousin, but on one of their outings Lea had said she had no family left. Weitz felt his heart go out to her. If she asked this question she must have her reasons.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I would do it.”

  Lea did her best not to cry, and Weitz did his best not to notice her distress.

  “What color is the sky?” he asked her as they walked on, past the train station, past the town hall, past the shuttered shops. She had slowed her pace to suit his limp.

  “Black,” she answered with certainty. “With stars.”

  “So people say,” Weitz said sadly. Dozens of colors were there, a hundred perhaps for those who could see underneath the darkness. “You should look more carefully.” When they reached the house, Weitz stood outside for a while longer before he went in to paint the real colors of the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE LABYRINTH

  IZIEU, APRIL 1944

  THE MILICE SEARCHED EVERY HOUSE in the villages near Izieu, rounding up Jews, refugees, and Resistance members. When they found Julien in a shed, he was deeply asleep, exhausted and freezing. He’d broken in and had been living on jars of fruit preserves that had long ago been stored on the shelves. A milicien kicked him in his injured leg, still badly bruised. Roughly awakened, he let out a shout as he rose up from a pile of hay where he’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. He didn’t argue when he was told to follow the policeman, but instead merely held up his hands and did as he was told, his mind racing. He had not survived Izieu to be picked up and led away like a mule.

  He was marched out to the road, where he was stunned to see a line of other prisoners, all of whom had been forced to drop their pants so the police could tell whether or not they had been circumcised. Those who had been marked as Jews were sent to one line, those in the French Resistance to another. Only a few of the men in line bothered to look when Julien showed himself, but the embarrassment he suffered made him seethe with fury. With a gesture, one of the officers sent him to the longer line.

  “What difference does it make if we’re in one line or the other?” Julien asked the fellow in front of him. They were all going to Montluc Prison in Lyon after all, that notorious place where the beast in charge was known to torture people for days.

  “Their line is sent to a forced labor camp when they leave the prison, we go to a death camp.”

  “We should run,” Julien said firmly.

  His companion glared at him as though he was an utter fool as he muttered under his breath. “Don’t draw attention to yourself. They’d be happy to beat you if you do.”

  But Julien was already devising a plan. His studies with his father had made him into an individual who could solve abstract problems, and his current situation was such a problem. He ignored his emotions and refused to give in to the panic that had set in. A man in their line was silently crying. Julien looked away from him and counted odd numbers to calm himself. The sky was gray, filled with mottled clouds. April could feel like winter when the wind came up, as it did now. After a while, Julien was able to think clearly. When he narrowed his eyes he saw the slit in the universe through which light shone through the darkness. He again thought of his father’s theory of how the night sky could be broken into segments. Then he took it a step farther. Everything could be divided into pieces, a street, an hour, a life, a death march.

  Close your eyes and see, his father had always told him at the Château de Villandry. A blindfold never hindered him. He could feel the space around him, the objects near and far. It took practice, but after a while there was never a time when he couldn’t find his way.

  He would treat this escape as if he were caught in another maze. Everything he had ever learned from his father as he sat in his study, annoyed and disinterested, came back to him. If he looked at his current situation as a mathematical equation, taking into account that there were fifteen men and boys in one line, twelve in the other, it was clear that it was best to be at the end of the longer line, an uneven number the police might fail to factor into their accounts. If nothing more, being last gave Julien more time to think of how to escape, and it made his presence less noticeable.

  They walked all that day, without food or water or protection from the elements. In the afternoon it rained buckets and they slogged through a field where the mud was past their ankles. Julien continued to think of the maze. He closed his eyes as they walked. He saw the world inside of his head, at the backs of his eyes, in a lace of logic where everything was made up of numbers and everything made sense.

  It was dusk when they reached a village. The night was cold and the prisoners were shivering. By then Julien’s clothes were soaked from the rain, and mud-splattered, and his bad leg was throbbing. Still, he was focused. Time was growing short. The lines of men would be herded into the town hall ahead of them and locked inside for the night. He was lagging behind by now, using his leg as an excuse, when a police officer came to shout at him.

  “Keep up,” the milicien demanded.

  “Of course.” Julien was warily polite. “No problem.”

  It was dark and therefore difficult for anyone to see when he once again slowed his pace. As they entered the village, Julien leaned down to scoop up a handful of rocks. It was a trick often used when navigating a maze. He dropped the rocks as they walked on, marking the path so that he could retrace it or avoid it, depending on what was best in order to escape. When they reached the center of the village, tiny cobbled streets led out in all directions, like the petals of a flower. Julien grinned and felt his heart lift. The village was clearly a maze, and that was something he could manage. He mustn’t overthink, he had to act quickly and leap into the labyrinth as if throwing himself into a well. He made certain to fall back on his heels as soon as the soldiers threw open the doors to the town hall. Right then, without taking a breath, he dashed into the closest alley. It was narrow in the alleyway, and pitch black, so he used another trick of running a maze; he kept his right hand on the walls of the buildings to lead him forward. He heard a shout behind him and a shot fired, but he continued to navigate the alleyway, faster now, as fast as he could go, as if his leg was perfect and no longer throbbed with pain.

  The village was circular; many of these mountain villages were built to surround
a château, in this case one built in the twelfth century. Julien dodged off as fast as he could. He felt a surge of nerves as he heard more shots. To calm himself, he imagined his father waiting for him. He had always been there at the end of the maze in the gardens at the Château de Villandry, where he’d been blindfolded, forging on when he heard his father call his name.

  Finally, he came to the last street in the village. He slipped past a tumbledown house, then jumped over a low stone wall. His leg didn’t matter. He was unwilling to think about it or feel any pain. He was flying now. He had left the village of stones, where everything was made of the local gray granite, all of the houses, and the stairs that led from one tiny street to another, the maze he had been through. He had not come upon a single stone that he had left to mark his path into the village. Here was the solution to his problem right in front of him. There was a stretch of woods, and he dove into the trees in the pitch black, cutting his face and hands on some thorny branches, and not giving a damn. He was glad there was no moon. That was a bit of luck. He ran even though breathing was coming so hard it hurt his chest. The forest was a maze as well, but he saw the North Star and knew to follow it and all the while he did, he heard his father call his name.

  When he stumbled upon a stream, he stripped off his clothes and dove in, grateful to wash away the mud that coated him and gulp mouthfuls of water. He hadn’t had anything to drink all day and his thirst had taken a toll. Now he was truly shaking, and the panic that had disappeared when he was so focused returned. He thought of the man in line who had been crying. If anyone took a count and discovered he was missing, all the men would be treated even more harshly. Either way, their journey would end at Montluc Prison, while he was here, gulping down cold mountain water, shivering so badly his bones hurt. He had escaped the arrests in Paris, and at Izieu, and now he was free again. Why was it that he hated himself for being so? He was pricked by guilt. He floated in the stream though the water was freezing cold, made of melting snow. He must be a monster. Why else would he still be alive? Or was it his promise?

  Stay alive, Lea had told him. He heard that, too. Her voice was with him, inside his head. Now here he was, alive as could be, his leg throbbing, pulling his filthy clothes back over his wet body, his posture bent as he shivered so violently he could hardly stand up straight.

  In the pitch dark he made out the form of a small stone farmhouse. There were clothes hanging on the line, and he grabbed a shirt and trousers. Both too big. He had lost weight, but what was left of him was all muscle and energy. His heart was pounding. He wondered if it would ever beat in a natural rhythm again. In the barn there were some boots, and he took those as well. He offered a silent apology to those he had stolen from as he took four eggs from the chicken coop; he broke them into his mouth and ate them raw. Eating those eggs, he knew he was alive.

  He slept in the woods, in a ditch near a river. He curled up and rested for a few hours, and when he woke the sky seemed too big. He watched the pink turn to a deep blue violet and was grateful that he had lived to see it. The fields were filled with the yellow field flowers called genêts. All at once, he remembered things he thought he had forgotten. His brother teaching him to play soccer. His mother at the table on Friday night, lighting the candles. The garden as it was, before they tore out the flowers to plant vegetables. Marianne laughing as they helped her hang laundry on a windy day. Lea sitting on a bench in the hallway, her gaze meeting his. But more than anything, he remembered his father, who had studied how the universe was expanding, intent on statistical analysis to measure the speed of distant galaxies receding from Earth. The professor had believed in the miracle of an ever-expanding universe, but in the end, he felt his studies were no longer useful, for the rational order he found in mathematics and in the natural world was nowhere to be seen in the world all around them. If Julien could see him now, if his father could walk through these woods in his good suit to lie down beside his son in the grass, if he could step out of the grave in Auschwitz that he shared with thousands of others, if he came to Julien now, Julien would have told him that mathematics had saved him. When he’d heard the professor in his study, approaching the mysteries of the universe, he would pause outside his door. He had always feared disappointing him, but he thought his father might be proud of him. He had loved his father and had been in awe of him, but he had never felt as close to him as he did right now. You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE RED SHOES

  HAUTE-LOIRE, SUMMER 1944

  THEY DROVE ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS, leaving the car hidden under branches a few miles from their target, using the doctor’s compass to aid them when they hiked to a wooded hillside where they were protected from sight, yet could still see the house and the gardens. Everything was in bloom, and the yellow fields of genêts were dazzling, but in front of them everything was dark, a black cloud of chaos. The end of the war would soon be upon them, and it was their duty to dispose of the evil that continued to send men and women and children to their deaths, more and more all the time, as if the Nazi regime was trying to beat the clock that was running down by murdering as many as possible.

  Victor and Ettie had come here several times before to observe the habits of their target, a captain in the Milice who resided in a beautiful château he had appropriated. He was a thief and a monster and a beast, but he looked like a small, ordinary man with pale blue eyes. It was said that no one was allowed to utter the name of the rightful owner of the house in the captain’s presence; he was simply called The Jew, or sometimes The Rich Jew. The previous resident’s family had lived in the area for hundreds of years, and Dr. Girard had known them well, and had seen them through several illnesses; he had brought their children into the world.

  There was no one to care for the garden, and by now most of the flowering trees were dead. Many plants had been crushed by soldiers who didn’t bother to use the gravel paths, but walked through the flower beds instead. Nothing mattered here. There was blood in the soil, and teeth in the ground. Resistance members were brought here and tortured beside the fountain, in which there was no longer water, only black mud. The captain now in residence was a fierce anti-Semite, a ruthless local citizen who had profited greatly from his association with the Germans. Ettie and Victor had kept his identity secret from the doctor, but had Girard known, he would have been pleased by the choice.

  The Jewish family who had lived in the house had been taken in for questioning two years earlier, had been sent immediately to Drancy, then to an extermination camp in the East. Between that time and 1944, more than 75,000 Jews had been deported from France to killing camps. The captain himself had been the one to have this family arrested, for he had grown up in the village and had greatly admired their house. As far as he was concerned, the Jews had always thought they were above the law, better than everyone else, for the husband was a lawyer and the wife came from a wealthy family. Her hair had shone black as she walked through the village in a pale cream-colored coat, and he had always watched her, wanting to have her and wanting to destroy her. Now he had done both.

  On the first night the captain resided at the château, he began to burn the books in the library. There were so many, it took three full days to complete the task, and soldiers had to take over the job. There were sparks floating in the air all that week and people in the village complained of cinders flying into their eyes. The air stank; the sky was black. Everything that had belonged to the family now belonged to the captain. He wore the Jew’s signet ring on his finger. He slept on his sheets. He looked through the bureau containing the wife’s undergarments and spilled his seed on the silk and lace.

  To show his loyalty to the Nazi regime, he continued to do his best to find hidden Jews, and had been honored by the Vichy government for his success in this matter. Several families had been discovered in safe houses, t
hen sent east, with their French helpers arrested and taken to Montluc Prison. Anyone who had ever crossed him, or who feared him, had left the village, and fathers had begun to lock their daughters up at night in cellars and attics, hiding the girls under the floorboards or in the woods, hoping this beast would never catch sight of them.

  Ettie and Victor kept watch, using the doctor’s binoculars, trying to chart a way to get to the captain. The house was too protected for them to make a move against him here. There were members of the Milice stationed at the front and back exits; guards roamed the garden with little to do, idly destroying anything nearby, breaking the branches off the trees, using stone walls for target practice, pissing in the herb garden, where there had once been rosemary plants as big as the children who had lived here, boys of three and five, who had often been sent out for sprigs of herbs while their mother was cooking dinner. These children had been murdered in a camp in Poland, but one of the policemen on guard often thought he saw two little boys crouched down in reedy stalks of what was left of the rosemary. In time, he asked to be sent elsewhere, anywhere else would do, but even then, when he was stationed outside the prison, he heard crying whenever the wind picked up.

  Each day, women were brought here for the captain’s use. They were women from the village who had no choice but to do as they were told when the miliciens came to their doors. Some were married, and would never tell their husbands, for fear their husbands would come to avenge them and be murdered here in this garden, where there was now a pile of bones. One hot afternoon a woman left her son when she went in, and the boy sat by the door, unnoticed and uncared for. Ettie could barely sit still. She wondered how Queen Esther had restrained herself, dressed in her silken clothes in the harem where she was kept, one among many wives, biding her time, knowing that her people were about to be sacrificed.