The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  By then Victor had crept near. The ignition was turned off, and as soon as the tailpipe cooled, he shoved the bomb in. His hands were dusted with gunpowder. This was it, the moment they had planned for.

  The captain was pulling down her dress. He kissed her roughly as he ran his hands over her. He had her now, she belonged to him, but she didn’t feel any of it. She thought about the doctor’s guest room, where everything was in its proper place. A comb and brush on the bureau, a glass of water on the night table, a silk rug on the floor. She thought of his kindness when he leaned down to speak to his patients, the way he stood at the door and looked into the dark, the way he kissed her, as if she were precious, as if she might break.

  “Wait,” Ettie told the captain. She smiled of course, as she’d been taught to do. “I have to get ready.” She wanted to step out to relieve herself. He told her to hurry, and she said she would. She wished she could stay and look into his eyes as he was dying, but that wasn’t the plan.

  “I will,” she promised.

  She got out and didn’t look back. She raced through the dark. Victor was gesturing to her to be faster; a police car had gone by, and he had a funny feeling when it slowed down after passing. Unused to the high heels, Ettie tripped as she ran. She fell, then got back on her feet, kicking off the shoes. She knew this was her fate, she was running into a field of grass, she was half-bird half-girl, flying.

  Victor spied the police car in his mirror, so he didn’t delay. He hit the detonator the moment Ettie was in the car. When the sports car blew up, a rain of fire and smoke shot by them. The car windows flew out, scattering glass, and a black cloud rose up. The passenger door of Victor’s car was blown off, so that Ettie nearly fell out when Victor stepped on the gas. He went through a pasture flying over the hilly land, surrounded by orchards, whose branches smashed against the windshield.

  The police car was behind them, and soon a second car approached at top speed, the wail of sirens tearing through the still night. A trail of smoke followed them and filled up the car. Ettie covered her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t choke. Victor was going so fast she felt they were in a whirlwind. She remembered flying once before with her sister. She remembered that moment. It was happening again. She thought of Ava, that brilliant creature she’d made with her own hands who could see the future. It had happened even though Victor was known to his friends to be the best driver in France. He shouted for Ettie to hold on, but his tire blew out and they went round and round on the slick grass until they were dizzy and shaking. They skidded in a circle, crashing into a tree. The police cars pulled up on either side. Steam had begun to rise from the engine, and little flares of sparks flamed from beneath the hood.

  “Get out of the car,” Victor urged. She must jump before the explosives in the backseat caught. “Ettie, go now!”

  She knew it was too late as she watched Victor make the leap. He was taken down by two members of the Milice. One of the officers sat on his back, a knee to his spine, crushing his ribs, as he cursed himself and the damned car that hadn’t been fast enough. He’d made a promise to Marianne, and she wouldn’t know if he was taken to Montluc Prison. He fought, but it did him no good. They slipped handcuffs on him and pulled him onto his feet. There were sparks everywhere. The car was already on fire, and the police officers backed away, pulling Victor with them. The explosives could be set off at any moment. It didn’t matter to Ettie. She knew the future and the past. She might appear to be in the car, but she was already running through the forest with her sister. She had seen what no human could see until her last moments. There beside her was the Angel of Death, more brilliant than any of his luminous brothers, so compassionate and so bright that she couldn’t look away. He was too beautiful, more beautiful than anything on earth.

  She had created life, she had been with a good man, she had battled a beast. She could hear the policemen shouting in the field. She had seen Victor being beaten until he couldn’t fight back. She knew that there was fire in the sky. Everything was black and red and burning. Everything was so loud it was as if the world was beginning or ending. When the angel finally took her, she was grateful. In his arms, she forgot everything, except for the grass in the fields when they jumped from the train, her sister’s hand in hers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE WAY HOME

  VIENNE, AUGUST 1944

  JULIEN DARED TO RETURN TO the church in Vienne. He went to Father Varnier’s room and knocked at the door, hoping for news of his brother. It was late, but the priest was awake. Neither he nor Julien could find sleep easily. Varnier worried over the souls of his parishioners, and Julien saw the faces of the children at Izieu whenever he closed his eyes. He looked exhausted as he explained that he had not seen his brother for several months and he worried more each day. Usually Varnier was brusque, he had little time for personal complaints, but this time he invited Julien in.

  “Perhaps I should stay out in the hall,” Julien suggested.

  His clothes were filthy and caked with mud. He had been eating regularly and had put on some of the weight he had lost in the past few years. He was muscular now, nearly six feet tall. But he didn’t bathe regularly and he labored outside and so he was embarrassed by his condition. All the same, the priest insisted he sit down in a leather chair. Julien ran a hand through his long hair, self-conscious. When he thought of the boy who had stood in the hallway in Paris on the day Lea arrived, it was as if he were imagining a younger brother, someone who was forever lost to him, a boy with little experience and too much confidence, who could fall in love in the blink of an eye.

  Father Varnier sat back in his chair and asked if Julien believed in heaven, and Julien answered truthfully. He wasn’t sure if he believed in anything anymore. The priest poured them both glasses of cognac, though it was all of ten A.M. When the father offered him a drink, Julien knew something was wrong. He waved his hand no to the drink and leaned forward in his chair.

  “We can’t know God’s reasons for what we mortals must endure,” Father Varnier told him. “We can only be grateful for our lives and for his love.”

  Julien was then told that his brother had been arrested. There had been a bombing in which a captain of the Milice had been killed, along with a Resistance worker, and the news had gotten back to Varnier. Victor had been taken to Montluc Prison in Lyon, and even though the end of the war was near, and Lyon would soon be liberated, he had been on the last train to Auschwitz on August 11. The Germans were retreating but the deportation was personally overseen by Klaus Barbie. One hundred and thirty-one Jews had been gassed upon arrival, Victor among them. Lyon was to be liberated thirteen days after the convoy was sent east.

  Julien stopped listening. He refused to hear any more. Not how the prisoners were chained two by two, Jews on one side, Resistance members on the other, not how the prison was being emptied, with as many as possible killed so there would be no human evidence when the British and Americans arrived. Julien stood and shook Father Varnier’s hand, then walked out without another word, past the flickering candle he had lit for Monsieur Bisset’s son, past the pew where he had slept when his brother had come to take him to Izieu. He didn’t let himself feel anything until he was on the road. Then he called out to God, his shouts shook the sky and he, himself, was made deaf by his own wailing. He fell to his knees, and tore his clothes in a wild fit of mourning, and he did his best not to curse himself for being the only one in his family who had managed to stay alive.

  When Marianne came home she was shocked by the damage from the storm and especially saddened to see the beehives were destroyed and, by now, deserted. She went to search for the key, tucked between two stones behind the wall near the old pump. She kept the house locked now, and only she and Victor knew where the key was hidden. She unhooked the latch and pushed the door open, breathing in the musty, damp scent of the house. She had been away for nearly a week. They were trying to get as many children over the border as possible. The closer they cam
e to the end of the war, the more the Germans wanted to rid the countryside of all Resistance workers and Jews. Everything was moving so fast, spinning closer to the end. At the border there were places where the Italians had left and it was possible to walk right into Switzerland, and other places the Germans shot whoever moved in the dark. Marianne had been very lucky. She’d lost no one. She was quite famous, really; everyone wanted to cross the border with her. Some people called her Saint Marianne, they said she wore armor under her dress, that she could walk through fire, that she was invisible to the Germans.

  But these were the imaginings of children who still believed in such things. The children would throw their meager belongings over the fence, then crawl beneath the wire that Marianne often held up so they could fit under. She told them to be brave, because when they crossed over the Swiss Border Guard would place each child under arrest, then give him over to the Corps des gardes-frontière, where a military officer would question the child yet again and draw up the formal arrest. Do not break, she told them. They are only questions. Make your statement when asked. Tell them, I crossed to escape the Germans’ actions toward the Jews. Think forward, not back.

  She tried to do the same, but when she opened the door, she had a feeling of dread. Someone had been in her house. Perhaps they had climbed in through the kitchen window, which had never closed properly. The intruder had been neat and tidy, and nothing was out of place. Some potatoes and onions had been eaten, but the dishes and the frying pan had been washed and set on the drainboard. Upstairs, the beds had been made. Someone had left some lupines in a glass jar on the long dining room table.

  Marianne stood by the sink and drank her tea once it had steeped. For some silly reason her hands shook when she lifted the cup. She was bone tired, of course, but it was more. She felt a wave of panic. In the following days, she went about her business, taking care of the farm, seeing to the damage caused by the wind, but all the while she had the same sinking feeling. The weather was hot and dry and the rows of vegetables needed to be watered. When all of her other chores were done, she saw to the watering, using a bucket to bring water up from a small nearby stream. By afternoon she was sweating through her dress, a bit dazed, suffering through a case of nerves. She was usually calm, and was known among the other passeurs for her patience and easy nature, but when she finished working in the field, she went in and took a bath and sobbed in the soapy tub, staying until the water was ice cold, which frankly felt good in the heat and in her feverish state of mind.

  She dressed and went downstairs and told herself to look forward, as she told the children at the border. And sure enough, when she looked out the window she saw Victor coming down the road, on foot, which was unusual. He was never without a car. She felt a thrill go through her. She’d been crazy to worry. She ran outside to the porch, calling as she went to meet him. There were crows in the fields she had watered, drinking from the puddles. The closer Victor got the more puzzled Marianne was, even though he lifted both arms to wave. And then she saw it was not Victor at all, but Julien who was approaching, who began to run toward her now, even though he had been walking for three days, not bothering to eat or sleep.

  “Victor will be so relieved,” Marianne said as they embraced. “He’s been worried sick ever since they took everyone from Maison d’Izieu. Where on earth have you been all this time?”

  When she let go of Julien and took a step back, she saw that he had intentionally torn his clothes. She looked at him, puzzled. That surely had some meaning, but she didn’t fully understand what.

  “Julien?” she said.

  He shook his head. What words could there be now? So he said only one, his brother’s name, and that word was so sad, so tragic, so beloved, that he needn’t say more for her to know that Victor was gone. Not that she believed it.

  “No, no,” she insisted. Already, she felt turned inside out. “He’s coming back at the end of the week. He’s going to stay here, with me. We decided that.”

  She turned from him so he wouldn’t see her cry.

  “He never loved anyone but you. He told me he didn’t care what my mother would have thought.”

  She laughed at that, through her tears.

  “I know exactly what she would have thought,” she managed to say.

  Marianne’s laughter became a sob, and she sank to the ground. Julien knelt beside her, his arms around her. She cried for a very long time, and then she nodded and said he was surely starving, which he was. They went inside and he sat at the table below the beam where Monsieur Félix had been hanged, and he wolfed down an omelet and toast with jam. Marianne stood by the window and looked out. She could not believe Victor would never walk up the road again, that he would never shout with joy, or tell her she was beautiful, or come upstairs with her to bed.

  After Julien slept for a while in the parlor, she asked him to tell her everything, and he told her all that he knew. Victor had been on the last train to Auschwitz, where everyone had been gassed to destroy the evidence that they had ever existed. But here were two people who knew Victor had existed. They lit a candle and Julien recited what he could remember of the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world.

  After supper, during which they said very little, Julien went out to hike along the hillside, mostly to give Marianne some time alone. He went up to the place where he’d been when Monsieur Félix was murdered, a beautiful spot where he could see for miles. Though it was nearly nine, the sky was still light. There were clouds above the mountains, but here it was clear, and Julien threw himself on his back in the tall grass. He was so tall and strong that his body often seemed to belong to a stranger. He closed one eye and squinted at the fading sun. If Lea was beside him in the grass she would surely know what he felt, a longing for something he could never have again. A normal life, a family. He spied a cloud coming close and then closer. It was the heron. Julien stood up to greet the bird, and as he did he realized he was crying, and that he couldn’t stop, and that anything which gave him hope of any sort was overwhelming.

  He slipped the message out of the tube, hands shaking, but before he could read the note or respond, the heron departed. The bird had an awkward gait at first, but when he leapt into the sky he was a marvel. Julien called for him to wait. He shook his arms at the sky. How would he ever write back to Lea? He turned to the message, but when he unfolded the paper, he saw it had not been written in Lea’s familiar script.

  She’s waiting for you here.

  There was a small intricate map, as if seen from a bird’s-eye view.

  Ava, he thought.

  He went back to the house and waited for Marianne to come down from her room, anxious, tapping his long fingers on the tabletop. He wished he had a cigarette, a habit he knew he would have to quit.

  When Marianne finally came downstairs she said she had been sleeping, but her eyes were red and her face puffy. Her hair had come undone, and for the first time Julien saw that she was, indeed, beautiful, just as his brother had always vowed.

  Marianne offered to help him cross the border, but he told her there was somewhere he must go. He placed the map on the table. “Here.”

  “It’s the doctor’s house,” Marianne said after a quick glance. “A day’s walk. An hour or two if Monsieur Cazales next door will take you in his truck.”

  She sent Julien with two golden jars of honey to bring to Cazales in return for the favor of a ride. He wouldn’t need the map. Everyone knew where the doctor lived.

  “You’ll be all right here?” Julien asked. She certainly didn’t look all right, but she nodded, and he remembered what his brother had told him. Marianne was strong.

  She went outside to see him off. She hugged him and told him she would say a prayer for him at her church. They would likely never see one another aga
in, but they had both loved Victor and they always would. Julien had no belongings, but Marianne packed a bag of Victor’s clothes that had been left behind. It made sense for someone to get some use out of them.

  “What will you remember most?” Julien asked Marianne.

  Everything, she thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.

  “Remember when he jumped off the roof?” Julien said.

  They remembered the house in Paris, and the laundry being hung in the yard on Tuesdays. Long before Victor had become a fighter, or planted bombs, or taken Marianne to bed, he used to run through the fresh white linens, insisting he was a ghost. Marianne embraced Julien for a long time. He was so tall she had to stand on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. They wished each other good luck, for they both believed in luck now, good and bad, a fate cast for no reason, where some would live and others would die. Julien headed to the neighboring farm, just over the hillside, setting off on the path Marianne had always taken when she brought their cows home from the pasture in the dark.

  Remember when I was his favorite brother, when he sulked whenever he didn’t get his way, how bad his temper was, how deeply he could love someone, how fast he drove, how bees didn’t frighten him in the least, how he was always convinced he was the best at whatever he tried, from explosives to kissing, how he filled up a room, how he would never follow his mother’s rules, how convinced he was that a plain woman was beautiful, how he always saw her that way, how he had promised he would never leave again.

  When Julien reached the farmhouse he introduced himself to the neighbors and presented the gift of honey from Marianne, then asked for a ride over the mountains to the doctor’s house.