A Coming Evil

by Vivian Vande Velde

  The Germans discussed this among themselves, possibly trying to determine a name from her information.

  The SS officer's tone seemed even more angry than usual.

  The captain from Sibourne took hold of her arm.

  "What are you doing?" Lisette said, although it was obvious what he was doing: he was bringing her to the door. "Where are you taking me?" She'd been frightened before; but, deep down, she'd thought she could convince them. "My aunt will be worried if she comes home and I'm not here."

  "If your aunt returns," the SS officer said, "she will be arrested, also."

  "I haven't done anything," Lisette protested.

  The one holding her looked much too friendly. "Don't worry, Fräulein, I'll take care of you."

  "I haven't done anything," Lisette repeated, trying to twist away from him.

  But he just tightened his grip and broadened his smile.

  Two of the men were obviously staying behind—the lieutenant and one of the soldiers. The SS officer, the captain who held her, and the three other soldiers were almost at the door.

  "Lisette!" a voice called from outside.

  For a second, she was too frightened to recognize it.

  "Lisette, I found your cat!"

  Gerard, she realized, just as he opened the door. Her heart sank. He should have stayed away.

  But he was triumphantly holding Mimi up by the scruff of her neck. She was hissing and spitting and had fluffed her fur out to twice her normal size so that she looked like an attack badger.

  They'll never believe you, Lisette thought. You were right. You should have stayed away.

  "What's this?" the SS officer sputtered.

  "This is a cat," Gerard explained patiently. "Why are you here? Has something happened to Aunt Josephine?"

  The SS officer took a step back. Lisette didn't blame him. The cat was twisting around in Gerard's grip, kicking her back feet so that the sleeve of the sweater Gerard wore was all pulled and tattered; and beyond the edge of the sleeve, his wrist was bleeding.

  "Put that thing down," the SS officer demanded.

  Gerard let Mimi drop.

  She landed right side up, but she was not pleased. She obviously felt cornered, and made a tight circle, glaring at all the legs around her.

  The SS officer took another step away from her, which was unfortunate for it put him directly by the open window and Mimi knew an escape route when she saw one. She went up his leg, across his chest, over his shoulder, and out the window, yowling and clawing him all the way.

  Lisette hesitated a second, unsure whether it was overdoing her naive act to complain about her cat getting loose again.

  In that second, the SS officer pulled out his pistol.

  In the space of time between one heartbeat and the next, Lisette saw him raise his weapon and take aim out the window; she saw his finger tighten on the trigger; she heard the explosion of the firing—much louder than she would have ever anticipated—and saw his arm jerk up from the recoil. The smell of gunpowder tickled her nose.

  In the awful silence that followed, Lisette saw the shock on Gerard's face, as though he'd seen a weapon from hell itself, and she saw the momentary twitch of a smile on the SS officer's face; pleasure at the kill itself or at his marksmanship, she couldn't tell. Despite her ongoing feud with the cat, Lisette was grateful she wasn't in a position to see out the window. It could be us next, she thought. It wouldn't make any difference to him.

  But he didn't aim the pistol at her or Gerard. He jammed it back in his holster and pulled back the sleeve of his left arm, trying to examine the damage Mimi had done. Lisette didn't have to understand German to recognize what he must be saying. Then, furiously tapping his finger against his wristwatch, he barked an order to his men in German.

  The captain protested, using the word Juden. Jew or Jews or Jewish; she remembered the word from the German who'd pulled the family from the train. The captain must have been pointing out that Gerard might be one of the Jews they were looking for.

  "Identity papers," the lieutenant demanded while the SS officer glared impatiently.

  "What?" Gerard asked, knowing enough not to glance at Lisette for clarification.

  "Where are your identity papers?"

  Gerard considered briefly. "Aunt Josephine has them."

  Which wasn't a very good response—but apparently good enough.

  The SS officer grasped Gerard under the chin, roughly tipping his face for a closer look. Gerard tensed as though about to pull away, but he didn't. The German scrutinized his face. "Nein," he finally said, which Lisette knew meant "no." He gave Gerard a shove, then he said something that ended in "nicht Jüdisch." Not Jewish, she realized. The SS officer had declared that Gerard didn't look Jewish. He growled something else to his men.

  Again the captain protested.

  The SS officer must not have been used to captains arguing with him. "Schweigen, Zer!" he shouted at him. "Lass gehen!" From the impatient gesture he made indicating the door, lass gehen must mean "move." "Lass gehen! Lass gehen!"

  Finally, the captain let go of her.

  Again the Germans started to move to the door, this time all of them, this time leaving Lisette and Gerard behind.

  Hardly daring to believe she was still alive, Lisette pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down heavily.

  Outside, two car motors started, one after the other. Tires crunched gravel. The hum of the engines faded in the direction of Sibourne.

  Then, belatedly, she began to shake. "I don't know what to do if they come back," she admitted.

  From behind her, Gerard answered, "They won't. Their commander said they'd wasted a whole day already and the proof pointed more to sloppy housekeeping than Jews."

  Lisette turned around to face him. "You speak German?" she asked.

  "I speak Frankish," Gerard corrected her. "The Teutonic Knights certainly wouldn't lower themselves to speak French, and their Latin was so bad, it was easier just to give in and learn Frankish. This was not that much different."

  Lisette leaned back in her seat. "Thank you," she said. "For coming back for me."

  "It seemed to me," he said, "if you claimed to be looking for a cat, having a cat might be useful. Though it didn't work out well for the cat."

  "Thank you," she repeated, not willing to let him make light of what he'd done.

  He nodded to acknowledge that he understood.

  "Let's get the children," she said.

  23.

  Thursday, September 5, 1940

  Once they found the children, frightened but unharmed, Lisette cried over each of them, though she had promised herself she wouldn't, and she kissed them all. Even Cecile. Even Louis Jerome, who made a face. Etienne had given his gas mask to Anne, "So she won't be so afraid of everything," he explained, and Lisette kissed him twice.

  She thought all the emotion had been wrung out of her, but as they crossed the backyard and were almost to the house she saw a movement on the porch: someone who had been sitting got to his feet, and her heart nearly stopped and then thudded wildly so that she felt the fluttering in her throat. She'd been carrying Rachel since the bottom of the hill and she didn't think she could run far with her. And Gerard had been carrying both twins even longer: one in his arms, the other on his back, her arms clutched around his neck, so that he'd begun weaving with exhaustion.

  "Don't be frightened. It's just me."

  It was too dark to see, but Lisette recognized the voice. Maurice.

  He opened the door for them. His face was white and his hands were shaking. "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "Yes," Lisette said.

  He must have been able to tell from her voice that she knew what had happened. Or he felt so guilty, he just assumed she did. "I am so sorry," he said.

  She handed Rachel to Louis Jerome, and Maurice took her hand, took Cecile's hand, looked at all the others. "I am so sorry," he repeated. "They were going to hurt my wife, and she's so frail, so ... frail.
I was frightened. I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do."

  "I understand," Lisette said.

  "I have never willingly hurt anyone," Maurice told them.

  Emma tugged on his sleeve. "You gave us the goat," she said.

  For a moment he just looked down at her, as though unable to understand what she was saying.

  "Softy," Anne said, peeking shyly from around Gerard's leg. The gas mask hung down her back, held by the chin strap around her neck.

  "We named the goat Softy," Emma explained.

  Then Maurice did understand. His eyes filled with tears and he cupped his hand under Emma's chin. He reached out his other hand to Anne, who ducked shyly back behind Gerard's leg.

  "Sometimes," Gerard said, "there's nothing we can do. Sometimes there are no right choices and we have to trust that God knows our intentions."

  Maurice nodded slowly. "Thank you." He moved to leave, resting his hand briefly on Gerard's arm.

  But then he stopped at the door and looked back at Gerard. "Do I know you?" he asked.

  Straight-faced, Gerard answered, "My family has lived here for years."

  Maurice nodded again, slowly, and left.

  Lisette sat on the floor, too exhausted to make it to a chair. Gerard sat behind her, back to back as they'd been in the cavern. The younger children were already recovering from their ordeal: Etienne started making airplane noises and chasing Anne; Cecile offered to brush Emma's hair, and Emma ran away squealing; Louis Jerome said, "Rachel has been in the same diaper all day. If I don't change it, she'll get a rash."

  It must be almost time to get supper started, Aunt Josephine obviously wasn't going to get back until tomorrow, the cat needed to be buried, and the poor goat hadn't been milked all day, but Lisette didn't want to move. She also needed to write a letter to her parents, to tell them that she was fine and that she was enjoying her stay in Sibourne, which was nice, though quiet, and that they shouldn't worry. She worked on the wording, but didn't have the energy to get the pen and paper.

  Cecile sat down cross-legged by the two of them. "I knew," she said.

  "You knew what?" Lisette asked.

  But Cecile was talking to Gerard. "I knew before you said it in the caves. Even if I hadn't recognized you—and I did—I certainly would have recognized my father's sweater."

  "Ah," Gerard said.

  "But I'm good at keeping secrets," Cecile said. "I just wanted you to know."

  "Thank you," he told her.

  "Will you stay?" she asked him.

  "Where else would I have to go?"

  "That's a terrible answer," Lisette told him.

  "I don't know how much time I have been given," he said softly. "I may well die again when I reach twenty-seven years of age."

  Lisette said, "I may well die when I reach twenty-seven."

  Gerard looked at her appraisingly. Then he lifted his chin. "Yes," he said to Cecile. "I will stay. I would like nothing better than to stay. If your mother,"—he nodded to include Lisette—"your Aunt Josephine will have me."

  "Of course Aunt Josephine will let you stay," Lisette said. "We'll tell her you're a poor Gypsy boy with nowhere else to go."

  From the doorway Anne and Emma giggled. "He's not a Gypsy," Emma said.

  "But we could say he is," Lisette pointed out.

  The girls giggled again, but nodded.

  "We can use being a Gypsy as an excuse for your accent and the fact that you've never been to school," Lisette told him. "And while you're here, we can teach you twentieth-century customs."

  "If he's supposed to be a Gypsy," Cecile said, "I'd better brush his hair so that he looks like a Gypsy."

  Emma and Anne exchanged a wide-eyed look that Gerard, facing Cecile, missed.

  I should probably warn him, Lisette thought. But then she decided it was probably best if he learned to cope with his new world on his own.

  * * *

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Although the characters in this book are fictional, Lisette and Gerard's worlds are both based on real historical periods.

  GERARD'S WORLD

  In the eleventh century Europe was united by a single goal. Peasants, nobles, priests, and knights—people from various countries—all worked together. Their purpose was a holy war—a crusade—to win the Holy Land of the Bible back from the Muslims. So sure were the European Christians of the Tightness of their cause that their motto was Deus volt, which means, "God wills it."

  While today many of us think of religious people as being thoughtful and gentle, for two hundred years popes urged and actively supported holy wars. There were several brotherhoods of knights whose members were monks; the Knights Templars was one such group.

  By the early fourteenth century the Crusades were over, a failure. But the orders of knights who returned home were rich and powerful—both a temptation and a potential threat to the European kings and Church hierarchy that had encouraged their formation. The events described by Gerard all happened: the arrest and imprisonment of the Templars by King Philip IV of France, Philip's use of propaganda and terrorism against his enemies so that even those opposed to his policies dared not complain, and the eventual dissolution of the Templars order. As the imprisoned Templars learned, it was safer to accept the lies, to confess and accept forgiveness.

  With the exception of Gerard, the participants mentioned were actual persons.

  LISETTE'S WORLD

  Closer to our own time, in the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler also used relentless lies against his enemies, which included not only Jews, but Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and those with physical disabilities. Hitler's intent was to make people fear and despise these targets of his hate, and this—again—was coupled with ruthless suppression of any who might speak out against him. Some believed Hitler's lies; others conspired to help those he oppressed; but many were simply paralyzed by fear.

  In 1940, after Germany had invaded France, the French government agreed to divide the country into two regions: the Occupied Zone to be run by the Germans, and the Unoccupied Zone under the direction of the Vichy government of France. The French government agreed to this arrangement in an attempt to stop the killing and to prevent Germany from taking control of the entire country. But some in France opposed this decision, feeling that the cost of such a peace was too high. Resistance fighters were those French men and women who continued to fight against both the Germans and anyone who collaborated with them. The actions of the Resistance were countered by brutal retaliation, often against innocent bystanders—again, governing by fear.

  OUR WORLD

  Looking back over history, it is easy to make judgments and label the actions of long-ago people and governments "right" or "wrong." But history, in one way or another, constantly repeats itself, and things happen that seem like echoes of events that happened before. So we must repeatedly ask ourselves would we—should we—do the same as those before us? That has always been the most difficult question for any era: Which is the better course of action: to fight for what you know is right, or to keep yourself and your loved ones safe?

  * * *

  RELATED READING

  Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. A detailed look at the last seven years of the Templars, including excerpts from transcripts of the trial.

  Collins, Larry, and Dominique Lapierre. Is Paris Burning? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965. A history of the last days of the German occupation of France.

  Greenfeld, Howard. The Hidden Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993. True-life accounts of children who survived the Holocaust by hiding or disguising themselves.

  Simon, Edith. The Piebald Standard. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1959. An overview of the Crusades, with special emphasis on the role played by the Knights Templars.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

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