Black Radishes

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2010 by Susan Lynn Meyer

  Map © 2010 by Rick Britton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meyer, Susan Lynn.

  Black radishes / Susan Lynn Meyer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89614-9

  [1. Paris (France)—History—1940–1944—Fiction. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Fiction. 3. Jews—France—Paris—Fiction. 4. Jewish children—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PS3613.E9793.B53 2010 813′.6—dc22 2009047613

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For my father,

  Jean-Pierre Meyer

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Paris, March 1940

  The Eiffel Tower was ugly. That was the only word for it, Gustave thought, gazing upward. It used to soar, a vivid red-brown, up into the sky over Paris. But now, quickly coated in dirty gray camouflage paint to disguise it from Nazi bombers, it somehow looked squat and sinister. From farther away in the city, earlier on this cool March afternoon, it had been hardly visible, melting eerily into the iron gray of the sky.

  But that was the point, of course. And it was still obviously the Eiffel Tower. So why did the strange old man blocking Gustave’s way on the sidewalk keep saying that it wasn’t?

  “That can’t be the Eiffel Tower,” the old man insisted again. “That’s some gigantic piece of machinery.”

  “No, really, it is the Eiffel Tower,” Gustave tried to explain hurriedly.

  How could the old man not know about the camouflage paint? He was definitely French, and everybody in France knew about the war preparations. Was he senile?

  “It’s just that they painted it in case there is a bombing. You know, that’s why they piled the sandbags up around all the monuments,” Gustave told him.

  The old man looked vaguely familiar. But Gustave was in too much of a hurry to find out why.

  “Excuse me, but I need to go,” he blurted out. “My Boy Scout troop is having a scavenger hunt. My team is the Eagles, and it’s a race—”

  But the old man interrupted.

  “It’s all nonsense, this war,” he said. “The Nazis will never bomb Paris. We have the strongest army in Europe. But now, young man, can you tell me how to get to the post office?”

  Gustave grimaced, dropped his rucksack, and started to explain. The old man had already insisted that Gustave stop to tell him about all the landmarks of Paris, and now he needed directions?

  “So I turn right after three blocks?” asked the old man, after Gustave had patiently gone through the directions three times.

  Gustave sighed. “No, left.” Why did the man keep misunderstanding the directions or forgetting them, making Gustave repeat himself over and over? How were the Eagles ever going to win the scavenger hunt? But maybe it was hard for old people to remember things.

  Gustave took a deep breath, and as he started going through the directions for the fourth time, a smile broke across the old man’s face.

  “Thank you, Boy Scout,” he said. “You have been very helpful.”

  The old man turned and walked away, more briskly than Gustave would have thought possible. Gustave sighed in relief, grabbed his rucksack, and ran down the street.

  His bag thumped against his back as he ran, but luckily it was light, so it didn’t slow him down. His best friend, Marcel, had the bag with the scavenger-hunt treasures their team had collected. Most of the objects hadn’t taken the three of them very long to find. A pocketknife, a teacher’s signature, two green marbles, a safety pin, a math textbook, a canceled postage stamp, a gas mask, and a domino with nine dots. But a yellow feather? That was the item that all the teams were having trouble with. Of course, maybe one of the other Eagles, Marcel or Gustave’s cousin Jean-Paul, had found one by now.

  They had split up to look for the feather in order to triple their chances. Jean-Paul had raced home to pull feathers out of the pillow on his bed to see if one of them was yellow. That didn’t seem very likely to work, but Jean-Paul had thought it was worth trying. Marcel was sure that his aunt had a hat with a yellow feather in it, so he had run off to her apartment to try to coax her into lending it for the afternoon. But it was very possible that she wouldn’t want to let him borrow anything of hers. Last week, when Gustave and Jean-Paul had decided to go to the park to sail their boats in the fountain, Marcel, who didn’t have a boat, had talked his aunt into lending him her umbrella—because it might rain, as he told her with a solemn face. The umbrella made a terrific boat, spinning around upside down in the water—but Marcel’s aunt had been angry at him ever since because two of the spokes of the umbrella had broken. It worked fine if you held it right, but she was mad anyway.

  Since the old man had delayed Gustave so long, both Marcel and Jean-Paul were probably already on their way back to the synagogue basement where the troop met, Gustave calculated. But there was no way of knowing whether either one of them had gotten the feather. So Gustave raced toward Monsieur Jouvet’s hat shop, dodging around people on the sidewalk.

  Monsieur Jouvet, who was an old friend of Papa’s, would definitely have feathers, Gustave thought as he ran down the crowded street. Monsieur Jouvet was a round-faced, cheerful man who always offered Gustave candy from a jar he kept behind the counter. Once, he had given Gustave a tour of the back of the shop. He had ribbons and flowers and feathers there in all sorts of colors. If he had a yellow feather, surely he would let Gustave have it. But it was getting late. Was there enough time to run to the hat shop, get the feather, race back to the bus stop, catch a bus, and be back at the synagogue basement in time for the end of the scavenger hunt?

  “Hey, Gustave!” Four boys from the Boy Scout troop
burst out of a doorway in front of him. “Looking for one of these?” Pierre reached into his bag and waved a long, yellow feather in the air. “I bet we’re the only ones who have one! Go, Bears!”

  Gustave jumped and snatched at the feather, but Pierre held it out of his reach. “Where’d you get that?” Gustave panted.

  “Pulled it out of my little brother’s Indian headdress! Better hurry! The Bears are about to win!” The boys headed down the street, laughing and yelling.

  Pierre’s team acted as if they had everything. But maybe they didn’t have a teacher’s signature yet, Gustave thought hopefully. That one wasn’t so easy either. And the Eagles had everything else, just the feather to go. Gustave sprinted down the last two blocks and around the corner.

  He came to an abrupt stop where the display window of the hat shop should have been. Something was wrong. The iron shutters were pulled down over the shop front. A small handmade sign on the wall beside the iron shutters read CLOSED. SHOP OWNER MOBILIZED.

  “Oh, no! Not him too!” Gustave gasped, thumping his fist against the sign in frustration. He leaned forward, his hands on his knees, catching his breath. So, Monsieur Jouvet was a soldier now too and away in the war, just like Jean-Paul’s father and Marcel’s, all of them off defending France against the Germans. Gustave would miss Monsieur Jouvet’s smile and his silly jokes—not to mention the free candy.

  Papa hadn’t been mobilized with the other men his age because he walked with a limp from having had polio as a child. Last September, after the other men had left, Papa had stormed around the apartment for weeks, mad at everybody. Gustave twisted the ends of his Boy Scout neckerchief around his finger until it hurt, then let it go. He would never tell anyone this, especially not Marcel or Jean-Paul, but secretly he was glad that his father was still home.

  Gustave turned and headed back toward the bus stop, wondering if he should try going to the Ménagerie, the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. Maybe at the Ménagerie he could find a yellow feather that had fallen off some exotic bird. Was there time? He looked at his watch, a gift for his eleventh birthday in February. Four-forty—no time to try anywhere else. The scavenger hunt was over at five o’clock.

  He was near the carousel at the Champ de Mars now. Usually it was busy with children, but now it was silent and deserted. Its paint had not been renewed that year. With their colors faded, the horses looked wild and unfamiliar, rolling their eyes and baring their teeth. Gustave suddenly wanted to be back in the synagogue basement with Marcel and Jean-Paul and the others. A few blocks away, a bus was approaching. He ran toward it, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes, and jumped on.

  As he found a seat, Gustave remembered something. There wouldn’t have been much point in going to the Ménagerie after all. The animals had all been evacuated to somewhere in the countryside to protect them in case of a bombing. Gustave imagined a parrot squawking while an air-raid siren sounded, dropping a yellow feather in its panic. If he had been a parrot, he would have lost a feather or two the first time that happened. Maybe every time it happened, to be perfectly honest.

  All the air-raid signals so far had turned out to be false alarms. But he always woke up stunned, his heart thudding in his chest, when the alarms wailed through the darkness. Those nights were all blurred together except for the first one, which was permanently etched in his memory. Papa’s hand gripping his shoulder, heavy and hot. White searchlights flashing across the sky. The crowd of people jostling one another, hurrying down the steps. The dank smell of the underground shelter.

  But all the parrots and other exotic birds and animals were safely hidden away now, far from Paris. So probably there wouldn’t be any yellow feathers on the ground at the Ménagerie. Still, Gustave could have gone and checked if only the old man hadn’t slowed him down so much.

  Pierre was so annoying, Gustave thought, breathing on the cold window of the bus and tracing a design on it with his fingernail. Pierre always won everything. The winning team was going to get chocolate bars, plus ten points toward their team total for the year. Gustave looked at his watch again and then out the window, watching clouds race across the darkening sky. Did Marcel and Jean-Paul have a yellow feather? Or was Pierre’s team going to win—again?

  2

  It was two minutes after five when Gustave pushed open the door to the room where the Boy Scouts were meeting. Monsieur Levi, the Scout leader, had already begun talking. He stopped as Gustave came in.

  “Just in time, Gustave!” he said, smiling broadly. “If you have anything to add to your team’s bag, you can bring it up.”

  “No, I don’t have anything,” said Gustave.

  “No yellow feather for the Eagles?” Pierre jeered, putting his fingers at the corners of his mouth and pulling them down. “Aw, too bad!”

  Gustave made a face at Pierre and squeezed in next to Marcel and Jean-Paul, who were sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  “Hey!” whispered Jean-Paul, shifting over to make room for him. “So, no luck at the hat shop?”

  “No—nothing in your pillow either?” Gustave whispered back. “And what about Marcel’s aunt?”

  Marcel leaned forward on the other side of Jean-Paul. “I remembered wrong. Her hat had a green feather.” He grinned. “She said, ‘Do you think I would have let you borrow it anyway, after what you did to my umbrella?’ But I think she would have.”

  Monsieur Levi was talking up at the front. “So,” he announced, “it would appear that the Bears have won. They completed the list and got back first.” Pierre jumped to his feet, and he and the other three Bears whooped and cheered.

  Marcel groaned. “Not again!”

  “I said that it would appear that the Bears have won,” Monsieur Levi said as the noise died down. “However”—he paused dramatically—“a secret test was part of the scavenger hunt.”

  The Boy Scouts were all giving him their full attention now. Monsieur Levi looked amused. “I asked your relatives to be out on the streets and to ask any boy in a Scout uniform for directions. Any Boy Scout who was not helpful got his team disqualified.” Monsieur Levi grinned at the Bears. “Do you remember someone asking you for directions?”

  “Oh, but that’s not fair!” Pierre groaned, then laughed. “It was my own uncle! He kept not understanding what we told him, but I was sure that he knew his way around Paris!”

  “He reports that you said, and I quote, ‘What’s the matter with you, Uncle? Have you become a complete idiot?’ True?”

  Pierre nodded sheepishly, and the Scouts broke into noisy laughter. Monsieur Levi held up his hand to quiet them. “So the second team to come back with all the items on the list, the Cougars, wins the scavenger hunt. They get the three chocolate bars, plus ten points for their team’s total for the year.”

  The Cougars cheered.

  “And”—Monsieur Levi held up his hand again—“I also award ten points to Gustave’s team, the Eagles, because Antoine’s grandfather, who was out on the street stopping Boy Scouts, reports that Gustave was ‘supremely polite’ to him for over fifteen minutes! I don’t have any chocolate bars for the Eagles, but those ten points make the Eagles and the Bears tied for first place in the team totals for the year.”

  Jean-Paul whooped. “Tied for first! Go, Eagles!”

  Marcel punched Gustave in the arm, grinning. “Supreme politeness! Where did that come from?”

  Gustave looked at his friends in amazement. “Oh, I thought that man looked familiar. He’s the reason I was so late—I think he slowed me down by about half an hour!”

  As the Cougars went up to get their chocolate bars, Monsieur Levi went on. “So, boys, remember: Boy Scouts are helpful to all those in need. And, speaking of being helpful, I will be asking for volunteers in the coming weeks to help war refugees at the train stations. These families are fleeing their countries to come to France for safety. Often they don’t speak French and don’t know where to go. The boy who does the best job of helping the refugees will earn twenty poin
ts for his team total.”

  The Boy Scouts were already getting up and gathering their treasure-hunt bags and rucksacks. “Remember to return everything you borrowed for the scavenger hunt, boys,” Monsieur Levi called. “See you next week!”

  When Gustave and his friends were out on the sidewalk, Marcel reached into the bag and handed Jean-Paul the gas mask and Gustave the textbook, the domino, and the marbles. Jean-Paul slung the gas mask over his shoulder, and they started toward home.

  “Bravo, Gustave!” said Jean-Paul. “Great job! But too bad we only got points for the end-of-the-year awards, not chocolate bars for right now. I’m starving!”

  Gustave and Marcel laughed. “You’re always starving!” said Gustave. “I can’t believe we’re tied for first. Now we just have to figure out how to beat the Bears before summer.”

  The wind was cold as they walked home. When they were a few blocks away from their neighborhood, Jean-Paul stopped to look into the window of a boulangerie. The smell of freshly baked bread made Gustave’s stomach growl. But he still felt light and happy. What did it matter about being cold or hungry when he had just won ten points for the Eagles?

  “Does anyone have any money?” Jean-Paul asked. “We could share something.”

  Gustave shook his head. “I haven’t gotten any pocket money in a long time.”

  “Me either,” said Marcel.

  The door jingled, and a woman with a tiny dog on a leash stepped out of the bakery. Two long loaves of bread stuck out of her basket. The dog yipped and pulled toward Gustave. It was small, but its teeth looked sharp. Gustave moved aside to let them pass. A big man in a brown overcoat squeezed by the boys on the sidewalk and entered the boulangerie, where there was already quite a line of people waiting.