Black Radishes

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  “Finally, we see some of our own soldiers,” Papa said, pulling over, “and people won’t get out of their way. Idiots.” Papa’s unshaven face looked tired and grim.

  Eventually, the crowd gave way a bit, and several trucks full of French soldiers drove through slowly, honking. In one truck, three of the soldiers had binoculars pressed against their eyes and were scanning the sky. One of the soldiers saw Gustave watching and saluted him, smiling.

  Gustave put his hands up to his eyes, wondering what it was like to look through army binoculars. As the trucks full of soldiers passed, Papa maneuvered his way back into the flow of traffic. Gustave scanned the crowd, looking through his imaginary hand binoculars. Did putting your hands to your eyes like that make things look closer? It almost seemed as if it did, especially when he closed his fingers in the middle, making two circles. Gustave looked through his hands at the tops of the trees on the side of the road, at clouds in the sky, at the hat of a man walking by the side of the road.

  From time to time, Gustave spotted the girl with the pony. When she saw him, she waved, and he waved back. Jacques, wearing blinders, was tethered next to another pony, helping to pull a wagon loaded down with four children, a grandfather clock, and a heavy wooden bed frame. Gustave felt weary just watching the small ponies straining to pull the weight. It looked like really hard, hot work, even though the grown-ups of the family were walking beside the cart and the oldest girl often got out and walked next to Jacques with her hand on his neck.

  Once, when they came into view on the road, she called to Gustave, who was now hanging out the window, “Come on out and walk with us!”

  Gustave could see that there was a breeze outside. “Can I get out and walk for a while?” he asked. “We aren’t going any faster than that, anyway.”

  “No!” said Maman sharply. “We don’t want to lose you.”

  “I’m not going to get lost,” Gustave protested. “I’m eleven.”

  Maman didn’t answer, and Gustave slammed himself back against the seat. How could anyone get lost? Everyone except for the soldiers was heading in the same direction, down the same endless road. The worst thing about the day wasn’t being hungry or hot or thirsty. It was having nothing to do. If only Jean-Paul or Marcel were there for him to poke or talk to or play rock-paper-scissors with. Gustave felt a heavy weight on his chest. He didn’t want to think about where Jean-Paul and Marcel might be right now. Instead, he tried playing rock-paper-scissors with himself, one hand against the other, but it didn’t work very well. Somehow, he always let the left hand win.

  Gustave gave up and looked at the green fields stretching out on either side of the road, and then up into the sky. A buzzard hung in the hot air above the endless column of people on the road, circling, its wings in a V. Gustave put his hands up into the binocular shape again to watch the buzzard wheeling through the sky. Suddenly, a dark object appeared on the horizon behind the buzzard, then another, and another. Gustave moved his hand binoculars over to look at them more closely. Planes. Painted with dark crosses and swastikas. For a moment, Gustave’s mouth wouldn’t work. Then he shouted, “Planes! Nazi planes!”

  “Pull over!” Maman screamed. The planes roared down through the sky, straight toward the column of people on the road, as if they were going to land on top of them. It sounded as if the sky were tearing in two. Through the roar came the wails of babies and the high, shrieking whinny of horses. People ran in every direction.

  Gustave pushed the door open while the truck was still moving.

  “Run!” Papa shouted. Gustave stumbled across the rutted field, his breath tearing through his lungs, making for a line of trees. Maman was to the side of him, but Papa, limping on his bad leg, was falling behind. Gustave turned around and reached out a hand to help him, but Papa waved him away, screaming, “Run!”

  The machine guns began just as Gustave reached the trees. Glancing up, he saw a plane no higher than the tree-tops, its machine gun pointing down. Bullets exploded. Hands shoved Gustave to the ground as Papa threw himself over him, heavy and solid, shielding Gustave from the cruel sky. Gustave’s heart was hammering, and his breath came in gasps. His lip bled where his teeth had cut it, and his blood tasted like metal. His cheek pressed against a bumpy tree root. His nose was full of the smell of the damp earth and the familiar scent of his father’s shirt.

  After a long while, the noise of the shooting stopped. Gustave could feel Papa’s heart pounding against his back. He heard the thrumming rising from the earth and the insects humming over the field. But he didn’t want Papa to get up. He wanted to stay there forever, wedged safely between the warmth of Papa’s body and the cool, damp ground.

  When Papa finally did push himself to his hands and knees, Gustave lifted his head and saw that Maman was next to them, holding Papa’s arm.

  The heel had broken off one of Maman’s shoes, and her left stocking was torn. Her breathing was ragged and hoarse. “Oh, Gustave!” she gasped, reaching for him. “Oh, Berthold!”

  With Maman limping on the broken shoe, they made their way back across the rutted field. It was the same brilliantly sunny day it had been an hour ago, but it was as if the familiar world had been turned upside down and shaken into a new pattern, like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. People were scattered around, some still screaming, others weeping. Some crawled out of the ditches beside the road and from under trucks and cars. Windshields had shattered. The road sparkled with broken glass. An elegant elderly woman sat in a ditch, her face dirty and her hat awry, looking stunned. A small boy, all by himself and too young to talk, stood crying forlornly. Maman paused and snapped the heel off her other shoe so that she could balance. She knelt down beside the little boy, wiping his nose with her handkerchief.

  “Shhh,” she told him, taking his hand. “We’ll find your mother.”

  “Maybe she’s over there,” said Gustave shakily, pointing toward a stone structure on the other side of the road where some people had run for shelter. Together, his family and the little boy made their way toward it. The ground was covered with dropped objects: a broken-handled suitcase, a sweater, a doll, one leg doubled under its body, gazing up at the sky with green glass eyes.

  When they had almost reached the shed, a bedraggled young woman hurried toward them, weeping wildly, carrying a baby and clutching a little girl by the hand. The boy cried out and rushed toward her.

  “He pulled and ran off,” the mother said over and over again to Maman, embracing her. “I couldn’t hold on to him.” The mother wept, but the boy, holding her skirt with one hand and sucking his thumb on the other, had stopped crying and was looking around, his eyes enormous. Gustave followed the boy’s gaze and looked out over the field. In the distance, under the bright glare of the sky, some people were still lying on the grass, unmoving.

  “Don’t look, Gustave,” said Papa sharply. “Let’s get going.” He stepped between Gustave and the field, blocking his view, and, with his arm around Gustave’s shoulder, turned him in the direction of the road.

  Gustave saw the delivery truck. It was like suddenly seeing home. “There it is!” he cried, running forward.

  “Be careful of the broken glass!” Maman called.

  No bullets had gone through the windshield of the truck. But there was something large and dark lying beside it in the road.

  “Wait!” Gustave’s mother caught him from behind, but he shrugged her off and darted forward. It was Jacques, the pony. He had been shot. His beautiful brown head was thrown back, and a pool of dark blood spread out around him. His pale mane was stained where it lay in the blood. The girl Gustave had talked to that morning sat on the ground beside Jacques, her arms around him, crying, her hair falling over her face. Gustave’s stomach clenched. He took a few steps toward the bushes on the side of the road and threw up.

  “Barbarians,” Papa muttered when they were back in the truck. “Barbarians.”

  The road was jammed again with exhausted, desperate people. Gust
ave curled up on the seat and put his head down on his knees. He couldn’t stop seeing the dead pony. His chest started to shudder, gasping for breath, and his eyes leaked tears. After a while, he felt Maman’s hand on his back. He could hear her crying too.

  “We’re going to be all right, Gustave,” said Papa hoarsely. “We will keep our family safe.” But how could Papa be sure of that? And what about Marcel and Jean-Paul and their families? After a long time, Gustave’s tears stopped. His eyes were swollen and hot, his mind empty. They drove on, slowly, for hours and hours. Around nightfall, the road was in complete confusion. Traffic stopped entirely.

  Gustave’s father got out of the truck to see what was happening.

  “A bomb exploded up ahead,” said a man on foot, his shoulders sagging under a heavy rucksack. His face was lined, and his eyes were sunken. “It destroyed the bridge and killed quite a few people. No one can get past.”

  Papa’s face was grim. With difficulty, he turned the truck around. The stream of people began slowly walking the other way, heading back in the direction from which they had come.

  “What do you think?” Papa said to Maman. “We could take another route, but in this mess, we won’t get to Spain for days. It’s obvious that the Germans are deliberately trying to kill civilians on the highways. It seems more dangerous on the road than anywhere else. And we may well be turned back at the Spanish border even if we get there.”

  Maman nodded slowly. “And we have so little food, and we may not be able to find more. Or more gasoline. If we go on, we might end up stranded somewhere. Let’s go back to Saint-Georges,” she said quietly.

  Gustave sat up. He hadn’t said anything for a long time, and his throat was dry. “But won’t the Germans be in Saint-Georges?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “I’m hoping that they won’t bother going into such a tiny village,” said Papa. His voice was weary. “But they may be.”

  10

  Saint-Georges, June 1940

  It took almost three more days to get home. On the way back, they passed a town that had been bombed. The black skeletons of buildings reached up into the quiet sky. They drove by abandoned automobiles with flat tires and others that must have run out of gasoline. Flies buzzed over another dead horse at the side of the road, next to a wagon with a broken wheel. Gustave also saw bags and suitcases, a cooking pot, a clock, and a teddy bear, all things that people must have dropped when they got too heavy to carry.

  When Papa drove the truck back into Saint-Georges, it was late in the afternoon. The old stone house stood as it had for a hundred years, quiet and solid, behind its low wall. Gustave took the box his father handed him and trudged toward the door. Some men walked over to help Papa unload and to ask what they had seen. Gustave was too tired to talk to anyone.

  The first few days back, he slept a lot of the time. Maman returned to her job. Two other families from the village, as well as several young men who feared being recruited into the German army, had left the same day that their family had, she reported when she came home. But they had all returned already, discouraged by the impossible traffic. No one had seen any Germans in the area yet, she said.

  But there was other news that Gustave and his family had missed while they were on the road. After a month of hard fighting, Norway had surrendered to the Nazis. Gustave overheard Monsieur Grégoire, the elderly man who lived across the road, telling Papa about it as they both stood, grim-faced, in the street one morning. That night, Gustave slowly painted Norway red on his map. His thoughts were fuzzy, and it took a long time for him to do anything, as if his brain weren’t connected quite right to his body. He stared at the open watercolor box.

  The red paint was nearly gone, and the block of blue paint was almost untouched. Nazi tanks were on French soil, and their planes were in the sky over France. And he and Maman and Papa couldn’t get out. They were caught like rabbits waiting, trembling, in a trap.

  The next morning, Gustave was tying a long rope to one of the rafters by the open window of his fort to make an emergency exit, when he saw something unfamiliar glinting on the road in the distance. A faint rhythmical pounding was getting louder and louder.

  He hurried down the ladder and ran to the gate to see what was going on. A woman emerged from the house across the street, wiping her hands on her apron. Other people opened the doors of their houses and stood watching over the walls and along the sides of the road. The pounding came closer, and then Gustave heard hooves. A man riding a glossy black horse appeared at the bottom of the hill. Gustave stared, but what he saw didn’t change. The man had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and he was wearing a German uniform.

  The horse tossed its head and started up the hill. More soldiers straddling muscular horses followed. The hooves clopped up the road, right in front of Gustave’s house. Behind the men on horseback came marching German soldiers, wave after wave of them, as if they would keep on coming forever. Gustave watched the shiny black boots. Eighty-two, eighty-four, eighty-six, eighty-eight, he counted feverishly. If he could only count fast enough, he thought dazedly, he would know how many there were. Ninety, ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-six. But the boots, rising up and smashing down, swam in front of him, and he lost count. He dragged his eyes away and looked up. Greenish gray uniforms, steel helmets, rifles. Faces like stone. The soldiers looked straight ahead as they marched south, turned the corner, and disappeared out of sight. They seemed to know exactly where they were going. They moved like machines, not men.

  Some of the watching French men and women wept silently, tears running down their faces. Gustave could hear his heart pounding, more loudly than the thunderous marching boots. He felt frozen to the ground, unable to move or even to turn his eyes away from the soldiers. German soldiers were marching through the streets of France, his country, his native land. Marching right through this tiny country village, this little, out-of-the-way place, where his family had come to be safe. It was like a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. But it was.

  A few houses away, on the other side of the road, two huge, wolflike dogs leapt at the gate from inside, snarling and growling. Their owner, Monsieur Grégoire, leaned on the wall across the road, his face twisted with grief. Let them out, Gustave thought despairingly. Let out the chiens méchants!

  But of course Monsieur Grégoire wouldn’t do that. Even if those dogs, with their fierce teeth, managed to hurt a few soldiers, the other Germans would just take their rifles down off their shoulders and shoot them. They would probably shoot Monsieur Grégoire too. The waves of Germans marched up the road, as the French people stood watching, and, over and over again, the dogs hurled themselves uselessly against the gate.

  When the first tank rumbled up the road, Gustave couldn’t watch anymore. There were too many soldiers. Too many tanks. He ran away from the road and, on his hands and knees, pushed his way under the low branches, into the bushes behind the garage. He sat there, curled up in the tight space, for a long time, trying to stop shaking. When he crawled out, all the tanks seemed to have rumbled by, but he could hear more feet marching.

  He scrambled up the ladder to the loft and looked around. The three spears still leaned against the wall, at the ready. He flushed. They didn’t look like spears anymore, just like stupid sharpened sticks. Dumb toys. And he was all by himself. Marcel and Jean-Paul weren’t there. Maybe they never would be. What did he think he needed three sharpened sticks for? He seized the spears angrily and cracked them over his knee, one after the other, until all that was left of them was a mess of splintered wood.

  The sound of the marching German boots gradually faded away into the distance, going deeper and deeper into France.

  11

  “A large part of our territory will be occupied on a temporary basis,” said an unfamiliar voice on the radio. It was Maréchal Pétain, who had just been appointed the new leader of France.

  “Armistice!” Papa shouted back at the radio when the speech was over. “That’s what you call an armistice! Ap
palling.”

  “What does it mean?” Gustave jumped to his feet and grabbed Papa’s arm. “What’s happening?”

  “It is a national disgrace!” Papa stormed. “This Maréchal Pétain has surrendered to the Germans, and he’s just sitting back and taking orders from them!”

  “It means that France has stopped fighting the war,” Maman explained. “So the Germans won’t be shooting at French people from airplanes anymore or dropping bombs.”

  “Sure!” Papa snorted. “But Pétain is going to let the Nazis occupy a large part of France. And who knows what they’ll do. Especially to the Jews.”

  “But what part is going to be occupied?” cried Gustave.

  “Let’s go,” said Maman. She and Papa were already at the front door. “We’re going to get a newspaper and find out.”

  The papers were all sold out in Saint-Georges, so they hurried the few kilometers to the nearby village of Francueil. Papa bought a newspaper and an ice-cold lemonade, and the three of them sat at a rickety black metal table in the tiny café to share the lemonade and study the map in the paper. At one of the other two tables, an elderly couple pored over another paper, ignoring their breakfast. A pigeon waddled close to their table, pecked up a large crumb, then fluttered away.

  “Look,” Papa said after hastily examining the blurry map in the paper and tracing a line with his finger. “Saint-Georges is just south of the demarcation line between the occupied zone and the unoccupied zone. Ah!” he breathed, slapping both hands on the table and looking at Maman. “What incredible luck! We’re in the unoccupied zone!”

  Maman pulled the map toward her. “Incredible!” she murmured. “What if the house we had rented had been just on the other side of the river?”

  “So there won’t be any Germans here?” Gustave leaned over Maman’s shoulder.