“Hey!” the man shouted.
“It’s too crowded here for that, boys,” Papa said wearily.
Their arrival in America was turning into something of an anticlimax. They had been waiting on board for two days now. All foreigners had to be interrogated and their papers inspected, one at a time, by FBI officials.
“Mine!” Giselle whined, running to her brother. Jean-Paul ignored her and retrieved the crumpled Spitfire, which had lodged between a large trunk and a violin case. Unfolding it, he sat down cross-legged on the deck next to Gustave and added it to the pile of scrap paper they had weighed down with the corner of Maman’s handbag.
“Remember in Paris when we learned how to make folded paper animals from that book?” Gustave asked Jean-Paul, folding rapidly. “Look—a bird!”
“Does it fly?” Jean-Paul tossed it up, and a gust of wind carried it sideways, overboard.
“Hey! No!”
“Sorry. Tic-tac-toe?” Jean-Paul scooped up a pen and another discarded form.
“Bird!” Giselle whined. She reached out for the pile, but Jean-Paul tucked it under his foot. “That’s our paper, Giselle,” he said. “We found it.”
Giselle wailed.
“Aren’t they ever going to call our names?” Aunt Geraldine muttered to Maman.
Gustave and Jean-Paul had nearly used up the pile of paper when finally their names were called and they filed down the gangplank of the ship and into a building where they waited again, in a windowless, low-ceilinged room. Customs inspectors rummaged through each of their bags. Then a stern-looking man examined the forms and asked the adults even more questions, which were translated into strange-sounding French by the bored-looking man next to him. Gustave’s attention wandered but snapped back when he heard, “Your family may now enter the country.”
Papa kissed Maman joyfully. Aunt Geraldine lifted Giselle high into the air. “We made it!” Gustave said, grinning at Jean-Paul. “We’re in America!”
Outside, the sky had clouded over, and an early dusk was falling, but the clash of metal and the shouts of dock-workers still rang out. Papa tapped Gustave on the shoulder. “Get ready—you tell the cabdriver where to take us.”
“Me?”
“Sure. Your English is the best.”
When a yellow taxi pulled up, the driver leaned over and rolled down the window.
“Where to?” he shouted.
“We go to…to trrren stah-syohn,” Gustave said shakily in English, climbing in.
The driver scowled at Gustave in the rearview mirror. “Which train station?”
Gustave looked at him blankly.
The cabdriver barked something else that Gustave didn’t understand. Then he looked at Papa and repeated the question, sounding irritated. Papa nodded at Gustave.
“Trrren stah-syohn…” Gustave hesitated. “New York?” The driver sighed breathily and pulled into the street, honking at a truck in front of them and muttering to himself. Gustave caught the word “stupid,” but he still felt a rush of pride. He had spoken English in America to a complete stranger—and it had worked!
He watched the streets of Baltimore blur by the windows of the cab. White marble steps gleamed through the dusk.
After a few miles, the driver pulled into a taxi line in front of an imposing white building. An illuminated clock on the front of the station spilled golden light out onto the street. In front of the building, an American flag waved proudly against the darkening blue of the sky. At the bottom of the flagpole, two men were working the pulley to bring it down for the night.
As soon as the taxi came to a stop, Jean-Paul and Gustave jumped out and started unloading bags, and Papa paid the taxi driver. A freezing drizzle was starting to come down. Behind them, another cab pulled up, and Gustave saw that Monsieur Benoit and some of the other French refugees his family had met on the ship had squeezed in together. Gustave tapped Papa and whispered urgently, “I need to find the toilets.”
“Run on ahead,” Papa said. “We can manage with the bags.”
Shielding his face from the rapidly intensifying rain, Gustave ran toward the station doors. On the side of the building, he saw a sign with some words he didn’t know, but also an arrow and the English word RESTROOMS. He ran down the cement stairs and through a door marked MEN.
He was hit by a smell so strong that it made his eyes sting. The room was cold and lit by a single bare lightbulb. An overflowing trash can stood in the corner next to a chipped sink with an empty soap dish. As Gustave washed his hands with water afterward, he noticed that two men, both of them africains, had come in. He had only ever seen Africans in France once—a group with instrument cases in front of a theater in Paris. Gustave glanced curiously at their dark skin for a moment, until he noticed that they were both looking at him strangely. He rubbed his hands dry on his shirt and hurried out, glad to be breathing the fresh air.
At the top of the cement stairs, two women with elegantly coiffed blond hair were stepping out of a cab, holding umbrellas in their white-gloved hands. Both of them stared at Gustave. The taller one murmured something inaudible to her companion, then shot Gustave an unmistakable look of disgust. Gustave sidled past. Just beyond them a broad-shouldered young man with his collar turned up muttered something that sounded like a curse and spat onto the sidewalk in front of Gustave’s feet.
A flash of memory hit Gustave. A French street and a shouting woman with a snarling face. Marcel and Jean-Paul running ahead of him through the rain. Spit dripping down his bare leg. “Sale juif.” Dirty Jew.
But he couldn’t understand why that would be happening here. Feeling bewildered, he ran toward the front of the building, where his family was standing with the other French refugees, surrounded by suitcases and trunks. Monsieur Benoit watched Gustave approach. Jean-Paul, who was squatting down to talk to a sleepy Giselle, straightened up.
“Where are the toilets?” he asked. “I need them too.”
Gustave turned to point, but Monsieur Benoit interrupted. “Not there. Did you use those? They’re the wrong ones.”
“No, it was the men’s room, I’m sure.”
“Gustave, you went into the women’s room?” Maman asked, amused. “I know English is hard to understand, but it isn’t that hard, when you see women there!”
“No!” exclaimed Gustave. “I didn’t!”
“But didn’t you notice that people were looking at you in a funny way?” Monsieur Benoit asked.
“The sign said MEN,” Gustave insisted. “There were other men in there.” He looked down the dark side of the building. One of the African men was just coming up the steps.
“See?” said Gustave.
“Look at the sign again,” said Monsieur Benoit.
Gustave peered through the dusk at the sign above the cement stairs. It did say MEN. But above that was a word that Gustave had ignored because he didn’t know it. In crude, block print, the sign read COLORED.
3
“Colored?” Gustave sounded out the English word.
“What does that mean?”
Monsieur Benoit cleared his throat. “The Americans have separate toilets for ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds.’ ”
“Which are we?”
“We’re…In America, Jews are considered ‘white.’ You should use the other toilets. ‘Colored’ is what the Americans call Africans. Or ‘Negro’—I believe that’s the more polite word.”
“Why are there different toilets?”
“It’s just the custom here, in the South. On one of my trips here before the war, someone told me about it,” Monsieur Benoit said. “You won’t see it farther north, when you’re in New York.”
“But…”
Papa flipped the timetable shut. “Gustave, we need to hurry! The train leaves in twenty minutes. Help bring the bags in and see if you and Jean-Paul can find the right toilets.”
The men’s room off the waiting room was heated and larger than the one outside the building. As Gustave waited for Jean-Pa
ul, he washed his hands with soap, studying the brilliant white basins and shiny mirrors gleaming under bright lights. It was a lot cleaner than the bad-smelling room where he had been a few minutes ago.
When the boys left the men’s room, the grand, high-ceilinged train station lobby was filled with echoing sound. It had gotten crowded and was now full of soldiers wearing khaki-colored military uniforms. He felt a surge of panic. They’re American soldiers, Gustave told himself, as he and Jean-Paul hurried across the vast room to join their parents and they all went down the stairs to the track. They’re on our side. But his breath came fast.
The train was packed. Sweating in their winter coats, squeezing their bags between the full seats, they made their way to the back of the train. Finally, they came to a car with a few empty seats and watched as the other French passengers ahead of them stowed their bags and sat down.
Papa and Monsieur Benoit took two seats together, and Aunt Geraldine and Maman sat in the two behind them. The seats across the aisle were empty. Gustave heaved the suitcase he was carrying onto the luggage rack.
Jean-Paul pushed ahead. “I call the window seat!” he said. “Want to play cards?” He pulled a deck out of the small bag by his feet.
“Me play!” Giselle whined, wiggling down from Aunt Geraldine’s lap and crawling over Maman so that she could squeeze in between the boys.
“You’re too little,” said Jean-Paul.
Giselle climbed onto Jean-Paul’s lap and grabbed at the cards, knocking some to the floor.
“Giselle!” Jean-Paul cried out.
“Maman!” Gustave said, nudging his mother across the aisle. “Tell Aunt Geraldine that Giselle is annoying us!”
Maman groaned. “Can’t you boys tell her a story? Then maybe she’ll go to sleep. She’s cranky because she’s tired.”
“No way. Not me. You do it, Gustave.”
“She’s your sister.”
“Forget it.”
Aunt Geraldine was already asleep in the corner, leaning against the window, her head tilted back and her mouth slightly open. Gustave looked reluctantly at Giselle, who was sucking her curled index finger. She was a decent sort of kid when she was in a good mood, but she was being aggravating right now, and he couldn’t think of any fairy tales. Then he grinned, remembering the way Marcel had once narrated “The Three Little Pigs” for a skit at Boy Scouts.
“Once there were three stupid little pigs and a very smart, hungry wolf,” Gustave started. “But one of the pigs wasn’t quite as dumb as the others.”
Giselle took her finger out of her mouth and looked at him with big, dark eyes. “Les maisons?”
“Yep, you know this story? They made houses.”
By the time he had gotten to the part of the story where the wolf tries to blow down the brick house, Giselle had fallen asleep. Gustave finished the story out loud anyway, murmuring it to himself. He wasn’t going to stop before telling the best part—the part where the wolf slides down the chimney, lands in the boiling water, screams his way back up the chimney, and runs away forever. Giselle’s curly head was heavy, warm, and damp on his arm. Gustave shoved her upright several times, trying to get her to lean on Jean-Paul instead, but she kept flopping back against him, and finally he let her stay there. Across the aisle, Maman’s eyes were closed. Jean-Paul seemed to have fallen asleep too, with his head leaning against the rain-spattered window. Gustave let his head fall back on the seat, listening to the wheels of the train, the chuff of the engine, and the intermittent, lonesome wail of the whistle.
In the darkness, behind his closed eyes, Gustave could be almost anywhere. His mind drifted along with the rhythm of the train wheels. Gradually, the wheels started to sound like the ticking of the clock in their old apartment in Paris, where they had lived before the war. In his mind, Gustave could see the way the sunlight fell across the wooden floor. It was Sunday morning, and he was running with Marcel and Jean-Paul down the steps of the apartment building and over to the bakery at the corner. For a moment, Gustave could almost smell fresh French bread, could feel it, warm and crusty, in his hand.
He pulled himself awake, focusing his eyes on the cold American night outside and the rain running down the train window. He wouldn’t think about Paris again. That world was gone. Misery twisted inside him. The Nazis were in Paris now, their soldiers on the streets in ugly green uniforms, their banners draped arrogantly over French buildings. Although Gustave and his parents had fled Paris just before the Germans came, he had seen photos in the newspaper. Sometimes Jean-Paul talked about what it had been like, but he usually wouldn’t say much.
Gustave pushed his memories of Paris away fiercely. If he wanted to think about France, he might as well think about the tiny village of Saint-Georges-sur-Cher, where he and his parents had been living until recently. Things were better there because, unlike Paris, it wasn’t in the part of France occupied by the Germans. But even in Unoccupied France, the Germans still told the French leaders what to do.
Gustave should look to the future, his parents said. Think about America, about the good new life they would have here.
A-me-ri-ca, the train wheels started to sing in his ears. A-me-ri-ca, A-me-ri-ca. Gustave remembered the way the American flag had looked, waving in the deep blue sky over the train station. The darkness behind his eyes closed in from all sides, and he drifted into sleep.
—
Gustave’s head snapped forward, waking him, as the train stopped with a jolt.
“Where are we?” murmured Maman’s voice. “Not Philadelphia already?”
“It must be a checkpoint,” Papa said.
“A border?” asked Aunt Geraldine nervously. “They’re going to check our papers again?”
“Oh, no. No borders—it’s all one big country,” said Monsieur Benoit. “There must be some mechanical problem with the train.”
Jean-Paul was awake too, rubbing his eyes. Giselle still flopped, heavily asleep, against Gustave’s side. Beyond the French voices, Gustave heard the Americans talking, sounding indignant at this unplanned stop. In the blackness outside the window, he could see only that they were at a small, dimly lit station.
The door at the front of the train car opened, letting in a gust of cold air. The conductor stepped in, and behind him came two men with stern faces, one tall and broad-shouldered, the other much more slightly built. All conversation ceased abruptly.
“Who is Mister Ben-oyt? Mister Arn-owd Ben-oyt?” the bigger of the two men demanded.
The man’s accent was so strange that it took Gustave a moment to realize that he was saying Monsieur Benoit’s name. A chill ran over him as the conductor pointed toward the French passengers.
Monsieur Benoit stood up slowly and stepped past Papa into the aisle. Both men walked toward him. The bigger one said something and gestured. Monsieur Benoit held his arms out to his sides. The man examined the flaps of his coat, then patted his hands over Monsieur Benoit’s chest and arms and even down his legs.
The burly man straightened, his face red, and barked something again. Monsieur Benoit reached up and took down his bags from the rack over the seat. The man examined their exteriors, rubbed at their metal corners, then shook his head and handed them to the thinner man behind him.
The front door of the car opened again. Two railway men staggered in, carrying Monsieur Benoit’s trunk.
“Ah!” The burly man squeezed past the thin man and strode toward it. He leaned over.
“Arn-owd Ben-oyt!” he read out, pointing at the label on the trunk. “Yours?” he demanded.
“Yes.” Monsieur Benoit spoke the English words quietly. “I am Arnaud Benoit.”
Huffing, the big man leaned down and scratched at one of the corners of the trunk. The dark paint flaked off. Gustave gasped. Even from his seat, he could see the soft gleam of the trunk’s corner.
“Gold!” the thinner man said triumphantly. “There it is!”
Gustave’s heart thudded. Were they all going to be searched?
>
The man with the big belly unclasped something from his waist and held it out toward Monsieur Benoit. Light glinted on dull metal. The elderly jeweler held his arms out, and the handcuffs clanked shut around his wrists. He stumbled slightly as the big man pushed him to the side and strode toward the other French passengers, shouting.
They looked at one another, bewildered. Monsieur Benoit turned around. His face was pale, his hands were shackled awkwardly in front of him, and Gustave saw sweat on his forehead below the brim of his hat. His voice was shaky but still courteous as he translated the command.
“These gentlemen are from the government, from the FBI. They say that all foreign passengers must get out their papers and bags for inspection. One row at a time. Starting here.”
4
A low, panicked murmur ran through the railroad car.
People began to stand and pull at their bags. The thinner of the two FBI agents started patting down another Frenchman from the ship. He ripped open the lining of the man’s coat, pulled something out, shouted, and pushed the man forward. Gustave’s pulse pounded in his temples. What if Maman’s corset with the hidden money crackled? Or what if they felt around carefully and noticed that the stays of the corset were bulkier than they should be?
Across the aisle Maman sat still, as if frozen, her eyes on the floor. Giselle was still sleeping against Gustave. His thoughts raced. They wouldn’t disturb a woman and a sleeping baby, would they? He slid his hands underneath his baby cousin. Keep sleeping, Giselle! he thought, as if he could will her to stay asleep if he thought it forcefully enough. Don’t wake up!
Maman lifted her head, and a look flashed between her and Gustave as she opened her arms to hold the little girl. Amazingly, Giselle remained asleep as Maman took her onto her lap and pressed her against her waist where the money was hidden. Giselle’s feet, in tiny, scuffed buckle shoes, dangled in the aisle.
The FBI agents were opening bags, rifling through them, and patting down people two rows ahead. The big-bellied one looked at Gustave and Jean-Paul.
Skating with the Statue of Liberty Page 2
