Stay strong. We do. Soon the crocuses will be sprouting.
Je t’embrasse,
N
Gustave read the letter several times, trying to be sure he completely understood it. She had written it before his letter had arrived, telling her about eating the turkey out of the garbage—that was pretty obvious! It had taken her letter a month to get here. The bit at the end was quite clear. She was riding her bike often. He knew what that meant. She was helping the Resistance, helping send signals to people escaping out of the occupied part of France. But she was biking with Claude? She was letting him help, the way Gustave had helped? Gustave felt a twinge of jealousy.
“So what’s the news?” Papa asked. “How are things in Saint-Georges?”
Gustave plunked down next to Papa on the sofa, and a musty smell rose up. “It’s cold there,” he said. “Or it was a month ago. Nicole says there’s almost no charcoal. She says she’s still working for the Resistance.”
“She says that?” Papa put down his tea, alarmed, and reached for the letter. “Even with no return address, they could trace it back to her, and she and her father could get into terrible trouble.”
“No, of course not, Papa! She’s smart. She says it in code, the way she did last time. She just says she’s riding her bike. But I understand what that means. But then there’s this whole long, confusing thing in the middle about a teacher I know she doesn’t like and a story he told them. Part of it is blacked out.”
“May I see?” Papa took the letter. Then he grinned. “Monsieur Faible. Mr. Feeble. I bet that’s not his real name.” He studied it some more and chuckled. “I’d like to have been in that cinema when all that coughing was going on! Don’t you see? They were trying to drown out the newsreel because it was celebrating Hitler.”
“Oh, that makes sense. But it’s the part that’s blacked out that I’m especially trying to figure out. Look, here you can see the tops of some of the letters. The censor didn’t quite cover up the whole word.” He showed Papa. “I think this word is ‘kids’ and that one is ‘teachers.’ You can see the tops of the letters, see? Do you think she was saying kids and teachers from a school disappeared?”
“Oh, who can say?” Papa murmured, studying the paper.
“But why would they arrest people from a school, Papa? It wouldn’t be our school in Saint-Georges, because she says ‘the cinema in the city of’ whatever it is. First of all, there’s no cinema in the village, and also nobody would call Saint-Georges a city. But do you think she was writing about a school?”
Papa looked at Gustave with a peculiar expression. “I don’t think there’s a lot of point trying to figure out what those words might have said. It could have been anything. Probably she mentioned the name of a city, and the Nazi censor blacked it out so that their enemies wouldn’t find out what’s going on in their territories.”
“I guess you’re right.” Gustave sat next to Papa on the sofa, half listening to the music from the radio and reading the letter over again. The word “colorful” seemed to be written a bit more darkly than the other words. Why?
And then he saw it. She was drawing his attention to the colors she mentioned in the letter. She had named three colors, and all three colors were written just a bit more darkly than the other words: her blue fingers and then Monsieur Faible’s face turning white and then red. Bleu, blanc, rouge. The forbidden colors of the French flag. Nicole had sneaked them into the letter in a secret act of patriotism, a secret act of rebellion against the occupying Germans. Gustave laughed out loud in delight. “Papa, look!” he said. “There’s something else here we didn’t see before!”
22
Gustave wrote back to Nicole the following evening. He printed instead of writing in cursive, because there was something special he wanted to do.
13 March, 1942
Chère Nicole,
I am writing letters—you just hadn’t gotten my last one yet when you wrote yours. I couldn’t read your whole letter because part was badly blotted with black ink. I think you were saying something important about students. Was it students our age? Otherwise, I understood everything in your letter well. I felt as if I could see everything in bright colors when I was reading it.
Something funny happened in school today. You remember my favorite teacher ever, Mrs. H., the one who loves my singing so much? (Surely by now you’ve gotten my last letter.) Well, some kids played a trick on her the other day. She’s always talking about how much she hates swing music—it’s really popular right now. So she was playing the piano while we sang Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It’s a Christian hymn. For some strange reason I didn’t know the hymn. Do you have any idea why? Anyway, Mrs. H. played one page, and then the boy who turns the pages for her flipped it over, and the next bars she played sounded funny. She looked confused.
Then I heard giggling and I recognized the tune she was playing. It wasn’t Beethoven. It was “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”—a Duke Ellington song that everybody’s been humming and whistling lately! In the back of the room, I heard someone singing quietly “boo-wop-a-bop, boo-wop-a-bop, a-bop”!
Some kids had pasted the music on top of the Beethoven sheets in her songbook! Mrs. H. crashed her hands down on the keys. “Who did this?” she shouted, but nobody would admit it. So she yelled at us the rest of the period, giving us a long lecture about not messing with her things and about how bad and decadent swing music is.
I found out who had played the trick because after the bell rang, I heard some guys laughing, and when they got into the hall, one of them said to another, “Gimme some skin!” It’s a kind of handshake some kids do here. Everyone thought it was really funny.
But poor Mrs. H. You can imagine how very sorry I felt for her. It made me think of your teacher, Monsieur F., the one you like so much.
I hope you’ll send me important news soon.
By the way, I don’t think I ever told you the name of my school. I go to Joan of Arc Junior High. It’s a skyscraper school! And I live near a Joan of Arc statue. A bit of France here in New York. My favorite part of France too.
Stay strong.
Gustave
Gustave looked over his letter, wondering if he dared to add the symbol he wanted to add, wondering if it was dangerous to do it. He was pretty sure Nicole knew that Joan of Arc was connected with the French Resistance. But just to be absolutely sure, he added the faintest line crossing each “J” a second time. The censors wouldn’t see that, and even if they did, they couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a random mark. But Nicole would know what the double-crossed “J”s were, Gustave thought triumphantly. The symbol of the French Resistance—the Cross of Lorraine!
To pay for an airmail stamp, Gustave took a quarter and two dimes out of the jar where he was keeping his earnings from Mr. Quong. Now he only had a nickel left. At this rate, it was going to take a long time to save enough to buy those secondhand pants. But it was worth it to send the Cross of Lorraine to Nicole. A secret symbol of defiance. A secret symbol of hope.
—
Cousin Henri and Jean-Paul were waiting outside Grand Central Terminal when Gustave got there on Thursday afternoon. Cousin Henri had invited the two of them to see The Jungle Book, a new movie about a boy raised by wolves.
“This sounds like a great movie!” Jean-Paul said, jumping over a puddle as they headed down 42nd Street.
“I know! It could really happen—a boy could be raised by wolves. There was a case in France once, right, Cousin Henri? That boy from Aveyron?”
“Sure,” said Cousin Henri, stopping in front of a plate-glass storefront. “Victor was his name. People talked about him a lot when I was growing up. My mother used to scold us, ‘Don’t eat like the wolf boy!’ Surprise! Who’s hungry?”
“I am!” said Jean-Paul excitedly.
“But I thought we were going to the movie!” Gustave said.
“We’re stopping in here first,” said Cousin Henri. “I thought you two should try out an Au
tomat. These were one of my favorite things when I first came to New York. It’s a special kind of American restaurant where you buy your food out of machines.”
The restaurant was huge. It had a marble floor and vividly colored stained glass. Banks of small compartments with glass windows lined the walls under signs reading CAKES, PIES, DINNERS, and SANDWICHES. It was like a palace celebrating food. People filled the room, talking, laughing, peering through the small windows, and eating at the tables. Gustave could smell beef and chicken and mashed potatoes, and through it all the strong, bitter aroma of coffee.
“I can’t believe how much food there is in this country!” Gustave said.
Cousin Henri laughed and handed Gustave a dollar. “My treat! Pick anything you’d like. But first you need to take this to the ‘nickel thrower.’ ” He said the last word in English.
“What’s a ‘nickel thrower’?”
“It’s the woman in that booth over there. She takes your dollar and gives you a pile of nickels to use in the machines.”
At the glass booth a bored-looking woman was chewing gum. She took the dollar and, using her rubber-capped forefinger, flipped them twenty nickels with impressive speed.
“Come on,” Jean-Paul called, grabbing some of the nickels and pushing the rest toward Gustave. “I’m getting a sandwich!” Jean-Paul ran off. “Or maybe cherry pie!” he called over his shoulder. “What are you getting?”
“I don’t know yet.”
There was so much delicious-looking food, it seemed impossible to decide. But when Gustave came to the bank of windows marked CAKES, he stopped. Behind the panes of glass were individual slices of cakes with cream, cakes with fruit, chocolate cake, lemon cake, cakes with dripping pink icing. Now he knew exactly what he wanted. A cake shaped like a pie with a crumbly-looking crust and a rich, creamy filling. Ahead of him, a man worked the machine and took out a plate with mocha-frosted cake on it. Gustave did the same thing, sliding two nickels into the slot and turning the knob. The glass door clicked, and Gustave lifted it up and slid out the plate.
“Ah! Cheesecake!” Cousin Henri smiled when he sat down. Jean-Paul was already there, biting into a thick sandwich. “That’s one of my favorites too.”
“Are you going to get a slice?” Gustave asked, pouring the extra nickels onto the table.
“I’ll just have coffee. Watch—this is my favorite machine!”
It was directly opposite their table. Cousin Henri fed it a nickel and lifted the handle, and from the golden head of a dragon, a stream of coffee poured into his cup.
“Cool!” said Jean-Paul.
—
Gustave could still taste the delicious creaminess of the cheesecake when they got to the movie theater. The movie had already started, so they went in quietly. Gustave stopped at a row with a lot of empty seats. The first seats of the row in front were filled with tall young men in soldiers’ uniforms, so Gustave kept walking down the row until he came to three spots where no one would block the view. He settled into a plush seat.
On the huge movie screen, in brilliant Technicolor, a small boy toddled into a wolf’s den. The soldiers laughed loudly as the baby patted the wolf cubs and plopped down among them. A few minutes later the baby on screen had grown into a twelve-year-old boy. The boy, Mowgli, dove into a river to get away from a tiger, and then Gustave and Jean-Paul gasped in unison as the camera moved back to show a crocodile swimming behind him.
It was an exciting movie, especially when Mowgli encountered humans for the first time and when the tiger came on screen. At one point Jean-Paul leaned over to ask Gustave to translate what a girl had said to Mowgli, and Gustave suddenly realized that he was watching a movie in English without even noticing that it wasn’t in French.
When the movie ended, the lights came back on, and some people filed out while others stayed in their seats to watch it again. “We missed the very beginning,” Jean-Paul said. “It’ll show again in a few minutes, right? Can we stay and watch it, please, Cousin Henri? Other people are staying.”
“Sure,” Cousin Henri said.
After a short time the lights lowered again, and the black-and-white images of a newsreel started to flicker on the screen.
“In news from Europe,” boomed a deep voice, “escaped prisoners tell frightening stories about the camps in Poland.” A photo of bare feet behind barbed wire filled the screen, then the boots of German soldiers and a snarling, slavering dog lunging forward at the end of a leash. Gustave felt himself go cold. “Political prisoners…unwanted people…civilians from occupied countries,” he heard. “France.” Yes, he had just heard “France,” pronounced the funny American way. The images on the screen rushed on: a line of prisoners seen from the back, mostly men, but also what looked like the black hair of a boy. “Cold…starvation,” the announcer said. “Death.”
Gustave’s stomach lurched. The screen seemed to waver in front of him. He pushed himself to his feet. Jean-Paul sat still, blank faced. Gustave shoved his way blindly to the end of the aisle and ran to the men’s room. The lights glared on the white tile, and a searing pain flashed behind his eyes. The stall door stuck and then gave way, and he almost fell toward the toilet as he threw up.
When Gustave came out of the men’s room, Cousin Henri was waiting in the lobby. “Are you all right?” He put his arm gently around Gustave’s shoulders. “Maybe that cheesecake was too rich for you, eh?”
Gustave felt as if he might throw up again if he opened his mouth to speak. The pattern in the carpet swam in front of his eyes.
“Let me get you something. Come.” Gustave let himself be led to the refreshment counter, where more American food gleamed, colorful, plentiful, tantalizing.
“One Coke,” said Cousin Henri. Gustave started to shake his head, feeling ashamed about all the food he was eating and all the money Cousin Henri was spending on him. But the young woman behind the counter was already handing Cousin Henri a green glass bottle.
“Here.” Cousin Henri smiled slightly. “Coca-Cola—the taste of America! Go ahead, try it—it will settle your stomach.”
The bottle was cold and smooth in Gustave’s hand. The coolness felt good. He tipped it toward his mouth.
Coca-Cola fizzed on his tongue, startling him. The taste was intensely, cloyingly sweet and utterly disgusting. It was like medicine, like cod liver oil. He swallowed what was in his mouth to be polite, but he shuddered as it went down, intense pain shooting through his head again.
“There now, that’s better, isn’t it?” Cousin Henri asked worriedly.
Gustave nodded, but he couldn’t take another sip. Instead he turned and walked back into the theater toward their seats. Jean-Paul was still watching the screen. The newsreels had finished, and the movie was starting up again. Maybe Jean-Paul hadn’t understood enough English to know what the newsreel was about. But there had definitely been a boy on the screen in that prison camp. A boy Marcel’s age.
Elephants moved across the screen and then gibbering monkeys swung. The soldiers in the row in front laughed, and one of them tossed a piece of popcorn up in the air. Couldn’t the American army do something about those prison camps where people were starving? Why wouldn’t America at least let more Jews in? The movie blurred in front of Gustave’s eyes, and he blinked hard to clear his vision. Now it was past the point in the story when they had first come in, but Cousin Henri and Jean-Paul were still happily watching. On the screen Mowgli was coming to the human village again. Buldeo, the angry man from the village, was saying they shouldn’t let Mowgli enter, that he wasn’t a person like the villagers. “He is a wolf,” Buldeo said, his face huge and scowling on the giant screen. “Let one in, and all will follow.”
“He’s a boy!” Gustave wanted to shout at the movie. “Let him in! He’s not a wolf. He’s a human being!”
23
The next Saturday Gustave went with Maman and Papa to the French synagogue on the Upper East Side. His parents wanted to meet the rabbi and arrange for him to b
egin tutoring Gustave for his bar mitzvah. The rabbi was already working with Jean-Paul. The plan was for both of them to get bar mitzvahed together in the fall, a few months late. It was going to mean a lot of studying between now and then.
They walked across Central Park to get to the East Side. The snow was completely gone now, and the ground was thawing, leaving unsightly stretches of mud where there would soon be grass. A faint reddening on some of the trees showed where leaves would be sprouting in a week or two. But there were no flowers yet, not even snowdrops or crocuses, Gustave noticed.
Papa was walking slowly and heavily, and Gustave had gotten ahead of his parents. He paused, and as they approached, he heard a snatch of their conversation. “I don’t know how we are going to be able to afford to pay the rabbi for tutoring Gustave,” Maman murmured. “And a suit for him to wear on the big day? His clothes are looking so disreputable. How are we going to afford that?”
“We’ll work something out. I might have a lead on a better job.” Papa paused and rubbed his leg.
“Why didn’t you bring your walking stick?” Maman scolded. “Sabbath or no, we’ll take the bus home.”
The synagogue was small and old and friendly-looking. They went in, and Papa collapsed into one of the back rows. Maman went upstairs to the women’s balcony. Jean-Paul turned around from a pew in the front and hurried back to sit with them. He was wearing an American suit with long pants that went all the way down to his ankles.
Services at the synagogue were very similar to the way they had been in Paris, partly in Hebrew and partly in French. The rabbi had a kind, weary-looking face. After services most of the congregation went down to the basement for kiddush, the meal after prayer. The room filled up quickly. Gustave was surrounded by so many voices speaking French that he could have been back in Paris. There was something familiar even about the strangers’ faces around him, something that tugged at him, reminded him of home.
Skating with the Statue of Liberty Page 13
