We’re shepherds, the older man had told his son. All we can do is tend to them.
The doctor couldn’t believe he was losing his wife, and yet every day he had more of an understanding of what she meant to him. They’d been fortunate to have had many years when they hadn’t thought about time at all, and had just greedily and happily lived their lives, having breakfast, walking in the woods, working, quarreling over inconsequential things, making love in their old bed, which had belonged to his parents. And then time was blown up altogether. Her disease was incurable, so he put away the clocks and removed his wristwatch, which he left in the night table drawer. They had six months, and then three months, and then, suddenly, a single day. A single day to look at her so that he would never forget the smallest details. The mole on her neck, the way she bit her lip when she was in pain, for she never complained.
Now, the Germans forced every Jewish woman to use the name Sarah after her own name on every official document. Girard was unwilling to let another woman die if he could save her. Each person who had slept in his barn, each he had given refuge, each Resistance worker he had helped, was for Sarah. It was always her, she was with him still, as if she were waiting in the kitchen, ready to embrace him as soon as he walked in the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HIDDEN
IZIEU, APRIL 1944
JULIEN ENTERED THE CHURCH TO see a familiar man in the pew nearest the altar. At last, his brother. He went to join Victor, and though it was a joyous occasion, they were cautious, unsure of who else might enter the building. They both looked straight ahead, as if they didn’t know one another, but it was a great relief for each to know the other was alive.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when they came for the old man,” Victor said.
“I’m glad you weren’t. How is Marianne?” Fortunately, she hadn’t seen the horror of her father’s death.
“She’s strong. All the same, it’s a terrible blow. He was a good man. It probably took ten of them to kill him. They didn’t see you, I assume?”
How could they? He was out on a mountain, daydreaming, waiting for the heron. In some ways, it was an embarrassment to still be alive. “By the time I got back, it was too late.”
“They shot him?” Victor asked.
“You really want to know?”
“No. Don’t tell me. If I know I’ll have to tell her.” He gave his brother a look. “And she should never know.”
Julien agreed. He wished he himself didn’t know, that he hadn’t had to cut the old man down and drag him out of the house and down the stairs. He didn’t like to think of it even now.
“It should have been me,” he told Victor.
“It wasn’t your time. Be thankful. But the thing about saving yourself is that once you do, you have to live with it.”
Victor had a car parked around the corner.
“Yours?” Julien asked.
“Sure. Once I stole it.”
Victor explained that he could not bring Julien back to the farm. Marianne was often gone now, taking as many children across the border as possible, and Victor had plans as well, ones he couldn’t speak about. He drove even faster than usual on the steep and winding roads, on his way to one of the last safe places for Jewish children. Maison d’Izieu, deep in the countryside, more than 50 miles from Lyon, had a beautiful view of the chain of mountains in the Rhône Valley, and it had recently been granted protection by the Vichy government. A huge stone château with an enormous fountain outside the front door, it was a safe haven where children could have a good night’s sleep, see to their studies, and breathe in the clean country air. In the hilly garden there were vegetables and a small orchard. Perhaps those in residence could forget some of what they had seen. Perhaps not. By now, hundreds of children had been in châteaus such as this, and Izieu was one of many OSE sanctuaries that would go on to rescue thousands of Jewish children. OSE schools were allowed by law to keep children of Jewish parents who had been deported. There was a standard of who could be arrested and murdered and who was allowed to stay in France. If you were under sixteen you were allowed to live.
When they arrived, Victor got out of the car to embrace Julien. “Eventually we’ll meet at the farm, but for now, just stay here,” he said. “You’ll be safe.”
“What if I don’t see you again?” Julien wanted to know.
“Then you’ll know you were my favorite brother.” Victor shrugged, a smile on his face. Despite everything that had happened, he still had hope for the future.
“Was I?”
Victor threw him a look. “Were you what?”
“Your favorite?”
“Idiot! Of course. And my only one.”
They clapped each other on the back. “Don’t worry so much,” Victor advised. “You’ll turn out to be older than me if you do.”
Julien watched the car disappear down the mountain road.
I’m still here, he wished he could write to Lea. I don’t understand how or why anymore.
The air was cool and fresh, and there was the scent of lily of the valley. Time was moving so quickly, perhaps all he had to do was hold on and wait and this would all be over and he would have his life back, or whatever was left of it.
If I don’t see you again, I have faith that you knew me.
He thought he might be turned away from Izieu due to his age; he was now sixteen, the age when all Jews were sent on the trains, but the teachers were interested when they heard his father had been a professor of mathematics and that he was quite advanced in that field. They told him they were in need of teachers, and invited him to stay.
The forty-four children at Izieu, aged three to sixteen, boys and girls, came out on the terrace to greet him. Most of them had lived in several places in the past few months, and all had been moved to the free zone by the OSE. Their parents were in hiding or had been detained or were members of the Resistance. So far the government had allowed the children to have the dream that they were French; the OSE had an agreement with the French police to overlook the châteaus, and all of the children had paperwork that allowed them to be at Izieu.
Julien shook hands with as many as he could on his way inside the front hall. He was especially pleased to find there was a dog on the grounds, a friendly wolfish creature named Lex, who took an immediate liking to Julien. A young man named Max, who had been a medical student in Paris and now taught biology to the older children, showed Julien around. He would be a counselor, living in a dormitory room and overseeing some of the younger boys. He would be in charge of math lessons for the younger boys in the morning, and teach more advanced lessons in geometry, logic, and number theory to the older, more talented students in the afternoon. A few high-spirited ten-year-olds rushed past to get their mail as Julien was on his tour. The children wrote home faithfully, and mail call was the most exciting event of the day. Those who received packages shared with those whose parents were unable to send treats. There was no discussion about where missing parents might be, for there was a deep belief that they would return. No one wished to crush the idea of that possibility.
Exhausted from his travels, Julien lay down on his metal bed and slept through dinner right into the night. Lex had been tracking rabbits on the lawn, but he soon found Julien and woke him by licking his hand. The hour was late, and Julien sprang from his bed, confused as to where he was. He had been dreaming about the garden of his parents’ house. Lea was there, but she was disappearing in front of his eyes. Don’t let me go, she’d said to him, and he’d been panic-stricken, not knowing what to do.
Julien watched the huddled forms of the boys who had crept into their beds so as not to wake him and now slept soundly. Gazing at them, he felt old. Three years had passed since he’d been in school himself, and fought with his closest school friend, and realized the world had changed before they knew what was happening.
“We teach them to live in the woods,” Max told Julien the following day about the expeditions with th
e children. “It’s fun and games, but someday they may need to survive on their own.”
Julien was polite, but he kept to himself. At night he often sat on the large patio, thinking of his last days in Paris, doing his best to remember details of that time. Sitting in the kitchen watching Lea and Ava prepare Hardship Soup on the day they arrived, his mother in the garden watering the tomato plants, his father in his study, sure that there was logic to the universe, the night they’d buried the few treasures they had left and Lea had looked at him, knowing it took everything inside him not to embarrass himself and cry.
Max came out to find Julien alone, gazing at the dark mountains. When they began to speak of their former lives, it turned out they hadn’t lived far from one another in Paris. Both had gone to the same school. Max was the same age as Victor and knew him from their classes.
“Not that he was the best student.”
“When the school wouldn’t let us continue any longer Victor said that at least we had one thing to be thankful for. Freedom.”
They both laughed. School was once important to them, but now they saw Victor as wise beyond his years.
“Let’s drink to Victor,” Max suggested.
“How do we manage that?” Julien asked.
Max motioned to him, and together they headed to the rear of the property. There was a sweeping view of the lawn, and in the distance the inky outline of the mountains, formed by layers of volcanic rock. The roof and steps at the château were made of this same rough rock, and the top of the roof was fashioned from planks of stone, an old pagan tradition, set there for fertility and joy and happiness.
At the edge of the garden was a wooden shed where supplies were stored. It was here Max kept a hidden bottle of Cointreau. He grinned when he saw the surprise on Julien’s face. “You never know when you’ll need it for medicinal purposes,” he said. Julien took a swallow, then the two handed the bottle back and forth. Julien found himself speaking of his despair. He felt lost, he admitted. Most mornings when he woke, he had no idea where he was and he sprang from his bed confused. He didn’t mention the old man, or Lea, or his parents. “I wish I had lived in another time,” he said gloomily.
“We can only think about this day, and do the same tomorrow,” Max said. “It’s the only way to get through it.”
Julien nodded. Max was right. If he thought too much, he might give up, and he wasn’t about to do that. The following day he began to teach math. The children were good students, and one boy in particular, a cheerful fellow named Teddy, who was not more than eight, could do complicated sums in his head. Julien had been much the same as a student; he’d had difficulty showing his work, for it was all done in his head, and one of his teachers had accused him of cheating before it was explained that he was the son of the professor and therefore a natural at mathematics. When Julien questioned Teddy, it turned out that his father was a mathematician and an engineer. The boy was proud of his father, and when he received a package of sweets, sent by his parents, members of the Resistance who were in hiding in Nice, he shared the gift with his friends and presented Julien with a bar of chocolate. It was the first Julien had tasted since leaving Paris, and he found he could only eat a few bites. It was too rich for him now.
In the afternoons, while the children played outside and worked in the garden, Julien graded their papers. In his free time, he would lie on his bed and read whatever books he could find in the library, preferring Kafka above all others. He’d told Lea to read The Castle, and they’d talked about the book for days. In Kafka’s work, the world made no sense, fates were cast for no reason, men were beasts or insects or they were simply lost, wandering through corridors that led nowhere, beset by those who followed orders no matter how foolish those orders might be. This was not a world in which a person could trust anyone. He’d learned his lesson at the farm and planned never to be defenseless again. He slept with Monsieur Félix’s knife under his pillow, and in the mornings, when he dressed, he kept it tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His philosophy had been formed by his experience. Trust no one, make your own future, love with all your heart.
An apple tree grew outside the window, and below that there was some shrubbery where birds nested. Dozens of swifts were nesting at this time of year, and Julien lay in bed in the early mornings, listening to the birds. The heron had never returned. Julien often felt a wave of despair at this hour, but when he closed his eyes and imagined Lea, he realized this was the way to survive. If he imagined her, he had not lost her.
He became used to his role at Izieu. The teaching itself was fine; and he was good at it, and in many ways it was a relief to be once again immersed in mathematics. He felt close to his father, and to the person he himself had been. Students who were refugees from Germany and Hungary seemed to prefer his class to all others, for the language of math created an equal playing field even for those who fumbled with their French. The couple that ran the school told him he was a natural teacher, and clearly math was his field. And yet, to Julien, making sense out of numbers seemed a false construct. Mathematics was a man-made puzzle that was tugged at and pulled apart until it fit inside a logical mind. Those mysteries his father had spoken of, grand endless numbers that explained the universe, problems thought to be worthy of spending a lifetime studying, seemed preposterous to him.
He wandered down the hall one morning after his own class and happened to glance into another classroom. The session was taught by one of the older women, a local teacher who gave her time freely. Today, she was having the children draw and paint. The creations were pictures to be sent to parents, even though they might never be heard from in return. Julien opened the door and gestured to the teacher that he would like to join them. She nodded as she continued instructing the children in her class, most of whom were between five and ten.
“You can show your parents what you are doing now, and what you hope to be doing in the future,” the teacher suggested.
Julien stood behind Teddy, his best math student. The boy was coloring a drawing of himself, his mother, and his father. The three were in a rocket ship, all waving. Julien sat down at the table and took a piece of paper for himself.
“Will you send yours to your parents?” Teddy asked.
Julien drew the outlines of a face. “If I could, I would send it to my girlfriend.”
Teddy wrinkled his nose with distaste. “You have a girlfriend?”
Julien laughed as he sketched. She was not yet a girlfriend, not truly, and yet she was more. In a few instants Lea’s image surfaced as if he’d conjured her.
“She’s pretty,” the boy granted.
“Actually she’s much prettier than this.” Julien folded up the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
That evening he went to the garden and gathered onions to bring to the kitchen to boil so he could use the residue as a wash of color over his sketch. When he painted the wash on the portrait, Lea seemed alive, as if the white paper had turned to flesh. From then on he joined the class every day, greeting the teacher, Madame Rey, then slipping into the room. He always sat beside Teddy, who grinned whenever he saw his new friend. In time, the teacher had managed to get some watercolors. It was a pleasure and a joy to have real paints, rather than washes and inks made of berries or grass or onion skin. Julien created his memory of the garden of his parents’ house, before his mother removed the roses and the peonies so she could replace the ornamental plants with vegetables for their meals. There was the tree he and Lea had climbed so they could be alone, and the gate she had walked through when Ava had rightly insisted they must leave, and the sky that was so bright on the day the police came for his family.
Madame Rey came to watch, standing behind him. She made him nervous, so he put down the brush. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Julien said, feeling a fool.
“No, you’re very good at this,” the teacher encouraged him. “You’re an artist.”
“I told him he was,” Teddy agreed. “I want him
to make a painting for my mother.” Teddy was at work on a colorful picture of himself with Lex, who often slept in the classrooms, stretched out beneath the desks.
“I’m sure your parents would prefer your own work,” Madame told Teddy. She patted his head and moved on. She already knew they were dead. A note had been received a few weeks ago; both mother and father had been apprehended in Nice for their Resistance work, sent east by train to a camp where they were murdered.
It had been decided that life in the château was difficult enough and that children who had lost their parents would be spared the news until their circumstances were more settled. For some of the children the château felt much like summer camp, a city child’s dream of the countryside, and in the brilliance of the afternoons they played on the lawn with dozens of new pals. At first, many of the city children were frightened by the countryside, and others could not speak the language and missed their parents terribly. But soon they settled in. The overnights in the woods were the greatest fun, especially for those who didn’t realize such excursions constituted training in case they ever needed to flee into the mountains. Sabine Zlatin, a French Red Cross nurse who had begun the home, was traveling, already looking for a safer place to move the children, for no matter how remote the château was, the situation was growing more dangerous by the day, and old agreements were being overturned by the Nazi regime. These nights in the woods were lessons that were more important than any learned in a classroom. How to catch a fish in your hand, how to tell if water was fit to drink, how to hide beneath a pile of leaves so that it seemed no one was there.
One afternoon the children were brought to a nearby waterfall. It was good practice to hide behind the falls. Children under sixteen were still protected, but what were rules in the hands of the Germans? It was best to be prepared. The children played a game in which they must make themselves invisible when a whistle was blown. Then, when the whistle sounded again, they were to show themselves. Julien’s duty was to make sure none of the children fell into the water as they pretended to be explorers who held the key to invisibility.
The World That We Knew Page 20
