SEVEN
The école élementaire was not a big school by city standards, but it was spacious and well laid out, plenty large enough for the children of the commune of Carriveau. Before its life as a school, the building had been stables for a rich landowner, and thus its U-shape design; the central courtyard had been a gathering place for carriages and tradesmen. It boasted gray stone walls, bright blue shutters, and wooden floors. The manor house, to which it had once been aligned, had been bombed in the Great War and never rebuilt. Like so many schools in the small towns in France, it stood on the far edge of town.
Vianne was in her classroom, behind her desk, staring out at the shining children’s faces in front of her, dabbing her upper lip with her wrinkled handkerchief. On the floor by each child’s desk was the obligatory gas mask. Children now carried them everywhere.
The open windows and thick stone walls helped to keep the sun at bay, but still the heat was stifling. Lord knew, it was hard enough to concentrate without the added burden of the heat. The news from Paris was terrible, terrifying. All anyone could talk about was the gloomy future and the shocking present: Germans in Paris. The Maginot Line broken. French soldiers dead in trenches and running from the front. For the last three nights—since the telephone call from her father—she hadn’t slept. Isabelle was God-knew-where between Paris and Carriveau, and there had been no word from Antoine.
“Who wants to conjugate the verb courir for me?” she asked tiredly.
“Shouldn’t we be learning German?”
Vianne realized what she’d just been asked. The students were interested now, sitting upright, their eyes bright.
“Pardon?” she said, clearing her throat, buying time.
“We should be learning German, not French.”
It was young Gilles Fournier, the butcher’s son. His father and all three of his older brothers had gone off to the war, leaving only him and his mother to run the family’s butcher shop.
“And shooting,” Fran?ois agreed, nodding his head. “My maman says we will need to know how to shoot Germans, too.”
“My grandmère says we should all just leave,” said Claire. “She remembers the last war and she says we are fools for staying.”
“The Germans won’t cross the Loire, will they, Madame Mauriac?”
In the front row, center, Sophie sat forward in her seat, her hands clasped atop the wooden desk, her eyes wide. She had been as upset by the rumors as Vianne. The child had cried herself to sleep two nights in a row, worrying over her father. Now Bébé came to school with her. Sarah sat in the desk beside her best friend, looking equally fearful.
“It is all right to be afraid,” Vianne said, moving toward them. It was what she’d said to Sophie last night and to herself, but the words rang hollow.
“I’m not afraid,” Gilles said. “I got a knife. I’ll kill any dirty Boches who show up in Carriveau.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “They’re coming here?”
“No,” Vianne said. The denial didn’t come easily; her own fear caught at the word, stretched it out. “The French soldiers—your fathers and uncles and brothers—are the bravest men in the world. I’m sure they are fighting for Paris and Tours and Orléans even as we speak.”
“But Paris is overrun,” Gilles said. “What happened to the French soldiers at the front?”
“In wars, there are battles and skirmishes. Losses along the way. But our men will never let the Germans win. We will never give up.” She moved closer to her students. “But we have a part to play, too; those of us left behind. We have to be brave and strong, too, and not believe the worst. We have to keep on with our lives so our fathers and brothers and … husbands have lives to come home to, oui?”
“But what about Tante Isabelle?” Sophie asked. “Grandpère said she should have been here by now.”
“My cousin ran from Paris, too,” Fran?ois said. “He is not arrived here, either.”
“My uncle says it is bad on the roads.”
The bell rang and students popped from their seats like springs. In an instant the war, the aeroplanes, the fear were forgotten. They were eight-and nine-year-olds freed at the end of a summer school day, and they acted like it. Yelling, laughing, talking all at once, pushing one another aside, running for the door.
Vianne was thankful for the bell. She was a teacher, for God’s sake. What did she know to say about dangers such as these? How could she assuage a child’s fear when her own was straining at the leash? She busied herself with ordinary tasks—gathering up the detritus that sixteen children left behind, banging chalk from the soft erasers, putting books away. When everything was as it should be, she put her papers and pencils into her own leather satchel and took her handbag out of the desk’s bottom drawer. Then she put on her straw hat, pinned it in place, and left her classroom.
She walked down the quiet hallways, waving to colleagues who were still in their classrooms. Several of the rooms were closed up now that the male teachers had been mobilized.
At Rachel’s classroom, she paused, watching as Rachel put her son in his pram and wheeled it toward the door. Rachel had been planning to take this term off from teaching to stay home with Ari, but the war had changed all of that. Now, she had no choice but to bring her baby to work with her.
“You look like I feel,” Vianne said as her friend neared. Rachel’s dark hair had responded to the humidity and doubled in size.
“That can’t be a compliment but I’m desperate, so I am taking it as one. You have chalk on your cheek, by the way.”
Vianne wiped her cheek absently and leaned over the pram. The baby was sleeping soundly. “How’s he doing?”
“For a ten-month-old who is supposed to be at home with his maman and is instead gallivanting around town beneath enemy aeroplanes and listening to ten-year-old students shriek all day? Fine.” She smiled and pushed a damp ringlet from her face as they headed down the corridor. “Do I sound bitter?”
“No more than the rest of us.”
“Ha! Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.”
Rachel bumped the pram down the three stone steps and onto the walkway that led to the grassy play area that had once been an exercise arena for horses and a delivery area for tradesmen. A four-hundred-year-old stone fountain gurgled and dripped water in the center of the yard.
“Come on, girls!” Rachel called out to Sophie and Sarah, who were sitting together on a park bench. The girls responded immediately and fell into step ahead of the women, chattering constantly, their heads cocked together, their hands clasped. A second generation of best friends.
They turned into an alleyway and came out on rue Victor Hugo, right in front of a bistro where old men sat on ironwork chairs, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking politics. Ahead of them, Vianne saw a haggard trio of women limping along, their clothes tattered, their faces yellow with dust.
“Poor women,” Rachel said with a sigh. “Hélène Ruelle told me this morning that at least a dozen refugees came to town late last night. The stories they bring are not good. But no one embellishes a story like Hélène.”