*
Midnight.
Isabelle crouched in the darkness behind a crumbling stone wall. She was deep in the woods and dressed in peasant clothes—denim overalls that had seen better days, wooden-soled boots, and a lightweight blouse made from an old shower curtain. Downwind, she could smell the smoke of nearby bonfires but she couldn’t see even a glimmer of firelight.
Behind her, a twig snapped.
She crouched lower, barely breathed.
A whistle sounded. It was the lilting song of the nightingale. Or close to it. She whistled back.
She heard footsteps; breathing. And then, “Iz?”
She rose and turned around. A thin beam of light swept past her and then snapped off. She stepped over a fallen log and into Ga?tan’s arms.
“I missed you,” he said after a kiss, drawing back with a reluctance she could feel. They had not seen each other for more than eight months. Every time she heard of a train derailing or a German-occupied hotel being blown up or a skirmish with partisans, she worried.
He took her hand and led her through a forest so dark she couldn’t see the man beside her or the trail beneath their feet. Ga?tan never turned on his torchlight. He knew these woods intimately, having lived here for well over a year.
At the end of the woods, they came to a huge, grassy field where people stood in rows. They held torchlights, which they swept forward and back like beacons, illuminating the flat area between the trees.
She heard an aeroplane engine overhead, felt the whoosh of air on her cheeks, and smelled exhaust. It swooped in above them, flying low enough to make the trees shudder. She heard a loud mechanical scree and the banging of metal on metal and then a parachute appeared, falling, a huge box swinging beneath it.
“Weapons drop,” Ga?tan said. Tugging her hand, he led her into the trees again and up a hill, to the encampment deep in the forest. In its center, a bonfire glowed bright orange, its light hidden by the thick fringe of trees. Several men stood around the fire, smoking cigarettes and talking. Most had come here to avoid the STO—compulsory deportation to forced-labor camps in Germany. Once here, they had taken up arms and become partisans who fought a guerrilla war with Germany; in secret, under cover of night. The Maquis. They bombed trains and blew up munitions dumps and flooded canals and did whatever else they could to disrupt the flow of goods and men from France to Germany. They got their supplies—and their information—from the Allies. Their lives were always at risk; when found by the enemy, reprisals were swift and often brutal. Burning, cattle prods, blinding. Each Maquis fighter carried a cyanide pill in his pocket.
The men looked unwashed, starving, haggard. Most wore brown corduroy pants and black berets, all of which were frayed and patched and faded.
For all that Isabelle believed in their cause, she wouldn’t want to be alone up here.
“Come,” Ga?tan said. He led her past the bonfire to a small, dirty-looking tent with a canvas flap that was open to reveal a single sleeping bag and a pile of clothes and a pair of muddy boots. As usual, it smelled of dirty socks and sweat.
Isabelle ducked her head and crouched low as she made her way inside.
Ga?tan sat down beside her and closed the flap. He didn’t light a lamp (the men would see their silhouettes within and start catcalling). “Isabelle,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
She leaned forward, let herself be taken in his arms and kissed. When it ended—too soon—she took a deep breath. “I have a message for your group from London. Paul received it at five P.M. tonight. ‘Long sobs of autumn violins.’”
She heard him draw in a breath. Obviously the words, which they’d received over the radio from the BBC, were a code.
“Is it important?” she asked.
His hands moved to her face, held her gently, and drew her in for another kiss. This one was full of sadness. Another good-bye.
“Important enough that I have to leave right now.”
All she could do was nod. “There’s never any time,” she whispered. Every moment they’d ever had together had been stolen somehow, or wrested. They met, they ducked into shadowy corners or dirty tents or back rooms, and they made love in the dark, but they didn’t get to lie together afterward like lovers and talk. He was always leaving her, or she was leaving him. Each time he held her, she thought—this will be it, the last time I see him. And she waited for him to say he loved her.
She told herself that it was war. That he did love her, but he was afraid of that love, afraid he would lose her, and it would hurt more somehow if he’d declared himself. On good days, she even believed it.
“How dangerous is it, this thing you’re going off to do?”
Again, the silence.
“I’ll find you,” he said quietly. “Maybe I’ll come to Paris for a night and we’ll sneak into the cinema and boo at the newsreels and walk through the Rodin Gardens.”
“Like lovers,” she said, trying to smile. It was what they always said to each other, this dream shared of a life that seemed impossible to remember and unlikely to reoccur.
He touched her face with a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes. “Like lovers.”
*
In the past eighteen months, as the war had escalated and Nazi aggression mounted, Vianne had found and hidden thirteen children at the orphanage. At first she had canvassed the nearby countryside, following leads given to her by the OSE. In time, Mother had connected with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—an umbrella group for Jewish charities in the United States that funded the struggle to save Jewish children—and they had brought Vianne into contact with more children in need. Mothers sometimes showed up on her doorstep, crying, desperate, begging her for help. Vianne never turned anyone away, but she was always terrified.
Now, on a warm June day in 1944, a week after the Allies had landed more than one hundred and fifty thousand troops in Normandy, Vianne stood in her classroom at the orphanage, staring out at the children who sat slumped and tired at their desks. Of course they were tired.
In the past year, the bombing had rarely stopped. Air raids were so constant that Vianne no longer bothered to take her children into the cellar pantry when the alarm sounded at night. She just lay in bed with them, holding them tightly until either all clear sounded or the bombing stopped.
It never stopped for long.
Vianne clapped her hands together and called for attention. Perhaps a game would lift their spirits.
“Is it another air raid, Madame?” asked Emile. He was six years old now and never mentioned his maman anymore. When asked, he said that she “died because she got sick,” and that was all there was to it. He had no memory at all of being Jean Georges Ruelle.
Just as Daniel had no memory of who he used to be.
“No. No air raid,” she said. “Actually, I was thinking that it’s awfully hot in here.” She tugged at her loose collar.
“That’s because of the blackout windows, Madame,” said Claudine (formerly Bernadette). “Mother says she feels like a smoked ham in her woolen habit.”
The children laughed at that.