Foreign legionnaires carrying barrels of latrine refuse across the courtyard set them down for a minute to rest. “Ice cream! Get your ice cream!” one of them shouted. They alone laughed.
“One hundred thirty-two?” the guard called finally.
Edouard replied, “One hundred thirty-two.”
Back inside, Max Ernst smoothed his dirty white hair over his balding head, then ladled coffee from a bucket on which a thin layer of reddish dust had already settled. Edouard, holding his now-hot tin cup gingerly, dipped his bread and took a bite.
“The bread’s better today,” he said.
“That’s last night’s bean soup still in your cup you’re tasting.” Max lowered his voice to a whisper. “Tater will have his pork this morning, if you can get enough of your money from the rag-shop boss.”
“He feeds our own garbage to his pigs and returns it cooked, sliced, and wrapped in old newspaper,” Edouard said, not that he spent his own money on anything but postage for his letters to Luki. “The barber can get you today’s paper, you know, and a folding chair to sit in while you read it.”
“The news would only be worse, and I’d have to leave the chair behind when we go.”
“Ever the optimist.”
The man next in line grumbled that his cup wasn’t full.
Max, ignoring him, further lowered his voice. “Feuchtwanger is again appealing to the commandant to give us back our papers and allow us a chance to be somewhere else before the Germans arrive. A train to the Spanish border.”
He’d been talking about this scheme for days.
“I have to get Luki from Paris,” Edouard said. “I can’t leave France without her.”
He took his cup and bread back to his straw mat. Across the room, dust motes reflected in a narrow shaft of light from a window. Closer by, a brick fell and broke, kicking up more dust.
Thursday, June 6, 1940
AVENUE FOCH, PARIS
Nanée set a last jerry can of gas into a two-wheeled trailer piled with belongings and attached to the back of her little Citro?n, and she joined T, Peterkin, and Dagobert in the car. She adjusted the white scarf at her neck, threw the car into gear, and headed down avenue Foch, already crowded with fleeing Parisians, the Arc de Triomphe fading in the distance as they left. It was a long slog through heavy traffic to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, eighty miles to the south, where she dropped T to stay with friends of Danny’s family, accepted an offer of supper, then set off with Dagobert along a languid river, past meadows and orchards and vineyards to a rental in Le Mesnil. The cottage had a tiny bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, and bathroom, with something akin to a tub in the shape of a three-foot-wide circular vat to be filled with water heated on the stove. She unloaded her things from the car, leaning down last to retrieve from under the driver’s seat the pearl-handled Webley revolver her father had given her, with which she’d won that first target-shooting contest—eighteens and under, short-barreled revolvers. She’d been the youngest, just fourteen, and the only girl.
“Well, Daggs,” she said, “welcome to our new home.”
Just a week later, though, they were in the Citro?n again, picking up T and Peterkin and heading farther south. The Germans had marched into Paris, the city covered in soot and a choking fog of smoke from oil and gas tanks the French forces destroyed in their retreat.
“Good god, will this heat never break?” Nanée said.
And where the devil were they? They meant to cross the Loire at Sully to avoid a bottleneck at Orléans, then drive the two hundred miles south to La Bourboule, to stay the night with another friend of the Bénédite family before continuing on toward the Atlantic-coast ports and a ship to England. But the little dirt road ended in nothing but a muddy field and woods.
Perhaps that explained the lack of traffic.
She studied the map spread out over the steering wheel in the sweltering car, to the distant sounds of German airplanes and bombs. She backed up to turn around, succeeding only in wedging the trailer and car, the wheels digging more deeply into a rut. Even little Peterkin climbed out to try to unhook the cart, Dagobert sniffing and marking his territory lest any other dog claim it. They rummaged around in the trailer for a makeshift tool, then hammered and tugged, trying to unlatch a hitch that wouldn’t budge, still to the sounds of bombs and airplanes. Were they closer now?
“If we get this apart,” T said, “we might never get it back together again.”
“Our gas will take us farther without the trailer,” Nanée said.
“Our jerry cans are in the cart.”
“Pffft. We’ll put them in the trunk.” Thinking through whether there was anything she particularly cared about in the trailer. Her books, yes, but she couldn’t possibly get them all in the car. And beyond that? Even the single piece of art she’d brought was not the one she’d wanted—not the Edouard Moss push-up man she’d returned to the Galerie des Beaux-Arts to purchase that day after the Surrealist exposition, but a photograph by another artist she’d bought when that one wasn’t for sale, a woman’s face and naked breasts seeming to float in murky water. On Being an Angel, it was called. She’d never even hung it, and yet it was the only art she’d brought, as if it would bring bad luck not to leave the Paris apartment intact for her return at this insanity’s end.
They gave up on the hitch, finally, leaving in the absence of their banging an eerie silence. Had the German attack, wherever it was, ended?
Nanée hopped into the driver’s seat to try to turn the car again, Dagobert following lest he be left behind. She pulled the car forward a few inches, then backward and forward, backward and forward, cranking the steering wheel with each reversal. Again and again and again, an inch or two gained each time, until finally she moved forward, completing the turn even with the trailer still hitched.
T cheered, and Peterkin cheered with her, his bunny still held by its ear, as Nanée climbed out to bask with them in this small victory. Dagobert put his paws to the window and barked.
A terrific roar sounded overhead, the inverted gull wings of a German Stuka flying low. As they stood watching, it fired.
Surely it wouldn’t shoot at them? Surely it wouldn’t shoot a child? Disbelief flooded Nanée even as she saw that Peterkin was straight in its path.
She ran for him.
T ran too.
Nanée reached him first.
Scooped him up.
Ran for the tree line.
The roar of the planes—several now—was deafening, the rat-a-tat-tat of their guns pure hell.
One of the planes followed them, shooting as if in a carnival game. But not at all like that. Not pretend. Not a nightmare. Real screams filled Nanée’s ears, real wails. T screaming, “Peterkin!” and Peterkin crying in Nanée’s arms. Was he hurt? Was T?
Nanée, still running, glanced back to confirm that T was just behind her.
She dove for the tree line, the sturdy trunks and cover of leaves.
She would not cry. She would not cry.