But how would Papa find her if she wasn’t with Tante Berthe?
Luki very quietly climbed from under the covers with Pemmy and Flat Joey. She opened the trunk at the end of the bed, climbed in, closed the lid, and pulled the sheets and blankets inside over her. She lay there in the muffled quiet, hugging Pemmy. She heard Tante Berthe calling for her, but she stayed completely silent, and Pemmy did too. She missed Papa. She thought maybe he had gone to be with Mutti. Tante Berthe used to remind her that Papa sent letters every week. “People in heaven can’t write letters,” Tante Berthe said. Luki didn’t know why they couldn’t, but it must be true, because Mutti never did write letters to her. But now Papa didn’t write letters either.
“Brigitte, where did Luki go?” Tante Berthe demanded.
Brigitte didn’t know.
Tante Berthe was frantic now, saying they had to find Luki. And still Luki lay silently in the trunk. Pemmy was scared, but not as scared as going on a boat with the Kleins to a place where Papa couldn’t bring real Joey to her.
WHILE TANTE BERTHE watched out the window, Luki and Brigitte sat facing each other in the trunk, looping strings with their fingers to make cat’s cradles and Eiffel Towers; Pemmy didn’t have any fingers, so she couldn’t play with string. Some men would be coming, Tante Berthe had said. They weren’t nice men. When they came, Luki was to play the hiding game again.
“All right, girls,” Tante Berthe said. “Now.”
Brigitte climbed out of the trunk to go downstairs and wait until the men came to the door. Then she was to come get Tante Berthe.
“Remember,” Tante Berthe said to Luki, “these men might be mean to me and maybe even to Brigitte, but don’t you worry, you just lie quietly in the trunk, playing the hiding game. You mustn’t cry or anything. If these men find you, they will take you away.”
Luki lay back on the blankets inside. “Would they take me to the angels, to be with Mutti?” she asked.
Tante Berthe scooped her up out of the trunk then, and hugged her so hard it pressed Pemmy into her bones. “No, Luki, you mustn’t think that,” Tante Berthe whispered, kissing her head again and again. “You mustn’t think that.”
She lay Luki back into the trunk then, gently, like Papa used to. “You just lie here and think about nice things,” she said.
“Like Papa singing to me?”
“Yes, exactly. Lie quietly and imagine your papa singing to you until I come back. But just your papa gets to sing. Don’t sing with him.”
“Pemmy won’t sing either,” Luki whispered.
“You are such a good, good girl,” Tante Berthe said. “All right. No matter what you hear, you stay in the trunk until I open it.”
Tante Berthe set sheets and blankets over her.
Luki held Pemmy tightly, and she touched one of the little flowers on the sheet as it settled onto her face. It was pretty fabric. It was soft. It smelled like Tante Berthe’s laundry soap and also the salty air outside, where Tante Berthe hung the laundry to dry, and it smelled a little of the rocks along the shore here, where the sea sometimes splashed up in great spray clouds even bigger than the ones at the dreaming log.
“Don’t be afraid, Pemmy,” she whispered as the lid of the trunk closed them into darkness. “You’re really fast, like all kangaroos. You could run away from anyone.” Pemmy didn’t like this hiding game, which wasn’t really a game now.
She heard Brigitte’s voice say, “They’re at the door, Maman,” along with some metal clicking just outside the trunk, above her ear. Then footsteps, Tante Berthe and Brigitte leaving.
The sound of the sea outside the window was wilder here than it had been with Papa at the cottage, but still Luki listened to it, like she used to listen in bed at night. She listened inside her head too, to Papa singing like he did at the dreaming log, Wie ist die Welt so stille.
Tante Berthe was speaking with some men. The men weren’t quiet like she and Pemmy were. Their voices were loud and raspy. They didn’t sound nice. Luki lay with her hand on Pemmy, trying to keep Papa’s voice singing in her head.
Pemmy was very hot and very scared and wanting to know, silently, how long the song would continue, when the not-nice voices came close. Tante Berthe kept saying to the men that she would do whatever they wanted, but she was sorry, she didn’t understand what they were asking. The words the men were using were some of the words of the song, Papa’s words. Would these men know where Papa was? She wanted to ask them, but she’d promised Tante Berthe she wouldn’t make a sound.
The men were asking about the trunk now, about the lock.
Luki felt a rush of fear. Was she locked inside? Didn’t Tante Berthe know she would be good? She was a good girl and Pemmy was a good kangaroo and even Flat Joey was very well behaved.
“I don’t understand, I’m sorry.” Tante Berthe’s voice was all wrong. Too high. She sounded like Pemmy when Pemmy was scared.
“Diese franz?sischen Idioten,” the man said.
A loud rattle sounded right near Luki’s ear—an angry rattle and a man’s voice demanding Tante Berthe unlock the trunk.
Luki wet herself. She didn’t even know she had done it until it was done. She couldn’t stop herself. But going tinkle didn’t make noise.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Tante Berthe kept saying.
“Der Schlüssel!” the man insisted.
Luki understood. He wanted the key. Should she tell Tante Berthe that? The man sounded so angry, like he was about to hit someone.
Monday, June 17, 1940
LA BOURBOULE
You can get out, Nanée,” T said. “You can go to America. You could take Peterkin with you. You could claim he’s yours.”
They were in La Bourboule, up in the salt peaks of Auvergne where the Angladas, husband and wife doctors and friends of Danny’s family, ran a spa for children with respiratory diseases. The trees here were full of birds calling to the morning sunrise, and Dagobert could not be more loved by the children already, and there were no signs of war—although whether that was because France had asked for peace or because they were too far away, Nanée wasn’t sure. As they prepared to go on, unhitching the trailer to save gas now that they had help, she tried to imagine what it might be like if they stayed. But there were still ships sailing from Bordeaux to England, or that was the rumor, and in just days, after the armistice was signed, a berth on a ship to an enemy country might be impossible to get.
“From Bordeaux, we’ll get a ship to England, T,” she said. “All four of us. You, me, Peterkin, and Dagobert.”