“Oh! I almost forgot,” the angel said, and she reached into her pocket and there he was: Joey, sitting on her hand.
“Pemmy, look!” Luki said. Then to the angel, “He isn’t an angel either?”
“The baby kangaroo?”
“Not a baby, a joey,” Luki said. “If I touch him, he won’t disappear?”
“Heavens, no!”
Luki took Joey and turned his key so he sang. She opened Pemmy’s pouch and set him inside it, next to Flat Joey Letters and the photograph and the dreaming-log drawing.
The angel offered her hand.
Luki said, “If you disappear, can you still take me to Papa?”
The angel smiled. She had a pretty smile, but different from Mutti’s smile in the picture. “Wouldn’t that be terrific, if we could disappear? That would make it easier for us to get you to your papa. Now, why don’t you call me ‘Tante Nanée’?”
Thursday, November 28, 1940
AMBOISE
Nanée climbed from the cart and brushed the hay from her borrowed peasant clothes. It was a chilly morning, the temperate weather giving way to a threatening storm more appropriate to what, back home, was Thanksgiving Day—at least for those who, like the gang at Villa Air-Bel, her family back in the US, and a third of the forty-eight states, ignored Roosevelt’s decree setting it a week early this year just to extend holiday shopping, for goodness’ sakes. She understood what she had to do now, and the storm might work to their benefit. The driver would take them to a chateau that bridged the river forming the demarcation line here, with its front door in the occupied zone but the south door from its gallery, which spanned the river, opening onto the far bank, in the free zone. The Reverend Mother’s message, sent by Sister Amélie, had been code that meant the convent was sending two people who needed to escape.
Nanée reentered the convent through the service door to find Luki in Sister Therese’s lap, holding her kangaroo and looking as earnest as when they’d found her kneeling in that pew in the transept, her kangaroo’s hands held together with hers in prayer. She was so small, Edouard’s daughter. So young. So very earnest. Had Nanée ever been that earnest? “This one spends an inordinate amount of time praying to the Virgin Mary,” the Reverend Mother had told Nanée. “I would dissuade her, but it brings her such comfort, so I settled on allowing her to borrow our Mary for as long as she stayed with us.” Leaving Nanée herself longing to be someone who could be comforted by prayer. “I would have told her she would return of course to being a Jewish girl when she rejoined her papa,” the Reverend Mother had said, “but I’m not sure she understands that she is Jewish, and in this time it’s safer for her not to.”
Luki had been brought to her by the Reverend Mother’s sister, Berthe, when Berthe could no longer keep Luki safe. The Reverend Mother had been afraid to hold out much hope to Luki, with her father in a camp.
“You are a good person, Reverend Mother,” Nanée said to her now.
“It is the way of Amboise,” the nun responded. “Even fallen to the Germans, we continue to fight.” She turned to Luki. “Remember, child, you must be absolutely silent from the moment you get into the cart until Tante Nanée invites you to speak. Not a whisper. But you can say anything to me now. Do you want to say anything?”
“I don’t want to be locked in,” the girl said.
Nanée, wondering what hell had provoked that comment and the sudden fear in the girl’s sea-bottom eyes, assured her, “The driver has a secret hiding place hollowed out in the hay for us.”
But people betrayed others in this new world for the smallest personal gain, and what did she know of this driver?
Luki said to Sister Therese, “Pemmy forgot to thank the Lady Mary, but I told her it was okay because the Lady Mary is God’s maman, and she knows everything.”
“Yes, that’s what we believe in our religion,” the Reverend Mother said. “But our Mother Mary is so happy now that you are going to your papa, who will take care of you and teach you from now on.”
“I’m not scared, but Pemmy is.”
“I’ve always said Pemmy is one very wise kangaroo. I suppose that’s why she gets to be a professor. Now, we must get you on your way. Your papa will be impatient to have you back with him.”
“We’re not going to fly?” Luki said to Nanée. “We’re going to ride on the cart, under the hay?”
“Indeed, yes,” Nanée said, wondering how the child knew she flew.
“And later we’ll fly?”
“Not fly, no. We’ll take a train.”
“Because you don’t have your wings.”
“No, not anymore.”
Sister Therese stooped to Luki’s level and took her hands and, with them, the kangaroo’s. “It has been one of the great pleasures of my life to have spent this time with you, Luki. Now Tante Nanée will take great care of you until you get to your papa. And he’ll be the happiest papa in the world, to see you again.”
The child turned her big, dark eyes to Nanée. “Will you hold Pemmy’s hand all the way?”
Nanée hesitated. She felt so inadequate to step into the shoes of the Virgin Mary and the Reverend Mother and this lovely young Sister Therese, and unsure whether to admit to Luki that she was scared too, or if knowing a grown-up was scared would make Luki more so.
She said finally, “I’ll hold Pemmy’s hand all the way, but will you hold mine?”
NANéE FELT ODDLY comforted by the slightly scratchy mohair kangaroo hand and the child’s warm fingers in hers under the scratchy hay. The jostle of the wagon was uncomfortable, the borrowed peasant garb uncomfortable too. But she’d become so used to discomfort that she was more comfortable being uncomfortable than not. She only wished she could do more to comfort the girl.
It seemed to take forever to cover the eight miles from Amboise to Chateau de Chenonceau, their heads together on Nanée’s overnight case, which was awkward to have on this part of the journey but would help them avoid suspicion as they traveled in the free zone. (Who trained across half of France without luggage?) The cart would turn, and slow, and even stop, and Nanée would hope finally that they were there. But it would be only an intersection or another cart or a dog in the road.
Again, they stopped. She listened. They were at the chateau’s gatehouse, finally. But even at the chateau only a very few knew of Madame’s efforts to help people escape occupied France: the foreman of the chateau’s farm operation, his wife and grown daughters, who worked in the kitchens, and his son who served as Madame’s chauffeur. One couldn’t know who might keep a secret and who might use it to better his own place.
The gate tender circled the cart, then said to the driver, “I’ll need to examine the hay.”