It wasn’t. It wasn’t her mother’s tomb, but Luki didn’t say that. She wished Pemmy were here to help her be brave.
He approached them. Tante Nanée tried to keep between Luki and him, but he knelt down to her level. He looked right at her.
“Ich habe eine Tochter in deinem Alter.” He had a daughter who was her age.
He put his gun away. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a hard candy. It smelled of lemons, even over the forest and mossy tomb smells.
Luki looked up at Tante Nanée, who nodded.
The man unwrapped the candy, and Luki took it and set it on her tongue.
Danke, she thought, but she said, “Thank you.”
“Danke?” the soldier asked, and he nodded as if he knew he was right.
Tante Nanée’s hand tightened over hers again.
Luki nodded too, but she didn’t say another word.
Friday, November 29, 1940
VICHY
Nanée and Luki were well settled in a first-class sleeper compartment with a private bath, just a wealthy American and her niece who was raised in France by her mother, now deceased. The full bed was already made, and Nanée had declined turn-down service. The sitting room had a sofa, a chair, and a table at which they could take meals so they wouldn’t be seen in the dining car. It was late, somehow still the same day that Luki, with the German’s lemon candy in her mouth at that tomb, had taken Nanée’s hand and waved goodbye to the soldiers. It hadn’t been a long walk, nor was the man repairing equipment at the farm to which Simone Menier sent them surprised to see them. He drove them to a town several miles away, each inch from the demarcation line distance well gained. There they caught a local train to Vichy, where they transferred to this night train to Marseille.
“Pemmy would like this,” Luki said. “A princess train.”
Outside the train widow: the Vichy station. It was past time to leave. Still the train didn’t move.
Nanée tried not to worry. They’d cleared their documents before they boarded, simply handing the two American passports over with the single transit pass as if of course the child didn’t need her own. She hadn’t been questioned.
She opened the book Simone Menier had given Luki, and pulled the girl closer. They admired the perfectly detailed illustration facing the title page, young Thérèse and her mother in rich fabrics and gorgeous hats walking together along a harbor. “‘It was 1789,’” she read. “‘A cold autumn rain darkened the city of Le Havre. And yet a great stir reigned on the quays because one of the vessels which made the crossing to America was preparing to set sail.’” Thérèse à Sainte-Domingue—Nanée had read this a hundred times. A French girl with her family in Haiti was terrified by the dark-skinned slaves. She almost dared not touch the black hands reaching out to her. By the final page, though, Thérèse would be helping her mother end slavery on the island, which had always left Nanée longing to do something more important than reading books in a dull house in a dull town where she was to master nothing beyond the foxtrot and needlepoint.
A knock at the door startled them. “We have need of checking your papers before the train can depart,” a Frenchman called out.
Their papers specifically, or were they double-checking everyone? Nanée squeezed Luki’s hand, then opened the door slightly and said they’d cleared documents before they boarded.
“It is an extra precaution due to Maréchal Petain’s visit,” the attendant apologized.
She handed him her passport and the French transit visa that allowed her to move about the free zone.
“And the child’s papers?”
“Pétain isn’t to visit Marseille until Tuesday,” Nanée said. “It’s only Friday.”
“It will be Saturday when the train arrives,” the man said. “We must take precautions. I’m sure you will understand. The lengths these troublemakers go to. An anarchist put a bomb in an underpass near la Pomme in hopes of killing the Prince of Wales.”
Nanée tried to hide her alarm: La Pomme was where Villa Air-Bel was. “Was nobody hurt?”
The man smiled indulgently. “I’m afraid the Prince of Wales has not visited France lately. This was perhaps eight years ago.”
“I see.” She laughed more easily than she felt, wondering what an attempted bombing nearly a decade ago could have to do with anything. “Well, you don’t imagine a five-year-old girl will blow up a bridge, I hope!”
“Truly, we must check everyone,” he apologized.
She fetched Luki’s passport, tamping back the temptation to ask how an anarchist attack years ago could possibly cause him to now need to confirm a child’s passport, far too aware that Luki had no French transit visa.
He gave the passport a cursory glance and handed it back. “I apologize that you may be bothered once or twice again on the journey.”
Nanée wondered how many stops there would be along the way, how many document checks, really. She would have to order coffee to keep herself awake. She couldn’t afford to be caught off guard along the way. But at least they were out of occupied France, with only Frenchmen now to be fooled or bribed.
“How long we will be delayed?” she asked.
The man shrugged. “You will arrive when you arrive, and not a moment earlier.”
Nanée snuggled again with Luki, who’d turned the book’s pages to an illustration of two jaguars. In the background, a dark-skinned boy held a baby jaguar by the back of its neck as a white man pointed a rifle at the poor thing.
“What are they doing to the baby?” Luki asked.
Nanée flipped pages, looking for a gentler illustration, only to come upon a jaguar on his back. Was he dead?
“That man is a bad man,” Luki said.
On the facing page, a man stripped to the waist and tied to a tree was being caned.
Nanée flipped pages more quickly, saying, “Now where did we leave off?” Perhaps the illustrations made sense in the context of the story, or perhaps she could finish the page and close the book.
Luki stopped her at a drawing of a man with arms tied behind a tree trunk as another man aimed a cat-o’-nine-tails at his bare chest.
“He’s a bad man, so he has to be punished,” Luki said, meaning the man being beaten.
How did you explain to a child that some people were unforgivably cruel? She remembered another illustration in another Pink Library volume, of a woman flogging a child. How terribly proper and yet brutal these books were, all manners and morals, with virtue always triumphant while bad children got the switch. What a beast she must have been as a child, to love them.
“The Germans are bad men,” Luki said. “I’m a German. That’s why I know the words the bad men say. But I’m a girl.”
Nanée nodded, trying to see where her mind was headed.
“Papa is a German.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Nanée hugged Luki close and kissed the top of her head. “Your papa isn’t a German like that. Your papa is a very good man. He’d never hurt anyone.”
“Even if they were bad men, like in the picture?”