How Huge the Night

chapter 3





Foreigner





“Julien, this is Benjamin Keller. Benjamin, Julien Losier.”

Julien stuck out his hand to shake. Then he stuck it so close to Benjamin’s stomach that the guy couldn’t miss it even if he was looking straight at his highly polished shoes. After a moment, Benjamin gave him limp fingers. He shook them.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Julien heard his mother saying behind him. Then Madame Keller, a little breathy, said: “I know you’ll take such good care of Benjamin. I can see it in your face.” She had a slight German accent. Julien clenched his teeth a little tighter.

“Would anyone like some coffee?” asked his father.

Benjamin stood there, skinny, looking about twelve. All you could see of his face was his nose and the tops of his glasses. A book dangled from his left hand, wrapped around one finger. Julien pictured himself walking through the school gate with him.

“Cream? Sugar?”

I am going to die.

They poured Julien verveine tea because, for some reason, fifteen still wasn’t old enough for coffee. Benjamin opened his book under the table and began to read. They talked about the new school, and they talked about the history of Tanieux, and they talked about how Monsieur Bernard, the stationmaster, didn’t think the pastor should be opening an international school in wartime and how wrong he was. Benjamin’s father sipped coffee and said he had heard wonderful things about Tanieux, and the pastor and his wife—a man with piercing blue eyes and a tall, rawboned woman—sat across the table from him and beamed. That pastor. This was all his fault.

Julien knew three things about the pastor: Papa was crazy about him, he was a pacifist, and his real name was César Alexandre. Rumor had it his middle name was Napoleon. Poor guy. That might explain the pacifist thing.

Papa called him Pastor Alex. His new best friend.

“Certainly there is some anti-Jewish sentiment,” Monsieur Keller was saying. He had an accent too. “It might not be something a non-Jew would notice, but we feel it is on the rise. And ironically enough, we have started to feel the effects of anti-German sentiment as well.”

Anti-German sentiment! In Paris? Really?

“I have hopes that Benjamin will find much less prejudice here,” said the pastor.

Julien slumped in his chair. We are both going to die.





They walked the Kellers to the early train. The station was full of people waiting, jostling, talking; farmers in their cloth caps standing by their stacks of crates, live chickens clucking from some of them; kids poking their fingers in and running away, screaming with laughter. And the summer people, the estivants. Women in white silk dresses with wide, immaculate straw hats; men in suits, hanging back from the dusty farmers and the grubby kids; their own children scrubbed and ready to go home to Lyon or Dijon or Paris. Where they belonged.

Where he belonged.

A high, far-off whistle, and the children began to yell: “She’s coming! La Galoche! She’s coming!” Madame Keller was shaking Mama’s hand again and again; Julien saw with horror that she was beginning to cry. He looked away and saw something he’d never seen before: Benjamin’s face. Benjamin, standing straight like a real person, looking at his father, his eyes big and brown and dark. And then the train was steaming round the bend, and some kid was jumping and waving at it, and the stationmaster in his dark blue cap with cold fury on his face was shouting, “Get behind the line, brat!” The kid flinched and fell back, and then the train was steaming into the station, and there was chaos and noise and luggage and boarding, and the Kellers looking through the window at them, their faces up against the glass, and Benjamin looking back at them, and the wheels starting to churn, and the train pulling out with a high, eerie whistle onto its long track between the hills.

And Benjamin, standing by Julien, staring at his feet.





A thick, smothering silence seeped out from Benjamin’s room and filled the house. He sat at every meal, looking at the food he was pushing around on his plate, dampening every attempt at conversation. Breakfast would end, and Papa would tell the top of Benjamin’s head that they were going out to the farm. Did he want to come? A tiny shake of his head.

Thank you, God.

Out at the farm, there was work to be done: there was harvesting and wood to be split and freedom to be drunk to the last drop. Julien could feel his swing growing truer, his muscles harder, his lungs deeper in the open air. A pleasant ache now ran through his limbs at night, instead of burning.

At home they had the radio, but no news. The boches—the Germans—were busy tearing up Poland. In France, nothing moved except reinforcements to the Maginot Line, the massive line of fortifications that would keep the Germans out of France. “C’est une drôle de guerre,” the announcer said. Funny kind of war. Julien kicked his ball around the little walled backyard in the evening, alone, thinking of Vincent. He’d asked Benjamin if he could teach him a little about soccer. Benjamin had said it wasn’t his life’s ambition to kick a ball.

Julien kicked his ball, and the wall sent it back to him perfectly, without fail. You couldn’t score against a wall. You couldn’t tell a wall about how Verdun wasn’t just a red splash on a map, or the broken glass in the sink, or how bad you wanted to drive a tank. To do something.

Papa got out the big family Bible for Friday night devotions, and Benjamin said his second full sentence. He said, “So this is one of the things I have to do to live here?”

Papa stared at him. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “No. You don’t”—Benjamin’s chair scraped on the floor—“but you will stay seated until I have finished speaking, young man.”

Benjamin sat motionless, his chair facing half away from the table.

“We are starting a new book of the Bible today,” said Papa. “Genesis.”

Benjamin did not move.

Papa outdid himself. He had Julien flip the lights off as he talked about the darkness before the dawn of creation. He talked about the word, and the act, and how the authors of the Bible knew that descriptions of God were nothing compared to showing what he did. In the dark, Julien heard the scrape of a chair on the floor. God’s first act, said Papa—the giving of light. And he switched the light back on, and Julien blinked in the sudden blaze. Benjamin was back at the table, looking at Papa with his wide brown eyes.





Monday was Julien’s last day on the farm. School started tomorrow. Tomorrow he would try his chances with Benjamin and those guys who’d stared at them in the street. He’d find out where there was some soccer going on. Then they’d see what Julien Losier was made of.

He and Grandpa were digging the last fall potatoes, Grandpa putting a digging fork in the ground and turning up a handful of them all golden for Julien to gather. He’d thought this was a weed patch till Grandpa had showed him the thin, withered stalks in a neat line where the potatoes hid. They worked in silence together, keeping up the rhythm, the only sound the small nourishing thunk of potato on potato in the basket.

When the silence had deepened and lengthened between them, Grandpa opened his mouth.

“How’s life with Benjamin?”

“Oh,” Julien said, and exhaled slowly, his fingers digging into the dirt. His mind was suddenly blank. “It’s … it’s not …”

Grandpa turned up another clutch of potatoes, and Julien gathered them with quick fingers. Grandpa planted his fork, put his foot on it, and paused.

“Not so good,” said Julien finally.

Grandpa nodded without surprise, and Julien felt the ache in his chest give way a little.

“I don’t know, Grandpa, it’s just …” Horrible. He makes everything weird, and wrong, and he’s German, and I think he hates me. “I wish …”

“What do you wish, Julien?”

“I wish one single thing was the way it used to be.”

Grandpa nodded. “You’ve lost a lot this summer,” he said.

A rush of tears filled Julien’s eyes, and he blinked fast. He bent down to gather a stray potato.

Grandpa was quiet for a moment, leaning on his fork. Julien looked up and followed his gaze past Tanieux’s hill and the farther wooded ridge, on toward low green mountains in the west, with the sun above them.

“The two-headed mountain. See it?” Grandpa pointed with his chin. One of the green peaks was split in two, one part taller than the other. “Her name’s Lizieux.”

Julien nodded.

“I like to think she’s the first thing our ancestors saw of this place on their journey north.” He looked at Julien. “Never let them tell you you’re not from Tanieux, Julien. You’re part of the story Tanieux is most proud of.”

“What?”

“You weren’t listening when your father and the pastor were talking to the Kellers. You were thinking, ‘That’s just history.’ Julien, history is where we come from.” His grandfather’s warm eyes were webbed with a thousand smile wrinkles. “Listen now. Our people came up from the south. They came in fear. Because they were Huguenots, and religious freedom had been revoked in France, and the king’s soldiers were arresting and torturing any Protestant they could find. They came looking for shelter. Refuge.” He looked at the far green mountains. “They came up the Régordane road, the old road beyond those mountains, and I like to think they looked east one morning and saw Lizieux holding up her wounded head and thought, ‘Maybe there. Maybe there is a place for us.’”

Grandpa turned to Julien. “They came here. And they were taken in.”

Julien looked at the mountains from where he knelt, his hands in the dirt. “I see,” he said.

“Oh, Julien, I want to tell you so many stories, if you’ll hear them. I want to tell you the stories of Tanieux. The story of how it started. Of Manu and how he built the chapel by the stream—have you seen it? Four hundred years old, that chapel is. Listen. Winter’s coming. That’s when we tell each other stories here. By the fire, when the burle is blowing outside. Come winter, I’ll tell you the stories of Tanieux. If you’re willing.”

“Yeah,” said Julien slowly. “That sounds good.”





Julien walked home slowly, watching the sun sink over Lizieux behind long bars of white and gold. Thinking of how Grandpa had called the mountain she. Of his people, whoever they were, fleeing north on the old road past the mountains.

Julien had fallen behind the others as he climbed the hill; halfway up, he passed a farmhouse, old stone with a slate roof and a broad orchard in back. A wall around the farmyard. And, leaning on the wrought iron gate, one of the guys who had stared at him in town.

Julien gave him a nod; the ice blue eyes looked right through him as if he wasn’t there. It didn’t matter whose people had come up the Régordane road; this road, on this hill, was someone else’s ground. That guy’s ground.

Julien gave the cold look back and walked on past with his head high. He’d see him at school tomorrow.

And he would show him.