How Huge the Night

chapter 36





Terms of Surrender





Oh God, please forgive us. Me and Henri. Undo what we have done.

He could feel it now. It was so strange, after all this time, not to feel like he was sending a telegram at all, but more like—like holding hands under a table might feel, or the touch of sunlight on your face when your eyes were closed. Something you were totally aware of but couldn’t see.

God, will you show me what’s good in Henri?

Still no answer came. He would have to look, he supposed. This was show, not tell.

But today, okay, God? Please?

Today was the day.





“So their father thought it was so dangerous to be Jews that they should leave the country with no adults, no papers, and apparently no money. And you believe that?”

“Yes,” said Julien.

“It’s insane. No father is that stupid.”

Julien sat in the Bernards’ kitchen, facing Henri across a pine table. Pale light came through the window; the house was empty except for them, dim and quiet. He lifted his cup of fake coffee to his lips to hide the fact that he had nothing to say. That he had come to talk terms of surrender. That he was scared.

“So they told your mother this ridiculous story, and she believed them, and then they told her the girl is sick?”

Julien put down the coffee and leaned forward. “They didn’t ‘tell’ us the girl was sick. She couldn’t stand up. I had to bring her up the street in a wheelbarrow, she was burning up with fever, any fool could have seen she was sick.” He tried to stop. “Except, apparently, your father.”

Henri’s eyes went very cold. “If you and your parents and that sanctimonious pastor want to get taken in by every pickpocket and street performer that comes along, that is no concern of my father’s,” he said. “When my father saw that girl, she was dressed as a boy and standing on her own two feet.”

“You mean on her crutches.” Julien closed his eyes for a moment. Then said in a quieter voice, “Your father probably mentioned that.”

“No,” said Henri. “He didn’t.”

Julien looked into his eyes; they looked back, pale and unreadable. “Her leg is twisted. My mother examined her and bathed her. I think it would be hard to fake that.”

“Hm.”

“Ma—someone’s taking care of her round the clock. I visited her the other week—she looked awful. Her arms are this big around. She looked like she was dying.”

Henri was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Are they at your house?”

Julien’s head jerked up. “No.” His eyes burned. He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. “You can come to my house and search it,” he said bitterly.

Henri shook his head quickly. “No. I believe you.” He took a sip of coffee. “But listen, Julien, if she’s really that sick, I don’t see what you’re so worried about. We’re only talking about informing the authorities so that this can be dealt with in the proper way. Whatever they decide is most appropriate. If they decide to send them to a refugee camp, they won’t make the girl travel while she’s dangerously ill. They’ll wait till she’s recovered.”

Julien stared. He trusted them. If you were in Paris, would you give them to the Nazis? If you were in … in the désert … would you just hand over the Protestants to the king?

“Henri, where did your family come from?”

Henri blinked. “From the Rhône Valley, right near Vienne. Village called Saint-Rémy. During the persecution under Louis the Fourteenth.”

“Le désert?”

“How d’you know what it’s called?”

“I’m from here, Henri. My father grew up here, he moved to Paris, he moved back. My grandfather’s told me the stories.”

Henri looked at him.

“Henri, this is what I wanted to tell you. Persecution is persecution. It was Protestants then, and now it’s gonna be Jews. I see it coming. I know government jobs aren’t that big a deal, but that’s how it starts. Isn’t it? In Paris, they’ve started breaking the windows of Jewish shops. Not boches—French people. And then the Marchandeau Law—the papers were already blaming the defeat on Jews before that. Didn’t they say stuff like that about Protestants too? That they weakened the nation by being different?” Henri was looking away. “Now that—”

“You can’t,” Henri interrupted in a low voice, “make a comparison between Marshal Pétain and Louis the Fourteenth.”

“I guess I wouldn’t compare him to the marshal. I’d compare him to Hitler.”

“What’s Hitler got to do with it?”

“Well—” Can’t you see? “We were defeated. I mean, they let us set up the Vichy government. The marshal has to give them what they want, because what’s to stop them taking the rest of the country?”

Henri’s eyes were hard. “You can harp on ‘Marshal Pétain is a Nazi puppet’ till kingdom come, Julien Losier, if that amuses you. I’m not going to listen.”

The doorknob rattled. Julien’s heart leapt to his throat, and he half turned, scraping his chair loudly on the floor. Henri lifted his lip.

The door opened. Victor Bernard had come home.

“Hello, boys. Talking politics? Well,” said Monsieur Bernard, “I’m sure he hasn’t got you promising to stop saluting our flag.” And he beamed at his son. Henri gave him a look Julien had never seen in his eyes before; the melting of the ice at last, the clear dance of water in the sun. So that’s what he looks like when he smiles.

“Um,” said Julien. “So. I should probably go.”

“Here. Take this to your parents from us.” Henri’s father pulled a bottle of cider out of the cupboard, smiling, and put it into Julien’s hand. Julien had to look at him then, meet the eyes of Victor Bernard, whom God loved, who had tried to send Gustav and Nina away. He took the bottle.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice odd in his clogged throat, and he shook Monsieur Bernard’s hand. Then Henri’s. Then he walked out the door into the dark day.





It had happened all wrong. When his mother asked, he growled, “At least we got a bottle of cider out of it.” The falling of her face hurt him so badly he turned away without a word, went to his room, and slammed the door.

On Monday morning, Henri Quatre was in his place, saluting the flag.





Nina slept, and woke, and slept again. Dark figures moved through her dreams. Fräulein Pinatel sat her up in bed and fed her soup, fed her milk, fed her spoonfuls of fishy oil; she lay down and slept again. In the morning, when the sun came in her window, Marita was there, rubbing her back and singing softly in Italian. She spoke to her sometimes. She said her name was Maria not Marita. She said it would be all right, she was safe now, God loved her.

Gustav was here now. She’d woken so many times, and he’d been gone. They’d said he was away working or that he’d be here soon. And he had come and gone again. But now he was here whenever she called for him. He sat by her bed and fed her soup and said she would be all right. He didn’t say anything about God. He talked about Father, and the good times, the way he used to swing them round and round in the living room when they were little, and the little white cat he’d brought home one day that he’d found in the rain. And the songs he used to sing while he was working. Gustav sang them to her: “I Had a Little Overcoat” and “Tum Balalaika” or “My Resting Place” if she was sad. But mostly she wasn’t. She woke more often now. There seemed to be more light.

“How long have I been sick, Gustav?”

“I don’t know, Nina. But I know how long you’ll be better.”

“How long?”

“A long, long time. All your life!”

She smiled weakly. She remembered lying on her quilt in the Lyon train station, letting herself go, the peace of it. And that peach, like the taste of sunlight. “Will I be happy?” she murmured.

“Yes, Nina. You’ll be happy as … happy as …” He grinned his old Gustav grin. “As a hog in slop!”

“A hog, Gustav?” She laughed out loud. It felt good.

And she lay, and felt deep inside herself, and found that maybe she could do it. If it was true, if she could trust them, if the nightmare was ending finally. For Gustav, for herself, for a chance again at the sweetness of life. For the taste of sunlight, on a morning without fear.

She could live.





On Friday, there was another headline, a black banner of shame across the top of the paper. Julien’s heart leapt at the sight. “Collaboration!” it read. Above a photo of Hitler and Pétain shaking hands.

Oh Lord, he thought. You’ve had mercy.

They’d had a meeting—Hitler and Pétain—at a place called Montoire, in a train car, and it was official. Collaboration. It was nothing new, nothing he hadn’t known already. Yes, it was awful, yes it made him angry, but there it was in black and white, a picture of two men shaking hands, it could never be erased. Henri would have to see it now.

Henri hadn’t told his father yet. Mama’d heard nothing. He had come to school all week, saluted the flag, looked past Julien—and said nothing to his father …

Julien walked down to school beside Benjamin, hope beating in his heart.

Henri wasn’t there. Julien stood by the wall with his friends, who were buzzing about the news, and he watched the flag circle gather and the flag rise, and Henri was not there. Maybe he was sick. Or maybe … oh Lord, tell me it’s true. Henri slipped in through the gate just before the bell. Julien looked at him, wild with hope.

Henri looked back with hatred in his eyes.

Julien drew back, and went into class and copied the Pythagorean triples from the board. All that day, whenever Julien looked at him, Henri turned his face away.





He prayed that night, and he prayed the next morning. He prayed for Nina and Benjamin and Gustav, and Vincent and his family, and Pierre. And for Henri.

He could still feel it. The sunlight on his face, though the sky was drowned in cloud.

On Monday, the schoolyard was in absolute chaos. By the flagpole, Monsieur Ricot called shrilly, but no one listened. No one but Gaston and Lucien. The rest of the school was gathered by the wall around a stocky figure with a loud, familiar laugh.

Pierre.

Pierre, even bigger than before, and deeply tanned; Pierre, grinning at the petits sixièmes’ wide-eyed admiration, eating it up. Pierre spotted him. “Hey, Julien, long time!”

“No kidding!” When they reached each other and shook hands, Pierre grinned and added under his breath, “I met your friend. He’s pretty cool.”

There was so much to hear, so much to tell. So much that was going to have to be told in private … the bell rang before they were halfway started, and Pierre went on talking as they filed into class. “So what’s with that flag thing? What was Ricot hollering about?”

Lucien answered. “It’s this new thing Marshal Pétain instituted—we’re renewing a spirit of patriotism in France. You want to join us tomorrow?”

“Wait. Who’s this marshal guy?”

Wow. He had been gone a long time.

“You know. He won the Battle of Verdun. He became head of government after the defeat. Head of Free France. He’s given everybody new hope—”

“He’s not the guy in the picture who’s shaking hands with Hitler, is he?”

“Um …”

Julien almost laughed out loud. Pierre was the best.

“And he’s supposed to be this war hero?”

“Pierre Rostin,” said Monsieur Matthias, “sit down.”





On Tuesday Henri was there again, saluting the flag, but Julien stopped and stared across the schoolyard at him. Henri’s hand was not raised stiffly in the air like the others’.

It was over his heart.





There was a letter. A flimsy, preprinted postcard, and on it Uncle Gino’s handwriting:

Dear Martin and Maria,

All … in good health … tired … slightly, seriously ill … wounded … killed … prisoner … died … without news of … family B. K. (evacuated). The family Pirelli … is well … back to work … in need of … supplies … money. Vincent … will go back to school at … Paris … is being put up at … is going to … Best wishes … Love … Giovanni Pirelli



Mama had tears in her eyes. Julien hugged her. They’re all right. After a moment they looked again at the postcard. “Evacuated,” Mama murmured.

They looked at each other. Julien thought of the roads, the bombers, Régis Granjon glancing up in fear.

“We don’t tell him,” said Papa.

Julien nodded, slowly.





Nina began to walk again.

She could put her feet on the floor. She could stand. Fräulein took her bedpan away, and she hobbled to the bathroom, leaning on Gustav’s arm. He brought her crutches, scrubbed clean; she stood leaning on them, holding the handgrips her fingers knew so well. Here it was, waiting for her: her life.

She walked between bookshelves out into a place of windows, and light. A kitchen table laid for three, a steaming bowl of potatoes. Gustav’s face lit at the sight of her; on the edge of her memory, she could see Father holding out his arms to her: Come on, herzerl! You can do it! She leaned her crutches against the table and sat at the place prepared for her. Gustav beamed.

She walked slowly through the apartment that afternoon, her crutches clicking gently on the floor. Every wall was lined with books. French, English, German, Italian, languages she didn’t even recognize. One that looked like Hebrew. Did this woman read Hebrew? She touched the spines of the books gently as she moved down the hall. It had been so long. She wondered if Uncle Yakov had given her books to Heide as she’d asked. If she’d ever see Heide’s round friendly face again—if she’d ever see Vienna, and Uncle Yakov, and her cousins—

“I wouldn’t start with Kant, if I were you.” She jumped and snatched her hand away from the books. It was Fräulein. “Not before you get your strength back.” Quiet amusement tinged her voice.

“I wasn’t going to … I … I couldn’t—”

“You certainly can and will read my books,” said Fräulein firmly. “I merely ask to be allowed to advise.” She took down a thick book from the opposite shelf. “Now this is the Torah. Should I presume you’ve read it before?”





She hadn’t read it. She leafed through it in bed that night. She read about the Flood, about a king murdering somebody over a vineyard; she read long poetry she didn’t understand, about God punishing and forgiving, full of warriors and chariots, mountains and springs of water, mothers and babies. It sounded familiar somehow. While she read she saw Uncle Yakov’s table, and the Shabbat candles.

The Italian woman came, the woman named Maria. Maria showed her the center of the Torah book; the psalms. She couldn’t read German, but she told Nina the number of her favorite psalm and quoted lines from it to her in Italian, her eyes closed, her face open: “When evil men come upon me to devour me, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall … Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up … I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

Nina found the psalm in the Torah book that night when Maria was gone. She read it three times. Then she read on. “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I thank him … The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders … The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve, and strips the forests bare, and in his temple everything cries, ‘Glory!’”

She did not believe or disbelieve the beautiful words. She read them. She heard the glory cry. She turned off the lamp and lay in the dark with her eyes closed, feeling strangely quiet, strangely open, as if someone had slipped in when she wasn’t looking and unlatched the doors of her spirit, opened them slowly, like the windows of a small and airless room.

When she woke, the wind had blown the whole sky in.

It was blue, bluer than any sky she had seen before, deep and filled to the brim with the sun. The curtains were a clean and brilliant white against the blue, and the sunlight rested on the edge of her bed, touching the tip of her fingers with a sure and gentle warmth. Her heart was buoyed and carried in the warm air, the strange sensation of lightness, the stone weight of fear rolled away.

“Peace,” she whispered in surprise. “It’s peace, isn’t it.”





She sat in Fräulein’s chair by the window with the Torah book open in her lap, drinking in the sky. Gustav paced behind her: to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the kitchen again. “You all right, Gustav?” she called, wishing it were warm enough to fling the window open. She pushed the curtains farther aside, and at the sound of rings sliding on the curtain rod, he was there. “Not so wide, please,” he begged.

“We need more light in here! They’re always shut!”

“Fräulein doesn’t like people looking in.”

“It’s a beautiful day out there, Gustav. You should go out or something. When I’m strong enough—”

Gustav swallowed and twitched the curtain just a little. “When you’re strong enough,” he said brightly, “you’ll step out the door, and all the boys in Tanieux will fall at your feet! Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“Oh, come off it.” But her face felt warm.





Julien had learned to stay out of Henri’s way. I may have my hand over my heart, his eyes said, but I still wish you were dead. Two weeks now, he had lived this way, asking his mother every evening: “Any news?” “No news,” she said, and he could breathe again. And sleep, and wake, and face the school day and Henri’s burning eyes.

Pierre still talked to Henri. Pierre, the old friend who was slow to understand the new alliances, who stayed out of the flag salute with puzzled disgust on his face and spent the rest of his break moving freely around the schoolyard—under the tree with Henri, by the wall with Julien, by the gate with Léon and Antoine. Pierre didn’t care. Julien wished he were Pierre.

Pierre, who had cut through the National Revolution crap so instantly he still thought he could straighten Henri out.

“I don’t get it, man,” Julien heard Pierre say, putting away his books after math class. “The guy is working with the boches. Why do you listen to a word he says?”

Henri clapped his math book shut. “You have to learn to see past appearances, Pierre.”

“You mean he just looked like he shook Hitler’s hand?”

“I mean,” said Henri, slowly and with emphasis, “that he was forced to shake Hitler’s hand.”

Gaston shot Henri a look of scorn. “Forced? You sound like Julien Losier.”

Henri turned white. “‘You sound like Julien Losier,’” he mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “You sound like a six-year-old. Go ahead. Tell my friend here why the marshal shook Hitler’s hand,” he snarled, “and make it good.” Henri turned to Julien, who instantly looked away. “And you. Get out of here. Now.” He took a trembling breath. “By the way,” he added in a quiet, deadly voice, “I know where they are.”

Julien’s heart stopped. Pierre’s eyes went wide. “Where what are?” asked Gaston.

“None of your business,” said Henri.





The farmer Gustav had worked for needed his help again, Gustav said, if Nina could spare him. They were putting the garden to bed before the frost, the last big push of the season.

“If I can spare you! You’re driving me crazy, pacing around here all day!”

“I’ll have to be gone for a couple nights.”

“Is it so far?”

He shrugged. “Out of town. I think I might need to leave in the morning early. You might not see me at breakfast.”

She lay in bed, wondering. She couldn’t sleep. Fräulein had been all strange today; she’d changed Nina’s sheets and taken all her little things off the desk—the thermometer, the water glass, the Torah book she was reading—and spent half an hour arranging boxes and tarps under the bed and practically crawling in behind them like she was playing hide-and-seek. But all without smiling. Hardly looking at Nina. It made her nervous. And Gustav—why did he have to work so far away? It didn’t make sense. She’d missed him so much while she was sick—hadn’t they known she needed him? He’d never been there, and now he always was—but pacing like an animal in a cage, twitchy, being strange about curtains … like he was …

Hiding.

He hadn’t left the house. Ever. In more than two weeks.

She heard the creak of a floorboard outside her door. She breathed deep and slow as a sleeper, her heart racing, her throat tight. Heard the click of a latch, and quiet footsteps on the stairs; she leaned to the window and saw, down below, the downstairs door swing open and a dark figure slip down the street; keeping to the shadows, afraid of the faint light of the moon.

The window was cold and hard against her forehead. None of it was true. The dark was a weight pressing on her, and the ragged moon laughed in her face, and she hardly heard her own dry whisper: Gustav, you lied to me. And everywhere there were evil men.





“Bonjour?” A head was peering in the barn door.

Gustav squirted the last couple streams of milk into the pail and released the goat. “Bonjour,” he said back, peering through misty dawn light. It was awfully early for anyone to be out there. Even him. But he’d missed this so much; the milking especially.

“Where is Pierre?” The boy’s silhouette was tall and thin.

“He sleep. I tell him I do milking today.”

“You’re Gustav,” said the boy, stepping through the door. Brown hair and a thin face; nobody he knew.

“Yes. You?”

“A friend of Pierre.”

“You look for Pierre?”

“I thought I’d help him with the milking. I can help you if you like.”

Gustav looked at the boy, considering. Well, he was a friend of Pierre, and he’d known where to find him at six o’clock in the morning. “You can milk?”

“No problem.” The stranger pulled the old milking stand out of the corner, took Paquerette by one horn, and with a neat twist got her up on it. “She used to be ours,” he told Gustav, beginning with a practiced hand to shoot a hard stream of milk into the pail. “We had three, but my father sold them to the Rostins a couple years ago. Now we just have a cow. Do you like it here?”

Gustav blinked. Nobody had asked him that. Don’t you know, friend-of-Pierre? I’m lucky to be anywhere that’s not behind barbed wire. The goat on his stand tossed her horns, and he grabbed her udder and started milking, feeling the rhythm of it in his hands. He liked this. Even on those farms in the mountains, as a raw kid just learning to work, he’d liked it.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes. I come from city, you know? My father, he made—” he gestured at his feet.

“Shoes?”

“Yes. But my father die, and we go. In Italy, I learn to work for farmers, and it is good. I like it. But I never can stay. Always there is danger. When we stop, we must go again … most time we are in cities, nobody know us, my sister she is very afraid. Here—I work on farm again, this is good family, I hope that now we can stay. This place, it is very, you know?” He couldn’t remember the word. “Like woman …”

The stranger’s hands paused in their motion, and he looked at Gustav. “Beautiful?”

“Yes. Beautiful.” There was more light now.

“How is your sister?”

“Better! Every day she is little bit better. I think … I think she will live.”

“What did she have? What kind of sickness?”

“I don’t have name. Fever, and—she need, you know, toilet all the time. Very thin. Before we come here, we are in Lyon. So many people, no food. I tried …” It hurt to even remember how he’d tried … He blinked fast and kept on milking. “In Lyon a woman beats her. Takes Nina’s stick for walking and she beats her, because she thinks we are Germans. Now she have hurt here”—he touched his side—“it breaks, you know? Maybe this make her sick. Maybe because hungry. I don’t know. Maybe because—” He released Nanette, and sat at the empty milking stand for a moment, looking into the darkness of the barn. “In Lyon—it is end. We think, now we die. She think that. How you say? I don’t know word …” He could not think how to say it. The morning sun filtered in through the cracks in the walls; it poured through the open doorway. The other boy looked away, toward the sunlit world.

“In Lyon, she think life no more good. She—I think she want to die. But Samuel bring us here. I make her come, and now she lives. She think safe. She not know about train man. I not tell her. I want she should get better.”

“If you tell her about the train man, she won’t get better?” The boy was sitting very straight, his hands motionless on Jaunette’s udder, his face very still. Gustav looked away.

“I don’t know. If she afraid again …”

The boy nodded. Abruptly, he began to milk again, harder than before. “This train man is a bad person?”

Gustav stared at him. He was milking furiously. Why would he ask such a thing? “What you think?” he said quietly, hard.

Jaunette bleated. “He told you to go away and die? Is that it?”

“He give us train ticket to go back, he say, because people no want us here. Back to Lyon. In Lyon we die.” Gustav looked away, his throat growing tight.

“I should go.” The boy untied Jaunette with a quick motion. “We are finished, no?”

Gustav glanced down the row of goats. “Yes,” he said, shaking himself. “Yes. Thank you. You stay maybe for—”

“My father will expect me at breakfast.”

Gustav held out his hand. “I not know your name—”

The boy looked at the hand for a moment and took it. “Henri,” he said. “My name is Henri.”