How Huge the Night

chapter 5





King of France





One day, Julien would have a real soccer ball. But for now, he had what he had: an old volleyball Papa had brought home from his school, with a couple seams Mama had repaired. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was his. He couldn’t bring it to school; no soccer balls allowed during school hours, just like back home. But there would be a way. There always was.

A single oak tree stood in the schoolyard, smooth dust and trampled grass in its shade; under it lounged a group of guys, and Julien knew them for what they were. At his old school, the broad stone steps were where the in-group of the troisième class would be holding court; the kings of the school. Here it was the tree.

In the center, his back against the trunk, sat the cold-eyed boy from yesterday.

Henri Quatre, they were calling him. Henri the Fourth, king of France in fifteen-whatever. King of France, anyway. He got the idea.

He’d lost Benjamin in the crowd before crossing the bridge; at least there was that.

But he was invisible. The twelve-year-olds in sixième—les petits sixièmes, he’d been one a lifetime ago—ran and shouted in the sun. Guys stood in groups by the low black stone wall or under the préau rain-shelter talking; Benjamin sat on the wall reading; Julien stood a few paces outside the royal court under the tree, and no one saw him. Not one glance.

The bell rang for assembly, and Monsieur Astier, the broad-shouldered principal, announced their fates for the year. Monsieur Matthias for French, Madame Balard for geography, Papa for history. Monsieur Ricot, a skinny frowning character, for physics and as professeur principal for the troisième class. A groan went up. “Not Cocorico!” someone whispered. Ricot frowned harder and led them away to their homeroom.

They scrambled for seatmates at the heavy double desks—or Julien scrambled; everyone else paired off instantly, leaving him looking at Benjamin across an empty front-row desk. He gritted his teeth and sat down.

Ricot called the roll. Henri Quatre was Henri Bernard. Bernard. Julien had heard that somewhere—the stationmaster with the cold, angry face. Naturally. Henri’s seatmate was a bull-necked guy named Pierre Rostin—as in, “Pierre Rostin, sit down!”—who, every time Julien glanced back, was flicking tiny drops of ink onto the neck of Gaston Moriot in front of him. They’d both been under the tree. They’d both been in town that day with the soldier. So had Gilles Perrault, with the light brown hair and the constant smile, and Jérémie, grinning and whispering to him. So had half the class.

And at break it was the same again, and Julien stood outside the circle, hesitant, unseen except for a moment’s hostile glance from Henri. They talked. He listened. Getting old Cocorico for homeroom was just their luck. Léon Barre’s father had said last week he’d vote for a Communist, and him and Gaston’s father had almost gotten into a fistfight. Pierre’s brother André, who drove a tank, had left a week ago for the Maginot Line. They were having a soccer game just as soon as they got the field set up. Tomorrow after lunch.

Julien stood still as a statue, an invisible statue on the wrong side of the tree, his blood pounding in his ears. He would be there. Oh yes, he would be there.





A little field lay behind the school, on the other side of the wall. Everyone was there.

Pierre was hacking at a sapling with a hatchet while Henri watched; guys were scraping the touchlines in the grass with hoes. Gilles and a short, solemn-faced guy were standing by a half-constructed goal, deep in discussion. The solemn-faced one glanced over at him, and a corner of his mouth went up.

“Hey,” said Julien, “you guys want some help?”

“You know the regulation height of a goal?”

“One-third of the width.”

Gilles’s eyebrows rose. He glanced at the goal. “Let’s see, that’d be …” He paced it out, then stared at one of the uprights. “Give me a leg up, Roland?” But Roland wasn’t looking at him.

“It needs to be three meters. Same as ours.” It was Henri Quatre’s voice, from behind them, with an edge in it.

“The new guy says one-third of the width, Henri—”

“The new guy? What’s he got to do with this?” Henri turned to Julien, cold eyes flashing. “Where’re you from?”

“Paris.”

“Thought you’d come show us all how it’s done in Paris? It’s three meters, Gilles. Here’s the tape measure.” Henri tossed it to him and turned away.

“But—” That’s too high, it should come to about two-and-a-half—

“You can watch,” said Henri, whirling back. “If you shut up.”

Watch? “What, you got full teams already? First day of school?”

“Yeah,” said Henri flatly. “Since last year.”

Julien looked at Gilles and Roland. But they were both looking away. Dear Vincent, Julien wrote. Wish you were here.

He scratched that out. Wish I were there. You’d hate it here. You would not believe what happened today.





Julien sat on the low stone wall and watched the games. Henri brought the ball, real leather, rich brown, and almost new. He wanted to scream at the injustice of it.

He sat in class beside Benjamin, walked home beside Benjamin, stood by the wall with him while Benjamin read his book. Same book as last week. He walked home and did his homework and took his pathetic little volleyball down to the narrow backyard to play against the wall. They were everywhere he turned these days. Walls.

There was nobody. Worse than nobody. At school, they wouldn’t look at him; nobody met his eye. At home, Mama and Papa asked him how school was and he wanted to scream but he said fine, looking at their bright eyes that wanted him to be fine, their eyes that in the end were only another wall.

He checked the mail every day. But Vincent didn’t write.

He watched the games. It was fascinating. He watched Henri’s team beat Gilles’s team day after day, but they never mixed up the teams. And Gilles had good players: Antoine was a great forward; Roland was one of the most solid defenders he’d seen. Yet they lost. They lost because Henri had a gift.

Henri was a real captain, a professional. His team worked as a unit, followed his signals—and won. It would never have worked with a different team every time; so they didn’t mix them. The whole thing served Henri, and only Henri. And they let him. The idiots. The sheep.

Gilles won one game and lost four. Then it began to rain.

They had these fall rains back home too; whole pouring days that churned the schoolyard to deep mud to be tracked into the school by dozens of feet, and that drenched the soccer field. At break, they crowded under the préau roof, and it rang with the rain and the echoing voices, with the scrape of the bottle caps the sixièmes kicked around on the smooth concrete. It rained for days. Julien kicked the volleyball around in his room. He walked to school in the rain, walked back in the rain, stared out the window at the drowned soccer field, and raged.

The rain, the walls, the boys with their stupid boring gossip and their sheeplikeness, Henri with his stupid vendetta. Benjamin with his stupid book. There he was now, huddled under his hood as they trudged home through the rain and the mud, holding a flap of his coat over his stupid book. “Haven’t you read that before?” Julien snarled.

Benjamin looked at him sullenly from under his hood.

“Like for two whole weeks? Don’t you have anything better to do?” It felt so good to raise his voice. “During break! Does anyone else have their nose stuck in a book during break? No!”

“Want to tell me why I should care?”

“Do you just not want to make any friends?”

“With this bunch of farmers with dirt between their ears? Thanks, but no thanks.”

Julien shut up. That was exactly what they were like, but coming from Benjamin, it sounded so … snobby. He opened the door and stepped into the dim hallway.

A fragile and lovely thread of sound was floating down from upstairs. He stopped. Mama was singing.

Benjamin bumped into him from behind. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Shh.”

“Julien, get—”

“Shut up!”

It was an aria, a bright one, quick golden stairsteps of song. Benjamin stopped as he caught the sound, and in the dim rainlight, his face began to soften as he listened. “Wow,” he breathed. “She’s good.”

“Yeah.”

Her singing wove a thread of gold through the dingy air as they kicked off their wet boots on the landing. “Come in!” she called. “I have a special goûter for you.” She did: three pieces of bread on the kitchen table, a whole third of a bar of chocolate on top of each one. And Mama smiling like sudden sunlight through the rain. Benjamin froze in the doorway.

“Something wrong?” said Mama.

“No,” he said thickly. “I’m fine, Ma—Madame Losier.”

“There’s something for you on the dining-room table, Benjamin. Go see.”

Two thick brown envelopes. Benjamin snatched them and ran for the stairs.

“From his parents,” Mama said. “Postmarked a week apart. It’s a shame how slow the mail is these days.”





Supper was merry that night, somehow; Papa smiled, and Mama sang as she brought the bread to the table; even Benjamin’s face looked more … relaxed. Magali was going on about her new friend at the girls’ school: “Her name’s Rosa, her parents run the Café du Centre, you know, the Santoros …” She beamed, and stuffed a whole piece of bread in her mouth.

“Santoro? They’re not French, are they?”

“Fe’s Fpanif,” said Magali. She swallowed. “I mean, she’s Spanish. Or was. She says her father’ll never go back now that what’s-his-name won the war.”

“General Franco,” said Papa.

“Yeah. Him.”

“Your mother’s got a new friend too,” said Papa. Mama gave him a smile like Julien hadn’t seen on her in weeks. “Sylvie Alexandre just asked her to join the sewing circle, so if you ever come home and the place is overrun with women, don’t be surprised.”

They ate, and Papa began telling stories. About Charlemagne, whose army loved him because he lived in the field with them on campaign and who liked to swim in the hot springs at Aix-la-Chapelle with his knights—sometimes a hundred knights in the water at once. (“I hope they took their armor off!” said Magali.) About Clovis, king of the Franks, whose baptism was the only bath he ever took. And who didn’t exactly turn into Saint Francis. Once his soldiers fought over a huge vase taken in the spoils of war, and one of them settled it by splitting the thing from top to bottom with his sword—and Clovis, when he heard, called the offender forward during troop inspection, took his sword, and did, well … the exact same thing.

“And the moral of the story is”—Papa finished up with a twinkle in his eye—“don’t let anyone kid you about the ‘good old days.’”

Even Benjamin laughed.





Julien sat with Benjamin in every class. It was great: a prime, closeup view of exactly how much smarter than him Benjamin was. Benjamin would sit drinking in Ricot’s equations, while Julien struggled to keep his eyes open.

“Pierre Rostin, stand up!” Julien jerked awake.

Ricot, red faced, was pulling Pierre out of his seat by the ear. “What did I just ask you, young man?”

Pierre stood, rubbed his ear, looked slowly around at the class. “Sorry, monsieur. Earwax.”

Ricot’s mouth shut like a trap. “Who proved,” he said slowly and loudly, “that the earth rotates on its axis? And how?”

“Um, Einstein maybe?” Pierre yawned. “Or, uh … Napoleon?”

A snicker ran through the class. Ricot’s ruler hit the desk. He grabbed Pierre by the ear again and marched him down to the blackboard. “You can stay right there, Monsieur Rostin, until somebody smarter than you has answered my question.”

Julien was wide awake.

Philippe didn’t know; he had to stay standing behind his desk. So did Dominique, and Antoine, and Léon. Jean-Pierre. Gilles. Jérémie. Lucien. Half the class was on their feet. Roland.

Roland would know. He paused, looking at Ricot.

“I’m sorry, monsieur. I’m not prepared to answer your question.”

Ricot sputtered. Julien began to chew his lip; three more guys and he was up. Um. Something about a pendulum …

Benjamin raised his hand.

“It was Foucault, n’est-ce pas? He hung a pendulum, sixty-seven meters long. He set it swinging, and its axis swiveled slowly over twenty-four hours. And then he proved that it was really swinging in the same plane all along, but the earth was rotating beneath it.”

“Ah.” Ricot’s voice was actually warm. “Well done, young man.” He gestured at the class. “The rest of you morons can sit down now.”

They sat. Benjamin was smiling. Pierre, Julien saw, was not.





Julien caught up with Roland on the way out of school, crossing the bridge. “You live in town?”

“No. Out that way.” Roland waved behind them at the dirt road that went south. “I’m buying bread.”

“You lived here long?”

Roland gave him a little smile. “Sure. About as long as that chapel there.” It stood on their left by the water, a humble little place; four black stone walls and an arched door, a roof of slates with their edges nicked and broken. It looked like it had grown there, out of the bones of the earth, and would still be there when the square concrete school had fallen to dust.

“I didn’t know you were four hundred years old,” Julien said. Roland laughed.

“Who told you how old it is?”

“My grandfather.” Roland’s eyebrows lifted, and Julien named Grandpa by his local name. “Le père Julien.”

“He’s your grandfather?” Roland gave his head a shake. “Did I know that?”

“Don’t ask me!”

After a moment’s pause, one corner of Roland’s mouth turned up. “You’re named after him.”

“Mm-hm.”

“You should tell people you’re from here. If they think you’re from Paris, they’ll ignore you. That’s what we do here. That’s what the estivants want.”

“Yeah? They don’t want to play soccer?”

Roland stuck his hands in his pockets and kicked at a pinecone on the sidewalk. “Hey listen,” he said suddenly, turning to Julien. “Are you good? What position d’you play?”

“Center forward. Yeah,” he said simply, “I’m good.”

“Just watch for when we’re missing a player and jump in, okay? Don’t ask. If you’re that good, Gilles won’t say anything. And Henri’s not gonna take his ball home or something in the middle of a game.”

“Thanks,” Julien said, surprised.

“No problem. We need you. We need something.”

“Hey … did you really not know the answer to that question?”

“Foucault?” Roland’s quirky smile came back. “Sure I knew. And Jean-Pierre knew. Pierre didn’t, that’s for sure.”

“So why didn’t you answer?” said Julien. “Was it some kind of prank?”

Roland gave him a sidelong look. “I don’t show up my friends for Cocorico, that’s why. So he can call them morons.” He snorted. “Nobody likes that. You should tell your friend.”

“Hm,” Julien grunted. They were at the boulangerie; the door opened, and the warm smell of fresh bread wafted out. Roland stuck his hand out to shake goodbye. “Well,” said Julien as they shook, “thanks.”

He walked on up the street behind Benjamin and his book. I’m supposed to tell him not to answer questions in class? He’d laugh. No. If Benjamin felt compelled to make sure nobody liked him, and clearly he did, it was his own problem. Julien couldn’t spend his time worrying about him.

He had better things to do. And now he knew how to do them.