The Nightingale

“You!” A gendarme stabbed Rachel in the shoulder with the butt of his rifle so hard she stumbled. “Move!”

She looked at Vianne, and the universe of their friendship was in her eyes—the secrets they’d shared, the promises they’d made and kept, the dreams for their children that bound them as neatly as sisters.

“Get out of here,” Rachel cried hoarsely. “Go.”

Vianne backed away. Before she knew it, she had turned and begun shoving her way through the crowd, away from the platform and the soldiers and the dogs, away from the smell of fear and the crack of whips and the sound of women wailing and babies crying. She didn’t allow herself to slow until she reached the end of the platform. There, holding Ari closely, she turned around.

Rachel stood in the black, yawning entrance of a cattle car, her face and hands still smeared with her daughter’s blood. She scanned the crowd, saw Vianne, and raised her bloody hand in the air, and then she was gone, shoved back by the women stumbling in around her. The door to the cattle car clanged shut.

*

Vianne collapsed onto the divan. Ari was crying uncontrollably and his diaper was wet and he smelled of urine. She should get up, take care of him, do something, but she couldn’t move. She felt weighed down by loss, suffocated by it.

Sophie came into the living room. “Why do you have Ari?” she said in a quiet, frightened voice. “Where’s Madame de Champlain?”

“She is gone,” Vianne said. She hadn’t the strength to fabricate a lie, and what was the good of one anyway?

There was no way to protect her daughter from all of the evil around them.

No way.

Sophie would grow up knowing too much. Knowing fear and loss and probably hatred.

“Rachel was born in Romania,” Vianne said tightly. “That—along with being Jewish—was her crime. The Vichy government doesn’t care that she has lived in France for twenty-five years and married a Frenchman and that he fought for France. So they deported her.”

“Where will they take her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will she come back after the war?”

Yes. No. I hope so. What answer would a good mother give?

“I hope so.”

“And Ari?” Sophie asked.

“He will stay with us. He wasn’t on the list. I guess our government believes children can raise themselves.”

“But Maman, what do we—”

“Do? What do we do? I have no idea.” She sighed. “For now, you watch the baby. I’ll go next door and get his crib and clothes.”

Vianne was almost to the door when Sophie said, “What about Captain Beck?”

Vianne stopped dead. She remembered seeing him on the platform with a whip in his hand; a whip he cracked to herd women and children onto a cattle car. “Oui,” she said. “What about Captain Beck?”

*

Vianne washed her blood-soaked clothes and hung them to dry in the backyard, trying not to notice how red the soapy water was when she splashed it across the grass. She made Sophie and Ari supper (What had she made? She couldn’t remember.) and put them to bed, but once the house was quiet and dark, she couldn’t suppress her emotions. She was angry—howlingly so—and devastated.

She couldn’t stand how dark and ugly her thoughts were, how bottomless her anger and grief. She ripped the pretty lace from her collar and stumbled outside, remembering when Rachel had given her this blouse. Three years ago.

It’s what everyone’s wearing in Paris.

The apple trees spread their arms above her. It took her two tries to tie the scrap of fabric to the knobby wooden branch between Antoine’s and Sarah’s, and when she’d done it, she stepped back.

Sarah.

Rachel.

Antoine.

The scraps of color blurred; that was when she realized she was crying.

“Please God,” she began to pray, looking up at the bits of fabric and lace and yarn, tied around the knobby branch, interspersed with unripe apples. What good were prayers now, when her loved ones were gone?

She heard a motorcycle come up the road and park outside Le Jardin.

Moments later: “Madame?”

She spun to face him. “Where’s your whip, Herr Captain?”

“You were there?”

“How does it feel to whip a Frenchwoman?”

“You can’t think I would do that, Madame. It sickens me.”

“And yet there you were.”

“As were you. This war has put us all where we do not want to be.”

“Less so for you Germans.”

“I tried to help her,” he said.

At that, Vianne felt the rage go out of her; her grief returned. He had tried to save Rachel. If only they had listened to him and kept her hidden longer. She swayed. Beck reached out and steadied her.

“You said to hide her in the morning. She was in that terrible cellar all day. By afternoon, I thought … everything seemed normal.”

“Von Richter adjusted the timetable. There was a problem with the trains.”

The trains.

Rachel waving good-bye.

Vianne looked up at him. “Where are they taking her?”

It was the first substantive question she’d ever asked him.

“To a work camp in Germany.”