The Nightingale

A stewardess takes one look at me and makes that here’s an old one who needs help face. Living where I do now, in that shoebox filled with the Q-tips that old people become, I’ve come to recognize it. Usually it irks me, makes me straighten my back and push aside the youngster who is sure that I cannot cope in the world on my own, but just now I’m tired and scared and a little help doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I let her help me to my window seat in the second row of the plane. I have splurged on a first-class ticket. Why not? I don’t see much reason to save my money anymore.

“Thank you,” I say to the stewardess as I sit down. My son is the next one onto the plane. When he smiles at the stewardess, I hear a little sigh, and I think of course. Women have swooned over Julien since before his voice changed.

“Are you two traveling together?” she says, and I know she is giving him points for being a good son.

Julien gives her one of his ice-melting smiles. “Yes, but we couldn’t get seats together. I’m three rows behind her.” He offers her his boarding pass.

“Oh, I’m sure I can solve this for you,” she says as Julien stows my suitcase and his weekender in the bin above my seat.

I stare out the window, expecting to see the tarmac busy with men and women in orange vests waving their arms and unloading suitcases, but what I see is water squiggling down the Plexiglas surface, and woven within the silvered lines is my reflection; my own eyes stare back at me.

“Thank you so much,” I hear Julien say, and then he is sitting down beside me, clamping his seat belt shut, pulling the strap taut across his waist.

“So,” he says after a long enough pause that people have shuffled past us in a steady stream and the pretty stewardess (who has combed her hair and freshened her makeup) has offered us champagne. “The invitation.”

I sigh. “The invitation.” Yes. That’s the start of it. Or the end, depending on your point of view. “It’s a reunion. In Paris.”

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“You were never meant to.”

He reaches for my hand. It is so sure and comforting, that healer’s touch of his.

In his face, I see the whole of my life. I see a baby who came to me long after I’d given up … and a hint of the beauty I once had. I see … my life in his eyes.

“I know there’s something you want to tell me and whatever it is, it’s hard for you. Just start at the beginning.”

I can’t help smiling at that. He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that.

Still. I am here, on a plane heading home, and I have an opportunity to make a different choice than the one I made when my pain was fresh and a future predicated on the past seemed impossible.

“Later,” I say, and I mean it this time. I will tell him the story of my war, and my sister’s. Not all of it, of course, not the worst parts, but some. Enough that he will know a truer version of me. “Not here, though. I’m exhausted.” I lean back into the big first-class chair and close my eyes.

How can I start at the beginning, when all I can think about is the end?





THIRTY-TWO

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

May 1944

France

In the eighteen months since the Nazis had occupied all of France, life had become even more dangerous, if that were possible. French political prisoners had been interned in Drancy and imprisoned in Fresnes—and hundreds of thousands of French Jews had been deported to concentration camps in Germany. The orphanages of Neuilly-sur-Seine and Montreuil had been emptied and their children sent to the camps, and the children who’d been held at the Vel d’Hiv—more than four thousand of them—had been separated from their parents and sent to concentration camps alone. Allied forces were bombing day and night. Arrests were made constantly; people were hauled out of their homes and their shops for the slightest infraction, for a rumor of resistance, and imprisoned or deported. Innocent hostages were shot in retaliation for things they knew nothing about and every man between eighteen and fifty was supposed to go to forced-labor camps in Germany. No one felt secure. There were no yellow stars on clothing anymore. No one made eye contact or spoke to strangers. Electricity had been shut off.

Isabelle stood on a busy Paris street corner, ready to cross, but before her ratty, wooden-soled shoe hit the cobblestones, a whistle shrieked. She backed into the shade of a flowering chestnut tree.

These days, Paris was a woman screaming. Noise, noise, noise. Whistles blaring, shotguns firing, lorries rumbling, soldiers shouting. The tide of the war had shifted. The Allies had landed in Italy, and the Nazis had failed to drive them back. Losses had spurred the Nazis to greater and greater aggression. In March they had massacred more than three hundred Italians in Rome as retaliation for partisan bombing that killed twenty-eight Germans. At last, Charles de Gaulle had taken control of all Free France forces, and something big was being planned for this week.