The Nightingale

A column of German soldiers marched up the boulevard Saint-Germain on their way to the Champs élysées; they were led by an officer astride a white stallion.

As soon as they passed, Isabelle crossed the street and merged into the crowd of German soldiers gathered on the other sidewalk. She kept her gaze downward and her gloved hands coiled around her handbag. Her clothing was as worn and ragged as that of most Parisians, and the clatter of wooden soles rang out. No one had leather anymore. She bypassed long queues of housewives and hollow-faced children standing outside of boulangeries and boucheries. Rations had been cut again and again and again in the past two years; people in Paris were surviving on eight hundred calories a day. There was not a dog or cat or rat to be seen on the streets. This week, one could buy tapioca and string beans. Nothing else. At the boulevard de la Gare, there were piles of furniture and art and jewelry—everything of value taken from the people who’d been deported. Their belongings were sorted and crated and sent to Germany.

She ducked into Les Deux Magots in the Saint-Germain and took a seat in the back; on the red moleskin bench, she waited impatiently, watched over by the statues of Chinese mandarins. A woman who might be Simone de Beauvoir sat at a table near the front of the café. She was bent over a piece of paper, writing furiously. Isabelle sank into the comfortable seat; she was bone weary. In the past month alone, she’d crossed the Pyrenees three times and visited each of the safe houses, paying her passeurs. Every step was dangerous now that there was no Free Zone.

“Juliette.”

She looked up and saw her father. He had aged in the last few years—they all had. Deprivation and hunger and despair and fear had left their marks on him—in skin that was the color and texture of beach sand and deeply lined.

He was so thin that his head now seemed too big for his body.

He slid into the booth across from her, put his wrinkled hands on the pitted mahogany table.

She reached forward, clasped her hands around his wrists. When she drew her hands back, she had palmed the pencil-sized coil of false identity papers he’d had up his sleeve. She tucked them expertly in her girdle and smiled at the waiter who had just appeared.

“Coffee,” Papa said in a tired voice.

Isabelle shook her head.

The waiter returned, deposited a cup of barley coffee, and disappeared again.

“They had a meeting today,” her father said. “High-ranking Nazis. The SS was there. I heard the word ‘Nightingale.’”

“We’re careful,” she said quietly. “And you are taking more risk than I am, stealing the blank identity papers.”

“I am an old man. They don’t even see me. You should take a break, maybe. Let someone else do your mountain trips.”

She gave him a pointed look. Did people say things like this to men? Women were integral to the Resistance. Why couldn’t men see that?

He sighed, seeing the answer in her affronted look. “Do you need a place to stay?”

Isabelle appreciated the offer. It reminded her of how far they’d come. They still weren’t close, but they were working together, and that was something. He no longer pushed her away, and now—here, an invitation. It gave her hope that someday, when the war was over, they could actually talk. “I can’t. It would put you at risk.” She hadn’t been to the apartment in more than eighteen months. Neither had she been to Carriveau or seen Vianne in all that time. Rarely had Isabelle spent three nights in the same place. Her life was a series of hidden rooms and dusty mattresses and suspicious strangers.

“Have you heard anything about your sister?”

“I have friends looking out for her. I hear she is taking no chances, keeping her head down and her daughter safe. She will be fine,” she said, hearing how hope softened that last sentence.

“You miss her,” he said.

Isabelle found herself thinking of the past suddenly, wishing she could just let it go. Yes, she missed her sister, but she had missed Vianne for years, for all of her life.

“Well.” He stood up abruptly.

She noticed his hands. “Your hands are shaking.”

“I quit drinking. It seemed like a bad time to be a drunk.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, smiling up at him. “Drunk seems like a good idea these days.”

“Be careful, Juliette.”

Her smile faded. Every time she saw anyone these days, it was hard to say good-bye. You never knew if you’d see them again. “You, too.”

*

Midnight.

Isabelle crouched in the darkness behind a crumbling stone wall. She was deep in the woods and dressed in peasant clothes—denim overalls that had seen better days, wooden-soled boots, and a lightweight blouse made from an old shower curtain. Downwind, she could smell the smoke of nearby bonfires but she couldn’t see even a glimmer of firelight.

Behind her, a twig snapped.

She crouched lower, barely breathed.

A whistle sounded. It was the lilting song of the nightingale. Or close to it. She whistled back.