The Nightingale

The man was talking, asking her questions. His mouth opened, closed, spewed smoke.

She flinched instinctively, curled into a crouch, squatted back. The man behind her kicked her in her spine, hard, and she stilled.

So. Two men. One in front of her and one behind. Pay attention to the one who is speaking.

What was he saying?

“Sit.”

She wanted to defy him but didn’t have the strength. She climbed up onto the chair. The skin around her wrists was torn and bloody, oozing pus. She used her hands to cover her nakedness, but it was useless, she knew. He would pull her legs apart to bind her ankles to the chair legs.

When she was seated, something soft hit her in the face and fell into her lap. Dully, she looked down.

A dress. Not hers.

She clutched it to her bare breasts and looked up.

“Put it on,” he said.

Her hands were shaking as she stood and stepped awkwardly into the wrinkled, shapeless blue linen dress that was at least three sizes too large. It took forever to button the sagging bodice.

“The Nightingale,” he said, taking a long drag on his cigarette. The tip glowed red-orange and Isabelle instinctively shrank into the chair.

Schmidt. That was his name. “I don’t know anything about birds,” she said.

“You are Juliette Gervaise,” he said.

“I have told you that a hundred times.”

“And you know nothing about the Nightingale.”

“This is what I’ve told you.”

He nodded sharply and Isabelle immediately heard footsteps, and then the door behind her creaked open.

She thought: It doesn’t hurt, it’s just my body. They can’t touch my soul. It had become her mantra.

“We are done with you.”

He was smiling at her in a way that made her skin crawl.

“Bring him in.”

A man stumbled forward in shackles.

Papa.

She saw horror in his eyes and knew how she looked: split lip and blackened eyes and torn cheek … cigarette burns on her forearms, blood matted in her hair. She should stay still, stand where she was, but she couldn’t. She limped forward, gritting her teeth at the pain.

There were no bruises on his face, no cuts on his lip, no arm held close to his body in pain.

They hadn’t beaten or tortured him, which meant they hadn’t interrogated him. “I am the Nightingale,” her father said to the man who’d tortured her. “Is that what you need to hear?”

She shook her head, said no in a voice so soft no one heard.

“I am the Nightingale,” she said, standing on burned, bloody feet. She turned to the German who had tortured her.

Schmidt laughed. “You, a girl? The infamous Nightingale?”

Her father said something in English to the German, who clearly didn’t understand.

Isabelle understood: They could speak in English.

Isabelle was close enough to her father to touch him, but she didn’t. “Don’t do this,” she begged.

“It’s done,” he said. The smile he gave her was slow in forming, and when it came, she felt pain constrict her chest. Memories came at her in waves, surging over the breakwater she’d built in the isolated years. Him sweeping her into his arms, twirling her around; picking her up from a fall, dusting her off, whispering, Not so loud, my little terror, you’ll wake your maman …

She drew in short, shallow breaths and wiped her eyes. He was trying to make it up to her, asking for forgiveness and seeking redemption all at once, sacrificing himself for her. It was a glimpse of who he’d once been, the poet her maman had fallen in love with. That man, the one before the war, might have known another way, might have found the perfect words to heal their fractured past. But he wasn’t that man anymore. He had lost too much, and in his loss, he’d thrown more away. This was the only way he knew to tell her he loved her. “Not this way,” she whispered.

“There is no other. Forgive me,” he said softly.

The Gestapo stepped between them. He grabbed her father by the arm and pulled him toward the door.

Isabelle limped after them. “I am the Nightingale!” she called out.

The door slammed in her face. She hobbled to the cell’s window, clutching the rough, rusty bars. “I am the Nightingale!” she screamed.

Outside, beneath a yellow morning sun, her father was dragged into the square, where a firing squad stood at the ready, rifles raised.

Her father stumbled forward, lurched across the cobblestoned square, past a fountain. Morning sunlight gave everything a golden, beautiful glow.

“We were supposed to have time,” she whispered, feeling tears start. How often had she imagined a new beginning for her and Papa, for all of them? They would come together after the war, Isabelle and Vianne and Papa, learn to laugh and talk and be a family again.