The Nightingale

The whistle sounded again and the car doors banged shut, plunging them all into darkness. Bolts clanged into place, locking them in. The train lurched forward. People fell into one another, fell down. Babies screamed and children whined. Someone was peeing in the bucket and the smell overlaid the stench of the sweat and fear.

Micheline put an arm around Isabelle and the two women climbed to the top of the hay bales and sat together.

“I am Isabelle Rossignol,” she said quietly, hearing her name swallowed by the darkness. If she was going to die on this train, she wanted someone to know who she was.

Micheline sighed. “You are Julien and Madeleine’s daughter.”

“Did you know from the start?”

“Oui. You have your mother’s eyes and your father’s temperament.”

“He was executed,” she said. “He admitted to being the Nightingale.”

Micheline held her hand. “Of course he did. Someday, when you are a mother, you will understand. I remember thinking your parents were unmatched—quiet, intellectual Julien and your vivacious, steel-spined maman. I thought they had nothing in common, but now I know how often love is like that. It was the war, you know; it broke him like a cigarette. Irreparable. She tried to save him. So hard.”

“When she died…”

“Oui. Instead of fixing himself, he drank and made himself worse, but the man he became was not the man he was,” Micheline said. “Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

The hours rolled by slowly. Often, the train stopped to take on more women and children or to avoid bombing. The women took turns sitting down and standing up, each helping the others when they could. The water disappeared and the urine barrel overfilled, sloshing over. Whenever the train slowed, Isabelle pushed to the sides of the carriage, peering through the slats, trying to see where they were, but all she saw were more soldiers and dogs and whips … more women being herded like cattle into more train cars. Women wrote their names on scraps of paper or cloth and shoved them through cracks in the carriage walls, hoping against hope to be remembered.

By the second day, they were all exhausted and hungry and so thirsty they remained quiet, saving their saliva. The heat and stench in the carriage was unbearable.

Be afraid.

Wasn’t that what Ga?tan had said to her? He said the warning had come from Vianne that night in the barn.

Isabelle hadn’t fully understood it then. She understood it now. She had thought herself indestructible.

But what would she have done differently?

“Nothing,” she whispered into the darkness.

She would do it all again.

And this wasn’t the end. She had to remember that. Each day she lived there was a chance for salvation. She couldn’t give up. She could never give up.

*

The train stopped. Isabelle sat up, bleary-eyed, her body aching and in pain from the beatings of her interrogation. She heard harsh voices, dogs barking. A whistle blared.

“Wake up, Micheline,” Isabelle said, gently jostling the woman beside her.

Micheline edged upright.

The seventy other people in the car—women and children—slowly roused themselves from the stupor of the journey. Those who were seated rose. The women came together instinctively, packed in closer.

Isabelle winced in pain as she stood on torn feet in shoes too small. She held Micheline’s cold hand.

The giant carriage doors rumbled open. Sunlight poured in, blinding them all. Isabelle saw SS officers dressed in black, with their snarling, barking dogs. They were shouting orders at the women and children, incomprehensible words with obvious meaning. Climb down, move on, get into line.

The women helped one another down. Isabelle held on to Micheline’s hand and stepped down onto the platform.

A truncheon hit her in the head so hard she stumbled sideways and dropped to her knees.

“Get up,” a woman said. “You must.”

Isabelle let herself be helped to her feet. Dizzy, she leaned into the woman. Micheline came up on her other side, put an arm around her waist to steady her.

To Isabelle’s left, a whip snaked through the air, hissing, and cracked into the fleshy pink of a woman’s cheek. The woman screamed and held the torn skin of her cheek together. Blood poured between her fingers, but she kept moving.

The women formed ragged lines and marched across uneven ground through an open gate that was surrounded by barbed wire. A watchtower loomed above them.

Inside the gates, Isabelle saw hundreds—thousands—of women who looked like ghosts moving through a surreal landscape of gray, their bodies emaciated, their eyes sunken and dead looking in gray faces, their hair shorn. They wore baggy, dirty striped dresses; some were barefooted. Only women and children. No men.

Behind the gates and beneath the watchtower, she saw barracks stretching out in lines.