The Nightingale

Vianne flinched, horrified that she had been caught standing out here with a German, the enemy, a man.

Isabelle stood in the moonlight, wearing a caramel-colored suit; she held her valise in one hand and Vianne’s best Deauville in the other.

“You have my hat,” Vianne said.

“I may have to wait for a train. My face is still tender from the Nazi attack.” She was smiling at Beck as she said this. It wasn’t really a smile.

Beck inclined his head in a curt nod. “You have sisterly things to discuss, obviously. I will take my leave.” With a brisk, polite nod, he returned to the house, closing the door behind him.

“I can’t stay here,” Isabelle said.

“Of course you can.”

“I have no interest in making friends with the enemy, V.”

“Damn it, Isabelle. Don’t you dare—”

Isabelle stepped closer. “I’ll put you and Sophie at risk. Sooner or later. You know I will. You told me I needed to protect Sophie. This is the only way I can do it. I feel like I’ll explode if I stay, V.”

Vianne’s anger dissolved; without it, she felt inexpressibly tired. This essential difference had always been between them. Vianne the rule follower and Isabelle the rebel. Even in girlhood, in grief, they had expressed their emotions differently. Vianne had gone silent after Maman’s death, tried to pretend that Papa’s abandonment didn’t wound her, while Isabelle had thrown tantrums and run away and demanded attention. Maman had sworn that one day they would be the best of friends. Never had this prediction seemed less likely.

In this, right now, Isabelle was right. Vianne would be constantly afraid of what her sister would say or do around the captain, and truthfully, Vianne hadn’t the strength for it.

“How will you go? And where?”

“Train. To Paris. I’ll telegram you when I arrive safely.”

“Be careful. Don’t do anything foolish.”

“Me? You know better than that.”

Vianne pulled Isabelle into a fierce embrace and then let her go.

*

The road to town was so dark Isabelle couldn’t see her own feet. It was preternaturally quiet, as suspenseful as a held breath, until she came to the airfield. There, she heard boots marching on hard-packed dirt, motorcycles and trucks rolling alongside the skein of barbed wire that now protected the ammunitions dump.

A lorry appeared out of nowhere, its headlamps off, thundering up the road; she lurched out of its way, stumbling into the ditch.

In town, it was no easier to navigate with the shops closed and the streetlamps off and the windows blacked out. The silence was eerie and unnerving. Her footsteps seemed too loud. With every step, she was aware that a curfew was in effect and she was violating it.

She ducked into one of the alleys, feeling her way along the rough sidewalk, her fingertips trailing along the storefronts for guidance. Whenever she heard voices, she froze, shrinking into the shadows until silence returned. It seemed to take forever to reach her destination: the train station on the edge of town.

“Halt!”

Isabelle heard the word at the same time a floodlight sprayed white light over her. She was a shadow hunched beneath it.

A German sentry approached her, his rifle held in his arms. “You are just a girl,” he said, drawing close. “You know about the curfew, ja?” he demanded.

She rose slowly, facing him with a courage she didn’t feel. “I know we aren’t allowed to be out this late. It is an emergency, though. I must go to Paris. My father is ill.”

“Where is your Ausweis?”

“I don’t have one.”

He eased the rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. “No travel without an Ausweis.”

“But—”

“Go home, girl, before you get hurt.”

“But—”

“Now, before I decide not to ignore you.”

Inside, Isabelle was screaming in frustration. It took considerable effort to walk away from the sentry without saying anything.

On the way home, she didn’t even keep to the shadows. She flaunted her disregard of the curfew, daring them to stop her again. A part of her wanted to get caught so she could let loose the string of invectives screaming inside her head.

This could not be her life. Trapped in a house with a Nazi in a town that had given up without a whimper of protest. Vianne was not alone in her desire to pretend that France had neither surrendered nor been conquered. In town, the shopkeepers and bistro owners smiled at the Germans and poured them champagne and sold them the best cuts of meat. The villagers, peasants mostly, shrugged and went on with life; oh, they muttered disapprovingly and shook their heads and gave out wrong directions when asked, but beyond those small rebellions, there was nothing. No wonder the German soldiers were swollen with arrogance. They had taken over this town without a fight. Hell, they had done the same thing to all of France.

But Isabelle could never forget what she’d seen in the field near Tours.