The Nightingale

She clutched her willow basket with its paper-wrapped treasures, small and insufficient as they were, and ignored the soldiers. She slipped around the corner and into an alley that was narrow and crooked, like all such passageways in town. Entrances were slim, and from the street, they appeared to be dead ends. Locals knew how to navigate them as easily as a boatman knows a boggy river. She walked forward, unobserved. The shops in the alley had all been shut down.

A poster in the abandoned milliner’s shopwindow showed a crooked old man with a huge, hooked nose, looking greedy and evil, holding a bag of money and trailing blood and bodies behind him. She saw the word—Juif—Jew—and stopped.

She knew she should keep walking. It was just propaganda, after all, the enemy’s heavy-handed attempt to blame the Jewish people for the ills of the world, and this war.

And yet.

She glanced to her left. Not fifty feet away was rue La Grande, a main street through town; to her right was an elbow bend in the alleyway.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her piece of chalk. When she was sure the coast was clear, she drew a huge V for victory on the poster, obliterating as much of the image as she could.

Someone grabbed her wrist so hard she gasped. Her piece of chalk fell, clattered to the cobblestones, and rolled into one of the cracks.

“Mademoiselle,” a man said, shoving her against the poster she’d just defaced, pressing her cheek into the paper so that she couldn’t see him, “do you know it is verboten to do that? And punishable by death?”





TEN

Vianne closed her eyes and thought, Hurry home, Antoine.

It was all she allowed herself, just that one small plea. How could she handle all of this—war, and Captain Beck, and Isabelle—alone?

She wanted to daydream, pretend that her world was upright instead of fallen on its side; that the closed guest room door meant nothing, that Sophie had slept with Vianne last night because they’d fallen asleep reading, that Antoine was outside on this dewy dawn morning, chopping wood for a winter that was still months away. Soon he would come in and say, Well, I am off to a day of delivering mail. Perhaps he would tell her of his latest postmark—a letter in from Africa or America—and he would spin her a romantically imagined tale to go along with it.

Instead, she returned her knitting to the basket by the divan, put on her boots, and went outside to chop wood. It would be autumn again in no time, and then winter, and the devastation of her garden by the refugees had reminded her how perilously balanced her survival was. She lifted the axe and brought it down, hard.

Grasp. Raise. Steady. Chop.

Every chop reverberated up her arms and lodged painfully in the muscles of her shoulders. Sweat squeezed from her pores, dampened her hair.

“Allow me please to do this for you.”

She froze, the axe in midair.

Beck stood nearby, dressed in his breeches and boots, with only a thin white T-shirt covering his chest. His pale cheeks were reddened from a morning shave and his blond hair was wet. Droplets fell onto his T-shirt, making a pattern of small gray sunbursts.

She felt acutely uncomfortable in her robe and work boots, with her hair pinned in curls. She lowered the axe.

“There are some things a man does around the house. You are much too fragile to chop wood.”

“I can do it.”

“Of course you can, but why should you? Go, Madame. See to your daughter. I can do this small thing for you. Otherwise my mother will beat me with a switch.”

She meant to move, but somehow she didn’t, and then he was there, pulling the axe gently out of her hand. She held on instinctively for a moment.

Their gazes met, held.

She released her hold and stepped back so quickly she stumbled. He caught her by the wrist, steadied her. Mumbling a thank-you, she turned and walked away from him, keeping her spine as straight as she could. It took all of her limited courage not to speed up. Even so, by the time she reached her door, she felt as if she’d run from Paris. She kicked free of the oversized gardening boots, saw them hit the house with a thunk and fall in a heap. The last thing she wanted was kindness from this man who had invaded her home.

She slammed the door shut behind her and went to the kitchen, where she lit the stove and put a pot of water on to boil. Then she went to the bottom of the stairs and called her daughter down to breakfast.

She had to call two more times—and then threaten—before Sophie came trudging down the stairs, her hair a mess, the look in her eyes sullen. She was wearing her sailor dress—again. In the ten months Antoine had been gone, she’d outgrown it, but she refused to stop wearing it. “I’m up,” she said, shuffling to the table, taking her seat.

Vianne placed a bowl of cornmeal mush in front of her daughter. She had splurged this morning and added a tablespoon of preserved peaches on top.

“Maman? Can’t you hear that? There’s someone knocking at the door.”

Vianne shook her head (all she’d heard was the thunk-thunk-thunk of the axe) and went to the door, opening it.