The Nightingale

In the empty space by the wall, she was twisted around and shoved back so hard she slammed into the wall.

“What is the meaning of this?” snarled the French policeman, his grip on her arm tight enough to leave a bruise.

Could he feel the index card beneath her sleeve?

“I’m sorry. So sorry. I need to work, but I’m sick, you see. The flu.” She coughed as loudly as she could.

Isabelle walked past him and left the building. Outside, she kept coughing until she got to the corner. There, she started to run.

*

“What could it mean?”

Isabelle peered past the blackout shade in the apartment, staring down at the avenue. Papa sat at the dining room table, nervously drumming his ink-stained fingers on the wood. It felt good to be here again—with him—after months away, but she was too agitated to relax and enjoy the homey feel of the place.

“You must be mistaken, Isabelle,” Papa said, on his second brandy since her return. “You said there had to be tens of thousands of cards. That would be all the Jewish people in Paris. Surely—”

“Question what it means, Papa, but not the facts,” she answered. “The Germans are collecting the names and addresses of every foreign-born Jewish person in Paris. Men, women, and children.”

“But why? Paul Lévy is of Polish descent, it’s true, but he has lived here for decades. He fought for France in the Great War—his brother died for France. The Vichy government has assured us that veterans are protected from the Nazis.”

“Vianne was asked for a list of names,” Isabelle said. “She was asked to write down every Jewish, communist, and Freemason teacher at her school. Afterward they were all fired.”

“They can hardly fire them twice.” He finished his drink and poured another. “And it is the French police gathering names. If it were the Germans, it would be different.”

Isabelle had no answer to that. They had been having this same conversation for at least three hours.

Now it was edging past two in the morning, and neither of them could come up with a credible reason why the Vichy government and the French police were collecting the names and addresses of every foreign-born Jewish person living in Paris.

She saw a flash of silver outside. Lifting the shade a little higher, she stared down at the dark street.

A row of buses rolled down the avenue, their painted headlamps off, looking like a slow-moving centipede that stretched for blocks.

She had seen buses outside of the prefecture of police, dozens of them parked in the courtyard. “Papa…” Before she could finish, she heard footsteps coming up the stairs outside of the apartment.

A pamphlet of some kind slid into the apartment through the slit beneath the door.

Papa left the table and bent to pick it up. He brought it to the table and set it down next to the candle.

Isabelle stood behind him.

Papa looked up at her.

“It’s a warning. It says the police are going to round up all foreign-born Jews and deport them to camps in Germany.”

“We are talking when we need to be acting,” Isabelle said. “We need to hide our friends in the building.”

“It’s so little,” Papa said. His hand was shaking. It made her wonder again—sharply—what he’d seen in the Great War, what he knew that she did not.

“It’s what we can do,” Isabelle said. “We can make some of them safe. At least for tonight. We’ll know more tomorrow.”

“Safe. And where would that be, Isabelle? If the French police are doing this, we are lost.”

Isabelle had no answer for that.

Saying no more, they left the apartment.

Stealth was difficult in a building as old as this one, and her father, moving in front of her, had never been light on his feet. Brandy made him even more unsteady as he led her down the narrow, twisting staircase to the apartment directly below theirs. He stumbled twice, cursing his imbalance. He knocked on the door.

He waited to the count of ten and knocked again. Harder this time.

Very slowly, the door opened, just a crack at first, and then all the way. “Oh, Julien, it is you,” said Ruth Friedman. She was wearing a man’s coat over a floor-length nightgown, with her bare feet sticking out beneath. Her hair was in rollers and covered with a scarf.

“You’ve seen the pamphlet?”

“I got one. It is true?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” her father said. “There are buses out front and lorries have been rumbling past all night. Isabelle was at the prefecture of police tonight, and they were collecting the names and addresses of all foreign-born Jewish people. We think you should bring the children to our place for now. We have a hiding place.”

“But … my husband is a prisoner of war. The Vichy government promises us that we will be protected.”