Ruth wiped her eyes. “South. Now that the children are safe, I need to make sure that I survive, too, so that they have someone to come back to. I’m all they have.”
It felt like the world was spinning out of control. “You’re safe here, Ruth,” Juliette said. “There’s no reason to think there will be more roundups coming.”
“Juliette, there’s every reason to believe that. The Union Generale des Israelites de France is helping people like me.” She wiped her eyes again. “I don’t want to go, Juliette, but it is my best chance of survival, and I must take it.”
Juliette went quiet as she stared at her friend. “How could it come to this?”
“The world is crumbling all around us, and no one is doing a thing to stop it.” Ruth smiled sadly. “How could it not come to this, Juliette? How could it not?”
* * *
By the following month, Ruth was gone, too, having left with a whisper in Juliette’s ear that she would pray for her each day. At night, sleep no longer came easily. As Paul snored beside her in the bed they shared, she stared into the blackness, thinking of the vanished Levy family—and of the impossible choice Ruth had made to let her children go.
The winter passed, dark and cold, and there was never enough food for the children, never enough fuel for the fire, but they were here, and they were safe and together. Elise came by at least once a week, and Juliette’s children delighted in seeing Mathilde. There were dark circles under Elise’s eyes now, and though she rarely spoke of her husband, Juliette knew that Olivier was the cause of her friend’s deepest concerns. Elise was in a better position financially than Juliette—she often brought bread and cakes for the children, thanks to Olivier’s art dealer and his black market contacts—but Juliette knew that it weighed on her friend heavily that Olivier’s activities were growing more and more dangerous.
“I’m not even certain he knows what he’s fighting for anymore,” Elise confessed one day at the beginning of March, her tone weary. “At this point, he merely seems to enjoy being in the middle of the action.”
“And you’ve talked to him about this?”
“More times than I can count. He doesn’t see the danger he’s putting Mathilde and me in, Juliette. He thinks he’s invincible, that we all are. But no one is invincible in war.”
That night, after Juliette and Paul had put the children to bed, Paul sat quietly in the parlor, reading a book, and Juliette puttered around the kitchen, washing and putting away dishes, full of nervous energy she couldn’t quite place. The winter had been long, and the nights seemed endless, especially with the blackout curtains drawn. That’s what she was thinking about—the blackness of the night—when suddenly, a bright burst of orange appeared at the very edges of the window shades, startling Juliette so much that she dropped the plate she’d been drying. It shattered on the floor.
“Juliette?” Paul’s voice was full of alarm as he appeared in the doorway. “What is it?”
“Something outside,” she said, moving closer to the window, which provided a full view of the building across the street and a glimpse of the rooftops that rolled east. She put a hand on the blackout shade, but Paul stopped her. “Turn the lamp out first,” he warned, and she quickly extinguished their light, plunging them into darkness.
Slowly, quietly, Juliette pulled the shade aside, and she and Paul gasped in unison, staring in disbelief at the wild landscape before them. All across the night sky, bright lights—some orange, some white—drifted slowly down, like fireworks in slow motion, a million candles floating in from the heavens. At first, Juliette couldn’t understand what was happening. “Paul?” she said, her heart hammering in both fear and exhilaration at the breathtaking show.
He was as frozen in place as she was for a second, and then all of a sudden, he gasped. “My God, Juliette, it’s an air raid!” he said, springing to motion, pulling her along with him.
She was already running up the stairs toward the children’s rooms behind him, his hand still on her arm. “But the sirens didn’t go! It can’t be—”
“They’re markers!” he shouted. Panic had erased all sense of volume, and his voice woke the children; she could hear all three of them crying as he flung open the door. “They’re dropping phosphorescent markers so they can see their targets in the dark!”
And all at once she understood as the light outside their window grew brighter and brighter, setting the sky on fire. The clouds over the city reflected the colors back like a terrible furnace surrounding them, and as Paul grabbed the boys from their beds, scooping them effortlessly into his arms, terror snaked itself around Juliette’s limbs, freezing her in place. “Get Lucie!” he cried, already running from the room and heading for the stairs. “Juliette, now!” he barked.
She snapped out of it, grabbing her wailing two-year-old and stumbling after Paul. “The gas masks!” she screamed.
“I’ll get them! Just get to safety!”
Down the stairs they all flew, through the bookstore, through the children’s section, to the narrow door against the opposite wall that led to the small, private basement beneath, which they used mostly as a storage area for books waiting to be shelved. “I’ll come back up for the masks!” Paul called over his shoulder as they clambered down the cellar stairs, all three of the children crying now. “Juliette, get on top of the children!”
In the darkness, Juliette pushed the sobbing children to the floor and shielded them with her body as Paul ran back up the stairs, returning a few seconds later with the five gas masks the local prefecture had provided. They’d had to queue for hours to receive them, and Juliette had been forced to return twice to argue that the children needed smaller masks, for the adult ones would swallow their faces but offer no protection. The result was that Paul, Juliette, and Claude had adult masks, and they’d been granted two smaller masks for Alphonse and Lucie. It would have to do.
The children cried and protested as she and Paul wrestled them now into the large masks, which smelled like rubber and made them all look like bug-eyed aardvarks. In the light of day, when they’d practiced putting them on, the boys had laughed about how funny they all looked, but now, it all felt terrifyingly real. The masks would protect them if this was a gas attack, and the beams of the cellar should protect them if it was a bombing, but there was no way to know what was coming.
“It’s the Allies,” Paul guessed after he had secured the masks on the boys. Lucie was wailing as Juliette secured the mask to her tiny face. “They won’t hit us here. They’re after the Renault factory.”
“The Renault factory?” Juliette asked as she struggled to put her own gas mask on. The strap caught in her hair. “But the factory is French!”
“They’re repairing German tanks, Juliette! They have no choice!” And then Paul’s mask was on, obscuring his face, and as Juliette pulled hers on, too, the world went dim, and she felt like she was in a terrible nightmare. She could hear the rush of her own strained breathing, the muted sounds of the children crying and whimpering in fear, but she couldn’t soothe them with her words, for they wouldn’t be able to hear her. So instead, she held tightly to their little bodies, and then Paul wrapped all of them in his arms, and they stayed that way as the whistling sounds overhead began.
When the first bomb hit, somewhere far away, the earth trembled, and Juliette clung to the children more tightly and began to pray, begging God to spare them. In the near blackness of the basement, which rattled each time a bomb landed nearby, Juliette squeezed her eyes tightly closed and tried to understand what was happening. The Allies were bombing them? How could they do such a thing, even if the Germans were in control of the Renault factory? Didn’t they understand how close the factory stood to civilian homes, how none of the innocent French people in the paths of the bombs that night had anywhere else to go? That most of the citizens on the ground here hated the Occupation, too? And why were the explosions so nearby? The factory was a thirty-minute walk away. Even in the smoke and darkness and confusion, how could the bombers be missing their targets by so many kilometers?
The cellar shuddered, the children screamed, and the world shook again and again, as their muffled cries, the shrieks of falling bombs, and the roar of aircraft engines went on for what felt like an eternity. Juliette could smell smoke and gasoline, and the terror of being blown up by an errant bomb was suddenly riding tandem with the dread that they might all burn to death down here if a fire began above them. Eventually, the bombing subsided, and Juliette felt her shoulders sag in relief. It was over. They had survived.
She began to remove her mask, but Paul grabbed her arm.