His father held him up. “Still want to go in?”
Zachary nodded. The corridor was dark. He looked through the doors of the first classrooms. They were empty and dark too. All the windows were boarded up. They followed the sounds of the voices along the corridor, past more empty classrooms.
No charger have I, and no sword by my side / Yet still to adventure and battle I ride. Somewhere, in the heart of the school, one class was singing. They found the classroom and stood outside. Zachary eased the door open and blinked in the sudden light.
Though back into storyland giants have fled . . . The singing tailed off as the children noticed Zachary standing there. There were only seven of them, not a whole class, and they were not all the same age. He recognized only two of them: most were not children he had been evacuated with. The older ones stopped singing first, and soon the little ones fell silent too. Last to stop was the teacher, who stood conducting the children with her back to the door. She carried on singing as she swept out the time in the air.
“ . . . And the knights are no more and the dragons are . . . Oh, do come along, children, what on earth is the matter, why don’t you sing?”
She spun around and Zachary flinched. Then her face softened. She nodded to his father, took a step toward Zachary and folded him into her arms. He collapsed against her, too weak to talk.
“Zachary Lee,” said Mary. “You are frightfully late, as usual.”
July, 1940
PARIS FELL, THE GRANDFATHERS manning the pissoirs as Hitler in his Mercedes cabriolet rutted the lawns of the Champ de Mars. The invaders marched behind his car with polished boots while the old men with their brandy headaches pissed venom against the zinc. The thing was to resist. It did not matter that it splashed back on their shoes.
In her classroom on Hawley Street, Mary chalked an outline of Europe on the blackboard and marked Paris with an Eiffel Tower. She topped off the tower with a beret and tucked a little baguette under its arm, since that was the only way the thing ought to be drawn.
“Who can tell me who built the Eiffel Tower? Yes?”
“Was it Napoleon?” said Maud Babington.
Mary smiled. “Nearly.”
Betty Oates was waving her hand in anguish, as if the answer’s continuing presence within her body were causing unbearable pain.
“Yes, Betty?’
“Gustave Eiffel!’
“Very good. The Eiffel Tower is made of ferrous metal and it has a magnetic field that generates romance within a mile of it.”
George Hampton, who was simple, became flustered at the word “romance.” He was fifteen and handsome. Young women dropped their purses in front of him to start a conversation, until they realized what was the matter. Now he pressed both palms to his temples and made the noise of a door hinge wanting oil.
Betty, ever diligent, was writing in her exercise book: Eiffel Tower. Magnetic field. Romance < 1 mile. George was still agitated. Poppy Brown, the mongol, climbed down from her desk and shuffled over to his place. She took his hands by the wrists and clapped them together until George forgot what had upset him. He wiggled his fingers, which to his great delight responded with pleasing undulant motions. “Pop-pop-pop,” he said, forming an accidental spit bubble with every bilabial. Poppy, who was five, clambered back up to her seat and stared at the blackboard with her slanted brown eyes that squinted outward, her bottom teeth protuberant over the upper lip.
Mary said, “Thank you, Poppy.”
Poppy pointed at the blackboard—her hand had a thumb and five fingers—and said, “That?”
“Is the Eiffel Tower, darling.”
Poppy made the shape of it with two steepled index fingers, then stuck one up each nostril.
“Don’t do that, please.”
Poppy withdrew her fingers and inspected a strand of mucous that had followed them out, pea green and fabulous. She ate it.
“Ewww!” said Kenneth Cox. “That! Is! Dis! Gusting!”
“Nevertheless,” said Mary, “it is not yet rationed, and I don’t suppose we must blame Poppy for making the most of it.”
The class settled. “All right, children. Some of you have heard the news about Paris, and I daresay you are worried.”
Zachary said, “What’s happened in Paris?”
“The Germans have arrived there.” She made her tone disapproving, as if the Germans had arrived at an inconvenient moment, or with too much luggage.
She was glad Zachary had spoken up. Naturally he was timid, after everything that had happened. If she could get him to put up his hand for one question a day, it was a small victory.
She drew a swastika on the blackboard beside her Eiffel Tower. “Who can tell me what this nasty symbol is?”
Thomas Essom, the cripple, gripped the push rims of his wheelchair. “Swastika,” he whispered.
“It’s all right, you know. You won’t drop dead just from saying the word.”