“They’re closed,” Cathérine said. “They get up in the dark to bake.”
“Someone is moving inside.” He rapped on the glass respectfully but urgently. They could hear heavy engines – perhaps of tanks or half-tracks. “I thought we had hours,” Philippe said. “We don’t.”
No one came. “Oh God,” Cathérine exclaimed as she saw, at the end of the street, the first vehicles leading an endless column of half-tracks, command cars, and trucks speeding past the gap straight into the sun.
Philippe rested his cello on the sidewalk and put his arms around his wife. The convoy at one end of the street was now matched by the lead vehicles of a similar column at the other end. As minutes passed, thousands of transports, artillery pieces, and tanks went by unceasingly. These were only part of an immense, overwhelming power stretching toward Paris. Philippe had seen such things as a soldier in the Great War, but to Cathérine they were new.
The glass door opened. Standing inside, his left hand still controlling the door lever – for he had yet to imagine much less make up his mind about what might be asked of him – was a short man in his fifties, with graying hair, a mustache of the same coloration, and a white apron, its strings loosely hanging parallel with the pinstripes of his gray pants.
This was Louis Mignon, thrice-wounded veteran of the previous war, baker, chef, deeply devout Catholic, husband of Marie, father to Jacques, and savior of Philippe Lacour, Cathérine Lacour, and their unborn child, Jules.
RISKING EVERYTHING HE had, the great-grandfather of Marie Druart Mignon had bought the building during a nineteenth-century financial panic, and now it was hers, three storeys above a shop, a steep Mansard roof with no windows on the street but three louvered vents where dormers might have been. One small dormer window looked out over the back garden, and in the twenties, when business was good, Louis had had a bathroom installed, even before a staircase, when the main plumbing stack had to be redone and the contractor suggested that they take the opportunity to prepare the attic for future habitation.
Hearing trucks and armored vehicles, Louis brought Philippe and Cathérine in quickly, closed and locked the door, and peered out the window, to left and right. “They’re not coming down this street,” he said. He stared at his guests. “Is she Jewish?” he asked Philippe. There was no hostility. It was a necessary question. Cathérine was beautiful, her face and deep red hair different somehow from the faces and deep red hair of the women of Brittany and Normandy. One could tell.
“We both are,” Philippe answered.
“You look Dutch. I would swear you were Dutch.” Philippe was tall and blonde. “You could pass for German. You’re not a German?”
Philippe shook his head to indicate that he wasn’t. “We were Dutch a long time ago before we came to France. There are many Dutch Jews.”
“What do you expect of me?” Louis asked.
“Nothing.”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
“No.”
“Not a temple, or other Jews? They say Jews always come out on top.”
“Yes, of course, like us.”
“You don’t take care of your own?”
“We would if we could. Right now, the richest, most powerful Jews in Paris are headed toward the Pyrenees, maybe walking on the road. Some may have diamonds sewn into their clothes, but that won’t help us here.”
“What will happen if the Germans see you?”
“I don’t know. They don’t like Jews of course, and although it’s not written on my face, I killed some Germans in Fourteen-Eighteen.”
Louis now looked at him in a different light. “I killed them, too,” he said. “You’ve come from Paris?” He could hear it in Philippe’s speech.
“This afternoon.”
“Why here if you don’t know anyone?”
“The trains were empty in this direction, and we thought we might get to Switzerland.”
“No,” Louis said. “Everything’s shut down.”
At this point Jacques and Marie descended from the floor above. “Who are they?” Marie asked. She was a little shorter than her husband, with wavy blonde hair. Jacques – seventeen, thin, tall, and dark – saw the arrival of the Lacours as messengers of what life was going to be like. He had already adapted, and for him it was an adventure.
In answer to his wife’s question, Louis Mignon said, “They’re Jews from Paris. We have to put them in the attic. The hatch is in the ceiling of the closet, and if we stuff the shelf with duvets you won’t be able to see the opening. We’ll have plenty of food, because the Germans will make us bake for them and we can siphon off whatever these two ….” He glanced at Cathérine, “these three, need.”
Marie thought about this, completely unafraid. “But the Germans will be here for bread and pastry every day.”
“That’s good,” Louis told her. “It’ll be as if it’s their own. They’ll be happy each time they take away what we bake, and they’ll never look here because for them it will be pleasant and familiar. If I could, I’d hide Jews across the street from wherever the Germans will have their headquarters. Jacques,” his father commanded, “get the ladder.” Everyone was enthusiastic, as if they were embarking on something that would neither be difficult nor last long.
MARIE MIGNON DELIVERED Jules as Philippe paced on the other side of a sheet hung as a barrier in the dimly lit attic. Philippe was puzzled, disarmed, and made superfluous by the feminine power and mystery of bearing and bringing forth new life. Jules cried for only a few seconds when he first came into the world. As if he had understood, he suddenly stopped. For four years, silence came naturally at first, then in imitation, and then as a game in which sound, though desired above all else except freedom, was the enemy. They didn’t flush the toilet or bathe unless the shop was closed and the Mignons kept watch, ready to knock with a broomstick against the ceiling of the third floor, as a signal to stop. Even when he was hurt or fell with a shock, Jules hardly cried, or when he did it was nearly silent, a disciplined gasping, then tears and nearly inaudible short breaths. For four years, like his parents, he didn’t speak, but only whispered, and didn’t know that his and their voices could be full, clear, and less like wind gently whistling through imperfections in the window frames of an old house.
Philippe fingered the strings of his cello and moved his right hand – always entrancing to Jules – as if he were holding the bow that he left in the case so as not to be too tempted. Though Philippe could hear the music as if it were actually sounding, Jules could not, but he saw clearly that his father was lifted into a different world that shone on his face and showed in his motions.
Little Jules would try to go there, too, moving his own imaginary bow with great seriousness. For his father and mother this was wonderful to see. “Someday,” Philippe told him, “you’ll learn to do this with a real bow, and with sound.”
“When?” Jules had whispered.