“Someday.”
The sounds that the child did hear came from the street and neighboring houses: engines, hawkers’ cries, orders commanded through German loudspeakers, thunder, rain and hail on the roof, birdsong, the wind, water running in pipes, muted conversation and laughter, and, eventually, artillery and bombs – bombs on the railheads, bombs on bridges, bombs in the city. The Lacours could never go to the basement during a bombing, where anyone on the street, including German soldiers, SS, even Gestapo, might take shelter. But as time wore on and the Germans didn’t show, Louis Mignon suggested that if the bombardments grew heavy enough it might be worth the risk.
For his first four years Jules knew nothing but one big, brown room, with raw, unfinished wood making up the steep ceiling, the knee walls, the beams, and the floor. A taut bedsheet on a wood frame cordoned off his parents’ ‘bedroom,’ where, when Jules was deep asleep, they made love in complete silence except for not-quite-silent, astounded breaths. Perhaps having heard this in his dreams, for the rest of his life, try as he might, no matter how abandoned his lovemaking, Jules was never able to utter an exclamation, a cry, a groan, or a single word.
They had no artificial light, because even with blackout curtains it might have shown through a fissure in the walls or vents. Thus, their hours were decided by the sun, and when the days grew short and the nights so long they couldn’t sleep through them, they whispered in the dark. They dared not look out their one window when it was light, so the only part of the outside world Jules knew other than a pinched view of the street through the louvers of the vents was the back garden in moonlight. Because the city was blacked out, he hadn’t even been able to see warm lamps in beckoning windows.
Although light came through the window in the day – had it not, they would have lived just like bats instead of almost like bats – Jules thought the world was much darker than it is. He thought the moon was the sun, something he was not allowed to see in the day, when, in his particular cosmology, for some reason the “moon” grew much brighter. The most beautiful things he had ever beheld were the beginnings of sunrise and the reflected remnants of sunset, especially when one or the other struck new copper flashing on a distant roof or steeple and the reflection of what he thought was the moon in its excitable state shot through the darkness of the attic, illuminating white, dancing dust in its beam and painting a portion of the sloping roof in blinding gold. The first time he saw the sun itself he was knocked back in shock, and his father, who was holding him up to the window as he himself stood on a chair, nearly toppled over. In the spring of 1943, a few months after most of the 226 Jews of Reims who had been flushed out of their hiding places had been sent east to die, he saw moonlight on a tree in the back garden when it bloomed into a fixed white cloud that winked on and off as the true clouds above it hid and revealed the light.
Immediately upon Jacques’ report of what the Resistance knew about the deportations of the spring, the Mignons had refined their already ingenious system. They would eat their meals and clean up before delivering food to the attic. Thus, when the Lacours had finished and the dishes were brought down, there would never be two sets that might cast suspicion. Jacques would keep watch during the passages. Working for the Resistance, he, like everyone in the house, was always in danger. Philippe regretted every day that he could not risk for the Mignons what they risked for him. He asked if he could participate in the actions that Jacques reported, taking the boy’s place as the obligation of an adult and a veteran. He knew how to use weapons and how to fight. But no, it was out of the question. He couldn’t move on the street. Even with false documents he would have been conspicuously out of place as he left and returned to the Mignons, passing Wehrmacht and SS troops and officers who, despite their military discipline, were as weak as anyone else in the face of baguettes and the famous biscuits rose de Reims, the scarce ingredients for the latter made available to a rather nervous Louis by an SS officer who, had he known what the Mignons were doing, would have executed the whole family without so much as a thought, rapidly delivering pistol shots to the backs of their heads.
The scheme required that even laundry be matched, so that though Cathérine was thinner than Marie, nothing came down to be washed unless it could be plausibly worn by one Mignon or another. Jules’ clothes never came down but were laundered with many of Cathérine’s in the bathroom sink, and part of his play was silently kneading them in the water.