Page 25 of The World That We Knew

“We refuse to bow to anyone,” the pastor said. “We never have and never will.”

Marianne’s father nodded in agreement. Fifty years earlier there had been a movement called le Réveil, the Awakening, a period in which Huguenots were asked to remember their mistreatment by the Catholic majority to remind them they must never let persecution happen again. They were pacifists who believed in the greater good, a philosophy they began to act upon in 1939, when they accepted Spanish war refugees into their community, taking them into their houses and barns. Later it was the sick children of workers, for the mountain air was thought to cure their ailments. Now it was the Jews. Monsieur Félix had never met a Jew, but that didn’t matter to him.

“We will hide anyone in need as we were forced to hide,” he told the pastor.

The men shook hands on it. The entire village had agreed to stand up to the Germans and would, by the time they were through, rescue between three thousand and five thousand Jews. There would be a messenger coming by, the pastor said, with identity papers that must be hidden so that children could cross the border into Switzerland. Other members of the Resistance would later come to claim the papers. Would this be a problem? Monsieur Félix laughed. He so rarely did so that both the pastor and Marianne were surprised. Then they found themselves laughing with him. No, it was not a problem; it was a blessing to rebel against tyranny, as their grandfathers had done.

Marianne served tea with their own honey. Everyone said it was the best on earth, and the pastor agreed. He asked if Marianne still knew the mountains as well as she had when she was a girl, and she said that indeed she did, even after her time away. She still had the talent of finding her way in the dark.

Would she be willing to take children across the border? She would be a passeur, a local resident who knew the topography, as well as the times of the patrols, and could manage to get those who were fleeing through the barbed-wire barriers. She would be assisted by the OSE, who provided for as many escapes as could be arranged into neutral Switzerland. The Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants was a Jewish organization begun in Russia and Berlin, whose goal was to rescue the next generation. The organization placed refugee children in châteaus the government allowed to be designated as schools.

Marianne thought over this request as she went to collect some speckled eggs from the hens to send home with the pastor. Her heart jolted against her chest and she noticed how sweet the air was. When she returned she said that yes, she would indeed be a guide.

“I can’t promise her safety,” Pastor Durand said to Monsieur Félix.

Marianne looked at her father, who nodded, but she made certain to answer for herself. “No one has to promise me anything.”

Marianne’s father was a man who was always willing to try to do what was right. If he was not a warrior or an angel, if he rarely spoke and never asked her what she thought or what she felt when she was young, he had always tried to do God’s will and act with faith. Now it seemed his daughter was the same, and he was filled with a raw pride. Guiding people across the border was dangerous. Several people had been detained at a crossing place known as the plaine du loup, the Wolf’s Plain. If Marianne were apprehended, she would be on her own. Monsieur Félix gazed at her and thought about Jeanne d’Arc, the girl warrior. Perhaps his daughter was stronger than he’d thought.

“Are you sure you want to help the pastor?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Marianne said. She had always wished to accomplish something, and, as it turned out, this is what she had been waiting for all along.

She went the first time with a man from the village, Albert, with whom she had gone to school and who now had a wife and five children. They shook hands and he told her to take the lead, even though he was a practiced passeur, to see if she still knew her way through the mountains. It took them close to a week, and then they got a ride back from another passeur from Annecy. Marianne felt exhausted and enthralled. She had remembered everything, and was as good a hiker as anyone. She walked from town thinking of the faces of the children who had been rescued. When she got to the house she was surprised to hear voices inside. She went to the barn for a hatchet, fearing another incident with the Germans, but when she returned her father opened the door to tell her they had a visitor, a young man who was a friend of hers.

“I don’t have any friends.” Marianne kept the hatchet in her hand as she walked inside, but dropped it the moment she saw Victor at the table, where he’d been having lunch with Monsieur Félix. Victor looked completely different, thinner and tougher, with his dark hair shaggy and long enough to bother him so that he kept flinging one hand through it, pushing it back. There were fresh burns on his hands and face that showed clearly he had been in an accident.

“Isn’t he your friend?” her father said, confused.

“Yes of course,” Marianne said, her heart lifting. Victor rose so quickly from his chair that it tipped back and fell with a clatter. He came to embrace her, and in his arms she rose off the floor. She was surprised when he stole a kiss, and even more surprised that the kiss burned. That was how it had begun.

He explained he had been living in the forest with a small group of Jewish resisters, and there had been an accident, a bomb had gone wrong. They’d scattered for a while. Victor had been hurt, his face and hands had been scorched. “You need to heal or you’ll be no use to anyone,” his friend Claude had told him.

Victor had seen a doctor known for helping their people. After that, the one place he could think to go was Beehive House.

“I remembered everything you ever told me about your home,” he told Marianne. “That’s how I found you.”

Marianne insisted he put her down. She sat to join them for lunch. She was starving, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Even before the dishes were done, she melted beeswax in a pan, then added olive oil and lavender as an herbal salve. Victor grinned at her as she saw to his burns. When he leaned forward to whisper he was much too close. “It was always you,” he told her.

“Quiet,” she said, glancing at her father. “That’s nonsense.”

But it wasn’t nonsense, at least not for her. She let him kiss her again, but only once, when her father was outside with Bluebell, the goat. “That’s enough,” she said, but of course it wasn’t. She made up a bed for him in the parlor, and he went to sleep immediately, grateful and exhausted. Victor was beautiful and young. But he wasn’t a boy anymore; he was a fighter. Marianne’s head was spinning to think he was here, in their house. When her father asked if she’d like to look at the stars, she was happy to do so.

“That boy seems to know you well,” her father said in an offhand way as he lit a small cigar, one of a few that he rationed for special occasions.

“Well, of course. We shared a house for five years.”

“Were you happy when you were away?” For all those years he had wondered what his daughter’s life was like in Paris. He thought she might come home with a family, a husband and perhaps some sons, but that was not the case.

“I was happy,” Marianne said. “He made me happy,” she admitted. “But I missed this place.”

The stars were falling from the sky as they climbed up the hill, he on his crutches, she with a ready arm to guide him. She made her father a promise that nothing would happen under his roof.

“Whatever happens, you’re my daughter,” he said.

She nodded, content to be here with him to gaze at the constellations that were so familiar from her childhood. You couldn’t see a trail of stars covering the entire sky in Paris. You had to be here in the countryside on a clear night. She thought of Victor asleep in the parlor, and the powder burns on his face and hands. He was here for now, and that was enough. Everything might disappear, but not these stars. Her father should not have the strength to climb this hillock, but he did it anyway, and he trusted her to do what was best. He was who he was, after all, and had loved her even while she was gone. Standing beside him, she felt fortunate to have found her way home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN