Page 27 of The World That We Knew

“We do,” Lea said from her hiding place on the stair. “The baker has gone.”

Ava and the nun both turned to her. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” the sister asked.

“Yes, of course.” Lea raced up the stairs to the classroom and went back to her seat, surprised to find herself comforted by Ava’s presence.

She will follow you to the ends of the earth. When she looks at you I will see you, when she embraces you I will feel your heart beat. You can love her if you want to. It will not be a betrayal, because when you do, I will be there with you.

“Please take Ava in,” Lea said softly as she faced a painting of Jesus, who was said to watch over them all. “Please save her.”

Renée was sitting next to her, and now clucked her tongue. She understood French, but simply refused to speak it. “Niemand kann uns retten,” she said in a whisper when she overheard Lea’s pleas. No one can rescue us.

Ava asked for no payment, other than food and shelter, and it was true the baker had run off, taking a pair of silver candlesticks with her. Ava was taken on as the baker’s replacement, who, as it turned out, had disappeared with the cook. Ava would take on both positions. She was brought to the huge stone kitchen, where there was an enormous woodstove and the stone sinks were large enough to bathe in. There she was given a cot in the scullery, along with two black dresses and a white apron. She was taller than any of the nuns, and because there were no shoes to fit her, she kept the rabbi’s boots. She was comfortable in them by now, and they fitted her perfectly. Ava said she was an excellent cook and she wasn’t in the least bit daunted by the baking. She came upon a pile of cookbooks in the pantry in which some of the recipes were three hundred years old and no longer practical. Blackbird pie, trout stuffed with pine and minced dove, hearts of ducks sautéed in brown butter and spice. She kept to simple fare for the nuns and their students, potato soup with leeks and what little butter they had, cheese pie, chicken stew that could feed fifty, with a gravy that tasted of chestnuts, rice fragrant with wild mint and fennel, apple tarte made with fruit she had collected in the woods, the crust formed from day-old bread.

Twice a month there was a delivery of wheat from a local shop owner. Ava’s first order of business each morning was to bake the baguettes served at breakfast and dinner, a chore that soon became a pleasure. She hoped to learn more about human beings through the process of baking, for their hunger was a mystery to her. She loved to knead the dough, which she set out in tin bowls to rise under white dishtowels. She was quick in forming baguettes, and her loaves were perfectly even. Sonya, the old woman who had been the housemaid at the convent for two decades, came in on Ava’s first morning in the kitchen and was dumbstruck by the new woman’s abilities. The housemaid asked if Ava was a baker’s daughter, but no, such things came naturally to her, she said.

In truth, she felt a kinship with bread and the way it was made, the damp weight kneaded and shaped into proper form, heated until it was set. When she worked in the kitchen she kept her long dark hair swept up with pins, with a white cap on her head. In the afternoons, when Lea was in class, she went walking in the forest beyond the convent to the marshes alongside the river. She carried a basket and often found marvelous things to bring back to the kitchen: mushrooms, hazelnuts, wild blackberries, chervil, water cabbages.

There were no mirrors in the convent, but Lea could see her reflection in the shine of the silverware the girls were made to polish, and she didn’t recognize the person looking back at her. Her hair had grown and was shoulder-length. Her features were so like her mother’s, she had to look away or she might burst into tears. She had begun her monthly bleeding. “Jetzt bist du in Schwierigkeiten,” Renée told her. Now you’re in trouble. “Niemand möchte eine Frau sein.” No one wants to be a woman.

Although Lea hadn’t told Ava about her situation, Ava seemed to know. She left clean rags and new undergarments, and when Lea found them she sobbed. Her mother should be the one to instruct her. She would have told her that Renée was wrong, becoming a woman should not be considered a terrible fate, even though it meant you bled. It was life that you carried inside you, your own and the life of the future. If you survive, I survive inside of you.

By now Lea had looked beneath her roommate’s bed. Renée hoarded food there, bread that was growing moldy, bits of cheese, fruit taken from the lunch table. Lea liked the quiet kitchen, with its stone floors and large windows, and helped Ava in the dark hours of morning before prayers and breakfast. She often filched a baguette, then ran upstairs and hid it beneath Renée’s bed. Renée never thanked her, but her dark eyes would settle on Lea, as if she wished to tell her something. All the same, Lea was friendless and lost and she missed Julien. Ava tried to cheer her with treats. Some new apples, a bar of chocolate she’d found in a cabinet, but Lea couldn’t even bring herself to smile. While the loaves were baking, she wrote notes that she kept in the back of her prayer book. Perhaps one day she would be able to send them to Julien.

“You’re still thinking about him,” Ava said.

“I’m not,” Lea insisted. But she was and they both knew it.

There was no news from Paris, but she worried about Julien’s fate. But there was nothing to do about it, or at least it seemed so until Ava sent Lea to pick up a basket of eggs from a neighbor. There she noticed a pigeon house near the chicken coops.

“You like birds?” the old woman who lived there asked. “These ones are smart. They can always find their way home.” The neighbor wore a red coat that she’d had for thirty years, and a pair of black boots. She took out a pigeon and called him by his name, Étoile, which meant star, with extreme tenderness. “I send my sister in Lyon messages.” All she needed to do was attach a tube to the pigeon’s leg, clasped in place with a leather band. A rolled-up message to her sister was inserted into the tube. All fine here. Come visit one week from Sunday. Don’t miss our visit like you did last month.

Lea watched as the neighbor lifted the bird into the bright sky. They held their hands over their eyes, squinting, as he disappeared into the darkening horizon.

“He’ll be back, don’t you worry,” the old woman said.

She smiled at Lea, unaware that she was speaking to a thief and a liar who had come up with a plan of her own. When the woman was about to go inside, Lea asked if it would be all right if she watched the pigeons for a while, and that is what she did, she watched them coo and peck at one another as she slipped one of the cylinders and a leather band into the pocket of her dress. She ran back to the convent in the falling dark. Ava was waiting for her at the edge of the lawn. From here she could see the neighbor’s yard; she’d kept an eye on Lea. It had been her idea to send her there, after all.

“What were you doing for so long?” Ava asked, as if she didn’t know. She couldn’t abide seeing grief in Lea’s eyes, not when there was a remedy.

Lea shrugged and bit her tongue. “Looking at birds” was all she would say.

“Nothing more?”

“Could you teach me their language?” When Ava hesitated, Lea added, “I know you can. I’ve heard you talk to the heron.”

“It takes time to learn a language.” Especially when it was complicated, with an ancient structure more complex than any human language. There were no numbers, no tenses, more syllables and vowels, and a series of clicks, all with ten or more meanings.

“I have time,” Lea vowed. She knew she was asking for a favor from someone she had treated shabbily. “I promise, I’ll be a good student.”

They went to the garden so lessons could begin. They sat facing each other. Everything else dropped away, everything changed between them, they were of one mind, and as they looked into each other’s eyes neither had the desire to look away. Think in blue, in green, in starlight, in song, in a blessing, in beauty, in gratitude.

Inside the convent they could hear birdsong all through the dinner hour. Some of the girls began to cry and others laughed out loud. The sisters remembered things they had long forgotten, from a time when they were young and filled with faith. No one noticed that Lea was late, and that when she arrived she sat down beside Renée, as if they were friends and had always been so, and that beneath the table, out of sight, Lea handed her a chocolate bar she’d stolen from the kitchen.

When the time came for Lea to ask the heron for what she wanted, she brought a pan of bread and milk into the courtyard as an offering. She had practiced the phrases so often through the night that the girls in the attic thought she was singing them to sleep, and even Renée closed her eyes and dreamed of things she had never seen before, trees made of flowers, beaches of black sand, clouds that were spun out of rain.

The heron came down from the roof when Lea entered the courtyard. After he’d had his breakfast, she begged for a moment of his time. It was a poor attempt at speaking his language, but he gazed at her with his yellow eyes, doing his best to understand her. When he didn’t immediately swoop away, she went on, hopeful he would help her. She asked politely for what she wanted, pleading for him to go back to the house in Paris.

Please find him for me.