Page 40 of The World That We Knew

On the fourth day, he had no choice but to leave. He passed the Roman ruins that had once been the temple of Augustus and Livia, and frankly didn’t know where to go next. By now, there were starving people everywhere. The Germans took whatever they wanted from shopkeepers and farmers until there was nothing left. It wasn’t safe to be in the street, so Julien retreated into someone’s garden, his presence camouflaged by the surrounding bushes after he had cut down some branches with his knife. He had no way to contact his brother, and the best he could do was to occasionally check in with Father Varnier, so here he was, sleeping beneath the rhododendrons with their flat, shiny evergreen leaves.

In the morning it seemed he hadn’t been as well hidden as he’d hoped. The elderly couple that lived in the house peered out at him from their window. Starving, he went to knock on the back door to ask if they might need household work done in exchange for a meal.

“You’re a carpenter?” the old gentleman who answered the door asked.

“More or less,” Julien said.

It was a lie but he supposed he could learn. He was hired for the price of a meal, which he wolfed down before the work had even begun. There was a hole in the roof, and although the old gentleman could still climb up the ladder that was propped against the house, he needed a helper to carry the heavy gray slate made of local rock and the bucket of tar. They worked all that afternoon with the steamy tar, their shirts off in the bright sun.

“I won’t know if we’ve done it right until it rains,” said the old man, who introduced himself as Monsieur Bisset.

They had dinner in the kitchen, where Madame Bisset set an extra plate, asking no questions, pleased that her ceiling would no longer leak. Their son, Alain Bisset, only twenty-two, was among those who had been lost in the Battle of France. They had lit a candle in the church, and had Father Varnier say the prayers for the dead. Perhaps this was the reason the couple allowed Julien to stay through the fall in their garden shed, where he slept among the rakes and brooms, quickly learning to ignore the mice who scuttled about at night, grateful they were mice and nothing more. He wore Alain’s winter coat, and his boots, and he sat at his place at the table. Sometimes, Madame let out a gasp when she came into the room and saw him there. With his long dark hair, and lean body, he looked like her son. But he was not, and Madame Bisset knew it. All the same, they were happy to let him stay, to let one young man live and watch him emerge into the blue morning to knock at the door, ready to attend to the chores on his list.

Madame Bisset became ill in November; it was her son’s birthday month, and most likely she was sick with despair over his fate. There was no body to bury and no one to mourn, and she went into a decline, refusing to rise from bed or cook or even to speak. Julien and Monsieur were halfway through plastering the old crumbling walls in the house when Monsieur Bisset told Julien he was sorry, but Julien would have to go. There were no explanations, but Julien understood. It was dangerous to have him in their house and they had been through enough pain and sorrow. But in truth it was more, when Madame saw a young man working in her parlor she was overcome with longing for her son.

On his last day with the couple, Julien found an old recipe book on a kitchen shelf and quickly set to work baking an apple cake, with fruit plucked from the spindly tree in the garden. He wondered what Ava would say if she could see him now. He’d been a spoiled boy in her eyes, and he had realized that had been true. But now he’d been forced to learn many skills: how to fix a roof, how to cook, how to steal, how to say goodbye.

When it was time for Julien to leave, Monsieur Bisset gave him a sack of food that he could hardly spare. Bread, cheese, crackers, apples, all luxuries.

“Do you know why we helped you?” the old man asked.

The two had become quite close, working together as they did. The house was in far better shape now than it had been when Julien first arrived.

Monsieur lowered his voice, as if the Germans were right outside his door. “Because we hate them.”

Julien would miss the scent of mint that grew in the patchy garden. He would miss lying on his back in the shed, where he would talk to Lea as if she were beside him. She alone understood him, and there were times when he missed her so badly he felt twisted with emotion. Stay alive. He was a flame when he thought of the words she had whispered to him. He did not intend to disappoint her.

The weather was still fine, and Julien could camp in the woods outside the city, like so many other boys and young men who were in hiding. He ran into them sometimes, groups from La Sixième and the French Resistance who were loyal to de Gaulle, the true leader of France, though he was in exile. One evening, Julien came upon two sisters, feral creatures of eight and ten years old who had been lost for weeks after their parents were arrested. Actually, the sisters had found him. He’d made a campsite and was eating the last of Monsieur Bisset’s food, which he’d been doling out to himself in small portions. When he looked up he saw the girls staring, their eyes on his food. They had dark hair and big, glassy eyes, and they appeared to be starving. Their parents had been sent to the terrifying Montluc Prison, where more than two thousand five hundred Jews were imprisoned by the Germans, with thousands deported and eight hundred murdered, dying from torture and neglect. Through a crack in the cupboard door they had seen the soldiers beat their father and do something to their mother that had made her scream. After their parents’ arrest, the girls had hidden in their house with nothing to eat but the peeling paint on the walls. At last, they had climbed out the window and fled into the woods. They trusted no one, but they were starving, so there they were, watching him, not saying a word.

Julien shared his food with them as the girls crouched close by, but not too near. They wolfed down the bread. Julien had saved a crumb, which he kept in his hand. A sparrow swooped down from the tree, then lit in the palm of his hand to take the bread, eating it, unafraid. The girls laughed, shocked that they could do anything other than cry.

Julien brought them to the Bissets’ late that night. Monsieur stared at him when he came to the back door, but when he saw the girls he understood. He summoned his wife from her bed, and when she saw how ragged and underfed the children were, she quickly gestured, willing to take them in. She let them bathe in the big old tub and had them wear her son’s childhood clothing until she could find something more suitable. It was the first time in weeks that Madame had left her bed.

“She needed children,” Monsieur said, to explain why the girls could stay while Julien had been made to leave. They had gone out to have a smoke in the garden. It was a habit Julien had picked up from Victor. “We can take them. We’ll say they’re our own, and after a while they will be.”

Julien nodded and watched the smoke rise into the night sky. Lea would be furious if she knew he was smoking. She’d told him her father had been a doctor, and said smoking was bad for the lungs.

“My brother has a farm,” the old man said. “It’s a little more than three kilometers outside town. Maybe he can use the help.”

They went there together, Monsieur driving, Julien in the space between the front and backseats, beneath a blanket. It was a small farm, and Monsieur Bisset’s brother was a brusque widower who had fields but no one to work them. Julien would stay in a borrowed canvas tent in the woods beyond the pasture until the snows came, and be given two meals each day, as long as he worked without complaint, for the hours were long, and the labor backbreaking. Julien shook hands with the first Monsieur Bisset and they wished each other luck. The food was not as good here, it was simple fare, mostly bread and eggs and cheese, but it was filling, and Julien didn’t mind living outside.

This is what it feels like to be alone, he would have written to Lea if he could. You hear more and see more. You’re a part of the world around you. Ants under the leaves, the clouds moving by. He had begun to divide the world into sections, as his father had taught him to do; everything was a piece of the whole, he understood that now. He had no difficulty finding his way to his campsite in the dark; he did so by touching the trees as though they were a map through a forest maze. The weather grew colder and he could feel how close winter was. At night he looked into the sky and remembered the names of the constellations. There was Orion, the hunter who appears in the winter sky with his bow and his dogs, so that he could be remembered by those who loved him during his time on earth. Julien imagined that his father lay on the ground beside him, looking upward. Dear father, he said aloud.

The nesting birds scattered at the sound of his voice. The vines had grown over his tent so quickly he sometimes thought he would disappear. Snow would fall, ice would cover the canvas, and one day Monsieur Bisset’s brother would come looking for him and be unable to find him in the woods.

Find me, he would have written to Lea if he could.

Find me before I disappear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE DOCTOR’S HOUSE

ARDèCHE, WINTER 1943

AT NIGHT, ETTIE WALKED OUT through the dark trees to have dinner with the doctor, nothing fancy, usually a shared omelet and some potatoes or stewed tomatoes. Dr. Girard, who was considered a fine chess player, had patiently taught her the game, and, as it turned out, she had a real talent for it. There was little else to do while she waited for Victor’s return, although she had begun to act as Girard’s nurse when he was called upon by the Resistance, always unexpectedly, often in the middle of the night. His telephone would ring and they would go off together in his car, a beat-up Renault that groaned when it took the hills as the doctor found his way to a safe house where a patient was waiting. In only a few months Ettie had learned quite a bit, how to clean and bind a wound, how to stitch flesh with a needle and surgical thread, how to calm a distraught man or woman who was in the throes of pain. This will only take a minute, then you’ll be fine, lie still, count to one hundred. Sometimes they would be driven through the night to a remote field, then be blindfolded and led to the injured. Ettie never wavered; she was firm and calm with the patients, and the doctor had been impressed with her courage.

“You’re a surprise,” he said, pleased to have found a worthy opponent at chess and an even worthier assistant in the field.