Page 41

It was the same everywhere they went. Too many people crammed into spaces with no roof, no proper floor. Emmie would produce a handful of candies for the children; hand out baby clothes and fine-tooth combs; elicit information about ailments and other pressing needs. And the missing. Every family had its tale of the missing, the children away avec les boches.

“She sounds lovely,” Emmie would say as a beloved and tattered photo was shown or a bit of old embroidery displayed or a treasured teacup, that was the last possession of a daughter or sister lost to the boches. “Now, about your grandson, we mean to start holding classes for children. . . . May I put his name on the list?”

“We must bring a bathtub next time,” Emmie said ruefully as they climbed back into the White, having made the rounds of all sixteen families eking out their existence in what had once been their home. “I’ve never seen so many lice. I’m itching. Are you itching?”

“I wasn’t until you mentioned it,” said Kate, not wanting to bring a bathtub, not wanting to come back ever again. I’m just here to drive the truck, she wanted to say, but of course, she wasn’t, she couldn’t; they were meant to all pitch in on everything. But she didn’t know how Emmie did it, how she kept talking and talking when Kate felt frozen in the face of so much misery, so much grief.

I had a daughter once. . . . I had a house once. . . . I had a family once. . . . The catalogue of loss went on and on.

“Shall we go back and take stock?” Kate asked hopefully. “We can help sweep out the Orangerie.”

“It’s hours until sunset yet,” said Emmie, spreading out the map. “Let’s go to Canizy.”

“It’s after three already.” It took a surprisingly long time, recording life histories. Kate had thought they would be in and out, checking boxes. “Canizy is the farthest of the villages.”

“Yes, but I want to visit the Boche baby and make sure she’s being properly cared for—if we leave by six, we should still be able to make it back before dark.”

“Assuming we don’t get a puncture. Oh, all right. Canizy it is.”

Canizy wasn’t even a ruin; it was a wreck. But the Boche baby was . . . a baby. A rather handsome baby at that, pink and crinkly-faced, folded in a dirty blanket, blinking its big, dark eyes at Kate in an unexpectedly endearing way.

Not that she’d expected horns. Not really. Or a miniature Prussian helmet.

“How perfectly beautiful,” said Emmie, carefully taking the bundle-wrapped baby from its mother, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Possibly younger still. It was hard to tell; dirt and worry added premature lines to the girl’s face. Emmie began to unwrap the layers. “May I? He has the most expressive eyes—just like yours.”

While Emmie was talking, she checked for sores and bruises, discretely testing the limbs, deftly changing out the stained swaddling cloth for a clean one they’d brought with them, all while keeping the mother engaged in a steady stream of gentle chatter.

Kate stood behind her, dutifully taking notes about the members of the household—one elderly woman whose mind was wandering, the young mother, the baby, all sharing the one room with another family—and making lists of imminent necessities, ranging from milk for the baby to shoes for the grandmother, who, it seemed, had a habit of wandering off and would come back with feet bare and bleeding.

“Georgette—that’s the baby’s mother—she’s only just turned fifteen—says her grandmother used to be the heart of the village.” Outside the hovel, Emmie’s face seemed to age five years in as many seconds. She rubbed at her temples with her fingers. “Her grandmother was a figure of defiance throughout the first year of the war, Georgette says, a sort of Robin Hood in skirts stealing things back from the Germans and sharing them through the village and never getting caught. But then the boches took her husband, her son, and two daughters away with them into Germany and it broke something in her. Georgette says that they got word that her uncle—that’s the son—died in a work camp in Germany, but no one will ever tell her grandmother that, so she keeps waiting for him to come home. I suppose that’s kinder? And she doesn’t seem to remember much from one moment to another, so it would be harder for her to have him die and die and die again.”

“Are you hungry? We never did have lunch.” It seemed obscene to eat after all that, but Kate’s stomach wasn’t aware of the proprieties and was beginning to growl quite obviously. And she didn’t really want to discuss it anymore.

To die and die and die again . . .

Emmie shook her head. “Georgette told me there was a child hurt this morning, in the old brasserie next to the ruined town hall. I need to see if there’s anything we can do. We can have lunch after,” she offered, and Kate felt like the lowest worm who had ever crawled.

“Never mind lunch,” she said. “Where’s this brasserie of yours?”

If Kate had had lunch, she would have lost it. The child, a little boy of two, had sat down in a basin of boiling water, and his flesh looked like—Kate didn’t want to think what it looked like. It seemed impossible he was still living, but he was, in a horrible, filthy room in the remains of what had once been a brasserie, with his nine brothers and sisters and another widowed mother with three other children. The din created by the thirteen children in that eerie, half-destroyed restaurant was unreal.

“We’ll have to go back and see if we can fetch one of the doctors—” Kate began, raising her voice to be heard over the hubbub.

Emmie grabbed her arm. “This child needs help now. Ambrine—I think I have some ambrine. . . .” At the look on Kate’s face, she said, “Don’t worry. I’ve dealt with burns before. They’re one of the more common injuries. There’s a packet of paraffin in the car—could you get that? And some clean sheets? Don’t worry, little one, we’ll have you feeling much better in just a moment. And a candy? Two candies. I’ll have candies for such a brave boy! Did I say it wrong? You’ll have to help me with my French, won’t you, little man? Kate, if you can heat this, and then if you just hold his arms—yes, like that—while I put this here. . . . I know! I know it hurts, poor little man. . . .”

Kate held his arms, despising herself for not wanting to look. But Emmie didn’t seem to have any such qualms. She applied hot paraffin to the boy’s scalded skin, wrapping it in yards and yards of clean linen. The boy’s mother was instructed on wound care and promised a visit from the doctors the next day (Kate wondered how Julia was going to like that, although she suspected it didn’t matter what Julia thought; Emmie would have her there one way or another) and a bed was made up out of a spare cot from the truck and clean linens, also from the truck.

Kate followed Emmie out, feeling thoroughly dazed and entirely useless. “I had no idea you knew how to do any of that.”

“One learns,” said Emmie. “I’m not a proper nurse, but you do pick up a bit over time. It’s impossible not to. I couldn’t imagine seeing a child in pain like that and standing there with my hands folded. It would be . . . immoral.”

As Kate had been prepared to do. Well, not entirely. She had planned to send for the doctors. That was something, wasn’t it?

“I don’t know how you kept your head like that.” Kate’s hands were shaking. She stuffed them into her pockets to hide it. “I was ready to be ill.”

“I can’t say I’ve seen worse,” said Emmie, tucking the remains of their supplies carefully back in the truck, “but I’ve seen as bad.”

“Was this what your settlement house work was like?” Kate had always assumed that Emmie’s work was the merest hobby, flitting in and out of people’s lives with books and baskets, like the do-gooders who came to Greenpoint to tsk over the poverty and filth of the immigrants and give them pamphlets on hygiene.