How Huge the Night (18 page)

The door scraped as it opened. Bright light hurt her eyes. A
figure
stood dark against it, holding a bowl in a hand that shook, and set it on the desk. The door shut, the key turned in the lock. Niko lay on her bare mattress, looking up at it; a hot bowl of soup, white steam rising into the thin lines of light the shutters let in. She did not move. After three days, you didn’t feel it anymore, the hunger. She hadn’t been even one day in the dark yet, but already she knew.

After three days in the dark, she wouldn’t feel anything
anymore
. She would be gone. Like him. Like her mother. Gone.

A dark silhouette stood against the light in the doorway: a nun. She stood; not shaking, not turning to leave. Looking at Niko. Sister Theresa from the marketplace, who had promised them soup and a bed.

Slowly Niko stood, and looked back into Theresa’s steady eyes. She felt something give in her chest; her mouth opened.
You do not think I am an animal. Sister. Do you?

Non sono
… she didn’t know the word for crazy. The word for sane. She didn’t know.

She stood a long moment; then with her hand, she touched the bowl on the desk.
Zuppa
, she said. Soup. She pointed to the mattress and said
letto
. She touched the door, said
porta
. Then she looked Theresa in the eye and said
luce
. Light. “
Per favore. Luce
.”

“
Non sei pazza
,” said Theresa. “
Vado a chidere.” Ask,
that meant.
I will ask. “Vado a chidere luce.
”

And Theresa set the bowl on the desk, looked at Niko and stepped out the door. It swung shut behind her, and Niko heard the key turn in the lock.

She waited for hours. But no light came.

The teachers didn’t even try to teach the last three days. Nobody would have listened.

The
boches
were sitting on the Somme River; the troops in Belgium were trying to evacuate to England. That was all they knew. Julien’s class stood under the tree, looking at their little map in the dirt, and said nothing. On Saturday Henri knelt and erased it, carefully.

They walked out the gate, all of them quiet, all of them
glancing
back. Their school looked strange and empty and small as they crossed the bridge; the world around them was widening. The sky hung huge above the hills as they stepped out into their new life.

He didn’t know what to do. He tried going into town, to see if any of the guys were around. He met Gilles and Lucien on a street corner, but the second time Lucien said, “We’ll drive those
boches
out yet,” in a tone of brittle insistence, Julien lost it. “You know my father?” he said, leaning in. “The history prof? You know what he says? ‘We haven’t lost yet, but we will.’”

That was the end of
that
.

At home, Mama was weeding the kitchen garden in the yard where he used to kick his soccer ball. “Want help, Mama?”

“This is my work. Find your own.”

He tried. He pulled Benjamin off the radio and went down to the farm, but Grandpa didn’t want them. They stood in the garden, a vast spread of dark tilled earth and green shoots, and Grandpa took off his hat and wiped his forehead and said he couldn’t train them. This growing season was too important, what with the prices and the war. “Sylvain and Jean-Luc have worked for me for years; they know exactly what they’re doing”—the two men moved down the rows using short-handled hoes as if they were their own hands—“and they’re what I need for now. Come back in a month when we start picking. For now—” He glanced up at the hills. “Go walking. Get to know the hills. Could come in handy.”

Benjamin looked up for the first time.

That evening, Grandpa walked with them and showed them how to find food. Dandelion leaves for salad and roots for coffee; wild thyme and mint and marjoram; nettles—stinging nettles—for soup. One of the most nourishing plants there was, he said, smiling at the looks on their faces. They weren’t going to waste any of what God had put out there for them. Not this year.

There was no bread. Breakfast was
potatoes
. Lunch was potatoes and cheese. There was no sugar. There’d been meat only on Sundays for months, and this week it was a beef bone in the leek soup. “I’m sorry—” Mama started. Papa cut in, “You will absolutely not apologize for this soup, Maria. Nor for the prices, nor for the war.”

Julien and Benjamin walked. Belgium had surrendered
unconditionally
. The
boches
were coming. They didn’t talk about it. They knelt in pastures between
genêts
in golden bloom and grubbed up
dandelions
, and Julien watched Benjamin get dirt under his fingernails and on his shiny leather shoes. He watched Benjamin pull on gloves and step carefully into a ditch, and grasp his first nettle, and pull till it came up by the roots. He stuffed it whole into his bag.

“Um,” said Julien, “we’re supposed to get just the young leaves?”

“We’re not wasting anything,” said Benjamin.

Julien stood at the crest of the hill, the
genêts
blazing yellow around him, and wondered when a letter would reach Paris if he sent it now. Whether it ever would. The white clouds raced through the blue, and the hills sang with bloom, and he thought of the Rue Bernier, and the park, and Vincent; the way he’d look now, sixteen years old and thinner, a fire in his dark eyes.
We’ll drive those
boches
out yet
.

Julien stuck his hands deep in his pockets and watched the cloud shadows flow over his hills.

He didn’t know what had happened to him. The chestnuts were in bloom, their long feathery flowers spreading like a pale yellow dust over the distant treetops; his eyes traced the thousand greens of those woods, the dark chestnut leaves and the deep green of scrub pines, the vivid leaves of the oaks and the light, living green of pasture. And everywhere the
genêts
, the dark, dull, tough
genêts
covered in gold.

He’d learned somewhere, and he didn’t know where, to love this. The curve of the hill that lay behind Grandpa’s farm—he loved it, and the low mountains in the distance, and the high wooded ridge that hid the road north and stood like a bluff above the Tanne. And the flash of the Tanne itself, down below, the river that had flowed there when his grandfather was a child. It would flow there still, singing the same liquid music to itself, when all of them were gone, and he was glad.

They walked the north road beside the train tracks at the foot of the ridge; they walked east where the hills grew low and rolling. They followed trails into the woods and dirt roads between
pastures
fenced with black stone walls. They were hungry. Mama packed them potatoes with no butter, and they wolfed them down as if they had never tasted food before, and they were wonderful. But not enough. They walked, feeling the unfamiliar edge of
hunger
in their bellies.

In the evening, it was still the same: the radio, the cluster of faces around it. In the daytime, there was peace somehow—in the green of the land, in the strength of his legs, in the mass and solidity of the hills they climbed. But in bed at night, Julien tried fumblingly to pray and found no words. What did God have to do with German tanks overrunning the earth, with bombers pounding Rotterdam to blood and fire? What did God have to do with the blitzkrieg?

He didn’t know.

He crept downstairs in the dark, wishing there was something, anything, he could eat. Wishing for warm milk to help him sleep; milk that he’d taken for granted in the old days, when there was enough.

There was candlelight in the kitchen, and Mama, a cup in her hand and her back to the door. She turned.

“Mama,” he whispered, “I can’t sleep.”

She nodded.

“Is there—anything I can have?”

“Sit down,” she whispered. “I’ll make you chamomile.”

He sat. Her Bible lay open on the table, in the wood-and-canvas cover he had made. The page it was open to was torn. He looked into the candle flame.

“Mama?” he whispered finally. “What was it like? The … other war?”

Mama looked at him, her face half in shadow. She put his cup of tea on the table and sat by him. “What do you want to know?”

He took the cup, hot against his fingers. It would warm his
stomach
. Fool it awhile. “Were you … were you hungry?”

She was looking straight ahead. She was looking at the candle as if it was the last light on earth. “Yes. Your grandmother. Your grandmother died of hunger.”

He stared at her. She did not look at him.

“They took our goats. We hid the best three, but they found them—they were hungry too—but they had guns. Julien.” He could feel her shaking. “Julien. I’m sorry. I can’t talk about this.” Her voice had lowered. “I pray you’ll never understand.”

They sat for a long time, watching the candle quiver in the dark. Listening to her breathing grow slower. “I’ve never been back,” she murmured. “It was so quiet. Without Mamma singing.”

She looked at him, and her mouth lifted in the ghost of a smile. “She sang off-key,” she said.

They walked south. Benjamin suggested it. Benjamin, who never spoke.

Benjamin wanted to make a map. They found a slate and some chalk and traced the roads they’d walked. Julien marked where they found nettles or blackberry brambles. Benjamin traced the south farm track and its lanes and the roads to Le Puy and the Rhône Valley, a full morning’s walk south. He marked the field near that same crossroads, where they found the bees.

A whole field of white clover, buzzing, alive with them; and in the woods behind, a dead tree golden with promise. He could taste it already. That feeling of sweet fullness after a meal, of having eaten
dessert
—he’d almost forgotten what it was like.

“Monday,” he said. Benjamin nodded and almost smiled.

That night there was news, finally. The Germans had captured forty thousand French troops at Dunkerque, and they were on the move again. Headed south.

Then the power went out.

“Though an army lay siege to me, my heart will not fear,” read Pastor Alex. Everyone was listening. “Though war break out against me, I am still filled with confidence.”
And if they’re bombing Paris right now?
“How could David be confident?” asked Pastor Alex. He described David’s situation. He could have been describing theirs. Every eye in the room was on him. Julien saw Monsieur Bernard in the next pew, his face still as stone, tightening ever so slightly when Pastor Alex used the word
defeat
, the word
refugee
.

“This man can speak to us,” Pastor Alex said. “Let us listen.”

Julien listened. David wanted only one thing in his defeat, Pastor Alex said. Only one, but he had to have it. “He wanted God. ‘Do not abandon me, do not hide your face from me.’ In God, he says, he has a light, a stronghold, a shelter. If God is with him, he says, ‘I will not be afraid.’”

Not afraid. Were Mama and Papa afraid, was Pastor Alex afraid? Was God with them?

“Show me the road you want me to go,” read Pastor Alex. “Lead me along the straight path.” Then he leaned forward in his pulpit and paused. A hush fell over the crowd.

“Friends,” he said, “we know what is happening. The time has come to say it. France is defeated.” The words fell slow and heavy. “The straight path is to walk, without closing our eyes, into this defeat. To know that the presence of God is not, for all this, taken away from us unless we choose to despair of him. To ask him to show us the road he wants us to go—now—” He said the next three words in a slow and level voice: “under German occupation.”

Julien opened his mouth, and tears were in his eyes. His parents were holding each other. Benjamin had his head down. Julien put an arm over his friend’s shoulder and sat looking up at the pulpit, the tears running down his face, grieving for his country.

Pastor Alex came that night to talk to them.

“I wish I had spoken about this sooner. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect all this.”
Really
. “We all know the Germans will probably be here before the end of June. What—what do you know? About the Nazis? And … the Jews?”

“I know there’s persecution,” said Papa. “I know there’s prejudice—maybe hatred.”

“Hatred. Yes. Listen. I have relatives in Germany. I traveled there before the war, while Hitler’s power was rising. Martin, Maria, hatred is a mild way of putting it.” He looked down at his hands, which were clasping each other tightly. “I believe that if the Nazis could find a way to make people accept it, they would kill them all.” He swallowed. “I believe it is very dangerous now to be a Jew in Germany. And soon …” He looked at them.

“Germany will come here,” Papa finished.

“Yes. It would be best if very few people knew that Benjamin is a Jew.”

“It’s a little late for that,” said Papa quietly.

Julien and Benjamin carried coals in a pot, feeding them with twigs, a full half-day’s walk to where the bee tree was. They carried a hatchet and the two biggest buckets they could find.

They lit a fire under the tree, a small one, the ground around it cleared. When it was big enough, they threw wet leaf mould onto it and blew the thick gray smoke into the tree. The many-voiced hum of the bees rose to a massed and angry buzz. Bees boiled out of the top of the tree; Julien grasped his hatchet in both hands and struck.