How Huge the Night (3 page)

I want to do something. God. Let me do something. Please.
The word
serve
rose in his mind, the word protect, but he couldn’t even think them; it sounded stupid. What did he know how to do? Do the dishes, play soccer. Split wood.

The breeze brought the scent of rain in the dark. A drop fell on the windowsill. He got back into bed, pulled the sheet up over himself, and slept.

Nina read the words on the pale green card for the last time.
Name
: Nina Krenkel.
Birth date:
07-08-1924.
Birthplace:
Vienna.
Hair:
brown.
Eyes:
green.
Race:
Jew.

Then she opened the furnace door and put it in.

The flames flared and ate the words in long licks. It was a ghost card of curled ash, the words still visible for a moment, slowly
fluttering
apart in the wind of the fire’s burning. Nina watched,
transfixed
, as her name fell away into flakes on the glowing coals.

“Nina! You
did it?
”

She whirled to face her younger brother. “I promised. And you promised too.”

“But we never got the fake ones!”

“He said we had to do it anyway. We have to, Gustav. We have to do everything he says.” Her eyes burned. She stood, pulling herself up by her crutches. “You want to go up there and tell him we’re not doing it? And let him die knowing that?”

“But Nina, Uncle Yakov—”

“Uncle Yakov is
wrong!
” she shouted. “Did you hear what he said? He said
crazy
. Is Father crazy, Gustav? Tell me.” She looked him in the eye. “Do you honestly think he is crazy?”

Gustav looked at her, his black eyes wide. “I—” He shut his mouth and looked down at his shoes. Shoes that Father had made him. “No,” he whispered. “He’s not crazy.”

“I know it’s scary, Gustav. I’m scared too. But he knows.”
Just look in his eyes. Did you ever wonder if dying people can see the future? It scares me, Gustav, it scares me so bad, the things he looks like he knows.
“He says we’re safer if we go. He knows. So we’re going.” She stood leaning on her crutches, looking at him; then she held out her hand. He looked back at her for a long time, put his hand in his pocket, and pulled out a pale green card.

She took it and bent again to the furnace door.

Everything was ready. She had packed food, clothes, blankets. She had the key to the drawer with Father’s letters in it, his will and the money and the tickets—the drawer where the false identity papers were supposed to have been when they came. They wouldn’t come now, Father had told her in his thin, labored voice—he could hardly breathe now. “He cheated me,” he’d whispered. “He cheated my children. May he be forgotten.” Then he’d swallowed and said, even softer, “Or maybe they caught him. Who knows?”

Father was in his attic bedroom, where he had been for weeks, the room where the doctor had told them he would die. Soon. The sun slanted in through the window; the white-stitched stars on the brown eiderdown shone, and so did Father’s eyes, out of the
dimness
. “Nina. Nina, my daughter.” She was still catching her breath from climbing the stairs on her crutches, but he had less breath than she.

“Father, I’ve done it. I burned mine, and Gustav’s too.”

His skin was paper thin around his eyes. His breathing rasped. “Good,” he whispered. “Nina. I love you so much.”

She looked at him. She must not cry. “What should I do next, Father?”

“Your hair.” His thin hand came up a little in a helpless
movement
toward her, as if he would have taken her long, wavy hair in his fingers to feel it. “It’s so lovely. So … Jewish. It won’t be safe. And the world was never safe for a woman alone, Nina. Tell Gustav to cut it now. You think you can do it? Be a boy?”

“I picked myself a name, Father. Niko.”

“That’s my girl. That’s a very smart name.” Suddenly a fit of something like coughing took him. Something in between
coughing
and choking, again and again the head bobbing forward and the wet sound in the throat. She bent over him, mouth open, hands going to him helplessly. Nothing she could do. He swallowed and breathed again. “Soon, Nina,” he whispered.

She bit her trembling lip hard.

“You will live, my daughter. You will give me grandchildren. You will find a place where you are safe.”
Did you ever wonder if dying people can see the future?
There was a strange light in his eyes.

He was gazing at her, the shimmer of tears growing in his eyes. His voice came out hoarse: “Nina, Nina, I want so much for you to live. Promise you’ll do everything I told you, Nina. Niko.”

“I promise,” she whispered, and bent her head.

“Julien, this is Benjamin Keller. Benjamin, Julien Losier.”

Julien stuck out his hand to shake. Then he stuck it so close to Benjamin’s stomach that the guy couldn’t miss it even if he
was
looking
straight at his highly polished shoes. After a moment, Benjamin gave him limp fingers. He shook them.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Julien heard his mother saying behind him. Then Madame Keller, a little breathy, said: “I know you’ll take such good care of Benjamin. I can see it in your face.” She had a slight German accent. Julien clenched his teeth a little tighter.

“Would anyone like some coffee?” asked his father.

Benjamin stood there, skinny, looking about twelve. All you could see of his face was his nose and the tops of his glasses. A book dangled from his left hand, wrapped around one finger. Julien
pictured
himself walking through the school gate with him.

“Cream? Sugar?”

I am going to die.

They poured Julien
verveine
tea because, for some reason, fifteen still wasn’t old enough for coffee. Benjamin opened his book under the table and began to read. They talked about the new school, and they talked about the history of Tanieux, and they talked about how Monsieur Bernard, the stationmaster, didn’t think the pastor should be opening an international school in wartime and how wrong he was. Benjamin’s father sipped coffee and said he had heard wonderful things about Tanieux, and the pastor and his wife—a man with piercing blue eyes and a tall, rawboned woman—sat across the table from him and beamed. That pastor. This was all his fault.

Julien knew three things about the pastor: Papa was crazy about him, he was a pacifist, and his real name was César Alexandre. Rumor had it his middle name was Napoleon. Poor guy. That might explain the pacifist thing.

Papa called him Pastor Alex. His new best friend.

“Certainly there is some anti-Jewish sentiment,” Monsieur Keller was saying. He had an accent too. “It might not be something a non-Jew would notice, but we feel it is on the rise. And ironically enough, we have started to feel the effects of anti-German
sentiment
as well.”

Anti-German sentiment! In Paris?
Really?

“I have hopes that Benjamin will find much less prejudice here,” said the pastor.

Julien slumped in his chair.
We are
both
going to die.

They walked the Kellers to the early train. The station was full of people waiting, jostling, talking; farmers in their cloth caps
standing
by their stacks of crates, live chickens clucking from some of them; kids poking their fingers in and running away, screaming with laughter. And the summer people, the
estivants
. Women in white silk dresses with wide, immaculate straw hats; men in suits, hanging back from the dusty farmers and the grubby kids; their own children scrubbed and ready to go home to Lyon or Dijon or Paris. Where they belonged.

Where he belonged.

A high, far-off whistle, and the children began to yell: “She’s coming!
La Galoche!
She’s coming!” Madame Keller was shaking Mama’s hand again and again; Julien saw with horror that she was beginning to cry. He looked away and saw something he’d never seen before: Benjamin’s face. Benjamin, standing straight like a real person, looking at his father, his eyes big and brown and dark. And then the train was steaming round the bend, and some kid was jumping and waving at it, and the stationmaster in his dark blue cap with cold fury on his face was shouting, “Get behind the line, brat!” The kid flinched and fell back, and then the train was steaming into the station, and there was chaos and noise and
luggage
and boarding, and the Kellers looking through the window at them, their faces up against the glass, and Benjamin looking back at them, and the wheels starting to churn, and the train pulling out with a high, eerie whistle onto its long track between the hills.

And Benjamin, standing by Julien, staring at his feet.

A thick, smothering silence seeped out from Benjamin’s room and filled the house. He sat at every meal, looking at the food he was pushing around on his plate, dampening every attempt at
conversation
. Breakfast would end, and Papa would tell the top of Benjamin’s head that they were going out to the farm. Did he want to come? A tiny shake of his head.

Thank you, God.

Out at the farm, there was work to be done: there was
harvesting
and wood to be split and freedom to be drunk to the last drop. Julien could feel his swing growing truer, his muscles harder, his lungs deeper in the open air. A pleasant ache now ran through his limbs at night, instead of burning.

At home they had the radio, but no news. The
boches
—the Germans—were busy tearing up Poland. In France, nothing moved except reinforcements to the Maginot Line, the massive line of fortifications that would keep the Germans out of France. “
C’est une drôle de guerre
,” the announcer said. Funny kind of war. Julien kicked his ball around the little walled backyard in the evening, alone, thinking of Vincent. He’d asked Benjamin if he could teach him a little about soccer. Benjamin had said it wasn’t his life’s
ambition
to kick a ball.

Julien kicked his ball, and the wall sent it back to him perfectly, without fail. You couldn’t score against a wall. You couldn’t tell a wall about how Verdun wasn’t just a red splash on a map, or the broken glass in the sink, or how bad you wanted to drive a tank. To
do
something.

Papa got out the big family Bible for Friday night devotions, and Benjamin said his second full sentence. He said, “So this is one of the things I have to do to live here?”

Papa stared at him. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “No. You don’t”—Benjamin’s chair scraped on the floor—“
but
you will stay seated until I have finished speaking, young man.”

Benjamin sat motionless, his chair facing half away from the table.

“We are starting a new book of the Bible today,” said Papa. “Genesis.”

Benjamin did not move.

Papa outdid himself. He had Julien flip the lights off as he talked about the darkness before the dawn of creation. He talked about the word, and the act, and how the authors of the Bible knew that descriptions of God were nothing compared to showing what he did. In the dark, Julien heard the scrape of a chair on the floor. God’s first act, said Papa—the giving of light. And he switched the light back on, and Julien blinked in the sudden blaze. Benjamin was back at the table, looking at Papa with his wide brown eyes.

Monday was Julien’s last day on the farm. School started tomorrow. Tomorrow he would try his chances with Benjamin and those guys who’d stared at them in the street. He’d find out where there was some soccer going on. Then they’d see what Julien Losier was made of.

He and Grandpa were digging the last fall potatoes, Grandpa putting a digging fork in the ground and turning up a handful of them all golden for Julien to gather. He’d thought this was a weed patch till Grandpa had showed him the thin, withered stalks in a neat line where the potatoes hid. They worked in silence together, keeping up the rhythm, the only sound the small nourishing
thunk
of potato on potato in the basket.

When the silence had deepened and lengthened between them, Grandpa opened his mouth.

“How’s life with Benjamin?”

“Oh,” Julien said, and exhaled slowly, his fingers digging into the dirt. His mind was suddenly blank. “It’s … it’s not …”

Grandpa turned up another clutch of potatoes, and Julien
gathered
them with quick fingers. Grandpa planted his fork, put his foot on it, and paused.

“Not so good,” said Julien finally.

Grandpa nodded without surprise, and Julien felt the ache in his chest give way a little.

“I don’t know, Grandpa, it’s just …”
Horrible. He makes everything weird, and wrong, and he’s German, and I think he hates me.
“I wish …”

“What do you wish, Julien?”

“I wish one single thing was the way it used to be.”

Grandpa nodded. “You’ve lost a lot this summer,” he said.

A rush of tears filled Julien’s eyes, and he blinked fast. He bent down to gather a stray potato.

Grandpa was quiet for a moment, leaning on his fork. Julien looked up and followed his gaze past Tanieux’s hill and the farther wooded ridge, on toward low green mountains in the west, with the sun above them.

“The two-headed mountain. See it?” Grandpa pointed with his chin. One of the green peaks was split in two, one part taller than the other. “Her name’s Lizieux.”

Julien nodded.

“I like to think she’s the first thing our ancestors saw of this place on their journey north.” He looked at Julien. “Never let them tell you you’re not from Tanieux, Julien. You’re part of the story Tanieux is most proud of.”