Nanée looked on as Danny knelt awkwardly in his new soldier’s uniform, the bustle of his regiment already boarding as he pressed his lips to his two-year-old son’s blond curls. Peterkin tipped his head back and looked up from under long lashes, an expression already identifiable as the boy’s disgruntled stare. He dropped his new floppy-eared bunny to the dirty platform and pulled two toy pistols from a holster.
“I have two guns, Papa,” he said. “One for me and one for Bunnykins.”
Nanée took T’s hand, drawing a glance from Danny. “You’re more family than my own family,” he’d told her when he asked her to come with them to the station. “T will need you to hold her hand after I leave.”
“I wish you could come with me, champ,” he said now. “You’d sure be a better French interpreter than I, but let’s not tell the British Army.”
It gave T some comfort, and Nanée too: that the only weapon Danny was to wield in this war was his ability with languages.
“You’re such a brave boy,” Danny said to his son.
What a brave girl you are, Nanée’s father had once said to her. She had been seven then, old enough to remember, which Peterkin was not.
Danny wrapped Peterkin and T in his arms one last time, his chin grazing T’s boy-cut hair.
“Nanée,” he said, “I’m trusting you to return these two to me in just as good a shape as I’m leaving them.”
T, wiping a tear, tried to muster the same note of humor and hope. “But who will take care of Nanée while she’s taking care of us?”
“Nanée can take care of herself and then some,” he said, and he grabbed his kit bag, and kissed T and Peterkin one last time.
Nanée watched him board the train and peer back out at them through the dirty window. As the train disappeared into its own steam, its clack clack clack fading into the chatter of the station, she stooped to pick up Bunnykins, then wrapped her arms around T and Peterkin both, like Danny had.
“You ought to leave too, Nanée,” T whispered, a heartbreaking ache in her voice. “You ought to go home.”
Nanée leaned back and looked into her friend’s face. “Pffft,” she said. “Just because Ambassador Bullitt commands me to?” Then, more gently, “I’m not leaving you, T.”
“If I had a home in America to return to, I would go.”
Nanée pulled the stuffed bunny’s ears and snuggled him against Peterkin’s little face, all the while trying to imagine living back in Evanston, or even at Marigold Lodge.
“If I had a home in America, T,” she said, “so might I.”
Saturday, October 14, 1939
SANARY-SUR-MER
You are Edouard Moss?”
Edouard, watching from the whistle-stop station platform as his friend Berthe settled her daughter and Luki in the train carriage, turned to see two policemen.
“You will come with us.”
“With you? No, my papers are in order.” He pulled them from his jacket pocket. “I’m sorry, the train is just leaving. Give me a moment to see Luki go.”
Luki, inside the carriage, was showing off her new yo-yo to her little friend, speaking in flawless French. At four now, she had lived all the life she knew in Sanary-sur-Mer, with no memory of Vienna or Berlin except through photographs and the stories Edouard told her out on their dreaming log. Now Berthe was taking her ahead to Paris, allowing him to finish packing up their cottage and prepare it for sale.
“You will come with us,” the man repeated. “To the station.”
Edouard, unable to hide his alarm now, stammered, “I don’t understand.”
He called to Berthe, “The kangaroo’s name is Professor Ellie-Mouse. She teaches mathematics, like all good stuffed kangaroos.” Trying to keep a lightness to his voice, to maintain his composure. One more day. That was all he needed. Paris would be a safer place for Luki and him. A big city. Anonymous. No paranoid neighbors. No one who, seeing his light on late at night, might suggest that his single steady bulb somehow signaled code to a Nazi ship. A single light behind old film he examined for some image he could develop and sell so he could feed them, only to print Salvation again and again, as if finding the right exposure time, solarizing, burning and dodging that single photograph into a perfect print might save him. Prints that brought in no grocery money, that he didn’t even try to sell.
He called to Berthe, “Luki loves numbers.” Like Elza had. “If she’s upset without me”—Lord, she would be frantic if he didn’t show up tomorrow as he’d promised—“run her through the multiplication tables; that soothes her.” If he kept talking, Berthe might realize what was happening, so she could explain to Luki if he was delayed. “She likes to square numbers, too, and cube.”