The booms again, one after another after another after another. And Sister Therese was pulling Luki into her lap, singing into her ear so she could hear even in the booms. The other nuns sang with her; Luki could hear their voices between the scary sounds. She tried to hear only their voices, tried to feel it was the angels the nuns sang about, the angels with Mutti, who used to sing her to sleep before only Papa did. “Il te couvrira de ses plumes; tu trouveras un refuge sous ses ailes.” He will cover you with his feathers; you will find refuge under his wings.
Saturday, June 22, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
You have to come with us, I tell you,” Max insisted, but Edouard only watched through the iron fence as the line filed out the Camp des Milles gate toward the waiting boxcars. He knew Max was right; you had to do nothing more than listen to the retreat, regiment after regiment, truck after truck, tank after tank. If the internees were in the camp when the Germans overran Aix-en-Provence, their circumstances would be dire.
Edouard had woken that morning to see Walter Hasenclever, who slept separated from him only by a suitcase, unmoving. Even in the dim light through the distant, dirty window, Edouard knew the Czech novelist was dead, that sometime in the night he’d taken the overdose of veronal he brought to the camp. More than two thousand of the camp’s three thousand internees, though, had chosen to take their papers and board the train for the border, to try to get out before the Germans arrived. Camp commander Goruchon had made the decision to let the men go on his own; the subprefecture knew nothing about it.
Max called back to Edouard, “Don’t be a fool! Come with us!”
“What, and leave the poor fleas and lice and bedbugs with nobody to feast on?” Edouard said.
He wasn’t a fool, but the train would be sealed until it crossed the border, and once he was in Spain there would be no coming back, no way for him to reach Luki in France.
He’d been able to write her once a week and receive letters from Berthe and her before the Germans took Paris, but he hadn’t had word of Luki since the letter she’d written by herself, which he kept in his pocket. He didn’t know whether Berthe and her daughter had fled Paris, whether they’d taken Luki with them, or where they might be if they had. Luki living with Berthe under Nazi rule—the thought was terrifying. But so was the idea that Luki might be anywhere in France or even in the world without him knowing where.
He didn’t wait for the train to leave. He didn’t allow time for his own fear to tempt him to change his mind. He returned to his straw mat under the bare bulb and opened his suitcase. He took his Leica out and set it aside. He took the top sheet from the box of stationery and, with one hand on his camera, began to write in the tiniest script he could manage, My Luki . . . Another letter he couldn’t send.
There would be a way out. There had to be. He wasn’t so naive as to believe Goruchon would open the gates and allow Edouard and the others to walk out. The camp commander was taking a huge risk even with the train, but an entire locked train might be explained as prisoners in transit lost in the chaos of the German invasion. Anything more would seal Goruchon’s fate when the Germans overran Aix-en-Provence. But in the chaos of the invasion, there would be a way out, just as there had been a way out of Germany.
Except there hadn’t been a way out for Elza.
Saturday, June 22, 1940
BIARRITZ
Nanée sat at the American consulate in Biarritz for the fourth time in as many days, looking for permission to take Peterkin to the United States. Despite the connections of the vile woman they’d ridden with and her remarkable knack for backing up and speeding around roadblocks she couldn’t talk her way through, there’d been no getting into Bordeaux. Nanée and Peterkin had ridden with her to a chateau outside Biarritz, where Nanée spent a single long night being appalled at the certainty of the woman’s fascist friends that Hitler would bring order to France. The next morning she took rooms in a hotel in town where she’d stayed so often that the concierge remembered her. She hired a girl to watch Peterkin, bought a suit from her favorite boutique—regretting she’d left the Robert Piguet in which she could convince anyone of anything in the trailer back in La Bourboule—and set about trying to talk her way around bureaucrats.
“As my colleagues have already told you,” the latest bureaucrat in the phalanx was now saying, “you may of course leave any time you would like. You have your American passport. But we cannot allow you to take this French child without his passport and a valid French exit visa.”