Friday, November 29, 1940
CHTEAU DE CHENONCEAU
Nanée startled awake to Simone Menier whispering, “It’s time. We have to hurry before the morning traffic on the river begins and the staff arrive.”
Nanée was immediately alert, climbing from the bed still in her traveling clothes, pulling on her shoes. “Luki,” she whispered, nuzzling the kangaroo into the child’s cheek. “It’s time to go to your papa.”
Luki, with the softest sound of half-asleep contentment, pulled the mohair kangaroo close to her. “Pemmy, the angel is taking us to Papa.”
At the gallery, the dawn peeked gray and overcast through the arched windows, good weather for escape, but still the long stretch of black-and-white tiles loomed ominous. Nanée and Luki might so easily be watched from outside until they exited, then taken into custody or worse. They stood waiting, watching the chauffeur at the far end peering out the last window before the doors, Nanée’s little case in his hand.
He held up a single finger, then signaled them to come.
“Joey!” Luki cried out.
Pemmy’s kangaroo pouch was empty.
Nanée looked to the chauffeur, who shook his head. No, there was no time to find a baby kangaroo.
She knelt to Luki’s level. “Joey will have to stay here, sweetheart, but Simone will take good care of him and send him when she can.”
Luki whispered to Simone, “Are you a queen?”
“Ah, my husband always said I was. Your Pemmy can write Joey letters. I’m sure he would write her back.”
“He can’t write. He’s only little.”
The chauffeur waved impatiently. Really, they needed to go.
“Could Pemmy stay with Joey and be a princess?” Luki asked. “I’ll have Papa. Joey doesn’t have a papa.”
“It’s up to you, Luki, but you have to decide now,” Nanée said. “It’s time to go.”
Simone met Nanée’s gaze over the child’s head, but Nanée had no idea which would be worse for Luki, to leave Pemmy behind or to carry the mother kangaroo away from her baby. She gave Simone the address of Villa Air-Bel as Luki hugged the kangaroo tightly, then kissed her again and again and again.
Nanée took the things from the kangaroo’s pouch—the photograph and Edouard’s letter with the drawing of the dreaming log—so that Luki wouldn’t have to. “Pemmy would want you to have them,” she said. “She won’t forget you, ever.”
The child kissed her kangaroo one last time and handed her to Simone. “Pemmy can’t go backward,” she said. “Kangaroos can’t. They can only go forward.”
Nanée, holding Luki’s hand, hurried across the gallery to the doors, which the chauffeur slipped open. He poked his head out and looked around, then handed Nanée her traveling case.
She ducked out and hurried Luki up the path, away from the river toward the tomb—a huge old stone thing dripping green and black with moss, carved with a robed woman sitting with one hand on a knee and the other to her cheek as if contemplating . . . not a sadness, but something weightier than the decaying leaves covering the tomb’s base and stairs.
Birdsong rose behind them, alarming Nanée. Someone coming?
Someone shouted, frighteningly guttural words.
She grabbed Luki and ducked up the stairs on the tomb’s far side, even as the birds fell into a frightening silence. She meant to tuck up against the mold-slimed stone, but on further thought ducked into the woods so they might move without being so exposed.
Two German soldiers came running, guns drawn. Germans, although this was free France. Were they the men from yesterday? Would they recognize Nanée and Luki?
The Germans stopped at the tomb, then cautiously circled it. Nanée kept a hand to Luki’s mouth, willing her to be silent, wishing she’d brought the Webley, and rehearsing in her mind the story she’d devised in that first little room at the chateau.
A red squirrel crouching absolutely still a few trees over shot off, zigzagging. The Germans fired their guns again and again.
One of the Germans began to laugh. “Es ist zu schnell für uns!”
The two of them, now laughing together, settled in on the steps to the tomb, just where Nanée and Luki would have been, and lit cigarettes.
They had just holstered their guns when one of the soldiers saw Luki. Nanée motioned her to stay where she was. Leaving the traveling case on the forest floor so she wouldn’t have to explain it, she stood, drawing their astonished looks off of Luki and onto her.