The first stamp I make is wrong. The impression is hazy around the edges. Maybe I need harder wood. Hickory, mahogany—what’s the hardest I can get? I spend a few days helping Sam down near the boys’ preventorium, where he’s now working as a scoutmaster. “Almost like old times,” I say, following in his boot prints on the trail with a troop of boys on a botany walk.
“Almost like old times,” Sam echoes, “but without Henri . . .”
His words, tight and strained, remind me that I’m not the only one who’s grieving. Not the only one who feels restless. Here in the Free Zone we’ve been waiting for someone to save us, for the world to come to its senses. Well, I’m done waiting. There’s nobody but us. “Help me find some maple.”
“What for?” Sam asks.
I want to tell him the truth, but the fewer people who know, the better, and the lie rolls off my tongue. “An art project.”
“Ah.” Sam stops to wipe sweat from his brow, and there’s sympathy in his nut-brown eyes. “I’m glad you’re getting back to your art. Henri would want that.”
It’s one of those things we say to help the living. Henri didn’t care about art, but he cared about helping children, so I know he’d approve. Meanwhile, Sam hacks a nice-sized piece of maple from a fallen tree, and I take it back to my tower lair, where I whittle out too large a chunk and ruin the stamp.
Merde. It’s the sixth of September and time is running out. The police are posting signs at the side of the road saying that anyone caught giving refuge to foreign Jews will be fined, interned at a concentration camp, or sent to jail for up to five years. They don’t admit it, but they’re arresting French Jews too, so I need to get the Kohn children off Madame Pinton’s farm and into the preventorium as soon as possible.
If I can’t get them admitted by the fifteenth, they’ll have to wait another month, and the urgency makes me aggravated with every interruption—even the impromptu celebration for Lafayette’s birthday that’s an annual tradition here at the castle. When I was a kid, we used to perform a little costume play. I have a memory of being stuffed into a miniature hoopskirt and powdered wig. We don’t have anything ostentatious planned this year, but Madame LeVerrier insists we mark the hero’s day.
The doyenne is herself now wrapped in a lace shawl in the English garden, where she’s arranged a special luncheon of apples, cheese, and a vegetable pie. How many ration coupons must have been spent for this, I can’t guess. I just make a plate of food and hoist myself up on the stone balustrade, wondering how quickly I can finish eating and get back to making illegal papers.
The mood on our impromptu Lafayette Day is anything but festive, but no one can say we’re not honoring the renegade hero, because we’re all complaining about the government. Sam’s voice is loud and frustrated as he argues, “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that the French National Assembly is officially abolished the same week—”
“If people had volunteered to go to Germany, these new measures wouldn’t be necessary,” Faustine Xavier interrupts, primly slicing her apple into wedges.
And I want to slap her. Since only a few Frenchmen volunteered to make munitions for Hitler’s war machine, the rest of us are now being conscripted. Under the so-called Service du Travail Obligatoire, the first group—young Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and twenty-three—have already been called up. With many more to follow, to be subject to do any work that the Government deems necessary.
“It’s slavery, is what it is,” argues Sam, his eyes fiercely defiant as he scarfs down his vegetable pie. “I didn’t get shot at by Nazis before the armistice only to now help them shoot at someone else. If they go through with this, I won’t go to Germany. I won’t collaborate.”
“You have no choice,” says Faustine. “It’s the law.”
“Let them try to arrest me, then,” Sam spits. “Just try rounding up every able-bodied Frenchman between the ages of eighteen and fifty. They’ll regret it.”
“They’re going to register women too,” Anna says from the patio table, glancing at me warily. She must be remembering our conversation in the church. Maybe she still thinks that if she’d gone to Germany she could’ve freed her husband, and saved fellows like Sam besides.
I think she’s wrong.
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Faustine scolds, readjusting her Victorian collar as if she were getting a little hot under it. “Only unmarried women like Marthe will be subject to the labor draft. There’s nothing to worry about.”