And her anxieties for her husband—like mine for Max—were keen. It would be tragedy enough to lose a loved one to war; nearly unbearable to lose a loved one in a war’s closing hours, when the illusion of freedom is so tantalizingly near.
FIFTY-SEVEN
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
April 1944
We hear of another Gestapo raid not so very far away. Klaus Barbie—the so-called Butcher of Lyon—and Konrad Wolff captured children from a safe house, snatching little Jewish boys and girls from the breakfast table where they were drinking chocolate. More than forty children were dragged kicking and screaming, pulled out from hiding places in closets and under beds and bushes. They are likely all murdered now.
Gone is my feeling of triumph on Christmas Eve when the whole village celebrated the spiriting away of Lafayette’s statue. We’ve managed to keep it from the Germans, while somehow letting them take little children instead . . . and I’m sick over it. As I toss and turn, Travert pulls me under one arm, his hand in my hair, heavy as his breathing in the night. He doesn’t like to stay in my room at the castle. He thinks a man should bed his wife under his own roof. But since he likes bedding me more than he likes being right, he’s here on a Thursday night.
“Can you find out their names?” I whisper in the dark.
“Why do you want their names?”
I squeeze my eyes tight. “Because it might have been my fault . . .”
In recent months, my new technique with photographic paper led me to an even greater discovery—namely that the hectograph tablet I used to copy spelling tests can, with the right ink, print almost any kind of official form. I’ve been reproducing stamps by the dozens. Mostly for adults—maquisards, nurses, teachers, and passers who smuggle kids into Switzerland. But in working with Monsieur Kohn and the OSE, I’ve made some for children too. I remember the photos I’ve so carefully glued onto identity cards. Twelve-year-old Otto and his dimpled chin. Ten-year-old Hans and his big round eyes. Five-year-old Lucie and her beautiful curly hair . . .
Maybe I made a mistake that gave them away. “If the authorities are onto my tricks—”
“It was an informant,” Travert says.
I sit up to face him in the moonlight. “How do you know? Did you—you weren’t part of the raid, were you?”
“I’d eat a bullet before I was part of that.”
I believe him, but that makes me feel sicker, because he might be faced with that choice. The littlest child taken was only four years old. Younger than any of our Lafayette kids. When I try to sleep, I picture lorries pulling through our gate—jackboots banging on Lafayette’s door—Josephine, Gabriella, and Daniel screaming.
It’s too easy to imagine.
Maybe that’s why Travert whispers, “I want to quit. Maybe go work in a factory or a repair shop . . .”
Last week he spent an hour and drops of precious glue putting back together a broken flowerpot. I told him I could make him a new one, but he said he liked the cracks. Now I tell him, “They’ll send you to Germany.”
“What’s the difference these days?” he asks, rolling away from me. There is a long pause before he adds, “You know, I was soft and tubby as a boy—I used to get beaten in the schoolyard . . .”
There’s not much that’s soft about him now, and as I stroke the strong muscles of his back, I think that if I ever carved him, I’d use a hard wood, with rough cuts, leaving some bark to show the texture of the soul.
“I wanted to be a gendarme to protect people,” he continues. “Now I feel disgust every time I button my uniform. Can you understand?”
I do, but say, “You still have to stay—to protect people, to warn us, to help the Resistance.”
He blows out a long breath, because he knows I’m right. “Well, if I can’t quit, you have to. You need to stop forging papers. It’s not like before when I could protect you. When the Gestapo seized those children, they took their caretakers and put them on that train to Auschwitz.”
I’ve heard that. The rumor too, that one of the children’s protectors—a young woman with convincing false papers—revealed her own true identity so she could stay with the children. I can’t imagine making that choice, and I don’t want to. But I also can’t stop forging, which has become more important to me than sculpting, because it’s an art that’s saving lives. So I swallow, sink back down, and pretend to sleep.
Travert isn’t fooled. “Marthe. If you’re caught, you’d be on your own.”