We celebrate the D-Day landings with a bottle of wine Madame Pinton has been hiding. And later, in the quiet of the loft bed, Travert asks, “Are you crying?”
“Maybe a little,” I whisper. “I’m teary these days for no reason.”
“Getting beaten with a truncheon will do that to you.”
He traces his thumb gently on my still-swollen jaw and broken lip. And I finally find the courage to ask, “Why did you come back for me?”
“You know why.” He winces as he tries to sit up against the pillow. “Don’t insult me by making me say it.”
The last thing I want is to insult him. I know he loves me. Even if he doesn’t want to say it. For him, it’s simple. You bed a woman you desire. You marry a woman you both desire and honor. The marriage and the desire came first with us, but now, little as I deserve it—he loves me and honors me too. I haven’t been very good to him, but I want to be good to him now, and I hope it’s not too late. “Thank you for saving me.”
He snorts. “I didn’t save you. I only got shot for you. We’d both be dead if it weren’t for two brats barely out of short pants.”
Oscar and Daniel, he means; two boys who should have been with their scout troop, building fires and baking beans and telling ghost stories. They’re children I was supposed to protect, not the other way around. Having joined the Resistance, they’d been posted to guard the cache of weapons at the preventorium, and when the moment came, they crept out of their hiding places and used them. Last I heard, they were fighting with Sam’s band on Mont Mouchet. And it’s a bloody, bloody summer.
The Resistance blows up trains, roads, cuts phone lines—and the German retaliation is horrific. We hear about maquisard boys being murdered at the side of the road. They’d been eating wild cherries when a Red Cross ambulance drove by and they waved it over, hoping to get help for their wounded comrades. When the back doors opened—German soldiers were waiting inside with machine guns and mowed them down.
I learn this from Josephine and Gabriella, who come to the farmhouse to tell us that Oscar and Daniel were among the dead left on that bullet-riddled road. When I hear all this, I grieve with rage-laced tears. I want to break things. I want to pull Madame Pinton’s pots down from where they’re hanging over the stove and smash porcelain into pieces. Me, who never likes to see anything broken . . .
Those boys saved my life, and now what justice will there be for them?
It’s a crime to use an ambulance that way; there’s no other word for it.
Instead of raging, I comfort the girls who have lost their brother—and their father too. Monsieur Kohn was gunned down in a firefight on Mont Mouchet—a soldier, a father, a hero for France. I can still hear him saying he wouldn’t go meekly . . .
It’s fitting, I think, that Josephine is now wearing his old tricolor pin. She says she’s been learning about Victor Chapman and the Lafayette Escadrille. And now she asks, “Madame Travert, do you think a girl could ever become a pilot?”
Very seriously, I say, “I think a girl can become anything she wants.”
She and Gabriella will never get back their loved ones or childhood innocence. I hope, at the very least, they can get back their names, their freedom, and their faith. Josephine remembers how to say the mourner’s kaddish. She says it’s an orphan’s prayer, and invites us to gather round the hearth as she recites it. Haltingly, hauntingly, her little sister Gabriella repeats her words in honor of their dead. I don’t know this ritual or this prayer, and I don’t understand the words, but they are for me a symphony of comfort and gathering strength.
After the reciting of the kaddish, we share a meal of tapioca soup with dried rosemary and sage. Madame Pinton has saved a few slices of fruit-peel cake for the girls, which she wraps in a checkered napkin when Josephine prods her sister and says, “We better go. We have to walk back to the preventorium before anybody realizes we’re gone.”
My mind works slower than it did before I was beaten with a baton, but I still remember the rules. “You walked by yourselves? You’re not supposed to leave without a guardian. How—”
“We slipped out the tunnels,” Josephine explains.
The Jewish girls told her about them, and now she knows the castle’s secrets too. It was Josephine who helped lead all fifteen high up into the mountains, where the maquisards saw them to safety. Then Josephine found her own way back to the preventorium, where the staff was too agitated to ask questions. What a little heroine she is.