She laughs. “Blasphemy!” While I’ve been sketching portraits and working my way through the dry history books about Lafayette’s wife, Anna, it seems, has been to the mayor’s office. She pulls two cards out of her pocket. “We just got these—we’re allowed to send them to the Occupied Zone and to our prisoners, I think. Even if you don’t have a current address for Henri, the Wehrmacht likely does. If nothing else, Germans are good record keepers . . .”
I stare resentfully at the interzone postcards. I see we’re supposed to circle or cross out preprinted messages such as in good health or wounded. And I hate the Nazis even more for treating us like animals without capacity to express ourselves beyond a circle or a strike. After so long without any word from Henri, I have a shaky moment where I wonder if it’d be worse for this damned card to disappear into the abyss of the wartime postal service or to get it back with the word killed in a circle.
Anna seems to know what I’m thinking. “It would be better to know, wouldn’t it?”
I’m not sure. I might prefer to live with delusions that Henri’s in a prison camp, tending to people, making them laugh, rather than to know if Henri’s gone—his roguish sense of humor, his dreams of becoming a doctor, just gone. “I don’t want to find out that I’m all alone, that I don’t belong anywhere, and that I don’t belong to anybody.”
Anna reaches for my hands. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. And unlike the cold, you never get used to it.”
It’s the orphan’s lament, but it shames me to complain—I hate myself for it. I can’t stand to look her in the eye, so I turn my back on her and the postcard, making it clear that I intend to get back to work . . . but she doesn’t let me. “Marthe, you’re not alone. You belong here at the castle. You belong to your friends.” She smiles. “You belong to me.”
You belong to me . . . I don’t know what she means by it. I don’t know what I want her to mean by it. I only know that her smile is angelic as newly fallen snow, whereas I suddenly feel like I’m boiling inside. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think I had a crush on her—the sort silly girls used to have for boys in the orphanage. Feelings that make girls sigh and spy and write their names in a heart. I mocked them; I laughed at those feelings when they cropped up, telling myself I was too tough to have sappy thoughts like that. Even for Henri. And I scorned those feelings, because sometimes I had them for girls too . . .
Now Anna presses her forehead to mine to cheer me up. “You can be the sister I never had.”
“You have sisters,” I grumble.
“Yes, but I didn’t choose them.” Is she choosing me? That alluring idea is a cliff, and I’ll fall if I make one wrong move. At my silence, she gives my hand a squeeze. “If not sisters, then roommates, at least? Your fireplace is nicer than mine . . .”
“An artist likes her solitude,” I tease, but when she gives a little shiver, I give in. “I guess you can stay on the really cold nights.”
She beams like a girl used to getting what she wants. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse! And if you fill out your interzone card for Henri tonight, I’ll send it tomorrow with mine to my husband.”
At the mention of our men, I get hold of myself. “Thanks.”
I scratch the date on the card. Then I circle the words to tell Henri that I’m healthy, still at the chateau, and desperate for news of him. There’s no room to write more . . . no way to tell him how afraid I am for him, even if I could find words that I wouldn’t mind being seen by the censors. Even if I could understand the jumble of feelings seething inside me, seeming to slip further from my control by the day.
* * *
—
In March, we have two things to celebrate.
For one thing, Samir Bensa?d is back. Like Henri, Sam was taken prisoner in the Fall of France. He should be in a stalag somewhere in Germany, but he’s somehow here sitting in the old guardroom by the fire, hands squeezed between his knees.
“How did you escape, my dear boy?” asks Madame LeVerrier.
Sam explains, “On account of my dark skin, the Nazis didn’t know if they should transfer me to a prison camp or shoot me. And while they bickered about it, I grabbed one of their motorcycles and made off with it.”
“That took some real nerve!” I say, giving his shoulders a fond squeeze.
“I thought you might approve,” Sam replies, explaining that it’s taken him months to get back, get his papers in order, and be officially demobilized. “I’m sorry Henri’s still a prisoner,” he says, smile falling away. “I wish he could’ve escaped too.”