1944

IN THE CHAOS before the Wehrmacht drove on Paris in 1940, vehicles and pedestrians rushed in all directions, crossing and weaving pointlessly as they sought salvation in places from which others had fled. Like most of the population, Philippe Lacour had taken to heart the lesson written in his own blood as a young poilu during the Great War, which was that Paris would not fall, or, if so, only after years of fighting. In the perfect June weather, the speed of the German columns and the collapse of the French army seemed both incredible and inappropriate. It was summer, the season of awakened life burgeoning under clear skies and strong sun. Just days before the panic, Philippe and Cathérine had seen young students celebrating their start into life arm in arm in tuxedos and gowns. As usual in June, Philippe, a cellist, had a full schedule of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and parties. As he and Cathérine rode toward the Gare de Montparnasse, in a taxi for which they had paid five times the normal tariff, he was anxious that he would be held to account and lose income for failing to show up at his engagements.

Though expensive, the taxi ride was short. Because everyone in Paris wanted to escape south, the streets were choked so much that half a kilometer from the station the taxi came to a halt. Every sidewalk was packed with people carrying heavy suitcases, many of which were eventually abandoned to thieves. At first they dragged their loot into the side streets and alleys, but soon they began to split open luggage where it had been dropped, struggling over precious items and littering the street with clothing strewn like entrails after a battle.

“People will be fighting to get on the trains, and how many trains will there be?” Philippe asked Cathérine. For him, her dark red hair had never ceased to be a mystery, endlessly deep, endlessly exciting. Now she was in the eighth month of her first pregnancy. He knew that even if they could make their way to the station and onto a train, the journey south might take their unborn child from them, and perhaps the life of the mother as well. And the rumor was that to stop movement south the Germans were strafing rail lines. As the cellist in a chamber quartet that had toured Europe, Philippe had flown in German civil airliners that had been surrogates for the development of military aviation otherwise forbidden to Germany – planes with metal airframes, ribbed sides, and powerful engines. He didn’t merely think of how the Luftwaffe would strafe rolling stock. Rather, he imagined the view from the cockpit as an aircraft easily overtook a train below. He knew that the approach and attack would take only seconds. He saw the steam issuing from the fleeing engine, waving in the wind before disconnecting. He saw the relative motion of aircraft, train, smoke, and steam on and across a landscape of rich green fields, wheat-colored grasses, and blue sky.

“She’s pregnant,” he declared to the taxi driver, who had noticed and taken pity, which is why they had been able to snare his cab. “We can’t fight that,” meaning the crowds and disruption visible through the windshield.

“So what do you want?”

“Go left at the next street. Then take us to the Gare de l’Est.”

“I was there,” the taxi driver told him. “People are pouring in from the Marne and Champagne.”

“The trains going out will be empty.”

“But to where? The Germans?”

“There’ll be a vacuum behind their lines, filled only by supply troops. They’ll focus on what lies ahead.”

“Bird shouldn’t fly into traps.”

“All of France is a trap. For the moment, we’ll take refuge in a neglected corner. If you were a German, would you pay more attention to Paris or Reims?”

The point was made, and the taxi driver grunted in assent. At the sooty Gare de l’Est, the least glorious of Parisian stations, Philippe and Cathérine fought their way against streams of people coming from the east. They had had to leave their suitcases strapped to the roof of the taxi, and now photographs, letters, and records, like their home and their past, were gone forever. Cathérine cried as she walked, but they pushed on, because their lives depended upon it.

All Philippe could think of was to save his wife and child. He had his cello and a briefcase with documents and money. Cathérine had her purse, to which she clung as if it were a child about to be ripped from her arms. In the crowds flowing past were many Jews, some Orthodox, their dress ensuring that they would be in the most danger, and some identifiable mainly to other Jews. Though they were assimilated, their eyes told everything. When Philippe and Cathérine passed them they knew each other for what they were, and it was not just Cathérine’s red hair, for Bretons and others frequently had red hair, but a certain tentative way in the world, always alert as if expecting what always came.

“The Germans will have flushed the Jews from Reims the way beaters clear a field of pheasants. They won’t be looking so hard for them as they will here. Provincial, non-elite troops may not know what to do, or be so inclined.”

“One hopes,” said Cathérine. “But where will we stay?”

“I said Reims because I don’t want to disappoint you, but maybe we can get to Switzerland. Perhaps they would let us in as refugees. I played a concert at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I remember the name of the functionary who took care of us: Von Arx. He was kind, and he may remember me. He wasn’t high-ranking, but that was in thirty-four. Perhaps he’s risen.”

In front of the station, they heard a sound from within like that of a chorus. It was the sound of people in distress, of the past breaking, illusions shattering, and mortality bursting forth from the comfort of ordinary life. It sounded like fire whistling on gusts of air through a burning forest.

Philippe turned to take a last look at Paris. He lifted his gaze to the sky and was astounded to see ragged smoke curling through flawless blue as rich as fresh paint. The smoke was as black and gray as the lines in an etching. Moving both violently and expansively, rising on the wind and racing as if to escape toward the sun, it was composed of the remnants of that which would disappear rather than submit.

IN THE STATION at Reims, open spaces were packed with anxious crowds that had flowed in from the city streets and surrounding countryside. Gustave Doré could not have drawn people stripped more of comfort and assurance. As would his son, Philippe loved sound, and he stopped to listen as the murmur of the crowd floated above them in a cloud. The station was alive with the electric energy of a thousand desperate people: children in arms (somehow they too knew the danger, and their little faces showed it); men charged with the protection of their families; old veterans and their wives, saddened to see war once again; officials who, though trying to do their duty, were beaten back by the panic.

Having discovered that no trains were moving southeast toward Switzerland, Philippe and Cathérine remained calm. Except for them, no one went from the station to the city, and as they walked against the tides the Parisian cellist and his wife felt that, driven by a kind of madness, they had almost left the world of the living. Not knowing where they were going or how they would end up, they persisted in moving toward the danger, suspecting that they were soon going to die.

On the boulevards, some stragglers were hurrying toward the railway, but the side streets were empty. “There are no hotels here,” Cathérine said as they looked down a long residential street half submerged in summer shadow. Brassy light spilled from the cornices and chimneys still illuminated by the sun, with the effect of blackening the darkness where sunlight did not strike.

“The last thing we should do is go to a hotel, because the first thing the Germans will do will be to requisition them for their officers.”

“Then where will we stay? We don’t know anyone here.”

“We’ll ask.” From the north and northeast came the muted sound of distant artillery. “We have perhaps a day, certainly hours. We’ll find something.” He wasn’t half as sure as he wanted to sound for Cathérine’s sake.”

They walked farther into the shadows. Halfway down the last of several streets later, they came to a storefront: Patisserie Boulangerie Mignon. Though it was closed, Philippe saw variations of light coming from a room in the back, as if there were a fire or someone were moving about and blocking or reflecting the light of a lamp. He knocked on the glass-paned door.

“They’re closed,” Cathérine said. “They get up in the dark to bake.”

“Someone is moving inside.” He rapped on the glass respectfully but urgently. They could hear heavy engines – perhaps of tanks or half-tracks. “I thought we had hours,” Philippe said. “We don’t.”

No one came. “Oh God,” Cathérine exclaimed as she saw, at the end of the street, the first vehicles leading an endless column of half-tracks, command cars, and trucks speeding past the gap straight into the sun.

Philippe rested his cello on the sidewalk and put his arms around his wife. The convoy at one end of the street was now matched by the lead vehicles of a similar column at the other end. As minutes passed, thousands of transports, artillery pieces, and tanks went by unceasingly. These were only part of an immense, overwhelming power stretching toward Paris. Philippe had seen such things as a soldier in the Great War, but to Cathérine they were new.

The glass door opened. Standing inside, his left hand still controlling the door lever – for he had yet to imagine much less make up his mind about what might be asked of him – was a short man in his fifties, with graying hair, a mustache of the same coloration, and a white apron, its strings loosely hanging parallel with the pinstripes of his gray pants.

This was Louis Mignon, thrice-wounded veteran of the previous war, baker, chef, deeply devout Catholic, husband of Marie, father to Jacques, and savior of Philippe Lacour, Cathérine Lacour, and their unborn child, Jules.

RISKING EVERYTHING HE had, the great-grandfather of Marie Druart Mignon had bought the building during a nineteenth-century financial panic, and now it was hers, three storeys above a shop, a steep Mansard roof with no windows on the street but three louvered vents where dormers might have been. One small dormer window looked out over the back garden, and in the twenties, when business was good, Louis had had a bathroom installed, even before a staircase, when the main plumbing stack had to be redone and the contractor suggested that they take the opportunity to prepare the attic for future habitation.

Hearing trucks and armored vehicles, Louis brought Philippe and Cathérine in quickly, closed and locked the door, and peered out the window, to left and right. “They’re not coming down this street,” he said. He stared at his guests. “Is she Jewish?” he asked Philippe. There was no hostility. It was a necessary question. Cathérine was beautiful, her face and deep red hair different somehow from the faces and deep red hair of the women of Brittany and Normandy. One could tell.

“We both are,” Philippe answered.

“You look Dutch. I would swear you were Dutch.” Philippe was tall and blonde. “You could pass for German. You’re not a German?”

Philippe shook his head to indicate that he wasn’t. “We were Dutch a long time ago before we came to France. There are many Dutch Jews.”

“What do you expect of me?” Louis asked.

“Nothing.”

“Do you have someplace to go?”

“No.”

“Not a temple, or other Jews? They say Jews always come out on top.”

“Yes, of course, like us.”

“You don’t take care of your own?”

“We would if we could. Right now, the richest, most powerful Jews in Paris are headed toward the Pyrenees, maybe walking on the road. Some may have diamonds sewn into their clothes, but that won’t help us here.”

“What will happen if the Germans see you?”

“I don’t know. They don’t like Jews of course, and although it’s not written on my face, I killed some Germans in Fourteen-Eighteen.”

Louis now looked at him in a different light. “I killed them, too,” he said. “You’ve come from Paris?” He could hear it in Philippe’s speech.

“This afternoon.”

“Why here if you don’t know anyone?”

“The trains were empty in this direction, and we thought we might get to Switzerland.”

“No,” Louis said. “Everything’s shut down.”

At this point Jacques and Marie descended from the floor above. “Who are they?” Marie asked. She was a little shorter than her husband, with wavy blonde hair. Jacques – seventeen, thin, tall, and dark – saw the arrival of the Lacours as messengers of what life was going to be like. He had already adapted, and for him it was an adventure.

In answer to his wife’s question, Louis Mignon said, “They’re Jews from Paris. We have to put them in the attic. The hatch is in the ceiling of the closet, and if we stuff the shelf with duvets you won’t be able to see the opening. We’ll have plenty of food, because the Germans will make us bake for them and we can siphon off whatever these two ….” He glanced at Cathérine, “these three, need.”

Marie thought about this, completely unafraid. “But the Germans will be here for bread and pastry every day.”

“That’s good,” Louis told her. “It’ll be as if it’s their own. They’ll be happy each time they take away what we bake, and they’ll never look here because for them it will be pleasant and familiar. If I could, I’d hide Jews across the street from wherever the Germans will have their headquarters. Jacques,” his father commanded, “get the ladder.” Everyone was enthusiastic, as if they were embarking on something that would neither be difficult nor last long.

MARIE MIGNON DELIVERED Jules as Philippe paced on the other side of a sheet hung as a barrier in the dimly lit attic. Philippe was puzzled, disarmed, and made superfluous by the feminine power and mystery of bearing and bringing forth new life. Jules cried for only a few seconds when he first came into the world. As if he had understood, he suddenly stopped. For four years, silence came naturally at first, then in imitation, and then as a game in which sound, though desired above all else except freedom, was the enemy. They didn’t flush the toilet or bathe unless the shop was closed and the Mignons kept watch, ready to knock with a broomstick against the ceiling of the third floor, as a signal to stop. Even when he was hurt or fell with a shock, Jules hardly cried, or when he did it was nearly silent, a disciplined gasping, then tears and nearly inaudible short breaths. For four years, like his parents, he didn’t speak, but only whispered, and didn’t know that his and their voices could be full, clear, and less like wind gently whistling through imperfections in the window frames of an old house.

Philippe fingered the strings of his cello and moved his right hand – always entrancing to Jules – as if he were holding the bow that he left in the case so as not to be too tempted. Though Philippe could hear the music as if it were actually sounding, Jules could not, but he saw clearly that his father was lifted into a different world that shone on his face and showed in his motions.

Little Jules would try to go there, too, moving his own imaginary bow with great seriousness. For his father and mother this was wonderful to see. “Someday,” Philippe told him, “you’ll learn to do this with a real bow, and with sound.”

“When?” Jules had whispered.

“Someday.”

The sounds that the child did hear came from the street and neighboring houses: engines, hawkers’ cries, orders commanded through German loudspeakers, thunder, rain and hail on the roof, birdsong, the wind, water running in pipes, muted conversation and laughter, and, eventually, artillery and bombs – bombs on the railheads, bombs on bridges, bombs in the city. The Lacours could never go to the basement during a bombing, where anyone on the street, including German soldiers, SS, even Gestapo, might take shelter. But as time wore on and the Germans didn’t show, Louis Mignon suggested that if the bombardments grew heavy enough it might be worth the risk.

For his first four years Jules knew nothing but one big, brown room, with raw, unfinished wood making up the steep ceiling, the knee walls, the beams, and the floor. A taut bedsheet on a wood frame cordoned off his parents’ ‘bedroom,’ where, when Jules was deep asleep, they made love in complete silence except for not-quite-silent, astounded breaths. Perhaps having heard this in his dreams, for the rest of his life, try as he might, no matter how abandoned his lovemaking, Jules was never able to utter an exclamation, a cry, a groan, or a single word.

They had no artificial light, because even with blackout curtains it might have shown through a fissure in the walls or vents. Thus, their hours were decided by the sun, and when the days grew short and the nights so long they couldn’t sleep through them, they whispered in the dark. They dared not look out their one window when it was light, so the only part of the outside world Jules knew other than a pinched view of the street through the louvers of the vents was the back garden in moonlight. Because the city was blacked out, he hadn’t even been able to see warm lamps in beckoning windows.

Although light came through the window in the day – had it not, they would have lived just like bats instead of almost like bats – Jules thought the world was much darker than it is. He thought the moon was the sun, something he was not allowed to see in the day, when, in his particular cosmology, for some reason the “moon” grew much brighter. The most beautiful things he had ever beheld were the beginnings of sunrise and the reflected remnants of sunset, especially when one or the other struck new copper flashing on a distant roof or steeple and the reflection of what he thought was the moon in its excitable state shot through the darkness of the attic, illuminating white, dancing dust in its beam and painting a portion of the sloping roof in blinding gold. The first time he saw the sun itself he was knocked back in shock, and his father, who was holding him up to the window as he himself stood on a chair, nearly toppled over. In the spring of 1943, a few months after most of the 226 Jews of Reims who had been flushed out of their hiding places had been sent east to die, he saw moonlight on a tree in the back garden when it bloomed into a fixed white cloud that winked on and off as the true clouds above it hid and revealed the light.

Immediately upon Jacques’ report of what the Resistance knew about the deportations of the spring, the Mignons had refined their already ingenious system. They would eat their meals and clean up before delivering food to the attic. Thus, when the Lacours had finished and the dishes were brought down, there would never be two sets that might cast suspicion. Jacques would keep watch during the passages. Working for the Resistance, he, like everyone in the house, was always in danger. Philippe regretted every day that he could not risk for the Mignons what they risked for him. He asked if he could participate in the actions that Jacques reported, taking the boy’s place as the obligation of an adult and a veteran. He knew how to use weapons and how to fight. But no, it was out of the question. He couldn’t move on the street. Even with false documents he would have been conspicuously out of place as he left and returned to the Mignons, passing Wehrmacht and SS troops and officers who, despite their military discipline, were as weak as anyone else in the face of baguettes and the famous biscuits rose de Reims, the scarce ingredients for the latter made available to a rather nervous Louis by an SS officer who, had he known what the Mignons were doing, would have executed the whole family without so much as a thought, rapidly delivering pistol shots to the backs of their heads.

The scheme required that even laundry be matched, so that though Cathérine was thinner than Marie, nothing came down to be washed unless it could be plausibly worn by one Mignon or another. Jules’ clothes never came down but were laundered with many of Cathérine’s in the bathroom sink, and part of his play was silently kneading them in the water.

In the four years spent in their dark brown room, the things that take up time in a normal life were absent: work, play, shopping, travel, amusements, promenades, visits, appointments. Instead, they read, they dreamed of life after the war, they whispered about what they remembered and loved, and they taught Jules, who as a result of this upbringing was unusually precocious. All day long, they read to him until he himself could read. Forced by circumstance and lack of choice, starting at age three, he read everything passed up through the hatch: Victor Hugo, Molière, even Voltaire, none of which he actually understood, but he loved the sound of the words. His parents taught him the rudiments of musical theory, promising that when it would be filled out with sound he would know one great day after another. Even if it were beyond his comprehension, he was nearly force-fed a child’s version of mathematics, philosophy, history, and the sad story of their lives, things young children are not normally required to learn unless compelled to by half-insane parents, or war. There was little else they could do with sixteen hours a day of enforced idleness made otherwise only by learning, talking, and dreaming. And always the drills and the crucial game, which taught Jules how instantly to stop his play and freeze in place without even putting down a foot that had been raised, except so softly he could not hear it himself. Despite what they told him, he thought that this and all the other unusual things were normal. He was happy despite his parents’ unhappiness, because he was with them, and because they loved him so much and so well. This was his world, but then, in August of 1944, it ended.

THE SPRING OF ’44 had been unusually hot and dry, and in June as the Allies fought through the hedgerows and all of France breathed expectation, the weather was unlike anything anyone had seen before. The heat beneath the copper roof in the attic was difficult to withstand. Three vents and the open window facing the garden were not enough to exhaust the air, so Philippe would open the hatch to get a convection current going. It worked so well that the column of rising air was enough to push back Cathérine’s hair when she looked down into the third-floor closet. They closed their eyes and imagined it was a sea wind. In Reims, no less than the rest of France, a heat wave arrived in August just ahead of the advancing American troops. By the time Patton’s Third Army had pressed the Germans into the city, it abated as if in deference to the expected battle.

On the 16th, the kind of immense convoys that in 1940 had carried the Germans west through Reims now flowed east in even greater volume, for, unlike as in the advance four years previously, the routes of retreat were constricted because, battered in the north, the Germans lost them there. They poured into Reims day and night in a cross between panic and military rigor. Now they didn’t merely course down the avenues, leaving only a small part of their mass to garrison the town as they pushed toward Paris, they stopped. There were so many that they had to splay into the lesser streets, which quickly filled with bumper-to-bumper military vehicles, field kitchens puffing smoke, tense and camouflaged soldiers, and defensive positions at key points replete with sandbagged revetments and emplaced anti-tank guns, the infamous 88s, pointing down the boulevards or across the squares to cover fields of fire.

The troops on the Mignons’ street looted the bakery in the first half hour, taking flour, sugar, and butter, and from then on the Mignons were unable to go out to replenish. Not much remained anywhere else anyway, except what they could beg of the bivouacked Germans. They had as much water as they needed, the heat had abated, Jacques dared not leave the house, and everyone was more or less still and waiting. At dusk when the shadows made it impossible from the street to see into the vents, Philippe looked out and reported. “There are almost a thousand German soldiers here. Trucks, half-tracks, armored cars. No tanks. We would have heard them anyway. There are four field kitchens belching smoke.” Later, the Mignons brought some German rations – potatoes and a small block of cheese – to the Lacours.

As the week passed, the troops in the street would suddenly pack up and leave, only to be replaced by a new column that choked the same space with nearly identical vehicles and equipment. The sounds of arrival and departure were always the same: straps slapping against metal, engines starting, tripods folding, the slides and bolts of weapons exercised after oiling, commands shouted, and, upon leaving, the blast of a whistle followed by the revving of engines as the vehicles rolled off. Each wave would rap on the door of the bakery and demand supplies. Told that they were gone, the corporals assigned to scavenge made forced inspections. Some wanted to check the upper floors for hidden food. This was highly suspenseful, but Marie Mignon, an honest woman of great maternal authority, would inform them that the first formation had taken everything. “We have only what you give us now,” she would say, truthfully. “Otherwise, we’d starve. We can’t move. There are three of us. We’ve hardly eaten in a week.”

Then came a pause in the retreat. Some units moved back into the city from the east, and those pouring in from the west ceased to depart. In all, twenty-five thousand infantry took up positions in and around the city. The encampment below now had another kind of energy, higher and quieter, as the soldiers made preparations for battle. Communications lines were run from newly established headquarters to numerous subsidiary commands in freshly requisitioned buildings. Chevraux de frises blocked streets bristling with 88s and machine gun revetments. Artillery battalions fell into line within range of the Marne, and what was likely a substantial proportion of the remains of the Luftwaffe, two flights of forty fighter planes apiece – or perhaps one passing over twice: no one knew – buzzed the city, as if to fool the waiting troops into false confidence.

One evening during the buildup, Louis Mignon poked his head above the hatch to confer with Philippe. Both had been at Verdun, and they feared that Reims was about to be leveled by bombing, artillery, or both. They decided that when the bombardment began the Lacours would go to the basement together with the Mignons. The Lacours would be cousins from Paris, and their papers would have been left upstairs in the rush to take shelter. Perhaps no Germans would come into the basement. Perhaps even if some did they would not query anyone as they waited out the attack. What a pity it would be if, only days before the liberation of Reims, either the Lacours would be discovered or they and the Mignons would be blown to bits, their flesh and blood mixed with that of the Germans who had driven them into hiding. Civilians who could, fled to the chalk caves beneath Reims famous for holding the major portion of the world’s aging Champagne. The Mignons – father, mother, and son – had decided that rather than abandon their guests they would live or die with them. But on Saturday, the 26th of August, the telephone lines that had just been run were re-spooled, the German generals mounted their elegant, nickel-trimmed cars and drove off before dawn, and their formations followed in the light. Reims had been so filled with men and material that it took two days and nights of steady movement to empty it. The Germans completely lost control on the 28th, and those remaining were confronted by the Resistance and an advance guard of Free French. By the evening of the 29th, American tanks were on the outskirts of the city, and would drive for the center just before sunrise on the 30th.

That morning, crowds surged through the streets and into the main squares. The Tricolor was unfurled everywhere. Jacques went out and returned, triumphant and elated, to report that there had been only minor skirmishes and few killed. It was over. Nonetheless, here and there small German units had been trapped or were lost. Some had only now arrived from the south, having made a hook after retreating from Paris. No one knew how many, but it was certain that these were very few and that they were trying to flee via inconspicuous routes before the main roads east were blocked by the Americans.

“What’s that?” Jules had asked, hearing the faint strains of the Marseillaise. For fear that it might somehow, in a circumstance they could hardly imagine, give him away, he hadn’t been taught it.

“That’s the Marseillaise,” Cathérine told him. “It’s the song of France. They’re singing because they’re happy the Germans have gone away.” Having whispered for four years, she whispered still.

As she spoke, Philippe sat down and pivoted his cello into position, but this time he held the bow. This time, he would play music sounded out. And now Jules would hear music not through walls or at a distance or in the abstract.

It would have been appropriate to play the Marseillaise, but it was not what Philippe chose. He wanted the first music his son would hear to reflect not a secular glory but something more powerful. Philippe chose instead the choral part of a Bach cantata, which before the war he had transcribed and which he heard, despite the lack of sound, almost every day of their confinement – Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren. Even to a Jew hiding in Reims in 1944, that it was Christian and that it was German was of no consequence, for it had been written as if in divine light, it was perfect, it was joy expressed through mourning, like the darkest clouds when lit by radiant beams. It was as if a mother were singing her last song to her child, confident that, like her love, the melody was invincible and would endure. Hearing music close and immediately for the first time, Jules was astounded, and loved it so that he knew that this was what he would follow for the rest of his life.

But he was not the only one who was moved. The cello had sufficient power to pour forth from the vents and fill the street immediately below, where, at first not hearing it, as the Lacours and the Mignons had not heard them, a detachment of Germans in three command cars and a half-track had come to a halt so as to listen carefully to the movement of armor in the distance. Like hunters in the forest, the SS troops and their commander, splintered from the barbarous 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Götz Von Berlichingen, froze, cocked their heads, and strained to determine the location of what they were hearing. The unmistakable rumble of tanks came from the northwest, quite far away. This they could tell if only because they were themselves part of an armored division, from which they had been separated, serving in Paris for two months. They wanted to stay away from the tanks above all, although they knew that PIATs or heavy machine guns could at any moment and from any redoubt or casual position do them in almost as well.

They heard an ocean-like hiss of crowds to the north and east. These, too, were an obstacle, although a way through them could be cleared with a few bursts of fire. And everywhere, they could hear the Marseillaise, played from many sources and therefore with a dissonance that was intolerably irritating to the fifteen hardened soldiers seeking escape through backstreets. In their silence – listening, still, stiff and straight – they accurately conformed to their image of themselves. They were self-contained, stoic, and ruthless. They had deliberately ceased long before to wonder about war and death so as to be hardened and unafraid. War was now a duty that, were it not necessary to be highly agile and alert, they would have conflated, even in its most savage parts, with tedium. When they did fight, they fought bravely, efficiently, and without emotion of any kind.

Nonetheless, the retreat had taken an invisible toll. The reality of loss and defeat had opened to them. In a surge of the kind of feeling so often coupled with resignation, they experienced a vision of – and an intense love for – the things of the world. Thus, standing absolutely straight in the lead vehicle, face turned to the sky as he listened for what he had stopped to hear, the major in command was moved, for the first time in a long time, by the music coming from above. For so long having denied himself such feeling, he decided that he would compliment the cellist, not only for his skill, but for being sagacious and catholic enough to play Bach at the moment of liberation, when probably no one else in France was playing anything but the Marseillaise or would dare play anything German. The major was greatly and uncharacteristically softened by this. He wanted to be kind, to give a gift, to share with whoever was playing the music, which he recognized exactly, the admission that they were in fact brothers, that the war would be over, that there were higher things.

He dismounted. Shadowed automatically by a corporal and a private each armed not as he was with a pistol but with a submachine gun, he went to the bakery. Not surprisingly, it was closed, but with his riding crop he rapped hard on the door. He expected to be received, and that someone would appear expressly to receive him. One thing he did not lack was authority. The glass nearly broke.

The sound of this startled the Mignons as they were gathered around the radio, listening for news of their liberation. Keeping himself hidden behind the curtains, Louis looked out the window. Then he backed into the room. “Germans,” he said. “They’re right there.” As the radio was switched off and the dial turned from the BBC, he heard the cello for the first time since the Lacours had been hidden. It was beautiful, and for an instant he noted that, but then signaled Jacques to run upstairs and silence it. As Louis went downstairs to answer the door, Jacques raced upstairs and knocked with a broom handle against the ceiling. The cello stopped instantly, and Jules held position as in the game he had learned from his beginnings.

Louis was used to officers, who came often to the bakery – but not so much to the SS. Perhaps his fear showed, although what fear he had was largely neutralized by his natural courage and discipline, the knowledge that Reims was very nearly liberated, and the conviction that the war would end with Germany prostrate. For the moment, however, he could not let this confidence show. In the last act, all they had to do was get through, just as they had come through four years of war and occupation. These were only the few remaining minutes. The major was smiling. It was obvious that he meant no harm.

“I want to compliment the musician,” he said, “not only for his talent but especially for playing German music.”

“Thank you,” Louis said. “I’ll tell him.”

Still benevolent and unsuspecting, the major said, “I’d like to tell him myself, if I can.” He was polite.

“I’ll get him,” Louis announced.

“No no no,” the major insisted, wanting to save him the trouble. Here, the indelible habit of absolute authority took over. “I’ll go myself.” He started up the stairs, untroubled by the impoliteness of doing so without invitation. His men followed, and the stairs creaked with their weight.

Louis had no idea what would happen. He waited, thinking that this might be the end for them all. He heard the major encounter Jacques descending from the third floor. “Are you the cellist?”

“Yes,” Jacques answered. It was not convincing.

“What moved you to play the Wach Auf?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Jacques, who didn’t know that this was not the piece Philippe had played.

“Really,” the major said, having changed in an instant. He pushed past Jacques to the third floor. The soldiers flipped off the safeties on their weapons. Looking around, with the pleasure of a hunter, the major asked, “Where’s the cello?” Jacques had no answer. He thought that so near the end of the war for Reims, he was going to die, and that he would be unable to protect his parents, who were going to die as well. He hoped they had fled, but knew that while he was in danger they would not.

The major looked at the ceiling just as he had looked at the sky a short time before, but now he felt betrayed, and he was angry. “What’s up there?” he demanded.

“Nothing. It’s a crawlspace. Too small to enter.”

“I saw the vents and the pitch of the roof,” the major said. He was both driven and led as if in the chase. The corporal opened the closet door and pulled out duvets and bedding, tossing them over his head. Then he announced that he had found a hatch.

Without an order, the private went over to the corporal, cupped his hands into a stirrup, steadied himself, and gave the corporal a boost to the closet shelf. The corporal then used the barrel of his gun to knock open the hatch, and poked his head through just as Louis had frequently done. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw the sad, improvised furniture of the attic, the cello, the bow, Philippe, and Cathérine – but not Jules, who had been told to hide among the beams where the bathroom had been built against the rear knee wall, and, as in all the games, had obediently done so.

“They’re hiding Jews,” the corporal called down.

The major was more disappointed than angry, although he was irritated that he was wasting his time and putting his men in danger for the sake of a generous impulse that, in his view, had been thrown back in his face. He could hear through the walls, if faintly, the chest-shaking vibration of at least several companies of American tanks, and the sounds, like surging water, of distant and exultant crowds. “How many?”

“Two. One bed, two chairs. There are only two.”

“Get them down.”

With the deepest sadness and boundless fear for themselves and their child, Philippe and Cathérine left the attic they had entered four years before, and awkwardly descended through the hatch. As the corporal and private helped Cathérine down, each of them felt her breasts with their hands. Philippe saw this. His head swam, and the only thing keeping him upright and able to move was the overwhelming imperative of saving his child. He looked at Cathérine, and she at him. In a single glance they said that they loved one another, that they understood they were going to die, and that what they had left to do now in the world was to hope that Jules, overlooked, would live.

Sadism feeds upon itself, and this was the SS. Philippe and Cathérine were not escorted down the stairs, they were kicked and thrown. By the time they reached the rez-de-chaussé, Cathérine’s ribs and wrist were broken, her face cut and bruised. Philippe was hurt even more, but felt nothing except the exquisite pain that he would not be able to save his wife. She looked toward him, he thought, as if he could save her. The Mignons observed all this in shock, certain that they themselves would be shot for harboring Jews.

As if to demonstrate to the soldiers outside that they were doing their job, the private and the corporal hit Cathérine and Philippe with their submachine guns to propel them out the door and ordered them onto the half-track. They were in too much pain to climb up themselves, so the soldiers hoisted them up, threw them onto the steel floor, and forced them to kneel.

As if to explain why they were not simply shot and left on the ground, and why he was not going to shoot the Mignons, the major said, “We’ll have to live with France.” Then he mounted the step and got into the half-track. He looked up and down the street. The unmistakable sound of tanks grew louder. His men looked at him as if to receive orders, but he held up his hand, meaning that they should leave their engines off, and freeze. He hoped that as the tanks passed on the boulevard they might fail to notice his small unit parked quietly and half in shade in the middle of the block.

Jules had never in all his life been anywhere but the attic room or without the presence of both his parents for as much as a second. Their absence was intolerable, and the game was over. At the hatch, he looked down. The shelf was close, but he was scared. He was, however, more scared to be left alone, so he lowered himself. Once on the shelf, he had to jump. He held his breath and did so, closing his eyes as he fell, and rolling when he landed. Shocked but unhurt, he saw the stairs. He’d never seen stairs, much less taken them, and it was difficult for him to do so. He used his hands, backing down, going sideways, terrified of the height. Still, he made his way down the several flights, and though he was confused as to where he was he saw through the bakery window his mother and father kneeling in the half-track, the Mignons outside, their backs to him, and all the soldiers.

He burst through the door, trying to reach Philippe and Cathérine, but Marie Mignon caught him and pressed him to her, hoping in vain that the Germans would take no notice.

“Is that their child?” The major asked.

“No,” Marie answered. “Our grandson, a Christian child, a Catholic child, baptized.”

The major took a step toward Philippe, who was bleeding from his face and could see through only one eye. “Is that your child?” he asked.

Philippe turned his head to look. Suppressing all emotion, he said, “No.” He knew that Jules would hear this and would not understand.

The major asked Cathérine, “Is that your child?”

It took her entire being not to shake and cry, but she said, “No. That is not my child.” Like her husband, she cast no last glance and shed no tears – the most difficult thing in her life.

The major withdrew his pistol from his holster and put it near Cathérine’s head. “Is he?” he asked.

“No.”

Then he fired.

Philippe’s heart burst with powerlessness and regret. Had he not been shot in turn, as he was, he might have died still. It was too much to live through.

Only when Philippe and Cathérine had collapsed, hidden by the sides of the half-track, did Jules speak. It was the first word he had ever said not in a whisper, and it was so loud that it echoed from the façades across the street. “Maman!” he cried.

At this, Marie dropped her head, and shed quiet tears. A soldier came and tried to pull Jules away from her. She resisted. Jacques and Louis joined her. The soldiers had rifles and were too close to fire, so they used them as clubs and beat everyone down. The Mignons fell to the ground and waited to be shot. Jules staggered toward the half-track. As if to prevent the four-year-old from damaging the armored vehicle, one of the soldiers – who had killed many children already – took a quick step after Jules and used the butt of his rifle to smash the back of his head. Jules saw the ground rushing up at him, and then, before losing consciousness, felt the left side of his face hit the pavement.

After the major had shot Philippe, he kept watch up the street, pistol in hand, as if nothing had happened around him. Just as the soldiers remounted their vehicles, pointed their rifles at the Mignons, and waited for the order to fire, the major saw an American tank on the boulevard pass the gap at the end of the street, stop, and slowly backup. “Go!” he ordered. “Drive!”

The engines started, the soldiers dropped behind the armor plate of the half-track, and the SS detachment, still carrying the bodies of Cathérine and Philippe, sped out as the turret of the American tank rotated to aim its gun. The tank fired one round before the targeted vehicles turned onto the boulevard at the other end of the street. The shot hit the second command car, blowing it across the boulevard, but the way was then made clear for the half-track to round the corner, following the lead car. The tank rotated its turret back and continued in the direction in which it had been going.

Marie dragged herself to Jules and pulled him to her again as Louis tried to rise to his knees. “Is he dead?” he asked his wife.

“No,” she answered, the blood from Jules’ left cheek soaking into the front of her dress as she cradled him, “but how can he live?”