The pimply teenaged Scout leader pointed at Max.
“Et toi?”
And you?
Max could feel the other boys looking at him. They were sitting in a circle in one of the gray, damp forests outside of Brussels and he was supposed to choose a spirit animal, but his mind had gone blank. It was hard enough coming up with goofy stuff like this in English, but in French, it was impossible. He didn’t know how to say any cool animals—eagle, mountain lion, bear.
“Crapaud!” Oscar shouted.
The other boys tittered, and Max felt his face turn red. He had no idea what animal a crap-o was, but he was sure it wasn’t a compliment.
“Tote?” the pimply Scout leader said, poking his tongue in and out at Max.
“Toad,” Max muttered.
He wished Inspector Fontaine had never showed up at his house. The “Scoot” meetings lasted five hours every other Sunday, a major chunk of Max’s weekends. The uniform was dorky—he had to wear a red-and-green scarf, a royal-blue oxford shirt and Bermuda shorts no matter how cold it was. He had to sing a bunch of goofy songs he couldn’t quite understand but that seemed to have something to do with promising to be friends and help his fellow Scouts. Which was impossible with Oscar as one of his troop mates.
* * *
THREE HOURS LATER, Max stumbled out of the woods and collapsed into the passenger seat of his family’s new Volvo.
“Drive,” he ordered.
His father obediently hit the ignition with a grin and pulled back onto the road. The sun was streaming through a break in the clouds, but the bruise-colored ones blowing in told Max it wouldn’t last long. That was Belgium; the weather was always changing—usually for the worse.
“So you loved it?”
Max unplastered his head from the window and glared at him.
“This place sucks. Can we just go home?”
“We’re going home.”
“I mean home to America.”
“Come on, Max. It can’t all be awful.”
“Well, it is. School, Madame Pauline, Scoots, everything.”
His father didn’t try to argue with him, which was a relief. He just drove.
The forest gave way to a fancy neighborhood of grand homes and embassy residences. They passed a fussy, overmanicured park and rejoined the tram lines. A drop of rain splatted against the windshield. A minute later, it began to pour. His father turned on the wipers.
“Max, have I told you what I’m doing at work these days?” his father said.
Max shook his head. He’d been so focused on his own life that he’d never asked.
“Something called resilience plans. According to the NATO charter, every country needs to have a plan for how to help itself in case it’s attacked until allies can step in. It’s important for every country to be resilient in the face of adversity—to fight on, not just give in.”
Max bristled. “So I’m supposed to be resilient.”
“All I’m saying is that you can’t let a few problems set you back.”
“This is not a few problems.”
“Okay, big problems then, huge ones. Look at the Belgians. During the First World War, the Germans invaded them with an enormous force. Not only did the German Army have ten times the number of troops, they also had machine guns and mustard gas and zeppelins—weapons that the Belgian Army had never encountered before. The Belgians should have been wiped out in weeks, but they fought for years, harder than anyone expected. They even flooded their own land to keep it from the Germans.”
Water as a weapon, like something out of Aquaman. Max was tempted to ask more about this. He loved talking to his dad about military history. Back home, they had toured Civil War battlefields together. But he was too angry to give him the satisfaction of showing interest, so he just turned on the radio. An old American song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” was playing, and it made Max even more homesick. His father had some nerve to suggest that his attitude was the problem rather than his parents’ lousy decision to come to Belgium in the first place.
The next afternoon, as he scratched away with his fountain pen, Max decided to ask Madame Pauline about the Belgians’ defensive flood.
“Did it really happen?”
Max knew it had—his father wouldn’t make up something like that—but he also knew acting doubtful would rile up Madame Pauline even more, distracting her from dictée.
“Of course!” Madame Pauline stared at him indignantly. “The Yser was a low-lying region. When the situation became desperate, the Belgians opened the canals and flooded the German trenches. We Belgians have always fought fiercely. Even during World War Two, there was always a resistance movement—”
Max sensed an opportunity to keep her talking. “How about here in Brussels?”
“In Brussels especially! Consider the name of your street.”
“Albert Jonnart?”
“Jonnart,” Madame Pauline corrected, even though to Max’s ear, she said it exactly the same way he had. “Do you know who he was?”
Max shook his head.
“He lived here during the war, when the street was called Jean Linden, after the orchid grower. Tropical orchids aren’t native to northern Europe, and it wasn’t easy at first to keep them alive here.”
Max didn’t say that they still seemed hard to keep alive, at least for his mom. She had bought them compulsively soon after they’d arrived in Brussels, only to have all the flowers shrivel and fall off the stems a few weeks later. When school had started, she’d gotten rid of them and bought the cloth orchids instead.
“Jonnart forged work papers so Belgians wouldn’t have to go to Germany and work for the Reich. And he hid a Jewish boy, a classmate of his son, named Ralph Mayer. Ralph was the only child of a Jewish couple who had fled to Belgium from Germany during the 1930s. When the Germans invaded Belgium, Ralph’s father asked Jonnart to protect the boy. So Jonnart hid him in his house.”
“Like Anne Frank,” Max said. He had read her diary the previous year in school. “How old was he?”
“I don’t know exactly. Not much older than you, maybe Claire’s age. Jonnart’s son, Pierre, and Ralph were classmates at College Saint-Michel, the secondary school.”
“What happened?”
“The Gestapo found out and arrested Jonnart. They sent him to prison, then to a labor camp in France, where he died. It’s why they renamed the street after him.”
Ralph must have died too, probably in a concentration camp like Anne, Max thought. The story was so sad that Max almost wished he hadn’t asked about Albert Jonnart. But then he would still be struggling to figure out the difference between toi, trois and toit.
“Did he live here, at number thirty-six?”
Madame Pauline shook her head. “He was at number fifty.”
Max wondered where Albert Jonnart had hidden Ralph. When they’d moved into this house, Max’s father had shown him a wing of unfinished rooms behind a door off the basement, including an old wine cellar. It was too damp and mildewy to use—even to store the moving boxes, which his parents had instead stacked up outside it—but it seemed like the kind of space where you could hide someone. He opened his mouth to ask, but Madame Pauline was onto him.
“Enough, Max,” she said firmly. “We need to get back to dictée.”