The battle beginning today will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years.
Adolf Hitler’s proclamation to the soldiers on the Western Front, 10 May 1940
I have never liked the dark. I feel as if I am in a closed box and the only way out is to find a bit of light. That is why I love the stars. They always seem to say, ‘This way.’
The city lights were extinguished. German planes continued to fly throughout the dark morning. I heard voices in the streets.
I had memorized a poem, in English, for Sister Bernadette, ‘The Light of Stars’ by Longfellow. I still remember a section:
Oh, fear not in a world like this,
And thou shalt know erelong,
Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.
One night, Hava and I were walking home from the opera when she pointed out the appearance of the first star in the dark sky. I told her it was not really a star, but the planet Venus. I was proud to tell her this because for once I was teaching her something she did not know.
‘It was named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love,’ I said as we walked through the park.
Hava took off her shoes and socks and said, ‘Let’s dance on the surface of Venus.’
‘Hava,’ I said. ‘People will . . .’
She cut me short. ‘Oh, Simone, stop worrying about what other people think. Someday you will want to be brave, eat chocolate all day, read D. H. Lawrence in church . . . and you will no longer care what others think.’ Hava ran through the park, clapping her shoes above her head and whooping loudly.
At that time, the star of Hava’s world was not Venus but the opera singer, John Charles Tillman, the love of her dreams.
Back then, Hava and I had no fear of the world. I feared others’ disapproval, but not the world, and I did not know how sublime a thing it was to suffer and be strong . . . not yet.
Sister Bernadette had taught us that fire begins when a material that can burn is combined with something packed with oxygen and is exposed to heat. ‘In a chain reaction, the fire burns and burns – like sin,’ Sister Bernadette added. ‘Like sin, which burns in your heart and causes a chain reaction, until your heart is nothing but a black, charred mass from the devil’s oven.’
When I finally reached Hava’s home that morning, I grabbed the cold, brass door knocker and knocked once, then twice. There was no response.
‘Hello!’ I called through the door. ‘Monsieur Daniels? Madame Daniels? Hello? Hava?’
Silence. I turned the doorknob. The door was not locked. ‘Monsieur Daniels? Hava?’
Weak sunlight filtered into the silent rooms, pearl light, blue light, nothing like the light of Venus or the opera. ‘Hava?’
In the corner of the large room I saw her sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest, head in her arms. Her legs were covered by her plain, dark dress.
‘Hava?’
I found a candle and some matches. As I struck a match, a small cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling. The smell of sulphur hung in the air. The flame illuminated my hand. I lit the black wick as the flame leapt willingly from the match to the top of the candle. I carried it across the room as the candlelight danced in the darkness.
I lowered the candle and knelt next to my friend.
‘Hava?’
She lifted her head and looked at me. ‘Your face is yellow, Simone,’ she whispered. I did not recognize the voice. When Hava spoke, you could usually imagine that you were at a circus and she was the ringmaster. But there, in the light of the candle, Hava’s whisper was weak. ‘They’re gone.’ She waved her hand in a wide, broad gesture towards the empty room. ‘They’re gone.’
‘Perhaps they’re visiting relatives.’ I said quietly. ‘Perhaps they were shopping when the planes arrived and now they’re with relatives or friends.’
Hava stared at me. ‘Let’s pretend the moon is burning. Let’s go swimming.’
‘Hava, are you all right?’
‘The moon, the cow . . . let’s jump over the moon and go swimming, Simone.’
Hava and I had always loved the moon. Sometimes we rolled old newspapers into pretend telescopes and looked directly into the moonlight.
‘I see John Charles Tillman,’ she’d say.
‘I see Clark Gable,’ I’d say.
I remember when Hava and I went swimming in Ixelles Pond. We dared each other to leap from a large rock and dive into the cool water. We took turns: back dives, flips, shallow dives, cannonballs, belly flops, all accompanied by much laughter.
The real idea was to impress a boy we knew, André Van Acker, the butcher’s son. We knew he liked to fish at the pond early on Saturday evenings. We knew his skin was bronze and his hair the colour of wheat. Each time we swam close to where he sat, André complained that we were disturbing the fish. ‘Go away,’ he said irritably.
Hava and I pretended that we had turned ourselves into fish and swam closer to the boy with the fishing rod in his hand. André Van Acker reeled in his line, stood up, placed his fishing pole on his shoulder like a soldier going off to war, and then said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Simone Lyon.’ Then he walked away into the undergrowth and disappeared.
‘You see, Simone! Too many people know you and are always turning a dream into a dull Saturday night.’
That’s when I jumped into the water. The moon had just risen into the early night sky. When I rose to the surface, Hava was standing on the rock in the fresh moonlight. She looked out at me and said, ‘I salute you, Daughter of the General.’ Then she too jumped into the water, and we swam together like newborn dolphins, our skin rippled with goose bumps.
The moon is one of the saddest objects in the sky, for it seems to go through much pain as it changes shape, enduring a passive position at the mercy of the brave sun. As the German invasion cast an evil melancholy over everything we had taken for granted, now we too found ourselves at the mercy of events beyond our ability to resist or comprehend.