SIXTY-THREE

MARTHE

Paulhaguet

June 1944

“You’re a terrible nurse,” Travert grouses, dabbing his bandaged chest where I’ve spilled broth.

He’s a worse patient, but I can’t complain, because my battered face still hurts when I talk. I try giving Travert another spoonful. He holds up a hand to say he’s not hungry. It’s a good sign that his Frenchman’s pride is more severe than his wound, but my bruised lower lip wobbles to remember him writhing on the ground in front of the boys’ dormitory, a bullet in his gut. And all for my sake . . .

He’d have died if Sam’s maquisards hadn’t carried him to the nearby preventorium hospital, where doctors rushed him to a surgical room. Now we’re in hiding at Madame Pinton’s farm, dependent on Dr. Boulagnon, who comes to change Travert’s bandages, check the stitches, and give him something for the pain.

It’s a miracle the bullet hit nothing vital, but Yves still can’t walk on his own. It won’t be long before the German authorities connect the dots between us, fifteen missing Jewish girls, and three missing Gestapo officers. So Travert wants me to go without him—flee to Marseilles or a village in the mountains—but I could never abandon him after he came back for me.

No one’s ever done that before.

To keep him from arguing, I say I’m not strong enough to go on my own. With a broken rib, that’s not far from the truth. I also have crushing headaches and lingering dizziness. I move very slowly around Madame Pinton’s house in helping to care for him. I’m ashamed to be putting her at risk, but she says she isn’t worried. “You think I’m afraid to leave this lousy world? And anyway, the Nazis have bigger problems than an old woman in an isolated farmhouse.”

With grim satisfaction, she tells us about the battle raging between the Germans and our maquisards at nearby Mont Mouchet. Then, just as my purple-black bruises are yellowing, the Allies land at Normandy and fight their way from the beachheads. British, Canadians, Free French, and fresh-faced Americans, well fed, well supplied, and motored by that quintessential spirit of get-up-and-go.

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.

I’m worried for everyone at the castle now—for the girls, for Anna, the staff, and anyone else who might still be held to account for what I did. It’s already a miracle the Gestapo hasn’t tracked us down here, so I don’t dare go back . . .

It isn’t until August, when the Germans start abandoning their checkpoints under the pressure of a rapidly advancing Allied front, that it seems safe enough to go into Paulhaguet for foodstuffs. There, I have the good luck to run into Anna, who is dropping off a package for her husband, in the hope it’ll reach him in his prison camp.

We sit together in the back of a little bistro by the post office, where we have privacy. Over a lunch of salmon and tomato in a vinaigrette, I say, “I’m sorry.”

I can’t say more, but I don’t need to. “No one blames you.”

“Not even Madame Xavier?”

“You didn’t hear?” Anna makes the sign of the cross over herself. “A farmer found her in a field with her throat cut. No one knows what happened, but you can guess. These days, we’re finding bodies everywhere. In ditches, wells, and barns . . . resisters, collaborators, who knows?”

I still have enough humanity in me not to dance a jig that someone slit Faustine Xavier’s throat, but not so much I’m sorry she’s dead. One day, I might find it in myself to pray for her soul. Today I’m just glad there’s one less person the kids need to fear, and one less stain to be washed off the castle walls.

From what we hear on the BBC, Hitler can’t win—even his henchmen have to realize it. Travert says that at this point the Germans must be idiots not to negotiate for peace. They’ve lost Italy as an ally. The Russians are crushing German forces on the Eastern Front. And the Americans are driving them out of France. But, according to Anna, they’re doing as much damage as they can in retreat. Nearby villages have been burned and looted, men lined up and shot. I wince at the word shot, and she asks, “How is he?”

She’s smart enough not to say Travert’s name aloud. “Better, but still in pain. And I’m chewing again.”

She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “You were nuts to give yourself up like that. Positively certifiable.”

“I know,” I admit, and she doesn’t know the half of it. On the other hand, maybe she’s guessed.

She shakes her head, big brown eyes downcast. “I wish I was even half as nuts as you . . .”

“You’re crazy enough to stay,” I tell Anna. “You should go to your maman in Marseilles in case the Germans return to the castle and try to hold you responsible for what I did.”

“I’m not going anywhere until after the war,” she says, looking very much like her mother in that moment. “And it’s almost over.”

As it happens, she’s right.

On August 18, the Secret Army of Lafayette attacks Germans in the streets of Le Puy. The Germans surrender there and evacuate from Brioude the next day. At Chavaniac, we’re liberated even before Paris. Sam and his maquisards march through town singing the “Marseillaise,” and it’s got even me all choked up . . .

Travert is out of hiding and back in uniform, wearing an armband with the tricolor. He and his gendarmes aren’t precisely sure who is in charge of France now, but what else is new? Probably General de Gaulle.

Travert holds me against his waist, and together we watch the fearless parade of red, white, and blue. The castle gates are flung open for parents who want to tell their children the joyous news. I see Josephine wearing her tricolor pin, and Gabriella with old Scratch purring in her arms. And, reunited with the girls, I kiss them and hug them a thousand times.

“Careful,” says Travert, “or someone might mistake you for a woman who wants a few babies underfoot.”

I laugh because I’m feeling happy enough to pull him into an alleyway and risk it, but I don’t say that in front of the girls, who are keen to visit Madame Pinton. It’s against the rules of the preventorium—but who cares?

I promise to take them the next morning.

Meanwhile, I’m awash in bittersweet memories, allowing myself to think of Henri without feeling like a traitor for doing so. Guilty for being alive, but relieved that the war and suffering are over. Exhausted and happy and sad all at the same time. I can’t seem to get it together until later that night, when Travert turns on the radio and pulls me into his embrace.

“So where are you going to take me?” I ask.

He chuckles. “There isn’t a café in miles where every table won’t be occupied tonight.”

I wrap my arms around him. “I meant where are you taking me after the war. You said we could go someplace nice. Travel the world—or what’s left of it . . .”

He meets my eyes. How did I never notice before that his are as dark as fertile volcanic soil? Now they glisten, because he remembers the rest of what he said that night. We could make life, after the war. We could go someplace nice. Travel the world—or what’s left of it. Make a baby. Who knows? Maybe you fall in love with me someday. Or maybe you leave me for someone else. That’s life. But we have to survive to live it.

Somehow, we survived. Now I want to live.

Yves holds me close. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

And these are the words I’ve been waiting to hear all my life . . .