The Book of Lost Names(14)
“So this is Free France,” Mamusia murmured as the train slowed an hour later to crawl into Vichy, which, even in the late evening light, looked beautiful. Window boxes overflowed with blossoms, and palatial nineteenth-century buildings reached for the sky. They stopped in the middle of a rail yard, and Eva kept watch for Germans, but outside the window, only French officers patrolled. Then again, it was the French police who had come for Tatu? the night before; they could trust no one.
When the train began to move again, Eva gazed out the window, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of the palace that Pétain and his ministers had decamped to when they abandoned Paris, but all she could see were parks, apartments, and cafés. Night was falling by the time the train crossed the Allier River into vineyard-dotted farmland, and it was fully dark by the time they made a quick stop in Riom and began moving south again. It was just before nine o’clock when the train finally shuddered to a halt within the boxy Gare de Clermont-Ferrand.
“Now what?” Mamusia asked as they disembarked with two dozen other passengers. “Surely there won’t be buses departing this late to anywhere.”
Eva took a deep breath. Even after crossing into unoccupied France with false documents, this felt like the riskiest part of the journey. “Now we wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For morning to come.” The station was quiet, but Eva and her mother weren’t the only ones who would need to spend the night on its hard wooden benches. More than half of the other passengers who had arrived on the train were also carving out corners of the platform, laying their heads on valises and using coats as makeshift blankets, though the air was warm. “Try to sleep, Mamusia. I’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”
* * *
It was late afternoon the next day by the time Eva and her mother finally boarded a bus to Aurignon. The journey took an hour and a half through streets lined with old stone houses that gave way to verdant forests and farmland.
Aurignon sat surrounded by dense pines at the top of a hill, and as the bus rumbled into the town, the engine straining with the climb, Eva could just make out the shadows of a stout mountain range to the west. She pressed her forehead to the glass and stared at the fog-cloaked slopes until the bus turned a corner and came to a slow, squealing stop in a small square surrounded by short, boxy stone buildings.
“Aurignon!” the driver announced to the half-dozen people on the bus. “End of the line!”
Slowly, the passengers stood, gathering bags and shuffling toward the door. Eva and her mother exited last, and it wasn’t until the bus was pulling away that Eva finally relaxed enough to gaze around and take in their new surroundings. They’d really made it.
Aurignon looked nothing like Paris, or indeed like anyplace Eva had been. When she was small, her parents had taken her on a few trips north to the Breton coast, where sea air swept the faces of wooden buildings, turning them gray as the wings of a dove. They had even ventured a handful of times an hour or so beyond Paris, where small houses dotted endless pastures threaded with streams, and the towns themselves were small, quaint, and orderly.
This town was more condensed, structures with narrow windows crowded together in a way that looked almost haphazard, as if they had started in neat rows but the earth had shrugged them off as it rose toward the sky. Stone paths meandered up the hill, and some of the roads that led away from the town square looked too narrow for even a single car. At the crest of the incline sat a small stone church with stained glass windows and a simple wooden cross above the front entrance.
The thing that stood out most to Eva was how alive the town felt, though only a handful of people hurried through the square. In Paris, since the Germans had come, people walked around clad in gray and black, heads down, as if trying to blend in with the buildings around them. Colors had leached from the landscape; in many places, the plants and flowers that had once thrived and brought the city to life had wilted and disappeared.
But here, window boxes overflowed with peppermint, chervil, and geraniums of pink, lilac, and white, while ivy crept cheerfully up the walls of stone buildings that looked as if they’d been here since long before the French Revolution. Clothes dried on lines strung across wooden balconies, and even the church overlooking the small town seemed to glow, the lights inside illuminating the colorful windows. The town square was anchored by a stone fountain featuring a bearded man with a cross in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. Water gurgled cheerfully around the statue’s feet. This was a town whose heart hadn’t yet been trampled, and for a few seconds, Eva didn’t know what to make of it.
“What is this place?” Mamusia whispered, and Eva exchanged tentative smiles with her mother for the first time since her father had been taken. She felt tears of gratitude prickling at the back of her eyes; for a few seconds, things felt almost normal.
Eva swallowed the lump in her throat. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It reminds me of the village where I grew up.” Mamusia breathed in deeply and closed her eyes. “The fresh air of the countryside. I had almost forgotten.”
Eva took a deep breath, too, the faintest scents of primrose, jasmine, and pine lingering just beyond reach. When she opened her eyes, there were two little girls staring at her, each of them clasping their mothers’ hands as they hurried by. She quickly gathered herself. They were out of Paris, but they weren’t out of the woods; they were traveling on false documents and needed to find a place to stay before they became even more conspicuous. “Come,” she said to her mother.