The World That We Knew(29)

“They can riot all they want,” Claude said sadly. “They can’t fight the Third Reich in the streets of Paris. The Germans have the soldiers, the weapons, the tanks, all of it.”

“So we do nothing?”

Claude shook his head. “There’s another way.”

Victor looked at his old friend.

“The Scouts are still functioning. Only now, we’re not playing.” Bands of young Jewish renegades, later to be called La Sixième, lived in the woods and did their best to help others escape and work against the Nazis. These young people were fearless and wild and felt they had nothing to lose. “Have you ever shot a gun?” Claude asked.

As a child, Victor had often been taken into the countryside by his grandfather. He’d been perhaps six or seven, too small to hold a proper rifle, so his grandfather had one made especially for him, the correct weight and size. They’d shot at birds, although it seemed a crime to do so; Victor had cried the first time they’d gathered the doves they shot, piled into a white sheet to carry home. Later, he had been given a full-size rifle, and as it turned out, he had perfect vision and excellent aim. Perhaps it had all been for a reason, his embarrassment at having cried in front of the old man on that first hunting trip, the rain of gray feathers that fell from the sky, the fact that he had learned to be so good at something that repelled him. Now it all made sense, as if his fate had been preordained the moment he walked out into the field with his grandfather and picked up the gun he hadn’t wanted to touch.

“Quite a number of times,” he told his friend.



At the hour when night was disappearing, Claire Lévi discovered that her elder son was not in his bed. She looked through the house, then searched the icy street, out in her nightclothes, in a panic, not bothering to think of the curfew that kept Jews inside at night.

When she failed to find Victor, she went to sit in the garden on a stone bench, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had not thought this was what her life would come to, but now she saw that it had. The professor noticed Claire wasn’t in bed, and when he found her in her nightgown, crying, he sat beside her.

There had been an early storm and the branches on the trees crackled with a sheen of ice. All of the rabbits that had once lived here had been caught and cooked by the neighbors, and the dormice had taken over the empty garden house, where bulbs and cuttings had once been stored under the glass dome of a ceiling. It was silent and dark, and Claire was hopeless. What a fool she’d been to think the world would not touch her or those she loved. André took her hand. For once he was truly beside her, not thinking of anything other than the moment they were in as she told him their son was gone.

“He’ll come back,” the professor insisted.

Claire shook her head. She knew how fearless and headstrong young men were; she just hadn’t realized that Victor was anything more than a boy.

“Of course he will,” her husband insisted. “He’ll be home by morning.”

But when the sun had risen, Victor hadn’t returned and they had no choice but to go inside and lock the door. That day the professor did not go to his study, but instead walked through the neighborhood and crossed the Seine at the appointed hour when Jews could shop, hoping to catch sight of Victor. He had always avoided the Marais, and had felt more connected to the academic Left Bank. Now as he went along Rue des Rosiers, past the bookshops and markets, and along the cobblestones of Rue des Barres, he realized how cut off he’d been.

When he’d had no luck finding Victor, the professor went to see the rabbi, although he hadn’t been to services for a dozen or more years. Neither of his sons had been bar mitzvah, and in the last few years they hadn’t celebrated Passover. He’d considered himself French through and through, but now here he was knocking at doors, asking if anyone had seen Victor. But no one could help him. Sons were missing all throughout Paris. He could search the world over, but when a young man wanted to fight for what was right, there was no holding him back.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


RUNAWAYS




VIENNE, WINTER 1941

ETTIE CAREFULLY OBSERVED EVERY CUSTOMER, hoping someone would signal to her, but no one came for her. No strangers waited for her, no notes were dropped beside a table, no customers making eye contact. The only person who seemed to notice that she was alive was the beastly owner of the café, Monsieur Favre, who liked to stand too close while he put his hands on her waist, insisting she was too pretty to be a waitress. She knew he was a liar as soon as he said that. Not wanting to be dismissed, she swallowed her fierce dislike of Monsieur Favre and forced a thin smile onto her face.

“Your wife is much prettier,” Ettie said, even thought Madame Favre was a dumpy, ill-tempered woman.

The café owner backed off once his wife was mentioned, for Madame Favre was working not ten feet away. Still, from then on, Ettie slept with a knife in her cot. You couldn’t trust anyone, really, especially when you yourself were living a lie. Weeks passed and no one contacted her. She began to think Father Varnier had decided she wasn’t worthy of becoming a fighter.

Then one evening she left soon after the dinner hour to take a walk and everything changed. By then winter was closing in. She washed dishes for so long every day that her hands were raw from the harsh soap they used. “Don’t use too much,” Monsieur Favre always told her. He was cheap and preferred dirty dishes to the cost of soap.