The World That We Knew(31)

Ettie nodded, her face glowing. Someone had come for her.



When the snow began to fall, Victor and Claude and the other men piled into the car and took off, saying nothing of where they were going or what their mission was.

“We don’t discuss such things,” Bettina told Ettie. “It’s safer for all of us that way. If one of us is caught, we know that no one can resist torture, and the less you have to say the better.”

The women moved into the old house. The snow was so high it was impossible for a car to get down the dirt road. No one could come after them or blunder upon them. They felt they would be safe, at least for as long as the snowdrifts covered the roads and the fields. There was a fireplace and some wood, as well as a pile of onions and potatoes in the cellar, gnawed on by field rats, but perfectly edible. As it turned out, Bettina was a forger, and soon enough Ettie was in training, her hands blue with ink at the end of the day. Bettina’s knowledge of printing techniques as an artist allowed her to produce a variety of identifications used by the Resistance to help smuggle Jews to the countryside or to the border. Visas, driver’s licenses, baptismal certificates, ration cards, anything that allowed Jews to move about the country or make their way into Spain or Switzerland or begin the journey to find a Jewish state. She had access to ink and paper in Lyon from a sympathetic French owner of a poster factory that was no longer in service.

A few weeks after the men had departed, Ettie stumbled over some loose floorboards. She knelt down and lifted a board. Hidden there was a cache of gunpowder and batteries.

“I think you could tell me something of what we’re doing here,” Ettie said while she and Bettina worked one afternoon. By then the snowfall was over the windows, and they were eating rice and fried onions. There had been days when Ettie imagined they would starve to death before the men came back or the snow began to melt.

“Our boys interrupt convoys to Montluc Prison and what we do here in this kitchen allows those who escape to have the proper documents.”

“Interrupt?” Ettie said.

Bettina shrugged. “Bomb.”

Ettie wished she were out with the men. She had spent most of her life in a kitchen, and now here she was again. They had been gone for so long, both she and Bettina were anxious. More than a month had passed. It might be possible for the women to hike to a village, or to a safe house Bettina knew about that belonged to a doctor on the other side of the mountain. But it was rough terrain, where people said wolves still roamed.

At dusk Ettie often went outside. She wore a heavy coat and her shoes were stuffed with paper to keep her feet from freezing. She had dug a small path to a stream, and once there had broken through the ice. Ettie crouched down and concentrated, then dipped her hand in the water, ignoring the cold. She caught a fish that was asleep in the frigid water. She carried him up the path into the house and placed him in front of Bettina. Bettina stood up, stunned by the fish flopping about on the table, then she laughed and couldn’t stop.

“This is a miracle,” she declared.

Bettina cooked the fish for dinner, and after they’d eaten the two women felt they had been saved. Every day Ettie went fishing in the mornings, and most days she caught something. She was a better fisherman than she was a forger. The fish swam directly into her hands. She was coming back from the stream one afternoon when an unfamiliar car pulled up the road. Ettie stopped behind a tree, in a panic, until she recognized Arno. She ran through the snow to meet him. She was about to ask if he had thought to bring food with him, until she saw the look on his face. She knew that something had gone wrong. He grabbed his rucksack and they went up to the house. The snow was turning blue. Soon it would begin to melt. Arno had indeed brought food, and he unpacked some bread and cheese and sausage. Bettina was there, her hands covered with ink, and when she saw him she burst into tears. There was no easy way to say what had happened, an explosion gone wrong, the bomb in Jean’s hands. Claude was fine, but Victor had been badly burned and after a doctor had seen to his wounds, he’d insisted on being taken to a farm near a village about an hour away.

“They’ll come back,” Arno said.

“Of course,” Bettina agreed.

Ettie made dinner that night, she was as good a cook as any of them. Afterward she went outside as she always did. Arno came out as well.

“We’ll have to move back into the woods soon,” he said.

He’d been nearby when the bomb had gone off and had seen what it had done to his friend. He now had ringing in his ears, but more than that, he seemed changed. He had a gun that he played with, as if he could never be ready enough for an attack. He’d brought in some rifles from the trunk of the car.

“All of those people on the convoy we couldn’t stop will die because we made a mistake,” he said. “I made the mistake. It was my plan.”

“We all make mistakes,” Ettie told him. It was better to make a mistake than to do nothing. “I think you should teach me some things.”

He looked at her, confused. “Bettina is teaching you to be a printer.”

“That’s not what I want to be.”

He took her in, then handed her the gun.

Vengeance was just beneath her skin, a shadow self, her true self, the one who had been holding her sister’s hand, the one who ran into the woods, who wanted to learn everything she could be taught, starting now.