The World That We Knew(41)
They went to the garden so lessons could begin. They sat facing each other. Everything else dropped away, everything changed between them, they were of one mind, and as they looked into each other’s eyes neither had the desire to look away. Think in blue, in green, in starlight, in song, in a blessing, in beauty, in gratitude.
Inside the convent they could hear birdsong all through the dinner hour. Some of the girls began to cry and others laughed out loud. The sisters remembered things they had long forgotten, from a time when they were young and filled with faith. No one noticed that Lea was late, and that when she arrived she sat down beside Renée, as if they were friends and had always been so, and that beneath the table, out of sight, Lea handed her a chocolate bar she’d stolen from the kitchen.
When the time came for Lea to ask the heron for what she wanted, she brought a pan of bread and milk into the courtyard as an offering. She had practiced the phrases so often through the night that the girls in the attic thought she was singing them to sleep, and even Renée closed her eyes and dreamed of things she had never seen before, trees made of flowers, beaches of black sand, clouds that were spun out of rain.
The heron came down from the roof when Lea entered the courtyard. After he’d had his breakfast, she begged for a moment of his time. It was a poor attempt at speaking his language, but he gazed at her with his yellow eyes, doing his best to understand her. When he didn’t immediately swoop away, she went on, hopeful he would help her. She asked politely for what she wanted, pleading for him to go back to the house in Paris.
Please find him for me.
She had no idea that Ava had already asked the heron to do this one kindness for her. And so he allowed her to tie the metal canister to his leg, though he was no one’s servant, and looked the other way as she did so.
Her script was tiny and neat. She’d used pale blue ink she’d found in the mother superior’s office when Ava sent her to deliver bread and jam and a pot of tea. She’d taken a pen as well, for she’d been taught to be a thief when the need arose.
I am fine, but no one knows me as you do. Please stay alive.
The heron returned a week later. He perched on the ledge and pushed the window open. The other girls in the attic thought they were dreaming, for what they saw was impossible, and so they went back to sleep. They thought that birds and mortals lived in the same world, but only the world of men mattered. Julien had thought the same thing when he found the heron in the yard in Paris. By now the military had taken over the house, and the family lived in the greenhouse with the domed skylight. When the rain fell it sounded as if rocks were falling. Julien and his father had been taken as forced labor. They cleaned the streets, scrubbing stones. They had blisters on their hands and they didn’t speak to Madame Claire about their humiliation. They didn’t have to. Claire now cleaned the house for the German captain who lived there. When she thought of Marianne and how she’d treated her, she closed herself in the linen closet and cried. The German professors and their families were still on the third floor, behind a brick wall, mice who no longer dared to speak. Where would they go if they left? Wasn’t it best to hide in plain sight where no one would think to look? Claire brought them food whenever she could, the leavings from their own table or from the captain’s dinner.
When Julien saw the metal cylinder attached to the heron’s leg, he approached cautiously and untied it, then crouched behind the greenhouse to read Lea’s message. His hands shook and he read it three times before he could make sense of it. He was grateful and confused. He told himself not to have hope for the future. The life that he knew had ended, and what else was there for him? He told himself he was part of a dream in which a huge gray bird allowed him to tie a message to its leg before rising into the sky. For an instant he remembered who he was. I know exactly who you are, he’d written back. Je sais qui tu es.
Je suis ici.
I’m here.
When the roses bloomed, the garden was a sea of silver. Before Ava knew it, summer would be gone. This is the way time moved in the human world. Slowly at first, and then much too fast. The heron still nested on the rooftop, but she knew that in a few months’ time he would leave for Spain or Africa. She tried not to think about his parting, and she wondered if love was like that, and if all mortals needed to close their eyes against the future and what it might bring. Sister Marie, who went to prayers at four, noticed Ava on her way to the chapel. The younger nuns remained nervous in Ava’s presence, and avoided her entirely. They said she never slept and some of the sisters believed she could read their thoughts. When she pressed their garments, the younger nuns swore that she gathered information about them. How else could she know their private thoughts and desires? Why she had even made Sister Félicité a bread pudding for her birthday, when no one in the convent had known that date or had ever celebrated the sister’s birthday before.
The mother superior paused in the courtyard in the dim light of morning to listen to Ava sing to the heron in a voice that brought tears to the sister’s eyes. They danced in the courtyard, bowing and circling one another, singing as if their hearts would break. Spying this on her way to prayers, Sister Marie knew enough of the world to know what she was seeing.
When Lea received the note from Julien she went behind the kitchen to be alone to read it. She sank down near the old stone water troughs, for the kitchen had once been a large stable. There was chervil and mint growing wild, and the scent would ever after remind her of him. His message was brief, but she read it again and again. All she needed was a word or two. A young sister came and shouted at her to come in to her studies, and although she did so, she took her time so that she could savor his message. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought or said or did.