The World That We Knew(58)

In the morning it seemed he hadn’t been as well hidden as he’d hoped. The elderly couple that lived in the house peered out at him from their window. Starving, he went to knock on the back door to ask if they might need household work done in exchange for a meal.

“You’re a carpenter?” the old gentleman who answered the door asked.

“More or less,” Julien said.

It was a lie but he supposed he could learn. He was hired for the price of a meal, which he wolfed down before the work had even begun. There was a hole in the roof, and although the old gentleman could still climb up the ladder that was propped against the house, he needed a helper to carry the heavy gray slate made of local rock and the bucket of tar. They worked all that afternoon with the steamy tar, their shirts off in the bright sun.

“I won’t know if we’ve done it right until it rains,” said the old man, who introduced himself as Monsieur Bisset.

They had dinner in the kitchen, where Madame Bisset set an extra plate, asking no questions, pleased that her ceiling would no longer leak. Their son, Alain Bisset, only twenty-two, was among those who had been lost in the Battle of France. They had lit a candle in the church, and had Father Varnier say the prayers for the dead. Perhaps this was the reason the couple allowed Julien to stay through the fall in their garden shed, where he slept among the rakes and brooms, quickly learning to ignore the mice who scuttled about at night, grateful they were mice and nothing more. He wore Alain’s winter coat, and his boots, and he sat at his place at the table. Sometimes, Madame let out a gasp when she came into the room and saw him there. With his long dark hair, and lean body, he looked like her son. But he was not, and Madame Bisset knew it. All the same, they were happy to let him stay, to let one young man live and watch him emerge into the blue morning to knock at the door, ready to attend to the chores on his list.

Madame Bisset became ill in November; it was her son’s birthday month, and most likely she was sick with despair over his fate. There was no body to bury and no one to mourn, and she went into a decline, refusing to rise from bed or cook or even to speak. Julien and Monsieur were halfway through plastering the old crumbling walls in the house when Monsieur Bisset told Julien he was sorry, but Julien would have to go. There were no explanations, but Julien understood. It was dangerous to have him in their house and they had been through enough pain and sorrow. But in truth it was more, when Madame saw a young man working in her parlor she was overcome with longing for her son.

On his last day with the couple, Julien found an old recipe book on a kitchen shelf and quickly set to work baking an apple cake, with fruit plucked from the spindly tree in the garden. He wondered what Ava would say if she could see him now. He’d been a spoiled boy in her eyes, and he had realized that had been true. But now he’d been forced to learn many skills: how to fix a roof, how to cook, how to steal, how to say goodbye.

When it was time for Julien to leave, Monsieur Bisset gave him a sack of food that he could hardly spare. Bread, cheese, crackers, apples, all luxuries.

“Do you know why we helped you?” the old man asked.

The two had become quite close, working together as they did. The house was in far better shape now than it had been when Julien first arrived.

Monsieur lowered his voice, as if the Germans were right outside his door. “Because we hate them.”



Julien would miss the scent of mint that grew in the patchy garden. He would miss lying on his back in the shed, where he would talk to Lea as if she were beside him. She alone understood him, and there were times when he missed her so badly he felt twisted with emotion. Stay alive. He was a flame when he thought of the words she had whispered to him. He did not intend to disappoint her.

The weather was still fine, and Julien could camp in the woods outside the city, like so many other boys and young men who were in hiding. He ran into them sometimes, groups from La Sixième and the French Resistance who were loyal to de Gaulle, the true leader of France, though he was in exile. One evening, Julien came upon two sisters, feral creatures of eight and ten years old who had been lost for weeks after their parents were arrested. Actually, the sisters had found him. He’d made a campsite and was eating the last of Monsieur Bisset’s food, which he’d been doling out to himself in small portions. When he looked up he saw the girls staring, their eyes on his food. They had dark hair and big, glassy eyes, and they appeared to be starving. Their parents had been sent to the terrifying Montluc Prison, where more than two thousand five hundred Jews were imprisoned by the Germans, with thousands deported and eight hundred murdered, dying from torture and neglect. Through a crack in the cupboard door they had seen the soldiers beat their father and do something to their mother that had made her scream. After their parents’ arrest, the girls had hidden in their house with nothing to eat but the peeling paint on the walls. At last, they had climbed out the window and fled into the woods. They trusted no one, but they were starving, so there they were, watching him, not saying a word.

Julien shared his food with them as the girls crouched close by, but not too near. They wolfed down the bread. Julien had saved a crumb, which he kept in his hand. A sparrow swooped down from the tree, then lit in the palm of his hand to take the bread, eating it, unafraid. The girls laughed, shocked that they could do anything other than cry.

Julien brought them to the Bissets’ late that night. Monsieur stared at him when he came to the back door, but when he saw the girls he understood. He summoned his wife from her bed, and when she saw how ragged and underfed the children were, she quickly gestured, willing to take them in. She let them bathe in the big old tub and had them wear her son’s childhood clothing until she could find something more suitable. It was the first time in weeks that Madame had left her bed.