The World That We Knew(63)
Julien nodded. Max was right. If he thought too much, he might give up, and he wasn’t about to do that. The following day he began to teach math. The children were good students, and one boy in particular, a cheerful fellow named Teddy, who was not more than eight, could do complicated sums in his head. Julien had been much the same as a student; he’d had difficulty showing his work, for it was all done in his head, and one of his teachers had accused him of cheating before it was explained that he was the son of the professor and therefore a natural at mathematics. When Julien questioned Teddy, it turned out that his father was a mathematician and an engineer. The boy was proud of his father, and when he received a package of sweets, sent by his parents, members of the Resistance who were in hiding in Nice, he shared the gift with his friends and presented Julien with a bar of chocolate. It was the first Julien had tasted since leaving Paris, and he found he could only eat a few bites. It was too rich for him now.
In the afternoons, while the children played outside and worked in the garden, Julien graded their papers. In his free time, he would lie on his bed and read whatever books he could find in the library, preferring Kafka above all others. He’d told Lea to read The Castle, and they’d talked about the book for days. In Kafka’s work, the world made no sense, fates were cast for no reason, men were beasts or insects or they were simply lost, wandering through corridors that led nowhere, beset by those who followed orders no matter how foolish those orders might be. This was not a world in which a person could trust anyone. He’d learned his lesson at the farm and planned never to be defenseless again. He slept with Monsieur Félix’s knife under his pillow, and in the mornings, when he dressed, he kept it tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His philosophy had been formed by his experience. Trust no one, make your own future, love with all your heart.
An apple tree grew outside the window, and below that there was some shrubbery where birds nested. Dozens of swifts were nesting at this time of year, and Julien lay in bed in the early mornings, listening to the birds. The heron had never returned. Julien often felt a wave of despair at this hour, but when he closed his eyes and imagined Lea, he realized this was the way to survive. If he imagined her, he had not lost her.
He became used to his role at Izieu. The teaching itself was fine; and he was good at it, and in many ways it was a relief to be once again immersed in mathematics. He felt close to his father, and to the person he himself had been. Students who were refugees from Germany and Hungary seemed to prefer his class to all others, for the language of math created an equal playing field even for those who fumbled with their French. The couple that ran the school told him he was a natural teacher, and clearly math was his field. And yet, to Julien, making sense out of numbers seemed a false construct. Mathematics was a man-made puzzle that was tugged at and pulled apart until it fit inside a logical mind. Those mysteries his father had spoken of, grand endless numbers that explained the universe, problems thought to be worthy of spending a lifetime studying, seemed preposterous to him.
He wandered down the hall one morning after his own class and happened to glance into another classroom. The session was taught by one of the older women, a local teacher who gave her time freely. Today, she was having the children draw and paint. The creations were pictures to be sent to parents, even though they might never be heard from in return. Julien opened the door and gestured to the teacher that he would like to join them. She nodded as she continued instructing the children in her class, most of whom were between five and ten.
“You can show your parents what you are doing now, and what you hope to be doing in the future,” the teacher suggested.
Julien stood behind Teddy, his best math student. The boy was coloring a drawing of himself, his mother, and his father. The three were in a rocket ship, all waving. Julien sat down at the table and took a piece of paper for himself.
“Will you send yours to your parents?” Teddy asked.
Julien drew the outlines of a face. “If I could, I would send it to my girlfriend.”
Teddy wrinkled his nose with distaste. “You have a girlfriend?”
Julien laughed as he sketched. She was not yet a girlfriend, not truly, and yet she was more. In a few instants Lea’s image surfaced as if he’d conjured her.
“She’s pretty,” the boy granted.
“Actually she’s much prettier than this.” Julien folded up the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
That evening he went to the garden and gathered onions to bring to the kitchen to boil so he could use the residue as a wash of color over his sketch. When he painted the wash on the portrait, Lea seemed alive, as if the white paper had turned to flesh. From then on he joined the class every day, greeting the teacher, Madame Rey, then slipping into the room. He always sat beside Teddy, who grinned whenever he saw his new friend. In time, the teacher had managed to get some watercolors. It was a pleasure and a joy to have real paints, rather than washes and inks made of berries or grass or onion skin. Julien created his memory of the garden of his parents’ house, before his mother removed the roses and the peonies so she could replace the ornamental plants with vegetables for their meals. There was the tree he and Lea had climbed so they could be alone, and the gate she had walked through when Ava had rightly insisted they must leave, and the sky that was so bright on the day the police came for his family.
Madame Rey came to watch, standing behind him. She made him nervous, so he put down the brush. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Julien said, feeling a fool.