The World That We Knew(66)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


THE OTHER SIDE




LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON, APRIL 1944

IN THE VILLAGE OF LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON winter always fell hard and stayed for a very long time. When spring came it was a joyous event, a miracle fashioned of blue and green, slowly unfolding, even when the snow was still in the shadows. It was a small town with a train station and long, sloping streets that were treacherous in winter. A deep forest of pines ringed the village of gray stone houses and shops. As soon as there was a snowfall, local boys took their sleds to the top of the hill and sledded all the way to the bottom, red-faced, shouting with joy. Now the sleds were put away; trees were greening and the birds were returning in huge flocks that nearly blacked out the sky. This was the heart of the Protestant stronghold, almost completely cut off from the rest of the world, a place known for taking in refugees, beginning with those who had been displaced in the Spanish Civil War. In houses and farms there were Jews hidden with families who had never before met someone of their faith.

The children’s home where Ava worked was made of a group of stone buildings in town with a school at the end of a steep road. She had gone directly to the kitchen, knocked on the door, and told them the only payment she needed was a place for her and Lea to stay. She had become a master baker and had no fear when the cook gave her a test. There was a stone baker’s house that hadn’t been used for some time where the stove was heated by logs. Ava was made to collect wood and fire up the old stove. Then she must bake ten tartes out of paltry ingredients: four cups of flour, ten bitter apples, sixteen chestnuts, unroasted and plucked from nearby trees. The results were stupendous and mouthwatering. The cook herself ate half a tarte in one sitting. Lea attended the school, but they were placed in the home of a local couple, as were many Jews who were hidden in town until they could be given false identification or taken to Switzerland. In all, somewhere between three and five thousand souls were saved by the village. The house they were brought to wasn’t far from the train station, on a lane off Rue Neuve.

All through the winter, they had shared an attic with an artist who’d also been taken in, a Jew from Belgium, Ahron Weitz. The couple who owned the house were Adele and Daniel. They owned a fabric shop and rarely spoke to their guests; the less they knew about one another the better in case the Milice, a paramilitary organization instituted by the Vichy regime to assist the Germans, came to question them. Ava often brought home baguettes from the school’s oven to share with their hosts, along with fruit pastries, tart due to the lack of sugar, but delicious all the same. The attic was well hidden, up two flights of winding stairs, more than ten cubits above the earth, which meant that Ava had no power at that height. She could not see into the future or hear the voices of angels or speak the language of birds while in that place. When she took a withered apple in her hand it remained so. Magic escaped her, and even when she tried to listen in to Lea’s dreams she was met by silence. She was almost an ordinary woman in this attic, one whose feet hurt at the end of the day, who was chilled by drafts and needed to pull on a sweater, who told Lea to sleep tight, and who, herself, slept for the first time, deeply and without dreams.

The painter was an older gentleman, a landscape artist, once quite famous in Belgium. Though known for his oil paintings, he now had little choice but to use watercolors, ones he made himself from crushed plants and berries mixed with a bit of oil in a cooking pot. He had been an animated, successful, rather wealthy man. His situation had so radically changed that he did not even recognize himself when he walked past a mirror. He was in his mid-sixties, but his back had been broken when a gang of Nazi sympathizers set upon him one day as he left his studio, and he now walked with a limp. What little hair he had had turned white when his son was sent to a death camp. He wasn’t sure if he had a reason to live, but some fellow artists had helped in his escape, and he felt he must stay alive in a show of gratitude. All of his paintings that had been left behind in his studio in Brussels had been stolen or burned. He knew he would not be remembered, not his work or his name, and that freed him to now do as he pleased. The attic walls were filled with small landscapes, luminous images painted in mysterious hues on plain white paper. A sky could be vermilion or crimson or indigo, an unexpected choice, yet true to nature.

The painter offered to give Lea his small bed, but she insisted she would be comfortable on the floor along with Ava. They were quiet, and didn’t bother one another, and soon enough became used to each other. Ava and Lea knew Monsieur Weitz woke up at six and made tea on the hot plate set on a bureau where they could cook, and he knew they left for the school by seven. They had dinner together, often leftovers Ava brought home from the school’s kitchen. The winter had passed in a dream, and before they knew it spring had arrived; the fields were greening and wild cabbages grew up through the frozen ground. There was soon mud everywhere, and people wore clogs or boots. They’d worn winter coats one day and shirtsleeves the next. It was the time of year when the birds began to return, clouds of greenfinches and goldfinches, pigeons and turtledoves and swifts. Each day Ava looked out with a hand over her eyes, waiting for the heron. She walked in the mountains that surrounded the village in the evenings. At last she saw him, in the distance, at dusk. Though it was April, there were still patches of snow in the forest, yet he had come back to her, returning a month before most of his kind would begin to leave their southern homes. Ava threw her arms around him and felt his beating heart against her chest. He told her where he had been, to beaches where the sand was black, where the heat turned the sun red, and the shells were as big as a human hand. Everywhere he went, he dreamed of dancing with her in the grass. They did so now, as if enchanted, as if no other time or place existed.