The Nightingale(130)

A gendarme grabbed the boy, yanked hard enough to make him stop. “Don’t be a fool.”

Vianne didn’t think. She saw her former student in trouble and she went to him. He was just a boy, for God’s sake. Sophie’s age. Vianne had been his teacher since before he could read. “What are you doing?” she demanded to know, realizing a second too late that she should have tempered her voice.

The policeman turned to look at her. Paul. He was even fatter than the last time she’d seen him. His face had puffed out enough to make his eyes as small and slitted as sewing needles. “Stay out of this, Madame,” Paul said.

“Madame Mauriac,” Gilles cried, “they’re taking my maman to the train! I want to go with her!”

Vianne looked at Gilles’s mother, Madame Fournier, the butcher’s wife, and saw defeat in her eyes.

“Come with me, Gilles,” Vianne said without really thinking.

“Merci,” Madame Fournier whispered.

Paul yanked Gilles close again. “Enough. The boy is making a scene. He is coming with us.”

“No!” Vianne said. “Paul, please, we are all French.” She hoped the use of his name would remind him that before all of this they’d been a community. She’d taught his daughters. “The boy is a French citizen. He was born here!”

“We don’t care where he was born, Madame. He’s on my list. He goes.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you want to lodge a complaint?”

Madame Fournier was crying now, clutching her son’s hand. The other policeman blew his whistle and prodded Gilles forward with the barrel of his gun.

Gilles and his mother stumbled into the crowd of others being herded toward the train station.

We don’t care where he was born, Madame.

Beck had been right. Being French would no longer protect Ari.

She clamped her handbag tightly beneath her armpit and headed for home. As usual, the road had turned to mud and ruined her shoes by the time she reached the gate at Le Jardin.

Both of the children were waiting in the living room. Relief loosened her shoulders. She smiled tiredly as she set down her handbag.

“You’re all right?” Sophie said.

Ari immediately moved toward her, grinning, opening his arms for a hug, saying, “Maman,” with a grin to prove that he understood the rules of their new game.

She pulled the three-year-old into her arms and held him tightly. To Sophie, she said, “I was questioned and released. That is the good news.”

“And the bad news?”

Vianne looked at her daughter, defeated. Sophie was growing up in a world where boys in her class were put in train carriages like cattle at the point of a gun and perhaps never seen again. “Another German is going to billet here.”

“Will he be like Herr Captain Beck?”

Vianne thought of the feral gleam in Von Richter’s ice-blue eyes and the way he had “searched” her.

“No,” she said softly. “I don’t expect he will be. You are not to speak to him unless you must. Don’t look at him. Just stay as invisible as you can. And Sophie, they’re deporting French-born Jews now—children, too—putting them on trains and sending them away to work camps.” Vianne tightened her hold on Rachel’s son. “He is Daniel now. Your brother. Always. Even when we are alone. The story is that we adopted him from a relative in Nice. We can never make a mistake or they’ll take him—and us—away. You understand? I don’t want anyone to ever even look at his papers.”

“I’m scared, Maman,” she said quietly.

“As am I, Sophie” was all Vianne could say. They were in this together now, taking this terrible risk. Before she could say more, there was a knock on the door and Sturmbannführer Von Richter walked into her home, standing as straight as a bayonet blade, his face impassive beneath the glossy black military hat. Silver iron crosses hung from various places on his black uniform—his stand-up collar, his chest. A swastika pin decorated his left breast pocket. “Madame Mauriac,” he said. “I see you walked home in the rain.”

“Mais oui,” she answered, smoothing the damp, frizzy hair from her face.

“You should have asked my men for a ride. A beautiful woman such as yourself should not slog through the mud like a heifer to the trough.”

“Oui, merci, I will be so bold as to ask them next time.”

He strode forward without removing his hat. He looked around, studying everything. She was sure that he noticed the marks on the walls where paintings had once hung and the empty mantel and the discoloration in the floor where rugs had lain for decades. All gone now. “Yes. This will do.” He looked at the children. “And who have we here?” he asked in terrible French.