The Nightingale(147)

He took her hand and led her through a forest so dark she couldn’t see the man beside her or the trail beneath their feet. Ga?tan never turned on his torchlight. He knew these woods intimately, having lived here for well over a year.

At the end of the woods, they came to a huge, grassy field where people stood in rows. They held torchlights, which they swept forward and back like beacons, illuminating the flat area between the trees.

She heard an aeroplane engine overhead, felt the whoosh of air on her cheeks, and smelled exhaust. It swooped in above them, flying low enough to make the trees shudder. She heard a loud mechanical scree and the banging of metal on metal and then a parachute appeared, falling, a huge box swinging beneath it.

“Weapons drop,” Ga?tan said. Tugging her hand, he led her into the trees again and up a hill, to the encampment deep in the forest. In its center, a bonfire glowed bright orange, its light hidden by the thick fringe of trees. Several men stood around the fire, smoking cigarettes and talking. Most had come here to avoid the STO—compulsory deportation to forced-labor camps in Germany. Once here, they had taken up arms and become partisans who fought a guerrilla war with Germany; in secret, under cover of night. The Maquis. They bombed trains and blew up munitions dumps and flooded canals and did whatever else they could to disrupt the flow of goods and men from France to Germany. They got their supplies—and their information—from the Allies. Their lives were always at risk; when found by the enemy, reprisals were swift and often brutal. Burning, cattle prods, blinding. Each Maquis fighter carried a cyanide pill in his pocket.

The men looked unwashed, starving, haggard. Most wore brown corduroy pants and black berets, all of which were frayed and patched and faded.

For all that Isabelle believed in their cause, she wouldn’t want to be alone up here.

“Come,” Ga?tan said. He led her past the bonfire to a small, dirty-looking tent with a canvas flap that was open to reveal a single sleeping bag and a pile of clothes and a pair of muddy boots. As usual, it smelled of dirty socks and sweat.

Isabelle ducked her head and crouched low as she made her way inside.

Ga?tan sat down beside her and closed the flap. He didn’t light a lamp (the men would see their silhouettes within and start catcalling). “Isabelle,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

She leaned forward, let herself be taken in his arms and kissed. When it ended—too soon—she took a deep breath. “I have a message for your group from London. Paul received it at five P.M. tonight. ‘Long sobs of autumn violins.’”

She heard him draw in a breath. Obviously the words, which they’d received over the radio from the BBC, were a code.

“Is it important?” she asked.

His hands moved to her face, held her gently, and drew her in for another kiss. This one was full of sadness. Another good-bye.

“Important enough that I have to leave right now.”

All she could do was nod. “There’s never any time,” she whispered. Every moment they’d ever had together had been stolen somehow, or wrested. They met, they ducked into shadowy corners or dirty tents or back rooms, and they made love in the dark, but they didn’t get to lie together afterward like lovers and talk. He was always leaving her, or she was leaving him. Each time he held her, she thought—this will be it, the last time I see him. And she waited for him to say he loved her.

She told herself that it was war. That he did love her, but he was afraid of that love, afraid he would lose her, and it would hurt more somehow if he’d declared himself. On good days, she even believed it.

“How dangerous is it, this thing you’re going off to do?”

Again, the silence.

“I’ll find you,” he said quietly. “Maybe I’ll come to Paris for a night and we’ll sneak into the cinema and boo at the newsreels and walk through the Rodin Gardens.”

“Like lovers,” she said, trying to smile. It was what they always said to each other, this dream shared of a life that seemed impossible to remember and unlikely to reoccur.

He touched her face with a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes. “Like lovers.”

*

In the past eighteen months, as the war had escalated and Nazi aggression mounted, Vianne had found and hidden thirteen children at the orphanage. At first she had canvassed the nearby countryside, following leads given to her by the OSE. In time, Mother had connected with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—an umbrella group for Jewish charities in the United States that funded the struggle to save Jewish children—and they had brought Vianne into contact with more children in need. Mothers sometimes showed up on her doorstep, crying, desperate, begging her for help. Vianne never turned anyone away, but she was always terrified.