The Nightingale(166)

Nothing felt right anymore. They were like strangers. He felt it, too. She knew he did. The war lay between them at night.

She got a quilt from the living room trunk, wrapped it around herself, and went outside.

A full moon hung over the ruined fields. Light fell in crackled patches on the ground below the apple trees. She went to the middle tree, stood beneath it. The dead black branch arched above her, leafless and gnarled. On it were all her scraps of twine and yarn and ribbon.

When she’d tied the remembrances onto this branch, Vianne had na?vely thought that staying alive was all that mattered. The door behind her opened and closed quietly. She felt her husband’s presence as she always had.

“Vianne,” he said, coming up behind her. He put his arms around her. She wanted to lean back into him but she couldn’t do it. She stared at the first ribbon she’d tied to this tree. Antoine’s. The color of it was as changed, as weathered, as they were.

It was time. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her belly was growing.

She turned, looked up at him. “Antoine” was all she could say.

“I love you, Vianne.”

She drew in a deep breath and said, “I’m going to have a baby.”

He went still. It was a long moment before he said, “What? When?”

She stared up at him, remembering their other pregnancies, how they’d come together in loss and in joy. “I’m almost two months along, I think. It must have happened … that first night you were home.”

She saw every nuance of emotion in his eyes: surprise, worry, concern, wonder, and, finally, joy. He grazed her chin, tilted her face up. “I know why you look so afraid, but don’t worry, V. We won’t lose this one,” he said. “Not after all of this. It’s a miracle.”

Tears stung her eyes. She tried to smile, but her guilt was suffocating.

“You’ve been through so much.”

“We all have.”

“So we choose to see miracles.”

Was that his way of saying he knew the truth? Had suspicion planted itself? What would he say when the baby was born early? “Wh-what do you mean?”

She saw tears glaze his eyes. “I mean forget the past, V. Now is what matters. We will always love each other. That’s the promise we made when we were fourteen. By the pond when I first kissed you, remember?”

“I remember.” She was so lucky to have found this man. No wonder she had fallen in love with him. And she would find her way back to him, just as he’d found his way back to her.

“This baby will be our new beginning.”

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Make me forget.”

“It’s not forgetting we need, Vianne,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “It’s remembering.”





THIRTY-SIX

In February 1945, snow covered the naked bodies piled outside the camp’s newly built crematorium. Putrid black smoke roiled up from the chimneys.

Isabelle stood, shivering, in her place at the morning Appell—roll call. It was the kind of cold that ached in the lungs and froze eyelashes and burned fingertips and toes.

She waited for the roll call to end, but no whistle blared.

Snow was still falling. In the prisoners’ ranks, some women started to cough. Another one pitched face-first into the mushy, muddy snow and couldn’t be raised. A bitter wind blew across the camp.

Finally, an SS officer on horseback rode past the women, eyeing them one by one. He seemed to notice everything—the shorn hair, the flea bites, the blue tips of frostbitten fingers, and the patches that identified them as Jews, or homosexuals, or political prisoners. In the distance, bombs fell, exploded like distant thunder.

When the officer pointed out a woman, she was immediately pulled from the line.

He pointed at Isabelle, and she was yanked nearly off her feet, dragged out of line.

The SS squads surrounded the women who’d been chosen, forced them to form two lines. A whistle blared. “Schnell! Eins! Zwei! Drei!”

Isabelle marched forward, her feet aching with cold, her lungs burning. Micheline fell into step beside her.

They had made it a mile or so outside of the gates when a lorry rumbled past them, its back heaped high with naked corpses.

Micheline stumbled. Isabelle reached out, holding her friend upright.

And still they marched.

At last they came to a snowy field blanketed in fog.

The Germans separated the women again. Isabelle was yanked away from Micheline and pushed into a group of other Nacht und Nebel political prisoners.