The Nightingale(18)

He didn’t scare her, not at all. Isabelle was not like her sister, Vianne, who was given to fear and anxiety. But neither was Isabelle a fool. If she was going to travel with this man, she had better get a few things straight.

“So,” she said. “Prison.”

He stared at her, raised a black eyebrow, as if to say, Scared yet? “A girl like you wouldn’t know anything about it. I could tell you it was a Jean Valjean sort of stay and you would think it was romantic.”

It was the kind of thing she heard all the time. It circled back to her looks, as most snide comments did. Surely a pretty blond girl had to be shallow and dim-witted. “Were you stealing food to feed your family?”

He grinned crookedly. It gave him a lopsided look, with one side of his smile hiking up farther than the other. “No.”

“Are you dangerous?”

“It depends. What do you think of communists?”

“Ah. So you were a political prisoner.”

“Something like that. But like I said, a nice girl like you wouldn’t know anything about survival.”

“You’d be surprised the things I know, Ga?tan. There is more than one kind of prison.”

“Is there, pretty girl? What do you know about it?”

“What was your crime?”

“I took things that didn’t belong to me. Is that enough of an answer?”

Thief.

“And you got caught.”

“Obviously.”

“That isn’t exactly comforting, Ga?tan. Were you careless?”

“Ga?t,” he said, moving toward her.

“I haven’t decided if we’re friends yet.”

He touched her hair, let a few strands coil around his dirty finger. “We’re friends. Bank on it. Now let’s go.”

When he reached for her hand, it occurred to her to refuse him, but she didn’t. They walked out of the forest and back onto the road, merging once again into the crowd, which opened just enough to let them in and then closed around them. Isabelle hung on to Ga?tan with one hand and held her suitcase in the other.

They walked for miles.

Automobiles died around them. Cartwheels broke. Horses stopped and couldn’t be made to move again. Isabelle felt herself becoming listless and dull, exhausted by heat and dust and thirst. A woman limped along beside her, crying, her tears black with dirt and grit, and then that woman was replaced by an older woman in a fur coat who was sweating profusely and seemed to be wearing every piece of jewelry she owned.

The sun grew stronger, became stiflingly, staggeringly hot. Children whined, women whimpered. The acrid, stuffy scent of body odor and sweat filled the air, but Isabelle had grown so used to it that she barely noticed other people’s smell or her own.

It was almost three o’clock, the hottest part of the day, when they saw a regiment of French soldiers walking alongside them, dragging their rifles. The soldiers moved in a disorganized way, not in formation, not smartly. A tank rumbled beside them, crunching over belongings left in the road; on it several whey-faced French soldiers sat slumped, their heads hung low.

Isabelle pulled free of Ga?tan and stumbled through the crowd, elbowing her way to the regiment. “You’re going the wrong way!” she screamed, surprised to hear how hoarse her voice was.

Ga?tan pounced on a soldier, shoved him back so hard he stumbled and crashed into a slow-moving tank. “Who is fighting for France?”

The bleary-eyed soldier shook his head. “No one.” In a glint of silver, Isabelle saw the knife Ga?tan held to the man’s throat. The soldier’s gaze narrowed. “Go ahead. Do it. Kill me.”

Isabelle pulled Ga?tan away. In his eyes, she saw a rage so deep it scared her. He could do it; he could kill this man by slitting his throat. And she thought: They opened the prisons. Was he worse than a thief?

“Ga?t?” she said.

Her voice got through to him. He shook his head as if to clear it and lowered his knife. “Who is fighting for us?” he said bitterly, coughing at the dust.

“We will be,” she said. “Soon.”

Behind her, an automobile honked its horn. Aah-ooh-gah. Isabelle ignored it. Automobiles were no better than walking anymore—the few that were still running were moving only at the whim of the people around them; like flotsam in the reeds of a muddy river. “Come on.” She pulled him away from the demoralized regiment.

They walked on, still holding hands, but as the hours passed, Isabelle noticed a change in Ga?tan. He rarely spoke and didn’t smile.