A Coming Evil (12 page)

"I can keep secrets," Cecile said.

"Madame Dumont and I will be leaving after lunch," Aunt Josephine said. "I know it's a nasty shock to hear that Papa's going to be visiting so close to home and that you can't see him."

"Is Madame Dumont staying for lunch?" Cecile asked, having made—Lisette thought—a miraculous recovery from her nasty shock. "I can do a cartwheel, Madame Dumont. Would you like to see?"

Aunt Josephine said, "Madame Dumont is staying for lunch, so perhaps you can show her your cartwheels later. Lisette, would you please set out four places?"

So Madame Dumont was friend enough to be given lunch, but not to be entrusted with the knowledge of the presence of the children.
Poor children,
Lisette thought,
stuck in the basement, not knowing what's going on, while we eat lunch.

Lisette kept watching Aunt Josephine, expecting some sort of signal regarding the children. But Aunt Josephine merely started cooking some pasta and breaking up a lettuce for salad.

Cecile ran to her room, then back downstairs to show off her ballet shoes, and chattered about lessons she'd been taking back in Nice, and how the teacher had said she was the most talented girl in the class. "Would you like to see me dance?" she asked Madame Dumont.

"Perhaps later," Madame Dumont told her, but Cecile put her shoes on anyway and did toe stands and grande jetés all around the table.

When lunch was just about ready and still Aunt Josephine had given no indication that she remembered the other children, Lisette said, "I think I need a bigger bucket for milking the goat. I'll look in the basement."

Downstairs, she tapped quietly at the secret door, realizing she risked giving Louis Jerome a heart attack. "Long live France," she whispered, "but just open the door a crack."

The door opened just wide enough for somebody—Louis Jerome, guessing by his height—to peek out.

"A friend of my aunt came to visit," Lisette said. "Do you think she saw any of you?"

Etienne poked his nose out—or rather, the nose of his gas mask, which was covering his face.

Louis Jerome said, "We were outside, still trying to think of a name for the goat, when we heard the sound of a bicycle coming up the driveway. We knew it was too early for Madame LePage and Cecile, so we ran in the house and looked out the living room window. When I saw it wasn't them, we came down here. I don't think she saw us. Why, did she say something about us?"

"No, you're fine," Lisette assured them. "She's staying for lunch, so you can't come up yet."

Emma wriggled in front of Louis Jerome. "We put the goat in the porch so she wouldn't get lost. Did you find her?"

"Yes, we did."

Anne came up under Louis Jerome's arm. "Softy," she said.

"What?"

"We named the goat Softy," Emma explained.

"She's not that soft," Lisette pointed out.

From behind the others she could hear Etienne complain, "You're the one who let Anne choose."

Anne grinned at her.

"All right," Lisette said, "Softy it is. Now everybody keep still and I'll come get you as soon as this woman leaves."

"What if she stays for supper, too?" Louis Jerome asked. "What if she stays for the night? What if she
did
see us?"

"She didn't see you," Lisette said again. "And she's only staying for lunch." Now was not the time to tell them that Madame Dumont was taking Aunt Josephine with her.

"But what if she
does
stay longer?"

"If she does stay, which she won't, I'll bring some food down for you. Now close the door again."

She could tell he was thinking,
But what if you don't come back?
but he didn't ask it. He closed the door and Lisette went back upstairs.

Madame Dumont smiled at her. "Couldn't find your bucket, my dear?"

She'd forgotten all about it. "Umm, no. I'll have to take a better look after lunch."

After lunch, however, Cecile talked Madame Dumont into going upstairs to see all Cecile's pretty clothes, and Lisette took the opportunity to ask Aunt Josephine, "Is she with the Resistance?" Now that the French army had surrendered, those who still fought the Germans were called Resistance fighters.

Aunt Josephine was washing the dishes while Lisette dried. She scrubbed at the pot before saying, "Yes."

"Then why couldn't the children have lunch with
us?" It wasn't that she
liked
the children. They were an awful nuisance, but she thought how frightened and hungry they must be in the basement, so she said, "If she's against the Germans, too—"

"Things aren't that simple, Lisette. People can be against the Germans and still hate the Jews. Just as they can be pro-German while sympathizing with the Jews. Or maybe they don't care about the Jews one way or the other."

"I suppose," Lisette said.

"It's like General de Gaulle. Some people think he's a saint who'll rescue France; others think he's only interested in himself. History books will make it all easy, deciding for us depending on the outcome. Looking back always makes things less complicated: 'The Roman Empire fell because of these four factors...' 'Napoleon didn't have a chance after Waterloo.' 'Marshal Petain was the hero of the battle of Verdun but the villain in the capture of Paris.' The thing to remember is the Romans didn't know they were falling any more than Napoleon knew he was done for."

"Josephine, what nonsense are you filling that child's head with?" Madame Dumont stood in the doorway giving her throaty laugh. She had stopped smoking long enough to eat lunch, but she had another cigarette now. She took in a deep breath of it and said, "You aren't trying to talk her into being a supporter of that doddering old fool Petain, are you?"

"No." By her tone, Aunt Josephine not only didn't find the idea reasonable, she didn't find it funny. She shook the excess water from her hands then reached for the towel. "I'm only saying that at this very moment there is probably some perfectly nice German family saying to themselves, 'Everything would be wonderful now, we'd have enough food, and our Papa would be home if only it weren't for those horrid French.'"

"My dear," Madame Dumont said, "there aren't any perfectly nice German families. If they were nice, they wouldn't be Germans."

Aunt Josephine laughed. "Where's Cecile?"

"Trying on her entire wardrobe, one dress at a time. I don't believe she's noticed I'm gone yet."

"I'll be ready to leave in just a few minutes."

Aunt Josephine went upstairs, and Madame Dumont laughed again. "Your aunt never ceases to amaze me," she told Lisette. "You must get her to tell you how we met." She took another drag on her cigarette—she always inhaled deeply as though each puff was the last one she'd ever get—then added, "Not in front of your little cousin."

And who could resist that? "How
did
you meet?" Lisette asked.

Madame Dumont looked at her for several seconds before saying, "It was on the road from Tours, in June, right before the armistice was signed. The Germans were bombing the city, and when the people tried to
flee, the planes flew very low and strafed them. Do you know 'strafe'—to shoot with a machine gun?"

Lisette nodded.

Madame Dumont took another deep breath of cigarette smoke. "Sometimes when they were close enough, you could see the pilot's blue eyes. I lived in Tours—notice I use past tense: there's not enough left for people to live there anymore; some continue to exist, but nobody
lives
there. Your aunt had been visiting ... your grandmother?"

"Cecile's grandmother—Uncle Raymond's mother."

"...who was sick. She died? Before the bombing?"

Again Lisette nodded. She expected Madame Dumont to offer condolences even though Lisette wasn't related to the woman—adults usually said such things—but she only took another deep drag.

"So she had an extra reason to want to get out of Tours before the Germans flattened it or cut us off: Cecile was still in Nice and Josephine was desperate to get to her. So there were all these people, a few in cars, some in horse-drawn carts, most walking. Some pushing grandparents or luggage in wheelbarrows. And Tours had been jammed with people to begin with, refugees in from the countryside. And the French army trying to get around us—some heading toward the fighting, some running the other way. And the Germans. Strafing." Madame Dumont pantomimed a gunner.

Lisette had known this before, but it was hard to imagine Aunt Josephine in the middle of it.

"As we got farther, people started dropping their luggage; grandparents wandered off and got left behind. People would kill to get a ride in a car, then the car would run out of gas, be left in the middle of the road. We'd walk around it. And there would be dead bodies. We'd walk around them. Your aunt ... her I met one time when the planes were farther off, bombing. There was an abandoned farmhouse, which was probably the stupidest place to hide, a nice big target. Several of us were there, standing in doorways, where the ceilings would be less likely to fall in on us. My dear, we could feel the ground shaking. Plaster dust fell on us like snow. A Gypsy wagon was in the front yard, lying on its side—the horses dead, a Gypsy man and woman dead. But there were two Gypsy children left alive, girls, too young to know what danger they were in. We'd all passed them on our way into the house, but Josephine went back to get them. Tucked one under each arm."

Lisette gasped, realizing Madame Dumont was talking about Emma and Anne.

"You think that was a brave thing to do?" Madame Dumont asked.

Lisette nodded.

"Perhaps," Madame Dumont said. "But what would have happened to your little cousin if her mother had been killed? Would the neighbors who'd taken
her in for a week still be watching her—her in Nice, and the rest of your family in Paris and Tours? And nobody would have known. I didn't know Josephine's name at that point. She'd be four months dead now, and your family still wouldn't know—not for sure."

"What happened next?" Lisette asked, uncomfortable with the direction the talk was taking.

"Some old woman was screaming, 'We're going to die, we're going to die.'" Madame Dumont's cigarette was just about gone. She started to get another one, but then they could hear Aunt Josephine coming down the stairs, followed by Cecile, sniveling and complaining. Madame Dumont crushed out the old cigarette. "We didn't, of course," she finished. "Not all of us. Ready, Josephine?"

Lisette saw that her aunt was carrying a little overnight bag. "How long are you going to be gone?" she asked as Aunt Josephine leaned to kiss her.

"The drop is supposed to be tonight," Aunt Josephine said. "But it might get delayed due to weather or..."

"German patrols," Madame Dumont finished for her.

Aunt Josephine had the same not-in-front-of-my-daughter expression that Lisette's parents used. For the first time in her life Lisette realized she missed that look. Aunt Josephine continued, "I should be back tomorrow afternoon. If not, no matter what happens, I'll only wait one day. So, tomorrow or Friday
afternoon. Make do with the goat's milk. There's no need to go into town. Lisette, it's past time you wrote to your parents."

Certainly,
Lisette thought.
I can tell them Cecile is miserable, Aunt Josephine is working me to death, I've gotten a ghost angry with me, and there are German soldiers lurking about ready to discover the Jewish children we're keeping. Thank you for sending me here.

Cecile wiped vigorously at her eyes. "I still don't see why I can't come," she said.

"Well," Madame Dumont said, "but you can't."

And with that they were gone.

As soon as Cecile got over her heartbreak at being left home—which lasted about as long as it took for Aunt Josephine to shut the door—she went completely wild.

"You know what Maman told me?" she asked Lisette in a voice already high and strained with excitement.

"What?" Lisette asked.

"She told me I was to listen to you. You know what?"

Lisette guessed it at the same moment Cecile said it: "Maman's not home."

Cecile pushed a kitchen chair out of the way and positioned herself for a cartwheel.

Perhaps it wasn't that she didn't care; perhaps she was misbehaving to hide her worry. But in either case Lisette decided that, all things considered, this was probably something she didn't want to see. She went to get the children from the basement.

It was a very long day.

And every time she looked at Anne and Emma, she thought of them in the tipped wagon. For the first time she began to miss her parents, really miss them, not just resent that they'd sent her away. She even took a moment to wonder about François—and she thought of him as François, not as "the baby." She wondered if he was well.

In the afternoon there was a thunderstorm, and it came as no surprise to Lisette that Anne was afraid of thunderstorms. She clutched Lisette's sweater and howled as the storm drew closer and closer, the thunder coming almost simultaneously with the lightning. Cecile, who Lisette suspected was not nearly as afraid as she pretended, squealed loudly at each flash, which frightened Anne even more. Lisette finally had Etienne pull shut the blackout drapes so that they couldn't see the lightning. But they could still hear the bone-rattling thunder and Anne knew that, seen or not, the lightning was out there. Eventually the thunder moved on, but the rain still pelted at the windows and the wind howled. Anne sobbed herself to sleep despite Louis Jerome, who stood by Lisette's elbow asking, "What if the house gets struck by lightning?"

By the time Lisette remembered, after supper,
that the goat still needed to be milked, she was exhausted.

And she realized she'd made a foolish mistake.

It was still raining, so she couldn't milk Softy in the yard by the last of the daylight. She'd have to go in the barn. Though tonight the electricity had stayed on, there was, of course, no electricity in the barn. And even if there had been, she wouldn't have been able to turn on a light because of the blackout regulations. How could she milk a goat she couldn't even see?