Violins of Autumn (6 page)

“What do you mean?” I ask, as fear of the answer grows in my chest.

“I don’t want to tell you. It’s worse than you can imagine. My sister’s friend runs an underground newspaper in Paris. They have photographs of the true story and eyewitness accounts from those who have escaped. My sister, her husband, their friends, they do what they can to expose the lies. The Germans are terrified of the truth getting out. They know that if one person reads an underground paper or listens to Churchill or De Gaulle on the BBC, they will tell someone else what they saw or heard. The Germans can’t allow that to happen. They justify every action they take to prevent it. It is considered a brave act now just to print a newspaper.”

“Pierre, when you say it’s worse than we can imagine—” Denise turns away, her body nestled into the corner of the bench. “They’re not hurting children, are they?”

“They are.”

She holds back a whimper with her fist, and stares at the grassy fields for the remainder of the ride.

Adults are purposefully harming children rather than protecting them. That seems almost too horrific to be true. What if I’m incapable of handling the atrocities I might witness here?

When the town comes into view on the horizon, Pierre brings the cart to a stop.

He points to a nearby road dividing the fields. “That road east is the one you want.”

Denise and I hop down after Pierre. We meet him around back of the cart as he retrieves our bicycles.

Giving us an upward glace as he fastens Denise’s suitcase more securely to her bike, he says, “You know where you’re going?”

Denise shows him what appears to be a small button pinned to the waist of her trousers. “We have compasses. And a map.”

“Good,” he says, returning to the driver’s seat.

“I’ll be seeing you soon,” I call up to him as he pulls the cart around.

The bewilderment on his face doesn’t shock me. He’s already forgotten our plan to spy on the factory.

“Yes, okay. Good-bye,” he says. “And good luck to you.”

With a brisk nod and a wave, he rides off for home.

“Well, this is it,” Denise says.

“I guess so.”

We push our bikes along, down a long, winding hill and up the other side. The road curves, and as we’re about to hop on our bicycles, I hear approaching vehicles.

I hurriedly grab our map, cleverly printed on a square of silk, and tie it around my neck like a pretty scarf. Denise’s suitcase radio will fool the eye, but not an inspection.

A convoy of trucks comes toward us from the other side of the bend.

“Keep going,” Denise says. “Act normally. Everything will be fine.”

She can’t quite fool me into believing she isn’t as frightened as I am.

We walk on, nonchalantly pushing our bicycles. I go over my cover story in my head. I prepare myself for the inevitable handing over of my papers.

The first truck rumbles past. Then another. All the trucks continue down the road. A handful of German soldiers march by
on foot. Still no one asks for papers or questions what we’re doing. I raise my face. A boy at the tail end of the group catches me looking and he smiles. He can’t be a day over eighteen.

In passing, he speaks, tossing out a remark the same way a school chum would. I don’t react and I don’t look back. Neither does Denise.

“I wonder what he said,” she whispers.

I put one leg over my bicycle and settle onto the seat. Denise does the same.

My shaking hands grip the handlebars. “Roughly translated, he said, ‘Hiya, babes.’”

Our journey into an unfamiliar land, into all its wonders and dangers, has begun.

I push the bicycle pedals through another cycle of pain. Our trip has become all about mindlessly pedaling our feet in circles to make round gears turn and wheels go round.

Beyond the wooded valley and the patches of brilliant yellow flowers and deep-green grassy wheat, the clouds skim the hills on the horizon like meringue on a cake. The bright sky reminds me of summers in Connecticut, fishing with homemade poles and catching frogs with Tom in the muddy creek behind our house. If we were riding in a car or a train the past hours would have seemed more like a holiday. It would be easy to forget that a war is on. Too easy to lapse into a sense of safety and let our guard down.

“Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle did more for the emancipation of women than anything else,” I say, “since women wore pants to make riding more comfortable. If not for the bicycle, you’d probably be in a frilly dress right now.”

“If you ever catch me in a dress, don’t look down. I haven’t any ankles. My legs go straight into my feet, like tree trunks. I’m surprised Mum didn’t sell me to the circus.”

“One of my toes is much longer than the others.”

“Like a monkey toe.” Denise giggles quite loudly over my long toe, even though I didn’t say a thing about her deformity. “Does it help you swing through trees?”

“I don’t find that very funny,” I say, but I crack up anyway. “Can you picture me going vine to vine, upside-down and holding on for dear life with my toes?”

“What a sight you’d be. Pierre could be your handsome and noble Tarzan.”

“I don’t think so!” I say, laughing even harder as I imagine Pierre stripped to the waist and wearing only a small loincloth.

We travel through a wooded area and I begin to suspect the dense walls of trees might squeeze shut on us like a vise. When the forest gives way to meadows, I breathe easier. In the open we have no cover, but nothing lurks out of my sight.

Denise points past my shoulder. “Look over there.”

The metal steeple of a church in the valley gleams with late-afternoon sunshine. Behind it, appearing to have burst straight out of the hillside, is a magnificent buttery-yellow stone castle. Storybook princesses don’t live in the dank, dark castles found in England. They live in castles like this one.

Before leaving Madame LaRoche’s, we were instructed to travel as far as her brother’s farm, outside of the town of Chevreuse. We’re ten kilometers away, if that. A drop in a deep bucket compared to a full day of cycling.

We come to some sparse woods and clatter onto a bridge. A river quietly burbles through the stone arches, carrying a family
of ducks. The babies swim behind their mother. The father duck charges ahead in the lead.

“Aren’t they sweet?” Denise gets right off her bike to take a look.

I get off my bike as well, but one glimpse into the expanse of deep water below sends me clutching for the railing. As a child, I nearly drowned in our pond out back. Even after all these years, the feeling of terror, the intense panic of being trapped underwater, unable to breathe, hasn’t left me. I’ve been terribly afraid of water ever since.

“Let’s take a break,” I say, heading for dry land.

We wheel our bikes to a short slope of grass at the river’s edge and park them between two evergreens. I don’t know how something as ordinary as sitting on grass could delight me, but it sure does. I’ve never been so happy to take a seat.

I untie the map at my neck and smooth it flat on the soft grass.

“Please excuse the extra features I’ve sweated onto the landscape,” I say with a laugh.

Denise and I hover over the map, button compasses in hand, and plot a route we both agree on. Once again the map becomes my scarf.

The ducks waddle out of the river, babies in tow. Father duck stands at attention in such a threatening way I wonder if he’s about to plod over to quack a warning in our faces.
Keep your distance from the ducklings! Quack!

“Do you know what I miss?” Denise says. “Sundaes from the Woolworths counter.”

Eyes closed, she tilts her head. From the dreamy smile on her face, I’d guess she’s thinking about a boy, not ice cream.

All that’s left of her dark lipstick is a faded rim, as if she
rubbed a cranberry around her lips. For the first time, I notice the copper-brown freckles that dot her cheeks. In spite of dirt, sweat, and sunburn, she’s quite pretty. I rake my fingers through my hair and wish for a damp washcloth.

Denise’s eyes pop back open. “So, Adele. What do you miss?”

What do I miss? I miss listening to Yankees games with my brother. I miss my friend Gayle, who I haven’t seen since I went to boarding school. I miss slobbering over Clark Gable at the movies and doing crossword puzzles with my aunt. I miss oranges and chewing gum and toothpaste.

“I can’t think of a thing,” I say with a shrug.

“You know what I don’t miss? The blackout. Summers were horrid. No air in the house at all. What did they expect us to do in a stuffy, muggy house with the windows shut and covered like that? Not breathe until the end of the war? I couldn’t even wake up half the time; it was so bloody dark in the morning I mistook it for night.”

Exhausted from the miles of riding, I’m not really in the mood to chat, especially about the blackout. All I want to do is eat, savor a few minutes of peace, and give my aching legs a break.

“And the Air Raid Patrol warden,” Denise says. “What a twit, swaggering around, checking our blackouts. Living under constant watch made us feel no better than common criminals.”

The entire time I lived in Britain, everything I ate, did, and said was watched and judged. Everyone, not only the wardens, kept tabs on everyone else. One of our neighbors was turned in for feeding birds in her garden. For wasting bread, she was fined a whole ten pounds. I didn’t want my aunt’s family to get into trouble because of me, so I followed the rules. Even the ones I found stupid or unnecessary.

The blackout was awful and inconvenient, but whenever I complained my aunt reminded me of the poor farmer in a town south of London who stepped outside to watch German bombers during a late-evening air-raid. He foolishly lit a cigarette, and all it took was that tiny red glow to pinpoint him. Needless to say, that cigarette was his last. I hated the blackout, but I would have hated being bombed even more.

“When the war is over, I hope to never again hear the words
make do and mend
.” Denise wiggles her fingers. “These hands will never darn another sock or sew another mismatched button. I won’t even wash my clothes. Once they’re dirty, I’ll toss them in the rubbish and buy something new.”

“My aunt would have a fit if she heard you say that.”

“Oh, is she one of
those
women, like my mum? Rationing and mending everything in sight is like a game to them. A game they’re too competitive to risk losing.”

“Yes, that sounds just like my aunt!” I remember the matching jackets she sewed us from old curtains. I suddenly feel very guilty about being too embarrassed to wear mine. “She shined our shoes with half a potato and sewed patches on the knees of my cousins’ new pants before they even had a chance to wear them.”

“My mum combed our dog and cat for wool.” Denise laughs. “I think I had fleas for a while.”

All of us agents are under orders not to discuss our personal lives with each other. But it feels so nice to be having such a regular conversation.

I cram my cheese into the bread to hide the moldy bits, saying, “My aunt would make a delicious sauce out of this cheese. She was so good at taking what she had and turning it into something else.”

I squeeze the bread into a tight wad and chomp on it, lost in thought, until my jaw aches. Even though my aunt is a wonderful cook, I never saw her eat much of anything. Whenever the air raid sounded during dinner, she rushed us out the door to the corrugated-iron-walled Anderson shelter in the garden with our plates but without serving herself.

“So what do you suppose we’ll do after this?” Denise says. “When we get back home to regular life. What does one do, exactly, after they’ve been a spy?”

“I never thought about it, really.”

My future, beyond my time in France, is a blank slate. What I had wished to someday return to no longer exists.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” Denise asks.

“You’ll think it’s silly.”

She draws an imaginary cross over her heart. “I promise I won’t.”

“I wanted to make movies.”

“No fooling? That’s fabulous!”

I grin. “How ’bout you?”

“A mum.” Denise settles onto the grass and lays an arm over her eyes. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

I take out my notebook. While Denise rests, I turn out a quick sketch of the ducklings fast asleep with their beaks tucked beneath their wings.

“Well, time to stop piddling about.” Denise gets to her feet, smoothing the wrinkles from her pant legs. “We have a farm to get to before dark.”

Before I have time to flip my notebook closed, she peeks at my drawing.

“You drew that? Just now?”

“It’s nothing. Only a doodle,” I say, tucking the notepad and pencil into my pocket. “I like to draw animals.”

“My goodness, you’re talented.”

I turn away, squirming beneath her praise. “Thank you.”

Back on our bicycles, we follow Madame LaRoche’s directions, which we coordinated with our map, along a path of minor roads. The route to the farm isn’t well traveled. The roads aren’t roads at all, we find, but wide dirt tracks through the forest.

Denise leans out over her handlebars. She cranes her neck. “Do you hear that?”

My ears snag a subdued drone out of the peace and quiet.

“It’s coming down fast,” Denise says. “Hear the sputter?”

The sound screams toward us like a runaway locomotive careening through the sky, and we hurry to the side of the road. Our heads tilt back to watch as a damaged fighter plane buzzes the treetops. Thick smoke, the plane’s dying breath, billows out behind it. Time stretches like warm taffy until we hear the inevitable crash. I can hardly believe that what happened right above our heads was real. It’s a startling reminder that in spite of our bike ride through an idyllic countryside, we’re not here to play.

Denise whistles. “That was a Mustang, a real stunner of a plane.”

“Think the pilot made it out?”

We scan the sky, but our view is limited, since we’re nearly surrounded by forest.

“There he is,” I say. Low in the sky, straight ahead, sunlight glints off silk. “He’s about to land in that meadow down the road.”