The French War Bride (7 page)

I did, but I couldn't say why. “It—it's odd, is all.” I didn't know how I felt. Strangely pushed aside, mostly. Maybe displaced. Definitely off-balance.

Another thought occurred to me. “Do you write him about me? Did you write about the other night?”

“No, of course not! I can't risk him telling your mother.”

Thank heavens she hadn't completely lost her head. “Please, please, please don't tell him about Joshua!”

“Oh, I won't. Don't worry.” She grinned. “Your secrets are safe with me. And I hope mine still are with you?”

“Yes, of course. It's just . . .”

“What?”

“Well, I would hate for you to lead him on and break his heart.”

She laughed as if this were wildly funny. “As if I could!”

“Well, I don't think you should try.”

“I wouldn't! It's nothing like that. It's just a little long-distance flirtation, that is all. So tell me about your date with Joshua.”

“It wasn't really a date. We met at the library and went for coffee.”

“Did he pay for your coffee?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then it was a date! Tell me all about it.”

So I did.

“Do you think you will introduce him to your parents so you can truly date?”

“I don't know. What do you think they will say?”

She gazed thoughtfully at the wall. “Your mother will not like that he's an immigrant.”

It was worse than that. I was fairly certain my mother would not take kindly to me seeing someone who wasn't our religion. “My father would not think it matters. He would be impressed that Joshua speaks French very well even though Yiddish and German are his native languages. I think he would be impressed that Joshua is an engineering student with a bright future.”

“Yes, but your mother will want to know all about his family.” She gave me a wry grin. “You have met your mother, haven't you?”

“Yes.” I sighed. Yvette was right; my mother could be a snob.

—

I sneaked out and met Joshua two days later—and continued to meet him two or three times a week as the winter wore on. We fell into a
pattern of walking and talking. He would hold my hand and he would give a quick peck on the cheek hello and good-bye, but he never really kissed me.

Yvette peppered me about it after every outing. “Did it happen?”

“No. But he gazes at my lips, and he smells my hair.”

“Oh, that's so romantic! He must be shy, though. You need to prompt him to make the first move.”

After a couple of months of this, I made sure we were on a deserted side street when it was time to say good-bye, and I turned my face toward him as he went to kiss my cheek. His lips met mine. He stiffened, and I thought I had made a terrible miscalculation—but then his mouth moved over mine with an ardor that left me breathless. It was everything I had dreamed of, and more. It was a chocolate soufflé of a kiss—hot and melting and sweet.

Too soon, Joshua groaned and pulled away.

“Don't stop,” I whispered.

“I don't want to start down a path where I may disrespect you.”

“You wouldn't!”

“I will probably try. A man's desires—they are not honorable. It will become more and more difficult to stop, and before I know it, I might compromise you.”

“You wouldn't,” I repeated.

“You might want me to.”

“I just want you to kiss me again,” I murmured.

I watched his Adam's apple move. “I want that, too. You have no idea how much. Sometimes at night, I think about you, and . . .” He blew out a harsh breath. A thrill chased through me.

But his next words were like a bucket of cold water. “Romance is not something we should even consider in a time of war.”

“We're not really at war,” I said. “There's no actual fighting.” Everyone called it
la drôle de guerre—
the joke of war. The Americans called it “the phony war.”

“It will come,” he said, “and when it does, it will be brutal. It is best for us just to stay friends for now.”

The thought of being something more in the future emboldened me. I stepped closer and put my hands on his chest. “Our friendship would be more special if you would kiss me again.”

He took my hands, removed them from his chest, and stepped back. “Do not persist in tempting my baser nature, or I will not see you anymore.”

“You would quit seeing me rather than kiss me?”

“Yes. I do not want to ever harm you.”

If his kisses were a prelude to how it would feel, I very much longed to be harmed.

—

I did not want him to stop seeing me, so I followed his rules. Rather than kissing, we talked at great length about politics, about Hitler, about the impending German attack. I asked about his family, and learned that he had distant aunts and uncles and cousins flooding into Paris, and that many of them were temporarily staying with him and his mother. I also learned that he'd had a younger sister who had died. He would not tell me how. Every time I broached the subject, he would come up with a reason to leave.

I did learn that his father had owned a fine leather-goods store. The family had lived in a lovely house in Vienna, but now lived in a squalid apartment in the eleventh arrondissement. His mother took in ironing to help pay the rent, much to his shame and chagrin.

“She says she does not mind, but it is probably a good thing my father is dead,” he said bitterly. “It would kill him to see her reduced to this. I want to quit school and fully support her, but she says my education is the key to the future, and hope for the future is all she has to cling to.”

—

On my own, I learned all that I could about what had happened in Austria in 1938—mainly by questioning my father. He was delighted that I was taking such interest in world affairs, and would give long, boring explanations involving Poland and other countries I didn't care about, talking in such detail that my eyes glazed like a Christmas ham.

As for Joshua, I learned that if I asked about political history, he would
talk freely. If I asked about his personal history, he would shut down. Little by little, though, I broke through his defenses.

We were at a deserted student café on a cold afternoon, sitting at a table by the fireplace, when he finally told me what happened.

“I know that Germany annexed Austria a year and a half ago,” I said. “Why didn't Austria fight the takeover?”

“We had a very weak leader. The Nazis presented annexation as a wonderful thing for our country, and most Austrians did not mind. But the Jewish population . . . oh, that is another story.”

“What happened?”

“The Nazis started a hate campaign against us almost immediately. Posters went up on every lamppost, along with awful comics in the newspapers calling us thieves and crooks and the scourge of the world. They made it difficult for Jews to travel or operate businesses. But it became untenable after Kristallnacht.”

“‘The night of broken glass.' My father told me about this. It was started by a murder here in Paris, right?”

He nodded. “A German diplomat was assassinated. The Nazis claimed it was conspiracy masterminded by Jews. They used it as a reason to attack Jews in Austria and Germany. The windows at our home, at my father's business, at our neighbors' homes were all broken that night. And afterward, the military relentlessly preyed on the Jewish community. They would stop us and make us do stupid things.”

“Like what?”

“They made an elderly woman who lived across the street hop on one leg while carrying water. They made an old man crawl down the street.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“They repeatedly vandalized our property and looted my father's store. They confiscated insurance payments for the damage they had inflicted, saying we were responsible for the destruction. We decided to emigrate. Father thought Paris would be the best location to open another store. But the Germans did not make it easy for Jews to travel. We had to get a visa and have documents approved, and to do so, we had to pay bribe after bribe. Delay piled upon delay.”

Joshua's hand curled tight around his coffee cup. “In order to emigrate, we had to agree to leave everything behind and to pay extraordinarily high ‘taxes.' In the end, we had only a little money—maybe enough for a few weeks of food, but not enough to start over. But by then, it didn't matter. The situation was so bad that it was impossible to stay. We were so glad that at last we had all the required papers.”

I barely dared to breathe. His eyes had a faraway look, and I was afraid that if I interrupted, he would end the conversation as he always had before. This time, he kept talking.

“The night before we left, I went to say good-bye to a girl. She and I . . . well, we were romantically involved. It is a mistake I will regret all of my life. I should not have left my family.”

“Why?” I gently prodded.

“When I got back, my mother was hysterical, and my sister . . .” He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed between his eyes. “She was catatonic. My father—he was lying in the hallway, on what looked like a red carpet. It took me a moment to realize it was a pool of blood, and he was dead.”

“Mon Dieu! What had happened?”

“Three German soldiers had come to check our house, supposedly to see what goods we were leaving behind. The real reason, I believe, is that they were looking for me. That night, they rounded up all young Jewish men in our neighborhood and sent them to concentration camps.”

I reflexively started to make the sign of the cross, then stopped myself.

“My father didn't want to let the soldiers in. This, of course, angered them. They forced the door, then saw my sister. My father tried to get her to run. This infuriated them more. They tied my sister to the bed, strapped my parents to chairs and then, they . . .” He ran his hand down his face. “They raped her. All three of them, one after the other, like dogs, while my parents watched. My father broke free—how he managed, my mother says she does not know; outrage and courage must have given him supernatural strength. He charged—Mama said he was like a bull. They shot him, then they left.

“An elderly neighbor came over as soon as I arrived home. He had been watching the house from across the street. He's the one who told
us the Nazis were rounding up young Jewish men that very night. I wanted stay and bury my father, but my sister was out of her mind with terror and shock, and my mother was hysterical, and the neighbor insisted we go. We took only what we could carry. We walked and walked and walked until we reached a train station in the suburbs of Vienna, a neighborhood where no one expected to see a Jew, so no one was looking—and with our papers, the papers we had given everything for—well, we were able to catch a train to Paris.”

He looked up at me. “So. That is my story. That is how I came to be here. That is how I know the Nazis are brutal beyond belief.”

“Your sister—you told me she had died?”

“My mother found her in the bathroom two weeks later, at the apartment where we stayed with some other refugees when we first arrived in Paris. She had slit her wrists.” He lowered his head, but not before I saw that his eyes were swimming. “She found it impossible to live with the shame.”

I put my hand on his arm.

“I failed her. I failed my father, my mother—my whole family. I should have been home. If I'd been with them, this would not have happened.”

“No.” I desperately wanted to lighten his burden of guilt. “If you had been home, you, too, would be dead.”

“At least that would have been honorable. If I had been there, they would have just taken me and left my sister alone.”

“You cannot know that.”

He buried his eyes in his hands.

“The important thing now is that you stay alive and try to provide a future for your mother,” I said.

He rubbed his eyes, then reached for his coffee. “That is not what I think in the dark of night. I fear that is not what my mother thinks, either.”

I reached for his hand. He squeezed it. I leaned in to kiss him, but, as always, he turned away.

1940

T
he joke of war stopped being funny on May 10. That was when Yvette and I came home from school to find Maman wringing her hands as she listened to the radio. Yvette's mother stood beside her.

“What has happened?”

“Germany has invaded Belgium,” Maman said.

“And Luxembourg and Holland,” Yvette's mother added. “It's a blitzkrieg.”

It was the first time either Yvette or I had heard the word. I thought it sounded like a pastry. “What's that?”

“It means lightning war,” Yvette's mother said. “Planes suddenly appear and drop bomb after bomb. And then panzer tanks move in and destroy everything in their path.”

A shiver ran up my spine. “Why are they attacking those countries? Has Germany declared war on them?” I asked.

“Nothing was declared. They just started bombing and invading.”

If they were doing that to countries that they weren't even officially at war with, what would they do to us?

When I voiced my concerns at dinner, Papa was quick to reassure me. Or maybe it was my mother he wanted to reassure. She seemed to be falling apart. Her hair was unkempt, her dress was wrinkled, and her face had taken on an unhealthy pall.

“We have defenses in place,” he said, “and we have allies. There are more than three hundred thousand British troops—the great British Expeditionary Force—in our country to shore up our army.”

The British had a new prime minister, a man named Winston Churchill. No one seemed to know anything about him, except that he had never advocated trying to make peace with the Nazis, as the previous English prime minister had.

We heard that the British and French military were moving toward the Dyle River. Were Thomas and Pierre on the move, as well?

Over the next few days, life in Paris went on as usual, except for the fact that the radio played more news than music. Yvette and I went to school. Father continued to teach at university. France had become so inured to a war that wasn't really a war that it was hard to realize how much the situation had changed. Everyone still believed the impregnable Maginot Line would hold.

Joshua was the one who told me the news when I met him at the Jardin des Plantes, in the Allée Becquerel. We had taken to meeting there now that the weather was warm. “The Germans are in France. They invaded through the Ardennes.”

“The Ardennes forest?” I had studied French geography just last year. “That is supposed to be impenetrable.”

He nodded grimly. “Which is why it was virtually undefended. No army in the history of the world has ever been able to get through.” He shook his head. “No one has ever seen warfare like this before. The Germans are using tanks and the Luftwaffe in a new way. No one could have even imagined the things they are doing.”

“What will happen?”

“We have no way of knowing. We must hope the English will save us.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “I long to join the French Foreign Legion, but I can't leave my mother. She says she can't make it without me.” He blew out a sigh. “I fear it is so.”

“I don't want you to leave, either.”

He placed his hand over mine. “It may be best that we all leave.”

“Where would we go?”

“Ah, that is the question,” he said. “That is why we stay.” His mouth took on a determined set. “But that does not mean I will not fight. The front line is not the only place to battle the enemy.”

—

The days went by. The radio told us very little—Joshua said it was propaganda to keep us calm—but we learned from travelers flooding in and from radio programs from London that Holland had surrendered.

Even after the surrender, the Germans continued their cruel assault. We heard they'd bombed Rotterdam, killing more than a thousand civilians and leaving more than 85,000 homeless. We heard that more than 10,000 French soldiers were captured in a single day.

And then we heard that the Germans were bombing northern France; the roads were jammed with millions of northern French inhabitants who'd either been bombed out of their homes or feared it was about to happen. The French and British armies, who had believed the Germans were coming through Belgium, found themselves trapped as the Germans rolled through the forest and lowlands, backing them against the sea.

I did not understand all that was happening, but I understood that the British had retreated along the English Channel and were arranging for ships to pick up their soldiers.

“What are they doing?” Papa railed. “Everyone knows that the channel is no place for military maneuvers. It will never work.”

We later heard that it had—that the British had evacuated 300,000 British troops. “They've abandoned us,” Papa moaned.

Joshua saw it differently. “The British were wise to withdraw so they can come back and help France fight another way.”

We heard that tens of thousands of French soldiers had run or surrendered. Were Pierre and Thomas among them? I prayed it was so, for then they would not be among the 100,000 French soldiers rumored to already be dead.

Along with Maman, I went to mass and lit candles for them every day. We heard that nearly 150,000 French troops had been rescued by
the British ships. I prayed that Pierre and Thomas were among them, that they were safely in England.

Paris was suddenly very crowded. The city streets teemed with refugees—from Belgium, from Holland, from northern France. My private school was abruptly dismissed for the summer, three weeks early, because so many students' families were fleeing Paris.

At first, Papa said we would stay. “Leaving shows a lack of faith in France and in our military. The Germans won't make it to Paris. We will stop them, just as we did in the Great War.”

Yvette's mother arrived at our door with somber news otherwise.

“The Germans are on the way,” she murmured in a low voice. “I received word from Jean-Claude.”

“French troops will intervene before they enter Paris,” Papa insisted.

“He says there are no French troops to defend us. Those who haven't been captured or killed were stationed along the Maginot Line and can't get into position to halt the advance. Yvette and I are leaving tomorrow for my father's farm.”

I had gone there with Yvette for several summers. It was near Dijon, in a beautiful part of the country. Her widowed grandfather was a dear man who insisted I, too, call him
Grand-père
. I fell into her arms. “Oh, Yvette—you can't leave Paris!”

“I must,” she said. “And you must, too.”

Even Joshua, who thought there was no safe place to flee, thought we should leave Paris.

“Well, then, you and your mother should leave as well,” I told him two nights later when we met.

“We have no money and nowhere to go,” Joshua said grimly. “Besides, we are hosting many, many distant relatives who have lost their homes and are in worse shape than us. But you and your family— it would be best if you leave.”

Maman and Papa argued that night. After learning that Professor Chaussant thought Paris was unsafe and discovering that most of his colleagues were fleeing, Papa had reversed his opinion. He now insisted that we leave immediately. “We have no choice.”

“But this is our home,” Maman argued. “How will our boys find us if we leave?”

“They are not coming home anytime soon,” Papa said grimly.

“You don't know that!”

“I do, Marie. And so do you. Our soldiers will be fighting a long, long time.”