Tante Berthe was quiet for a long time. Luki wondered if she knew about Flat Joey Letters and the photograph Luki wasn’t supposed to have either. Luki made Flat Joey Letters before she put Flat Joey Numbers in the fire. She told Pemmy it was okay because Flat Joeys were pretend; they were just a way to remember that Joey was safe with Papa, wherever Papa was.
“Luki,” Tante Berthe said, “your papa is still writing to you. I know he is. Just like Brigitte’s papa is writing to her. The letters can’t get to us right now. But I promise you, your papa is writing to you.”
Tuesday, June 18, 1940
BRIVE
Nanée dressed that morning in her favorite gray flannel slacks and some of her best jewelry—a diamond ring and her emerald earrings—but with her grandmother’s pearls underneath her blouse and the diamond brooch that had belonged to generations of her father’s family pinned inside her trouser pocket, the Schiaparelli fur bracelet that had only ever been hers there too. She packed nothing but a few toiletries, saving the space in the small satchel she could have at her feet for Peterkin’s bunny and his clothes, while T moved through the motions of getting him ready, her voice, which had been so steady, now flat and toneless, necessary words and nothing more. T couldn’t let any feeling creep in, or she would not be able to do this, and she had to do this; Nanée understood that.
At the car that was to take them to Bordeaux—a flivver no American would value particularly—its fascist owner eyed her with disappointment, no doubt wondering whether Nanée was really the kind of American who might open roads otherwise closed. The vile woman’s maid sat in the back seat, surrounded by suitcases stacked so precariously that surely they would whack the poor girl in the head at the first turn. This woman valued her own possessions over other people’s lives.
Nanée offered her most gracious smile. “Thank you for agreeing to take Pierre and me.” Pierre. More upper-class than Peterkin. This silly woman would care about that.
T focused on Peterkin. She put one hand on each of his little cheeks and made him meet her gaze.
Nanée squatted down to Dagobert’s level. She couldn’t watch T saying goodbye to her son. She couldn’t bear it. She could barely bear to say goodbye to Dagobert.
She took her white silk scarf—less clean than it once had been—from around her neck, and tied it around Dagobert’s. It would smell of her. She kissed his little face twice, in the French way, leaving lipstick on his fur.
“I don’t want to go either,” she whispered. “But it’s for Danny.”
He licked her bare wrist, then her face. She petted the mess of his fur and kissed him twice again. “Surely even the Boches will love such a wonderful fellow,” she said.
She was glad he couldn’t understand her words.
She buried her face in Dagobert’s then, her mouth open wide so that she would taste him, taste his fur and his little black nose, his eyes that had not stopped loving her even in her cowardice.
She climbed into the passenger seat then, and accepted Peterkin, and pulled the door shut so that T wouldn’t have to close it. She refused to cry even as they drove off, Peterkin clutching the bunny and looking out the window at T and Dagobert.
Tuesday, June 18, 1940
AMBOISE
Luki didn’t look up to the beautiful colored windows because there was a scary man up there who was bleeding from a crown of thorns on his head. The church had been pretty when she came with Sister Therese earlier, when the man in the robe talked and it was full of music and the nun held Luki’s hand and sang in her beautiful voice. It still smelled like the pipe smoke of Papa’s friends, and the Lady Mary wasn’t scary, she was God’s mutti, except Luki wasn’t supposed to say mutti anymore. Reverend Mother said she must call even her own mutti “Maman,” and nobody else was to know Luki was German.
“I know it’s scary, but this is what good Catholic girls do,” Luki said to Pemmy as she walked carefully up the side aisle where she knew she would find the Lady Mary, staying as far away from the wall and the scary paintings as she could. Pemmy was a Catholic kangaroo professor now and she was a girl too, and Catholic girls came to this place and prayed, which just meant you knelt down and talked to a statue. Luki didn’t like the bleeding man, but the Lady Mary’s face was pretty, so she came to pray to her.
She gasped: the bleeding man was lying here now, and he was reaching out, trying to grab her!
She turned and ran as fast as she could back up the aisle and through the door into the sunshine, which was so bright it blinded her.
IT WAS DARKER in the cellar even than in the church. Luki curled up with Sister Therese. She was so tired. She wanted to sleep, but every boom was so loud and shaking. She buried her face in Pemmy, feeling the edge of Flat Joey Letters tucked with the photograph in her pouch. “Don’t be scared, Pemmy,” she said, trying to sound like Sister Therese. Sister Therese sounded scared whenever she said it, but her voice made Luki feel better.
Another boom came, and rat-a-tat-tats again and again, and more men’s voices, not gentle voices like Papa’s, but shouting. Mean. Some in the old words and some in the new ones, but even the voices using the new words were angry.
The booms again, one after another after another after another. And Sister Therese was pulling Luki into her lap, singing into her ear so she could hear even in the booms. The other nuns sang with her; Luki could hear their voices between the scary sounds. She tried to hear only their voices, tried to feel it was the angels the nuns sang about, the angels with Mutti, who used to sing her to sleep before only Papa did. “Il te couvrira de ses plumes; tu trouveras un refuge sous ses ailes.” He will cover you with his feathers; you will find refuge under his wings.
Saturday, June 22, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
You have to come with us, I tell you,” Max insisted, but Edouard only watched through the iron fence as the line filed out the Camp des Milles gate toward the waiting boxcars. He knew Max was right; you had to do nothing more than listen to the retreat, regiment after regiment, truck after truck, tank after tank. If the internees were in the camp when the Germans overran Aix-en-Provence, their circumstances would be dire.
Edouard had woken that morning to see Walter Hasenclever, who slept separated from him only by a suitcase, unmoving. Even in the dim light through the distant, dirty window, Edouard knew the Czech novelist was dead, that sometime in the night he’d taken the overdose of veronal he brought to the camp. More than two thousand of the camp’s three thousand internees, though, had chosen to take their papers and board the train for the border, to try to get out before the Germans arrived. Camp commander Goruchon had made the decision to let the men go on his own; the subprefecture knew nothing about it.
Max called back to Edouard, “Don’t be a fool! Come with us!”
“What, and leave the poor fleas and lice and bedbugs with nobody to feast on?” Edouard said.