Part 9 (1/2)

”No. Listen, Julien. I didn't know then why you were doing it. Now I do.” Julien looked up. ”Son, I want you to understand: you made the wrong choice in fighting him. But you made another choice today that was very right. You could have stood aside when they called him boche and pretended nothing happened. Very easily. You didn't do that. For that, Julien, I'm proud of you.”

Julien looked up into his father's eyes. He felt a warmth spread through his chest.

”Hey Papa. Is it ... okay if I stay home from church tomorrow?”

Papa grinned. ”Julien, you want to hide that thing, you'll have to stay in from now till Christmas. Hold your head up! At least you've got something to show for all that!”

Julien grinned too.

Chapter 12.

Everywhere In Trento there was a house; and the house had a door.

It stood in a deserted place between railroad tracks and an old factory with broken windows and weeds growing up from the foundation. Most of the roof was caved in, but the kitchen was whole and had a chimney and a door. The kitchen was where they lived.

At first, Niko slept like the dead. Gustav came and went; Niko woke long enough to wedge the door securely shut behind him and slept again. Gustav brought matches from somewhere and made a fire with bits of broken boards; Niko hung their wet clothes on a string in front of the chimney and slept again. Gustav brought food in greasy brown paper: cold pizza he'd been given at a restaurant's back door. Niko ate, and slept.

And they lived. Through the long day, Niko lay on her father's eiderdown, looking into the fire, putting on more sticks and boards when it sank down; and at evening, Gustav came with food and stories. Showing her the routine he used at the back doors of restaurants, big puppy-dog eyes and a hand on his stomach, and ”Food? Food for empty belly?” It made them laugh, he said. Italians liked a laugh, even when you were begging. He liked Italians, he said. A camp of Gypsies had settled out that way, he said, in the field across the drainage ditch. He said he liked them too.

Then they would bed down by the fire, but now Niko could not sleep. She lay awake long hours in the dark, by the dim light of the fire, wondering. Wondering what Father knew.

Everywhere there are evil men. It was why she stayed in this house and did not go out with Gustav. Everywhere. Was Uncle Yakov right, then? she asked Father. She asked G.o.d. What is this world you made? Father had told her stories of corpses piled up in ditches, just for being Jewish. He hadn't said what happened to the women. But she could guess. G.o.d. Why? Why do you let them? She couldn't do it, she couldn't lie here all day and all night with only her and the questions in her head, and a G.o.d who did not answer-she couldn't do it. But outside, she heard voices sometimes; men's voices, laughing. Outside, for her, there was nothing but fear.

Then came the pain in her throat, and outside, the snow. Niko lay under the eiderdown, s.h.i.+vering, no matter how high the fire was, and sweating. Two, three, four days, and the fever did not go. Gustav felt her forehead, his eyes dark. ”I don't know what to do, Niko. I need to get help.”

”Gustav, no. You can't tell anyone I'm here. Gustav, promise. Gustav, you have to promise!”

He promised.

She lay staring at the fire, wandering a dark wilderness in her mind. She was in the woods on the border with Uncle Yakov-he was saying run, run, the Cossacks are coming. Father was up ahead, maybe she could catch him and Mother-Mother who ran so fast that she'd never seen her. She called out to them-wait, wait, you forgot Gustav ... Don't worry, Father called. Gustav can look after himself. He knows their language. They like a laugh. And he was gone, ahead of her in the dark woods, over the border, and she couldn't find the gap. Father, Father come back, Gustav wants you to come back! And then Gustav was there, and a fire, he had made a fire in the woods, but the Cossacks would see it, and he was saying something, he was shouting. ”No, Nina, no. I won't let you. I won't let you die!”

And then he was gone.

Chapter 13.

Weapons It happened exactly like Julien had expected.

He heard the news Monday in math cla.s.s from Gaston, who was telling Dominique behind him. Apparently he, Julien, was a snitch of the lowest kind who had gone straight to Pierre's mother with a pack of lies about the fight. He heard Dominique respond to this information with a soft, shocked, ”He did?”

Benjamin turned, but Julien elbowed him. Eyes front. You can only make it worse.

Pierre's eyes were cold and hard as the crusted snow, as cold and hard as Henri's. That moment they had looked each other in the eye and shaken hands was gone now. Never happened. Julien sat beside Benjamin, staring out the window. He was going to sit this one out.

Two weeks till Christmas break.

The road to school was gray frozen slush; the bridge over the Tanne coated with ice. He walked down it in the early morning dark, the stars overhead, and he walked back up in the dim blue evening, thinking of home and warmth and firelight. Mama would have the fire roaring, the light dancing golden-warm on the walls; he would hang his wet socks up to dry and stretch his feet out near the blaze, and the chill would melt off till he was warm all through.

Benjamin asked if he'd like to do homework together. They sat at the table, mugs of mint tea by their books, the firelight from the living room turning their notebook pages a pale honey-gold, and Benjamin showed him how to work those equations Monsieur Vanier had them on just now. They worked together every night, and Benjamin shook his head and grinned at Julien's complaints about how the teachers piled it on.

”What else is there to do?” he asked wonderingly.

”Soccer,” said Julien, rolling his eyes, then looked out the window at the blowing snow and sighed.

Benjamin left a week early, before Christmas break, to see his family in Paris. There was a light in his eyes as Julien shook his hand goodbye at the station, in the howling burle. Julien walked to school alone, his head down against the wind.

Back in the science room, he looked over at the circle of the cla.s.s and wondered if he should try them now, with Benjamin gone, but he wasn't so sure anymore. To have the troisieme cla.s.s tolerate him, was that what he wanted? He took a seat on a desk among them, closer to the fire, and no one stopped him. But he saw no friends.h.i.+p in their faces.

Suddenly he hated doing his homework alone.

The air was bright and bitter cold as Julien walked out the school gate, and his boots kicked the powdery snow into glittering clouds in the sun. He was free.

At home, there was the roaring fire, and hot chocolate, and preparations for Christmas. It was going to be a simple one this year. Prices were up, Papa said, and there was a freeze on raises for all government employees-and he was teaching at the public school next year instead of the new one. Except for two unpaid courses he'd volunteered for, for love of Pastor Alex. More work, less money. Thanks to Julien.

There was nothing Julien could do except pitch in and not complain and try to think of a good Christmas present with no money. Which was what he intended to do. For Papa and for Mama.

One night, he came down to the kitchen for a cup of milk to help him sleep, and she was there. Candlelight wavering on the walls, and Mama with her little Bible in front of her, eyes closed, moving her lips in a faltering whisper, in Italian. He froze in the doorway, staring. Tears were streaming down her face. He turned and fled in silence.

He lay awake a long time, gazing into the dark.

He wanted to learn to carve.

Grandpa was carving Magali a deer. It was beautiful. It was beautiful just watching the skill in his hands, taking off a shaving here and there, bringing a shape out of formless wood. There'd been a porcelain statue Mama had wanted in a Paris shop-cupped hands cradling a baby that barely filled their palms. G.o.d's hands or something. Papa'd wanted to buy it for her, but it was too much. Julien would make it out of wood. For them both.

”That's a pretty advanced project, mon grand,” Grandpa told him. But he gave him wood and his second-best knife, and they sat by the fire together peeling golden shavings of wood onto the floor. For a couple of days. But Grandpa was right.

Grandpa taught him wood-burning, and brought him and Magali in on his project: two wooden Bible covers for Papa's big black Bible and Mama's little Italian one. Magali did the sewing in strong canvas, Grandpa cut and planed the thin oak boards for the front and back, and Julien sanded and finished and polished them until they glowed.

There was firelight and wood and snow; they went out to cut pine boughs and holly for the house and came home to hot mugs of tea and Grandpa's stories after supper by the fire. A letter came from Vincent. He missed Julien; their soccer games just weren't the same; he had Madame Larron for social studies, wasn't it awful? He'd wanted to send him a present, but he couldn't, so he'd lit a penny candle in the church and prayed Julien would get a soccer ball. How was he, anyway?

He was all right.

On Christmas day, they cut a pine tree in the woods; they brought it in and tied candles to its branches. They helped Mama stuff the chicken with chestnuts Grandpa had gathered and told her it was better than turkey. They sat round the fire and read the Christmas story, with all the candles lit, and Julien got a new coat, and from Grandpa a carving of a wolf, its head thrown back howling: beautiful. And Magali liked her wood-burned tree picture, and the Bible covers glowed in the candlelight with the high s.h.i.+ne he had put on them, and Mama and Papa glowed too. And Mama cried.

”So, Julien,” said Grandpa. ”You still want to learn to carve?”

”Yes.” Next year he'd make them the hands.

So Grandpa started him on his first project: a simple, stylized, round-crowned tree.

Soon it was the only good thing left in his life.

Benjamin came home and looked at his plate during meals and hid in his room. He gave Julien an ill.u.s.trated history of soccer and offered a pale smile and a thank-you for the wood-burned Bible verse Julien had made him: The Lord is my rock and my fortress, my deliverer, in whom I take refuge. The Jews wrote the Psalms, Grandpa had insisted; but that didn't make them Benjamin's thing. He'd been right. He backed out of the room, away from Benjamin's pale, unseeing face.

They were frozen in time, all of them; frozen at the worst possible time. At school, nothing had changed, just hardened into a permanent shape like the footprints in the schoolyard that had been there since fall, frozen solid in the mud. Puddles lay in them, gray, flat, lifeless ice reflecting nothing of the sky. The circle of the cla.s.s was as it had been: Henri Quatre hard and proud at its center; Pierre throwing dirty looks; the rest not seeing Julien, even Roland. Roland, who had almost been his friend. He had no friends now. He sat at his desk beside a pale, silent Benjamin, studying motionless images of soccer, and did not look up.