Part 7 (1/2)

Exceptions were made. Pa.s.sport: Victor Hugo. Born Paris 1922. Number: 88140175.

The English streets are dark and gray. It's hard to understand what people are saying.

And the damp!

I learned to take hot baths before bed.

Three major things happened in the decades after Paris: 1. I joined a monthly poetry group.

2. I became friends with a boy who moved in next door for a few years.

3. I built a greenhouse for the cultivating of tomatoes.

One day I was told I had to retire. Why? I asked.

Laughed, they all did. Told me was time to enjoy my life. There was a small party. People who didn't know me got drunk. I sat down. I watched all. Listened. Wondered if He could see.

I spoke English well by then. But still they looked, still they pitied, still they feared and sometimes spat.

And life kept going . . . kept dragging me along in its teeth.

A man came to see me last month at the house. At first I wouldn't let him in. Then he told me he worked at the BBC. I wondered if I was watching too much. Had a friend in America, he said. Asked if he would deliver a letter to an old neighbor called Mr. Hugo.

It was something I had been too afraid to wish for. Some days I wondered if I had imagined him.

He told me to read the letter. Think it over. He would come back in a couple of weeks and help make arrangements if it was something I wanted. He told me to consider the next few years. He asked if I would get lonely. (I laughed at that one.) He said California is always sunny. He said Danny is a famous director now and his films are shown all over the world. Would be a nice place to spend time, he said. The retirement center even has a pool and small garden.

I asked him to stay for dinner and cooked fish fingers. He arranged french fries in the oven dish. I put on children's programs. We watched and ate off trays. It got late. He touched my hand before he left. I gave him tomatoes.

Went to bed. Lay awake with my eyes open. Would have to leave my home. Would have to leave my poetry group-would not catch the bus twice a month on Tuesday, would not sit at the back and read names and messages scratched into the gla.s.s. Would not know that: Daz luvz Raz Gareth is a t.w.a.t Lizzie is a slag Declarations of love or anger.

To think: Most fought until the end, Murdered until the end, Hated until the end.

And I was one of those, remember-one of those: hated.

I should tell Danny. He has a right to know what Mr. Hugo did.

On nights when the poetry group meets, I boil an egg in the kettle. I take it with me on the bus. It keeps my hands warm until eaten. Sometimes I take a bag of tomatoes that I cultivated in the greenhouse and give them out. I will miss all that. I am attached to things most people find insignificant.

I will miss this house and the birds outside every morning. Just open your window at dawn and you'll understand. People who sleep through it wake to silence.

New people in the poetry group always want to know where I lived when I was a boy. Far away, I tell them. They think I'm wise-think I have a story. But the older I get, the less I understand.

So I make things up. The smell of hay. Falling asleep under trees. Riding a bicycle across an entire country, picking vegetables in a field. No point going on about the starvation, or father's fists, or the ropes and how much I screamed-not so much for pain but because I loved him, and wanted our lives to be different.

Though it is true I grew up in an old blacksmith's cottage. Best place to live in winter, I always add, as the fireplace is larger than normal.

Inside, I go on, a stone floor worn down in one place. It's where horses stood. A shoe is being fitted. A horse's leg has to be lifted with strength and gentleness.

Outside, cows tearing across hillsides.

Probably 1938.

My father convinced the men in town I was older than I was.

Thought he was helping me.

He said, When you come back, a kiss for every Jew.

JOHN.

FRANCE,.

1944.

I.

JOHN AWOKE IN a stew of mud and dead leaves with a fierce pain in his foot. His wrist.w.a.tch had stopped a few minutes before nine.

He expected the enemy would return with more men or dogs, and so untangled himself quickly from the bush.

Here was a landscape John had always loved. Roots poked up through the ground on their way to deeper earth. Heavy mosses wrapped dead branches and smoothed the gnarls of dying trunks. It was an old wood that had seen many wars, and once even hosted a gang of deserters from Napoleon's Grande Armee, whose uniforms and weapons were still tucked into the hollow of a dead tree.

Harriet had several sketchbooks of John's drawings. They were lush and messy. She liked to look at them. Over the course of their lives, she hoped he might teach her how to draw. It could be something they did together, a way to fill the Sundays ahead.

John's escape from this place would have to be a work of art, something original, something the enemy would not antic.i.p.ate.

He stepped slowly through the forest, trying not to break small branches underfoot, when two arms grabbed him from behind. He struggled and kicked his legs violently, but the person holding him was much bigger. A voice told him to relax, and he did. The thick arms loosened.

The man wore a long waterproof coat with tall farmer's boots.

”I knew you were here somewhere,” the man said with a French accent. ”We saw you land, but you fled before we could get to you.”

The farmer led John through the woods to a pile of potatoes at the edge of a plowed field. There was also a cart and a muscular horse that looked up when they approached. Pheasants were penned in a wire basket and pressed their feathered bodies against the mesh.

The man told John that his cousin's farm was on the other side of the village, and that's where they were going. John watched as he filled several sacks with potatoes and then hauled them onto the cart.

When the farmer picked up the final sack, he motioned for John to get in. Then he filled it with a few handfuls of potatoes and stacked it against the others.

After a jerk, they began to move. A short time later there was a sudden echo of hooves, and John realized they had left the field for a road. The pheasants were flapping against the sides of the basket. John closed his eyes and tried to block the pain in his foot, but it was hard to keep still.

When the cart stopped, men spoke quickly in German. The farmer said in French, ”Come and see what I found.”

The soldiers stopped talking and followed him.

After the farmer had presented the pheasants to the soldiers, John heard matches being struck. The odor of cigarette smoke. n.o.body talking.

His foot stung so wildly that he felt in danger of being betrayed by his own body. Just as he began to stir, there was a great weight on the cart, and John felt a large back lean against him.

When they reached the house, John was carried inside and released from the sack. The farmer's name was Paul. He had witnessed the invasion from the fields. The sky full of parachutes. Equipment stuck in the mud, wheels spinning. The rattle of machine guns upon anyone who resisted. Paul said that people he once trusted were profiteering from others' misery, or openly walking with soldiers in the square, out of fear or for advancement. He attended the public executions of his friends, helped bury them afterward, and listened to the stories of soldiers sneaking out of their barracks in search of girls they had seen. n.o.body was safe, he said.