At night when I told my family about Guillaume, Papa in particular looked grave. “You must always be on guard,” he said. His look swept the table. “All of you, all of the time.”
“There was a German soldier behind me in the bakery today,” Pierre said. “He came in so quietly that I didn’t know he was there until I turned around.”
“Yes,” said Papa. “So it’s lucky you weren’t making jokes about the Germans. You must be careful what you say, whether or not you can see soldiers. You never know what people might do.” He took a bite of supper. “There are rumors of spies,” he said. “Men and women both, dressed in civilian clothes, who speak perfect French. You would never know them for Nazis, not at all.”
“Be careful,” Maman said quietly. “Be careful always.”
“Why so quiet today?” Madame Marcelle asked one summer afternoon. I had gone for a singing lesson, but we had finished and were having a cup of tea. Madame Marcelle was telling me the story of the opera Rigoletto. She sang bits of it. The sea breeze fluttered through her lace curtains.
“Pardon, madame?” I looked up. I had been listening closely to the Rigoletto story. I didn’t know what she meant.
“You were much livelier six months ago,” she said. “Are you still enjoying your singing?”
“More than anything,” I said. I studied the pattern on the teacup in my hand. I loved Madame Marcelle’s apartment. Nothing in it ever changed. Sitting in it, you would never know there was a war.
“You don’t mind the work? Singing is harder the more serious you become.”
“I never mind work,” I said. “I like hard things. If I am quiet, it’s because of everything that isn’t singing.”
Madame Marcelle waited, watching me.
“I went to Yvette’s house this morning,” I said. “She still doesn’t speak to me, or to anyone, not even her mother. So today I tried to make her angry at me. I tried to make her lose her temper and shout at me.” I looked up at my teacher. “She used to do that, you know. Not very often, but once I told her that her new hat looked like a bag of pudding, and she told me I was the daughter of a goat and my singing sounded like sheep who were trying to yodel.”
Madame smiled. I didn’t. I played with the fringe on the edge of her sofa cushion. “I told her she was a coward, ” I said. “I told her she was letting the Nazis win, letting them kill her just as they killed Madame Montagne. I told her she was weak and selfish and afraid.”
“And then?” asked Madame Marcelle.
“Nothing. She looked at me as though I were there to clean the carpet. Only she isn’t a coward. I know Yvette; I know she must be doing the best she can. I am the coward, to say such things to someone who is hurting as much as she is.”
“You’re not a coward,” Madame Marcelle said. “You are fearless when you sing.”
I nearly laughed. “See? That must be why I sing.”
We were forbidden, of course, to fly the French flag— the tricolor, blue, white, and red—or to sing the national anthem or show any sign of patriotism toward France. We didn’t disobey. As Papa said, we weren’t that stupid. But one day Etienne came to lunch with three pencils lined up in his shirt pocket, a blue pencil, a white one, and a red one. Blue, white, red.
“What is that?” thundered Papa.
“What?” asked Etienne, startled. I think he had forgotten the pencils.
“That in your pocket—that, you know.”
Etienne looked down. “Oh, that.” He smiled and ran his finger across the tops of the pencils. “I needed some new pencils, Papa, that’s all. I thought these looked like good ones. Don’t you agree?”
Papa stared at Etienne’s bland expression for a long moment before laughing. When Papa laughed, the rest of us did too. “And if the Germans ask you, that’s just what you say,” he told Etienne. “ ‘I needed some pencils,’ hein? You hadn’t noticed anything about their colors.”
“Of course not, Papa,” said Etienne. “What would there be to notice? They’re only pencils.”
All around, things were not what they seemed. German spies spoke perfect French; pencils held a secret message. Meanwhile I did nothing useful. I sang, I helped Maman. I still visited Yvette, but not so often. Seeing her hurt my heart.
“I would like to be a help to someone,” I told Maman.
“Good,” she said. “Scrub those rutabagas for me, and then you can hem the skirt of that dress I’m making.”
I preferred to do something more adventurous. “If I eat another rutabaga,” I declared, “I will die.”
“I’m sorry your life is to be cut so short,” Maman replied. “I hope you will be able to finish the skirt before dinner so that you’ll have something nice to wear when you are lying in your casket.”
“Maman!”
“Oh, Suzanne,” Maman said, laughing. “We can’t take everything seriously, can we? Even now.”
Instead of making me scrub the rutabagas, Maman told me to go down to the docks and get some fish for dinner. Beef, sugar, butter, flour, and many other foods had become scarce, but in Cherbourg we could always get fresh fish. The Nazis still allowed French fishermen to earn their living as long as they stuck to coastal waters.
“I’ll go too,” Pierre declared. I rolled my eyes, but he came anyway.
It was a warm, slightly overcast day. We walked quickly through the streets. “Oh, look,” said Pierre. “There’s Monsieur Vardin.” He was a prominent local man, quite well-off and educated. We sometimes saw him at church, and I knew Papa had great respect for him.
“What’s that on his arm?” I asked. Monsieur Vardin wore a white armband, like the black ones people wore for mourning, only much more noticeable, over his brown suit. I read it. “RAF?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Pierre.
Clearly printed on the armband were the letters RAF. The only RAF I knew was the Royal Air Force, the British fighter pilots, our allies. Surely Monsieur Vardin would not wear such a thing in public?
“Bonjour, children,” he said cheerily to us as we passed him.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” we replied. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what his armband meant. Neither, I supposed, could Pierre, for he said nothing.
We had barely gone three steps farther when we heard a harsh shout. “You there! Old man!”
We whirled around. Pierre put a steadying hand on my arm. Two German soldiers stood in front of Monsieur Vardin. “What is this?” one shouted, jabbing the armband. “RAF? What is this?”
“Oh, that.” Monsieur Vardin lifted his hands and shrugged expressively. He didn’t seem at all afraid. “Pardon, messieurs. This rationing, it’s so hard on an old man. The armband stands for rien à fumer, ‘nothing to smoke,’ because I am out of cigarettes. I’m hoping that if I advertise my unfortunate predicament, someone who still has cigarettes might take pity on me.”
He said this so seriously that the soldiers didn’t know what to think. I bit my lip and struggled not to laugh.
“Hmpf.” One of the soldiers dug into his jacket pocket. He tossed a pack of cigarettes to Monsieur Vardin. “Here you go, then. But get rid of the armband.”
Pierre had a paper route and so he was out on the streets quite often. One night he came home shaking with laughter. He told us the story at dinner. “You know Monsieur Vardin and his RAF armband?” he said. “Well, I saw him wearing it again today. And the Nazis stopped him again, and they said, ‘We told you to get rid of that armband,’ and he said, ‘Oh, pardon, messieurs, it’s not the same armband. This one stands for remerciement au Führer pour les cigarettes,’ ”— thanks to Hitler for the cigarettes.
“So what did they do?” I asked.
“Gave him more cigarettes. But I think he’ll have to leave the armband off now.”
Such things were funny, but many other things weren’t. The cigarette ration was hard on Papa, who had always smoked. Wine was rationed. My parents usually drank cider during the week, but soon they drank it even on S
undays. There was no candy. “I would do anything for a bite of chocolate,” I told my school roommate Martine. She had come to spend the day with us late in August, just before school began.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Anything,” I said.
“Would you kiss a German soldier?”
“Martine! Never! Of course not!”
“Would you speak to one?”
“Not if I could help it,” I said.
“Not even for a whole bar of chocolate? If you just had to say, ‘Excuse me, I’d like some of that chocolate,’ would you?” she asked.
I thought of the Germans living in my house, sleeping on my bed under the photo of Tino Rossi on the wall. I thought of Yvette’s blank face, Yvette’s mother’s sadness. “No,” I said. “I would not.”
Martine shook her head. “Me either,” she said.
“Well,” I said fiercely, “that’s good. Because I’ll tell you something, Martine—if you had answered differently, I’m not sure I could still be your friend.” Martine smiled at me but looked a little surprised by my tone. I wasn’t joking, not at all.
We had been walking through the cemetery by our apartment. It was a good place for private conversations. Martine bent and gently rearranged the flowers that someone had left on a loved one’s grave. “When the war is over,” she said, “I’m never eating rutabagas again.”
I laughed. “Oh, Martine,” I said, “I think we’ll be friends for a long, long time.”
Our daily lives went on. I would have liked to believe that shortages of chocolate and cigarettes and flour were the worst things we had to endure. But I started to notice something frightening: Sometimes people disappeared.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I didn’t realize it at first. I hadn’t known it could happen. Around the time that school began again, the Nazis passed the first of their laws restricting the activities of French Jews. At the same time they banned books by Jewish authors from the stores.
“They threw the books into the streets,” Madame Marcelle told me at my singing lesson. “They burned them. If the author was a Jew.” Her voice was tight with anger.
“Are there operas written by Jewish people?” I asked. I didn’t know of any. Not Mozart, not Verdi, not Bizet.
“What difference does that make?” Madame Marcelle asked. Now she sounded angry with me.
“None,” I said. “I mean, it won’t make a difference, will it, if it doesn’t affect what I can sing? Or what I learn at school?”
“It makes a difference,” she said. “Suzanne, think.”
I thought, because she wanted me to. “Like the newspaper,” I said. “How it’s only propaganda now. The Nazis are trying to control what we can read.”
Madame Marcelle shook her head. “It’s much worse than that,” she said. “Controlling the newspaper makes sense in an occupied land. Novels and works of literature are art in the same way that songs are art. It’s wrong to burn them. It’s wrong to ban them.”
I could see that it might be wrong, but I couldn’t see why Madame Marcelle was so upset. She shrugged, sighed, and set me to learning a new Alleluia to sing for Christmas.
I had the same roommates again for the new school year. In the dormitory late at night I asked them what they thought about the new rules.
“It doesn’t hurt us, does it?” said Odette.
“How can we know?” I asked. “Madame Marcelle thinks it can.”
“Everyone in Cherbourg is Catholic,” said Odette. “I’ve never even seen a Jew.”
“No,” said Martine. “Maman said she knew of one, but not in Cherbourg.”
“I know a Protestant,” offered Colette.
“A Jewish family lives near my uncles in Paris,” I said.
“What do they look like?” asked Colette.
“Same as us,” I said. “You can’t tell they’re Jewish by looking at them.” So maybe I understood Madame Marcelle after all.
Not far from our apartment there lived a man who operated a taxi service from his home. Automobiles were rare in town, so he was always busy. He and his wife and children all had dark skin; they were one of the few black families in Cherbourg. One Friday when I was walking home from school, I saw his taxi parked in front of his house. This was strange; he usually worked quite late on Fridays. I hoped he wasn’t sick.
On Monday morning when I passed his house, the taxi was still parked in the same spot. A few leaves had blown onto the windshield. It didn’t look as though the car had been moved.
I didn’t think about the taxi driver all week, but on Friday, as I was walking home again, I saw that the taxi was still parked on the curb, more leaves fallen onto the windshield and hood.
I felt a little chill run through me. There was something not right about the taxi. Why hadn’t anyone driven it? The taxi was the man’s livelihood; surely if he were sick, he would have found someone to drive it for him.
Without really knowing why, I ripped a sheet of paper out of my notebook. I stuck it against the windshield, tucked under one of the wipers. Anyone driving the car would take the paper off first.
On Monday morning the paper was still there. The car looked dirtier and more forlorn. The little garden in front of the man’s house was filling with dead leaves. I walked to school with an anxious lump in my throat.
“Do you know the taxi driver?” I asked Soeur Elisabeth.
She shook her head. “We never take taxis,” she said. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Odette and Colette thought it was strange that I should be so worried about a man I’d never spoken to, whose name I didn’t even know. Martine didn’t say she thought it was strange, but she didn’t seem to understand. Yvette would have, I thought. Yvette had cared about everyone before she fell apart.
That night as I tried to go to sleep I spoke in my mind to the old Yvette, the one who always had answers to my questions. A taxi driver could be useful to the Germans, the way my father is useful. They wouldn’t do anything to a useful person, would they?
No one answered me now. On Friday when I walked home again, I gathered my courage and peeked into the window of the taxi driver’s house. I saw a room left in disorder, children’s toys scattered about, a baby blanket in a heap on the floor. The blanket chilled me. They could not have meant to leave it behind.
I ran home and told my parents what I had seen. They shook their heads and looked grave.
“Where do you think they went?” I asked. “What do you think happened?”
Papa sighed. “I think they disappeared,” he said. “I think it will be better if you don’t ask questions.”
“Better?” My voice rose in a shriek.
“Better for you,” Papa said. “Not better for them. I don’t think anything we could do would be either better or worse for them. At this point, Suzanne, we can do nothing to help them. I doubt whether we ever could have.”
I felt like crying, but I wouldn’t. “I thought Hitler only hated Jews,” I said. “I didn’t know he hated black people too.”
Papa was smoking black-market cigarettes, which stained his fingers yellow. He rolled a pencil between his yellow fingers. “Now you do.”
It was months before someone hauled the taxi away. After a few weeks I began to walk back and forth to school by a different route so that I wouldn’t have to see it. Meanwhile I sang and sang, Alleluias and Glorias and operatic arias, and in the chapel every morning I prayed and prayed and prayed.
CHAPTER NINE
The winter of 1940 was bleak and cold. My little cousins kept getting sick, one after another. Their illnesses weren’t serious, but they kept Aunt Suzanne from visiting us, or us from visiting them. I hadn’t realized how much I would miss them.
Now fuel had gotten expensive. Papa could afford to heat our little apartment, but the school was cold all the time. My brothers were cold too in their monastery school. Maman sent us all off with extra blankets and made sure we had warm
socks, but she couldn’t find cloth to make a new winter coat for me. I wasn’t tall, but I had gained a few centimeters over the summer, and now my coat was short in the sleeves and tight in the shoulders.
“Never mind,” Maman said. “I can fix it.” All in one weekend she picked apart the seams of the coat and re-sewed them. She made the coat as large as she could. It fit better then, but it looked odd. The fabric was brighter near the seams.
Papa hated working for the Germans. Etienne hated not being a soldier. Pierre disliked going to school. Maman missed our pretty house, her piano, her kitchen. Food at school was dreadful, with no meat or flour and only winter vegetables—cabbages, potatoes, rutabagas.
“Eat it,” Soeur Margritte would scold me. “No one cares if you don’t like it, Suzanne. Eat it, and thank God for your blessings.”
How was I supposed to do that? What would I say? Thank you, God, for not making me a Jew. Thank you for not making me a black person or anyone else that Hitler would hate. Thank you for not giving the Nazis a reason to make me disappear.
I couldn’t imagine God having much patience with such prayers. And no matter what Soeur Margritte said, I refused to be thankful for rutabagas.
Still I knelt and tried to pray. I tried to be honest and I tried to be true, and what came out was Dear God, make me strong. Make me sing, and make me strong. Take care of my family. Make me strong.
On my fourteenth birthday Papa gave me half a chocolate bar. “Oh, Papa!” I said. I hadn’t seen so much chocolate in months, and oh, I had been wanting it for so long. With sugar rationed and so hard to find, we almost never ate anything sweet. “How did you get it?”
Papa shrugged. “I traded some cigarettes,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. I broke off some pieces and handed them to my brothers. Maman refused her share, and so did Papa.
“Enjoy it,” he said. “You are a good girl.”