At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  “I do understand,” she tells them. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Then say it again. Our Father … ?”

  Fine. She takes a deep breath. “Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name …” All in one breath, delivered fast, good.

  “We believe in one God, the Father almighty … ?” Claude prompts.

  “Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …” she recites. How hard is it, really, memorizing a few sentences? Like in school, La Fontaine, she recited three fables in a row that time. Maman and Papa applauding. She’d won a ribbon. All those ribbons, on the wall at home. An empty home, now. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s another family living there, now. A German family. A little blond-bright German girl, sleeping in her covered-with-roses bed, cuddling with Adele. A German woman combing her blond hair at her mother’s vanity, a German soldier cracking the spines of her father’s precious books,

  “we look for resurrection of the dead, and lifeoftheworldtocome, amen.”

  She swallows again, tries to catch her breath.

  “Very good, Marie,” Claude says.

  Luc shrugs. “I knew them all when I was three.”

  “Hail Mary … ?” Berthe urges. She’s crazy about the Virgin Mary, that big picture of Mary over her bed, blue robe and gold-flecked halo. She acts like Mary is a movie star.

  Berthe begins braiding her hair. Too tight, too hard. “Marie, go on, Hail Mary, full of grace … ?” She’s seen Berthe dig those big bare hands into frozen ground for carrots. Fill a bucket with dried manure. Snap a soft brown rabbit’s neck.

  Deep breath. “HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee …”

  Berthe is nodding along, mouthing the words, beaming. “Every time you say the Hail Mary, dear, you’re handing a beautiful rose to our Blessed Mother.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Her love and mercy are always with us. Our prayers will be such a comfort to you, Marie. When you open your heart that way.”

  “I know, you said.”

  “You’ll be able to forget about everything, from before. That’s what’s best.” Berthe finishes the braids. “Remember, cross yourself when we do. Bow your head. You cannot make a mistake.”

  “I know, Berthe.” And she’ll have to kneel and then not kneel, sing and then not sing, pray to saint statues, eat and drink all that pretend body and blood. Maybe you can tell them you don’t feel well, she thinks. Maybe tell them you’ll go next Sunday, and by then maybe they’ll have forgotten anyway.

  “Tante Berthe. Remember that.” Berthe picks up Danielle’s coat, her new coat with the white fur collar.

  “Tante Berthe,” she repeats. “Tonton Claude. Cousin Luc. I know, don’t worry. But maybe, maybe I’m not … what are you doing?”

  Berthe has a knife in her hand, is cutting, digging around the fur collar.

  “Oh, don’t do that, please!” Like gutting that rabbit, those red hands at the soft white belly skin, the moment of shiny purple insides spilling through. She closes her eyes. Her beautiful coat. She tightens her hands into fists.

  “Baby’s going to cry now,” Luc says.

  “I am not!” she snaps.

  “You’d stand out in these things, Marie.” Berthe tosses the collar in the fire; the white fur catches then leaps up as brief flame. “Don’t worry, dear, I have something nice for you.” She fusses inside a small oak trunk. “Such pretty red hair you have. Golden red.” She lifts out a fistful of fraying yellow ribbons. “And that fair skin. You always looked Irish to me. Or Scottish. Such a beautiful people, the Scots. When you visited with your maman, you’d sit on my lap, I’d brush your hair. Do you remember?” She advances on Danielle’s braids.

  “I can tie those myself.” She reaches. Yellow, not a good color for me, she thinks.

  But Berthe is already seizing, twisting a braid with ribbon. “She’d be dressed up fancy to go out with your grandparents. All that beautiful jewelry of hers! The necklaces and earrings and bracelets she wore! Like a queen.” Berthe jerks a tight bow. “And you’d come running to the kitchen. ‘I get to stay with Berthe!’ you’d yell. We’d play games together all evening.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “No?” Berthe looks disappointed. “You don’t look much like your parents, really. Certainly not your father.”

  Her father. She looks, looks for her father’s face in her mind, it flickers, blurs, but—

  Our Father, who art in Heaven …

  —soon, he’ll be back soon, she thinks, confused. Her father. With eggs,

  “But you have your mother’s beautiful red hair.”

  and her mother, too, she’ll come back for her when the war is over, she promised

  Holy Mother of God, always with us …

  they will be together again, and her mother will hold her, like on the train here, dark and rumbling, German soldiers examining people’s papers, her mother smiling bright at them, taking off Danielle’s fur hat—why?—finger-combing Danielle’s hair forward, on display,

  “I always wanted a daughter. A little Marie. You know,” Berthe turns to her husband, “she hardly looks at all …” the Germans are smiling back, at her mother, at her,

  “like a Jew.”

  smiling at her pretty golden red hair.

  “Not my Marie, no—”

  “Stop it,” jerking her head from that woman’s hands, “I’m not your Marie! You aren’t my family. Mary isn’t my blessed mother, there’s no father in Heaven, stop pretending this is real, it’s all just a big lie, a joke, it’s not—”

  The slap is like missing a bottom step she didn’t see, that snaps at your ankle and makes your stomach lurch. It doesn’t feel like hurt until the lurch stops and she feels her face burn. No one has ever slapped her. She is stunned silent, without breath. Luc is grinning. Berthe’s red fingers are pressed to her mouth. Claude cracks his knuckles in the quiet.

  “I’m so sorry, Marie.” Berthe crosses herself. “Marie-Jeanne?”

  She looks down, away, so they won’t see her cry. No, she squeezes her eyes shut, you’re a big girl now, looks at her clenched hands, sees a thin line of dirt under her nails, a peasant girl, that’s what you are now, wearing their old rags, scrubbing their potatoes and floors. Run, hide, flee, yes, why can’t she? Escape this icy house and dead wet fields, hurry down those black mountains and away from this place. Go home. No, go find her mother Underground, wherever that is. Maman’s fingers lacing her hair, the scent of roses, her soft hand on her face.

  But no, she’s gone. She left you here, with a woman who slaps. There’s nowhere to go, no place to run away to. So act like it didn’t hurt. Go on. Pretend, like you’re supposed to. Lie.

  “No, I’m sorry, tante Berthe,” Danielle says, raising her head. “Really, Tonton, Cousin Luc, please forgive me.”

  She smiles brightly at Berthe, and Berthe smiles back.

  “I know this is hard for you, dear. We know you’re doing your best. And we’re so happy you’re here with us.”

  Claude puts his big square hand on her shoulder. “We are, Marie-Jeanne. All of us.” Claude looks at Luc, who shrugs, looks away. “Really.”

  She nods, smiling, smiling. Go on, thank them for their scraps and rags, she thinks. Their Christian charity. Tell them how grateful you are. But she can’t bring herself to that, not yet.

  “Well, she’s going to make us late,” Luc mutters. “And you should make her practice the Creed again. She got it wrong yesterday.”

  “I know it now, I promise,” she says to all of them. “I’ll be perfect. Please don’t worry.”

  “Yeah, well if she messes up …” Luc heads out of the kitchen, slamming open the heavy wood door. “I’m not getting shot just because of her.”

  Before the Germans marched into Paris last June, everyone acted like the end of the world was on its way, marching across the map. They’d marched all the way up into Denmark and Norway, across to Belgium and right into France, sneaking in through the unlocked
back door, sweeping through the Maginot Line like brushing off strands of spider silk, slaughtering as they went, our brave men butchered, our women and children chopped to bits. Danielle heard the terrible stories everywhere, people babbling in the cafes, the shops, the cinema lines about what horrors were coming next, Get ready for war, they say it’s marching toward us, blood and death, marching, the end of our ways, of our pride our honor our France, of everything we know, can’t you feel it, the coming end? And she could feel it, the end of everything coming at her, sneaking inside her room at night to pound her chest and beat blood in her fingertips and ears when she tried to sleep, hoping the lace curtains and satin coverlet would shield her, hide her, keep the dangerous butchering thing out. Maybe she should say a prayer, the way her grandparents always told her to, Please God, she mumbled into her pillow, Please, God, please … but wasn’t sure which words came next. Anyway, it wasn’t nice to pray only when you wanted to ask for something, that isn’t why God is there, her father always said.

  People sewed newspapers into curtains for the coming blackouts, dried fresh plums into prunes, dug out old gas masks from the Great War for the looming bombs. Urinate on a handkerchief when the gas comes, hold it to your face, they say it kills the burn! Save up your butter, you’ll need it to soothe blistered skin! Everyone said the Germans were barbarians, dirty Huns, sale boches, and they would beat everyone up and steal and kill, yes, the Germans are inhuman, no, superhuman, they must be, to have beaten us this way, godlike in their Herculean strength, striding whole-limbed and golden across our fields, conquering without sweat, and the British troops, our allies—our friends!—fleeing Dunkirk while our own French soldiers were left bleeding into the sand and sea. Danielle saw people running away, then, running with stunned, stupefied faces, big suitcases and paintings and boxes of books, mattresses on their backs, dragging children by the hand, hurry, hide, flee! Officials dumped files into the Seine and burned papers in huge bonfires that sent black smoke blooming overhead for days and into her nose and throat and made the whole city smell like singe. Oil depots were exploded, to keep them from German hands, and their oily flames streaked the sky in hot oranges and blacks. She saw shopkeepers running with chickens flapping under their arms, women tripping with birdcages, with hatboxes from the rue de la Paix, and two men carrying a big rolled-up rug overhead, making a wild stagger as they went, and shouldn’t she and her parents be running away too, she thought, hurrying and hiding from the knives and guns and burning flesh? She worried which of her blouses and shoes she might carry away, which favorite books. Everywhere, people were fleeing, in cars, on bicycles, on foot, and rumors whispering their way back of children lost in the crush at train stations, people abandoning their possession-filled cars on dusty roads for lack of gasoline and walking south, women dying of premature childbirth in ditches, old people dropping dead of exhaustion and being scratch-buried in fields, towns overwhelmed with refugees forced to sleep in churches, looting and pillaging, spates of suicides, mayors offering themselves as hostages to the German army, hoping to spare their villages, their towns. She saw a spotty brown dog roaming their street all day, yelping, and talked her mother into letting her give the dog a plate of scraps. But then there were more dogs, all the dogs people couldn’t take away with them in the exodus, yelping in the streets then turning on each other with howls and snapping bloody jaws, and her mother told Danielle to leave them alone, they’d gone wild from hunger, they would just have to fend for themselves.

  Most of their neighbors fled, and their maid Sophie went home to Geneva, and her parents’ friends who used to come on Shabbat to argue about God and art, who was or was not betraying France, and whether the war was real or just rumor and threat, a drole de guerre, a phony war. Her mother sent Danielle to bed early on those Friday nights, when the arguments were less about French politics and God and more about Poland and ghettos and the Nazi man in charge of Germany, Hitler. But Danielle listened at the door,

  You’re blind, Paul, she heard them say, Jews and the academics, it’s who they always come for first. Jews and academics.

  But This is our home, her father said. This is our country! We’re not running away.

  And she lay in bed, blood pounding, are they coming, would there be blood in gutters, would the poison gas burn through her curtains to blister her lungs and shred her skin, rolling tanks crushing those wild dogs in the streets, and shouldn’t they flee? But no, her father wanted to stay, and surely he would shield her, keep them all safe, of course he would, yes.

  Then the soldiers did arrive, marching in their shiny black boots, the streets going muddy green with uniforms and harsh with German accents like constant coughs. They marched right in, with their soup bowl helmets and rumbling tanks, in tidy rows like chess pieces, but no blood or boiling oil, no screaming horses or babies speared on bayonets, and the last of the smoke just thinned away. But they did carry guns, machine guns hanging from shoulders or big pistols in holsters at their sides. Her parents wouldn’t let her go to school, and her father stopped going to the University. And she waited, still, for the end of everything to come get them, like everyone said, the whispers of neighbors and friends, they say Hitler has invaded Britain, they say the United States has attacked Germany, the Pope has committed suicide, the Germans are planning to burn Paris to the ground, they say, they say. Our leaders have been taken prisoner, they say, have been tortured and killed; no, they’ve all fled to North Africa, to Bordeaux; no, they’re fleeing further east, to Vichy. The invaders are marching thousands of our men back into Germany, guns pointed at their heads, German soldiers are cutting off the hands of French boys so they can’t grow up to fight, German soldiers use French citizens as human shields when they march, German soldiers smear their excrement on our precious works of art.

  And then the voice on the radio, thin and scratchy, like a frail old woman with bad lungs. An old war veteran brought back from the dead, her father told her, Marshal Philippe Petain, the hero of the Great War, of Verdun. I am giving myself to France, the voice said, to offer myself in her hour of need, to ease her pain. Her father muttering, Who does he think he is, Christ? Petain would not flee, as so many others did; no, he would stay to lead them, to share their sorrows and misfortunes. And, his decree: The fighting must stop. We must lay our weapons down, accept an honorable defeat. Her mother crying, He’s giving France to the Germans, just handing us over, that’s what he’s doing! But was that so bad, Danielle wondered, if it meant no more fear, no more worrying, with each breath, if you were inhaling that burning, blistering gas, no more poor frightened dogs gone savage and yelping in the streets?

  Yes, everything returned to normal again, almost. So what if there’s no more President or National Assembly, no more Republique, they said in the long lines forming at shops, We’re safe now, we have Marshal Petain to lead and protect us, a true hero of France! And Pierre Laval as Deputy Prime Minister, well, he’s a thug, with his hooded eyes and bad teeth, none of the Marshal’s natural elegance, that’s for sure. But a real political operator, that Laval, look how he persuaded our National Assembly to dissolve itself, wipe out the 3rd Republic, to hand full powers over to Marshal Petain! Isn’t that just the kind of shady character we need to deal with the Germans? Two million of our men held in German prisoner-of-war camps, but they’ll come home soon! Yes, that’s what they say! Yes, not since Louis XIV have we had such a strong leader, such a bright future!

  And so what if clocks were moved forward an hour, to match German time? So what if there were fewer cars on the streets, no gasoline to fill them, except for Germans in their shiny coupes and sedans? So what if meat and cheese became hard to find, and no more whiff of baking bread or sausage or chestnuts when you walked along the avenues, so what if roasted acorns and saccharine became bitter ersatz coffee and ersatz sugar? Just laugh about it, everyone laughing it off together. So what if there were no more dinners at Drouand’s, no more Sundays at the cinema? She could go back to school. And they c
ould go for walks again in the Tuileries, she and her father, among the people roaming with empty baby carriages and wheelbarrows in hopes of finding something, anything, to eat or hoard or trade. They could watch people trapping pigeons in makeshift cages to take home for a meal, although her father hurried her away when a man grabbed at a bird, seized its tiny bird head and body in tight fists before a loud crack. They could still stroll past the Hotel de Ville, although the pretty French flag was gone, the tricolore, and the ugly German flag flapped there now, red and white with the thick black scar marching around it forever in a jagged circle, more and more of those flags, flapping on terraces, atop monuments. But she didn’t have to look at them, or the tightening outline of her father’s face as they went by. Yes, long walks with her father, just like always, no more wafer cookies or chocolate or carousel, but still, the two of them together, Papa not caring about her messy braids or her gloves stuffed in her pockets, walking on slow Sunday afternoons until the sun began its drop and they’d stop on the Pont Neuf, to watch the candles and lamplights twinkle on in the buildings.

  Watch the colors change, Danielle, he’d say, pointing to the sky, look how beautiful. Look at all the shadings, always changing, from silvery lemon, over there, to that deep sapphire, look how it’s turning to ink. It’s like a painting. We’re ‘entre chien et loup’ at this hour. Now look carefully, and you show me the moment when day changes to night, when the light turns to dark. Can you see it?

  And she’d look and look but could never see exactly when the shift happened, when the dog became the wolf. And that didn’t change, the twilight sky, just because the Germans were there.

  Occupation, she thought, well, it isn’t so bad. The German soldiers on the street were always well-mannered. Perfectly correct. They smiled, tipped their caps to ladies and showed clean necks and well-trimmed hair. They bought postcards of the Eiffel Tower, took photographs in front of Notre Dame like giddy tourists on holiday. Once she saw a young captain help old Monsieur Lesaire carry a stack of newspapers across the street, and he was a Jew, too, who fought in the Great War, his Legion d’Honneur medal always pinned to his chest. And the German saluted him! Clearly, these weren’t the bad barbarian Germans. She almost stopped noticing all the guns, the accents, the sound of marching boots.