Prologue
Aubry-en-Douve
June 6, 1944
I was dreaming about carousels the night the sky got loud. Like the one Sabine drew for me that time I asked her what a fair was like. The white wooden horses with brown manes and gold saddles looked like they were running, but she told me it was just the carousel turning. I’d never seen one for real before, but Sabine was seven years older than me and she could remember things from before the Germans came.
“We’ll see one soon, Lise,” Papa had promised me. When I asked him how soon, he’d kind of hunched a shoulder. Then he’d leaned in and touched my hair like you pet a dog. “Maybe really soon.” His voice had the fairy-tale softness I liked.
I believed him that day, but I didn’t believe him anymore after a lot of months went by and the Germans were still in the village down the road. And I guess I really stopped believing I would ever see a carousel on the day I turned six and the gendarmes took Papa away. Two policemen and a German soldier rode up to our cart on their black bicycles when we were in the village trading leeks for beans. Papa got pale when they asked for his name. They accused him of being in the résistance and he told them that it wasn’t him, but the big policeman said someone had seen Papa talking with people in the cemetery after curfew. He yelled at Papa that he was a traitor and that the only place for traitors was Hitler’s camps in Germany. He was smiling and sweating when he looked at the people standing around us, like he wanted to make sure they were paying attention.
The gendarmes handcuffed Papa’s hands behind his back while the German officer watched. Sabine and I didn’t know what to do. Old Albert was standing behind us and I could hear him growling really low. He took a couple steps toward the policemen, but Papa told him to stop. “Albert, non.” He said it really sharp, like when he’d tell the dogs to be quiet.
Albert stepped back and put a hand on my shoulder. I heard him whisper to Sabine that she should take me home, but we didn’t want to leave Papa. He kept repeating that he was innocent, that they couldn’t take him away. It was just the three of us since Mum had died and we needed him at home. That’s what he told the gendarmes. When the German barked something at them and pointed his chin down the road, Papa started to scream, but they didn’t seem to hear him even then. The gendarmes were French like us, but he called them boches anyway, the word we were never supposed to say around them.
I ran to Papa before Albert could stop me. I squeezed him tight around his waist and begged him not to leave, like I could keep him with us if I just hung on long enough. The German yelled something again and I felt Albert’s hands on my arms. He kept saying that I needed to let go. There was something shaky in his voice. It scared me so much that I didn’t fight him when he dragged me back to my sister.
Sabine grabbed me and I could feel her arms trembling around me. She pleaded with the gendarmes to change their minds. She said we needed Papa with us, since Albert was so old and our farm was so big. She kept saying that they had the wrong person and he wasn’t a résistant. She looked around at the villagers like she wanted them to help, but they just looked away or stepped back.
“I beg of you,” she said to the biggest gendarme, tears on her face.
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he grabbed Papa and turned him around toward our village friends. “Be warned,” he shouted. “This is what happens to traitors!”
Papa’s face was white and hard as he passed in front of us, with the two gendarmes and the German soldier pushing their bikes behind him. But there was something sad and scared in his eyes. “Prends soin d’eux,” he said to Albert. Take care of them. Albert nodded and stepped in front of me when I tried to follow Papa down the road.
We didn’t say anything on the way home. Sabine went to the kitchen and sat at the table. Albert stood in the doorway like he didn’t know what to do. I went to my sister and leaned in so she had to look at me, and I asked her when Papa would be coming home. She just closed her eyes. I asked her again when we were making stew from the green beans we’d gotten in the village and the rabbit Albert had trapped. She still didn’t answer. I probably asked the same question a hundred more times that same afternoon, louder and louder. And at the end of the day, when I asked Sabine again before going to bed, I saw red blotches spreading on her neck. She slapped my face and told me to just . . . stop . . . asking.
Then she looked really surprised and stared at her hand for a minute. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there until she said, “I’m sorry. Lisou, I’m sorry.”
Her voice was sharp and hoarse at the same time, but when she used my special name, I knew she wasn’t really mad at me. She kissed my cheek where the skin still stung. She kissed it lots and said she was sorry again. Then she held me away from her and looked hard at my face. Her grip on my arms felt really tight.
“We’re going to be fine.” I could tell she was talking to herself. She squinted her eyes shut for a long time, then she blew out a breath and her lips trembled like a loose rubber band. “The German work camps . . .” She shook her head and I could see tears teetering on her eyelashes. “I don’t know when Papa is coming home.” She covered her face with her apron, the one Mum used to wear, with the square pocket and the daffodils. I could see her shoulders shaking.
Albert was old but he was strong. He kept the farm going after Papa went away, even after the Germans moved in, maybe two months later. They turned up with their horses and one fancy car and told us they were going to live with us. Albert said they should go back to the village and leave us alone.
They beat him up bad.
So we moved out of the upstairs bedrooms and into the apartment off the kitchen, where Aunt Sophie used to live.
On the night the sky rumbled, I could barely hear the Germans’ boots running down the steps and out the front door. It was so loud, it felt like it was coming from underneath the ground. I sat up and looked around. The shutters were closed, but something orange shining around the slats made shadow-ladders on my wall.
I tiptoed to the window. Normally the air would smell like dew and Mum’s lilacs and manure and ocean salt. But it just smelled like shooting that night. I could hear the big guns going off again and again in the battery the Germans had set up in a field behind my friend Lucien’s house.
I undid the latch that kept the shutters closed. Then I poked a finger into the opening to make the crack just big enough to look through if I tilted my head sideways.
The sky was bright over by the beach where we used to go before they took Papa away. There were all kinds of reds and yellows, and a glow on the ground like bonfires burning. I stepped back from the window and shook my head to make sure I was awake. Then I pinched the skin on the inside of my elbow just to be really sure.
The rumbling was getting so loud that the floor shook under my feet. I peeked through the crack again and looked up, way up past the tip of the roof. It looked like a thousand giant, black trout swimming in the sky. It was so much like magic that I didn’t really hear the booming coming from the village anymore.
“Lise!” Sabine was standing in my doorway when I turned around. “Come—come quickly,” she said, motioning for me to hurry up.