‘But I miss you. I want you here. I wish you would come more often.’
‘You know how it is, Papa. Grandmère needs me and between her and my studies, well, there’s not much time left. I miss you too. But – here I am!’
‘Well, we need to make the most of it. I would be happy for you both to stay here forever. All of us living here, Jacques too. Families need to stick together. Promise me that if the war comes to Alsace you will move back home, Juliette. The people might have returned to Strasbourg but it’s still dangerous. Your safety is more important than your studies.’
After the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, all 120,000 Strasbourg citizens had been evacuated and relocated to southern France, like other border towns west of the Rhine River separating the two warring nations. For ten months the city had been completely empty except for garrisoned soldiers. At the arrival of the Wehrmacht troops in mid-June 1940 most of the citizens returned – but to a city now occupied by Germans.
‘I won’t. I haven’t told you yet, but – the university is not returning to Strasbourg. It will remain in Clermont-Ferrand. I happened to be in Colmar, with Grandma, only because of a study break.’
‘And the war has already come to Alsace, Maxence. That’s why we’re here now, isn’t it. Nothing will be the same again. But hopefully the British will come in and drive the Boche from our streets.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
For the first time, Margaux spoke, and she and Maxence looked at each other.
‘Non?’ asked Maxence, holding her gaze. ‘You think we are in for another long war, like the last one?’
Margaux nodded. She stood up and stepped over to the stove, opened the lid of the pot, peered in, stirred the soup. ‘I do. My useless husband does have some skills, besides business. He’s kept in touch with the major politicians in Paris. He says that we are in for a long, long war. It will be just as brutal as the last one or even worse.’
‘It can’t be possible!’ Maxence exclaimed. ‘What are our leaders thinking! Haven’t they learned from the last war?’
‘Nobody wants war except that madman Hitler,’ said Margaux. Her voice was calm, as if she didn’t care. She stirred the soup. Around and around and around. ‘He’s the one agitating for bloodshed. He’s the one who wants to expand and expand until the whole world is German.’
And then, without warning, she banged on the edge of the pot with the wooden spoon, and her voice was a cry, a rallying cry. ‘But over my dead body! They’ll have to shoot me and all of my children before we submit! We will never surrender, never!’
‘Shhh, Margaux,’ said Maxence. ‘It’s not going to come to that. Come, the soup’s finished. Bring the pot. We’re all starving.’
Three
Two days she spent at home, one day with at the chateau with Victoire and Margaux. On the fourth day, Juliette managed to tear herself away her father’s overprotective affection, her grandma’s overzealous attentions, her best friend’s over-devoted neediness, excuse herself tactfully and escape back to Colmar, a city now decked in swastikas. As she hurried through the cobbled streets of the old town towards the Pharmacie Blum, her heart began to beat faster, and a dialogue with herself ran through her mind. I hope he’s there. No, I don’t. Let him be there, dear God. Taise-toi! Shut up! But I hope… no, he won’t be…
He – that was Nathan Levi-Blum, the pharmacist’s son, who had graduated just a few months ago and now worked at the pharmacy full-time, alongside his father or alone in the large storeroom behind the shop, filled with countless shelves stocked with bottles containing mysterious substances: liquids, tablets, capsules.
Juliette had known him when they were children; as they both grew older she had seen him from time to time when she went to collect prescriptions for her grandmother. In his final years of secondary school he had worked there after school as an assistant in the shop, greeting customers, supplying them with over-the-counter remedies, taking their prescriptions and passing them through the hatch to whichever pharmacist was on duty, and Juliette had often found herself calculating his work hours so as she could coincide with them on her medicine-collection errands.
Then he had gone off to university, and she had seen him only during the holidays. She had nursed a secret hope that once she, too, became a student they’d meet up at the university; the truth was, she could count on one hand the times she’s seen him at the Strasbourg campus, and then only from a distance. Sometimes, even, she’d wished she’d chosen pharmaceutics instead of veterinary science as her discipline – but no; she invariably dismissed that thought. She’d always known she’d be a vet, and not even the soulful dark eyes of Nathan Levi-Blum could change that.
Nathan, in his final year of studies, had often worked at the pharmacy alone during the vacances. He took on night and weekend shifts, and it was during the weekend daytime shifts that their paths sometimes crossed. Or rather, didn’t cross. They barely spoke. Juliette would ring the bell on the counter that summoned him from the storeroom. He’d come through the door in his white lab coat, like a doctor; her heart would skip a beat, and there was nothing she could do to stop it, or to stop her eyes from seeking his, searching his.
His face! Long, dark, sallow, with an inevitable strand of black hair falling over his forehead: it seemed to contain a sadness, an enigma she longed to solve, and his eyes spoke volumes but in a language she could not understand. She tried to read them, but couldn’t. But the act of trying to read them meant that she’d gaze into them for a moment too long; she knew she shouldn’t but she did it anyway because – well, because his eyes were magnets and she could not look away.
She’d hand him Grandma’s prescription, held by those eyes. They’d exchange a few words, if need be, but most often he’d glance at the prescription – he was always the one to break contact – nod and walk back through the door to the storeroom with it. She’d wait, heart pounding, breath shallow, for his return, browbeating herself with the internal commands: Stop it! Breathe normally! Don’t stare when he returns! It’s nothing, he’s nothing, just stop it!
She loathed this weakness of hers. This sense of her knees turning to jelly when he reappeared, this inability to make normal small talk with him: normal! That was the element missing! Why couldn’t she just be normal, her normal cool, calm, sensible self, when in this shop, when in the presence of this perfectly normal young man who obviously cared less than two hoots for her and probably couldn’t tell her apart from the other customers, who knew her simply (probably!) as the girl-who-brought-the-prescription for Madame Dolch.
The year she had first joined primary school, she had been a sheep in the nativity play, and he had been Joseph for a few rehearsals. Just for a few. Then his father had stormed into one of the rehearsals, grabbed him from the makeshift stable, railed at the teacher and stormed out of the school with Nathan in his arms. They’d had to find a different Joseph. So tall, so dark, so brooding; he’d been a perfect Joseph. But he would never have noticed a stupid little sheep.
But she had noticed Joseph, noticed him; she remembered. Even then, he had made an impression on her, and in later years, as they both attended the lycée, she’d always noticed him. But it was perfectly hopeless. She had since learned that he was Jewish, but that mattered not one bit; she might be officially Catholic, but surely Jesus was Jewish; she didn’t see what difference it made, and this whole hullaballoo going on in Germany, with Jews somehow being the target of hatred and acts of violence – it flummoxed her, and placed her irrevocably on the side of the victims. That was her nature. It was why she loved animals and was studying to be a vet. She’d always be on the side of the innocent.