How Huge the Night

 

“Isn’t that beautiful, Julien?”

“No.”

Even without looking, he knew he had hurt his father. He shoved his hands in his pockets and stood there at the top of the hill,
looking
at the so-called view. A few hills with trees on them and cow pastures in between and, tumbled down the hillside like blocks some giant kid had spilled, the houses of Papa’s hometown.

Papa thought he’d given Julien a great present. Taken all his happy boyhood memories and wrapped them in a brown paper package and tied it up with string.
Papa. I know where I’m not wanted
. While Mama and Magali unpacked the boxes, he’d gone down into town and seen the flat, cold eyes of the guys his age. The stares that told him not to come closer. Not to say hi. He’d lost his way and wandered narrow dirt and cobblestone streets, not daring to speak to anyone. He passed old men in cloth caps, cigarette stubs in their dirty fingers, laughing; he heard one say something about “
les estivants
,” and his friend reply, “At least they’ll leave.”
Les estivants
. The summer people.
No, see, I live here. Unfortunately
.

“I know you miss Paris, Julien. But Tanieux is a very special town.”

There was a tightness in Julien’s chest.
I tried so hard to lie to you, Papa. I can’t do it anymore.

“I hate it here.”

“Julien.” His father’s voice was sharp. “You know nothing about this town. Do you know what it’s called when you hate something you know nothing about? It’s called prejudice.”

“I know something. I know
they
hate
me
.”

“Julien, what basis can you possibly have—”

Day before yesterday on his way through town, Julien had seen a soldier in full uniform—a Third Armored Company uniform, brown leather jacket. A tank driver—
man
he’d wanted to talk to that guy—holding the hand of this beautiful girl in a white dress, with all these guys Julien’s age clustered round, and everyone going on about something he couldn’t quite hear—blah blah
Germany
,
something
something
Hitler
, blah blah blah
army
,
get ’em
, loud shouts of Yeah and laughter, and then the girl shouting,
It’s not funny, it’s not funny, you could get killed!

Julien had stood there, riveted by that beautiful girl shouting at her soldier, and a hot whisper had run through his veins:
It’s war—isn’t it
. And he’d taken one step into the street, to cross, to ask
What happened? What did Hitler do?
—and the soldier had turned to him with a flat, outraged stare. And then the others, one by one—like he was a cat that had peed on the carpet. The girl in the white dress didn’t look at him at all. He could still feel it. It burned.

“That pastor promised you this job in his new school, and now it’s not even opening and now you have to teach at the public boys’ school. Why do
you
like it here?”

“The new school will open next year, and I will teach there. As you know.” Papa’s voice was hard now. Yeah. He knew. He knew next week he would have to walk through the school gate and face those guys who’d looked at him like he was something they’d found under a rock. He would have to walk through that gate beside some skinny Jewish kid with glasses—some kid with parents from
Germany
—their new
boarder
, who was going to get the empty room across from his in a few days so they could be the
two
new boys from Paris, together.

“You also know that there is going to be a war. So aside from
why I like it here
, you could try considering what other reasons your mother and I might have had for moving south.”

He’d come home, the day he’d seen the soldier, to find his sister cooking supper. Burning supper. To find that Hitler had invaded Poland and his mother and father were in their bedroom with the door closed. His mother hadn’t come out.

There was silence for a moment. Julien thrust his hands into his pockets and contemplated the dull gray slate roofs of beautiful, beautiful Tanieux.

“You see this bush?”

Julien glanced up. Papa was pointing at a green, scrubby thing that looked like an uneven, upside-down broom. He didn’t look mad. Apparently they were moving on to botany. “Do you know what it’s called?”

“No.”

“It’s a
genêt
. Around here we used to call them
balais
.”
Brooms
, how brilliant. “You could use them for a broom if you didn’t have one. You could burn them for winter fuel when there wasn’t enough wood.”

Or tie them on your feet for snowshoes. For walking to school uphill both ways.

“We did that during the Great War. There wasn’t enough of
anything
then.”

Julien looked at the bush, its skeletal green fingers all pointing up at the sky. Dozens like it, all down the hillside, dotted the cow pastures. They didn’t look like anything the cows would want to eat. They didn’t look like they would burn either.

“I don’t know what the next few years hold, Julien. But the
people
who live on this land—they know how to survive.” Papa looked out over the hills. “You don’t know how deep your roots go till you need them.”

Julien said nothing. His father sighed, and turned, and led the way on down the road to Grandpa’s farm.

They had come here every Christmas since Julien was a kid; he could see it without even shutting his eyes, what it looked like in winter. Snow blowing over rock-hard wheel ruts frozen in the mud, the bitter wind cutting through your clothes: the
burle
, a wind so harsh it had a name. That was Tanieux to him: a winter town, a cold, stone village huddled on its hillside, Grandpa’s kitchen its one welcoming place. He’d loved that kitchen, golden with firelight, warm with the steam of a pot-au-feu on the stove.

Now it was hot and bright and dusty, and the garden was a vast green jungle, and his back hurt worse than it ever had in his life, and he was less than halfway done with his row of beans. Mama was in the kitchen, her eyes red and her black hair plastered to her
forehead
, canning the three buckets he’d already picked, with Magali, his younger sister, stoking the woodstove. And Mama wasn’t
singing
; she was working and not singing. It wasn’t right.

Mama was
good
. She should have been an opera singer; there’d never been a day in Paris that she didn’t sing. Thinking of it, the sound of it, he was visited with a sudden, painful image of
happiness
: looking out their kitchen window, down into the little courtyard with the sun shining through the leaves of the tree he’d climbed as a kid, looking at his cousin Vincent standing down there with his brown leather soccer ball under his arm, calling, “Come on, Julien. Let’s go!”

And instead, he’d go home tonight and sit with an aching back, alone in his room, and tomorrow he’d wake up and look out the window and see not his own street but the jumbled rooftops of Tanieux, where nobody wanted him. From the window of his room, he could see all the way down to the boys’ school, a square gray block with a low stone wall around it, standing alone on the other side of the river. It looked like a prison from where he was standing. He’d be starting in a week.

He walked away. Suddenly, and fast.

He didn’t know where he was going. Away. A feverish energy drove his feet: they kicked at the dirt between the rows, they moved like there was someplace to go to get rid of that aching knot behind his breastbone. Between the edge of the garden and the woods was a long, low stack of graying firewood, and an ax stuck in a piece of log.