How Huge the Night (10 page)

They were filthy, their clothes were filthy, the white stars on the eiderdown were black as dirt. The streams they found were icy; if they washed, they would never get warm again. They had no fire; they didn’t dare. They had no matches. Father hadn’t said to pack matches. She didn’t know what he’d had planned for them with the rabbi; but it wasn’t this.

It rained. Icy, pouring rain, and no houses or barns, and
nothing
to do but walk, their wet clothes clinging to their skin. Gustav’s pack was soaked; the eiderdown wet and heavy, the bread sodden and falling apart. It was so cold; and nowhere to stop and get warm and dry again, no help, no one they could trust. She had never imagined anything like this. She wanted to sink down beside the road, to give up, but she kept going. The rain stopped before
nightfall
, and they lay in the wet woods under the soaking eiderdown, and Niko knew in her heart that they could not go on much longer. They ate their soggy bread and said nothing. She would not let him see her cry.

Winter came in quickly, without preliminaries, like an uninvited guest who means to stay; like an invader.

The school went on winter rules, every class spending break in their homeroom. Ricot let them put the desks in a half circle near the woodstove, and the guys arranged themselves on them, sitting on the tops of desks, the backs of chairs, in a perfect echo of Henri’s court under the oak tree. Roland had his place by Jean-Pierre at the edge of it. Benjamin and Julien stayed at their desk.

At home in the mornings, Julien still prayed. He prayed that the school would get the old Gautier place, after all, that it would be like nothing had ever happened, that God would please, please help. He didn’t know if anyone was listening.

It snowed, and Tanieux finally looked the way he remembered it: a winter town of soft white curves and blue shadows, the tiny warm glow of windows down along the white streets. Magali and her friend Rosa ambushed Julien and Benjamin on the way to school with snowballs, and they gave back as good as they got. The schoolyard rang with shouts when they got there, snowballs flying; Julien fell on the deep snow by the wall and started packing
snowballs
. He got Léon Barre in the ear, and Léon’s friend Antoine got him back, and then he got Pierre in the neck; that was sweet. He filed into class with the others and listened to Henri and Philippe and Pierre behind him planning a battle, a real one; a whole-class snowball fight fought by the rules of
ballon prisonnier.
It was
brilliant
. He had to give them credit. It was going to be perfect.

And he was going to be there.

The sun was bright and the sky deep blue, and the wind had blown the snow into knee-deep drifts and long sparkling curves in the sun. The trees were a black-and-white tracery, the river clear and edged with ice, and in the schoolyard Henri Quatre and Pierre were picking teams.

The lines were laid out: two team zones facing each other across a narrow no-man’s-land, and behind each team’s zone, its prison, bounded by a hand-high wall of snow. If you got hit, you were taken. If you managed to catch a snowball someone had dodged, you could remake it and throw it at the enemy, and if you hit one of them you went free. The military implications were beautiful. Julien took one look at those prison walls and instantly craved the same thing as every boy in that schoolyard: to be the brave French soldier, captured but not cowed, resisting, breaking through the lines of the cowardly
boches
.

Gilles for Henri’s team, Philippe for Pierre …

“Hey we’re the French, okay, and you’re the
boches!
”

“
You’re
the
boches!
”

“Julien,” said Pierre.

He was in Pierre’s camp in a flash, bending down to pack a
snowball
; it crunched delightfully, perfect snow. He was shaping another when he heard Benjamin’s voice.

“Um … can I join?”

Julien straightened but did not turn; he stood motionless as Pierre shouted, “Hey, we’re the French Army, we can’t take
boches
. Go ask them over there!” And laughed.

“
You’re
the
boches!
” hollered someone from the other team.

Julien turned then and saw Benjamin’s face.

Benjamin turned away and walked silently across the field. Something stuck and burned in Julien’s throat. He looked across at the no-man’s-land, at the prison camp, all the lines and colors of high adventure drawing themselves in those packed snow walls. He wanted it. He wanted that daring escape, that courage under fire. The battle was gearing up, his team assuring each other confidently that they were the French Army, that the line would hold. He was a part of this. No one had thrown
him
out. But as he bent for a snowball to hurl at the enemy, before his eyes was Benjamin’s face collapsing like a bombed house. The windows shattered, the walls falling inward: a direct hit.

Julien looked at the wall. Benjamin stood in deep snow, his head down, a small gray figure against the white. Snowballs flew; around him boys were calling, their voices thin and distant as the cries of rooks. He dropped his snowball and walked off the field.

The snow muffled his steps as he approached the wall. “Hey.”

Benjamin’s head came up fast, and Julien caught the gleam of tears in his eyes before he looked away, blinking hard. “Yeah?” he said roughly. “Why aren’t you out there?”

“Because that was wrong.”

Benjamin looked at him. The tears in his eyes wavered and spilled. “There’s no place for us,” he said. “In Germany they hated us because we were Jews. They broke all the windows of our shop. That’s one of my first memories. I was four. That’s when we left. Last year they beat my uncle David and broke his hands so bad he can’t work anymore.” He swallowed. He took off his glasses and wiped a sleeve across his eyes.

“Oh,” said Julien. “Oh.” No other words came.

“And we came to Paris, and they still hated Jews. They talked about us behind our backs. And Papa wouldn’t let me wear my yarmulke, and he stopped wearing his, and we stopped going to synagogue—we kept changing so they wouldn’t hate us, and now they hate us because we’re
German
.” He almost choked on the word.

And at that precise moment a snowball flew past Julien’s left ear, and hit Benjamin directly across his weeping eyes.

It was packed hard, and shattered against his face. He fell back against the wall, dropping his glasses, clawing blindly at his eyes; then he was blinking frantically, compulsively, his face crumpled in pain.

Julien had seen the motion out of the corner of his eye; over there, on what had been his team. It was Pierre.

The field blurred. He saw nothing; only Pierre. Laughing.

He strode across the field and up to Pierre, drew his arm back, and punched him as hard as he could right in his stupid, laughing face.

It felt glorious.

Pierre stumbled back with a look of pure shock; then his eyes narrowed, and all Julien caught was a glimpse of his thick-jawed face before pain hit him in the left eye, and he fell. The snow was cold on the back of his head, and there were shards of red light around his eye, and oh it hurt. He rolled out of Pierre’s reach as Pierre came down with another blow.

“Fight!” “Over here! Fight!”

They were up again, eyes fixed on each other, circling warily. There was no one, only the two of them inside the tight, pulsing circle of their rage. Julien’s blood pounded in his ears in rhythm with the pain in his eye and the dimly heard chant: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Then Pierre swung.

Julien dodged, and Pierre overshot his aim. Julien grabbed him by the sleeve and tried to follow the motion, trip him at the ankles and send him down. It was like pulling on a boulder. For a moment they were locked, struggling; Julien let go. Pierre’s lip lifted. Julien faked with his left and then threw his right fist with all the force of his body behind it, right at that sneering mouth.

He connected, felt the hard edge of Pierre’s teeth against his knuckles and the soft lip caught between; when he drew back his fist, he saw blood on Pierre’s face, blood down his chin. A fierce joy rose in him, and as Pierre blinked, Julien pulled back and slammed a fist into his face again.

A hand grabbed the back of his collar, hard. Behind Pierre,
suddenly
, was the muscular form of Monsieur Astier. Astier had Pierre by the shoulders, struggling. Julien struggled too for a moment; then the teacher behind him spoke.

“Julien, control yourself,” said his father’s stern voice. “
Now
.”

Pierre was marched through the watching crowd and into the school by Monsieur Astier; Julien followed, walking in front of his father. That way he didn’t have to look him in the face.
It wasn’t what it looked like, Papa.

But Papa didn’t ask. He put his hands on Julien’s shoulders as they entered the building and let them rest there till they reached Astier’s office; then Julien felt them lift and let go. He heard, before his father turned away, his voice with an edge of weariness.

“Georges,” he said. “Will you handle this one?”

“A
snowball
?
” Astier sounded incredulous.

To hear Pierre tell it, Julien had just walked up and punched him, God knew why. Julien told what he could of the truth. How could he explain Benjamin’s face, or the broken bloody hands that had flashed so vividly into his mind? Astier’s eyebrows rose very slightly at the word
boche
connected with Benjamin, and he gave a tiny nod.

Pierre swore wide-eyed on his mother’s grave that the snowball had been an accident.

“That’s impossible, monsieur! We were by the wall, and he got him right between the eyes!”

“You were on the other side! I was aiming at the other team,
non mais m—
” Pierre bit off the end of the swear word with a glance at Monsieur Astier.

Julien turned on him. “You liar,” he said. “You’ve had it in for us since the day we got here, you and Henri. You think I don’t know who stole Benjamin’s book?”

“Slow down,” Monsieur Astier’s deep voice cut in. “First,” he glared at them, “do
not
start this fight again in my office if you know what’s good for you. And second, if there has been a theft at my school, I’d like to know why I wasn’t informed.” He turned a sharp eye on Julien, who swallowed.

“It was returned, monsieur. Someone left it on his desk.”

Astier nodded heavily. “And are you certain that Monsieur Rostin here stole it?”

Julien hesitated. “No,” he said finally, and hung his head. “I didn’t see.”

Astier sighed. “Well.” He gave them a hard stare. “I’m going to have to find a detention room for each of you for the rest of the school day. During which time, I want each of you to do some thinking.”

He turned first to Julien. “Monsieur Losier,
you
will think on this. You have attributed to Monsieur Rostin a cowardly and
premeditated
cruelty which I personally doubt his capacity for.” Pierre looked up. “Though today’s callous stupidity, I don’t find surprising at all,” Astier added drily. “You have also for some reason decided without direct evidence that he is a thief. Think about how you would feel were such assumptions made about you.

“And Monsieur Rostin.” He turned to Pierre, who shrank back a little at the stony gaze. “Here is what I want
you
to consider.” His voice grew even heavier.

“At our school, we do not tolerate insults that relate to a person’s race or nationality.” His eyes flashed. “Not even if that person’s nation is at war with us. I am going to notify the teachers to be on their guard, and if I ever hear of such a word applied to young Monsieur Keller or anyone else—” He broke off, taking a deep angry breath. “If I hear of
any
student being treated differently from
others
on the basis of race, nationality, or religion, in
any
way, believe me: the offender will be punished.”

He puffed out the rest of his breath and looked at the thoroughly cowed Pierre. “I am sorry,” he said. “That is not exactly what I want you to meditate on. You were in church last Sunday. If you were listening, you may recall that God instructed the Israelites settling into the Promised Land to be kind to the foreigners among them, remembering that they, too, were once strangers in a strange land. You will think,” he said, “about the meaning of that command.”

Julien sat at a dusty desk in the storage room Astier had stuck him in, a cluttered place with one pane of window golden from the high sun. There was blood on his knuckles, and he didn’t know whose; his eye hurt, his head hurt with the pressure of trying not to weep.
What else could I have done?
The tears grew in his eyes and escaped. He laid his head down.

He cried a long time, silently; then lay, not moving, his cheek on his wet sweater sleeve. Feeling empty. Washed. The window was bright above him. It was still there when he closed his eyes, a shadow of light.

He woke when the bell rang for break. The sun was lower and streaming in, turning the dusty air golden, full of drifting motes. He watched them, their slow unhurried play.

“God,” Julien whispered.

God, why did he keep screwing up?

It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair; it was so confusing. The way you could mess up everything with a word, without meaning to, one little word, and when you tried to fix it, that was wrong too. And the way you thought it was turned out not to be the way it was at all. His face … how was he supposed to know, he didn’t know, God. They broke his uncle’s hands. Did they really? In the twentieth
century
? “I didn’t know, God, I swear. I didn’t know
boche
would make him look like that. Oh, God. I’m … sorry …”