The Nightingale (53 page)

“Wake up, Micheline,” Isabelle said, gently jostling the woman beside her.

Micheline edged upright.

The seventy other people in the car—women and children—slowly roused themselves from the stupor of the journey. Those who were seated rose. The women came together instinctively, packed in closer.

Isabelle winced in pain as she stood on torn feet in shoes too small. She held Micheline's cold hand.

The giant carriage doors rumbled open. Sunlight poured in, blinding them all. Isabelle saw SS officers dressed in black, with their snarling, barking dogs. They were shouting orders at the women and children, incomprehensible words with obvious meaning.
Climb down, move on, get into line.

The women helped one another down. Isabelle held on to Micheline's hand and stepped down onto the platform.

A truncheon hit her in the head so hard she stumbled sideways and dropped to her knees.

“Get up,” a woman said. “You must.”

Isabelle let herself be helped to her feet. Dizzy, she leaned into the woman. Micheline came up on her other side, put an arm around her waist to steady her.

To Isabelle's left, a whip snaked through the air, hissing, and cracked into the fleshy pink of a woman's cheek. The woman screamed and held the torn skin of her cheek together. Blood poured between her fingers, but she kept moving.

The women formed ragged lines and marched across uneven ground through an open gate that was surrounded by barbed wire. A watchtower loomed above them.

Inside the gates, Isabelle saw hundreds—thousands—of women who looked like ghosts moving through a surreal landscape of gray, their bodies emaciated, their eyes sunken and dead looking in gray faces, their hair shorn. They wore baggy, dirty striped dresses; some were barefooted. Only women and children. No men.

Behind the gates and beneath the watchtower, she saw barracks stretching out in lines.

A corpse of a woman lay in the mud in front of them. Isabelle stepped over the dead woman, too numb to think anything but
keep moving
. The last woman who'd stopped had been hit so hard she didn't get up again.

Soldiers yanked the suitcases from their hands, snatched necklaces, pulled earrings and wedding rings off. When their valuables were all gone, they were led into a room, where they stood crowded together, sweating from the heat, dizzy from thirst. A woman grabbed Isabelle's arms, pulled her aside. Before she could even think, she was being stripped naked—they all were. Rough hands scratched her skin with dirty fingernails. She was shaved everywhere—under her arms, her head, and her pubic hair—with a viciousness that left her bleeding.

“
Schnell!
”

Isabelle stood with the other shaved, freezing, naked women, her feet aching, her head still ringing from the blows. And then they were being moved again, herded forward toward another building.

She remembered suddenly the stories she'd heard at MI9 and on the BBC, news stories about Jewish people being gassed to death at the concentration camps.

She felt a feeble sense of panic as she shuffled forward with the herd, into a giant room full of showerheads.

Isabelle stood beneath one of the showerheads, naked and trembling. Over the noise of the guards and the prisoners and the dogs, she heard the rattling of an old ventilation system. Something was coming on, clattering through the pipes.

This is it.

The doors of the building banged shut.

Ice-cold water gushed from the showerheads, shocking Isabelle, chilling her to the bone. In no time it was over and they were being herded again. Shivering, trying futilely to cover her nakedness with her trembling hands, she moved into the crowd and stumbled forward with the other women. One by one they were deloused. Then Isabelle was handed a shapeless striped dress and a dirty pair of men's underwear and two left shoes without laces.

Clutching her new possessions to her clammy breasts, she was shoved into a barn-like building with stacks of wooden bunks. She climbed into one of the bunks and lay there with nine other women. Moving slowly, she dressed and then lay back, staring up at the gray wooden underside of the bunk above her. “Micheline?” she whispered.

“I'm here, Isabelle,” her friend said from the bunk above.

Isabelle was too tired to say more. Outside, she heard the smacking of leather belts, the hissing of whips, and the screams of women who moved too slowly.

“Welcome to Ravensbrück,” said the woman beside her.

Isabelle felt the woman's skeletal hip against her leg.

She closed her eyes, trying to block out the sounds, the smell, the fear, the pain.

Stay alive,
she thought.

Stay. Alive.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

August.

Vianne breathed as quietly as she could. In the hot, muggy darkness of this upstairs bedroom—
her
bedroom, the one she'd shared with Antoine—every sound was amplified. She heard the bedsprings ping in protest as Von Richter rolled onto his side. She watched his exhalations, gauging each one. When he started to snore, she inched sideways and peeled the damp sheet away from her naked body.

In the last few months, Vianne had learned about pain and shame and degradation. She knew about survival, too—how to gauge Von Richter's moods and when to stay out of his way and when to be silent. Sometimes, if she did everything just right, he barely saw her. It was only when he'd had a bad day, when he came home already angry, that she was in trouble. Like last night.

He'd come home in a terrible temper, muttering about the fighting in Paris. The Maquis had started fighting in the streets. Vianne had known instantly what he'd want that night.

To inflict pain.

She'd herded her children out of the room quickly, put them to bed in the downstairs bedroom. Then she'd gone upstairs.

That was the worst of it, maybe; that he made her come to him and she did. She took off her clothes so he wouldn't rip them away.

Now, as she dressed she noticed how much it hurt to raise her arms. She paused at the blacked-out window. Beyond it lay fields destroyed by incendiary bombs; trees broken in half, many of them still smoldering, gates and chimneys broken. An apocalyptic landscape. The airfield was a crushed pile of stone and wood surrounded by broken aeroplanes and bombed-out lorries. Since Général de Gaulle had taken over the Free French Army and the Allies had landed in Normandy, the bombing of Europe had become constant.

Was Antoine out there still? Was he somewhere in his prison camp, looking out a slit in the barracks wall or a boarded-up window, looking at this moon that had once shone on a house filled with love? And Isabelle. She'd been gone only two months, but it felt like a lifetime. Vianne worried about her constantly, but there was nothing to be done about worry; it had to be borne.

Downstairs, she lit a candle. The electricity had been off for a long time now. In the water closet, she set the candle down by the sink and stared at herself in the oval mirror. Even in candlelight, she looked pasty and gaunt. Her dull, reddish gold hair hung limp on either side of her face. In the years of deprivation, her nose seemed to have lengthened and her cheekbones had become more prominent. A bruise discolored her temple. Soon, she knew, it would darken. She knew without looking that there would be handprints on her upper arms and an ugly bruise on her left breast.

He was getting meaner. Angrier. The Allied forces had landed in southern France and begun liberating towns. The Germans were losing the war, and Von Richter seemed hell-bent on making Vianne pay for it.

She stripped and washed in tepid water. She scrubbed until her skin was mottled and red, and still she didn't feel clean. She never felt clean.

When she could stand no more, she dried off and redressed in her nightgown, adding a robe over it. Tying it at the waist, she left the bathroom, carrying her candle.

Sophie was in the living room, waiting for her. She sat on the last good piece of furniture in the room—the divan—with her knees drawn together and her hands clasped. The rest of the furniture had been requisitioned or burned.

“What are you doing up so late?”

“I could ask you the same question, but I don't really need to, do I?”

Vianne tightened the belt on her robe. It was a nervous habit, something to do with her hands. “Let's go to bed.”

Sophie looked up at her. At almost fourteen, Sophie's face had begun to mature. Her eyes were black against her pale skin, her lashes lush and long. A poor diet had thinned Sophie's hair, but it still hung in ringlets. She pursed her full lips. “Really, Maman? How long must we pretend?” The sadness—and the anger—in those beautiful eyes was heartbreaking. Vianne apparently had hidden nothing from this child who'd lost her childhood to war.

What was the right thing for a mother to say to her nearly grown daughter about the ugliness in the world? How could she be honest? How could Vianne expect her daughter to judge her less harshly than she judged herself?

Vianne sat down beside Sophie. She thought about their old life—laughter, kisses, family suppers, Christmas mornings, lost baby teeth, first words.

“I'm not stupid,” Sophie said.

“I have never thought you were. Not for a moment.” She drew in a breath and let it out. “I only wanted to protect you.”

“From the truth?”

“From everything.”

“There's no such thing,” Sophie said bitterly. “Don't you know that by now? Rachel is gone. Sarah is dead. Grandpère is dead. Tante Isabelle is…” Tears filled her eyes. “And Papa … when did we last hear from him? A year? Eight months? He's probably dead, too.”

“Your father is alive. So is your aunt. I'd feel it if they were gone.” She put a hand over her heart. “I'd know it here.”

“Your heart? You'd feel it in your
heart
?”

Vianne knew that Sophie was being shaped by this war, roughened by fear and desperation into a sharper, more cynical version of herself, but still it was hard to see in such sharp detail.

“How can you just … go to him? I see the bruises.”

“That's
my
war,” Vianne said quietly, ashamed almost more than she could stand.

“Tante Isabelle would have strangled him in his sleep.”

“Oui,”
she agreed. “Isabelle is a strong woman. I am not. I am just … a mother trying to keep her children safe.”

“You think we want you to save us this way?”

“You're young,” she said, her shoulders slumping in defeat. “When you are a mother yourself…”

“I won't be a mother,” she said.

“I'm sorry to have disappointed you, Sophie.”

“I want to kill him,” Sophie said after a moment.

“Me, too.”

“We could hold a pillow over his head while he sleeps.”

“You think I have not dreamed of doing it? But it is too dangerous. Beck already disappeared while living in this house. To have a second officer do the same? They would turn their attention on us, which we don't want.”

Sophie nodded glumly.

“I can stand what Von Richter does to me, Sophie. I couldn't stand losing you or Daniel or being sent away from you. Or seeing you hurt.”

Sophie didn't look away. “I hate him.”

“So do I,” Vianne said quietly. “So do I.”

*   *   *

“It is hot out today. I was thinking it would be a good day for swimming,” Vianne said with a smile.

The uproar was immediate and unanimous.

Vianne guided the children out of the orphanage classroom, keeping them tucked in close as they walked down the cloisters. They were passing Mother Superior's office when the door opened.

“Madame Mauriac,” Mother said, smiling. “Your little gaggle looks happy enough to burst into song.”

“Not on a day this hot, Mother.” She linked her arm through Mother's. “Come to the pond with us.”

“A thoroughly lovely idea on a September day.”

“Single file,” Vianne said to the children as they reached the main road. The children immediately fell into line. Vianne started them off on a song and they picked it up instantly, singing loudly as they clapped and bounced and skipped.

Did they even notice the bombed-out buildings they passed? The smoking piles of rubble that had once been homes? Or was destruction the ordinary view of their childhoods, unremarkable, unnoticeable?

Daniel—as always—stayed with Vianne, clinging to her hand. He was like that lately, afraid to be apart from her for long. Sometimes it bothered her, even broke her heart. She wondered if there was a part of him, deep down, that remembered all that he had lost—the mother, the father, the sister. She worried that when he slept, curled up against her side, he was Ari, the boy left behind.

Vianne clapped her hands. “Children, you are to cross the street in an orderly fashion. Sophie, you are my leader.”

The children crossed the street carefully and then raced up the hill to the wide, seasonal pond that was one of Vianne's favorite places. Antoine had first kissed her at this very spot.

At the water's edge, the students started stripping down. In no time, they were in the water.

She looked down at Daniel. “Do you want to go play in the water with your sister?”

Daniel chewed his lower lip, watching the children splash in the still, blue water. “I don't know…”

“You don't have to swim if you don't want to. You could just get your feet wet.”

He frowned, his round cheeks bunched in consideration. Then he let go of her hand and walked cautiously toward Sophie.

“He still clings to you,” Mother said.

“He has nightmares, too.” Vianne was about to say,
Lord knows I do,
when nausea hit. She mumbled, “Excuse me,” and ran through the tall grass to a copse of trees, where she bent over and vomited. There was almost nothing in her stomach, but the dry heaves went on and on, leaving her feeling weak and exhausted.