the next town and returned to Versailles,” he said, chewing slowly.
Jacob nodded solemnly. “I don’t mean to sound like a brat. We understand what you’re risking by taking us to the unoccupied zone, but my brother is just a kid. He can’t stay locked up in there.”
Fearful, Moses looked at the man. Leduc shrugged and said, “Fine, take the risk, but I assure you that getting deported to Germany is no pleasure cruise. During the Great War, I fought at Verdun, and the Germans captured me. I was locked up in a hole for almost two years in northern Germany. The Boche might seem like serious, conscientious folk, but they treated us like the scum of the earth. The winters were unbearable—no warm clothes and what I had on my feet one could hardly call shoes. And they forced us to work fixing the roads or in heavy factory jobs. It was torture, truly. I’d rather die than fall into their hands again.” His face was dark and he looked at something very, very far away.
“I’m so sorry,” Jacob said. His family was German. In another lifetime, they would have been Leduc’s enemies. Evil had a way of transcending nationality and clan, becoming a darkness that overshadowed everything.
“They’re just memories. I always knew we’d face each other again, but I have the feeling that it’s different this time. The issue is not the victory of some empires over others, or the survival of the French Republic’s values. This time we’re fighting a kind of evil the world has never known before. Totalitarianism on the left and the right is after the same thing: destroy everything good in human beings and turn them into cogs in an infernal machine that makes the world a very terrible place.”
The boys stared at him with wide, confused eyes. They could not follow him completely but understood the gist of what he said. In the interminable discussions around the dinner table at Aunt Judith’s apartment, their parents, aunt, and other adult friends had talked about the Nazis and their leader, Adolf Hitler, and the power of evil to corrupt everything it touched. The power the führer held over the masses was not natural. The adults had said that he seemed like a magician doing devious tricks.
They all three got into the front seat again. Leduc started the engine and guided the van down the rough lane flanked by beech trees that led them back to the road. The tall lines of trees on both sides of the road enclosed and protected them from the intense sun. They were quiet for a long time. Leduc no longer hummed, but Jacob and Moses felt much happier than they had been when hidden.
“When we see our parents, we’ll tell them all you’ve done for us,” Moses said. “And when the war’s over, we’ll come visit you. It’ll be nice to spend time with you in Versailles. You can show us the palace and the gardens.”
Leduc’s mouth twitched in an attempt to smile, but he doubted he would see the end of the war. If the gendarmes and the Gestapo did not find him, then hunger, disease, or old age would. “Old men don’t make plans for the future. Everything happens here and now, you see? Who knows what will become of me within a few hours. I’ve been alone my whole life. Art is my family. The paintings, the statues—they’re with me every day, and I can only be who I really am with them. This world . . . It scares me,” he said, puzzled at his revelations to two Jewish kids.
Leduc’s mother had raised him Catholic, and he had never known his father, who died of heart complications when Leduc was not yet four years old. From as early an age as memory could register, he recalled his mother’s black dress, the closed curtains that let in only the vaguest hint of light, and the dark smells of bitter coffee and garlic in his home. They lived comfortably enough on his father’s state employee pension. They spent little money and never traveled, but at least his mother allowed him to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the French National School of Fine Arts. She appreciated his sketches and his ability to shape things. As a young man, Leduc was not socially skilled, but he had a special connection with works of art, which is why he believed in the absolute values. He did not