David shone brightly against their worn-out shirts, endlessly mended by their aunt.
The four sections of the apartment building, lined with windows, walled in the interior courtyard. From there they would pass through an archway and an outer gate leading to the street. Each side of the square building had its own staircase. As soon as Moses and Jacob stepped into the courtyard, they sensed something was wrong. They ran to the street. More than twenty dark buses with white roofs stood parked up and down the sidewalks. People swirled around as French police officers with white gloves and nightsticks herded them into the buses.
A chill ran all the way up Jacob’s spine, and he grabbed hold of Moses’s hand so tightly the younger child made a noise and tried to pull away.
“Don’t let go of my hand!” Jacob growled, yanking his brother back toward the building. He knit his eyebrows together.
They were reentering the building when the doorwoman, leaning on her broom, sneered down at them and hollered to the gendarmes, “Aren’t you going to take these Jewish rats?”
The boys looked at each other and took off running toward their stairway. Three of the policemen heard the doorwoman’s raucous calling and saw the boys dashing toward the other side of the courtyard. The corporal gestured with his hand, and the other two ran after the boys, blowing their whistles and waving their nightsticks all the while.
The boys raced along the unvarnished wooden floor and the worn-down steps with broken boards, unable to keep their feet from pounding with terrible volume. The police looked up when they got to the stairwell. The corporal took the elevator and the other two agents started up the stairs.
Jacob and Moses panted as they approached the apartment door. Moses reached for the doorknob, but Jacob pulled him, and they ran toward the roof. They had spent countless hours there among the clotheslines, hiding among the hanging sheets, shooting doves with their slingshot, and staring at the city on the other side of the Seine.
When they reached the wooden door that led to the roof, they paused past the threshold, hands on their knees as they gasped for air. Then Jacob led them to the edge of the building. The roofs stretched out in an interminable succession of flat black spaces, terra-cotta tiles, and spacious terraces some Parisians utilized for growing vegetables. The brothers climbed up a rusted ladder attached to an adjacent wall and walked tentatively among the roof tiles of a neighboring building.
The police watched them from the roof of Judith’s apartment building. The corporal, winded despite having taken the elevator, blew his whistle again.
Jacob turned for a moment to judge the distance between the men dressed in black and themselves—instinctively, like a deer wondering how close the hounds are.
The younger two gendarmes awkwardly climbed up the ladder and resumed the chase, breaking half a dozen roof tiles as they closed the gap second by second.
Jacob stepped between two tiles and felt something crack. His leg fell through a hole, and searing pain shot up his shin. When he managed to pull his leg out, blood poured down into his dingy white socks. Moses helped him get to his feet again, and they kept running to the last building on the block. A chasm of more than seven feet separated the last rooftop from the next building.
Moses glanced at their pursuers and then at the abyss shining with the intense light of summer. Despite the light of day, a cavernous darkness below seemed eager to swallow anything that dared fall into it. Moses turned his bewildered look to Jacob, at a loss for what to do.
His brother reacted quickly. Just below them there was a small terrace. From there, a ledge circled the building toward the main road. Perhaps they could reach a house, then the street, then try to get lost in the crowd. Without a second thought, Joseph jumped and turned to help Moses, arms outstretched. Just as the younger child began to leap, a pair of hands grabbed his legs. He twisted and hit the rooftop hard.
“Jacob!” Moses screamed, trapped.
For a moment, Jacob did not know what to do. He could not abandon his brother, but if he went back up on the rooftop, they would both fall into the police’s hands. He did not understand why, but his parents had warned him about the Nazis sending Jews to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.