join them. Julien returned with the bottle and a tray of small glasses. The glasses were green and fragile and would all be broken before long. It was the first time Lea had tasted alcohol and she felt grown up and reckless. Ava came to look for her and immediately noticed that she was standing too close to Julien. She gave him a look, but it was too late. He was sick of being told what to do. They might be considered children, but it was possible they would not be alive long enough to become adults.
Out of sight, Julien took Lea’s hand.
Out of sight, she let him.
“Now they’ll know where our valuables are,” the professor’s wife whispered once their belongings were in the ground. She threw a look over her shoulder. There was Ava, glaring back with cold gray eyes. “Who’s to say that woman’s not a thief ?”
“She’s not, but even if she was, it wouldn’t matter,” her husband responded. “We no longer have anything to steal.”
Ava heard the call outside the window at an hour when no birds sang. It was the call of a messenger to warn of a battle to come. The gray heron was in the garden. He looked at the world as a map, in shades of blue and green, but now the colors were murky and there were black clouds everywhere, so that it was nearly impossible to see. Already, huge flocks of birds had taken to the sky, fleeing the city as if escaping from a fire. The darkness was caused by the descent of the angels. There were angels of confusion and of destruction and fear, and accusing angels who did their work in the darkness, so men and women never knew when they’d been marked. This world was shattering. Ava could see where it was breaking, a fine white line that revealed what had already passed and what was to come. She shook Lea awake.
In her groggy state, Lea didn’t think to be defiant when Ava said they must leave. She dressed quickly, while Ava tossed the suitcase out the window, then they both climbed out. There was a stream of pale moonlight, like the moonlight in a dream. It was already spring. The world was green and pulsing and beautiful.
“Hurry,” Ava told Lea, who lagged behind.
Lea now stopped on the path, refusing to go any further. “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re not my mother.”
Ava was not made to have emotions, but the remark hurt, as if she had pricked her finger on glass.
“You’re nothing to me,” Lea went on, furious with Ava ever since her refusal to go back to Berlin. “You go! Leave me here.”
Ava put down the suitcase. “I may not be your mother, but I act on her behalf. Do as I say.”
Lea’s eyes were blazing. “I won’t. I don’t want to go because I don’t want to be with you!” she cried.
“You can come with me,” Ava said, “or I can take you with me.”
“How? With a rope around my neck?”
“If I need to, yes.”
Their breath came hard in the cool, foggy night. Ava seemed even taller in her black boots.
“There is no rope,” Lea said uncertainly. “And, anyway, you wouldn’t dare.”
Ava nodded at the shrubbery that was covered with burlap, tied with heavy rope. It was a lilac and the leaves were growing right through the burlap. The rope was slack.
Lea knew what her mother would say if she had been there.
She has been sent to you to save your life. Don’t throw everything away.
“Fine,” Lea said grudgingly. “But first I say goodbye.”
The heron was waiting in what had once been a sapling the first Monsieur Lévi had planted, a cutting from the oldest locust tree in Paris, which had stood on the Rive Gauche for more than four hundred years at an ancient Roman crossroad. It was said that good luck would belong to anyone who ran their hand over the locust’s bark, but Ava could see demons massing in trees all over Paris, in the cherry trees that surrounded Notre-Dame, the sequoia brought from California that stood in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the huge ginkgo biloba planted in the Parc Monceau in 1879.
Ava let Lea have the one thing she wanted, such a small request, really, when she would lose everything else. Their time here was over, it was already in the past, and they both knew it.
Lea rushed to take some pebbles from the ground to toss against