Their parents had been sent to the terrifying Montluc Prison, where more than two thousand five hundred Jews were imprisoned by the Germans, with thousands deported and eight hundred murdered, dying from torture and neglect. Through a crack in the cupboard door they had seen the soldiers beat their father and do something to their mother that had made her scream. After their parents’ arrest, the girls had hidden in their house with nothing to eat but the peeling paint on the walls. At last, they had climbed out the window and fled into the woods. They trusted no one, but they were starving, so there they were, watching him, not saying a word.
Julien shared his food with them as the girls crouched close by, but not too near. They wolfed down the bread. Julien had saved a crumb, which he kept in his hand. A sparrow swooped down from the tree, then lit in the palm of his hand to take the bread, eating it, unafraid. The girls laughed, shocked that they could do anything other than cry.
Julien brought them to the Bissets’ late that night. Monsieur stared at him when he came to the back door, but when he saw the girls he understood. He summoned his wife from her bed, and when she saw how ragged and underfed the children were, she quickly gestured, willing to take them in. She let them bathe in the big old tub and had them wear her son’s childhood clothing until she could find something more suitable. It was the first time in weeks that Madame had left her bed.
“She needed children,” Monsieur said, to explain why the girls could stay while Julien had been made to leave. They had gone out to have a smoke in the garden. It was a habit Julien had picked up from Victor. “We can take them. We’ll say they’re our own, and after a while they will be.”
Julien nodded and watched the smoke rise into the night sky. Lea would be furious if she knew he was smoking. She’d told him her father had been a doctor, and said smoking was bad for the lungs.
“My brother has a farm,” the old man said. “It’s a little more than three kilometers outside town. Maybe he can use the help.”
They went there together, Monsieur driving, Julien in the space between the front and backseats, beneath a blanket. It was a small farm, and Monsieur Bisset’s brother was a brusque widower who had fields but no one to work them. Julien would stay in a borrowed canvas tent in the woods beyond the pasture until the snows came, and be given two meals each day, as long as he worked without complaint, for the hours were long, and the labor backbreaking. Julien shook hands with the first Monsieur Bisset and they wished each other luck. The food was not as good here, it was simple fare, mostly bread and eggs and cheese, but it was filling, and Julien didn’t mind living outside.
This is what it feels like to be alone, he would have written to Lea if he could. You hear more and see more. You’re a part of the world around you. Ants under the leaves, the clouds moving by. He had begun to divide the world into sections, as his father had taught him to do; everything was a piece of the whole, he understood that now. He had no difficulty finding his way to his campsite in the dark; he did so by touching the trees as though they were a map through a forest maze. The weather grew colder and he could feel how close winter was. At night he looked into the sky and remembered the names of the constellations. There was Orion, the hunter who appears in the winter sky with his bow and his dogs, so that he could be remembered by those who loved him during his time on earth. Julien imagined that his father lay on the ground beside him, looking upward. Dear father, he said aloud.
The nesting birds scattered at the sound of his voice. The vines had grown over his tent so quickly he sometimes thought he would disappear. Snow would fall, ice would cover the canvas, and one day Monsieur Bisset’s brother would come looking for him and be unable to find him in the woods.
Find me, he would have written to Lea if he could.