back. Nothing mattered anymore, not how she looked or how frail she had become. This was the only time they had, this and nothing more.
“I’m filled with stones,” she told him, and it was true. Often a patient knew more than her doctor, especially when the doctor didn’t wish to know. When he brought her back to Lyon, her surgeon X-rayed her and discovered the cancer was in many other places, her lungs, her liver, her spine. This doctor was a younger man, and he thought because he was dealing with another doctor there was no need to mince words. “A few months at most,” he said to Girard.
She was still his beloved wife, but she was already leaving him. Sometimes when she slept he could see an illumination, as if the light was seeping out of her. He felt worthless and helpless. The reason he became a doctor was to possess the ability to change a person’s fate, as he’d seen his father do with his patients. He wanted to heal, not to idly sit at her bedside with cups of tea and stories to read to her. Even books, which he’d always loved, seemed like silly, unimportant things. There was only one thing that mattered now. The single moment they were in.
As a boy he had often gone to see patients with his father. At first he had been made to sit outside, but as time went on he’d been allowed into sickrooms. By the age of fourteen he’d seen more than most medical students would see in their first year. He had observed his father as he cared for those who were dying with great kindness and compassion, and afterward they would go out walking the steep paths in the Ardèche, where the air was thin and clear.
We’re shepherds, the older man had told his son. All we can do is tend to them.
The doctor couldn’t believe he was losing his wife, and yet every day he had more of an understanding of what she meant to him. They’d been fortunate to have had many years when they hadn’t thought about time at all, and had just greedily and happily lived their lives, having breakfast, walking in the woods, working, quarreling over inconsequential things, making love in their old bed, which had belonged to his parents. And then time was blown up altogether. Her disease was incurable, so he put away the clocks and removed his wristwatch, which he left in the night table drawer. They had six months, and then three months, and then, suddenly, a single day. A single day to look at her so that he would never forget the smallest details. The mole on her neck, the way she bit her lip when she was in pain, for she never complained.
Now, the Germans forced every Jewish woman to use the name Sarah after her own name on every official document. Girard was unwilling to let another woman die if he could save her. Each person who had slept in his barn, each he had given refuge, each Resistance worker he had helped, was for Sarah. It was always her, she was with him still, as if she were waiting in the kitchen, ready to embrace him as soon as he walked in the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HIDDEN
IZIEU, APRIL 1944
JULIEN ENTERED THE CHURCH TO see a familiar man in the pew nearest the altar. At last, his brother. He went to join Victor, and though it was a joyous occasion, they were cautious, unsure of who else might enter the building. They both looked straight ahead, as if they didn’t know one another, but it was a great relief for each to know the other was alive.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when they came for the old man,” Victor said.
“I’m glad you weren’t. How is Marianne?” Fortunately, she hadn’t seen the horror of her father’s death.
“She’s strong. All the same, it’s a terrible blow. He was a good man. It probably took ten of them to kill him. They didn’t see you, I assume?”
How could they? He was out on a mountain, daydreaming, waiting for the heron. In some ways, it was an embarrassment to still be alive. “By the time I got back, it was too late.”
“They shot him?” Victor asked.
“You really want to know?”
“No. Don’t tell me. If I know I’ll have to tell her.” He gave his brother a look. “And she should never know.”
Julien agreed. He wished he himself didn’t know, that