Julien laughed as he sketched. She was not yet a girlfriend, not truly, and yet she was more. In a few instants Lea’s image surfaced as if he’d conjured her.
“She’s pretty,” the boy granted.
“Actually she’s much prettier than this.” Julien folded up the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
That evening he went to the garden and gathered onions to bring to the kitchen to boil so he could use the residue as a wash of color over his sketch. When he painted the wash on the portrait, Lea seemed alive, as if the white paper had turned to flesh. From then on he joined the class every day, greeting the teacher, Madame Rey, then slipping into the room. He always sat beside Teddy, who grinned whenever he saw his new friend. In time, the teacher had managed to get some watercolors. It was a pleasure and a joy to have real paints, rather than washes and inks made of berries or grass or onion skin. Julien created his memory of the garden of his parents’ house, before his mother removed the roses and the peonies so she could replace the ornamental plants with vegetables for their meals. There was the tree he and Lea had climbed so they could be alone, and the gate she had walked through when Ava had rightly insisted they must leave, and the sky that was so bright on the day the police came for his family.
Madame Rey came to watch, standing behind him. She made him nervous, so he put down the brush. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Julien said, feeling a fool.
“No, you’re very good at this,” the teacher encouraged him. “You’re an artist.”
“I told him he was,” Teddy agreed. “I want him to make a painting for my mother.” Teddy was at work on a colorful picture of himself with Lex, who often slept in the classrooms, stretched out beneath the desks.
“I’m sure your parents would prefer your own work,” Madame told Teddy. She patted his head and moved on. She already knew they were dead. A note had been received a few weeks ago; both mother and father had been apprehended in Nice for their Resistance work, sent east by train to a camp where they were murdered.
It had been decided that life in the château was difficult enough and that children who had lost their parents would be spared the news until their circumstances were more settled. For some of the children the château felt much like summer camp, a city child’s dream of the countryside, and in the brilliance of the afternoons they played on the lawn with dozens of new pals. At first, many of the city children were frightened by the countryside, and others could not speak the language and missed their parents terribly. But soon they settled in. The overnights in the woods were the greatest fun, especially for those who didn’t realize such excursions constituted training in case they ever needed to flee into the mountains. Sabine Zlatin, a French Red Cross nurse who had begun the home, was traveling, already looking for a safer place to move the children, for no matter how remote the château was, the situation was growing more dangerous by the day, and old agreements were being overturned by the Nazi regime. These nights in the woods were lessons that were more important than any learned in a classroom. How to catch a fish in your hand, how to tell if water was fit to drink, how to hide beneath a pile of leaves so that it seemed no one was there.
One afternoon the children were brought to a nearby waterfall. It was good practice to hide behind the falls. Children under sixteen were still protected, but what were rules in the hands of the Germans? It was best to be prepared. The children played a game in which they must make themselves invisible when a whistle was blown. Then, when the whistle sounded again, they were to show themselves. Julien’s duty was to make sure none of the children fell into the water as they pretended to be explorers who held the key to invisibility.
He had quickly become a great favorite at the school, especially with the boys. He wasn’t quite old enough to be a strict teacher, and he seemed more like a brother. The sun was out on the day of their waterfall holiday; it was April already. His memories of his own