They walked side by side through the dusk. They always waited for this hour to return to the house, the time when they could slip through shadows on the steep streets of the village. There was some talk of Ava being Lea’s cousin, but on one of their outings Lea had said she had no family left. Weitz felt his heart go out to her. If she asked this question she must have her reasons.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I would do it.”
Lea did her best not to cry, and Weitz did his best not to notice her distress.
“What color is the sky?” he asked her as they walked on, past the train station, past the town hall, past the shuttered shops. She had slowed her pace to suit his limp.
“Black,” she answered with certainty. “With stars.”
“So people say,” Weitz said sadly. Dozens of colors were there, a hundred perhaps for those who could see underneath the darkness. “You should look more carefully.” When they reached the house, Weitz stood outside for a while longer before he went in to paint the real colors of the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE LABYRINTH
IZIEU, APRIL 1944
THE MILICE SEARCHED EVERY HOUSE in the villages near Izieu, rounding up Jews, refugees, and Resistance members. When they found Julien in a shed, he was deeply asleep, exhausted and freezing. He’d broken in and had been living on jars of fruit preserves that had long ago been stored on the shelves. A milicien kicked him in his injured leg, still badly bruised. Roughly awakened, he let out a shout as he rose up from a pile of hay where he’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. He didn’t argue when he was told to follow the policeman, but instead merely held up his hands and did as he was told, his mind racing. He had not survived Izieu to be picked up and led away like a mule.
He was marched out to the road, where he was stunned to see a line of other prisoners, all of whom had been forced to drop their pants so the police could tell whether or not they had been circumcised. Those who had been marked as Jews were sent to one line, those in the French Resistance to another. Only a few of the men in line bothered to look when Julien showed himself, but the embarrassment he suffered made him seethe with fury. With a gesture, one of the officers sent him to the longer line.
“What difference does it make if we’re in one line or the other?” Julien asked the fellow in front of him. They were all going to Montluc Prison in Lyon after all, that notorious place where the beast in charge was known to torture people for days.
“Their line is sent to a forced labor camp when they leave the prison, we go to a death camp.”
“We should run,” Julien said firmly.
His companion glared at him as though he was an utter fool as he muttered under his breath. “Don’t draw attention to yourself. They’d be happy to beat you if you do.”
But Julien was already devising a plan. His studies with his father had made him into an individual who could solve abstract problems, and his current situation was such a problem. He ignored his emotions and refused to give in to the panic that had set in. A man in their line was silently crying. Julien looked away from him and counted odd numbers to calm himself. The sky was gray, filled with mottled clouds. April could feel like winter when the wind came up, as it did now. After a while, Julien was able to think clearly. When he narrowed his eyes he saw the slit in the universe through which light shone through the darkness. He again thought of his father’s theory of how the night sky could be broken into segments. Then he took it a step farther. Everything could be divided into pieces, a street, an hour, a life, a death march.
Close your eyes and see, his father had always told him at the Château de Villandry. A blindfold never hindered him. He could feel the space around him, the objects near and far. It took practice, but after a while there was never a time when he couldn’t find his way.
He would treat this escape as if he were caught in another maze. Everything he had ever learned from his father as he sat in his study, annoyed and disinterested, came back