Black Radishes (2 page)

2

I
t was two minutes after five when Gustave pushed open the door to the room where the Boy Scouts were meeting. Monsieur Levi, the Scout leader, had already begun talking. He stopped as Gustave came in.

“Just in time, Gustave!” he said, smiling broadly. “If you have anything to add to your team’s bag, you can bring it up.”

“No, I don’t have anything,” said Gustave.

“No yellow feather for the Eagles?” Pierre jeered, putting his fingers at the corners of his mouth and pulling them down. “Aw, too bad!”

Gustave made a face at Pierre and squeezed in next to Marcel and Jean-Paul, who were sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Hey!” whispered Jean-Paul, shifting over to make room for him. “So, no luck at the hat shop?”

“No—nothing in your pillow either?” Gustave whispered back. “And what about Marcel’s aunt?”

Marcel leaned forward on the other side of Jean-Paul. “I remembered wrong. Her hat had a green feather.” He grinned. “She said, ‘Do you think I would have let you borrow it anyway, after what you did to my umbrella?’ But I think she would have.”

Monsieur Levi was talking up at the front. “So,” he announced, “it would appear that the Bears have won. They completed the list and got back first.” Pierre jumped to his feet, and he and the other three Bears whooped and cheered.

Marcel groaned. “Not again!”

“I said that it would
appear
that the Bears have won,” Monsieur Levi said as the noise died down. “However”—he paused dramatically—“a secret test was part of the scavenger hunt.”

The Boy Scouts were all giving him their full attention now. Monsieur Levi looked amused. “I asked your relatives to be out on the streets and to ask any boy in a Scout uniform for directions. Any Boy Scout who was not helpful got his team disqualified.” Monsieur Levi grinned at the Bears. “Do you remember someone asking you for directions?”

“Oh, but that’s not fair!” Pierre groaned, then laughed. “It was my own uncle! He kept not understanding what we told him, but I was sure that he knew his way around Paris!”

“He reports that you said, and I quote, ‘What’s the matter with you, Uncle? Have you become a complete idiot?’ True?”

Pierre nodded sheepishly, and the Scouts broke into noisy laughter. Monsieur Levi held up his hand to quiet them. “So the second team to come back with all the items on the list, the Cougars, wins the scavenger hunt. They get the three chocolate bars, plus ten points for their team’s total for the year.”

The Cougars cheered.

“And”—Monsieur Levi held up his hand again—“I also award ten points to Gustave’s team, the Eagles, because Antoine’s grandfather, who was out on the street stopping Boy Scouts, reports that Gustave was ‘supremely polite’ to him for over fifteen minutes! I don’t have any chocolate bars for the Eagles, but those ten points make the Eagles and the Bears tied for first place in the team totals for the year.”

Jean-Paul whooped. “Tied for first! Go, Eagles!”

Marcel punched Gustave in the arm, grinning. “Supreme politeness! Where did that come from?”

Gustave looked at his friends in amazement. “Oh, I thought that man looked familiar. He’s the reason I was so late—I think he slowed me down by about half an hour!”

As the Cougars went up to get their chocolate bars, Monsieur Levi went on. “So, boys, remember: Boy Scouts are helpful to all those in need. And, speaking of being helpful, I will be asking for volunteers in the coming weeks to help war refugees at the train stations. These families are fleeing their countries to come to France for safety. Often they don’t speak French and don’t know where to go. The boy who does the best job of helping the refugees will earn twenty points for his team total.”

The Boy Scouts were already getting up and gathering their treasure-hunt bags and rucksacks. “Remember to return everything you borrowed for the scavenger hunt, boys,” Monsieur Levi called. “See you next week!”

When Gustave and his friends were out on the sidewalk, Marcel reached into the bag and handed Jean-Paul the gas mask and Gustave the textbook, the domino, and the marbles. Jean-Paul slung the gas mask over his shoulder, and they started toward home.

“Bravo, Gustave!” said Jean-Paul. “Great job! But too bad we only got points for the end-of-the-year awards, not chocolate bars for right now. I’m starving!”

Gustave and Marcel laughed. “You’re always starving!” said Gustave. “I can’t believe we’re tied for first. Now we just have to figure out how to beat the Bears before summer.”

The wind was cold as they walked home. When they were a few blocks away from their neighborhood, Jean-Paul stopped to look into the window of a
boulangerie
. The smell of freshly baked bread made Gustave’s stomach growl. But he still felt light and happy. What did it matter about being cold or hungry when he had just won ten points for the Eagles?

“Does anyone have any money?” Jean-Paul asked. “We could share something.”

Gustave shook his head. “I haven’t gotten any pocket money in a long time.”

“Me either,” said Marcel.

The door jingled, and a woman with a tiny dog on a leash stepped out of the bakery. Two long loaves of bread stuck out of her basket. The dog yipped and pulled toward Gustave. It was small, but its teeth looked sharp. Gustave moved aside to let them pass. A big man in a brown overcoat squeezed by the boys on the sidewalk and entered the
boulangerie
, where there was already quite a line of people waiting.

Marcel leaned toward the others. “Looking-up game!” he whispered.

Jean-Paul nodded, already putting on his serious face. Gustave laughed. It was a perfect place for the game, with so many people coming in and out of the bakery. The three of them looked up at the sky. Behind them, the door jingled again, and two men stepped out with long loaves of bread under their arms. Seeing that the boys were looking upward, the men paused and looked up too. A woman came out with her bread poking out of a string bag, holding the hand of a little blond girl who was tugging at her and fussing. She hushed the girl sharply and tilted her head back, peering up at the sky. A moment later, another woman, pulling a metal shopping cart, started to go around the two men, and then she too stopped and gazed upward.

Gustave felt warm bubbles of laughter rising up inside him. It was working so fast this time! He and Marcel and Jean-Paul used to play the looking-up game a lot when they were younger, but they hadn’t done it in several years. Marcel had discovered the game by accident. It turned out that if all three of them stopped and looked up at the sky, outside an entrance to the Métro or in another busy spot in the city, other people would quickly stop and look up too.

Gustave glanced over his shoulder. More and more people were gathering behind them, completely blocking the sidewalk. Gustave smiled to himself and looked back up at the sky, which was turning an eerie pinkish gray. Mountainous storm clouds piled up in the east.

“Is it an airplane?” a woman whispered to one of the two men who had stopped first, her voice anxious.

“There’s something behind that cloud,” one of the men said. “Those boys saw it first.”

“An airplane? French or German?” asked someone else. “Where?”

Gustave’s stomach lurched. They thought that he and his friends had seen a German bomber? So that was why so many people had stopped so quickly. Should he explain to them that it was just a game? Gustave tapped Marcel’s shoulder. Marcel looked back, saw all the people, and grinned, nudging Jean-Paul.

“But there’s no air-raid signal,” the woman with the little girl was saying in a petulant voice. Jean-Paul looked over at her blankly and then exploded into laughter. Marcel was laughing now too. The three of them slipped through the gathering crowd, trying to escape. Someone moved backward and stepped on Gustave’s shoe, smashing his toes. He yanked his foot out from underneath, sweating. Someone else’s elbow poked him in the back. Bodies were on all sides of him, crowding him in. Gustave’s breath caught in his throat. He ducked down to slip underneath someone’s arm and wiggled through the space along the bakery wall, scraping his shoulder against the rough bricks, and squeezed out past the edge of the crowd.

“Boys!”
said one of the women, in disgust. “Just a trick to scare people.”

“Boy Scouts too!” said another. “Shameful.”

But they hadn’t meant to scare anyone, Gustave thought indignantly. They hadn’t been thinking about airplanes or bombs, just about how funny people look peering up at the sky. And they
had
looked funny. Should he explain? He paused.

A woman clutching an umbrella glared at Gustave. “Those aren’t regular Boy Scouts. Look at their uniforms,” she said, pointing. “See that badge? Those are
Éclaireurs Israélites
, Jewish Boy Scouts.” She spat onto the sidewalk right next to Gustave, splattering his bare left leg. “They’re Jews,” she said. “Dirty Jews.”

Gustave stared back at the woman’s hostile eyes, unable to move to get away. So they were Jewish Boy Scouts. So what? There were Catholic Boy Scout troops, Protestant ones, and Jewish ones. All of them were Boy Scouts. Without thinking about what he was doing, he picked up his right foot and rubbed his sock against the repulsive wetness on the other leg to clean it. A drop of rain landed on his forehead and another on his cheek. Overhead, with an enormous crash of thunder, the storm broke.

Marcel darted back and pulled on Gustave’s sweater. “Come on!”

Rain poured down. The glaring woman snapped open an umbrella and stomped off as the crowd scattered. Gustave ran with his friends toward home. Jean-Paul was still laughing, and Marcel carelessly glanced over his shoulder, whipping his wet hair away from his face.

“She’s just some old crank,” he yelled to Gustave. “Don’t worry about it.”

Gustave nodded. But as he remembered the worried faces, his stomach felt queasy. He hadn’t scared the people on purpose, and neither had the others. Why was that woman so nasty? The looking-up game didn’t have anything to do with being Jewish.

Gustave’s shoelace was flopping. He stopped to tie it, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. Marcel and Jean-Paul sprinted away from him through the downpour, yelling, but to Gustave, the water felt good, soaking into his shorts and his sweater, splashing down his legs, washing away the slimy spit. He started running again. The others were ahead of him, and he watched from behind as his friends turned into the narrow street where they all lived. When he caught up to them, first Jean-Paul and then Marcel leapt over a huge puddle of water, splashing down on the other side. Water always accumulated there when it rained.

As Marcel and Jean-Paul disappeared into their apartment buildings, calling back to him through the rain, Gustave stopped, his heart still thudding, and looked down to see if the drain at the curb was clogged again. Large words were scrawled across the street in white paint, partly covered by the puddle. The writing, all in capital letters, wavered under the water, but one word stood out.
“JUIFS.” Jews
.

Gustave leaned over to see what the other words were. As he read them, his wet clothes suddenly grew cold against his skin. It felt as if an angry voice were shouting at him and at the other people in his neighborhood. At the men and women living nearby, who were just now doing their shopping, coming home, starting dinner in their kitchens, hanging up their hats, opening the newspaper. At all the small children in the apartments along the street, who were playing with toy cars on the floor, poking their brothers and sisters, sucking their thumbs, asking when dinner would be ready. At older girls, who were trying out new dance steps to the music on the radio, rinsing vegetables in kitchen sinks, or reading, stomach down on their beds. And at all the boys Gustave’s age, who were just now dashing home through the rain from the synagogue, shouting goodbye to one another, and swinging their bags of scavenger-hunt treasures.

“LA FRANCE AUX FRANÇAIS!”
the words on the street read.
“JUIFS HORS DE FRANCE!” France for the French! Jews out of France!

3

B
y the time Gustave had reached the second floor of his apartment building, he had decided not to tell his parents about the woman who had spat at him or about the words on the street. Maman got upset too much of the time lately as it was. But he wanted to get to the bathroom right away to wash his leg with soap. He pushed open the apartment door and immediately got a whiff of Aunt Geraldine’s flowery perfume. Her coat was hanging on the peg next to Papa’s, and he heard voices coming from the living room.

If Gustave said hello politely to Jean-Paul’s mother, the way he was supposed to, it would slow him down in getting to the bathroom. His leg felt contaminated, as if it wouldn’t be part of him again until it was washed. Maybe he could slip by without being noticed. Gustave left his muddy shoes by the door and tiptoed into the hall, his socks making wet footprints on the wooden floor. But he stopped when he heard raised voices.

“We can’t go,” Aunt Geraldine wailed. “We can’t just leave. How will my husband find us when he comes back from the war?”

Gustave peered into the room. Aunt Geraldine was perched on the sofa with her legs crossed. Maman sat forward in an armchair, and Papa paced, frowning, in front of the windows.

“But we applied together for the immigration visas for both families!” Maman gestured wearily, as if she had said the same thing many times before. “David wants you to go to America. He wants you to be safe!”

“But we were all going to go to America together!” Aunt Geraldine moaned. “The children and I can’t leave without him. No!” She waved her hands in front of her face as if she were brushing something away. “The war should be over in a few months, when the Nazis realize they can’t do anything to France.”

“But it is dangerous right now,” Maman insisted. “
Because
of the war. We can’t wait. You really
must
come with us.”

Aunt Geraldine adjusted her skirt. “You worry too much. When David comes home, he and I will talk about whether we should emigrate. But the American consul said that we might not get the immigration visas or that it might take a long time. Meanwhile, the children and I will stay here in Paris, like civilized people, not go running off into the countryside.” Aunt Geraldine smoothed her skirt’s silken folds.

Maman leaned back and sighed in frustration. The floor creaked under Gustave’s feet, and they all looked up and saw him.

“Oh, the boys are back,” said Aunt Geraldine, sniffing. “I have to go.” She got up, quickly embraced Maman, Papa, and then Gustave, kissing each of them on both cheeks, and ran out of the room. Maman hurried after her.

What were they talking about? Going to America? Leaving France? Gustave remembered the graffiti—“France for the French! Jews out of France!”—and his stomach hurt. But his family
was
French. Weren’t they? Papa had grown up in Switzerland, but he had lived in France since he had been a young man. Maman and her sister, Aunt Geraldine, had both been born in France, and so had Maman’s parents and her grandparents. The hospital where Gustave had been born was right here in Paris. Of course they were French. French
and
Jewish.

Maman came back into the room, rubbing her arms as if she felt cold. She looked right at Gustave, but she didn’t seem to notice his wet clothes.

“What’s the matter?” Gustave asked. “Why were you and Aunt Geraldine arguing?”

“Let’s sit down,” Maman said. “We have to talk.”

Something was definitely wrong. Maman usually made a big fuss about his changing immediately out of wet clothes—especially before sitting on the upholstered furniture. Gustave perched on the edge of the sofa. His dirty leg felt awkward, and he stuck it out in front of him. He picked up the embroidered pillow next to him and put it on his lap, scratching at the beads.

“What?” he said hoarsely when nobody said anything.

“We’re going to leave Paris,” said Papa finally.

Gustave stared at him. They really were leaving, then.

“But why?” he cried. Maybe Papa or Maman had seen the writing too.

“We want to get as far away as we can from Nazi Germany,” Maman answered. “It will be safer. The Nazis treat Jews very badly.”

Safer from the Nazis? Gustave’s thoughts swirled, confused. But that writing wasn’t in German; it was in French. And with the French defense so strong, how could the Nazis get into France?

Papa sat down on the sofa next to Gustave. He added gently, “You remember how we talked about what’s been happening in Poland and why it’s such a good thing that Marcel’s parents moved away from there just before he was born?”

Gustave shuddered, remembering that day when he had gone to the movies with Jean-Paul to see
Robin Hood
. He and Jean-Paul had saved their pocket money and waited a long time to see the film, but Gustave hardly remembered it—because before
Robin Hood
began there had been a newsreel. During the movie, the images from the newsreel repeated over and over again in his head, blocking out the story on the screen. Instead of watching Robin Hood and his Merry Men, he kept seeing the Nazis driving their tanks into Poland and forcing people into camps. That night, Gustave had shouted in his sleep, and Papa had come in, bleary-eyed, in his bathrobe, to talk with him. But there hadn’t been much that he could say to make Gustave feel better except that it was all far away.

Gustave had dreamt about that newsreel for weeks afterward. The Nazis shot people in Poland just because they felt like it, just to show that they were in charge. They especially hated Jews. They put them and other people they didn’t like in places surrounded by barbed wire, places called internment camps. A few refugees had escaped to Belgium and France and had told people about it. The camps were like prisons. There were soldiers with guns. They gave the people in the camp almost no food, and the living quarters were crowded and filthy. People died there from the cold, from hunger and diseases. They treated the people in the camps “worse than animals,” the narrator had stated in his deep, sonorous voice. “But France and civilization will defeat barbarism!” he had proclaimed. “The French army is strong!”

“But the French army is strong,” said Gustave. “That could never happen here?” It came out sounding more like a question than he had meant it to.

“France
is
strong,” Papa agreed. “But you know how your mother worries.” He smiled at Maman. “She has convinced me that we would be safer if we left Paris. We have applied for visas to go to America with Jean-Paul’s family, but that process takes a long time.”

“Leave France?” It seemed impossible to imagine.

“Maybe we will,” Papa said. “We’d be lucky if we could get permission to immigrate to the United States. I’m hopeful, because I have a cousin there. That helps. But it still isn’t certain. We’ll see. For now, we are going to go live in a small French village.”

“With a madman like Hitler in charge of Germany, invading one country after another, it’s better to be in an out-of-the-way place,” Maman explained. She patted Gustave’s knee, but he could tell that she was talking to Papa as much as to him.

Papa nodded slowly. “Who knows what the future holds here for the Jews? More and more French people seem to hate us, just like Hitler and the Nazis. I hope that you haven’t encountered any of that, Gustave, but these days it is everywhere.”

Papa looked at Gustave searchingly. Gustave swallowed and looked down.

“I have rented us a place to stay in the countryside, in a nice little village near a river,” Papa went on. “You’ll like it, I’m sure.”

Well, at least they would be in France, not in a whole different country where he couldn’t even speak the language. America was too far away even to think about. But how could they leave their life in Paris?

“But what about school?” Gustave asked. “What about the end-of-year prizes? I think I’m going to win the history prize again this year! Maybe math too. Aren’t we going to wait until school is over? And what about the store?”

“Papa has been trying for months to find someone to take over the lease for the store,” Maman said. “Now that he has found someone, we are going to leave. Being safe is the most important thing.”

Gustave couldn’t believe it. His parents never thought that anything was more important than school. Maman still kept the history prize he had won two years ago, a book inscribed on the front leaf by his teacher, in a place of honor in the bookcase with glass doors in the dining room. Sometimes she even took it out to show visitors who stayed for dinner. And now, when he was almost sure to win another prize, she wanted to leave Paris?

And Papa loved his store. He had opened it when Gustave was just a little boy. Gustave had visited his father there ever since he could remember. The shop had its own special smell, like chalk and cloth and new shoe leather, mixed with the floor-cleaning soap Papa used. How could Papa give it all up?

“What is it called, the village where we are going?” Gustave asked. He heard his voice quaver and bit down, hard, on his lip.

“Saint-Georges,” Maman said. “It’s in the Loire Valley. Do you remember it? We went there once for vacation with Jean-Paul’s family when you were younger.”

“No,” said Gustave, pressing his finger down over the bumpy beads embroidered on the pillow. He ran his finger over and over the beaded outline of a leaf. One bead was missing, and it bothered him every time he jumped his finger over the space.

“We’re leaving on Friday,” Papa added.

“On Friday!” Gustave shoved the pillow aside, and it fell off the sofa. “But I
can’t
go now. The Eagles just tied with the Bears today for first place at Boy Scouts. We have to beat them! Can’t we just wait until July, when the team prizes are awarded?”

Maman’s face tightened. “We can’t wait any longer,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. We have to go now.”

Gustave stood up and looked dazedly at his parents.

“But we’re all going together, right?” he said. A bad feeling started to come over him. “You’ll convince Jean-Paul’s family to come too? And what about Marcel and his mother?”

Maman sighed. “I tried to tell Madame Landau that she and Marcel should get out of Paris,” she said. “She says she can’t afford to live if she leaves her job.”

“What about Aunt Geraldine and Jean-Paul and the baby?” Gustave insisted.

Maman shook her head. Gustave was startled to notice that she had tears in her eyes—Maman, who never cried. “No,” she said. “I’ve been begging Geraldine and begging her. How can I leave my little sister and her children behind? But she says no. She says she won’t come with us.”

Gustave washed his leg off in the bathroom, scrubbing his shin with a soapy washcloth until it stung. Then he stood in his room, staring at the map that he had pinned up on the wall a few years ago, when they first started studying geography in school. The countries of Europe were outlined in black ink on the white paper. He could use the map to keep track of the war.

Somewhere in his desk were his watercolors. Gustave found them in the back of a drawer. He filled a little cup with water from the bathroom and carried it back to his room, walking slowly so as not to spill it. He put it down on the bookshelf and opened the paints. France and Britain were allied against Germany. He carefully outlined France and England in blue, his favorite color, and painted them in. When he dipped the brush to clean it, blue paint swirled into the water. He would use red for Nazi Germany, since red was one of the colors on the Nazi flag. Gustave covered Germany in red paint.

But Germany was expanding and expanding. In the last two years, Germany had taken over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Gustave wet the brush again and painted Austria and Czechoslovakia red. And then in September, Germany had invaded Poland. That’s when France and Britain had declared war. Gustave quickly washed red paint over Poland, trying not to think about what might have happened to Marcel’s family if they had still been living there.

A drip of red paint ran down the map, and Gustave used his handkerchief to clean it off. All that red made Europe look as if it had some horrible, contagious disease. And the disease pressed right up against the French border.

But Antoine’s grandfather had said that France had the strongest army in Europe. And everyone talked so proudly about the Maginot Line, the underground forts France had built all along the German border, along the border between France and Luxembourg, and a little way along the line between France and Belgium. Gustave had seen newspaper photographs of them.

Thinking about the huge guns pointing up from underground toward Germany made him feel better. He grabbed his fountain pen out of his desk drawer and drew in the Maginot Line, running the pen up and down, from the northern end of Switzerland, all along Germany, up to the southern end of Belgium, and back again, until he had made a thick, dark border.

Gustave sat down on his bed and looked across the room at the map. With the Maginot Line inked in, it looked much better.

“The
Boches
will never get past that,” he said out loud, using the insulting French word for Germans. “Just let them try.” Terrible things were happening in other countries. But the Nazis would never control France.