Black Radishes (7 page)

But the Nazis weren’t supposed to bother people on this side of the line. He reached for the black pen again and wrote in all capital letters, below the line,
“ARRETEZ! ARRETEZ!”
He shouted the words as he wrote them.
STOP! STOP! STOP!

Gustave jabbed the pen into the paper and traced the demarcation line over and over until the thin map ripped, startling him. It was a stupid map, anyway, almost all the same color. Smeared with red everywhere, it didn’t separate anything from anything. Gustave grabbed it and tore it down from the wall, then ripped it into smaller and smaller pieces, until the floor was covered with the torn-up pieces of Europe.

12

Saint-Georges, September 1940

T
he night before school started in the fall, Gustave dreamed about Paris. A German soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder had his hand clamped on Marcel’s neck and was making him march down a long, dark street. When they were about to turn the corner, Marcel looked back at Gustave. In the moonlight, his face was white. Gustave tried to call out, but something choked his throat. He woke up making a strangled cry.

Gustave’s mouth was too dry to swallow his bread at breakfast that morning. It didn’t make him feel better when Maman sat down and looked earnestly at him across the table. “Remember, don’t tell anyone at school that you’re Jewish,” she told him. “They might guess because of when we came from Paris, yet they may not if you say as little as you can about yourself. Becker is not an obviously Jewish last name.”

“But can people tell we’re Jewish by the way we look?” Gustave asked.

“Maybe,” Maman said slowly. “You and Papa both have wavy, dark hair. But so do a lot of French people. No one could be
sure
you were Jewish just by looking.”

“And, of course, you’re circumcised—but no one is going to see that, right?” added Papa, smiling. “Just try to be inconspicuous,” he went on. Gustave’s hand was on the table, and Papa patted it. “Don’t let anything bother you—try to get along with everybody so that you don’t stand out.”

Gustave nodded. But at school, the kids were sure to ask questions. How was he supposed to avoid answering? Gustave reached into his pocket, checking to make certain that Monkey was there. It would be embarrassing if anybody knew how often he carried Monkey around with him, but he didn’t have any other friends in Saint-Georges.

The principal of Gustave’s new school walked with him to his classroom and spoke in a hushed voice to the teacher, Monsieur Laroche. Monsieur Laroche had white hair and a weary face, but his voice was friendly.

“I would like you to meet Gustave Becker,” he said to the class. “He comes to us from Paris. Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.” Gustave looked out at all the faces, some curious, some bored, as the names went by him in a blur. Then one face, in the back of the classroom, suddenly stood out. It was the pale-eyed boy who had shoved Gustave into the fountain. “Philippe,” the boy said curtly when his turn came.

Gustave’s heart pounded. Why did
that
kid have to be in his class? It was going to be hard not to get into any arguments with him around. Philippe’s eyes bored into him. Gustave was glad when Monsieur Laroche handed him a book and pointed him to his desk.

At recess, a group of children gathered around Gustave.

“You’re from Paris?” asked a girl. “Why did you come here?”

Philippe walked by the group and stopped. He pushed his lank, light hair away from his forehead, running his fingers through it. His hair looked greasy. “There are a lot of
youpins
in Paris, aren’t there?” he called out.

Gustave’s face burned, and the other kids looked at him curiously. Once, back in Paris, some boys had shouted
“Youpin!”
—
Yid!
—at Marcel. One had thrown a rock that cut Marcel’s ear. Gustave didn’t want to let the insulting word for Jews go by. But he wasn’t supposed to let anyone guess that he was a Jew, so how could he defend Jews?

“Um, yeah,” he said, looking at the ground. “I guess there are.”

“I know what I’d do if I met a Yid,” said a freckle-faced boy cheerfully. “My cousin met one once, and he baptized him. Problem solved! Not a Yid anymore!”

“How did he get the holy water?” a girl asked.

“Oh, you can use any kind,” said the boy. He ran over to a puddle in the corner of the schoolyard, knelt down, and scooped up a handful of water in his cupped hands. “See, like this!” He smashed his clasped hands together and squirted the water at another boy through the space between his thumbs. “I baptize you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!”

The wet boy yelled and knelt down to get a handful of water himself. Soon they were all running around the yard, shouting about the Holy Ghost.

Was it really true that the water could turn a Jew into a Catholic? Gustave’s heart raced, and his palms felt clammy. What if someone did it to him? It was hard being Jewish, but it was who he was. He didn’t want to become Catholic. The back of his neck felt very bare and exposed to the flying drops of water. Gustave turned and walked away stiffly, trying not to look as if he was hurrying.

In another part of the schoolyard, some kids were sitting on the ground. Gustave squatted near them, keeping his head down. Two boys and a girl in a blue dress with a white collar were trying to get three large, black beetles to race.

A little way apart, a girl with light brown curls was prodding at a cluster of beetles with a stick, pushing them into a line.

“Bring one over and race it with ours, Nicole!” called the girl in the blue dress.

“No, mine are soldiers,” answered Nicole. She noticed Gustave watching her. “Look!” she said to him. She prodded the line of beetles with her stick. “March!” One of the beetles flew away, but the others moved obediently forward, still in the line. Their shiny backs looked like the boots of the Germans. Gustave’s jaw clenched. He sprang to his feet and stamped, smashing the beetles that didn’t scurry away quickly enough.

“Hey!” shouted Nicole, jumping up and shoving him. “What are you doing?”

“They look like the Boches!” Gustave panted.

“Oh.” Nicole looked at him for a moment with her hands on her hips. “Well, they aren’t. They’re just beetles. Look.” She sat back down and swept the insects together again with a stick.

She was right, of course. They were just beetles. Gustave sat down on the ground next to Nicole, his ears hot.

“How do you get them to line up and march?” he asked after a moment.

“Oh, just poke at them!” said the girl, grinning at him.

“One time my friend Marcel made a beetle spitball,” said Gustave.

“Pas possible!”
Nicole was scornful. “No way! I don’t believe you. Your friend chewed up a beetle?”

“No, the beetle was attached to the spitball,” Gustave explained. “Marcel tied one end of a piece of thread around a spitball and the other end around the middle of a beetle. He shot the spitball at the ceiling through a straw, and it stuck there. The beetle looked so funny, dangling there, wiggling its legs!”

“Ew!” said Nicole, giggling. “That’s disgusting! But, honestly, it really worked?”

Gustave nodded, smiling. He and Marcel and Jean-Paul had all gotten into trouble that day for laughing in class, but none of them had told the teacher about the beetle, which stayed up there for at least an hour before falling down somewhere next to the teacher’s desk and scurrying away.

“Do you happen to have any thread on you?” Nicole asked, her brown eyes gleaming. “Or maybe a piece of hair would work.” She yanked one out of her head, then looked at it, disappointed. “But we don’t have a straw to shoot the spitball with.”

Just then a teacher rang the bell to call them in. Nicole waved and ran off to go in with her class, and Gustave lined up with his. None of the drops of baptismal water had landed on him, so he was still Jewish—even if it really was true that the water could have turned him Catholic. And Nicole was friendly and interesting.

But Nicole’s class and his didn’t usually have recess at the same time. Gustave looked around for her at recess for several days afterward before he figured that out. Claude, the freckle-faced boy whose cousin had baptized a Jew, was in Gustave’s class, and he seemed friendly too, but he asked so many questions that Gustave wasn’t supposed to answer.

“Why did you leave Paris?” Claude asked one day when he and Gustave were teamed up for a relay race.

“Because of the war,” Gustave said. “My mother was worried about the bombs.” That was partly true.

“So, are you going to go back now?” Claude persisted, panting, as he came back from running his leg of the race. “I wish I could go to Paris.”

Gustave shrugged. “I don’t know.” Of course they weren’t going back, so
that
really wasn’t true. Claude didn’t seem completely satisfied, but he let it go.

But one Monday morning, as Gustave slid into his seat, Claude looked over at him and asked, curiously, “How come I never see you at church?”

Philippe sat on the other side of Claude. “Yeah, why not, Paris boy?” he sneered.

Gustave froze. He couldn’t think of a single excuse, and his tongue wouldn’t move, anyway. He heard his watch ticking, slowly. He opened his mouth, about to mumble something—he didn’t know what, maybe something about Papa’s limp and the long walk—when Monsieur Laroche rang the bell to signal the beginning of class. Gustave’s breathing slowly went back to normal.

But how could he make friends when he couldn’t tell the truth? With Philippe around, always butting in, making friends was just about impossible, anyway. Gustave’s thoughts whirled while Monsieur Laroche talked about grammar. Why did Philippe act like that? What if someone did find out for sure that Gustave’s family was Jewish? Could that be a problem even here, in the unoccupied zone? What did Maman and Papa think would happen here in Saint-Georges if people knew?

13

G
ustave’s parents were having problems too.

“Incroyable!”
Papa shouted, shaking the newspaper one morning in October. He banged on the table, making the dishes rattle and almost spilling his cup of coffee. “Unbelievable! How can our own government do such a thing? It’s an outrage!” He read aloud from the paper. “ ‘Jews are forbidden to hold jobs in government, the law, and civil service. All Jewish teachers will be fired from the public schools. Jews may no longer work in radio or in film or as newspaper reporters or editors.’ ”

“These are French laws, laws from our own government?” Maman asked, twisting a dish towel between her hands. “Not laws from the Germans?”

“Not
our
government, Lili!” Papa exploded. “The new France with
Vichy
laws. I tell you, Maréchal Pétain and the Vichy government are worse than useless. And I closed up the store in Paris just in the nick of time. If we still lived there, it would have been taken away from us. The Germans are taking over all Jewish-owned businesses. What is happening to our country?”

Pétain’s picture hung on the wall of every classroom in the school. Gustave usually tried to avoid looking at the stern old face with its bushy white mustache, but that morning he stared at it after he finished his page of math exercises, as if somehow the face could make him understand. Why would a Frenchman, a military hero, make so many Jews lose their jobs? How could people live if they couldn’t work?

Maman was upset every evening when the mailbox was empty. The Germans had finally decided to let mail cross the demarcation line between the two zones of France, but you could send only preprinted postcards with messages to circle or cross out, saying things like “We are well” or “We are ill.” Maman bought one in the village, circled a few messages, and sent it to Aunt Geraldine. But the Nazis let only a few of the cards go across every day, and people were saying that many were getting lost or thrown away at the border. No cards had come yet from Paris, nothing from Aunt Geraldine or from Marcel’s mother, Madame Landau.

One evening, as the weather was getting cooler, Gustave saw that Maman had tears in her eyes as she ladled soup into bowls at dinner. “There’s just no food here,” she said. “How am I supposed to make a meal with yesterday’s bread and rutabagas? That’s all I could buy today. The shopkeepers say that the government takes all the food directly from the farmers to give to the Germans. The only reason I can get rutabagas is because the Germans don’t like them.”

“We have nothing more in the garden?” asked Papa.

Gustave scooped up a spoonful of stringy mashed rutabagas, stuck it into his mouth, and quickly gulped water so that he could swallow without tasting it. He hated rutabagas too, but they filled his stomach.

“All that work for nothing,” Gustave said. Practically every day all summer, Maman had made him weed that garden.

“Well, not for nothing,” said Maman. “We harvested those tomatoes and green beans. But I wish we had gotten just a few radishes. Those would have kept over the winter, and they would have made the bread taste more interesting. But I think those seeds were no good. They just didn’t grow. Or maybe something ate them.” She sighed.

Gustave bit into his stale bread, imagining how much better it would taste with creamy butter and the spicy tingle of black radish. He and Maman both loved those radishes. So did Aunt Geraldine. One day last fall in Paris, Gustave, Jean-Paul, and Marcel had been the first to see that black radishes were for sale in the outdoor market and that people were lining up to buy them. The three of them had waited in line for ten minutes to buy some. Their mothers had been delighted when they’d come home. Gustave’s family had invited Jean-Paul’s and Marcel’s over for lunch, and they had shared the first gnarled, twisty black radishes, peeled and sliced very, very thin, on buttered chunks of bread.

“How thick a piece of radish can you eat just plain?” Marcel had asked Jean-Paul, cutting himself a slice twice as thick as usual, biting into it, then quickly swallowing water. Jean-Paul had sliced one as thick as his thumb. He held the radish piece in front of his mouth for a moment, grinning at Gustave and Marcel, before taking a huge bite. The other boys had watched, fascinated, as Jean-Paul’s face slowly flushed a deep scarlet.

“Ah!” he screamed, running for the bathroom to spit it out.

“Boys, please don’t waste food,” Maman had said pleasantly as Jean-Paul gulped down almost the whole pitcher of water to cool his tongue. She wouldn’t say that so calmly now, Gustave thought. The chunk of radish Jean-Paul had spat out that day last fall would have been enough to flavor his bread and Maman’s and Papa’s for several meals.

“Some of the farmers
must
have hidden food away from the Germans,” Papa said, gripping the table so vigorously that Gustave’s spoon fell out of his soup. “And I have all that leftover stock from the store. It’s time to start making use of it. People need shoes and cloth as much now as ever, and there’s nothing in the stores.”

“Oh, Berthold, be careful,” Maman whispered.

Papa lowered his voice. “Wait and see. Tomorrow maybe I’ll be able to find a farmer who will trade a nice, plump chicken for a pair of good leather shoes.”

Maman anxiously twisted her napkin between her fingers. “That’s the black market, Berthold,” she whispered again. “You know that the government has declared that sort of trading illegal.”

“As a Jew, I can’t run my business now,” Papa said fiercely. “And I’m certainly not going to let good leather shoes rot while we starve.”

Dinner the next night was much more filling. Papa came home with a whole sack of potatoes and three eggs that a farmer had given him in exchange for two pairs of children’s shoes. Maman made hot, crispy potato pancakes. A week later, Papa came home with something even better.

“Look what I have today!” he said to Maman, kissing her on the cheek. “A whole kilo of butter and a bag of apples! I traded the farmer for a pair of slippers.”

Maman made a rich, buttery apple tart that night, and for the next several weeks, the food was better. But after the first frost, Papa came home with less and less.

Then one day, Gustave was sitting on the living room floor, working on a jigsaw puzzle picturing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, when Papa bounded in, beaming.

“Voilà!”
he said. “Look what I have for us tonight!” He pulled a plucked chicken out of his sack.

“Chicken!” Gustave’s stomach rumbled. They hadn’t eaten meat in months. “Where did you get it?” he asked joyfully, jumping up from the floor to get a better look. “I can’t believe it, Papa!”

But Maman was frowning in the doorway. “Where
did
you get it, Berthold?” she asked, with an edge to her voice.

Gustave glanced from one of his parents to the other. Why was Maman upset? He ducked back down to the floor and flipped over puzzle pieces, looking for a corner. He only needed to find the fourth corner piece to complete the frame.

“It comes from just over the river,” Papa replied calmly. “The farmers on our side of the Cher mostly cultivate grapes for wine. But what we need is food. There’s more at the farms on the other side of the demarcation line.”

“You crossed over the line into the occupied zone?” Maman’s voice was high and thin. “What if the Nazis had given you trouble?”

“I’m not going to let the Germans stop me from crossing a French river,” said Papa evenly. “I used my Swiss identity papers. I tell you, the farmers and the men I meet at the cafés envy me for having Swiss papers and being able to cross the line.”

Maman sighed. “I don’t like it. It isn’t safe.”

“We have to eat, Lili,” said Papa, throwing himself into one of the armchairs. Maman sighed again and went into the kitchen.

When she was out of the room, Gustave fit another piece into his puzzle and looked up at his father. “Why is it good to have Swiss papers?” he asked quietly.

“You know how the Germans are letting some French people cross the line now?” Papa answered. “You can apply to them for a pass to cross the line, but I hear it is a big runaround to get one. But with Swiss papers, I don’t need a pass. I can cross anytime, since Switzerland is a neutral country, not fighting in the war.”

Gustave ran his finger over the edge of a puzzle piece. “But then why can’t Jean-Paul’s family and Marcel’s just get passes and leave the occupied zone?” he asked.

Papa leaned back, and the armchair creaked. “The Nazi officials give those passes to a few of the French people who apply for them,” he said. “But not to Jews. They won’t do any favors for Jews.”

Soon the house was filled with the delicious smell of roasting chicken. But everyone was quiet at dinner. Gustave chewed the rich, tender meat, watching his parents. Finally, Maman said, “You’re right that we need to eat, Berthold. But please be careful. And next time, I’ll write a letter to Geraldine, and you can mail it from the other side of the line. Even though that’s illegal too. But that way, there’s more of a chance she’ll get our letter, even if we can’t hear back from her.”

Papa smiled, rubbing her arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Germans want to stay on the good side of the Swiss government. The guards at the line won’t bother me. I’ll only go if we really need the food.”

So every now and then, Papa bounded into the house with something special—a full dozen eggs, a bunch of carrots, or a wheel of cheese. One night, Maman slit open the seam of a cloth bag, tucked in a letter to Aunt Geraldine, and sewed it neatly closed. Papa took the letter across to mail it. On the days when he came back from his bartering trips with something particularly good, he acted the way he used to in Paris when he had had an especially good day at the store: he kissed Maman and whistled around the house, and sometimes he played with Gustave after dinner. One cool fall evening, Papa even pulled himself up the ladder in the garage to admire Gustave’s fort.

The road in front of the school was full of exuberant children on the last Thursday in October, the day before La Toussaint. As Gustave made his way around a group of girls with their arms linked, who were singing at the top of their lungs, Claude ran toward him.

“Think fast!” He threw a pinecone at Gustave’s head.

“Hey!” Gustave picked it up and threw it back.

Nicole and a girl named Celeste, who was always playing hopscotch at recess, broke away from the group of singing girls and joined him and Claude. The four of them started toward home.

“No homework for a week!” Celeste said gleefully, tossing her blond head and glancing at Gustave with vivid blue eyes.

“Do your families have food for the All Souls’ supper?” Claude asked the others. “Are you having bacon? We don’t have any left, so we’re just having pancakes, cider, and pears. But bacon is the best part!”

“We have some,” Celeste said. “My mother’s been saving it. But we have eight people coming, so there won’t be much for each. Do you have any? Or any
rillettes
?” She looked straight at Gustave.

Gustave’s throat tightened with disgust at the thought. Bacon or
rillettes
? Of course not. Both were made from pork, and Jews didn’t eat pork. La Toussaint was a Catholic holiday, and none of the kids from his neighborhood in Paris celebrated it. He didn’t even really know what Catholics did on La Toussaint, just that for everybody, it was the beginning of a week off from school. But he couldn’t say that. Nervously, he shoved his hands into his pockets, frantically trying to think of something to say.

“Wake up, Gustave!” Claude knocked on his head. “Anybody in there? Celeste asked if your family has bacon for the All Souls’ supper.”

“We don’t!” Nicole jumped in. “I’m just glad that we have enough eggs for pancakes. I like the cider and hazelnuts and pancakes best, anyway. Oh, and I really love the roasted
marrons
. I always smell those chestnuts that Monsieur Arnaud sells outside the cemetery when we’re saying the prayers over the graves. Once, my father let me buy some when we came out, but when my aunt comes to visit, she tells my father not to spoil my appetite. As if it would! My aunt is so annoying! When she and my uncle and cousins visit, she always tells my father that I’m a hooligan and that he isn’t raising me properly. She never likes the dresses I wear when we go to decorate my mother’s grave. Anyway, could you buy a pot of chrysanthemums to decorate the graves with? We couldn’t, but I know where some purple aster is growing. I think it’s pretty, and my mother loved wildflowers, but my aunt will never approve. She doesn’t even approve of colored chrysanthemums for my mother’s grave, only white.…” Nicole went on and on, hardly stopping to take a breath.