Black Radishes (9 page)

17

I
t was five-forty p.m. on Gustave’s watch and getting dark and bitterly cold when they arrived at the demarcation line. There was a car with a spare tire on its roof up ahead, and several men stood, shivering and stamping their feet, holding bicycles, in the line just in front of them. Papa turned off the engine to wait. Things seemed to be moving very slowly. Gustave watched his father’s fingers gripping the steering wheel. Coming back across the line, Papa always tried to arrive just at the end of the guards’ shift, when they were tired and less likely to be thorough. But arriving at this hour was risky, because it was hard to time it just right. When the day shift ended, at six o’clock, the new guards came on, well rested and in no hurry.

The car with the spare tire moved forward across the line, and two of the soldiers walked over to the men with bicycles. Gustave recognized one of them as the stocky blond soldier who had made them get out of the truck earlier in the day. The blond soldier said something to one of the Frenchmen with bicycles, and the Frenchman unbuttoned his coat and took it off. The blond German shook out the coat, then slowly reached inside all the pockets, turning them inside out. When he had finished examining the coat, the soldier dropped it onto the road. One of the sleeves landed in an icy puddle. The Frenchman leaned down to pick it up. But as he reached for it, the German, grinning, slammed his boot down, hard, on top of the coat, just missing the man’s fingers. The man straightened, shivering, and crossed his arms against his chest.

Gustave looked at Papa. He was watching too, his face grim. After asking a lot of questions, the blond soldier finally moved his boot and kicked the coat toward the Frenchman. The man picked up his coat, hastily brushed it off, squeezed out the wet sleeve, and put it on. He blew on his fingers and buttoned the coat rapidly, then swung his leg over the bicycle and pedaled off. Now there were only two men on bicycles ahead. Another car pulled up behind them and came to a stop.

The soldier Gustave did not recognize walked back toward the truck, and Papa rolled down the window. He was older than the burly, blond German, and he had curly reddish brown hair and a wide, snub-nosed face. Gustave relaxed his hands, suddenly realizing that he had been clenching them in his lap.

“Bonsoir,”
said the German, in foreign-sounding French.

“Guten Abend, Herr Offizier,”
Papa said in German, smiling politely and handing him the papers. Gustave could understand those words—
“Good evening, Officer”
—but not the other German words that followed. The snub-nosed soldier chuckled at something and nodded. Then the big, blond soldier, who was still examining the papers of one of the men on bicycles, looked back over his shoulder and shouted something. The soldier by the truck stopped smiling and walked back to the larger man.

“What did he say, Papa?” whispered Gustave.

“He said to search the truck,” Papa answered very quietly. “Don’t worry. The ducks are well hidden.”

But Papa’s smile, when he turned toward the returning soldier, didn’t look real. And although he was making his voice sound cheerful, Gustave could hear the tension underneath. Just then, someone banged on Gustave’s window, and he jumped. It was a third soldier, with thick, greasy-looking dark eyebrows. Gustave rolled down the window, his hand shaking.

The soldier looked at the watch on Gustave’s wrist, then spoke in French. “What time is it?” he asked.

Gustave held up his watch so that the man could see.

“Five fifty-five! You are on German time, I see. Good boy! What have you got there?”

The soldier reached for one of the radishes and picked it up by the stalk. “Ah! Black radishes! Nice big ones. Georg!” he called to the blond soldier. “Come see! Beer radishes!”

The burly blond soldier walked over to Gustave’s side of the truck, grinning, his rifle swinging as he walked. Gustave’s heart thudded. He folded his arms over the remaining radish on his lap, but there was no way to hide it now. The soldier with the black eyebrows dangled the first radish up high by its stalk, said something in German, and laughed uproariously. The massive blond soldier chuckled, grabbing at the dangling radish with a beefy hand. They spoke to one another in German, and the blond soldier slapped the one with black eyebrows on the back.

Then both of their faces came up close to the open window. Gustave leaned back, trying to get away from their sour breath. The soldier with the black eyebrows spoke. “What does a boy like you need beer radishes for? Are you planning on drinking tonight?” He laughed loudly, and a gold filling glinted in his mouth.

Gustave knew what he had to do. The Germans wanted the radishes. Somewhere in the truck, his father had hidden the black-market ducks. If the Germans searched the truck, they might find them. Gustave slowly picked up the other radish on his lap. Cradling it in both hands for a moment, he passed it out the window.

“Ah, very nice! Too bad you aren’t a little older so that you could come drink with us.” The soldier with the black eyebrows smirked and banged a triumphant rat-a-tat-tat on the side of the truck again. The burly blond soldier, laughing now, said something to the first soldier who had spoken to Papa, who was still standing on Papa’s side of the truck. That soldier walked to the back of the vehicle, opened it, glanced in, and slammed the door closed. He walked back to Papa’s window, said something, gestured Papa forward, and raised the striped barrier.

Gustave’s blood pounded in his head as they drove on, and his fingers trembled. What right did the German soldiers have to take his radishes? What
right
?

“Why did they call them beer radishes, Papa?” he burst out when they had driven several kilometers and the demarcation line was far behind them.

“Germans slice up radishes and salt them to dry them out,” said Papa grimly. “Then they eat them while they drink beer. They must be planning quite a party.”

“What a stupid thing to do with radishes,” Gustave exploded.

“I’m really sorry that happened, Gustave,” Papa said after a while. “I didn’t think they would bother about vegetables. But you were smart to give them the second radish. It stopped them from searching the truck.”

“But now I can’t bring the radishes to Maman,” Gustave said. His voice wavered, and he bit down on his lip. He looked out the truck window into the darkness beyond it, and without thinking about what he was doing, he reached into his coat pocket to rub Monkey’s head. But Monkey wasn’t there. He was in the occupied zone, divided from Gustave by the demarcation line. Those soldiers with the big, laughing mouths and the cold eyes stood guard between Gustave and Monkey—and also between him and Jean-Paul and Marcel. They seemed so far away, and so did his old life in Paris. Would Gustave ever see his friends again? French Jews couldn’t get the right papers. And without the right papers, how could anyone cross the line, with soldiers like that in charge? Gustave’s eyes stung, and he swallowed hard. Suddenly, remembering the leering soldier, he jerked up his coat sleeve and adjusted his watch back to French time. No matter where he was, he promised himself, he would never put his watch on German time again.

18

Saint-Georges, March 1941

G
ustave’s fingers were too awkward from the cold to turn the pages of his history book. He got up from the kitchen table and stretched. His pants slipped down, and he tugged them back up again. Even though they were getting too short, they were loose around his waist. Food had been in short supply during the winter, and Gustave was getting used to being a little hungry almost all the time. Even on his twelfth birthday, all Maman had been able to make was hard-boiled eggs and rutabaga soup.

Gustave stamped his feet and blew on his fingers to warm them. The winter had been long and bitterly cold, and heating fuel was expensive and scarce. It was especially bad when you had to run outside to the outhouse, but on this March evening, when winter should have been giving way to spring, it seemed to be almost as cold inside the house as it was outside. Even here in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house, Gustave’s fingers were numb and stiff.

But it was probably better than living in England, Gustave thought. According to the newspapers, the German bombing there was merciless. Every now and then, Philippe and some of his friends hid behind a wall near the school and lobbed snowballs up into the air so that they plopped down on top of other kids heading toward the building, pretending they were dropping bombs.

“Iiiiiaou—pfff!”
Philippe had screamed gleefully last week as one fell on Gustave’s head, showering bits of snow down the collar of his jacket. “Another bomb hits London!”

Now, remembering the ice on his neck that day, Gustave rubbed his cold fingers under his shirt, massaging his neck and shoulders. Then, without thinking, he shoved his hands into his pockets, the fingers of his left hand feeling for Monkey’s warm fur. But his pocket was empty. He usually remembered not to do that anymore because Monkey was never there. Shortly after the soldiers had taken the black radishes, the demarcation line had been closed.

A few weeks ago, the line had opened back up again, but Papa hadn’t tried crossing because he had heard that security was very tight. “I’d rather not run into that Boche Georg again,” he told them.

So Monkey was still with little Marguerite, and Papa had never gone back to the Roberts’ with her boots. Gustave wondered if her tiny feet were cold in the snow. And still no reply had come to Maman’s letter to Aunt Geraldine, not even one of those preprinted postcards. What was happening to Jean-Paul and Aunt Geraldine and little Giselle? What was happening to Marcel and his mother? For years, in Paris, the three families had seen each other almost every day. Now, as month after month went by with no news, Marcel and Jean-Paul and their families seemed to be drifting further and further away.

Gustave’s back grew slightly warmer as he leaned on the wall they shared with their landlady. Her kitchen was on the other side, and her stove backed up against the shared wall. After she cooked, the wall stayed warm for a while, radiating heat into the kitchen where Gustave was working. Madame Foncine ate after Gustave’s family did, so her kitchen stayed warm later.

It was hard to concentrate, though. Gustave’s parents were talking in the living room, and he could overhear most of their conversation, even though they were obviously trying to talk quietly—which, of course, made him try all the harder to hear what they were saying.

“Things are bad in the occupied zone,” Papa was saying, almost in a whisper. He added something that Gustave could not hear, and then his voice grew louder. “When I was buying a newspaper today, I heard a man on the street saying to another that Jews in the occupied zone are going to be made to wear badges showing that they are Jews. He was actually glad about it! ‘Now we can tell who the Jewish pigs are,’ he said. Unbelievable.”

“Oh, but that was just one foolish person, Berthold,” murmured Maman. “Surely such a thing couldn’t happen in France, in a civilized country.”

“But people are saying even worse things than that,” Papa exclaimed. His voice was loud and clear now. “They are putting the foreign Jews into camps. Pétain’s government is even doing it here in the unoccupied zone. I heard it again in a café today, and I have heard it enough times that I’m afraid it’s true. Whole families—elderly people, small children, women. Imagine trying to survive in unheated barracks in a prison camp in this weather, living in filth and mud. They’re saying that people die there every day from the cold, from hunger, and from illness.”

Gustave’s mother gasped. “Foreign Jews? But the Landaus are from Poland!”

Camps? Gustave thought. Terrible internment camps like the ones he had heard about back in Paris on the newsreel? The French government was doing it too, not just the Nazis? Gustave’s pulse raced. How could the citizens of France let them? It was bad enough that the new laws took Jews’ jobs away. But to make people live in prison camps, places so horrible that people were dying, just because they were Jewish? He had to do something to stop it, something to fight it. But what? Gustave jumped to his feet, shaking, and paced around the kitchen.

Papa looked in the kitchen doorway. “Finished?” he said to Gustave with strained cheeriness. “Do you want to join us for the BBC broadcast?” He turned to Maman. “It’s the best way to find out what’s really going on.”

Papa adjusted the shortwave knob delicately with his fingertips, finding just the right spot between loud bursts of static. A deep voice sounded in the room. Maman jumped up. “Quieter!” she exclaimed, turning the volume down and eyeing the closed shutters. “Remember, it’s illegal to listen to the BBC,” she whispered.

“I heard Madame Foncine listening herself the other day. She won’t inform on us,” Papa answered, but he was speaking quietly too.

“
V
for
victory
!” The hushed words coming from the radio were strong and sure. “On the walls, on the streets, chalk
V
for
victory
!”

Papa smiled grimly. “That should be amusing,” he said when the broadcast was over. “The French Resistance wants people to chalk
V
s all over their cities and towns to show how many people want France to overthrow the Nazis. I wonder how many people will dare to do it. It’ll be dangerous for anyone the police catch at it. But maybe we’ll see a few, even here in Saint-Georges.”

Gustave’s heart pounded. Yes, he thought fiercely, there were going to be some
V
s in Saint-Georges. He didn’t have any chalk. But he was going to do it.

Before he went to bed, Gustave dug out his old box of watercolor paints. He couldn’t help glancing at the well that had once held the red paint. Its emptiness was like a taunt. Gustave flipped open his pocketknife and ran the blade around the block of blue paint, then carefully pried it out, keeping it intact, and shoved it deep into the pocket of the pants he would wear to school the next day.

It was dawn when he left for school, leaving a note for his parents. He took a shortcut down a side alley. No one was around. He looked over each shoulder, his fingers grasping the block of paint. With a shaky hand, he marked a large blue
V
on a white wall.

As he turned onto the main road of Saint-Georges, he saw a
V
chalked by someone else on the street and one on the corner of a building. His pulse raced. He ran around to the side of the post office. No one was in sight, and again he marked a large blue
V
, more firmly this time. He looked at it in satisfaction and added the whole word.
“Victoire!” Victory!
The letters stood out, bold and blue, on the pale wall. Footsteps sounded on the main road ahead of him, coming closer. Quickly shoving the block of paint into his pocket, Gustave walked back toward the main road. It was the baker, just opening the
boulangerie
. He looked at Gustave for a moment.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,”
said Gustave, trying to make his voice sound casual and polite, although his heart was pounding.

“Bonjour.”
The baker nodded. Gustave felt the baker’s eyes on his back as he walked on, past the bread bakery and down the road toward the school.

Gustave quickly scrawled three more blue
V
s on the way to school and counted five others done in white chalk by other people. Someone had even put one on the front of the school. Next to the door was a large white
V
and a cross of Lorraine, a vertical line with two crossbars, the symbol of Free France.

Many people here were against the Nazis! Gustave tingled with a fierce joy. He shoved the crumbling remains of the blue paint into his pocket, noticing as he did so that his fingers were slightly stained blue, and ran up the steps into the school.

The school was buzzing with talk. To add to the confusion, Monsieur Laroche was not in his classroom. The principal put his head in the door, quieting the mounting roar of voices, and directed Gustave’s class to join another across the hall. As they carried in chairs and crowded around the few empty desks, Gustave spotted Nicole. She flashed a grin at Gustave. In the front of the classroom, the teacher, a young, slender man with dark hair, looked at the children. His eyes were exultant behind his thick glasses. “I am Monsieur Brunel,” he said to Gustave’s class. “The homework assignment on the blackboard is for both classes. Please copy it down.”

Gustave looked at the blackboard at the front. “Read La Fontaine’s ‘The League of Rats,’ ” it said. “Pay special attention to Verses 1–9, Verses 12–15, Verses 27–28.” Gustave looked again. Was it his imagination, or did the
V
s on the board look larger and thicker than the other letters? Gustave glanced around the room. A few students scowled down at their work, but many of them were looking at each other and grinning. The teacher caught Gustave’s eye and smiled right at him. Gustave smiled back. Then he copied down the homework assignment in his notebook, running his pencil over his own
V
s, making them darker and darker. He stopped only when his pencil point tore a small hole in the paper. His pulse pounded in his fingertips, and he felt as if he could jump up from his desk and run and run.

Nicole looked back at him over her shoulder, her brown eyes sparkling gleefully. Gustave glanced around. All the other kids were working now. No one was watching. Holding his hand in front of him where only Nicole could see it, he smiled at her and lifted up two blue-stained fingers in a
V
for the flicker of a moment. She flicked her own fingers up in a
V
and smiled back. On her right cheek was a smudge of white chalk.