Chapter Thirty-Three #2
She saw what the war had done to him, how it had etched lines in his forehead and placed puffy bags of flesh beneath his tired-looking eyes, how it had leached the color from his skin and turned his hair white.
He was terribly thin; age spots dotted his sagging cheeks.
She was reminded of his return from the Great War, when he’d looked this bad.
“Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?” he said. “I’d rather not meet your German.”
“He’s not my German, but oui.”
She could hardly blame him for not wanting to meet Von Richter. “The house next to mine is vacant. To the east. The Germans thought it too small to bother with. We can meet there.”
“In twenty minutes,” he said.
Vianne pulled her hood back up over her scarf-covered hair and stepped out of the alleyway.
As she left town and walked along the muddy road toward home, she tried to imagine why her father was here.
She knew—or supposed—that Isabelle was living with him in Paris, although even that was conjecture.
For all she knew, her sister and her father lived separate lives in the same city.
She hadn’t heard from Isabelle since that terrible night in the barn, although Henri had reported that she was well.
She hurried past the airfield, barely noticing the aeroplanes that were crumpled and still smoking from a recent bombing raid.
At Rachel’s gate, she paused and glanced up and down the road. No one had followed or seemed to be watching her. She slipped inside the yard and hurried to the abandoned cottage. The front door had been broken long ago and now hung askew. She let herself inside.
The interior was shadowy and limned in dust. Almost all of the furniture had been requisitioned or stolen by looters, and missing pictures left black squares on the walls; only an old loveseat with dirty cushions and a broken leg remained in the living room.
Vianne sat down, perched nervously, her foot tapping on the rush-covered floor.
She chewed on her thumbnail, unable to be still, and then she heard footsteps. She went to the window, lifting the blackout shade.
Her father was at the door. Only he wasn’t her father, not this stooped old man.
She let him into the house. When he looked at her, the lines in his face deepened; the folds of his skin looked like pockets of melting wax. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. The long white strands rearranged themselves into spikes, giving him a strangely electrified look.
He moved toward her slowly, limping just a little. It brought her whole life back in an instant, that shuffling, awkward way he had of moving. Her maman saying, Forgive him, Vianne, he isn’t himself anymore and he can’t forgive himself … it’s up to us to do it.
“Vianne.” He said her name softly, his rough voice lingering over it.
Again, she was reminded subtly of Before, when he had been himself.
It was a long-forgotten thought. In the After years, she had relegated all thoughts of him to the closet; in time, she’d forgotten.
Now she remembered. It scared her to feel this way. He had hurt her so many times.
“Papa.”
He went to the loveseat and sat down. The cushions sagged tiredly beneath his meager weight. “I was a terrible father to you girls.”
It was so surprising—and true—that Vianne had no idea what to say.
He sighed. “It’s too late now to fix all that.”
She joined him at the loveseat, sat down beside him. “It’s never too late,” she said cautiously. Was it true? Could she forgive him?
Yes. The answer came instantly, as unexpected as his appearance here.
He turned to her. “I have so much to say and no time to say it.”
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll care for you and—”
“Isabelle has been arrested and charged with aiding the enemy. She’s imprisoned in Girot.”
Vianne drew in a sharp breath. The regret she felt was immense, as was the guilt. What had her last words to her sister been? Don’t come back. “What can we do?”
“We?” he said. “It is a lovely question, but not one to be asked. You must do nothing. You stay here in Carriveau and stay out of trouble, as you have been. Keep my granddaughter safe. Await your husband.”
It was all Vianne could do not to say, I’m different now, Papa. I am helping to hide Jewish children. She wanted to see herself reflected in his gaze, wanted just once to make him proud of her.
Do it. Tell him.
How could she? He looked so old sitting there, old and broken and lost. There was only the barest hint of the man he’d been. He didn’t need to know that Vianne was risking her life, too, couldn’t worry that he would lose both his daughters. Let him think she was as safe as one could be. A coward.
“Isabelle will need you to come home to when this is over. You will tell her that she did the right thing. She will worry about that one day. She will think she should have stayed with you, protected you. She will remember leaving you with the Nazi, risking your lives, and she will agonize over her choice.”
Vianne heard the confession that lay beneath.
He was telling her his own story in the only way he could, cloaked in Isabelle’s.
He was saying that he had worried about his choice to join the army in the Great War, that he had agonized over what his fighting had done to his family.
He knew how changed he’d been on his return, and instead of pain drawing him closer to his children and wife, it had separated them.
He regretted pushing them away, leaving them with Madame Dumas all those years ago.
What a burden such a choice must be. For the first time, she saw her own childhood as an adult, from far away, with the wisdom this war had given her. Battle had broken her father; she had always known that. Her maman had said it repeatedly, but now Vianne understood.
It had broken him.
“You girls will be part of the generation that goes on, that remembers,” he said. “The memories of what happened will be … hard to forget. You will need to stay together. Show Isabelle that she is loved. Sadly, this is a thing I never did. Now it is too late.”
“You sound like you’re saying good-bye.”
She saw the sad, forlorn look in his eyes, and she understood why he was here, what he’d come to say.
He was going to sacrifice himself for Isabelle.
She didn’t know how, but she knew it to be true just the same.
It was his way of making up for all the times he’d disappointed them.
“Papa,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
He laid a hand to her cheek and it was warm and solid and comforting, that father’s touch. She hadn’t realized—or admitted to herself—how much she’d missed him. And now, just when she glimpsed a different future, a redemption, it dissolved around her. “What would you do to save Sophie?”
“Anything.”
Vianne stared at this man who before the war changed him had taught her to love books and writing and to notice a sunset. She hadn’t remembered that man in a long time.
“I must go,” he said, handing her an envelope. On it was written Isabelle and Vianne in his shaky handwriting. “Read it together.”
He stood up and turned to leave.
She wasn’t ready to lose him. She grabbed for him. A piece of his cuff ripped away in her grasp. She stared down at it: a strip of brown-and-white-checked cotton lay in her palm. A strip of fabric like the others tied to her tree branches. Remembrances for lost and missing loved ones.
“I love you, Papa,” she said quietly, realizing how true it was, how true it had always been. Love had turned into loss and she’d pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable.
“How can you?”
She swallowed hard, saw that he had tears in his eyes. “How can I not?”
He gave her a last, lingering look—and a kiss to each cheek—and then he drew back. So softly she almost didn’t hear, he said, “I loved you, too,” and then left her.
Vianne watched him walk away. When at last he disappeared, she returned home.
There, she paused beneath the apple tree full of scraps of fabric.
In the years that she had been tying scraps to the branches, the tree had died and the fruit had turned bitter.
The other apple trees were hale and healthy, but this one, the tree of her remembrances, was as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it.
She tied the brown-checked scrap next to Rachel’s.
Then she went into the house.
A fire was lit in the living room; the whole house was warm and smoky. Wasteful. She closed the door behind her, frowning. “Children,” she called out.
“They are upstairs in my room. I gave them some chocolates and a game to play.”
Von Richter. What was he doing here in the middle of the day?
Had he seen her with her father?
Did he know about Isabelle?
“Your daughter thanked me for the chocolates. She is such a pretty young thing.”
Vianne knew better than to show her fear at that. She remained still and silent, trying to calm her racing heart.
“But your son.” He put the slightest emphasis on the word. “He looks nothing like you.”
“My h-husband, An—”
He struck so fast she didn’t even see him move. He grabbed her by the arm, squeezing hard, twisting the soft flesh. She let out a little cry as he shoved her back against the wall. “Are you going to lie to me again?”
He took both of her hands and wrenched them over her head, pinning them to the wall with one gloved hand. “Please,” she said, “don’t…”
She knew instantly that it was a mistake to beg.
“I checked the records. There is only one child born to you and Antoine. A girl, Sophie. You buried others. Who is the boy?”
Vianne was too frightened to think clearly.
All she knew for sure was that she couldn’t tell the truth or Daniel would be deported.
And God knew what they’d do to Vianne … to Sophie.
“Antoine’s cousin died giving birth to Daniel.
We adopted the baby just before the war started.
You know how difficult official paperwork is these days, but I have his birth certificate and baptismal papers. He’s our son now.”
“Your nephew, then. Blood but not blood. Who is to say his father isn’t a communist? Or Jewish?”
Vianne swallowed convulsively. He didn’t suspect the truth. “We’re Catholic. You know that.”
“What would you do to keep him here with you?”
“Anything,” she said.
He unbuttoned her blouse, slowly, letting each button be teased through its fraying hole. When the bodice gaped open, he slid his hand inside, sliding it over her breast, twisting her nipple hard enough that she cried out in pain. “Anything?” he asked.
She swallowed dryly.
“The bedroom, please,” she said. “My children.”
He stepped back. “After you, Madame.”
“You will let me keep Daniel here?”
“Are you negotiating with me?”
“I am.”
He grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard, pulling her into the bedroom. He kicked the door shut with his booted foot and then shoved her up against the wall. She made an ooph as she hit. He pinned her in place and shoved her skirt up and ripped her knitted underpants away.
She turned her head and closed her eyes, hearing his belt unbuckle with a clatter and his buttons release.
“Look at me,” he said.
She didn’t move, didn’t so much as breathe. Neither did she open her eyes.
He hit her again. Still she stayed where she was, her eyes closed tightly.
“If you look at me, Daniel stays.”
She turned her head and slowly opened her eyes.
“That’s better.”
She gritted her teeth as he yanked down his pants and shoved her legs farther apart and violated both her body and her soul. She did not make a single sound.
Nor did she look away.