Franck Lévy had said the same thing that very morning.
FOR TEN MINUTES, JULES and Geneviève had rushed about the house, like frantic animals, not speaking, wringing their hands. They seemed in agony. They tried to move Rachel, to carry her down the stairs, but she was too weak. They had finally kept her in bed. Jules did his best to calm Geneviève down, without much success; she kept collapsing on the nearest sofa or chair and bursting into tears.
The girl trailed after them like a worried puppy. They wouldn’t answer any of her questions. She noticed Jules glancing again and again toward the entrance, peering through the window at the gates. The girl felt fear pluck at her heart.
At nightfall, Jules and Geneviève sat face to face in front of the fireplace. They appeared to have recovered. They seemed calm and composed. But the girl noticed Geneviève’s hands trembling. They were both pale, they looked incessantly at the clock.
At one point, Jules turned to the girl. He spoke quietly. He told her to go back down into the cellar. There were large bags of potatoes. She would have to climb into one of them and hide there as best as she could. Did she understand? It was very important. If somebody went into the cellar, she would have to be invisible.
The girl froze. She said, “The Germans are coming!”
Before Jules or Geneviève could say a word, the dog barked, making them all jump. Jules signaled to the girl, pointing to the trapdoor. She obeyed instantly, slipping into the dark, musty cellar. She couldn’t see, but she managed to find the potato bags, toward the back, feeling the rough material with her palms. There were several large sacks of them, piled one on top of the other. Quickly, she pulled them apart with her fingers and slithered between them. As she did so, one of the bags split open, and potatoes came tumbling around her, noisily, in a series of quick thumps. She hastily layered them around and over her.
Then she heard the steps. Loud and rhythmic. She had heard those steps before, in Paris, late at night, after the curfew. She knew what they meant. She had peered out of the window, and she had seen the men march by along the feebly lit street, with their round helmets and their precise movements.
Men marching. Marching right up to the house. The steps of a dozen men. A man’s voice, muffled but still clear, came to her ears. He was speaking German.
The Germans were here. The Germans had come to get Rachel and her. She felt her bladder loosen.
Footsteps just above her head. The mumble of a conversation she did not catch. Then Jules’s voice, “Yes, Lieutenant, there is a sick child here.”
“A sick Aryan child, sir?” came the foreign, guttural voice.
“A child that is ill, Lieutenant.”
“Where is the child?”
“Upstairs.” Jules’s voice, weary now.
She heard the heavy steps rock the ceiling. Then Rachel’s thin scream all the way from the top of the house. Rachel torn from the bed by the Germans. Rachel moaning, too feeble to fight back.
The girl put her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear. She could not hear. She felt protected by the sudden silence she had created.
As she lay under the potatoes, she saw a dim ray of light pierce the darkness. Somebody had opened the trapdoor. Somebody was coming down the cellar stairs. She took her hands off her ears.
“There is no one down there,” she heard Jules say. “The girl was alone. We found her in our dog shed.”
The girl heard Geneviève blowing her nose. Then her voice, tearful, spent.
“Please don’t take the girl with you! She is too ill.”
The guttural response was ironic.
“Madame, the child is a Jew. Probably escaped from one of the nearby camps. She has no reason to be in your house.”
The girl watched the orange flicker of a flashlight creep along the stone cellar walls, edging closer, then, aghast, she saw the oversized black shadow of a soldier, cut out like a cartoon. He was coming for her. He was going to get her. She tried to make herself as small as possible, she stopped breathing. She felt as if her heart had stopped beating.
No, he would not find her! It would be too hideously unfair, too horrible if he found her. They already had poor Rachel. Wasn’t that enough? Where had they taken Rachel? Was she outside in a truck with the soldiers? Had she fainted? Where were they taking her, she wondered, to a hospital? Or back to the camp? These bloodthirsty monsters. Monsters! She hated them. She wished them all dead. The bastards. She used all the swearwords she knew, all the words her mother had forbidden her ever to use. The dirty fucking bastards. She screamed the swearwords in her mind, as loud as she could in her mind, closing her eyes tight, away from the orange spot of light coming closer, running over the top of the sacks where she was hiding. He would not find her. Never. Bastards, dirty bastards.
Jules’s voice, again.
“There is no one down there, Lieutenant. The girl was alone. She could hardly stand. We had to look after her.”
The Lieutenant’s voice droned down to the girl, “We are just checking. We are going to look around your cellar, then you will follow us back to the Kommandantur.”
The girl tried not to move, not to sigh, not to breathe, as the flashlight roamed over her head.
“Follow you?” Jules’s voice seemed stricken. “But why?”
A curt laugh: “A Jew in your house and you ask why?”
Then came Geneviève’s voice, surprisingly calm. She sounded like she had stopped crying.
“You saw we were not hiding her, Lieutenant. We were helping her get better. That’s all. We didn’t know her name. She could not speak.”
“Yes,” continued Jules’s voice, “we even called a doctor. We weren’t hiding her in the least.”
There was a pause. The girl heard the Lieutenant cough.
“That is indeed what Guillemin told us. You were not hiding the girl. He did say that, the good Herr Doktor.”
The girl felt potatoes being moved over her head. She remained as still as a statue, not breathing. Her nose tickled and she longed to sneeze.
She heard Geneviève’s voice again, calm, bright, almost hard. A tone she had not heard Geneviève use.
“Would you gentlemen care for some wine?”
The potatoes stopped moving around her.
Upstairs the Lieutenant guffawed, “Some wine? Jawohl!”
“And some pâté, perhaps?” said Geneviève, with the same bright voice.
Steps retreated up the stairs, and the trapdoor slammed shut. The girl felt faint with relief. She hugged herself, tears streaming down her face. How long did they remain up there, glasses tinkling, feet shuffling, hearty laughs ringing out? It was endless. It seemed to her that the Lieutenant’s bellow was jollier and jollier. She even caught a greasy belch. Of Jules and Geneviève, she heard nothing. Were they still up there? What was going on? She longed to know. But she knew she had to stay where she was until Jules or Geneviève came to fetch her. Her limbs had gone stiff, but still she dared not move.
At last, the house went silent. The dog barked once, then no more. The girl listened. Had the Germans taken Jules and Geneviève with them? Was she all alone in the house? Then she heard the stifled sound of sobs. The trapdoor opened with a groan and Jules’s voice floated down to her.
“Sirka! Sirka!”
When she came up again, her legs aching, her eyes red with dust and her cheeks wet and grimy, she saw that Geneviève had broken down, her face in her hands. Jules was trying to comfort her. The girl looked on, helpless. The old woman glanced up. Her face had aged, had caved in. It frightened the girl.
“That child,” she whispered, “taken away to her death. I don’t know where, or how, but I know she will die. They wouldn’t listen. We tried to make them drink, but they kept their heads clear. They let us be, but they took Rachel.”