“The war was a terrible time. The Boche were brutal. If not for my vegetable garden, my mother and I would have starved. And then, after the Nazis massacred the people in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, villagers were fleeing in every direction, like scattered chickens, not knowing where to go. They flooded our village even though we weren’t any safer here.” She gulps air. “Someone brought to the church two toddlers from Valençay.”
“Valençay?”
“That’s a château north of here, and there’s a village adjacent to it.”
Valençay, Sharon thinks. Her heart sings at the new lead. “Was Daniel one of them?”
Evelyne Niquet nods. “My neighbor Régine Robillard, who had lost three pregnancies, took him. He was about a year and a half old, maybe a little more, and starting to talk a bit. He was so precious.” Evelyne Niquet wipes away a tear. “I would have taken him in, but the priest gave the babies only to families that had both parents, even if the father was a no-good drunkard.”
“Was he, her husband, a drunkard?”
Evelyne Niquet shrugs. “Yes, but in the priest’s opinion, he was good enough to adopt a kid.”
“There’s a difference between taking in a child and adopting him.”
“These were orphaned babies, and Daniel was so beautiful, and he had this ringing laughter that I can still hear in my head—Régine fell in love with him instantly.” Evelyne Niquet pauses. “A day or two later, she discovered the blue tattoo on his foot. It was a shock. She’d never expected to shelter a Jewish child, and now both of them were in danger. She feared that if her husband found out, he might blurt it out in the tavern or even just hand Daniel to the Nazis. It was a terrible strain to keep the boy in shoes.”
From upstairs comes the sound of someone walking. Cabinet doors open and close; there’s a cough, water running in a sink.
“Who was his biological mother?” Sharon asks.
“I have no idea.”
“She must have been Jewish, because Judaism follows the line through the mother,” Sharon says.
“Daniel’s last name didn’t sound foreign, like the Jewish refugees’. I don’t recall it now.”
“Pelletier?” Sharon’s finger is on the letter.
“Yes, that’s it.” Evelyne Niquet holds Sharon’s gaze. Her eyes, under wrinkled lids, are bright blue. “Régine loved this boy with all her heart, and he immediately started calling her Maman.” Her voice breaks. She rises, gets a glass of water, and returns to the table. “No one in town ever talked of the atrocities, not then and not now. We’re all neighbors. We live with what no one speaks of, yet we cannot hide anything or ever forget what happened, what people did.”
“What atrocities?” Sharon whispers.
Evelyne Niquet casts her eyes down. “Terrible things happened here.”
“To Daniel? To Madame Robillard?”
Evelyne Niquet glances toward her daughter, who is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a sprig of mint in her hand. “It’s time you hear it,” she says to Anne-Marie and takes a deep breath. “Régine thought that the best way to protect her Jewish boy was to befriend a Boche, an officer who was living in my house, in the room upstairs, the one with the tub. That’s where the enemy settled, in our midst. He ordered me and my mother around, but he brought produce. My mother cooked for him, and I spit in his plate before serving him.” She stops, seemingly lost in her memories.
“Régine?” Sharon prompts her.
“He was not a nice man, the Boche. Loud, bad-mannered. I disagreed with her idea that, should anyone find out about Daniel, this crude German would protect him.”
The dozens of stories that Sharon has heard about World War II and the Holocaust whirl in her head. Danny asserted that they were all the same, but each was a unique human tale, and this one is turning out to be more bizarre than most. “So what happened?”
“What happened was that the war ended—though it went on longer than people think, because there was still a lot of fighting going on for months. The Boche didn’t lay down their arms; the Allies progressed into some areas and not others, leaving voids where the Résistance was at odds with the new French army. Our police chief, a Communist, was always quarreling with his deputies, who were Gaullists. All that time, we were still starving.”
“Where was your tenant?”
“The only good thing was that he left, thank God.” Evelyne Niquet puts her hand over Sharon’s. “Who would ever have imagined that our people would be worse than the Nazis?”
No one could be worse than Nazis, Sharon thinks, then recalls the Vichy police, everyday Frenchmen in uniform who captured Jewish children and sent them to their death. “What did they do?”
“The purging. Have you heard of it?”
Sharon shakes her head. “No.”
“Revenge disguised as justice. Enemies settling scores. After the war, Communists and collaborators were given punishments without the benefit of a trial. People accused each other of betrayal for the sin of holding different ideologies. The nationalists went on a rampage.” Evelyne Niquet crosses herself. “Some people, they shot in the forest, out of sight. Others they hanged at the tower for the whole world to see.”
A thought of Félix Amiot flits through Sharon’s mind, and she wonders how he escaped the purge. What regrets he must be living with. He’s been tireless in his efforts to make amends, yet Jews like Rachelle refuse to forgive him.
Evelyne Niquet points outside. “The tower in the center of town carries our shame.” She tightens her fist around a handkerchief. “They constructed their hanging poles there and noosed whomever they thought was a traitor. Régine included.” She cries openly. “I begged them. They had already beaten her and shaved off her hair. She was naked, bruised, and bleeding, and now the rope was around her neck. I fell down on my knees and vouched for her honesty, yelling and crying and telling them that it was a huge mistake, that nothing had passed between her and my tenant. I knew that God would forgive my lie. How could Régine’s good intentions to protect the boy be so unjustly punished?” Evelyne Niquet raises her apron to her face and sobs into it. Sharon can barely decipher her broken words. “They pushed me out of the way and just kicked the box from under her.”
The blood drains from Sharon’s face. War made visible what had lain hidden—the bestiality of human nature reared its ugly head. “How awful. How awful” is all she can utter.
“We all know who did what then. We have never trusted each other again.” Evelyne Niquet continues to weep into her apron, and Sharon places her arm around the shaking shoulders. Danny was loved by this woman, and he has no recollection of it.
Minutes pass. The grandfather clock chimes the hour. Sharon can’t believe that she is shirking her responsibilities, but she can’t leave, not until she hears everything that Evelyne Niquet remembers. In a soft tone, she asks, “What happened to Daniel?”
The Frenchwoman collects herself. “The poor little boy was left alone with the drunkard, who didn’t care whether he was alive or dead. By now everyone knew about the tattoo, and the priest would not allow me to take him in, saying that there were enough Christian orphans needing our charitable hearts, that caring for one of them was what Jesus wanted from me.”
“So you did?”
“My mother and I took care of a very sick girl for a while, until her soul went to heaven. God forgive me, but I never loved her like I did Daniel, and after she died, I asked again for the priest’s permission to take him in. The poor boy was so neglected. He would have starved if it were up to Robillard. But the priest said that Jews were no longer in mortal danger and that this boy was cursed with the cardinal sin of his adulterous mother.” She sniffles.
The cardinal sin of his adulterous mother. The words echo in Sharon’s head and anger rises at that anonymous, cruel priest. And she had thought that rabbis were harsh. Would this priest have interceded and saved this woman from hanging if he had not believed that she deserved this gruesome death? Didn’t he see the sacrifice of a loving mother?
“And that’s when Uzi Yarden showed up?”
