Page 20 of The World That We Knew

“I deliver you, and then, after they train you, if you’re any good, you’ll be my partner,” the young man said.

“Good at what?”

“What do you think?” her companion said. “You went to the priest.”

“I’d like to destroy the people who killed my sister.”

“How do you plan to do that?” he asked.

She had no idea. A knife in her hands would do little.

When she didn’t answer he said, “We’ll show you.”

She turned her head so he would not see that beneath her blindfold she was crying, tears streaming down her face. Whatever she did could never bring her sister back. Perhaps the boy felt for her. “I’m Victor,” he told her despite the rule to keep his identity secret. “From Paris.”

“I’m called Nicole here,” she said. “My family called me Ettie.”

They drove for quite some time, Ettie in the passenger seat as they barreled down the roads at a high speed. She couldn’t see through the blindfold, but she knew they were headed into the countryside, for the roads were now bumpy and steep. They stopped once and the back door was wrenched open. A man got in and sank heavily into the backseat. He stank of cigarette smoke and he brought the cold inside with him. Ettie felt a wave of panic. She didn’t like the idea of being outnumbered. The driver must have sensed her fear.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “He’s one of us.”

So that was it, she was one of them now, and she didn’t even know who they were. They were simply fools the priest had sent for her, who she hoped knew how to do battle. They drove for perhaps an hour. She learned that the fellow in the backseat was Claude. At last the car turned down a rutted road filled with puddles the tires splashed through, coming to a stop in a half-cleared spot in the woods where the parked car would not be seen. Victor got out and came around to help Ettie from the passenger seat. When he took off her blindfold, she saw they had come to a small abandoned house. They walked past it, into the woods. It was nearly midnight now. Ettie knew the café owner would find her empty cot, and the knife she kept there, and curse her. Let him. She was never going back. She had leapt from a cliff and now all she could do was wait to see where she fell.

There were two more young men, and a young woman. Jean and Arno and Bettina. They greeted her, and gave her supper, then asked what she knew about fighting. She knew how to hate, nothing more, so she shrugged. The others were not impressed.

“She’ll be fine,” Victor said. “All she needs is a teacher.”

They laughed because Bettina had been an art teacher in Paris.

“If you’re ready, so am I,” Bettina said.

Ettie nodded, her face glowing. Someone had come for her.

When the snow began to fall, Victor and Claude and the other men piled into the car and took off, saying nothing of where they were going or what their mission was.

“We don’t discuss such things,” Bettina told Ettie. “It’s safer for all of us that way. If one of us is caught, we know that no one can resist torture, and the less you have to say the better.”

The women moved into the old house. The snow was so high it was impossible for a car to get down the dirt road. No one could come after them or blunder upon them. They felt they would be safe, at least for as long as the snowdrifts covered the roads and the fields. There was a fireplace and some wood, as well as a pile of onions and potatoes in the cellar, gnawed on by field rats, but perfectly edible. As it turned out, Bettina was a forger, and soon enough Ettie was in training, her hands blue with ink at the end of the day. Bettina’s knowledge of printing techniques as an artist allowed her to produce a variety of identifications used by the Resistance to help smuggle Jews to the countryside or to the border. Visas, driver’s licenses, baptismal certificates, ration cards, anything that allowed Jews to move about the country or make their way into Spain or Switzerland or begin the journey to find a Jewish state. She had access to ink and paper in Lyon from a sympathetic French owner of a poster factory that was no longer in service.

A few weeks after the men had departed, Ettie stumbled over some loose floorboards. She knelt down and lifted a board. Hidden there was a cache of gunpowder and batteries.

“I think you could tell me something of what we’re doing here,” Ettie said while she and Bettina worked one afternoon. By then the snowfall was over the windows, and they were eating rice and fried onions. There had been days when Ettie imagined they would starve to death before the men came back or the snow began to melt.

“Our boys interrupt convoys to Montluc Prison and what we do here in this kitchen allows those who escape to have the proper documents.”

“Interrupt?” Ettie said.

Bettina shrugged. “Bomb.”

Ettie wished she were out with the men. She had spent most of her life in a kitchen, and now here she was again. They had been gone for so long, both she and Bettina were anxious. More than a month had passed. It might be possible for the women to hike to a village, or to a safe house Bettina knew about that belonged to a doctor on the other side of the mountain. But it was rough terrain, where people said wolves still roamed.

At dusk Ettie often went outside. She wore a heavy coat and her shoes were stuffed with paper to keep her feet from freezing. She had dug a small path to a stream, and once there had broken through the ice. Ettie crouched down and concentrated, then dipped her hand in the water, ignoring the cold. She caught a fish that was asleep in the frigid water. She carried him up the path into the house and placed him in front of Bettina. Bettina stood up, stunned by the fish flopping about on the table, then she laughed and couldn’t stop.

“This is a miracle,” she declared.

Bettina cooked the fish for dinner, and after they’d eaten the two women felt they had been saved. Every day Ettie went fishing in the mornings, and most days she caught something. She was a better fisherman than she was a forger. The fish swam directly into her hands. She was coming back from the stream one afternoon when an unfamiliar car pulled up the road. Ettie stopped behind a tree, in a panic, until she recognized Arno. She ran through the snow to meet him. She was about to ask if he had thought to bring food with him, until she saw the look on his face. She knew that something had gone wrong. He grabbed his rucksack and they went up to the house. The snow was turning blue. Soon it would begin to melt. Arno had indeed brought food, and he unpacked some bread and cheese and sausage. Bettina was there, her hands covered with ink, and when she saw him she burst into tears. There was no easy way to say what had happened, an explosion gone wrong, the bomb in Jean’s hands. Claude was fine, but Victor had been badly burned and after a doctor had seen to his wounds, he’d insisted on being taken to a farm near a village about an hour away.

“They’ll come back,” Arno said.