The Nightingale

Isabelle followed the women in front of her. They passed through open gates, past a throng of skeletal men and women in gray-striped pajamas who looked at them through a chain-link fence.

“Juliette!”

She heard the name. At first it meant nothing to her, just another sound. Then she remembered.

She’d been Juliette. And Isabelle before that. And the Nightingale. Not just F-5491.

She glanced at the skeletal prisoners lined up behind the chain link.

Someone was waving at her. A woman: gray skin and a hooked, pointed nose and sunken eyes.

Eyes.

Isabelle recognized the tired, knowing gaze fixed on her.

Anouk.

Isabelle stumbled to the chain-link fence.

Anouk met her. Their fingers clasped through the ice-cold metal. “Anouk,” she said, hearing the break in her voice. She coughed a little, covered her mouth.

The sadness in Anouk’s dark eyes was unbearable. Her friend’s gaze cut to a building whose chimney puffed out putrid black smoke. “They’re killing us to cover what they’ve done.”

“Henri? Paul?… Gaëtan?”

“They were all arrested, Juliette. Henri was hanged in the town square. The rest…” She shrugged.

Isabelle heard an SS soldier yell at her. She backed away from the fence. She wanted to say something real to Anouk, something that would last, but she couldn’t do anything but cough. She covered her mouth and stumbled sideways, got back into line.

She saw her friend mouth “Good-bye,” and Isabelle couldn’t even respond. She was so, so tired of good-byes.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Even on this blue-skied March day, the apartment on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais felt like a mausoleum. Dust covered every surface and layered the floor. Vianne went to the windows and tore the blackout shades down, letting light into this room for the first time in years.

It looked like no one had been in this apartment for some time. Probably not since that day Papa had left to save Isabelle.

Most of the paintings were still on the walls and the furniture was in place—some of it had been hacked up for firewood and piled in the corner. An empty soup bowl and spoon sat on the dining room table. His volumes of self-published poetry lined the mantel. “It doesn’t look like she’s been here. We must try the Hôtel Lutetia.”

Vianne knew she should pack up her family’s things, claim these remnants of a different life, but she couldn’t do it now. She didn’t want to. Later.

She and Antoine and Sophie left the apartment. On the street outside, all around them were signs of recovery. Parisians were like moles, coming out into the sunshine after years in the dark. But still there were food lines everywhere and rationing and deprivation. The war might have been winding down—the Germans were retreating everywhere—but it wasn’t over yet.

They went to the Hôtel Lutetia, which had been home to the Abwehr under the occupation and was now a reception center for people returning from the camps.

Vianne stood in the elegant, crowded lobby. As she looked around, she felt sick to her stomach and grateful that she’d left Daniel with Mother Marie-Therese. The reception area was filled with rail-thin, bald, vacant-eyed people dressed in rags. They looked like walking cadavers. Moving among them were doctors and Red Cross workers and journalists.

A man approached Vianne, stuck a faded black-and-white photograph in her face. “Have you seen her? Last we heard she was at Auschwitz.”

The photograph showed a lovely girl standing beside a bicycle, smiling brightly. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.

“No,” Vianne said. “I’m sorry.”

The man was already walking away, looking as dazed as Vianne felt.

Everywhere Vianne looked she saw anxious families, photographs held in their shaking hands, begging for news of their loved ones. The wall to her right was covered with photographs and notes and names and addresses. The living looking for the lost. Antoine moved close to Vianne, put a hand on her shoulder. “We will find her, V.”

“Maman?” Sophie said. “Are you all right?”