The next morning Isabelle blinked awake to see sunlight gilding the leaves rustling overhead.
She sat up, resmoothing the skirt that had hiked up in her sleep, revealing lacy white garters and ruined silk stockings.
“Don’t do that on my account.”
Isabelle glanced to her left and saw Gaëtan coming toward her. For the first time, she saw him clearly. He was lanky, wiry as an apostrophe mark, and dressed in clothes that appeared to have come from a beggar’s bin. Beneath a fraying cap, his face was scruffy and sharp, unshaven. He had a wide brow and a pronounced chin and deep-set gray eyes that were heavily lashed. The look in those eyes was as sharp as the point of his chin, and revealed a kind of clarified hunger. Last night she’d thought it was how he’d looked at her. Now she saw that it was how he looked at the world.
He didn’t scare her, not at all. Isabelle was not like her sister, Vianne, who was given to fear and anxiety. But neither was Isabelle a fool. If she was going to travel with this man, she had better get a few things straight.
“So,” she said. “Prison.”
He stared at her, raised a black eyebrow, as if to say, Scared yet? “A girl like you wouldn’t know anything about it. I could tell you it was a Jean Valjean sort of stay and you would think it was romantic.”
It was the kind of thing she heard all the time. It circled back to her looks, as most snide comments did. Surely a pretty blond girl had to be shallow and dim-witted. “Were you stealing food to feed your family?”
He grinned crookedly. It gave him a lopsided look, with one side of his smile hiking up farther than the other. “No.”
“Are you dangerous?”
“It depends. What do you think of communists?” “Ah. So you were a political prisoner.”
“Something like that. But like I said, a nice girl like you wouldn’t know anything about survival.”
“You’d be surprised the things I know, Gaëtan. There is more than one kind of prison.”
“Is there, pretty girl? What do you know about it?” “What was your crime?”
“I took things that didn’t belong to me. Is that enough of an answer?” Thief.
“And you got caught.” “Obviously.”
“That isn’t exactly comforting, Gaëtan. Were you careless?” “Gaët,” he said, moving toward her.
“I haven’t decided if we’re friends yet.”
He touched her hair, let a few strands coil around his dirty finger. “We’re friends. Bank on it. Now let’s go.”
When he reached for her hand, it occurred to her to refuse him, but she didn’t. They walked out of the forest and back onto the road, merging once again into the crowd, which opened just enough to let them in and then closed around them. Isabelle hung on to Gaëtan with one hand and held her suitcase in the other.
They walked for miles.
Automobiles died around them. Cartwheels broke. Horses stopped and couldn’t be made to move again. Isabelle felt herself becoming listless and dull, exhausted by heat and dust and thirst. A woman limped along beside her, crying, her tears black with dirt and grit, and then that woman was replaced by an older woman in a fur coat who was sweating profusely and seemed to be wearing every piece of jewelry she owned.
The sun grew stronger, became stiflingly, staggeringly hot. Children whined, women whimpered. The acrid, stuffy scent of body odor and sweat
filled the air, but Isabelle had grown so used to it that she barely noticed other people’s smell or her own.
It was almost three o’clock, the hottest part of the day, when they saw a regiment of French soldiers walking alongside them, dragging their rifles. The soldiers moved in a disorganized way, not in formation, not smartly. A tank rumbled beside them, crunching over belongings left in the road; on it several whey-faced French soldiers sat slumped, their heads hung low.
Isabelle pulled free of Gaëtan and stumbled through the crowd, elbowing her way to the regiment. “You’re going the wrong way!” she screamed, surprised to hear how hoarse her voice was.
Gaëtan pounced on a soldier, shoved him back so hard he stumbled and crashed into a slow-moving tank. “Who is fighting for France?”
The bleary-eyed soldier shook his head. “No one.” In a glint of silver, Isabelle saw the knife Gaëtan held to the man’s throat. The soldier’s gaze narrowed. “Go ahead. Do it. Kill me.”
Isabelle pulled Gaëtan away. In his eyes, she saw a rage so deep it scared her. He could do it; he could kill this man by slitting his throat. And she thought: They opened the prisons. Was he worse than a thief?
“Gaët?” she said.
Her voice got through to him. He shook his head as if to clear it and lowered his knife. “Who is fighting for us?” he said bitterly, coughing at the dust.
“We will be,” she said. “Soon.”
Behind her, an automobile honked its horn. Aah-ooh-gah. Isabelle ignored it. Automobiles were no better than walking anymore—the few that were still running were moving only at the whim of the people around them; like flotsam in the reeds of a muddy river. “Come on.” She pulled him away from the demoralized regiment.
They walked on, still holding hands, but as the hours passed, Isabelle noticed a change in Gaëtan. He rarely spoke and didn’t smile.
At each town, the crowd thinned. People stumbled into Artenay, Saran, and Orléans, their eyes alight with desperation as they reached into handbags and pockets and wallets for money they hoped to be able to spend.
Still, Isabelle and Gaëtan kept going. They walked all day and fell into
exhausted sleep in the dark and woke again to walk the next day. By their third day, Isabelle was numb with exhaustion. Oozing red blisters had formed between most of her toes and on the balls of her feet and every step was painful. Dehydration gave her a terrible, pounding headache and hunger gnawed at her empty stomach. Dust clogged her throat and eyes and made her cough constantly.
She stumbled past a freshly dug grave on the side of the road, marked by a crudely hammered-together wooden cross. Her shoe caught on something—a dead cat—and she staggered forward, almost falling to her knees. Gaëtan steadied her.
She clung to his hand, remained stubbornly upright. How much later was it that she heard something?
An hour? A day?
Bees. They buzzed around her head; she batted them away. She licked her dried lips and thought of pleasant days in the garden, with bees buzzing about.
No.
Not bees.
She knew that sound.
She stopped, frowning. Her thoughts were addled. What had she been trying to remember?
The droning grew louder, filling the air, and then the aeroplanes appeared, six or seven of them, looking like small crucifixes against the blue and cloudless sky.
Isabelle tented a hand over her eyes, watching the aeroplanes fly closer, lower …
Someone yelled, “It’s the Boches!”
In the distance, a stone bridge exploded in a spray of fire and stone and smoke.
The aeroplanes dropped lower over the crowd.
Gaëtan threw Isabelle to the ground and covered her body with his. The world became pure sound: the roar of the aeroplane engines, the rat-ta-ta-tat of machine-gun fire, the beat of her heart, people screaming. Bullets ate up the grass in rows, people screamed and cried out. Isabelle saw a woman fly into the air like a rag doll and hit the ground in a heap.
Trees snapped in half and fell over, people yelled. Flames burst into existence. Smoke filled the air.
And then … quiet. Gaëtan rolled off her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She pushed the hair from her eyes and sat up.
There were mangled bodies everywhere, and fires, and billowing black smoke. People were screaming, crying, dying.
An old man moaned, “Help me.”
Isabelle crawled to him on her hands and knees, realizing as she got close that the ground was marshy with his blood. A stomach wound gaped through his ripped shirt; entrails bulged out of the torn flesh.
“Maybe there’s a doctor” was all she could think of to say. And then she heard it again. The droning.
“They’re coming back.” Gaëtan pulled her to her feet. She almost slipped in the blood-soaked grass. Not far away a bomb hit, exploding into fire. Isabelle saw a toddler in soiled nappies standing by a dead woman, crying.
She stumbled toward the toddler. Gaëtan yanked her sideways. “I have to help—”
“Your dying won’t help that kid,” he growled, pulling her so hard it hurt. She stumbled along beside him in a daze. They dodged discarded automobiles and bodies, most of which were ripped beyond repair, bleeding, bones sticking out through clothes.
At the edge of town, Gaëtan pulled Isabelle into a small stone church. Others were already there, crouching in corners, hiding amid the pews, hugging their loved ones close.
Aeroplanes roared overhead, accompanied by the stuttering shriek of machine guns. The stained-glass window shattered; bits of colored glass clattered to the floor, slicing through skin on the way down. Timbers cracked, dust and stones fell. Bullets ran across the church, nailing arms and legs to the floor. The altar exploded.
Gaëtan said something to her, and she answered, or she thought she did, but she wasn’t sure, and before she could figure it out, another bomb whistled, fell, and the roof over her head exploded.
