How Huge the Night Read online

“See if you can get on my back,” said Pierre. “Here—” He knelt in the snow. Julien climbed on, clumsily, gasping in sudden pain as his ankle caught Pierre’s coat. “You okay?” Pierre put his hands under Julien’s knees. “Does that hurt?”

  “No,” Julien whispered. Pierre stood, slowly, and began to walk, his gait labored, forcing his way through the snow. There was no sound but the swish of his boots and the keening of the wind; no world but the broad back and strong arms holding him, and his head on his enemy’s shoulder.

  He woke with a jolt. Pierre was squatting, trying to put him down. He slid off onto his good foot.

  “Gotta stop a minute,” Pierre gasped. “Get my breath.”

  “Yeah. Sorry …”

  “Oh, it’s all right.” Pierre stood for half a minute while his labored breathing slowed. He looked at the darkening sky and at the snow up past his knees and muttered, “Merde.” Then with a sideways glance at Julien, “Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for cussing when you’re saving my life!”

  Pierre laughed. Julien did too. They looked down at the snow.

  “Guess tomorrow’s off,” said Julien.

  “Yeah.” Another pause. “You wanna call it off or do it when you’re better?”

  Oh, what a stupid fight it would be. “Maybe it should be up to you.”

  Pierre grunted.

  “Um. But. Listen.” I want you to know the truth. That’s what I want. “I really didn’t tell on you. Honest. Either time.” Pierre gave him an unreadable glance. “Okay, the first time there was a kind of accident—”

  “Accident?”

  “I came home, and your mom was in my living room! And man, she’s really good at jumping to conclusions.”

  Pierre snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He looked away into the white for a long moment. “She gave me double my share of chores for a month.”

  “That’s not right. When you didn’t even start it. I told her you didn’t—”

  “Oh, if I didn’t deserve it this time, I will next time. Ask her.”

  A lump was forming in Julien’s throat. No. You deserve … something else. “You sure she’s right about you?”

  Pierre looked at him. In the dusk, in the snow, it was hard to see his eyes.

  “I really didn’t tell on you, Pierre. I swear.”

  Pierre held out his big hand. Julien took it in his numb fingers, and they shook.

  The swish of skis on snow woke him, and voices. “I’m sorry, sir. I just went for a walk. Yes, sir.” A man’s deep voice, indistinct. Then, “He’s hurt his leg.” A circle of golden light on the snow. A stocky figure, his legs lit by the lantern in his hand, his face dark.

  “I can carry him now,” said the deep voice. Monsieur Rostin. “Anyone looking for him?”

  Julien lifted his head with an effort. “My family—I fell behind …”

  “Headed to town?”

  “Yeah.”

  The lantern light bobbed crazily as Monsieur Rostin bent down. “Here.” He was pushing his skis toward Pierre on the snow. “Go into town. If you don’t meet the Losiers before your uncle Maurice’s place, get him to come with you and go tell them the boy’s safe with us. But don’t come home tonight. D’you hear? Stay with Maurice.”

  “I can make it back—” Pierre began, but his father cut him off.

  “Sure you can. But you do what I say. I want you back tomorrow. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Julien felt himself lifted, laid across Monsieur Rostin’s powerful shoulders like a sack of potatoes. A chaos of white and dark and bobbing lantern light, silence; then warm windows, all golden brown, and a door opening, light spilling out, the crackling of a fire. Hands shifting him, arms under his body. Then he felt himself falling, not into light, but into darkness.

  He was floating in the sea, the warm sea, in Italy. No. He was lying on the shore by a driftwood fire. What was that sound of pots and pans clanging? The slamming of a cupboard door. Julien opened his eyes.

  He’d never seen this place before.

  It was beautiful. Small, full of lamps and firelight, warm. A little kitchen with a big iron stove, a shape in a gray dress bending over it. He was on a rug. His fingers brushed old stone. He turned his head and saw the fire, and tears welled up in his eyes. The red and the gold and the little blue flames licking the wood, washing the whiteness from his mind; life flaming bright against the great dead world outside. He had never known what beauty was before.

  “Where does it hurt?” It was Monsieur Rostin. He was beautiful too.

  Julien’s wet coat and sweater were pulled off; the fire was warm on his bare skin. Monsieur Rostin prodded and squeezed his leg for where it hurt, got towels full of snow from Madame Rostin, whom he called Ginette. Imagine. Ginette, like a little girl in pigtails. His leg was packed with snow that stung with cold and wrapped with towels; he was given a swallow of something fiery, then a bowl of warm milk. “Mon pauvre petit,” said Ginette.

  He slept.

  Julien woke in the dark with a single thought: I’m alive.

  It was quiet. The fire was banked and barely glowed; there were deep shadows. The hush was unnerving. The burle had moaned around the house and rattled the shutters for hours, and he’d hardly heard it; now it was still. It was the silence that had woken him.

  He was alive.

  He had been rescued. And he had cried. In front of Pierre Rostin.

  Julien closed his eyes again and pressed his palms against them. In front of Pierre—

  Pierre who had looked at him and said, It’s going to be okay. And said, I think I can carry you.

  For a moment he writhed.

  In that moment all was clear as day inside him, unbearable. The dim fire-glow warmed and softened the bare room around him, but in his head was a horrible brilliance that lit, with sharp-edged shadows, everything. How he’d prayed and hated, how he’d hoped to win, and how he’d lost. How it shamed him that Pierre had carried him, Pierre the Good Samaritan, safe as in the arms of God. And what that meant about him.

  Julien swallowed, a trail of broken-glass pain down his throat. He tried not to swallow again, and failed.

  He turned away from the shadows. He propped himself on one elbow and reached for the woodpile, got another log onto the fire. A shower of sparks rose, and the flames flared and lit up this place he was alive in, this bare little house.

  A table with two benches. Against the wall, a wooden hutch with doors; no other cupboard in the room. In the far corner, a woodstove with a sink beside it; and on his right, four straight-backed chairs. The living room. Bare walls. No books that he could see. No radio.

  No, there were books on the hutch. Two of them. A big family Bible and a brown almanac; and two framed pictures. One old daguerreotype reflecting the fire in its metal surface; two dim figures, sitting stiffly upright. The other was André in his tank-driver’s cap and leather jacket, standing tall.

  The truth rested on Julien’s shoulders, waiting, like a huge and heavy hand. The truth was it shamed him, that Pierre had saved his life; that Pierre had spoken to him gently, as he cried; that Pierre had been, most truly, the hero. It shamed him because he had already decided who was who in this story, and Pierre was the bad guy, and Julien was the hero with the weapons of love. Because he’d wanted to come out on top. Because that was what he’d thought God’s weapons were good for. The truth whispered itself without sound; the truth filled the room like the fire’s light. You cannot attack with the weapons of love.

  He bowed his head.

  The fire breathed warmth on him, and he lifted his eyes to it, the blue and red and gold. God was stranger than he had ever known; strange and terrible and kind.

  You carried me. He whispered aloud the words that stuck in his throat. “I was wrong. I am sorry.” The firelight danced in his tears, and the world was red and golden, and he raised his head. “God. Can you forgive me. Please.”

  And the fire burned, and
the dark hung over him in the rafters just out of reach, like someone looking at him from the shadows, where he could not see. Gentle as a mother, more commanding than a father, wild as the storm, and wise as Grandpa’s eyes. Warm eyes deep with years, the strength of ancient days. God. Could God be like Grandpa? Someone he could come to—before it came to this—someone to whom he could say, I need help, and sit down and tell the truth about himself and—and learn to carve?

  Oh God. Will you teach me?

  Because he wouldn’t do it right, not next time either. Because the weapons of love were too big for him. “That’s a pretty advanced project, mon grand,” he whispered into the silence. The log popped in the fire, and its two halves fell apart from each other, each one dancing, flaming with life against the dark.

  Pierre came at dawn with the doctor and Grandpa and a sled. Papa came after to haul him up the hill toward home.

  Monsieur and Madame Rostin stood at the door of their little house, its walls muffled deep in snow, so bright in the sun he could barely look. “It’s nothing,” Monsieur Rostin was saying to Papa, who was shaking his hand again and again, not letting go.

  Julien lay wrapped in so many blankets he could hardly stir, watching the snow-powdered branches move past against the deep blue sky. He could hear the heavy breathing of Benjamin and Papa pulling, and Pierre pushing from behind. The branches ended; the sky broke free into endless blue; they were almost home. Julien leaned back till he could see Pierre’s cloudy breath and whispered hoarsely through the pain in his throat. “Hey, Pierre. I always wondered.” He couldn’t see his face. “What’s it like being a hero?”

  He heard an odd noise behind him. “Not too bad,” said Pierre.

  From over Mama’s wild crushing hug at the door, Julien caught a glimpse of Pierre before he turned away. He was grinning from ear to ear.

  Chapter 16

  Woman

  The younger of the dark women was Marita. Strong cheekbones and flashing black eyes. Then there was the old one, whom everyone called Grandmother, and obeyed. Gustav was in awe of her. When they’d first come to get Niko, Grandmother had slung her over her shoulder—“like a sack of potatoes, Nina!”—and carried her to the camp.

  It was Grandmother who brought her the dress.

  She laid it on the foot of the bed and stood there, fixing Niko with a sharp look from her good eye, and said something extremely commanding in Romany. Then in Italian, which didn’t help. Still, the voice and the dress said it: You’re all better. Get dressed. Now.

  “Gustav,” Niko whispered. “What’s Italian for pants?”

  “Bit late to fool ’em now.”

  “Gustav, I mean it. I’m not wearing that thing.”

  Gustav cleared his throat, said something halting in Italian. The old woman snapped out something in Italian or Romany or both about how she’d have no girl wearing pants in her wagon or some such thing and dropped a commanding finger at the dress, and Niko folded her arms and the old woman started shouting. Niko sat up in bed and shouted back in Yiddish. “My father is dead! You hear? He’s dead, and he told me to cut my hair and burn my papers and call myself Niko, and you people may have saved my life, but you’re not my father and you’re not my mother either! I’ve done what my father told me since the day I left home, and that saved my life too, so I don’t want to hear what a nice girl does or doesn’t wear, I want my pants!” The old woman was looking at her with hard, shocked, angry eyes, and Niko’s eyes blazed back at her. Gustav was staring at Niko, his mouth open, something oddly like joy in his face. The children were staring too. Marita stood in the doorway, her dark eyes bright. Then she was gone.

  Marita came back with Niko’s old pants, clean, off the line. Grandmother turned and left. Gustav left too. Marita gave Niko a long look, opened a drawer, and pulled out the long band of cloth Niko had used to wrap around her chest. Clean and folded. Her mouth fell open at the sight.

  Marita smiled.

  She was well. She was Niko. She walked on her crutches beside the wagons with Gustav, hearing the horses’ harnesses jangle, breathing the cold clean air. She sat inside the wagons, rocking with their movement, playing with the children. “What’s this?” she would ask in Italian. “Cos’ è?” And Drina and little Mari would laugh and tell her, and she would repeat it and they would laugh again. She shared their mattress at night; Marita was their mother; Marita, with her deep black eyes and her loud laugh, who had showed her how to tie the cloth round her chest twice as tight as before. Marita who had saved her life.

  When the wagons stopped, Marita would clap her hands and marshal her children: Gustav and the boys to go fetch firewood, Niko and the girls to chop potatoes, vegetables, anything—meat if they were lucky—into the big soup pot over the fire. And it was by Marita’s campfire they sat when they were done, and warmed their feet and ate their fill. And people came and went around them, dozens of people old and young, sitting on folding chairs and logs and the ground, laughing and talking in Italian and Romany and both, interrupting each other, slapping each other on the back, their laughing faces lit by the fire. And then maybe someone would start singing. And the women would jump up and dance, fast and faster, graceful and wild. Sometimes they almost made Niko want to be a girl.

  Chapter 17

  End of the Line

  Julien spent his first week in bed, burning and freezing, his throat raw as meat and almost as bloody. He’d never felt so awful in his life. He tossed and rolled through fever-dreams of white, crawling through snow toward lantern light that receded into the night. Then he was in his room again, Mama bending over him, saying, Drink this. Then he was gone again.

  Then he was back. He woke, and blinked, and outside his window were huge clouds lit brilliant white against the blue of the sky, and he stared and stared at them. He was alive.

  He spent his second week in bed getting very bored.

  Mama said she was glad his fever had broken but he wasn’t healed yet, and he was going to stay put. Benjamin brought him the homework from school and sat on his bed and helped with his math. Grandpa brought up a knife and some wood and started him carving a cat rolled into a ball. He carved, he did homework, he wrote to Vincent. He prayed.

  Will you teach me? he’d said. As if he believed for a moment that God would talk to him, that praying wasn’t like sending a letter at all. Maybe God had been talking to him, in the snow, in the fire, in Pierre’s face; maybe the storm was God’s terrible speech, the warmth of the fire his love. But what was he saying now, in the blue bedspread, the white walls, day after day?

  Still, there was something there. He wasn’t eyeing God across the room anymore, like him and Benjamin the day he’d arrived, wondering what they could possibly have to say to each other. Now there was something to talk about.

  He read the gospel of Matthew, then Mark. By the time he’d finished, he knew one thing: Jesus was cool. Wore himself out healing people and walked on water and wasn’t afraid to say anything to anyone. All that yelling and flipping tables in the temple, and the next week they killed him—was that what they killed him for? Was that loving your enemies? Confronting them and not caring what they did to you? He’d imagined something … nicer. Not that Jesus couldn’t do nice with sick little girls and all. He wondered if just anybody could do the yelling part, or if you had to be the Son of God.

  He prayed, Teach me, still, like a letter, like renewing his application. He prayed for Pierre, that this time they’d actually end up friends, and for Henri, that … that anything. Whatever God had in mind. He didn’t know.

  By the third week in bed, Julien had run out of things to talk to God about. He’d finished his cat carving, he’d finished the Gospels, and he wanted out of this stupid bed. He told Mama this. She smiled. “Sounds like you’re going to live.”

  Downstairs, Magali and Benjamin had their homework spread out by the fire. “Hello, long-lost brother!” said Magali. “What news?”

  “What news? My walls are white, and there are
four of them.”

  “How’s the leg?”

  He pulled up his pant cuff and showed the ankle. The network of angry, reddish-purple bruises had died down to faint dark-brown and yellow, fading away under the skin.

  “Ew,” said Magali.

  “How ’bout you?”

  Magali vented a long sigh. “Rosa’s not talking to me. ’Cause according to her I like Lucy better. She could try letting me say who I like. You know what she said to me yesterday?”

  “I thought she wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Hush. She said, ‘Go to—’”

  “She didn’t!”

  “‘Go to Ireland!’”

  Julien and Benjamin burst out laughing. “It’s not funny,” said Magali. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Can’t you invite her to hang out with you and Lucy? Can’t you all be friends?”

  Magali shot him a look. “Oh, I forgot how much you know. Mister ‘girls are different and that’s why you have to help them.’”

  “Oh,” he said, his face warm, “shut up.”

  Roland came by and stood in the doorway, wiping his boots and looking awkward till Julien offered him a drink of Grandpa’s strawberry sirop. They sat at the kitchen table, watching the reddish swirls of concentrate dissolve in their glasses, and began to talk. Julien told his story from start to finish; the story of how he’d learned that he could die. Roland was nodding soberly. “Heard your fight’s off.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Speaking of … all that. I wanted to tell you.” Roland looked out the window. “I feel stupid. About, you know, not hanging out with you in homeroom. It was … stupid.”

  Was stupid. Julien’s heart lifted, just a little.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Please.”