Mathieu stayed out of the way and didn’t show up until dinner. Sven couldn’t bring himself to think about their quarrel. He was still too shaken and frightened because they’d been seen.
After dinner, Hugo went outside to carry on working. Sven was about to join him when Juliette asked him to stay for a while.
She began to clear away the dishes. “I saw the two of you in the river earlier.”
Sven’s heart was pounding. A wave of relief flooded his body. It wasn’t an outsider who had spotted them. No one was going to report them to the police. Then the shame hit him. Then the guilt. Then the fear. Juliette would never report her son, but what if she reported him? Maybe she thought that Sven had led Mathieu astray?
“I’m so sorry, I ... I can turn myself in to the police or the Nazis. I don’t want anything to happen to Mathieu.” He tried to pull himself together. “It was my fault. It was my fault.”
Juliette stopped what she was doing. “Calm down—nobody is going to report anybody, and I know it wasn’tyourfault. I know my son, the hopeless romantic. I also know that he was the one who put you in danger.”
“I should have had more sense.”
Juliette nodded. “Yes, you should have.” She pulled out a chair, indicated that Sven should take a seat, then sat down opposite him. “But love makes us indiscreet. Love makes us crazy.” She smiled. “After we heard about Gerard’s death, a part of Mathieu died too. But he’s come back to life since you arrived. He’s himself again. It’s so good to see, and I’m so grateful to you, Sven.”
He didn’t say anything.
“But what you did today was dangerous, and I’m well aware that Mathieu doesn’t always consider the consequences of his actions.”
“I won’t do it again, and I won’t allow Mathieu to take off like that.”
“That’s not your responsibility. But Mathieu listens to you. You make him feel safe.” Saying that, she smiled again, wider this time. “The two of you took a huge risk today. Even if love is what enables us all to survive right now.”
“What we were doing, Mathieu and I, it wasn’t ...” Sven searched for the right words. “I mean, we’re not ...”
Juliette shook her head. “We don’t need to talk about that. With all the terrible things that are going on, how can tenderness between two people be wrong? Love is life-affirming. It’s what makes the world go round. How can it be bad for two people to love each other?”
Sven took in what she said; it sounded so straightforward, so self-evident a truth. A million miles from her describing him as having a disgusting, revolting sickness, which is what Sven had imagined everyone else thought.
“Was that why you joined the Foreign Legion?” Juliette asked.
He nodded. “I thought it would cleanse me, that I’d change. And it gave me a new place to be. I was able to get away from home, where I was no longer welcome.”
Mathieu considered the large map in front of him. It would be used to help another family escape from Bordeaux, from occupied France. Mathieu and his parents never knew the names of the people they helped, so there was no risk of them revealing anyone’s identities if they were arrested and tortured as a way to make them talk. Whoever they were helping now could easily be someone he knew. He’d had classmates who came from Jewish backgrounds, and it was strange to think that none of them were still around. Some had been sent to labor camps where they might well have died. Others had gone undergroundor managed to flee. Mathieu and his parents could have been involved in making that happen—he really hoped they were.
He sighed. He knew that Sven thought he’d been careless and rash, but Mathieu lived in these conditions all the time, just like Sven did. He just tried to handle it in a different way, in order to keep from going under completely. If he worried as much as Sven about everything that had happened, he wouldn’t be able to cope.
Gerard.
Friends and acquaintances they hadn’t heard from for months.
Had they been deported?
Killed?
And then there was the loss of his own personal freedom.
The constant fear.
Mathieu’s way of dealing with it all was to find those glimmers of light in the endless darkness, like searching for a twinkling star on a cloudy night. Recently Sven had been Mathieu’s star, the source of his happiness.
The candle flickered in a draft. The hatch opened and Sven clambered down, moved toward Mathieu.
“I’m sorry about our argument earlier.”
“Is that an apology?” Mathieu asked. “Because if so, it’s a terrible one.”
“No, it’s not an apology. I meant everything I said, even though I was angry. We have to be careful.”
