All the Light There Was Read Online Free PDF Page A

materials we needed and for lunch at the school canteen. We both loved the Lycée Victor Hugo for its notebooks, French dictations, and even the exams, at which we excelled. I enjoyed wearing the required hat and gloves and putting on the beige smock with my name and the name of the school embroidered on it. The smock kept anyone from knowing if the dress underneath was fashionable or not or if the same dress was worn several times in one week.
    The war had marred the closeness of our school community. One of the most unsettling aspects of the Occupation was the way it made you suspicious of your neighbor. How could you truly know where people’s loyalties lay? When we had returned to school that fall, the noticeable absence of Mademoiselle Lévy, the beloved Latin and Greek teacher who had been dismissed because she was a Jew, had upset us all, but our dismay had been muted. We found out after the war that Mademoiselle Lévy had joined the Resistance soon after leaving us and that eventually the Nazis had decapitated her with an ax in Germany.
    I was sure the Rozenbaums felt the way our family did about the Occupation, but even so, it was important to be careful about what one said.
    “Seems as though there are more of these each morning.” I gestured at the chalk marks on the wall.
    Denise took my arm, moving her head closer to mine. “I’ve been counting them while we walk. I’ve passed eighty-six so far. Better than the stupid posters the Boches plaster on all the walls. ‘Put your trust in the German soldier.’ Not even Pétain believed that one.”
    “What would you think if you found chalk hidden under your brother’s bed?”
    “Or if he came home with chalk dust on his jacket cuffs? There are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of these marks. That’s a lot of chalk.”
    I imagined an army of boys deployed in pairs, moving through the lightless streets and scrawling defiantly on walls in each neighborhood.
    “You know what I dream about?” Denise asked after we crossed the boulevard.
    “Chocolate?”
    “I do dream about chocolate, but no—I dream about writing
traitor
on each photograph of Pétain in the lycée.”
    “That would be an all-day job.”
    “Some of the teachers admire him, you know,” Denise said. “He has made of his person a gift to the nation, and so on and so forth.”
    “Some of them seem to admire German efficiency.”
    “It can’t be more than a few,” Denise answered.
    “And it’s not the concierge!”
    The concierge of our lycée, the only man in the building, had lost a leg in World War I. Since school had opened in September, he had been stomping around on his wooden leg, grumbling under his breath about the Boches.
    “Not him. But I wonder about Madame Bourdet,” Denise said.
    Madame Bourdet, our math teacher, had a razor for a tongue. No one talked out of turn or daydreamed in her class. She berated offenders in the most elegant French.
    “Is it something she said?” I asked.
    Denise shook her head. “It’s just a feeling I have. I don’t think she likes Jews.”
    I said, “Oh, Denise. It’s not particular to Jews. She doesn’t like anyone.”
     
    One night a few weeks later, Missak was uncharacteristically late for dinner. My mother insisted on waiting, but after an hour my father ordered us to the table, where I stared down at my plate without appetite. Throughout the meal my aunt and my mother exchanged glances, and at the sound of footsteps on the landing, my mother flew from her chair to the door. It was only Mr. Lipski arriving home.
    My father threw down his fork. “I’ll go look for him.”
    He returned alone an hour later. “Zaven hasn’t seen him since they left school. Missak went off with a few other boys and Henri. I went to the Rozenbaums’, and Henri was home. He said he had left Missak and a boy named Marcel at the Parc de Belleville some hours ago. The park was empty. God only knows what mischief they’ve gotten themselves up