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  Still, I wondered how brave I would be facing the world without Zizou at my side.

  I did learn to manage without her and slowly made friends. Susanne was in Classique, with emphasis on Latin and Greek. I was in Moderne, stressing math and science—it had been my luck that the Lycée’s Directrice and my parents decided that, math being my weak point, I must be schooled in it. How logical was this? How lucky could I be?

  Math didn’t make any sense to me. Math homework and tests were a nightmare. Reading the problems was like looking at a blank wall. Fortunately my other friend and classmate, Monique, excelled in math and, bless her heart, allowed me to copy her homework minutes before it was due.

  I enjoyed English, loved French, and couldn’t wait for the weekly Greek Mythology class.

  “Why can’t I change to Classique?” I asked.

  “Latin and Greek are dead languages that will not put food on your plate.”

  “But, Pa, I’d be very good at it.” I added with passion, “I know I would.”

  “The choice was made for your own good.”

  So I limped through la sixième and shuffled through the beginning of la cinquième.

  Quarantine

  One mid-January night of my thirteenth year, I tossed and turned in bed. Math homework was due in the morning and Monique was home sick. God, please, make me sick too so I won’t have to go to school without my homework done.

  Zizou fumed. “Stop tossing. I want to sleep.” She pulled the blankets her way. “And stop hogging the blankets. I’m cold.”

  I curled up on my side and cradled my misery in the tight space between my knees and elbows.

  When I woke up the next morning, my forehead didn’t even feel warm. Darn, pas de fièvre.

  I dragged myself to the kitchen wishing something awful would happen to keep me home. I kissed Maman on both cheeks, “Bonjour, Ma.”

  “Bonjour ma fille.” She felt my forehead. “Tu es fievreuse.”

  My brows shot up in surprise. I didn’t feel feverish when I woke up.

  She held my chin. “Stick your tongue out.” She opened the front of my pajamas, examined my torso, and ordered me to bed.

  On the way to my room, I heard Ma say four more times, “Stick your tongue out,” then she sent six-year-old Riri to my bed. She took our temperatures and compared our symptoms with those described in her home-care bible—the medical book she consulted when we fell ill.

  The heavy leather-bound volume described symptoms of what seemed like every disease and deformity in the world, supported by large color plate illustrations—the pictorial details so vivid that whenever we peeked at them, Zizou and I squirmed and scratched for half an hour.

  “Scarlatine,” Maman announced.

  Scarlet fever kept Riri and me en quarantaine—four weeks of isolation in our parents’ bedroom during which we had contact with no one but them.

  After a while of such isolated, close living, Riri started to call me “Maman,” which both flattered and touched me somewhere deep in my belly.

  To make time move forward, I read and did school work Papa collected from my teachers. He brought in books and games. Still, days were long and nights, endless. Well, Nanna, you prayed for it. Didn’t you?

  More and more often, I got up and stared out the window. In the late January daylight, the trees’ bare branches scraped the wintry sky, and the fields down the road and weeds lay flat and dull.

  Even the pear and fig trees at the edge of the back garden stood barren of fruit and leaves. But the large laurel, darker green than in full summer, bore leaves that still perfumed Maman’s cooking. And, best of all, it held a secret ….

  Upon reading stories about the Barbary Coast corsairs and Sinbad the Sailor, I had become convinced that a treasure chest lay buried among the roots of our laurel tree. I was so certain of its existence that it might as well have stood in the yard, open for the entire world to behold, brimming with diamond tiaras, ruby rings, streaming garlands of pearls, and jewels of opal, emerald, and sapphire. They sparkled in my mind’s eye as brightly as in a full August sun.

  I didn’t need to dig among the roots or pry open the lid to prove it lay there. It was enough for me to know.

  I wanted to share my secret with my little Riri. But he played in his pen or slept, hugging his cowboy hat. Well, he wouldn’t understand what “treasure” means, anyway ….

  The blessed day came when the quarantine was lifted. Hungry for fresh air, I ventured out the front door to the perron and its usual commanding view of the compound across the street and the surrounding fields. Today, a world oddly void of people and sounds greeted me and a bleak sky cloaked the still air with an eerie yellow haze. The ghostly mood filled me with a hard-to-define dread until a faint motion on the other side of the compound wall across the street breached the odd gloom. A glimpse of the old Fatima’s solid frame vanishing behind her beaded door curtain.

  Several families with common ties occupied separate quarters of the enclave. Most had known my mother since she was born. Fatima, the oldest living resident, owned a few cows she pampered like kittens. In return, they let her draw milk from their meager tits and provided the dung she shaped into flat patties and plastered to her adobe walls, drying them out for use as fuel for her canoun at cooking time.

  * * *

  Every morning Fatima waddled across the street on her bowed legs and stout bare feet to our front door with her milk pail. We returned the previous day’s empty container and counted change into the palm of her large hand, rough as a man’s. She smiled her strong-toothed smile and dropped the change inside the bosom of her flowered dress.

  Liver spots further marred the freckled complexion of a true redhead, the skin deeply crevassed and thick as the hide of her cows. As old as she was, she was still a force of nature, and when I visualized her as a young woman, I imagined the beauty and might of an Amazon.

  “Tomorrow, I make fromage blanc. Your mother, she want some?” Fatima would ask.

  “Ma, do we want du fromage blanc?”

  Sprinkled with sugar, Fatima’s home-made cottage cheese was the best summer dessert ever, and Ma knew we wouldn’t leave her in peace until she said yes. She’d call from the kitchen, “Fatima, can you bring four fromages?”

  “You sure you don’t want six, Elise?”

  After a beat, Ma would say, “All right, bring me six.”

  Fatima would waddle heavily down the stairs, the empty milk pail swinging from her fingertips, a glad smile on her face.

  * * *

  While, from the perron, I watched Fatima’s lengths of beaded curtain sway behind her, Doctor Laurie’s car drove up and parked at the roadside along our yard.

  He shined a light in our eyes, checked our tongues, and after pronouncing little Riri fit to return to kindergarten and me to step into the second semester of la cinquième, he knocked on Pépé Honninger’s bedroom door.

  “Is Pépé sick, doctor?” I asked.

  Doctor Laurie patted my cheek. “We are trying to find out, Nanna,” he said, and opened the door.

  I tried to follow him in, but he gently pushed me back. Nonetheless, before the door closed, I stole a quick glimpse at Pépé. A very pale and gaunt Pépé. What is wrong with him?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Shots

  June, 1957

  “If you please—draw me a sheep!”

  “What?”

  “Draw me a sheep!”

  It was Saturday. I celebrated the first day of summer holidays and my upcoming fourteenth birthday sitting on the floor, leaning against the foot of my bed, a book open in my lap. I had reached the part where plane-crash survivor Saint Exupery meets the little prince in the desert when Papa’s car turned into the driveway. Strange. Every Saturday, his day off as police investigator, Pa checked on the work his workers had accomplished during the week. He wasn’t due back home from the cemetery until much later. Strange ….

  I closed my Little Prince book, met Papa in the corr
idor, and trailed him into the kitchen. Riri, who had spent the day with Pa, followed. Our father’s pallor under the suntan, shortness of breath, and Riri’s blue eyes big as Delft saucers, all suggested something bad.

  Maman ogled her husband and seven-year-old son. “What happened?”

  “They killed Gorman.”

  Maman’s hands dripped with water as she filled two glasses at the faucet and set them in front of Papa and Riri. “When? Where?” She wiped her hands on her apron and pulled out chairs for them. “Why?”

  “At the cemetery, Ma. And Papa ran out with his gun,” Riri squeaked, the high pitch of his voice betraying his nervous excitement.

  We all zoomed in on Papa like periscopes. He took a sip of water and put the glass down. “I was at the shop, planning the next job with Debbah, when I heard gunshots outside. Someone yelled, ‘They shot Gorman.’ ”

  “Oui, Ma,” Riri cut in, “and Pa drew his gun and ran out.”

  Papa snarled, “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the shop with Debbah?”

  Maman blanched. “Why? Did he follow you?”

  “I didn’t realize it until—”

  “I wanted to make sure nothing happened to you, Pa,” Riri broke in again.

  Papa’s dark look silenced him. “I ran to see what happened to Gorman and bumped into two armed terrorists running out of his shop—”

  “They saw Papa and shot at him”—Riri’s eyes pulsed a darker blue—“and at me, too.”

  We listened, mesmerized. Mireille spoke for all of us, “I’m glad they didn’t hurt you, Pa, and Riri.”

  Papa took up where Riri had left off. “Their shots went wide—”

  Still wound-up, Riri crooked his thumb and pointed his index finger at Papa. “Peeeve. Peeeve,” imitating the sound of ricocheting bullets.

  “Stop that. RIGHT NOW,” Maman warned.

  Mireille cut in, “Then what happened, Pa?”

  “I took aim at them, but a bus showed up and let out a group of Arab women and children and the terrorists took cover among them. They took potshots at me from there and I couldn’t return fire without the risk of hurting civilians.” Papa took another sip of water. “I’m lucky. They must have run out of ammunition because they fled.”

  “That’s when Papa went after them,” said Riri.

  Zizou batted her eyelashes. “Did you get them, Pa?”

  “Merde, non. While I neared the cluster of civilians, I stopped, thinking, ‘Hey Vincent, you old son of a bitch, what if another of these armed fuckers is hiding among them? He’d drop your ass before you’d know it.’ ”

  A disappointed Yves asked, “So, you didn’t kill them, Pa?”

  Papa studied his four-year-old son with hard eyes then went on, “The crowd dispersed and I walked back to check on Gorman, but discovered,” he gave Riri a pointed look, “that this little shit had been standing at my side all along.” He shifted in his seat and lifted his arm to backhand Riri, but changed his mind. “When I tell you to hide, you hide.” He stared at each of us in turn. “Compris?” His green eyes seethed with anger. “Or I’ll beat the shit out of you all.”

  We all nodded in a hurry.

  “Now,” Papa’s green gaze stabbed four-year-old Yves. “Non, I didn’t ‘kill’ them. First, had I gone on shooting, I would have hurt innocent women and children. Second, by going after them I could have fallen victim to an ambush.” He asked Yves, “Do you know what an ambush is?”

  The kid bobbed his head. “It’s like when Riri hides and jumps on me when I don’t know he is there.”

  Papa nodded “Third, this is real life, mon fils. Not a cowboy movie. One kills only to defend one’s life or protect someone else’s.”

  Maman laid her hand on Papa’s. “I’m sorry Gorman is dead. Do we know why they did it?”

  Papa’s neck pulsed and he swallowed hard. Monsieur Gorman had been his patron and friend. He shook his head. “Because he was there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In the course of the next two years, bad times followed good times and good times followed … nothing old. Nothing new. Until, something really new heralded the year of my sixteenth birthday

  Papa, Please

  May, 1960

  During the weeks leading up to my sixteenth birthday, my father boasted, “Ma fille passed le Certificat d’Étude.” He offered rounds of toasts and threw a theatrical hand in the air. “How could it be otherwise?” he bragged. “She has her father’s brains.”

  Sure I do—fair-weather friend!

  The Examination of Primary Education diploma was promptly added to the box containing the other important family documents. Having no other recourse, I basked in Papa’s pleasure and waited impatiently for the forthcoming summer holidays.

  The week before the last day of school, my friend Susanne said, “My parents agreed to give a party to celebrate passing le Certificat. Would you like to come?”

  Would I like to come? I mean, to go? Hell yes. Overwhelmed with the idea of my first party—nobody had ever invited me before—“Oui,” spilled out of my mouth without first going through my brain. “I’ll go.”

  “It will be next Sunday, starting at two in the afternoon.” She nudged my arm and grinned. “There will be boys.”

  “Boys?” I echoed, pain in my voice.

  Her index finger pushed her thick glasses back up the bridge of her stubby nose. “I tried to convince my parents they didn’t have to supervise, but they said, ‘Unless you want it to be girls only … and remember, no alcohol.’”

  “That’s all right; I don’t drink.” Even if I did, I wouldn’t mind not being able to.

  Going to this party became the single focus of my life. I agonized over how to ask Papa’s permission. I lay in bed so worried he’d refuse that I twisted and turned, prompting Zizou to protest, “Will you let me sleep!”

  I rehearsed one approach after another. But, whenever I was close to broaching the subject, my guts churned and I chickened out.

  Two days before the celebration, Zizou warned, “You’re running out of time.”

  “I know, but I’m afraid he’ll say no.”

  “Well, if he does, he does.” She gave me a wink. “But I’d suggest you don’t ask and just go.”

  “I can’t do that.” Could I?

  In the end, I approached Papa at his courtyard workbench. I often watched him work, initiating idle conversations to manufacture a warm togetherness moment when I’d have him all to myself. But this time, I doubted the moment would be so cozy.

  I worked my mouth several times, like a fish out of water, until the words squeezed out. “Papa I ….”

  After a short hush broken only by the sound of blood whooshing in my neck, he said, “Yes ….” his tone reserved—letting me know he was aware I needed something from him but was afraid to ask.

  He kept his eyes trained on his task—reeling me in. I took a deep breath and blurted, “My friend from school, Susanne—you know, Monsieur Schroeder’s daughter?—she’s giving a party at her house next Sunday to celebrate passing le Certificat and she’s invited all her friends who passed and her parents will be there the whole time and there won’t be any alcohol. Can I go Papa?”

  “Non,” he decreed, not even looking up.

  “But, Pa, I passed le Certificat and I’ll be sixteen at the end of the month. Can I go, please?” I cast all sense of pride to the wind and begged, “Please, Papa, let me go.”

  His eyes remained on his busy hands. His mouth twisted at one corner. “Will boys be there?”

  I’m going to lie. I’m going to say there won’t be boys at the party. It’s my only chance. I’m going to lie.

  I said, “Boys are invited,” and quickly added, “but Monsieur and Madame Schroeder will be there the whole time. Everyone else who passed the Certificat will be there. Say oui, Pa.”

  He remained bent over the workbench, intent on his work. “I said, Non.”

  “Please, Papa, sois gentil.”

  But he refus
ed to be nice. “J’ai dit non.”

  Defeated, I sidestepped around the bench and shuffled toward the house. I had nearly reached the bottom of the stairs when I heard “Psst!”

  Zizou’s head poked around the corner at the far side of the house. She beckoned with a crooked finger. When I joined her, she whispered, “What did he say?”

  My faint side-to-side headshake was news enough. She plumped her cheeks and blew air out. “I knew it.” She shoved my shoulder in anger. “Why don’t you do like I do—don’t ask and do what you want?”

  “Oui, you can do that because you’re younger and he thinks he doesn’t have to watch you—not yet. He thinks I’m so stupid and gullible, boys could make me do whatever they want.”

  “Well, it’s too bad. I really kept my fingers crossed for you to go.” A quacking laugh escaped her lips. “I hoped the boys there would get to know you and stop calling you ‘la princess de glace.’ ”

  My brows shot up. “They call me the ice princess?” I couldn’t believe it. “What does that mean?”

  “At the bus stop, you never answer their smiles and look away. They believe you think you are too good for them.”

  “But that’s not true. I think they’re making fun of me, because I have skinny legs and don’t have big boobs like the other girls.”

  Zizou shrugged. “Well, I tell you how it is.”

  A deep anger roared inside me like a mighty wave crashing upon jagged rocks. I hit the stucco wall hard with the side of my fist. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

  Baited by Zizou’s rising eyebrows, I squared my shoulders and gave her a withering stare. “I don’t care what HE says. I’m going.”

  She threw me a dubious look. “You’re sure that’s what you want?” Stunned by what I had just said, I remained silent. Zizou sighed. “You know there will be hell to pay.”