Resistance by Anita Shreve

Author:Anita Shreve [Shreve, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780316166584
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2006-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

There was a name for it, balustrade, Monsieur Dauvin once said, but the boy thought of it simply as a covered walkway, with stone pillars and mosaic archways and long views down into the village square. It reminded him of pictures he had seen in the rectory, drawings of balustrades in walled gardens in Italian cloisters, hushed places where hooded monks walked and thought in silence. But this covered walkway, the boy's covered walkway, was at the top of the school, once a monastery, and access could be gained only from the deserted fourth floor. It was forbidden to go up to the attic, as the fourth story was referred to, because the floor and the ceiling were in such disrepair that the teachers worried for the safety of the children. The covered walkway, which was open to the square, was thought to be even more dangerous than the attic. The stones of the pillars and the graceful arches had worked themselves loose over the centuries. Merely leaning on the railing, which reached to the middle of Jean's chest, might cause the structure to give altogether. Several years ago, some fuss had been made over whether to repair the fourth story or raze the school altogether, but then the war had come, and all the laborers in the village had been immediately otherwise engaged.

Jean thought of the balustrade as his.

He came to this place often. He had removed the crosspieces that barred the door so many times now that the nails slid effortlessly in and out of their holes. He knew the route across the attic floor as a sapper might a minefield—which boards would give way even under a boy's weight, where to avoid the crumbling plaster chunks that dangled from the ceiling. He came here as often as he could manage. It was, within the school, his sanctuary. As was the wood when he was not in school.

All forays here meant some risk. At the least, a flogging by Monsieur Dauvin should Jean be discovered; an injury or a fall should he not be careful where he stepped or rested his weight. But this journey today was, by far, the most dangerous of all.

For the building was no longer a school. Nor was the church any longer a church. The sisters, in their white-winged cornettes, had fled to the adjacent convent to pray; Father Guillaume had not appeared since the Gestapo had entered the village. The classrooms of the school were now interrogation rooms; the school was a prison. All day, from his perch, the boy watched them come and go, heard, even through the three floors that separated him from the ground-floor classrooms, the muffled screams, followed abruptly by an uncommon silence, as though silence were the only way to survive.

The boy had known this all his life.

Earlier that morning, Jean had ridden his bicycle to school as he always did, but Marcel, whose house he daily passed en route, whispered frantically to him from an open window.

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