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“Perhaps I make us too hungry,” she said apologetically, reaching to pull up her limp white sock that was sagging into her shoe.

“It’s all right to talk about food,” he said. “I think about food every day!”

“We should speak of other things,” she said emphatically. “Now, let’s learn flowers.”

“Do I need to know flowers? I was never any good with botany. Botanique?”

“Well, then, trees. It is necessary to know les arbres.” She led him through a list of trees, then some animals. “At our summer house in Normandy, we had geese and chickens. We could have stayed there since the beginning of the war, when everyone suddenly left Paris, but we returned. Maman insisted we were in more danger there than here. My father had to be here, and I must be here to do what I can to help,” she said.

“Do your parents hide many aviators? How do you feed them?” He wasn’t supposed to ask his helpers questions, so the Krauts couldn’t force anything out of him if he got caught.

She shrugged. “We manage.”

“And what do you do?” He knew she went somewhere Friday afternoons after school.

“You are not to know.” She smiled. “The Germans, if they are on the bus, I put my books beside me and occupy as much space as possible. I enjoy making inconvenience for them. Also, it is amusing to drop my books at their feet. In a way they are gentlemen. ‘Oh, mademoiselle, I must assist you!’ and in another way they are ready to make the arrest. But they do not, not the schoolgirls. So they think they are kind and helpful, but we are laughing at them. Every little bit of trouble we can cause, innocently—‘Oh, it is only the schoolgirls’—is a way to express our frustration.”

“Should you be provoking the Germans?” he asked. “It sounds dangerous.”

“I know. But how can one resist?”

Mme Vallon was at the door, with her groceries, mostly rutabagas.

“Your usual catch,” Marshall said, but he could not make the expression understood.

“If this war ever ends, I will never touch another rutabaga!” Mme Vallon said, depositing the bags on the kitchen table.

“Did you find anything else?” Annette asked, poking into the smaller bag.

“I have ten grams of butter—very precious. I have the sugar. We must get along without even ersatz coffee. Tomorrow, they said. No bread, of course. All the farina is going to Germany. Maybe our men working at the factories will get some of it.” Mme Vallon rummaged deeper in the bag. “One cheese ration.”

“Let me imagine,” Annette said. “Tonight, baked rutabaga with cheese. A soupçon of butter.”

“A tiny pinch of sugar with the butter,” her mother said with a smile. “I have some herbs.”

THEY WARNED HIM to stay away from the dining room window, which gave onto the street, but he could watch from a side angle through the lace curtains. He saw only an occasional vehicle—a Kübelwagen or a Mercedes-Benz flying a small flag with a swastika on it. The building was on a corner, and his bedroom overlooked a small side street. The blackout curtains at night cocooned him. He heard few traffic noises. People were out in the mornings and flocking home late in the day, after dark. He watched them, did exercises to keep his muscles from cramping with inactivity, and studied French. For months as a pilot trainee he had studied mechanical manuals: hydraulic pressures, lift angles. In January he had been keeping house in his barracks, writing lovesick letters to Loretta, trying to squelch suspense over the next mission. During the day he attended lectures and flew trial runs, and ten times in two months he had been out on wild sky rides, lugging bombs. A few times he had visited the villages near the base, and once he had been to London. Now, he was trying to talk French and reading Verlaine. He was almost twenty-four years old. He had stepped into an alternate life, like Alice in Wonderland, down a rabbit hole—but without his Bugs Bunny jacket.

There was hardly anything he could do to help Mme Vallon. He envied Robert, the good-humored young guy who came by bringing