The Day the World Stopped Turning Read online

  “Wunderbar!” he exclaimed. “Wunderbar. Wonderful. One day this carousel will turn again, and the music will play. One day. Nothing is more important than our children. In this uniform, I am Caporal Willi Brenner. Under this uniform, I am Herr Willi Brenner, husband, father, und Lehrer—teacher—from Tübingen. I wish to say this, that your carousel is very important. And do you know why? It is because it makes children happy. I think this is the most important thing we can do—make our children happy. You still have much work to do, but, when it is done, it will be good work, because it will make your children happy; it will make many children happy. If ever there is any help I can give you—”

  “We shall manage,” said Papa, his voice so cold I was ashamed of him.

  “I am sure you will,” the Caporal replied. “Guten Tag, meine Freunde—good day.” He was hesitating. He seemed to have something else on his mind, but was unsure whether to say it or not.

  He lowered his voice. “I want you to remember what I say now.” He was looking directly at Maman and Papa as he spoke. “It is important, very important. I know that you are Roma people. Here in the marshes you are out of sight, and that is good. But, sooner or later, people will get to know. My soldiers, they go into town sometimes, and soldiers talk. The Milice, the Gestapo, they have eyes and ears everywhere. If they come, I may be able to warn you, but I cannot stop them. You understand? You must be ready always to go, to have somewhere to hide.”

  Then Papa said: “But if they have eyes and ears everywhere then they will come anyway. So what’s the point in running? And where would we run to? We will not run. Our family has lived in and around these marshes for thousands of years. It is our home, and we will stay. Besides, we have the carousel to finish.”

  “Yes,” said the Caporal. “All that you say is true. And yes, you have the carousel to finish. That is most important.” With that, he turned and limped out of the barn.

  Maman came up and put her hand on Papa’s shoulder. “They can’t all be bad,” she said. “There are good ones amongst them.”

  “They all wear the uniform,” Papa replied. “Never forget that.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Killing Dragons

  “I do remember that from that day onward, busy though we still were out on the farm, nothing mattered more than the rebuilding of our carousel. There were long and purposeful discussions in the barn, during which the most difficult decisions were made, all of us standing over the remains, crouching over them, walking around them. We were having to make up our minds about which precious fragment was worth keeping, which was too damaged and beyond repair, which was still intact enough, and strong enough, to become part of our new carousel.

  Of one thing we were now quite sure: that we would never give up as we had so nearly done before. We were determined that the Charbonneau Carousel would one day be turning again in the town square, the children laughing, the music playing. Lorenzo had given us all such heart and hope. He had shown us there was a way forward, that there had to be. We just had to overcome whatever difficulties and problems lay ahead, and get on with it. One way or another, we would do it. And, though no one said it at the time, I have always thought that those few words of encouragement spoken by the giant soldier—the Caporal as we came to call him—in the barn that day helped spur us on as well.

  Every piece that was to be discarded had to have Lorenzo’s approval. He would stand by the barn doors, making quite sure nothing was being carried out that could or should be saved. He was particularly adamant that no fragment, however small or insignificant, from the frieze of flying pink flamingos was ever to be taken away. He understood, as we all did, that the animal rides, the poles the children held on to—which served as roof supports too—the flooring, the roof, all these had to be strong; and that most of the carousel was so damaged it would have to be completely replaced. Many times I saw Lorenzo reaching out to touch some fragment of one of the animal rides as it was carried past him, as if saying good-bye to it for the last time.

  You may have noticed on your travels, Vincent, that out on these marshes there are very few trees. They struggle here to reach any size at all. If they grow to any height, the wind will soon blow them down. Trees do not like wind, or salt. Here we have both, and in great abundance too. Just finding enough wood for our fires and stoves to get us through the winters was always hard. C’est toujours comme ça! It still is! A fire is the heart of every home. Wood is precious.

  Now, for this one winter ahead at least, neither family—either in the farmhouse or in our caravan—would have to worry. None of the unusable wood from the ruins of the carousel, however small, was allowed to go to waste. We sheltered our pile of scraps and splinters and shards under the caravan, and Henri and Nancy and Lorenzo stacked theirs away in the woodshed behind the farmhouse.

  Nancy told me how upset Lorenzo would be if he ever saw anything from the carousel going onto the fire, or into the stove so she always had to wait until he was out of the house before burning anything. We felt much the same in the caravan, especially Papa, who of course knew every piece of it so intimately. But on the coldest of nights that winter—if I am honest—Papa and Maman and I, we were quite happy to be warm.

  It was during those winter months that we began to try to gather in the rest of the timber we knew we were going to need to rebuild the carousel. With no trees to cut down on the farm, and no spare money to buy any wood, we had to make the long trek by horse and cart down to the sea to scour the beaches and dunes for any washed-up timber. Winter storms often brought in quite a harvest of wood from the sea. We made several trips, some more successful than others. Papa and Maman had an idea where it might be best to concentrate our searches. We had often traveled the shores of the Camargue coast, even scoured the beaches for firewood, especially around Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a Roma town we had been to often. Maman and Papa knew the winds and tides there, all the beaches where any flotsam was most likely to be washed ashore.

  One lucky day, out on one of those windswept beaches, after a cold and fruitless morning of tramping the sand and finding nothing but dead and dried-up jellyfish, we came across a veritable treasure trove of wooden planks, some of them half buried. In fact, I was the one who spotted them first—and I’ve always been very proud of that. I remember Lorenzo counting them at once—twenty-seven it was—and then he did a flamingo dance on the beach in celebration. Soon we were joining in, all of us honking with him in triumph.

  Breathless with dancing, we laid all the planks out on the sand, and then stood back, admiring our find. Papa examined them, and said they were pine, just as the original floor of the carousel had been, that they could not have been in the water for long, and would be perfect. It may not be all we needed, by any means, he told us, but it was a start, and a great one. We did have a few damaged floor planks that we had saved from the remains of the carousel, which could be used again, but we would still need to find much more timber from somewhere, so we had to keep looking.

  It was a good thing we did too. Farther along the beach that same day, we came across a couple of washed-up tree trunks, whitened by sun and wind, that Papa said might just provide enough wood from which he could carve at least two of the rides. It was a wonderful day that cheered Papa and all of us to no end. We loaded all the wood onto our cart. On the way home, we sang and sang, mostly “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” because that’s what Lorenzo wanted to hear, of course. Our hearts were full of happiness and hope.

  Most of the work, as we began to restore the carousel, was done during the evenings, Papa in the barn, busy at his carving, Henri at his forge, hammering away at the ironwork, at the circular frames for the floor and roof of the carousel, beating them back into shape. Lorenzo and I would be there with him, Lorenzo working the bellows, keeping the fire hot. I was used as the water carrier, fetching and carrying from the lakeside all the buckets of water Henri needed for cooling the iron.

  I hurried back with every bucket, because I loved to be th
ere when he plunged the red-hot iron into the water, filling our faces with billowing steam. J’ai adoré ça! I loved that!

  Progress was slow, but bit by bit, as the weeks passed, we could begin to see that all we had to do was keep working at it, that one day Maman’s barrel organ would play again, and Papa’s carousel would turn again, and one day the pink flamingos on the frieze would fly again.

  I think it was because I was beginning to feel trapped on the farm that I kept asking Maman and Papa if I could go into town with Nancy and Henri on market days, taking Lorenzo with us, and be there with them, selling on the stall, but both Papa and Maman forbade it. They would not say why. I could tell there was something they were hiding from me. Papa in particular wouldn’t hear of it. When I argued, and asked him why yet again, he just said I was to do as I was told for a change. We ended up shouting at each other, with him grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, with me yelling out the worst insults I knew at him, then running off into the marshes.

  Maman came after me, and caught up with me. She was in tears too. I kept on and on at her to tell me why I shouldn’t go.

  “I know about the German soldiers,” I cried. “I know about the Milice. You told me! But we haven’t done anything wrong, have we? Why can’t I go, why?”

  In the end, to stop me crying, I think, to calm me down, she told me. And only then did I understand why they had not wanted to tell me.

  “The Germans, they don’t like Roma people, Kezia. I mean, more than most people they don’t like us,” she said. “So it is best to keep out of their way, as Papa told you. And the Milice, the brown shirts—some of them are worse than the Germans. They hate Roma people, all of us. They hate Jewish people too. You remember Madame Salomon at your school? Well, first she lost her job only because she was Jewish. They did not want her teaching their children. Then, and this happened only a couple of weeks ago, Henri told us, they came for her, the Milice it was, and took her away, her and her husband. No one has seen them since. And I don’t think anyone will. Jewish people, Roma people—the Germans, the Milice, they want to be rid of us. That is why you cannot go into town with Nancy, Henri, and Lorenzo. Now do you understand? We didn’t want to tell you all this. We didn’t want to frighten you, to upset you. So you mustn’t blame Papa. He doesn’t want you anywhere near them, and neither do I. And they hate children like Lorenzo too.”

  “Why?” I asked her. “How could anyone hate Lorenzo?”

  She sighed deeply, sadly. “Because he is different, Kezia—the same reason they hate us, and the Jews, because we are different. There is no other reason.”

  After that, I remember I prayed to Saint Sarah every night to look after Madame Salomon. I would think of her whenever I looked at the icon of Saint Sarah in the corner of the caravan. Papa and I forgave each other for all the harsh words, but it took awhile. Neither of us forgave easily.

  The farm was our home now, our haven from the world, and, after everything Maman had told me, I was happy to stay there. But we had to work, both Lorenzo and I. Feeding the hens and horses was our main task, which we loved to do. But mucking out, spreading manure, picking stones off the fields, weeding, and endlessly filling up buckets of water for the animals, none of this was much fun. Lorenzo knew how and when it was best to skip off unnoticed, and so we often ended up sitting watching flamingos from the upturned boat, or nursing his animals in his hospital shed.

  It was a strange thing to see, but he would talk more fluently to a young flamingo, or a sick calf, than he ever did to people. When he was with them, the words, even sentences, seemed to flow out of him. They didn’t all make sense, not to me, but they did to them. No, I mean it, Vincent—and I know it sounds ridiculous—but I am telling you that all his creatures would really listen, really understand.

  And then we would run off down the farm track to Camelot, where we would hide away, and play for hours on end. Sometimes, sitting on the rock in the courtyard, I would read him stories from his King Arthur book again, which always kept him happy, and it kept Nancy happy too. I must have been practicing a lot, Nancy said, because my reading was making great progress. But the truth was that I only practiced with this one book, so I knew it almost by heart by now, as Lorenzo did. He would act out his favorite stories as I read them, often echoing every word of the story as I was reading it.

  I loved being his “Guin”—I noticed he only called me that in his castle. It was the only place he ever bowed down to me too, the only place he pulled a sword from the stone, or acted out his sword fights or killed dragons. There were no dragons in the stories. He made them up. I think he loved killing dragons because he loved saving me.

  “Agon agon!” he would cry triumphantly, thrusting his sword down another fiery dragon’s throat, and saving me yet again from a horrible death.

  One afternoon, we had abandoned our farmwork as usual and we were playing in Camelot. I was sitting on the stone, and Lorenzo was swishing his stick, slaying more dragons. We both heard it at the same moment, a distant rumbling, not of a storm, not of thunder, as I first thought, but of engines. I stopped reading. Lorenzo stopped killing dragons. A car was coming down the farm track. It sounded now more like several cars. Standing up on our stone, we could see over the walls and the rushes beyond. There was a car, but behind it came trucks, three trucks, four trucks, a whole convoy of them, and they were stopping on the farm track just by the bridge, German army trucks, with white crosses on the sides. There were barked orders, and then soldiers were jumping down out of the trucks, and running across the bridge, their boots thundering. They came pouring through the gateway, filling the courtyard, surrounding us, rifles at the ready.

  We stood on our story stone, stunned and fearful. I felt Lorenzo’s hand creep into mine. He squeezed it tight, and I squeezed back, each of us filling the other with the courage we needed.

  “Agon agon,” he whispered to me. He still had the stick in his hand, his dragon-killing spear, and, for a moment, I feared he might jump down and run at one of them and spear him in the throat. I held his hand tighter, pulled him closer.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Agon Agon!

  “That was when I saw the Caporal come limping into the courtyard, his stick in one hand, a map in the other.

  “Agon agon!” Lorenzo was shouting down at him from our high stone, slapping his chest again and again. I never saw him so furious, not even in the town square in Aigues-Mortes that day when the Germans arrived. I could hear the tears in his voice, tears of rage and defiance. “Lot Lot! Roi, moi, roi, moi!”

  The Caporal recognized him at once, and did not seem at all offended by his anger. “Hello, Lorenzo,” he said, waving the map at him. “It is me, Caporal Brenner. It is good to see you again. You remember me? Caporal Willi Brenner. We have met before, no? This must be the place I was looking for on my map.”

  “Capo!” Lorenzo shouted, shaking his fist. “Capo Capo! Agon agon!”

  “What are you doing here?” came a voice, Henri’s voice, from behind us. He was standing there with Papa at his side. “This is private property. You have no right. This is our place, our farm. This is Lorenzo’s castle.”

  The Caporal folded his map, and saluted Henri. He produced from his pocket a piece of paper. “I am afraid I do have the right, monsieur,” he went on, as he handed it over. “I have my orders. You will see here on this paper that the German Army is taking over this fortification. We will be building it up, strengthening the walls, making it strong again. We will be bringing guns here, big guns for our sea defenses, against the Americans, should they be foolish enough to land here. We will do our best not to inconvenience you, monsieur. But from now on this place, for the time being, is to be considered the property of the German Army. My men will be putting up a barbed-wire fence today. I shall be the Caporal in charge of the building works. No one else will be allowed to come in here, and this includes children, of course. It will not be safe for them. We shall be camping here tonight. All the building work
s for the bunker and gun emplacements, and the garrison we will need for the soldiers, all will start tomorrow. This will be our home from now on. And you and your children, you have to leave now. I am sorry.”

  The long silence that followed was a standoff. The Caporal and his soldiers were not going to move, and neither were we. I had the impression that Lorenzo had understood every word that had been spoken, for his hand gripped mine tighter and tighter, and I knew it was not in fear but in determination, defiance.

  In the end, it was Henri who broke the silence. He spoke very quietly and deliberately. “The Romans built this place a long time ago, Caporal, for the same reason as you, to make defenses, to make a fort. Our ancestors were here when they came. Like you, they were occupiers. They came and they went. They were driven out, as you will be. We stay in the Camargue, just as the flamingos stay. We have always stayed. It is our place. Our time will come again, and you and your men will be gone. Meanwhile, we shall keep away, just so long as you and your men also stay away from the farm. You make your war here if you must, Caporal. We want only to be left in peace with our children on our farm. Let that be the agreement between us.”

  “It is agreed,” the Caporal replied.

  Papa was calling us down from the stone. The Caporal came and offered his hand to help us down. Lorenzo and I stood there, towering above him. Lorenzo was ignoring his proffered hand. Instead, he was pointing his stick at him, right at his throat.

  Speaking very quietly, he said, “Agon agon.” I knew what he meant, as did Papa and Henri, but the Caporal and all the soldiers simply looked bewildered.

  Then, still holding hands, we both jumped down, and walked away with Papa and Henri, leaving Camelot behind us. Lorenzo strode on ahead over the bridge and up the track, past the convoy of lorries, shoulders hunched, head bent, kicking out at the stones in his fury. He stopped suddenly, and let out a great cry of anger that became a wailing, then a roar of anguish that echoed over the marshes, sending the flamingos flying. Seeing them overhead calmed his rage, but brought on tears. I ran to him and we stood there on the farm track, forehead to forehead, hands on each other’s shoulders, the flamingos honking above us, as if they knew, as if they were singing to soothe his sadness, all our sadnesses.