How Huge the Night Read Online Free

sentiment,” Monsieur Keller was saying. He had an accent too. “It might not be something a non-Jew would notice, but we feel it is on the rise. And ironically enough, we have started to feel the effects of anti-German sentiment as well.”
    Anti-German sentiment! In Paris? Really?
    “I have hopes that Benjamin will find much less prejudice here,” said the pastor.
    Julien slumped in his chair. We are both going to die.
     
     
    They walked the Kellers to the early train. The station was full of people waiting, jostling, talking; farmers in their cloth caps standing by their stacks of crates, live chickens clucking from some of them; kids poking their fingers in and running away, screaming with laughter. And the summer people, the estivants . Women in white silk dresses with wide, immaculate straw hats; men in suits, hanging back from the dusty farmers and the grubby kids; their own children scrubbed and ready to go home to Lyon or Dijon or Paris. Where they belonged.
    Where he belonged.
    A high, far-off whistle, and the children began to yell: “She’s coming! La Galoche! She’s coming!” Madame Keller was shaking Mama’s hand again and again; Julien saw with horror that she was beginning to cry. He looked away and saw something he’d never seen before: Benjamin’s face. Benjamin, standing straight like a real person, looking at his father, his eyes big and brown and dark. And then the train was steaming round the bend, and some kid was jumping and waving at it, and the stationmaster in his dark blue cap with cold fury on his face was shouting, “Get behind the line, brat!” The kid flinched and fell back, and then the train was steaming into the station, and there was chaos and noise and luggage and boarding, and the Kellers looking through the window at them, their faces up against the glass, and Benjamin looking back at them, and the wheels starting to churn, and the train pulling out with a high, eerie whistle onto its long track between the hills.
    And Benjamin, standing by Julien, staring at his feet.
     
     
    A thick, smothering silence seeped out from Benjamin’s room and filled the house. He sat at every meal, looking at the food he was pushing around on his plate, dampening every attempt at conversation . Breakfast would end, and Papa would tell the top of Benjamin’s head that they were going out to the farm. Did he want to come? A tiny shake of his head.
    Thank you, God.
    Out at the farm, there was work to be done: there was harvesting and wood to be split and freedom to be drunk to the last drop. Julien could feel his swing growing truer, his muscles harder, his lungs deeper in the open air. A pleasant ache now ran through his limbs at night, instead of burning.
    At home they had the radio, but no news. The boches —the Germans—were busy tearing up Poland. In France, nothing moved except reinforcements to the Maginot Line, the massive line of fortifications that would keep the Germans out of France. “ C’est une drôle de guerre ,” the announcer said. Funny kind of war. Julien kicked his ball around the little walled backyard in the evening, alone, thinking of Vincent. He’d asked Benjamin if he could teach him a little about soccer. Benjamin had said it wasn’t his life’s ambition to kick a ball.
    Julien kicked his ball, and the wall sent it back to him perfectly, without fail. You couldn’t score against a wall. You couldn’t tell a wall about how Verdun wasn’t just a red splash on a map, or the broken glass in the sink, or how bad you wanted to drive a tank. To do something.
    Papa got out the big family Bible for Friday night devotions, and Benjamin said his second full sentence. He said, “So this is one of the things I have to do to live here?”
    Papa stared at him. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “No. You don’t”—Benjamin’s chair scraped on the floor—“ but you will stay seated until I have finished speaking, young man.”
    Benjamin sat motionless,