Lea sat up. The sunlight was thin, perhaps that was why she shivered so. She wished she were far away from here, in some far-flung land, on some hot beach where the sand was like sugar. Ava said the heron went there when the weather changed; that he couldn’t last through winter. So far he hadn’t returned with a message from Julien, and she had no way to ask him the sorts of questions she now asked Weitz.

“What if your son asked you to do it?”

Weitz was finished for the day, out of precious homemade paint. He would mix more in the morning from the berries he’d had Lea gather earlier in the day. He began to pack up the brushes he had smuggled out of Belgium, his canvas seat, and what was left of their lunch. He couldn’t yet speak to answer Lea’s question. His son had been dragged off the street. He’d been a promising young artist who had joined the underground in 1941, when Flemish fascist collaborators burned down the house of the chief rabbi in Antwerp. Twenty-five thousand Belgian Jews were taken onto the trains the following year, Weitz’s son among them. There would be no one to remember him or his art once Weitz was gone.

They walked side by side through the dusk. They always waited for this hour to return to the house, the time when they could slip through shadows on the steep streets of the village. There was some talk of Ava being Lea’s cousin, but on one of their outings Lea had said she had no family left. Weitz felt his heart go out to her. If she asked this question she must have her reasons.

“Yes,” he admitted. “I would do it.”

Lea did her best not to cry, and Weitz did his best not to notice her distress.

“What color is the sky?” he asked her as they walked on, past the train station, past the town hall, past the shuttered shops. She had slowed her pace to suit his limp.

“Black,” she answered with certainty. “With stars.”

“So people say,” Weitz said sadly. Dozens of colors were there, a hundred perhaps for those who could see underneath the darkness. “You should look more carefully.” When they reached the house, Weitz stood outside for a while longer before he went in to paint the real colors of the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE LABYRINTH

IZIEU, APRIL 1944