He will do the same, he will blurt out everything, but not the fact that his father cries in his study because he knows that the only numbers that matter now are the numbers of the dead. This is how it begins and how it ends, this is your weakness and your strength, when you are alone, you are not alone, when you have lost the world, you have found each other. After a while it doesn’t matter if the garden is ruined and the trees are all cut down. It doesn’t matter if there is ice over your heart. He knows who you are.

In the midst of dinner there was knocking at the door. The professors from Germany and their wives and children had been served bowls of Hardship Soup, but they now ran upstairs and hid in the cabinets, holding knives in their hands. When André Lévi went to open the door, it was only their neighbor, Monsieur Oches, who’d come to call. But he was frantic as he reported that people were fleeing, not just the foreign born, but their own neighbors, French citizens, even those who had fought in the previous war and were decorated veterans. People were leaving for Lyon or Toulouse, where life was somewhat better for them, or to the border of Italy or Switzerland. Anyone with a relative in America or England had already left. There was talk of a roundup to come when no one would be saved, not women, not children, not the sick, not the elderly.

“It won’t happen at dinner,” the professor said. “Go home and be with your family.”

“Don’t think I’m exaggerating!” Monsieur Oches said. “We’ll all be murdered before long!”

Professor Lévi thanked his neighbor and led him to the door so the family could finish their dinner. Claire Lévi had worried that these cousins of her husband would call trouble to them, and now they had an attic full of unwanted guests. When she and her husband were at last alone at the table, she told him their guests must leave. “We can’t have refugees here.”

“Not tonight.” There was strange resolve in the professor’s voice. He had realized his wife did not yet understand what was happening. They were all the same now, whether they were refugees or French born. This was not their city anymore.