Free Black Radishes by Susan Lynn Meyer

confusion. Traffic stopped entirely.
    Gustave’s father got out of the truck to see what was happening.
    “A bomb exploded up ahead,” said a man on foot, his shoulders sagging under a heavy rucksack. His face was lined, and his eyes were sunken. “It destroyed the bridge and killed quite a few people. No one can get past.”
    Papa’s face was grim. With difficulty, he turned the truck around. The stream of people began slowly walking the other way, heading back in the direction from which they had come.
    “What do you think?” Papa said to Maman. “We could take another route, but in this mess, we won’t get to Spain for days. It’s obvious that the Germans are deliberately trying to kill civilians on the highways. It seems more dangerous on the road than anywhere else. And we may well be turned back at the Spanish border even if we get there.”
    Maman nodded slowly. “And we have so little food, and we may not be able to find more. Or more gasoline. If we go on, we might end up stranded somewhere. Let’s go back to Saint-Georges,” she said quietly.
    Gustave sat up. He hadn’t said anything for a long time, and his throat was dry. “But won’t the Germans be in Saint-Georges?” he whispered hoarsely.
    “I’m hoping that they won’t bother going into such a tiny village,” said Papa. His voice was weary. “But they may be.”

10

    Saint-Georges, June 1940
    I t took almost three more days to get home. On the way back, they passed a town that had been bombed. The black skeletons of buildings reached up into the quiet sky. They drove by abandoned automobiles with flat tires and others that must have run out of gasoline. Flies buzzed over another dead horse at the side of the road, next to a wagon with a broken wheel. Gustave also saw bags and suitcases, a cooking pot, a clock, and a teddy bear, all things that people must have dropped when they got too heavy to carry.
    When Papa drove the truck back into Saint-Georges, it was late in the afternoon. The old stone house stood as it had for a hundred years, quiet and solid, behind its low wall. Gustave took the box his father handed him and trudged toward the door. Some men walked over to help Papa unload and to ask what they had seen. Gustave was too tired to talk to anyone.
    The first few days back, he slept a lot of the time. Maman returned to her job. Two other families from the village, as well as several young men who feared being recruited into the German army, had left the same day that their family had, she reported when she came home. But they had all returned already, discouraged by the impossible traffic. No one had seen any Germans in the area yet, she said.
    But there was other news that Gustave and his family had missed while they were on the road. After a month of hard fighting, Norway had surrendered to the Nazis. Gustave overheard Monsieur Grégoire, the elderly man who lived across the road, telling Papa about it as they both stood, grim-faced, in the street one morning. That night, Gustave slowly painted Norway red on his map. His thoughts were fuzzy, and it took a long time for him to do anything, as if his brain weren’t connected quite right to his body. He stared at the open watercolor box.
    The red paint was nearly gone, and the block of blue paint was almost untouched. Nazi tanks were on French soil, and their planes were in the sky over France. And he and Maman and Papa couldn’t get out. They were caught like rabbits waiting, trembling, in a trap.
    The next morning, Gustave was tying a long rope to one of the rafters by the open window of his fort to make an emergency exit, when he saw something unfamiliar glinting on the road in the distance. A faint rhythmical pounding was getting louder and louder.
    He hurried down the ladder and ran to the gate to see what was going on. A woman emerged from the house across the street, wiping her hands on her apron. Other people opened the doors of their houses and stood watching over the