The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.

“Who is Juliette Gervaise?” Julien says and it shocks me a little to hear that name from him. I close my eyes and in the darkness that smells of mildew and bygone lives, my mind casts back, a line thrown across years and continents. Against my will—or maybe in tandem with it, who knows anymore?—I remember.

The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other.

Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?

Beauty was just another way to discount her, to not see her. She had grown used to getting attention in other ways.

“You’re not alone, and you’re not the one in charge,” Mother said gently. “Ask for help when you need it, and give help when you can. I think that is how we serve God—and each other and ourselves—in times as dark as these.”

“No. You will not turn me away, Papa. You have done that too many times. You are my father. This is my home. We are at war. I’m staying.”

He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne.

“I love you, Papa,” she said quietly, realizing how true it was, how true it had always been. Love had turned into loss and she’d pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable. “How can you?” She swallowed hard, saw that he had tears in his eyes. “How can I not?”

“I am the Nightingale,” she said, standing on burned, bloody feet.

They both knew that the women who cried at night were the women who died in the morning. Sadness and loss were drawn in with each breath but never expelled. You couldn’t give in. Not for a second.

For the first time in his life, he understands the gulf between us, rather than the bridge. I am not simply his mother now, an extension of him. I am a woman in whole and he doesn’t quite know what to make of me.

“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

I will tell my son my life story at last. There will be pain in remembering, but there will be joy, too. “You’ll tell me everything?” “Almost everything,” I say with a smile. “A Frenchwoman must have her secrets.” And I will … I’ll keep one secret.