The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

  Monsieur Goujon, her father’s old boss, had helped her to find part-time work repairing typewriters, just as her father had once done, and that allowed her to pay the rent on a tiny studio apartment in the seventh arrondissement. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to return to Aurignon yet, though she knew she would someday, when she was stronger and train travel through the war-shredded country had been restored. She had to know if Père Clément had survived, whether Madame Noirot, Madame Travere, and Madame Trintignant had made it through the war. She knew in her heart that the answer was probably no, but she couldn’t bear to face the reality yet. As long as she waited in Paris, she could imagine them all alive and well. Besides, she had said she would meet Rémy here. Leaving, even for a few days, would be like admitting he was gone for good.

  In the spring, tattered and emaciated Jews who had spent the war in the concentration camps to the east had begun to return. Those who had lost family members peered into the faces of these walking skeletons, struggling to find the people they were so sure they’d never see again. Sometimes, there were joyous reunions. Mostly, though, the survivors returned to find that everyone they loved had perished and that their reward for enduring hell was a renewed sense of loss and despair.

  When the Hôtel Lutetia began processing refugees, there was some hope. The Red Cross set up there, and they kept careful lists of the former prisoners and those who were seeking them. Everyone who survived was given food, a temporary place to stay, two thousand francs, and a coupon for a new suit. Eva had posted a precious photograph of her father, and each day, she turned up holding a sign with his name on it, hoping that someone would be able to give her an answer about his fate. She knew he was dead; she could feel it in her bones. But she needed someone to say the words so she could officially close that chapter of her life. Hope was a dangerous thief, stealing her todays for a tomorrow that would never come.

  Hundreds of people streamed through the front doors of the hotel each day, and Eva peered into all their faces, grew numb to their chorus of tears and the scent of the blood dried into their prison-striped clothes. She couldn’t stop coming, though, not without an answer.

  And then, on the fourth of June, she finally got one. She was wearily searching the eyes of the incoming refugees when someone said her name in a voice she recognized, but only barely. Her heart skipped, and when she turned, she was staring into the face of a man who couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos. His cheeks looked sunken and carved out of bone; his hair had gone gray, and his beard was patchy. But she recognized him instantly. “Tatuś?” she whispered, too afraid to touch him for fear that he was an illusion, that he would dissipate before her eyes.

  “Is it really you, słoneczko?” he asked, his voice a raspy echo of what it had once been.

  She could only nod, and when he pulled her into his arms, his body felt fragile and unfamiliar, but the strength of his love felt like coming home. She sobbed into his shoulder, and he into hers. When they finally pulled away, she found the father she had once known in his wise, brown eyes.

  “And your mother?” he asked her. “Where is your mother?”

  “Oh, Tatuś.” She began to cry again. “She died. In the early winter of 1944.”

  His eyes filled. “I felt it, you know. I will mourn her, Eva, but I will forever thank God that you survived.”

  “I’m—I’m so sorry, Tatuś. I wish she had been the one to live, not me.”

  “Oh, słoneczko, God has a plan for you. For all of us.” Tatuś wiped her tears away. “We must always keep moving forward.”

  * * *

  It took Eva a week to tell Tatuś what had happened to her mother, and when he cried and told her it was not her fault, she couldn’t bring herself to believe him, even when he insisted that Mamusia must have been so proud of her. “All she wanted for you was a happy life,” Tatuś said. “She would be so glad that you survived.”

  “Tatuś, I brought her only disappointment.”

  “That’s not true, Eva.”

  “It is.”

  He was quiet as she told him the story of Rémy, of how she had fallen in love with him despite her mother’s objections, how Mamusia had been furious about it and about so many of the other choices Eva had made. “I failed her, Tatuś,” she concluded miserably. “If I had listened, maybe she would still be alive.”

  “If you had listened, słoneczko, you’d be dead, too, for you would have followed her advice right into Joseph Pelletier’s arms.” His expression was grave. “Just because she was your mother didn’t mean she was right.”

  “But if I had honored her…”

  “You do honor her—and me—every day by being the kind of person we raised you to be.”

  Eva covered her face with her hands, and Tatuś gently rubbed her back.

  “This Rémy, do you still love him?” he asked after a moment.

  “I’m certain he’s dead by now, Tatuś.”

  “That’s what you thought about me, too, isn’t it? And here I am.” He paused. “You know, your mother’s parents did not want her to marry me.”

  Eva looked up. “They didn’t?”

  He smiled. “They thought I was too poor, that I could never give her a good life. They wanted her to marry a man named Szymon Lozinski, the son of a doctor. This Lozinski was a cruel man, though, and marrying him would have broken your mother’s heart. I like to think that for the years I had with her, I made her happy.”

  “You did, Tatuś. You did.”

  He smiled. “My point is that every parent wants what is best for his or her child. But we are all guilty of seeing things through the lens of our own lives. We forget sometimes that it is your life to live.”

  “What about Rémy’s religion, though? Mamusia always said that to love him would be to betray the Jewish faith, especially at a time when we are being wiped from the earth.”

  “You are betraying nothing if you follow your heart,” Tatuś said firmly. “Deep down, you know that, too.”

  When she didn’t say anything, he leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Go, Eva. Go back to Aurignon and see if anyone there knows what became of him. It is the only way you’ll have peace—and we all deserve that.”

  “Will you come with me, Tatuś?”

  “No, Eva, I cannot.” He shivered. “I can’t imagine being on another train. But you go. I will be here waiting for you when you return.”

  * * *

  When Eva got off the bus a week later in Aurignon, it looked just as it had that summer day in 1942 when she and her mother had first arrived. The flowers were in bloom, their perfume coloring the air, and the streets were alive with honeyed sunlight and the scent of pine. Eva closed her eyes for a minute and breathed in, trying to imagine Mamusia standing beside her, but it was no use. Her mother was dust in the wind, long gone.

  The Église Saint-Alban looked just as she remembered it, though it had gotten a fresh coat of paint since she had last been there, and the trees outside had grown, arching over the entrance like a canopy of welcome. The sun trickled in as Eva approached the front door.

  Inside, the church was silent, but the familiar statue of Jesus on the cross was just where she remembered. “Hello there,” she whispered, and it felt like greeting an old friend. The pews had been restored, the church repainted and refurbished, as if all the things that had happened here had been merely a bad dream.

  She checked the confessional in the back, and the office behind the altar, but she was alone. She took a deep breath and approached the door to the secret library. She still had her key, but when she inserted it into the lock, it didn’t open. She tried again, jiggling the key, but it didn’t work. Her heart sank.

  “Eva?” The voice came from behind her and she whirled around, relief washing over her. It was Père Clément, and he was staring at her as if he was dreaming. “Is it really you?” he asked.

  She felt as if she, too, was seeing a ghost. He was a shell of the man he’d once been, thirty pounds li
ghter, his sandy hair turned gray, his frock hanging loosely from a skeletal frame. But he was here and alive, and she had to stop herself from collapsing under the weight of her relief. “Père Clément,” she whispered.

  “Eva, it is you.” He came forward and pulled her into a hug. “I was sure you were dead.”

  “I feared the same of you.” She breathed in the familiar scent of him, frankincense and pine. There was something else now, too, an edge of smoke, of having come through a fire. “What happened to you?”

  He pulled away and gave her a small smile. “I spent some time as a guest of Germany in Poland.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He waved the words away. “But I’ve managed to return, and that is what matters. The church closed when I was gone, so I was glad to be able to repair it and open its doors once again. And what about you, Eva? You made it to Switzerland?”

  She nodded and briefly told him about her return to Paris and her reunion with her father. Then, because she couldn’t bear to wait any longer, she asked him the question that had been burning a hole in her heart since that cold winter night in the shadow of Switzerland’s freedom. “And Rémy, Père Clément? What happened to him?”

  From the shadow that crossed Père Clément’s face and the pain that filled his eyes, she knew the answer before he said it. “Oh, Eva, you don’t know.” He reached for her hand. “I’m so sorry, my dear. He didn’t make it.”

  She had known it was true, for if he had lived, he would have come for her. But she hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d still been holding on to so much impossible hope. Her whole body went cold, and in what felt like slow motion, she collapsed to her knees, her limbs suddenly as limp as rags. She could feel the blood rushing through her veins, the tears prickling at the backs of her eyes, the air suspended in her choked lungs, the aching hole in her heart where the possibility of a future had once been. “No,” she finally whispered, and then she was drinking the air in desperate gulps, unable to control the tremors that shook her whole body as Père Clément knelt beside her and stroked her back while she sobbed into her hands. “What happened?” she asked when she could finally breathe again. “What happened to him?”

  “He came back to Aurignon,” Père Clément said slowly. “I caught glimpses of him twice near the town square, but both times, he pretended not to know me. I later learned he was following a gendarme named Besnard, a man who used to worship here, a man whose children I baptized.”

  Eva blinked. “I remember him.” He was the gendarme who used to stare at her, whose gaze made her uneasy, though she had tried to convince herself it was only her imagination.

  Père Clément nodded and drew a deep breath. “As it turns out, Besnard had been betraying his fellow officers, the ones who were sympathetic to the French, and reporting them to the German command. He was closing in on the families of some of the maquisards. Rémy had been sent to capture him before he could do more harm.”

  Eva could hardly breathe. “What happened?”

  “Someone tipped Besnard off, and he was heavily armed when Rémy came for him. From what I understand, there was a fight outside the same barn where Geneviève died, and both men perished.”

  Eva began to cry. “When?”

  “The first week of June 1944.”

  It was four months after she had fled. If she had waited longer, would she have seen Rémy once more? Could she have persuaded him not to walk into a trap? To stay with her after all? They were questions she knew would haunt her forever. “Was he… was he buried here?”

  Père Clément shook his head. “The maquisards took care of their own, Eva. They came for his body before it could be desecrated by the Germans. I’m so sorry.” He hesitated and added, “I said funeral rites for him anyhow.”

  “That would have meant a great deal to him, I think.” For a moment, she was silent, imagining a world without Rémy in it. It was astonishing that the sun had continued to shine, that the earth had continued to turn, as if nothing had changed. The truth that he had been gone for more than a year now seemed impossible.

  “I’m very sorry, Eva. I know how much you loved him.”

  “If I had said I would marry him—”

  “Don’t do that,” Père Clément said, cutting her off. “The end would have been the same, my child. He still would have fought. He felt it was his duty. He died a hero of France.”

  “A hero of France,” she repeated in a murmur. “And what of the others? Madame Noirot? Madame Travere?”

  “Both sent east. Neither returned.”

  “And Madame Trintignant? Did she survive, at least?”

  He sighed. “I’m afraid she was caught at the border when she tried to escape into Switzerland. She died in prison.”

  Eva shook her head. The scope of loss was almost unimaginable. She thought of Rémy, standing outside the blue barn, knowing he might be walking right into his own death. Had he died knowing she loved him? Or had he died thinking that her answer to him would always be no? “Père Clément? Did Rémy return to the secret library before he died? Did he look in the Book of Lost Names?”

  Something changed in the priest’s face. “Eva, I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “Can you unlock the door for me? I need to see the book.” Suddenly it felt like the most urgent thing in the world. Had Rémy read her message? Had he left one of his own? “Please, mon Père.”

  But the priest didn’t move, though the sorrow on his face deepened. “Eva, the library was looted by the Nazis right around the time Rémy lost his life. It was clear the war was lost, and they were fleeing, but they wanted to take whatever they could with them back to Germany. There were several private homes ransacked, as well, along with Madame Noirot’s bookstore, but our secret library suffered the greatest losses, perhaps because they perceived our collection of old religious texts to be very valuable.”

  “Did they take our book? The Book of Lost Names?” she whispered.

  He nodded slowly.

  Tears filled her eyes again. It was another staggering blow. Now, not only would she never see Rémy again, but she would never know if he’d died realizing that she wanted to marry him. Nor would she have a record of the hundreds of children whose names were changed, the ones whose pasts she wanted so desperately to preserve. The loss of the book felt like a death of hope. “May I have a few moments alone in the library?” she asked.

  “I changed the lock and closed it tight when I returned to Aurignon,” Père Clément said. “It’s been too painful to go inside. It made me think of you and Geneviève and Rémy and all the things we accomplished here—but also all the things we lost.”

  Eva bowed her head. “That’s why I need to say goodbye.”

  Père Clément nodded and led her toward the familiar room. He withdrew a key from beneath his robe, unlocked the door, and opened it for her. “I’ll be just outside,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “Stay as long as you like.”

  It took a few seconds for Eva’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting; she hadn’t thought to ask Père Clément for a lantern. Still, sunlight spilled in narrow ribbons from the stained glass windows overhead, just as it always had, and Eva found a bit of comfort in the familiar glow.

  But that was the only thing that felt the same about the room. The table where she had once worked was gone, as were the chairs that had anchored it. The shelves were nearly bare, with only a hundred or so books remaining from the thousands that had once lined the room. A fine layer of dust made everything look haunted, and as Eva ran her hands over the remaining volumes, sadness swept through her.

  The Germans had taken everything of any conceivable value, leaving only newer-looking volumes behind. There were some church missals that had been printed in the 1920s, some newer Bibles, and a collection of scholarly texts with spines too ragged to be of any use to anyone. They seemed lonely on the shelves by themselves, devoid of the brothers and sisters they’d spent years with, and Eva felt a surge of grief for the
m that she knew was illogical.

  She ran her hands over the books, saying what she knew was a final goodbye to these old friends that rested in a place she knew she’d never see again. But as she neared the end of a row of familiar Bibles, she stopped abruptly, her fingertips on the tattered spine of a volume that didn’t belong there.

  She pulled it out and stared at the cover. It was an English-language edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book she had once mentioned to Rémy as they worked side by side, two months after she’d arrived in Aurignon. He had asked about her father, and she had told him about all the books that had once lined his beautiful library at home. Did you know, she had asked him, that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was among the first novels written on a typewriter? It was one of my father’s favorite things. We had a copy, but I had to leave it behind Is it strange that it’s one of the things I miss most from home?

  Slowly, she opened the front cover of the book, and her breath caught in her throat. There, on the title page, in Rémy’s scratchy handwriting, was a note.

  For E: I found this in Paris. One day I’ll buy you a better copy. R

  4 June 1944

  She read the message once, twice, three times, searching for a meaning, a code, but the words were just words, one final gesture of kindness from a man who’d been thinking of her before he died. But had he left her a message in the Book of Lost Names, too? Or had he been in a hurry, stopping only long enough to drop off this gift? And why had he left it here if he’d known she had already fled to Switzerland? Was it because he knew she would come back if she lived through the war?