Yes, but they would also know someone had cared.
Aurélie tried desperately to think what else they might bring. If she’d had her old room, she might have ransacked the useless trivialities, the little luxuries she had taken so for granted. But now she slept in a garret above the kitchen, sparsely furnished. A coin for each—if they’d had the coins to give. If they wouldn’t have to worry about the coins being confiscated, the children punished for receiving them. So many things had been made illegal, it was hard to remember them all.
“Here,” said Suzanne, coming unexpectedly to her aid. “We’ve some nuts put by. If we tie them up in a bit of cloth with some string, it will be enough. Just so they can see Father Christmas made the effort after all.”
“Give them here,” said Victor. “I’ll parcel them out.”
Aurélie’s father looked at her sideways. “And who’s to deliver these parcels?”
It felt like a challenge. “I shall.”
“After curfew?”
“Didn’t you just say there’s no curfew for a de Courcelles?” Ordinarily, she’d never have spoken so to her father. He was the head of his house, and due respect.
But he didn’t take her to task for it. “I didn’t say it quite like that. All right, then. If you’re determined.”
She hadn’t been determined, but he seemed to have determined it for her. Aurélie squinted at her father. The fire in the kitchen smoked; she couldn’t tell, but she thought he was, obscurely, pleased. Because she was thumbing her nose at the Germans?
But this wasn’t about the Germans, she reminded herself. It was about the children. And Father Christmas.
Why, then, did she feel as though she had been managed?
“You will be careful?” said Suzanne, handing her the basket. She was beginning to look worried. “If they’ve sentries out . . .”
“They’ll all be at the feast.” Aurélie wasn’t quite as sure as she sounded. She doubted Hoffmeister would ignore so obvious a precaution. He’d probably enjoy denying some man his Christmas revels, making him sit outside in the cold. “They wouldn’t shoot a woman.”
Never mind that they had before and probably would again. Why did they say these things when they all knew them to be untrue? But Suzanne and Victor were nodding along as though they didn’t know as well as she it was all lies, as if any of them believed what she had said. Was it because the truth was too unpalatable to bear? Like lying to the children about Father Christmas, only they were lying to themselves, trying to make themselves believe that the old rules still applied.
“It could wait until morning,” suggested Suzanne, uneasy. “Until light. Even Father Christmas loses his way sometimes.”
“Especially with his wounded foot,” said her father, expressionless.
He was testing her. She wasn’t sure why, but he was.
“Do you need a light?” asked Victor.
“No. I know the way well enough.” What was a twisted ankle among friends? She didn’t need her father to tell her that to carry a light would be folly. She might as well pose as a grouse and invite hunters to take turns shooting at her. “I won’t be long.”
Another lie. She had no idea how long she’d be.
It felt colder outside than before, the air crisp with the scent of frost. Once out of the old walls, through the gap her father had shown her when she was a child, it was almost eerily silent.
No bells. The Germans had torn the bells from the church, had shipped them to Germany to be melted into instruments of war.
But no, that wasn’t it. It took her a moment to realize that the shelling had stopped. For the first time in months, the guns from the front had fallen silent.
It ought to have been beautiful, but it wasn’t. It was eerie, terrifying. She felt like a rabbit in a clearing, caught out of concealment.
Through the silence, she heard the crunch of footsteps on the hard ground and froze. Not just footsteps. Boots. German boots. A man in uniform appeared at the other end of the lane, by the graveyard, where the walnut trees no longer grew.
“Don’t shoot!” It seemed really quite imperative not to die just now. “I can explain!”
The steps quickened, the moonlight glinting off the silver insignia on a peaked cap. “Aurélie?”
“Lieutenant von Sternburg. Max.” Aurélie gulped in air, the cold burning her lungs. The nearness of her escape made her dizzy. She resisted the urge to sit down hard on the cold ground, holding tight to her basket instead. “What are you doing out here? Shouldn’t you be feasting on stolen brandy and plundered geese?”
“I hadn’t the stomach for it.” The moonlight played tricks, obscuring familiar features, but his voice was the same, cultured, rueful. “What have you got there?”
Aurélie shifted the basket in her arms, twisting it away. “Some nuts for the children. That’s all. They’re from our own store.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she could sense his sudden stillness, hear the change in his voice. “Did you think I was going to report you to the major?”
“I—I don’t know.” She had hurt him. It seemed strange to feel guilty for it, when he was one of the conquerors, one of the barbarians. “You have your duties. If you aren’t going to report me—then I have some packages to deliver.”
“For the children?” Max shook his head. “You’re too late.”
“Too late?” A hundred horrid images scrolled through Aurélie’s cider-fuzzed brain. “Wait. You don’t mean—”
“Don’t look like that! It’s nothing like that. All I meant was, Father Christmas already came.”
“He did?” Aurélie looked up at him, the meaning of his words finally sinking in. “I thought—I thought he had a wounded foot.”
Max smiled unevenly. “He managed to hobble out of bed. He brought little enough. Chocolates. Tops. Balls. But something.”
Aurélie gave up the pretense. “Why?” she demanded, staring up at him, trying to make out his expression in the moonlight. “Why?”
“Father Christmas wouldn’t . . . ,” he began, and then stopped. “Why? I don’t believe in making war on children. There’s so little that’s truly precious. To destroy like this—to take away their peace, their innocence—how can we do that? This isn’t what war ought to be.”
“What ought it be?” There was a bench by the denuded graveyard. Aurélie sat on it, feeling the shock of cold straight through her dress and drawers. “Two rows of men shooting at each other?”
“Yes!” Max’s face was earnest in the moonlight. “Exactly that. Men who chose what they chose, fighting by recognizable rules. Not—not this trampling of innocents for sport!”
His confusion made something twist in her chest. She had been like that, too, what felt like a very long time ago. She had thought that war was bugles and glory. Jean-Marie had known otherwise the last time he saw her, had tried to tell her. But she had ignored him.
Aurélie thought of the stories that had nourished her childhood: their glorious ancestor who had followed Joan of Arc, her father dashing into battle against the Prussians. But those were only the bits they sewed into the tapestries, sanitized and edited.
“Was it ever otherwise, do you think?”
Max let out a long sigh, folding his tall body onto the bench beside her. “Probably not. Not if you believe Voltaire, at any rate. Candide asks if men have always massacred each other, if they have ‘always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels’ and so forth. His friend replies, ‘Have hawks always eaten pigeons?’”
“Your commanding officer has banned pigeons,” Aurélie pointed out. “So the hawks might be out of luck.”
Max choked on a laugh. “This is a metaphorical pigeon.”
“I don’t believe that makes a difference,” said Aurélie. “It’s contraband, all the same. You’d best get rid of it.”
Max stifled a yawn, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “Shall I put it in the book? Item: one pigeon,
metaphorical, executed. Of course, that raises the question of how one executes a metaphorical pigeon.”
It was the sort of debate they used to carry on by the hour in her mother’s salon. Aurélie had never been part of those discussions; no one had ever thought her worth having them with. And, to be fair, she had thought it all nonsense, pointless nothings. Now there was something strangely bittersweet about it. It felt like a luxury to sit here, in the dark, in the cold, and talk nonsense. “How does one execute a metaphorical pigeon?”
Max stretched his long legs out in front of him. Aurélie could see the mist of his breath in the cold air, the rise and fall of the silver buttons on his coat. “By removing all irony,” he said at last. “Killing all thought. Draining dry wit. Reducing the world to the imposition of blind obedience, with no sense or justice in it. No kindness. No mercy.”
Aurélie glanced up at him sideways. “How did we get from pigeons to this?”
He grimaced. “How did we get from anything to this?”
“I keep wondering that, too,” Aurélie admitted. “I had thought, at the beginning, that it would be a few weeks, and then everything could go back to normal. But now . . . I don’t even remember what normal was anymore.”
“Rainy days at the Louvre,” Max said softly. “Cakes at Angelina.”
“You left. You left after that. I looked for you at my mother’s salon . . . to return your umbrella,” she added hastily. “But you never came back.”
“No.” He looked down at his hands. “I was called back to Berlin.”
“And it was only an umbrella.” Aurélie rather wished she hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t sure why she had. But it was Christmas Eve and the shelling had stopped and everything was strange and edged with ice. “Not the least bit important. One can find a new umbrella anywhere.”
“Not anywhere. There are some umbrellas—there are some umbrellas that matter more than others.” Max leaned forward, his eyes pale in the moonlight. “I ought to have written . . . I meant to write . . . I would have written . . . but it was too hard. It was my sister, you see. Elisabeth . . .”
“You mentioned her.” At the Louvre. He had shown Aurélie the picture he kept in his watch.
“She was the heart of our family, our good angel. For the longest time, it was only me. My mother—she lost child after child. I wasn’t meant to know, you understand. But . . .”
“Nursemaids talk,” Aurélie provided for him. She knew it well. It was how she had learned of the peculiarities of her own position, that “Uncle Hercule,” who lived in the suite with them, was, in fact, her father’s cousin and her mother’s lover.
“Yes,” said Max gratefully. “And when Elisabeth was born . . . she was such a little thing, so delicate. They’d had the mourning bands ready, but she lived. She lived and everything was bright again. My mother had headaches; she had kept the curtains drawn and I was meant to be quiet and not disturb her, but once Elisabeth arrived, it didn’t matter anymore. Suddenly, everything was light and we could run and laugh as much as we liked and there were flowers in all the rooms. I was nine already when Elisabeth was born. But it was like living in a whole new house, as though my life started again with Elisabeth. Does that sound strange?”
“No,” said Aurélie. There had been a life before the Ritz, she knew. She could still vaguely remember the slamming doors, her mother’s raised voice, the flat of her father’s palm against a tabletop, making her jump. Her life, her life as she knew it, had begun when she was four years old, when her mother had taken up permanent residence at the Ritz. “Did she . . . is she—”
“It was a chill,” said Max. “Just a chill. All of our science, all of our advances in medicine, and not one doctor could save her. I was in time to see her. But just.”
“I’m sorry,” said Aurélie. Without thinking, she put her hand on his, squeezing hard. “I’m so sorry.”
“That was why I left, you see. Why I left and didn’t come back. My mother . . . she was in a bad way.” He shifted to face her, turning his hand so that they were palm to palm, his hand holding hers. “That’s what I don’t understand, about any of this. There is so much misery we cannot prevent. Why do we go out of our way to cause more?”
“I don’t know.” Aurélie ran her tongue along her dry lips. “I was never philosophical.”
“No,” said Max, lifting his eyes from her lips. “You only put us all in our places with a few well-chosen words.”
“I didn’t,” Aurélie protested. She pulled back, looking at his face, his familiar, careworn face. “Did I?”
“It was beautiful to behold.” His voice was so low she could hardly hear. “You were beautiful to behold.”
“Were?” Aurélie asked hoarsely. This was folly, she knew. Worse than folly. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. Not when he was looking at her like that. No one, not even Jean-Marie with his clumsy affection, had ever looked at her like that before.
“Are.” The word was torn from his throat. Aurélie wasn’t sure how it had happened, but both her hands were in his, their knees bumping together. “I wish—I wish we were anywhere but where we are. I wish I had come back to Paris.”
“For your umbrella?”
“It was never about the umbrella.” His eyes were very pale in the moonlight.
“That’s good,” Aurélie said unevenly. “Because I think one of my mother’s friends filched it.”
Max’s hands tightened on hers. “I hate this. I hate what we’ve done here. I hate the cruelty, the waste of it. But, most of all, I hate being here, with you, knowing that to you I must always be the enemy.”
Never mind that it was exactly what she’d been thinking not an hour ago. “You’re not my enemy.”
“Aren’t I?”
“I don’t know.” It should have been simple. It should have been easy. Aurélie glowered at him. “It’s your own blasted fault. If you’d just be like the rest of them, it wouldn’t be so hard to remember that I’m meant to hate you.”
“I’m sorry.” He smiled crookedly at her, that wry, rueful smile that was so his own. “I’ll try harder to be hateful if you like.”
“Don’t,” said Aurélie fiercely, and kissed him.
Chapter Fifteen
Daisy
Avenue Marceau
Paris, France
July 1942
The kiss shocked her. Pierre had long ago fallen out of the habit of kissing Daisy when he left for work. Or when he returned. Or at any time at all, really, except at the specific moment when he required sex.
At one time—again, long ago—Daisy had missed that small gesture of affection and what it meant. Then she became used to its absence, as human beings do, and stopped even caring that he didn’t offer it. Now?
Now she was busy! She was getting the children ready for school, the last day of the term, making sure they ate their breakfast and packed their little gifts for the teachers in their satchels. (Not little gifts at all, actually—Daisy had secured some coffee, real coffee beans, which she wrapped in cheesecloth and tied with ribbon. The teachers would be so delighted!) She was giving instructions to Justine, who now came daily, and checking the larder for the day’s shopping, and checking the clock, because every minute counted. As she raced about the apartment in the sticky July heat, as she performed all the myriad small chores that made up her mornings, she was thinking about kisses, all right. Just not from her husband.
“Where’s my hat?” Pierre had thundered from the hallway, the grand foyer of the gigantic new apartment on avenue Marceau, into which they had moved six weeks ago when Pierre took up his new position in the Jewish Affairs Bureau. Pierre loved hearing his voice echo from the soaring ceilings and the plasterwork. Daisy hated it. Daisy had put Olivier’s satchel back on the kitchen floor and hurried out to find the hat, which had fallen off the commode and behind the umbrella stand. She brushed off a speck or two of dust and handed it to him.
“Here you are, dear.”
She�
�d fully expected him to rage and grumble and storm out the door, smashing the hat down as he went, but he didn’t. Instead he said—yes, it’s true!—he said, Thank you, Daisy, and placed the hat on his head. He’d inspected himself in the oval mirror, nodded with satisfaction, and just as Daisy had turned to hurry back down the hallway, he reached for her shoulders and kissed her. On the lips!
“Oh!” she gasped.
“When I return from work this evening, I want you to wear your best dress, my dear. That blue one, perhaps?”
Daisy resisted the urge to wipe her lips. “Whatever for?”
“We’re going out to dinner, of course. At Maxim’s.”
“Maxim’s!”
“Yes. I have something to celebrate!”
Daisy stared at her husband for the first time that morning, and she realized Pierre was smiling, actually smiling, and his eyes were as bright as if he’d taken some kind of drug. Had he? Or was he coming down with a fever, perhaps?
“Celebrate?” she asked.
He laid a finger over his damp lips. “Shh! It’s a secret.” But because he was Pierre, he went on. “Let’s just say that a certain project I’ve been working on for the past two months is coming at last to its fruition. By the end of the week—well! You’ll see. You’ll read about it in the newspapers, my dear wife, and you will be very proud of your Pierre, I promise!”
A chill went down Daisy’s limbs, thick and slow, as if her heart were pumping slush instead of blood. “That’s—that’s wonderful,” she whispered.
“All this”—Pierre gestured to the hall around them, the gilded furniture and the shining parquet floors, the intricate ceilings that yawned above—“it’s only the beginning, my love. And it’s all for you. For our children. I have done all this for your sakes.”
“Pierre, I don’t want this, I don’t want luxury—”
“Hush! None of this. Just wait. A few more days only.” He adjusted his hat and smiled again. “And remember tonight! Your best dress!”
“But what are we celebrating? What’s this project?”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 21
