by Pam Jenoff
She ignores my remark. “Come in.” If she is put off by my unexpected visit, she gives no indication, but opens the door then steps aside to let me in. The lobby is dim and in disrepair but the banister carvings are ornate, belying a once-fine home. Paned windows swung inward to let in the fresh air, which carries a hint of smoke.
I follow her up the winding staircase, hanging back as she unlocks the door. She does not speak but walks to a tiny kitchen in the corner and puts on the kettle. The flat is just a single room, tall narrow windows overlooking a stone courtyard. The space is cozy, large pillows, everything in a maroon and gold reminiscent of something from India. There are books stacked in the corners, rich paintings on the wall. There is no table and I wonder where they eat. A candle, now extinguished, gives off a cinnamon smell.
I stand in the entranceway, clutching my gloves. To have shown up unannounced is bad enough, but I do not intend to overstay. A moment later, she carries two cups of coffee to the cushioned seat by the window. “Please, come sit.”
I take off my coat. “Your flat is lovely,” I remark, as I perch on the edge of the settee.
She waves her hand. “It’s a fine little place. We’ve been here since before the war, when the neighborhood was less in fashion.”
What might my own apartment be like? A vision pops into my mind of a garret like this, with lots of windows and light, a nook where I could drink my breakfast tea and gaze out the window. I’m not sure of the city in which my fantasy apartment exists—back in Berlin just steps from Papa, or somewhere farther away?
A cat slips quietly around the base of the chair before jumping up and folding itself into Krysia’s lap. I’m surprised—I’ve seen almost no pets since we’ve been back in Paris, none of the poodles and little terriers on leashes that littered the parks before the war. There are the strays, of course, animals too large and mangy to have been anyone’s pet for long, hurrying busily between the rubbish piles in the side streets. But there wasn’t enough food for the people during the war, much less animals, and it was a mercy I’m sure to put one’s beloved pet to sleep rather than let it starve. Some were probably eaten.
Through the floorboards comes a lively, unrecognizable tune from a gramophone. “I’m so sorry to intrude,” I apologize again.
“Not at all. Artists are a bit reclusive, but back home in Poland there are none of these formalities. Guests are always welcome at a moment’s notice.”
Relaxing somewhat, I take the cup she offers. “I hadn’t seen you. And then I heard that you were sick.”
She waves her hand dismissively. “Just a bad cold. These things get so exaggerated.” But there are circles beneath her eyes that suggest something more. She takes a sip of coffee, savoring it with relish. Coffee, like so many things, was scarce during the war, the ersatz mix of ground nuts and grains hardly a substitute.
My body goes slack with relief. “I was worried.” The fullness of my voice reveals my concern.
“It’s good to know that someone might notice if I dropped off the face of the earth.” She smiles faintly, her tone wry.
The cat hops across into my lap, purring low and warm. “She doesn’t like most people,” Krysia observes approvingly.
We drink our coffee in silence. Something about her absence and her tired expression do not make sense. I take a deep breath, then dive in. “Krysia, I wanted to ask you about the young women in the park.”
She blinks. “How do you know about that?”
“When you left Wilson’s reception, you went to the park....”
“You followed me then, too?” she asks, cutting me off.
“No. That is...I was curious where you were going and why.” I falter. “I guess I did follow you.”
“And I should ask the question—why exactly?” She has a point. We’ve spoken twice, spent a few hours together—hardly the kind of intimate friendship that warrants such probing questions.
“I was concerned.”
“You were curious,” she corrects. I was both, I concede inwardly. Of course I wanted to know what she was doing, understand her mystery. But I feel a certain kinship to Krysia, more so than I should for a woman I’ve only just met.
“Years ago I had a child,” she says, her voice a monotone. I stifle my shock. Whatever I had expected Krysia to say, it wasn’t that. “I was twenty-two when I got pregnant.” Just about the age I am now, though I cannot fathom the experience. “Old enough to make my own choices. The father—it wasn’t Marcin back then—was long since gone.” I struggle not to reach for her. “My parents wanted me to have it taken care of, to avoid the scandal that would have devastated them socially. I made the appointment and even went. I couldn’t go through with it, though. I had the baby.” Her voice cracks slightly. “But I was too afraid to try to raise her on my own. So I gave her up.”
Her. I remember the young women skating. One had been taller than the rest, with chestnut hair not unlike Krysia’s. She continues, “I go to the park each week to see her. Just once a week. Any more would only raise suspicion.”
“Have you ever spoken to her?”
She shakes her head. “I have no wish to intrude and complicate her life. I’ve tried to do the right thing—letting her go when I couldn’t support her, keeping an eye out for her safety. Yet it all gets twisted somehow. I mean, I had to give her up. But I can’t just abandon her, can I, and go on as though she doesn’t exist and this piece of me isn’t out there in the world?” She sounds lost, no longer confident and strong but a child herself somehow. Krysia is caught in a kind of purgatory, unable to leave the child but unable to be with her.
“She’s no longer a child. Perhaps if you spoke to her now, you could explain.”
“There are some doors that are not meant to be opened.” Her tone is firm.
I recall the girl, so similar to Krysia, except that she was slight, a thin slip of birch beside Krysia’s oak. “She looks well cared for.”
“The people who adopted her are good folks,” she agrees. “A bit more materialistic and less cultured than I would have wanted. But there’s time for that later, perhaps a year abroad, study at the Sorbonne.” She sounds as though she is planning a future that she will somehow be a part of, though that, of course, is impossible.
“Perhaps,” I soothe. I have no idea if she is right, but it is what she needs to hear. “Perhaps you’ll have children of your own. More children,” I add as she opens her mouth to protest that the girl is her own.
“Having Emilie nearly killed me.” Emilie. I do not know if that is the child’s actual name by her adopted parents, or just one Krysia uses in her mind. “She’s seventeen. But she hasn’t settled on a suitor that I can tell, I think because she is still studying.” There is a note of pride in Krysia’s voice, as if through her estranged child she could correct the mistakes of her own youth.
“I’ve never told anyone.” Underlying her voice is a plea that I not judge her choices. “I don’t know why I’m telling you.” Because I caught you, I want to say. But she could have lied to me, made up a story about the girls in the park. No, there is something about me that she trusts almost instinctively. I’ve always had that way about me, that makes people want to talk and share.
“What about your parents?”
“There was a time they would not speak to me. Now we’re civil since we’ve put all that behind us.” She places heavy irony on the last two words, as though acknowledging that it is anything but in the past.
“This week she didn’t appear at the park. Listening to the others, I learned that she’d been taken ill.” I understand then Krysia’s absence, the circles beneath her eyes that came not from her own sickness but worry about her child. “It was the worst thing in the world. I wanted to go to her in the hospital but, of course, I couldn’t. So I’ve been in church, praying almost nonstop for her recovery.” No, madly liberal, communist Krysia was not religious. It was the helplessness and despair of a sick child she could not be with that had literally br
ought Krysia to her knees. “She’s turned the corner now and is recovering.”
Yet Krysia still prayed. “When I didn’t see you for a time, I thought maybe I had said or done something to offend you,” I say, changing the subject. Then I stop, realizing how insecure I sound.
“Not at all. I’m glad to know you. I have Marcin, of course, but I’ve forgotten how pleasant the company of another woman can be.”
I nod. “Me, too.” I am not comfortable in the company of women. I dislike their gossipy talk and the way they eye one another as if in constant competition. But Krysia is different somehow. For a minute I consider sharing Ignatz’s request that I help provide information. But Ignatz bade me not tell her about our conversation, almost as if he considers her too vulnerable and weak to be trusted. I do not want to bother her now, while she is so worried about Emilie.
She picks up some knitting needles and yarn beside her. Her hands are so often in motion, playing the piano, knitting—like two birds she needs to keep occupied so they don’t fly away.
“So have you made any decisions?” she asks abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“When we last spoke, you were trying to figure out what you were going to do.” She watches me expectantly, as though I was supposed to have remolded my life plan in a few short weeks. Why must I do at all? As a girl, no one expected me to do or be—I just was, a happy state of affairs that I should have liked to carry on indefinitely. In truth, our conversation and Krysia’s challenge had prickled at me nonstop since our last meeting. But I have no new answers. There have always been expectations: I will be wife to Stefan, a mother someday if his condition still permits it. Those things just meant being an appendage to the lives of others, I see now. Could that possibly be enough?
“You have a real gift with words,” she adds when I do not answer. “Have you ever considered being a writer?”
I laugh, toss my head. “A writer? What would I say? You have to have more than just words—you need life experience and I have so little of that.”
“Where will you go after the conference?” she asks, trying an easier question.
“Back to Berlin with Papa, I suppose.”
She scrutinizes her knitting, then pulls out a stitch. “Why? Why not see a bit of the world now, while you can?”
“But my fiancé...”
“Ah yes, you mentioned him the other night, fleetingly. Once you go back to him, there will be a wedding, then children. There will always be something to stop you. You only have right now. Go while you can.”
“I’ll go back to Stefan after the conference,” I say stubbornly.
“You sound enthralled.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” But it isn’t my tone that she has taken issue with—it is the fact that I am going back at all.
“Is that what you want?”
I start to say yes, then stop. It is a lie.
“Then why go?”
“Because he is my fiancé. And he was badly wounded.”
I expect her to ask how he was hurt, the seriousness of his injuries. “Do you love him?” I’m not sure what love is, really. When I was fifteen, Stefan and our tiny neighborhood, the park where we would walk together, and our quiet cinema dates, were the only world I had ever known. Stefan would have changed during the war.
“I care for him.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“I know.” I turn to gaze out the window at the courtyard below. “I feel so differently now.”
“Or maybe you feel the same, but you’ve changed and so those feelings are no longer enough.”
I consider this. Part of me has always sensed that there were differences. I recall a conversation Stefan and I had once about my mother. I’d found an old playbill from a show she’d done in Morocco and shown it to him. “How exciting,” I remarked, “to have traveled the world.”
But Stefan had looked at me blankly. With everything he wanted right here in Berlin—his family and me—he had no desire to leave. “It must have been terribly difficult,” he replied, “not to mention dangerous.”
I could see it in his eyes, too, the day he left for the army. “You’ll get to go so many places,” I’d offered as we stood on the platform and said goodbye, trying to force optimism into my voice. “Belgium, Holland, maybe even France.” But Stefan had never wanted to leave in the first place, whereas I could not wait to go. No, the differences were there even before the war, but it had taken the years apart to make me perceive them clearly. Now they are magnified, not just by time, but the ways in which I had changed, as well.
“Maybe,” I reply to Krysia. “We were so young and four years apart feels like a lifetime. Sometimes he seems more like an idea than a person. I hate feeling this way. And he needs me.”
“A sense of obligation is no way to start a life,” she presses.
“Loyalty is important.” My voice sounds tinny and weak.
“So is happiness. Would you want someone to marry you for such a reason?”
“No, of course not.” But I am not lying wounded in a hospital bed, with no prospect of a future. I am suddenly annoyed. I barely know Krysia. Why is she asking me such things? “I should go.” I stand and put on my coat. “Thank you for the coffee.”
I half wish she will try to stop me, but she nods, rising. “Thank you for calling. I hope to see you again soon.”
Outside it is warmer now, the late-morning sun taking away some of the chill. The sidewalks are now lively with pedestrians, merchants and deliverymen unloading crates from lorries. As I make my way toward the metro, Krysia’s questions about Stefan prickle at me. I hear her voice, exhorting me to see the world now, while I still can. A thousand objections roar through my brain: I can’t leave Papa. I can’t travel alone.
Nothing has changed—my problems loom as large as ever. But despite my earlier annoyance, it felt good to share my fears about Stefan and a life together with Krysia, to verbalize to somebody the thoughts and feelings I’d barely dared to acknowledge to myself for so long. And Krysia confiding her story of Emilie helped, as well. Learning that someone as strong and self-assured as Krysia also wrestles with the past and the right thing to do makes me feel somehow less alone. She seems to enjoy my company, though perhaps I am simply a proxy for the daughter she so desperately wants to know but cannot. Squaring my shoulders, I start down the street with a lighter gait than I’ve had since before the war.
Forty minutes later, I reach our suite at the hotel. I open the door and stop. The curtains are drawn and only faint daylight filters in. A rustling noise at the desk startles me and I jump. Papa is here, hunched over the desk in the darkness, when he should have been at the ministry. “Papa?” Alarmed, I rush forward. He does not move. I put my hand on his shoulder, fearful that it is his heart and the worst has happened. “Papa, are you well?”
He straightens but his expression is dazed as though he does not see or recognize me. Before him on the desk sits a newspaper. “There’s been an attempt on Clemenceau’s life.” I pick up the paper. My breath catches as I take in the photograph of the would-be assassin. The dark-eyed boy from the La Closerie des Lilas stares back at me.
“The attacker possessed information from the conference that was not public, information that prompted him to act.” Papa drops his head to his hands once more. “And I’m afraid they’re going to blame it on me.”
Part Two
Versailles, April 1919
Chapter 4
I peer out the window down the road at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. The six-story building, with its aged yellow facade and arched doorway, stands behind hastily erected barbed wire, giving it the feel of a fortress or prison, depending upon whether one is to be kept in or out. Either way, it looks as if the German delegation is to be quarantined, defeat a virus that no one wants to catch. Apple blossoms frame the hotel in a defiant lush pink.
The road leading to the guarded hotel gate is lined three deep with onlookers, reporters and ph
otographers and townspeople and those who had packed the trains down from the city. There is no official party as there had been when Wilson arrived, no military band or other pageantry to herald the Germans’ arrival—just hordes of the genuinely curious, waiting to see those who are to be held responsible for the world’s suffering.
I turn back into the room where Papa sits working at his desk, oblivious to the spectacle taking place across the road. Our apartment in Versailles is located not in a hotel, but a tall row house that has been converted into apartments to accommodate the sudden influx. It is laid out much like our previous quarters in the city, two bedrooms adjoined by a common space. Everything, from Papa’s piles of books to the photograph of my mother on the mantelpiece, is in the same location as in Paris. It is as if we travel in a shell, I’d decided when we first settled in, re-creating the identical living environment for ourselves in each city. But the rooms here are smaller and oddly shaped, the parlor something of a trapezoid, walls with faded flowered paper slanting inward from the windows.
“They should be here soon,” I say. Papa does not answer. He had not wanted to be here today—or at all for that matter. He had tried to lure me away with an excursion to Paris. But I had insisted that we stay, despite his derisiveness of what he called the “circus of shame.” He does not stand at the window himself, but busies himself at the desk. How can he not look?
The topic had come up at a dinner party three weeks earlier when it was announced that the Germans had finally been summoned to the conference. “You’ll move over to Versailles now, of course, and stay with the delegation?” someone asked Papa. Until that point we had enjoyed our neutral status, not being identified too closely with any one camp, including the defeated. But when a telegram came from the head of the delegation inviting us to relocate, Papa could avoid it no longer. So we left the city for this dreary little suburb of Versailles, though he still commutes almost daily to the conference proceedings at the ministry in Paris.
