“I came before he even met your mother. And it wasn’t fair. She left him, yet he refused to have anything to do with me. I wasn’t young, Kira: almost forty. I’d taken a great risk, to have his child. Because I loved him more than life itself, and because I thought that he loved me, too.”
Henriette’s voice, low and calm, hit a nerve inside Kira. She remembered so many things, haphazardly: herself, naked in the small wood, with Pierre, willing him to leave her pregnant; her mother, suffering in Vienna; her mother, suffering again, alone, in Paris. And her own anger, her stubborn refusal to accept Mark MacDonald. “Your grandmother tells me that you, too, are in love, with a young man of twenty-one,” Henriette was saying. “You aren’t a child anymore. You have to try to understand!”
“Why?” Kira whispered.
“Because Claude is dead, and Alain is your brother. And because you’re both so much like Misha, that you have to be my friend, you have to help me!”
Kira plunged her fingers through the pins to her scalp, scouring the soft skin as if to punish herself for being caught here, listening to this dreadful, painful story—painful for all. “My grandmother: does she know?” she asked.
“Claire is a strange, reserved woman. But I’d say yes, she’s guessed. Before, the resemblance was only on the surface. Alain was a small boy, plump and rosy. But now, he’s begun to grow lean and tall, and to take on some of the mannerisms of Misha. Claire would have had to be blind not to notice. But she’s never brought it up.”
“What is it you actually want of me?” Kira demanded.
Henriette was staring at her, her long, narrow eyes gleaming with a strange, unremitting passion. “Claude told me everything,” she murmured. “Before he left for Russia. About how your grandmother . . . that great lady . . . gave birth to him illegitimately, just as I did to Alain. And about how she was a Jew, and Claude’s natural father was one, too.”
Kira didn’t answer, but she could feel new waves of shock unfurling inside her. She repeated, her voice suddenly like her father’s, haughty and cold: “What’s your point, Aunt Henriette?”
“I want you to promise to help me. The tide is turning, Kira, and my side is losing. Surely your mother’s told you about how Claude and I ...collaborated with the Germans. There will be severe reprisals . . . and I could lose everything. Everything I ever worked for!”
Revulsion was twisting Kira’s stomach. “If reprisals come, it’s going to be important to have you on my side. I know all about the young officer you’re in love with. He’s a Rublon. His family’s always been prominent. I want you to vouch for me, to deny to one and all that I ever collaborated.”
Now the anger exploded from within Kira. “Why should I protect you?” she cried. “My whole family has stood in danger because of people like you and my uncle Claude! Why should I lie for you?”
Henriette’s reply came, unexpectedly soft, belying the strange gleam in her eyes. “Because,” she whispered, “I’ve been lying for you. When this is all over, I thought we might be friends. It would be to the advantage of all of us.”
Kira’s expression remained defiant.
Henriette breathed in slowly, straightening her shoulders. She was shorter than Kira, but the latter was still seated, and so she looked down at her, deeply into her eyes. “I see I placed my bet on the wrong horse,” she declared, and walked proudly out of the room.
Slowly, like a sleepwalker, Kira stood up and went to the entrance hall to retrieve her books and her bag. Then, without going back into the house, she opened the front door and slipped out, shutting the large black panel quietly behind her. Outside, darkness had fallen, and she knew that it was past six o’clock, and that she’d get home late.
She’d invent a story to tell Lily: that Aunt Marthe had not let her go home in time, and that, thirsty for companionship, she’d pried and prodded until she’d made Kira miss her train. But she would make no mention of Henriette Bruisson.
The following Wednesday, Kira took the train from Luzarches, on her way to school, as was her custom. She left Lily and Sudarskaya bringing water in from the fountain in the courtyard, while Madame Portier cleaned the kitchen.
At eleven that same morning, while Lily and the landlady were peeling potatoes and Sudarskaya quietly sewing in the bedroom, there was a persistent knocking at the front door. When Madame Portier opened, Lily behind her, drying her hands on her apron, they saw the two nice policemen from Luzarches, and, between them, a captain of the German Gestapo. Lily’s fingers numbed over the clean cotton of the apron. The Germans never came to Chaumontel, a peasant village of no consequence to them. “We’re sorry to have to disturb you, Madame,” one of the gendarmes told the landlady. “But there was no avoiding it.”
His face seemed to be pleading forgiveness. Madame Portier, her chin defiantly jutting forward, swung the door more widely to let them through. Lily still stood, stunned, in the hallway.
“We’ve come to check your papers,” the captain of the Gestapo stated, his metallic eyes narrowed at her. “We’ve heard you didn’t register at Luzarches. You are Liliane Brasilova?”
Lily nodded, and went into the bedroom. As soon as she saw her, Sudarskaya realized that something was terribly wrong. Lily pressed her finger to her lips, and took her bag out of the closet. Then she left, closing the door behind herself. Sudarskaya, alarmed, cowered on the bed, listening for sounds.
Extracting her identification card from her wallet, Lily handed it to the captain in the hallway. “It’s not in order,” he declared. “You don’t have a J stamped across it. And I see you’re not displaying the yellow star on your clothing.”
“Madame Brasilova isn’t Jewish,” Madame Portier countered.
“Then why didn’t she register for food cards?”
“She just came here for a short vacation.”
“Our information is different. The Princess Liliane Brasilova is a Jew, and she came here to hide, with her daughter. Where is Princess Kira?”
“She went into Paris.” Lily wondered who had given them away, and hoped that there would be a way to contact Kira, to prevent her from returning home. There was obviously no escape. Even the nice policemen, their eyes betraying compassion, no longer could help her. “I have a certificate of baptism,” Lily announced.
“It makes no difference. You are half a Jew. Your daughter is one-quarter Jewish. By law, you both should wear the Star of David. You have broken the law by not registering your religion. You are to come with us right away, Princess—as soon as I’ve searched the grounds for any further evidence of your daughter’s whereabouts.”
Lily felt a tremendous calm spreading through her body, after the sudden burst of adrenaline. It was over. There was nothing left to do now, except hope to save Sudarskaya. But . . . how? It looked as though her old friend was doomed, as she herself was. She’d find some way of alerting Kira—maybe through the nice policemen at the Luzarches station. But already the German officer was marching through the corridor, throwing doors open.
When she heard the strange, martial footsteps outside their room, Sudarskaya, like a terrified animal, leaped from the bed and behind the door. When the captain pushed it open, the tiny piano teacher pressed herself against the wall. “There’s nobody here,” she heard, and then she glimpsed, through the crack, the retreating form of the Gestapo man. He hadn’t checked her hiding place!
In the living room, one of the policemen was murmuring to Lily: “We did all we could, Madame. But we had no choice.”
Urgently, her voice a mere whisper, Lily said, her fingers pressing the sleeve of the young gendarme: “My daughter will come home by the last train, to Luzarches. If you could meet her there, and send her back immediately . . .”
“Consider it done.”
The Gestapo captain was reentering the room, his face impassive and hard, like a closed door. “Very well,” he announced. “I’ll be back in the morning, for the young one. We are leaving now.”
Outside, between the ca
ptain and one of the gendarmes, Lily walked, her head bent, her legs moving mechanically over the dirt road that she had come to know by heart. It was over. Over. She shut her eyes against the memory of Wolf, bald and skeletal, falling on the platform at Compiègne. And she hoped that he had died on the way.
Sudarskaya had been saved, for the second time, by Providence. And she knew that the young gendarme would meet Kira at the station, and warn her not to come home.
* * *
When the doorbell sounded, Jacques, in his shirt sleeves, went to open it. Four officers of the Gestapo stood on the threshold. “Jacob Walter?” one of them demanded.
The seventy-four-year-old man’s eyes widened. Slowly, it dawned on him that they knew all about him, and he nodded. When they came in, he went to sit down on the living room sofa, and watched as they took several plastic bags into the master bedroom. He understood what they had come to do, and waited for them, resting against the soft cushions. It was the maid’s day off, and Maryse and Claire had gone together to pick Nanni up from school. He was absolutely alone in the apartment, but he was not afraid, simply expectant, feeling in his bones that his peaceful, dignified existence was about to be irrevocably violated.
He could hear them prying open the floorboards in his and Claire’s room. Obviously, the maid had finally told on them. She was a young girl from Brittany, whose brothers had joined the Resistance, and he found it difficult to accept her betrayal. But no further explanation presented itself.
My God, he thought: I have to stop Claire and Maryse, somehow! On tiptoe, he walked from the living room onto the balcony, and stood leaning over the railing. And then he felt a hand clamping down on his shoulder, and a German voice saying: “It’s no good, Herr Walter. We have two men stationed downstairs, in front of the elevator. They’ll have taken them by now.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked, calmly.
“With you? There isn’t much we can do, Herr Walter. You’re Swiss. We’ll just have to send you back home, on tomorrow’s first train, with a minimal sum of money in your pocket. We’ve found your silver, and your wife’s jewelry, and all the money and gems Frau Steiner hid around the house. But we can’t touch you, because of Switzerland’s neutrality.”
“And ... my wife?”
“Your wife is French. She is a citizen of a country the Reich is occupying. That’s a different story.”
They walked back into the living room, and Jacques sat down, his whole body trembling, tears gathering in his eyes.
Mere moments later, it seemed, Claire and Maryse were led into the Walters’ apartment, a Gestapo man on each side of them, while Nanni stood between her mother and Claire, her face ashen. “Jacob!” Claire cried, when she saw her husband coming toward her, tears streaming down his face. Throwing off the officer’s hand, she ran across the room and hurled herself into Jacques’s arms, hugging him tightly.
Maryse, numb, simply stood limply while her daughter massaged her hand, an expression of defeat painted on her elfin face. At thirty-eight, Maryse now looked older. The skin had tightened over her small features, and her golden hair no longer shone with magic luster. Wolf’s departure from Compiègne had taken the last ounce of fighting spirit out of her, so that now that doom had come, she was simply yielding up to it, much in the same way that Wolf himself had given in after his experience on the Saint Louis.
But Claire had been a survivor since her early youth. Her arm still tight around her husband’s waist, she asked, defiantly: “Who turned us in?”
“It’s not our business to inform the Jews.”
“But you knew. You came in here looking for our silver, and our jewelry. Only our family was aware of where they were—yet you knew exactly where to go!”
“It had to be Marie,” Jacques said, his voice hushed. “Who else but our family—?”
“No. Marie’s brother was killed last week, in a partisan fight. She’d never collaborate.”
“You’ll have to come with us now, Madame Walter. You’re under arrest.”
Jacques’s fingers twined in hers, Claire shook her head. “I’m never going to leave my husband. Where he goes, I go.”
“It’s not so simple. We have to send Herr Walter back to Switzerland. But you and the others will be deported to a family work camp. Resettlement,” he specified, the sharp, clear word electrifying Maryse with her memories.
Nanni uttered a piercing cry, and Claire moved between her husband and her friends. “You can’t take this child away!” she exclaimed. “She isn’t of legal age, anyway. She’s not fifteen yet!”
“It’s for us to judge,” the first officer snapped.
“Aunt Claire, I am the only one here of legal age,” Maryse said at length, her voice toneless. “You’re too old, and Nanni’s too young. Take me, officers. I don’t care what happens to me now, in any case. Without Wolf, I—” Her voice broke off, and she hunched over, hiding her face in both her hands.
“We don’t intend to waste the whole day convincing you Jews to leave quietly. Madame Walter, either you come with us, without any further fuss, or I shall have to shoot you down.”
Jacques stepped back, his mouth falling open. The Gestapo officer, a captain, had placed his right hand on his holster, and was drawing a pistol out, threatening Claire. The old man cried, “No!” and positioned himself directly in front of his wife. “Darling,” he said, “when I reach Basel, I’ll take all the necessary steps to have you released. You must do as they tell you. You know that I’ll get you out . . . there’s no question—”
“But I don’t care if he shoots me down. I’m not going to be separated from you, Jacob. I can’t let them take Nanni, either. There are laws . . .”
Claire was sixty-four. Still full-figured and elegant, her white hair swept into a French knot at the back of her head, she continued to hold her husband’s hand. She’d lived out her life, hurting and being hurt; she’d made her sacrifices, and endured her pain. Now, the gun aimed at her, she stood unafraid, her mind clear, her heart intact. “You won’t take me to a concentration camp,” she told the officer quietly. “All my adult life, I had to hide being a Jew. And now I’m proud to tell you what I am. I am not a coward, and I’ll stay with Jacob, because he’s old and sick, and I’m his wife. And, as long as I live, I shall not let you take an innocent Jewish girl of fourteen, when the law reads, clearly, that you can only take those between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five.”
“Then, Madame, you leave me no choice.”
In the minute that ensued, Claire’s mind took in chaotic parts of a single scene, seeing Nanni running toward her, Maryse collapsing, and Jacques trying to jump in front of her. She saw the officer’s finger on the trigger, watched his face as he pulled it. And then, the scene exploded into myriad red splashes, and she felt the jagged pain searing her insides, and felt her legs give beneath her. Conscious of a pungent odor, she knew, too, that she had voided her intestines, and as she fell, she saw Jacques bending toward her, this loving man; and she thought that she heard Lily’s voice, and Claude’s, and Paul’s, all calling to her.
Jacques Walter, his face streaked with tears, the front of his shirt splattered with his wife’s blood, was crying, from where he kneeled over Claire’s dead body: “You didn’t have to do that! She would have gone with you! She simply meant to say good-bye!”
“She was a pig Jewess, and tried to resist an officer of the Reich.”
“You don’t understand,” Jacques whispered, his hand caressing Claire’s white cheek. “We’d never been separated. We were married sixteen years, and she’s the only woman I ever loved.”
A nervous tic twisting his face, the Gestapo captain simply turned aside, and Jacques saw him clench and unclench his hands at his sides. “Hurry up,” he called crisply to his underlings. “Clean up this mess, and let’s get out of here.”
On the other side of the room, Maryse and Nanni were holding each other. Jacques could smell the gunpowder in the air, and felt as if his lungs were
about to burst. His worst punishment, he thought, was in not having been allowed to be the one to die.
A sergeant was pulling him to his feet, and yet another man was throwing a sheet over Claire’s body. Jacques Walter’s lips formed in the kaddish, and, silently, he mouthed the words of the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
* * *
When Kira stepped off the train at the Luzarches station, the young gendarme moved out of the shadows into the lamplight, and she saw him approach her, surprise registering in her mind. “You’re Princess Kira?” he asked, his voice low and pressing.
She nodded. “What’s going on?”
“The Gestapo came to our headquarters, this morning, and sent two of us out with a German captain, to arrest you and your mother. She told me to meet you here and to tell you not to come home, because they’ll return tomorrow.”
For a moment, her legs weakened. “Where’s my mother?” she whispered.
“They’ve taken her to Paris. The captain didn’t even let her pack. But apparently, he didn’t know anything about the old lady—Madame Sudarskaya. She hid behind the door, and since he wasn’t looking for her, he didn’t pursue the search. It was you they were after.”
The young policeman, full of pity, put his arm around Kira, and led her to a bench on the platform. She was weeping softly, her head bent forward. “Do you have anywhere to go?” he insisted.
“My grandma’s, in Paris. Unless . . .” Her eyes, huge and green, burned into his heart. “And Raïssa Markovna—I can’t leave her here. There’s my great-aunt, who isn’t Jewish, and who’s old and sick. I suppose I could go there, for a few days.”
“Then I’ll go get Madame Sudarskaya, and bring her here. Don’t move. I’ll stay with you tonight, to make sure nothing happens to you. And in the morning, you’ll both go to this aunt’s, on the dawn train.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, feeling as if the universe had collapsed around her. She’d never been without her mother. Everyone had left her: Misha, Nicky, Pierre. But Lily . . . She’d always taken it for granted that they’d be together; she’d taken her mother for granted, all her life. And now . . .
The Keeper of the Walls Page 56
