She closed the door behind her, her breath shortened, her heart pounding with dangerous hope.
And then a few days later, on June 6, the wireless announced that the liberation of France had begun: “Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.” Max picked her up in the living room, accidentally knocking over their coffee cups on the low table, her stocking feet dangling a few inches above the carpet. He held her so tight she almost couldn’t breathe.
She whispered, “It’s nearly over. Nearly. Just a few more months, maybe less.”
He placed her back down, his face flushed. “We’ll go straight there and get her.”
* * *
• • •
Elsa and Leon came over later that day with champagne. Pauline and Conrad were also there. They drank in the garden to a crooning Frank Sinatra while Leon and Max took turns imitating General Eisenhower, shaking their fists in the air, proclaiming: “This is the Europe we came to free!”
“Will you move back to France, after the war?” Pauline asked, sipping champagne. They sat in the shade at the edge of the garden.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vera said, stretching her arms overhead. The fig tree was beginning to bloom, and she inhaled its deep rich scent. “We’ve gotten used to life here. And France is not the France it once was. What is there now? Ruins? Collaborators? I’d rather raise Lucie here, free of all those old associations. I want her to have a new start. I want that for all of us.”
* * *
• • •
The next day, Vera walked into the extra bedroom that would become Lucie’s room. She touched the faded yellow wallpaper, and imagined it replaced with pink rosebuds leafed in green. It would be too bold to actually replace the wallpaper now, even if the room needed brightening. But she did allow herself to buy one dress for Lucie, which she kept in the packaging, hidden in the back of the closet. A crossed-back pinafore dress, mint green and dotted with flowers, with little pearl buttons down the front. She couldn’t imagine Lucie fitting into the dress, it looked so big on the hanger, a size eight, but that was her age now.
Sitting down on the twin bed, Vera imagined Lucie playing with her dolls in this sunlit room, the animated stream of her make-believe talk floating through the house. Glancing at the pink bedspread and lace pillows, the very pillows Lucie might soon lay her head on, she felt a stab of anxiety but pushed it away. Oradour was in a peaceful corner of France where there had been no fighting. And soon, she thought, the town would be liberated along with the rest of the country.
Daringly, she filled every room with freshly cut flowers. She planted rosebushes in the garden, willing the light pink buds to bloom early. She hung a wooden bird feeder from the fig tree, hoping for bluebirds, harbingers of luck. She fixed her hair more often, and bought a set of colored ribbons, wondering if Lucie still liked her hair plaited. For Lucie’s room, she found a porcelain figurine of a black cat licking its white paws that looked just like Mourka.
She acted as though any day now, Lucie would come home.
* * *
• • •
This morning, Vera sat at the kitchen table drinking a glass of orange juice. The sun shone, dissipating an early mist that hung over the mountains. She heard the birds rustling in the trees and Max dressing upstairs. In the distance, someone mowed their lawn, and from the tennis court next door, she half listened to the ball repeatedly strike the rackets, followed by Conrad’s muffled grunts, indicating that Pauline was winning.
The sounds of Sunday, Vera thought, turning the page, scanning the headlines: “Stunning Blows Strike Foe in Pacific Arena: Saipan is Stormed,” “Allies Landed Men Months Ago to Dig Sample of Normandy Soil,” “Landing Puts End to 4-Year Hiatus: Fiery Renewal of Battle for France.”
And then, up in the corner, a smaller article stood out: “A Martyred Village—Wrong French Town Burned.”
She sat up in the chair. The article had been reported by French headquarters in London. She kept reading, an odd needling numbness spreading through her:
On Saturday, June 10th, beginning in the early hours of the morning, all the men, women, and children in the sleepy French village of Oradour-sur-Glane were shot and burned to death by the Nazi SS Division, on the charge that the population gave shelter to Resistance fighters and hid explosives. The men were locked in barns and shot to death, and the women and children burned to death in a locked church. A total of 642 townspeople—245 women, 207 children, and 190 men—were massacred.
Ironically, a German general stated in Neue Zürcher Zeittung that “the massacre was committed in error,” instead intended for Oradour-sur-Vayres, a town a mere 17 miles away, where German troops suspected that members of the FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans) were sheltering ammunition as well as an abundance of rationed commodities.
Putting down the paper, Vera swallowed hard, staring at her coffee cup, her chipped nail varnish, the china-blue walls, the large clock hanging over the swinging door. She closed her eyes, as if to hold time in place, as if nothing had changed, and maybe nothing had changed, but then the paper lay there, with the evidence printed. If she kept very still, it all might disappear.
Max swung through the kitchen door. He wore his white trousers for golf.
Gripping the kitchen table, her hands shook.
He poured himself a cup of coffee from the French press on the stove.
She held her breath, watching him dump a teaspoon of sugar into his cup, wanting to preserve these last moments before everything would change.
Stirring the sugar, the teaspoon hitting the porcelain to create that high-pitched ting-a-ling sound, he turned toward her, the sun slanting across his face. He had just shaved. The lime-blossom scent he doused on afterward filled her nose.
He smiled, but his mouth looked crooked. “Is everything all right?”
A thick sheet of water rushed over her, his voice faintly calling from above. He looked confused when she started to talk, until she realized that she was sobbing, making deep guttural sounds.
He came toward her and knelt down to her eye level.
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut, her stomach clenching. She couldn’t catch her breath, but she wanted to tell him herself, to stop him from reading those terrible words.
“Max,” she said, grabbing onto his arm, knocking over the orange juice.
The juice soaked through the paper and dripped from the edge of the table onto the floor.
She swallowed down a surge of vomit.
“Vera, what is it?”
She gestured to the wet newspaper.
He delicately lifted up the wet sheet of paper and started to read.
“My God,” he whispered, his expression hollow, the air dense, interspersed with the cry of seagulls and the dinging of an ice cream truck winding its way down to the beach. The thud of an errant tennis ball hurled itself against the side of the house, having sailed over from Pauline and Conrad’s court.
“Sorry!” Conrad yelled over the wall.
They sat as still as statues, holding hands across the table, their wrists sticky from the juice, the transparent print seeping into the wood.
Max’s voice, faint and unsteady, cut through the quiet. “What are we going to do now? What are we going to do?”
He covered his face with his hands. She kept staring down at the soaked-through newspaper. An overwhelming numbness pulsed through her, as though a lead apron were draped over her chest, stifling all feeling, all movement, all thought. Everything went colorless, the kitchen monochromatic. Max, with his gray hair and white golf shirt, was a newspaper cutout.
He kept shaking his head and started to manically clean his glasses with a square of silk. “I don’t understand,” he cried, his face naked and vulnerable. “I don’t understand how this happened. I don’t understand
.”
She sat very still.
There was nothing to say.
Chapter 19
SASHA
June 1944, Omaha Beach and Normandy, France
The fire-swept beach blurred with bodies, most dead, some still alive, and Sasha yanked soldiers, one by one, from the rough surf, onto the sand toward a medic. The guys screamed as salt water rushed into their wounds, but Sasha kept running and pulling them out along the open beach as he gained more ground. An ammunitions truck burst into flames, lighting up a few soldiers, and two other guys stared in confusion before they were shot down by machine gun fire. Seconds later, another man stepped the wrong way, and a land mine blew him up, his body arcing into the air. Panic rang in Sasha’s ears, his heart bursting, knowing his only purpose was to deliver this one piece of information and then get the hell back.
He stumbled over corpses, dismembered limbs, and almost staggered into the surf, but all the dead bodies blocked him, piled up like sandbags where the tide broke. Lurching back onto the sand, he fell over something, his chest smacking into a corpse, and the idea of just lying there, playing dead, crossed his mind, but he forced himself up and sprinted, blindly and hysterically, down the beach.
Minutes felt like hours, until finally he spotted Taylor hugging a nearby seawall with another soldier. Taylor was smoking the butt end of a cigar, and Sasha screamed out: “E-I exit’s open!”
“Who blew it open?” Taylor yelled.
“I did.”
“All right.” Taylor spit out his cigar butt and ordered Sasha back to the breach, and he and the other men would follow. Sasha knew he’d have to run back into that hellish nightmare. But he did it, plunging through it, knowing any minute a Nazi bullet might shoot through his head, as guys all around him caught bullets in their necks, their backs, their chests.
* * *
• • •
They kept moving inland, at a crawling pace, through the immense tangle of hedgerows where German snipers hid, and through small hamlets where French peasants cowered in their farmhouses. Teenagers from the Free French Forces filtered back and forth across enemy lines, sharing information about German positions, and they elected one kid, Gussie, as their unit’s mascot. He spoke pretty good English, and he was always joking and laughing over any small thing, the gap between his two front teeth seemed to widen the more he laughed. One night, after they secured Colleville-sur-Mer, Gussie liberated a bottle of calvados from an empty bar. Sitting at the deserted tables, they passed around the brandy until there wasn’t a drop left. No one said much; they were just glad to sit at a table and drink out of a glass, almost feeling human again.
* * *
• • •
To recuperate and wait for replacements, Sasha’s outfit bivouacked on a wide château lawn in the village of Colombières. They wrote letters home under the generous shade of pine trees, while Red Cross girls served up coffee and doughnuts. They threw around some baseballs, which landed in rosemary bushes. Nick and Sasha played poker for long stretches until they got tired, and Sasha napped on the grass, a Raymond Chandler novel open and facedown on his chest. His mother had included it in her last care package. He pictured the winding roads through Laurel Canyon, the cool blondes lounging by swimming pools, the way Marlowe was always in his car, driving and mulling over some detail of a case that would later be the key to everything. Closing his eyes, Sasha almost believed he was back there.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, Sasha and a few guys from his unit, Nick and Gussie included, strolled into town, hoping to find more brandy and cigarettes. Gussie boasted about a flirtation with one of the Red Cross girls. Sasha kept worrying about land mines, even though they were walking on cobblestone streets; he knew the forest was littered with them, and tried to reason with himself that they could walk freely here. They passed buildings peppered with bullet holes, followed by entire bombed-out blocks.
Up ahead, an old man pushed a wooden cart overloaded with bedding bound together with rope. A woman trudged a few paces behind, lugging a sack over her shoulder. They both wore faded black clothing, and with their austere white hair and wizened faces, they appeared like figures out of a fairy tale, as a kind of warning or bad omen. A chill passed through Sasha, reminding him of his mother’s Baba Yaga stories about a forest witch who stole newborns in the night. She used to tell him that he was the only child Baba Yaga had let her keep.
* * *
• • •
Rounding the corner, Sasha sensed commotion along the main street culminating in the square. Gussie and the others lagged behind at a tabac, but Sasha followed the townspeople, who spoke in animated tones, gesturing with impatience. The street hummed with a carnivalesque quality. A few men from the Resistance, their rifles slung across their chests, walked along with the crowd. One of them gave Sasha a grim smile. The general pace quickened and Sasha kept up, seeing that in the square, men were cutting and shaving off women’s hair; this was the main attraction, and the crowd jeered at the women, forming a loose semicircle around them. Some children watched and laughed because the adults were laughing, but otherwise the children looked ill at ease, confused to be celebrating punishment. One woman knelt down and cried when she touched her newly shorn head. A few tiny nicks on her scalp glinted in the sun. Another woman jerked away, but a man held both of her hands in his while another man fisted her hair. Nearby, a young woman, wearing red lipstick and a silk floral dress, casually sat on a bench while a man cut away. She didn’t protest or scream, like the others, but only stared vacantly ahead, her mouth slightly parted.
Then there was a shift in the air; one of the shaved women started walking away with a bundle in her arms. Barefoot, she wore a thin slip. She walked swiftly, and townspeople ran after her, heckling, calling out names, but she kept walking and Sasha strode parallel to her, and he saw that she held a baby in her arms. The baby was about six weeks old, from what he could tell, with a mound of dark hair, its tiny face scrunched up in sleep, its miniature hands fisted into its cheeks. The crowd chanted “collaboratrice putain” with the force of a battle cry. The townswomen spat on her and laughed, their wooden heels clacking against the cobblestones.
The shaven woman had no one, only the baby, whom she clutched close to her chest. She stared straight ahead, her cheeks burning. Someone had used red lipstick to paint a swastika on her forehead. Sasha saw she had nowhere to go, but could not stop; otherwise the crowd might descend on her and yank the baby from her arms, the living evidence of what she had done. Seeking refuge, her eyes met his, and in that moment, seeing her chapped lips, protective eyes, thin dirty neck, and the shame that coated her every gesture, recognition pierced him, circling back to his birth. In a flash, the harsh morning sun shining down on her shorn head, he knew his father must have been a German soldier instead of the story his mother spun: that her husband, a Russian Jew from their village who had died during the first year of the Great War, was his father. Why else would they whisper “mamzer” behind his back? Why else did she never talk about him? Why else?
On some level, he’d always known this, haunted by the hidden photograph of the soldier in field gray against the tree, a photograph he periodically sought out, desperate to know who his father was, and desperate to link omissions, silences, and shame into a story he could understand about himself.
He held up his arm to the crowd and walked over to her. The crowd stalled, unsure of what to do. Nodding to the Resistance fighters, he pretended to have a plan, and they nodded back, and somehow, within the span of a few minutes, the crowd dispersed, seeking another target, or maybe they just grew bored.
Too afraid to look at Sasha, she whispered “merci” over and over again. Gently taking her by the elbow, he guided her to the only place he could find, an empty doorway shaded by an overhanging portico.
She sat down there, the baby stirring, and she slumped against the wall
.
When he walked away, he heard the baby begin to wail, his cries gathering force and intensity, despite her shushing, or maybe because of it.
Chapter 20
LUCIE
August 1944, St. Denis Convent, Southwestern France
At first light, she ran behind Camille, following the flash of her thick golden hair around the corner. When she caught up to her, they balanced on the wooden benches beneath the window for a better view of the road. Listening hard, they heard distant cheering and honking, and then the distinctive thundering of “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem.
“Do you think the Americans are here?” Lucie wondered.
“They’ve come to save us.” Camille sighed, her breath smudging the windowpane. “And they’re so handsome,” she added dreamily, even though she’d only seen a few snapshots of American soldiers in the newspaper.
Camille’s eyes then filled with light, the same light Father Belanger said had encircled Mary during the Annunciation, and Lucie knew the war was ending.
The doorbell rang, and Sister Ismerie ran to open it, trying to appear calm and overcome her old anxiety that it might be the Germans. Camille immediately clasped Lucie’s hand, her eyes frozen, waiting, followed by the sound of the door opening and exclamations in French. A woman’s voice, high and sweet, rang through the corridors.
“My mother is here!” Camille gasped. She pulled Lucie along, and they ran barefoot, hair loose around their shoulders, sleep still in their eyes.
Sister Ismerie and Sister Helene stood speaking with an elegant couple with light hair and light eyes, smiling expectantly. The man wore an officer’s uniform with the tricolor badge around his arm, the woman a smart jacket cinched at the waist and wide-legged trousers. Their eyes lit up, and the woman cried out when Camille ran to them. She knelt down to catch Camille. Then the man picked her up and hugged her close, as if he might crush her.
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