In the failing light, she crossed the street, looking at the chalkboards propped up on the sidewalk, advertising all the same entrées. Two American soldiers strode by, brisk in their step, tipping their wedged caps. They offered relaxed smiles, confident and unguarded, the smiles of victors.
She studied the boards while out of the corner of her eye, Vera noticed the doll seller assessing her, and a flicker of recognition passed between them. With a pang, she realized it was the same man who used to sell dolls near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He wore that silk scarf twined flamboyantly around his neck, and those hooded eyes peeked out from under his cap, with the same ragged double-breasted jacket with various medals pinned to it, an artifact from the Great War. Some of the dolls had no arms. Others lacked bodies, offering only heads of matted hair, hanging from hooks with an air of disparagement. A few were still intact, but stripped of clothing, their hard beige flesh reminiscent of the doll Vera had given Lucie for her baptism, with flaxen hair and rose lips. Lucie had proudly named her Camille, which Vera thought fitting as the name meant “serving at the altar.” She wondered if Camille was still under that bench in Sanary.
The man craned his neck, trying to catch Vera’s attention, but she pretended not to see him, feeling his pressuring gaze imploring her to look back.
* * *
• • •
A few days later, she sat at her desk in the apartment Katja had found for her. She had just moved in; the rugs smelled of its former inhabitants, who had cats, and on the walls hung paintings that didn’t belong to her. Tomorrow she had an appointment with Madeleine Dreyfus at the OSE. And this morning, she had gone to the offices of the EIF (the French Israeli Scout Movement). Gussie had told her that the EIF was another underground rescue organization, posing as a scouting club, that had forged identity papers for Jewish children when the deportations began in 1942. They managed to move thousands of children to Christian families, or out of the country. The building was closed with a handwritten note attached to the padlocked door promising to reopen at three p.m., but when she returned, the door was still locked. She stood there, ringing the bell, staring at the stubbornly silent intercom. Then it began to rain. She hovered under the portico for another hour, but no one came.
Sitting at the desk now, she stared out at the rows of plane trees along the boulevard, the charcoal sky hinting at evening, and she shivered. Not so long ago, she had pretended at life under the palm trees and eternal sunshine, her hand on the back of Sasha’s neck as he drove with the top down, the tepid air infused with sea salt. She still recalled the heavy gray sky when he whispered, “I miss you already,” sitting in the parked car in front of Union Station, both of them reluctant to get out.
California’s great distance from Europe had protected her from what Europe had become. She now understood Max’s fear; they no longer belonged here. Instead, Paris belonged to the Russian ambassador who lived in their flat, to the British and American soldiers who strolled their streets, hungry to consume the city’s charms, and to the intelligence officers, counterespionage experts, and all those journalists feverishly typing away their impressions of the liberated city in every café and run-down hotel, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. And yet she felt acutely aware of the disappeared: schoolteachers and acquaintances, the cashier at the tabac around the corner from their apartment, their favorite waiter at Café de Flore, Lucie’s little friends and their mothers and fathers, whose absence haunted every street corner, every crowded bistro, every primary school.
She kept thinking of that wall of photographs at the Hotel Lutetia: Last seen on June 9, 1943 . . . If you have any information kindly contact . . . Husband searching for his wife, Lilian Gosselin, from Dijon, age 36. These pleading messages entered her thoughts without warning. While riding the tram, she could be staring out at the familiar streets and see a lost grandmother from one of the portrait photographs, waiting in a bread line. She would leap up, breaking into a sweat as the tram sped past, realizing it wasn’t the same woman and knowing the real grandmother from the picture was probably dead by now. She had heard that in the camps, the sick and old were exterminated upon arrival because they couldn’t work.
Sighing, she laid her fingers on the keys of the black Olivetti lent to her by Katja, and missed her pale green Underwood, still in a trunk, traveling across the Atlantic at this very moment. Katja had urged Vera to write about what had happened to her—escaping from Gurs, crossing the Pyrenees, and moving to California—but Vera didn’t know if she could. The story was unfinished, and the knots gathering in her stomach, which had only intensified since her return, implied that it might not end well.
Erratically, she started banging on the keys, nonsensical letters imprinting the page. She kept going, wincing at the harsh cacophony, until she banged both fists down on the keyboard.
In that moment, the doorbell rang.
* * *
• • •
She froze, embarrassed by this spectacle. Was she becoming a madwoman, typing gibberish? Standing up, she smoothed down the front of her dress, wondering if it was the landlady, a snow-haired woman who ferreted out gossip, or if the man next door was complaining about the banging.
Pausing before the door, Vera thought perhaps the person had left, but then she heard a sigh, and the air gathered with that particular density of someone waiting on the other side of it.
Drawing open the door, she caught her breath.
Sasha stood there, hat in his hands. He started to say something, but she rushed into his arms, breathing the fresh air he’d carried in from outside, and the familiar cigar scent of his unshaven cheek pressing into hers.
Vera touched his face. “Sasha.” She could barely speak. “You’re here.”
Chapter 45
SASHA
July 1945, Paris, France
His first night in Paris, they talked until early morning.
Vera never got the letter that he sent from New York, and so he explained his mother’s death and what she had revealed. While he spoke, Vera stroked his face, her hand falling to his shoulder, resting there, her warmth funneling into him a comfort.
“It’s strange, but I already kind of knew, or at least I sensed there was this other story running beneath the story she told me. She tried so hard to keep it from me, but at the same time, there were signs: on her face, in my dreams, and the photograph she kept of him buried inside that box. He must have been close to my age now when they met, judging from the picture.” He drew a breath, flooded by the memory of the stalled train in the Berlin station, the expectant way his mother craned her neck, peering through the dirty window, willing his father to appear on the platform, to say one last goodbye, or perhaps to come with them. He didn’t know.
Sasha lit a cigarette, passing a hand through his hair. “I have no idea if he’s alive, if he survived the war, if he would even want me to find him . . .”
“Do you want to find him?”
The question startled him. He rubbed his eyes and said quietly, “I don’t know, Vera. I don’t know.”
Hunting around for a lighter, he asked if Gussie had supplied her with any useful contacts, and she mentioned the OSE, and a few other rescue organizations. She described the Hotel Lutetia, the terrifying wall of absents, how the man behind the desk there seemed to think her search was a lost cause. Settling back into bed, she said she was a stranger in her own city, and explained the disturbing sensation of visiting her old apartment, now filled with the detritus of other people’s lives.
Drifting into sleep, her head on his chest, she whispered, “Thank you for coming here.”
* * *
• • •
He awoke in the late morning with the image of his mother’s collarbone rising and falling in his mind, as if she were struggling to breathe, beseeching him for help. Sitting up in bed, he felt powerless, a hated feeling. Deciding to go out, he dressed and shaved. Befo
re leaving, he lingered in the semidarkness of the bedroom a moment, inhaling Vera’s perfume.
He kissed her beneath the earlobe. “See you in a little bit, before the OSE?”
Her eyes flickered open, a dense brown. “Where are you going?”
“Need cigarettes. And a paper. Thought I’d take a stroll.”
She smiled faintly and then tossed an arm over her face, burrowing back into sleep.
A map folded into his back pocket, Sasha waded through the blue morning, crossing avenues lined with chestnut trees. He wanted to see where Vera used to live with Max—she had described it to him so many times. On his walk there, the towering Gothic churches and curved facades of elegant apartment buildings were impressive, but he couldn’t help noticing signs of the recent occupation: sandstone walls pockmarked by bullets, and the stylish women who cycled past, rail thin, with that hungry gleam in their eyes. Posters of film stars were plastered over crumbling brick walls in an attempt to cover up the decay. Sitting against the wall, a little boy played with a tin can. Every time it rolled away, he wailed with renewed frustration.
Up ahead, workers laid down new cobblestones. An older woman selling flowers silently watched Sasha, ignoring the restless child in her arms. These stone streets, with their reticent flower sellers, and crates crowned with small yellow potatoes, were so unlike the flamboyant entreaties of his childhood, where peddlers demanded that you smell, taste, try.
He smiled, thinking of them with affection, the sting of salted cashews hitting his tongue, the peddlers always pressing a little treat into his palm. Later, his mother would yell, waving his pants through the air like a flag, “In the height of summer, who hides a chocolate in his trouser pocket and then lets it melt? Are you trying to make more work for me, on top of all the cleaning and cooking and sewing? Are you?”
“No,” Sasha whispered, rounding the corner onto Avenue Constant Coqueline, a narrow side street funneled with hushed quiet. Feeling like a trespasser, he ventured into this shaded green seclusion, scanning each ornate entryway for the number 10.
He found Vera’s old apartment at the end of the block. Ivy spilled over the balcony railings, green tendrils against the smooth sandstone. Fine iron grillwork overlaid a pair of glass doors leading into the lobby. He squinted up at the top story, almost believing Vera smoked a cigarette on the balcony, as she had described to him many times, while Lucie played with her dolls under Vera’s desk. His mother would have marveled at this place, similar to the exclusive apartment buildings they used to covet. On the rare free Saturday, his mother liked to take him on the subway to the Upper East Side, where she would stop and admire the black lacquered doors with those brass knockers placed in the middle of each one, as though the doors deserved their own little crowns, announcing to his mother that they would never open for her.
* * *
• • •
Ordering a coffee, he noticed an older man at the end of the bar sizing him up, most likely having overheard Sasha’s American accent when he ordered in French, which often induced a ripple of derision, as it did now. He’d picked up some basics of the language in the army, though even what little he knew was rusty. Part of him wanted to remind the man that he’d be speaking German right about now if it weren’t for the Americans, but he stopped himself. What was the point? The French knew they had lost, having submitted to their occupiers, some willingly, some not. And now they chose to see themselves as winners. Everyone does that, Sasha thought, so they can hold their heads high.
Catching his reflection in the cloudy mirror behind the bar, Sasha wondered about his father. What was his wife like? And his children? And had Sasha inherited any of his father’s proclivities and habits, his tastes and attitudes, or was blood merely biological, carrying none of the ineffable qualities that people often claimed were passed down from one generation to the next?
Sighing, Sasha looked up from his half-eaten dish of hazelnuts and saw Vera paused on the threshold, her silk coat cinched around her waist. She smiled at him from across the dim bar, a smile he’d never seen before. It lit up her whole face.
Coming over to him, she took his arm and whispered, “Shall we go?”
“Yes,” Sasha said, “let’s go.”
Chapter 46
VERA
July 1945, Paris, France
Photographs of children were tacked to the wall next to Madeleine Dreyfus’s desk. In one photograph, small children sat in a circle on a lawn, playing a nursery game, a château in the background. In other photographs, older children attempted some form of gymnastics, balancing in a human pyramid, on the verge of toppling. Often, the children looked stiff, arms crossed over their chests, their faces too old for their small bodies.
Of course, Lucie wasn’t in any of these photographs.
Vera drew her coat closed, staving off the depressing atmosphere of the gray unheated OSE office, with papers scattered over desks, social workers speaking to parents in sympathetic tones, and the smell of burnt coffee and old clothes. She refocused on the photographs, listening to Madeleine explain, in a mixture of French and English, for Sasha’s sake, that the children in the pictures were orphans. Their parents had been rounded up and sent to the camps. Some of the children were French, but most of them were not. They lived in various homes and châteaus, run by Cimade and Secours Suisse and Tante Soly in which Jewish children mixed with French Catholic ones, providing the Jewish children a natural cover. For example, Château de Chabannes near Lyon, and the Rothschild château in Seine-et-Marne.
Vera nodded vaguely, finding it unbearable to talk about all the saved ones, when Lucie had not been saved. Then Madeleine spoke a great deal about the rescue mission in the Haute-Loire region, where a network of villages in the plateau, Le Chambon being a primary one, rescued hundreds of Jewish children during the war, getting them over the border to Portugal and procuring visas for them to immigrate to the United States, or Palestine.
“Palestine?” Vera repeated, alarmed. “Do you think Lucie could be there?” She reached for Sasha, and his warm hand closed over hers.
“I would have remembered a girl coming to us from Oradour.” Madeleine sighed, glancing at a stack of documents on her desk. The phone rang, but she ignored it. “I personally went into the camps, Gurs in particular, and persuaded the mothers to give me their children. All of them did. They knew the alternative.”
“I was at Gurs. September and October of 1940.”
“Before things got bad.”
Vera nodded. “I didn’t want Lucie there. And I thought they would release us in a matter of weeks. This was the whole reason why I had arranged for her to go with Agnes instead.” She took a shallow breath. “It’s my fault.”
“No,” Sasha said, almost rising from his seat. “You had no choice.”
“He’s right.” Madeleine fixed her eyes on Vera. “I’ve witnessed too many mothers lose their children for no reason other than bad luck: a neighbor who knew too much, a visa that didn’t go through at the last minute, the wrong nationality, the wrong hair color, the wrong accent.” She shook her head, her mouth a grim line. “The Germans did this. Not you. Never you.”
Vera shifted in her chair, that familiar sharpness spidering over her chest, making it hard to breathe.
Frowning slightly, Madeleine leafed through some papers, and then sank back into her chair, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
“We’re trying to locate a survivor of the massacre, to see if they’ll talk to us.” Sasha paused, stealing a glance at Vera. “What else should we do?”
“I’ve been turning something over in my mind ever since Gussie called me, about your daughter.”
Vera held her breath, too afraid to speak, waiting for Madeleine to reveal something worse. Worse than what she had already imagined. She glanced down, realizing that her hands were shaking.
“If you consider how much harder it became to
hide Jewish children with the increased deportations and roundups in the summer of ’42, and with having to wear the yellow star, it would have been very difficult to keep hiding Lucie in Oradour after this point.” She absently touched her pendant, a low-hanging scarab. Pale gold, it caught the light. “Perhaps they moved her.”
Vera nodded, feeling a pang at the memory of Max anxiously reading the paper that Sunday morning, telling her that the yellow star was now mandatory. They were afraid, but at that point, they had no idea how afraid to be.
“Where do you think Agnes would have taken her?” Madeleine lit a cigarette. “Did Agnes have any relatives or friends in other parts of France? Or Switzerland?”
Vera shook her head. “If she dared to move Lucie, it would have been somewhere nearby. She probably didn’t want to travel too far as that would raise the chance of being stopped and asked for papers. And petrol was probably hard to come by.” Vera paused. “She was a very cautious person. Discreet and fastidious. If she thought to do this, she would have waited until the absolute last moment to leave, perhaps not wanting to risk it.”
Madeleine nodded thoughtfully, taking a long drag on her cigarette.
Vera sat down again and pressed the heel of her palms into her thighs. “Do you think there’s a possibility that Lucie is alive?”
Their eyes met, and Vera caught the uncertainty on her face, but she also saw a flicker of promise.
“Maybe,” Madeleine said.
Those Who Are Saved Page 32
