The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  This spring Jews in Paris had been made to buy yellow stars to be sewn onto their clothing. They had been given food cards imprinted with the word Jew. All public places were now forbidden.

  Lea went into the garden to wait for Ava. She felt as though her mother had woken her for a reason. She thought of all her mother had done for her and all she had sacrificed.

  If what she’d read was true, Ava would not refuse her one wish.

  At last, near dawn, the golem returned with mud on her bare feet and her hair wringing wet. She leapt over the wall as if she were a deer and landed in an overgrown bed of ivy. When she saw Lea, she was embarrassed to appear as a wild creature, hands patchy with river silt, nearly flying into the garden. She came to sit beside Lea on the bench. The hem of her dress was wet; it was the same dress the housemaid had worn before she’d run away, but Marianne had kept her clothes starched and pressed, and now the fabric was streaked with mud.

  “You should be asleep,” Ava told Lea.

  “So should you.”

  “But here we are.”

  “I won’t ask you where you’ve been,” Lea said.

  Good. Ava was surprised by her own thoughts. I won’t tell you.

  “But I need you to save my mother,” Lea went on. “We must go back to Berlin.”

  It was impossible. Ava was made to do as she was told and she had been told to keep Lea safe. “I must do as your mother instructed.”

  “Would you do anything my mother told you?”

  “I’m here to keep you safe” was all Ava would say.

  Here because you have to be, Lea thought. Because you are a slave and I am your burden. I am your duty and nothing more. We are yoked together and we’d best not speak about it, or look into each other’s eyes, in case we find that nothing at all is there.

  The golem knew that Lea’s neighborhood in Berlin had been emptied of Jewish residents. Thousands had been sent east to Poland to the killing camps, Hanni Kohn among them. Soon after they had left for France, on an ordinary afternoon, the soldiers came. Bobeshi had been shot as she lay in her bed; she’d been too infirm to be taken from the apartment, too much trouble, too unimportant, not a person, not a soul, not a woman who spoke to God as she was murdered, turning to the angel in the black coat when he came to offer her comfort and take her in his arms.

  “There’s nothing to go back to,” Ava said.

  It was a dark dream, Hanni whispered in her daughter’s ear. Lea did not need to be asleep to hear her mother’s voice. It was nothing like the world that we knew. Stones, murder, lice, greed, horror, birds falling from the sky, the grave you made for others, the grave you made for yourself. There were more demons every day, so many, there was no longer any room for them in the trees or on the window ledges. They walked through the streets as if they were men, ready to own the world. And where were the angels, the ones who walked so near to mortals you could sometimes feel them beside you? There was only one angel left in all of Berlin, the one with the black coat and the book of names. There were as many names as there were demons. The book was filled in a matter of days. There was another book needed, and then another, until there were three hundred, and then three thousand, and then the books were piled upon each other until they reached to heaven.

  Keep her safe.

  That was her last thought as she stood in the cavernous hole she had been forced to dig, in a country where she didn’t belong. Those were the words Ava had heard at the moment Hanni arose into the World to Come. Those were the words Lea heard now.

  Lea went to hide behind the greenhouse. She was there crying when Julien found her. The whole city of Paris was crying, but hers was the only voice he heard.

  “I want to go home,” she told him.

  “All right.”

  “But I can’t. I can never.”

  “Of course you can. I’ll go with you.” When she gave him a look, Julien insisted. “Why not? Who’s to stop us?”

  But Lea knew that Ava was right. Hers was a wish that could never be granted. It was too late, it was over; there was no home to go back to. When you have lost your mother you have lost the world. You can sit in the garden and see nothing at all, not the woman on the garden bench watching over you, not the boy who refuses to leave you, even when you tell him to go.

  Your grief won’t go away; it’s not a door you can close, or a book you can put back on the shelf, or a kiss you can give back once it is given. This is the way the world is now. Keep the worst things to yourself, like a bone in your throat.

  He will do the same, he will blurt out everything, but not the fact that his father cries in his study because he knows that the only numbers that matter now are the numbers of the dead. This is how it begins and how it ends, this is your weakness and your strength, when you are alone, you are not alone, when you have lost the world, you have found each other. After a while it doesn’t matter if the garden is ruined and the trees are all cut down. It doesn’t matter if there is ice over your heart. He knows who you are.

  In the midst of dinner there was knocking at the door. The professors from Germany and their wives and children had been served bowls of Hardship Soup, but they now ran upstairs and hid in the cabinets, holding knives in their hands. When André Lévi went to open the door, it was only their neighbor, Monsieur Oches, who’d come to call. But he was frantic as he reported that people were fleeing, not just the foreign born, but their own neighbors, French citizens, even those who had fought in the previous war and were decorated veterans. People were leaving for Lyon or Toulouse, where life was somewhat better for them, or to the border of Italy or Switzerland. Anyone with a relative in America or England had already left. There was talk of a roundup to come when no one would be saved, not women, not children, not the sick, not the elderly.

  “It won’t happen at dinner,” the professor said. “Go home and be with your family.”

  “Don’t think I’m exaggerating!” Monsieur Oches said. “We’ll all be murdered before long!”

  Professor Lévi thanked his neighbor and led him to the door so the family could finish their dinner. Claire Lévi had worried that these cousins of her husband would call trouble to them, and now they had an attic full of unwanted guests. When she and her husband were at last alone at the table, she told him their guests must leave. “We can’t have refugees here.”

  “Not tonight.” There was strange resolve in the professor’s voice. He had realized his wife did not yet understand what was happening. They were all the same now, whether they were refugees or French born. This was not their city anymore.

  After dinner the professor took a box of their most valued possessions out to the yard and had Julien dig a hole underneath the oak tree. Julien’s shirt was soon soiled, as if he was a gravedigger, but he kept going until his father told him to stop. Into this trench went what was left of the silverware that had belonged to Julien’s great-grandmother, along with the professor’s studies packed into a leather case and a box of family photographs. If they were forced to leave, they could later return for these things.

  Lea stopped at the doorway when she saw the Lévi family gathered in the garden. During the time she’d been their houseguest, the professor and his wife had mostly ignored her, but now Professor Lévi gestured to her.

  “Join us. Perhaps you have a treasure to bury?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Claire said. “What on earth would this girl have?”

  Lea touched the charm around her neck. Her only treasure, and she yearned to be rid of it. Julien was watching her with his fierce dark eyes that were flecked with gold. His white shirt was streaked with dirt, and he couldn’t seem to look away from her. Lea met his glance and hesitated, until Madame Lévi urged him to hurry, and then it was too late for Lea to be rid of the locket. Not that it mattered. She had memorized her mother’s instructions. She knew what she must do, whether or not she had the charm.

  Shovels of dirt were tossed over the trench, and a frozen rosebush was planted
above the buried treasure. The one thing of value the professor kept was his watch. It had belonged to his father, and, though he had paid no attention to time in the past, he thought he must now do so. He asked his son to bring out a bottle of cognac, the last they had. The German professors and their wives came to join them. Julien returned with the bottle and a tray of small glasses. The glasses were green and fragile and would all be broken before long. It was the first time Lea had tasted alcohol and she felt grown up and reckless. Ava came to look for her and immediately noticed that she was standing too close to Julien. She gave him a look, but it was too late. He was sick of being told what to do. They might be considered children, but it was possible they would not be alive long enough to become adults.

  Out of sight, Julien took Lea’s hand.

  Out of sight, she let him.

  “Now they’ll know where our valuables are,” the professor’s wife whispered once their belongings were in the ground. She threw a look over her shoulder. There was Ava, glaring back with cold gray eyes. “Who’s to say that woman’s not a thief ?”

  “She’s not, but even if she was, it wouldn’t matter,” her husband responded. “We no longer have anything to steal.”

  Ava heard the call outside the window at an hour when no birds sang. It was the call of a messenger to warn of a battle to come. The gray heron was in the garden. He looked at the world as a map, in shades of blue and green, but now the colors were murky and there were black clouds everywhere, so that it was nearly impossible to see. Already, huge flocks of birds had taken to the sky, fleeing the city as if escaping from a fire. The darkness was caused by the descent of the angels. There were angels of confusion and of destruction and fear, and accusing angels who did their work in the darkness, so men and women never knew when they’d been marked. This world was shattering. Ava could see where it was breaking, a fine white line that revealed what had already passed and what was to come. She shook Lea awake.

  In her groggy state, Lea didn’t think to be defiant when Ava said they must leave. She dressed quickly, while Ava tossed the suitcase out the window, then they both climbed out. There was a stream of pale moonlight, like the moonlight in a dream. It was already spring. The world was green and pulsing and beautiful.

  “Hurry,” Ava told Lea, who lagged behind.

  Lea now stopped on the path, refusing to go any further. “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re not my mother.”

  Ava was not made to have emotions, but the remark hurt, as if she had pricked her finger on glass.

  “You’re nothing to me,” Lea went on, furious with Ava ever since her refusal to go back to Berlin. “You go! Leave me here.”

  Ava put down the suitcase. “I may not be your mother, but I act on her behalf. Do as I say.”

  Lea’s eyes were blazing. “I won’t. I don’t want to go because I don’t want to be with you!” she cried.

  “You can come with me,” Ava said, “or I can take you with me.”

  “How? With a rope around my neck?”

  “If I need to, yes.”

  Their breath came hard in the cool, foggy night. Ava seemed even taller in her black boots.

  “There is no rope,” Lea said uncertainly. “And, anyway, you wouldn’t dare.”

  Ava nodded at the shrubbery that was covered with burlap, tied with heavy rope. It was a lilac and the leaves were growing right through the burlap. The rope was slack.

  Lea knew what her mother would say if she had been there.

  She has been sent to you to save your life. Don’t throw everything away.

  “Fine,” Lea said grudgingly. “But first I say goodbye.”

  The heron was waiting in what had once been a sapling the first Monsieur Lévi had planted, a cutting from the oldest locust tree in Paris, which had stood on the Rive Gauche for more than four hundred years at an ancient Roman crossroad. It was said that good luck would belong to anyone who ran their hand over the locust’s bark, but Ava could see demons massing in trees all over Paris, in the cherry trees that surrounded Notre-Dame, the sequoia brought from California that stood in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the huge ginkgo biloba planted in the Parc Monceau in 1879.

  Ava let Lea have the one thing she wanted, such a small request, really, when she would lose everything else. Their time here was over, it was already in the past, and they both knew it.

  Lea rushed to take some pebbles from the ground to toss against Julien’s window. He woke and looked out, rumpled with sleep. When he saw her, he knew. Julien pulled on his clothes and took the stairs two at a time. He brought his rucksack with him. He had decided that if they should leave, he would go with them and had already written a note for his parents, wherein he did his best to explain his disappearance. But when he reached the kitchen, there was his mother, waiting for him. Since Victor had vanished she hadn’t once slept through the night. Now she’d heard stones flung up to his window.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him. “Do you think you’re going somewhere?”

  “Mama,” Julien said. He could see that her hands were shaking. “I must.”

  “And do what your brother did? Abandon us?”

  He came to sit beside her. She was brokenhearted. He had never seen her cry before, and now tears streamed down her face. “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s that girl,” Claire said.

  “Not at all.”

  She gave a short bitter laugh. “You’re too young for such things anyway. You’re a baby.”

  “It’s time to go. You know it’s true.”

  “When your father says it’s time, it’s time!” Claire’s expression was set, her eyes bright with hurt. If she lost her children she lost everything. The house and all the time she’d spent on keeping up appearances meant nothing. This was her heart, sitting beside her, the boy who looked anxiously through the window, so ready to leave. “Go on,” she said. “Go! But you tell your father, not me. Wake him up and tell him. Look at his face while you do so. Then you can leave.”

  Julien thought of the look on his father’s face as he’d buried his papers. Most likely all of his writings would rot in the ground before anyone could dig them up again. He was well aware that his father cried late at night, alone in the library. There were hardly any books left, and the empty shelves haunted him.

  “Tell him right now!” Julien’s mother said. “And then you can break my heart because we will never see each other again.”

  Because he could not do that to her, Julien left his rucksack on the chair and went into the garden. As soon as Lea saw his expression she knew he wasn’t going.

  “My parents,” he said. “My mother.”

  His mother was in the doorway now, watching. Even from a distance Lea could tell she was crying.

  “I’ll write to you,” Lea told Julien.

  Julien smiled, a weary look on his face. She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he was wrong. She would find a way. Julien was so tall Lea was forced to stand on tiptoe as she leaned closer. There was only one thing he had to do and they would surely see each other again.

  “Stay alive,” she told him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE FARAWAY PLACE

  HAUTE-LOIRE, SPRING 1942

  THE SOLDIERS ARRIVED WHEN MARIANNE was in the woods, looking for the chickens that had run off into the underbrush. She’d been distracted when she noticed a milan royal, the red kite that was so fierce and beautiful only members of the royal family in France had been allowed to fly it in the practice of falconry. She’d climbed along a ravine to watch, then stretched out on the hill, sprawled in the grass. She was thinking about Victor, though she probably shouldn’t. The shadows grew long and she realized it was late. She began the trek home, embarrassed that she’d failed to find the chickens. When she saw the trucks, she ducked into the underbrush. By then the soldiers were taking the cows, which lowed as they were forced into trucks and pulled against the thick ropes looped around their necks. A cow had been sh
ot in the pasture, an act of thoughtless savagery. Flies buzzed over the blackened blood. Marianne’s father came out with a shotgun, and one of the soldiers grabbed the gun and hit him over his skull. When he was on the ground several of the soldiers kicked him with their heavy boots until he stopped moving.

  “Don’t be a fool, old man,” one told him. “Next time we’ll shoot you instead of the cow.”

  Marianne sank down behind the hedges with one hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out. She was shattered by what she saw, but knew it would do no good to run into the fray and be beaten herself, perhaps raped and murdered in a failed attempt to help her father. Still, her inaction stung. She pinched herself, hard, until her nails drew blood.

  When the trucks pulled away they’d left very little behind, only Bluebell, who’d wandered into the woods, and the beehives teeming with bees, and of course, her father, lying prone, bloodied and broken. She ran to help him up, then brought him to the house, and escorted him up to bed, nearly carrying his full weight. She saw to his wounds with a damp cloth, then nursed him with herbal remedies, nettle tea and a poultice composed of mint and leaves of rosemary. Marianne should have cleaned the blood from her dress with salt, but she was too agitated about her father’s condition to do so.

  For three days she thought her father would die, but she dared not go to the village for help, fearing the Germans would be there. When finally her father could speak he said, “Are you my daughter?” She said she was and he then said, “You have saved me,” and he wept. They never discussed this exchange afterward. He was a tough old gentleman who didn’t wish to take help from anyone.

  Marianne realized she must find a doctor to see to his broken leg or he wouldn’t walk again. There was a physician on the other side of the mountain who her father said was a decent fellow, often seeing patients for free. She went to the neighboring farm and used the telephone, thanking her neighbor, Monsieur Cazales, a taciturn farmer who was too polite to ask why she had blood on her dress.