The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  “And you are Catholic?” the mother superior asked.

  “It says so on my papers, Madame.”

  They exchanged an open gaze. A lie was a lie, papers or not. The mother superior understood that the girl was Jewish, carrying a false name and identity. “We’re glad to have you with us, Lillie,” she said warmly. “We ask only that you obey the rules and pay attention to your studies.” Usually, Sister Marie was told a bit of background, where the child had previously resided, perhaps, or the fate of her parents, but this girl had come on her own and her arrival was a bit of a mystery. Still, they turned no one away. They’d made that decision after the monsignor had first come to talk to them. Every child was equal in their eyes. “I’m sure you will learn the prayers easily.”

  “My mother taught me several already,” Lea told the sister.

  “Then I think your mother would approve of you being here. She would be happy to have you safe in our midst.”

  Lea was given a uniform consisting of a navy blue dress, black stockings, and a pair of laced shoes. There were new undergarments and a nightgown as well. A younger girl called Pauline had been asked to show her the dormitory. It was a special section for the Jewish girls, hidden in the attic behind a wrought-iron gate and a heavy wooden door. The room was guarded by an old nun, Sister Félicité, a very deep sleeper who snored quite loudly. The sister slept with a broom in her lap, there to defend herself and her girls if the need arose. She claimed to be fierce, but she was nearly eighty and walked with a limp and she didn’t even manage to scare her own students when she threatened they would have to clean the stone floors with a scrub brush if they didn’t behave.

  Pauline, also from Berlin, was to bring Lea to their room. She was eager to show off her French.

  “The sisters practiced with me until I lost my accent. It’s best to do as they say.”

  Remember your own room, the blue rug on the floor, the way the light came in through the curtains in the morning, the sound of my voice as I called to you in the park, my darling, my girl, light of my life, come here and give me a hug, eat this apple, sit on this bench, watch the birds above us, and the sky that’s so bright, take the love that I have for you that will never end.

  Lea quickly dressed in her new uniform. She did her best not to think, she pushed away dark thoughts until they were folded into a tiny corner of her mind, behind a locked door. At night the heron came to Lea’s window and stood on the ledge, so close she could feel his heart beating. She knew that Ava had told him to watch over her. She is nothing to me, Lea told herself. She is not my mother, she is not my cousin, she may not even be a woman. She is here because she has to be, because she was made to be, because she cannot make her own decisions or cast her own fate.

  Lea found her way along the confusing corridors of the convent, but her stomach twisted with nerves. She had already decided; Julien would be her only friend. She needed no others. Tu me connais, she would have told him if she could. You alone know me.

  At lunch, Lea was so famished she could barely restrain herself from reaching for the hard heels of bread until all of the prayers were recited. Then the other girls chattered away about the baker who had left; there’d been nothing to eat but old bread all week, although they knew they should be grateful. After lunch had been served Sister Marie stood to announce there was a new student. Lea had no choice but to stand as well and be introduced as Lillie Perrin. Everyone greeted her in unison, in perfect French, except for a petite, dark girl called Renée, a recent arrival from Berlin who refused to speak anything but German. She had been rescued, fortunate to have been among a group who had managed to escape when being moved from one camp to another. She had a tattooed number on her arm that she rubbed at when she thought no one was looking and she never undressed in front of the others. The OSE brought her to France, and to this convent. Her name had been Rachel. Her mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents, sisters, and brothers had all been on the trains. She was older than Lea, perhaps already fifteen. In the attic, her bed was next to Lea’s. That evening as they prepared for bed, Renée glared at Lea. She looked fragile, but there was a core of fire inside her. “Rühr mich nicht an,” Renée said. Never touch me. “Und schau nie unter mein Bett.” And never look under my bed.

  It was difficult to follow the rules, much less understand them, and now, after Lea’s encounter with Renée, she felt even more unsure of herself. No one dared to break the silence before going to chapel in the morning or at breakfast. There were scores of prayers to recite, many more than her mother had taught her. The sisters looked sterner than Sister Marie in their stiff black habits. She thought of biting the soldier in the alleyway, of the wolves in the snow, of the blood on their shoes, of how fast she had run. After a while she wasn’t afraid, but she kept her eyes lowered when she greeted the sisters, and she stayed as far away from Renée as possible.

  In class, she did her best to follow along as they studied the stories of the martyrs, including the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, who went to the guillotine. She was imagining the death of the first and youngest sister to die, Sister Constance, who was said to face her fate with the grace of a queen, when in the midst of the lesson, she heard the heron on the roof call out with joy. Lea gazed out the window, and there was Ava, coming into the courtyard.

  Lea raised her hand even though she was meant to be silent in class. When the sister approached, she asked to leave the room, claiming to have an upset stomach. She quickly took the stairs, making her way past several stained-glass panels representing scenes from the Bible in which angels climbed into a cobalt blue sky. She wanted to witness how Ava managed to get herself into the convent.

  The young nun at the door was thanking Ava for her gift of wild berries. “I don’t know if we need anyone in the kitchen,” the nun said.

  “We do,” Lea said from her hiding place on the stair. “The baker has gone.”

  Ava and the nun both turned to her. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” the sister asked.

  “Yes, of course.” Lea raced up the stairs to the classroom and went back to her seat, surprised to find herself comforted by Ava’s presence.

  She will follow you to the ends of the earth. When she looks at you I will see you, when she embraces you I will feel your heart beat. You can love her if you want to. It will not be a betrayal, because when you do, I will be there with you.

  “Please take Ava in,” Lea said softly as she faced a painting of Jesus, who was said to watch over them all. “Please save her.”

  Renée was sitting next to her, and now clucked her tongue. She understood French, but simply refused to speak it. “Niemand kann uns retten,” she said in a whisper when she overheard Lea’s pleas. No one can rescue us.

  Ava asked for no payment, other than food and shelter, and it was true the baker had run off, taking a pair of silver candlesticks with her. Ava was taken on as the baker’s replacement, who, as it turned out, had disappeared with the cook. Ava would take on both positions. She was brought to the huge stone kitchen, where there was an enormous woodstove and the stone sinks were large enough to bathe in. There she was given a cot in the scullery, along with two black dresses and a white apron. She was taller than any of the nuns, and because there were no shoes to fit her, she kept the rabbi’s boots. She was comfortable in them by now, and they fitted her perfectly. Ava said she was an excellent cook and she wasn’t in the least bit daunted by the baking. She came upon a pile of cookbooks in the pantry in which some of the recipes were three hundred years old and no longer practical. Blackbird pie, trout stuffed with pine and minced dove, hearts of ducks sautéed in brown butter and spice. She kept to simple fare for the nuns and their students, potato soup with leeks and what little butter they had, cheese pie, chicken stew that could feed fifty, with a gravy that tasted of chestnuts, rice fragrant with wild mint and fennel, apple tarte made with fruit she had collected in the woods, the crust formed from day-old bread.

  Twice a month there was a d
elivery of wheat from a local shop owner. Ava’s first order of business each morning was to bake the baguettes served at breakfast and dinner, a chore that soon became a pleasure. She hoped to learn more about human beings through the process of baking, for their hunger was a mystery to her. She loved to knead the dough, which she set out in tin bowls to rise under white dishtowels. She was quick in forming baguettes, and her loaves were perfectly even. Sonya, the old woman who had been the housemaid at the convent for two decades, came in on Ava’s first morning in the kitchen and was dumbstruck by the new woman’s abilities. The housemaid asked if Ava was a baker’s daughter, but no, such things came naturally to her, she said.

  In truth, she felt a kinship with bread and the way it was made, the damp weight kneaded and shaped into proper form, heated until it was set. When she worked in the kitchen she kept her long dark hair swept up with pins, with a white cap on her head. In the afternoons, when Lea was in class, she went walking in the forest beyond the convent to the marshes alongside the river. She carried a basket and often found marvelous things to bring back to the kitchen: mushrooms, hazelnuts, wild blackberries, chervil, water cabbages.

  There were no mirrors in the convent, but Lea could see her reflection in the shine of the silverware the girls were made to polish, and she didn’t recognize the person looking back at her. Her hair had grown and was shoulder-length. Her features were so like her mother’s, she had to look away or she might burst into tears. She had begun her monthly bleeding. “Jetzt bist du in Schwierigkeiten,” Renée told her. Now you’re in trouble. “Niemand möchte eine Frau sein.” No one wants to be a woman.

  Although Lea hadn’t told Ava about her situation, Ava seemed to know. She left clean rags and new undergarments, and when Lea found them she sobbed. Her mother should be the one to instruct her. She would have told her that Renée was wrong, becoming a woman should not be considered a terrible fate, even though it meant you bled. It was life that you carried inside you, your own and the life of the future. If you survive, I survive inside of you.

  By now Lea had looked beneath her roommate’s bed. Renée hoarded food there, bread that was growing moldy, bits of cheese, fruit taken from the lunch table. Lea liked the quiet kitchen, with its stone floors and large windows, and helped Ava in the dark hours of morning before prayers and breakfast. She often filched a baguette, then ran upstairs and hid it beneath Renée’s bed. Renée never thanked her, but her dark eyes would settle on Lea, as if she wished to tell her something. All the same, Lea was friendless and lost and she missed Julien. Ava tried to cheer her with treats. Some new apples, a bar of chocolate she’d found in a cabinet, but Lea couldn’t even bring herself to smile. While the loaves were baking, she wrote notes that she kept in the back of her prayer book. Perhaps one day she would be able to send them to Julien.

  “You’re still thinking about him,” Ava said.

  “I’m not,” Lea insisted. But she was and they both knew it.

  There was no news from Paris, but she worried about Julien’s fate. But there was nothing to do about it, or at least it seemed so until Ava sent Lea to pick up a basket of eggs from a neighbor. There she noticed a pigeon house near the chicken coops.

  “You like birds?” the old woman who lived there asked. “These ones are smart. They can always find their way home.” The neighbor wore a red coat that she’d had for thirty years, and a pair of black boots. She took out a pigeon and called him by his name, Étoile, which meant star, with extreme tenderness. “I send my sister in Lyon messages.” All she needed to do was attach a tube to the pigeon’s leg, clasped in place with a leather band. A rolled-up message to her sister was inserted into the tube. All fine here. Come visit one week from Sunday. Don’t miss our visit like you did last month.

  Lea watched as the neighbor lifted the bird into the bright sky. They held their hands over their eyes, squinting, as he disappeared into the darkening horizon.

  “He’ll be back, don’t you worry,” the old woman said.

  She smiled at Lea, unaware that she was speaking to a thief and a liar who had come up with a plan of her own. When the woman was about to go inside, Lea asked if it would be all right if she watched the pigeons for a while, and that is what she did, she watched them coo and peck at one another as she slipped one of the cylinders and a leather band into the pocket of her dress. She ran back to the convent in the falling dark. Ava was waiting for her at the edge of the lawn. From here she could see the neighbor’s yard; she’d kept an eye on Lea. It had been her idea to send her there, after all.

  “What were you doing for so long?” Ava asked, as if she didn’t know. She couldn’t abide seeing grief in Lea’s eyes, not when there was a remedy.

  Lea shrugged and bit her tongue. “Looking at birds” was all she would say.

  “Nothing more?”

  “Could you teach me their language?” When Ava hesitated, Lea added, “I know you can. I’ve heard you talk to the heron.”

  “It takes time to learn a language.” Especially when it was complicated, with an ancient structure more complex than any human language. There were no numbers, no tenses, more syllables and vowels, and a series of clicks, all with ten or more meanings.

  “I have time,” Lea vowed. She knew she was asking for a favor from someone she had treated shabbily. “I promise, I’ll be a good student.”

  They went to the garden so lessons could begin. They sat facing each other. Everything else dropped away, everything changed between them, they were of one mind, and as they looked into each other’s eyes neither had the desire to look away. Think in blue, in green, in starlight, in song, in a blessing, in beauty, in gratitude.

  Inside the convent they could hear birdsong all through the dinner hour. Some of the girls began to cry and others laughed out loud. The sisters remembered things they had long forgotten, from a time when they were young and filled with faith. No one noticed that Lea was late, and that when she arrived she sat down beside Renée, as if they were friends and had always been so, and that beneath the table, out of sight, Lea handed her a chocolate bar she’d stolen from the kitchen.

  When the time came for Lea to ask the heron for what she wanted, she brought a pan of bread and milk into the courtyard as an offering. She had practiced the phrases so often through the night that the girls in the attic thought she was singing them to sleep, and even Renée closed her eyes and dreamed of things she had never seen before, trees made of flowers, beaches of black sand, clouds that were spun out of rain.

  The heron came down from the roof when Lea entered the courtyard. After he’d had his breakfast, she begged for a moment of his time. It was a poor attempt at speaking his language, but he gazed at her with his yellow eyes, doing his best to understand her. When he didn’t immediately swoop away, she went on, hopeful he would help her. She asked politely for what she wanted, pleading for him to go back to the house in Paris.

  Please find him for me.

  She had no idea that Ava had already asked the heron to do this one kindness for her. And so he allowed her to tie the metal canister to his leg, though he was no one’s servant, and looked the other way as she did so.

  Her script was tiny and neat. She’d used pale blue ink she’d found in the mother superior’s office when Ava sent her to deliver bread and jam and a pot of tea. She’d taken a pen as well, for she’d been taught to be a thief when the need arose.

  I am fine, but no one knows me as you do. Please stay alive.

  The heron returned a week later. He perched on the ledge and pushed the window open. The other girls in the attic thought they were dreaming, for what they saw was impossible, and so they went back to sleep. They thought that birds and mortals lived in the same world, but only the world of men mattered. Julien had thought the same thing when he found the heron in the yard in Paris. By now the military had taken over the house, and the family lived in the greenhouse with the domed skylight. When the rain fell it sounded as if rocks were falling. Julien and his father had b
een taken as forced labor. They cleaned the streets, scrubbing stones. They had blisters on their hands and they didn’t speak to Madame Claire about their humiliation. They didn’t have to. Claire now cleaned the house for the German captain who lived there. When she thought of Marianne and how she’d treated her, she closed herself in the linen closet and cried. The German professors and their families were still on the third floor, behind a brick wall, mice who no longer dared to speak. Where would they go if they left? Wasn’t it best to hide in plain sight where no one would think to look? Claire brought them food whenever she could, the leavings from their own table or from the captain’s dinner.

  When Julien saw the metal cylinder attached to the heron’s leg, he approached cautiously and untied it, then crouched behind the greenhouse to read Lea’s message. His hands shook and he read it three times before he could make sense of it. He was grateful and confused. He told himself not to have hope for the future. The life that he knew had ended, and what else was there for him? He told himself he was part of a dream in which a huge gray bird allowed him to tie a message to its leg before rising into the sky. For an instant he remembered who he was. I know exactly who you are, he’d written back. Je sais qui tu es.

  Je suis ici.

  I’m here.

  When the roses bloomed, the garden was a sea of silver. Before Ava knew it, summer would be gone. This is the way time moved in the human world. Slowly at first, and then much too fast. The heron still nested on the rooftop, but she knew that in a few months’ time he would leave for Spain or Africa. She tried not to think about his parting, and she wondered if love was like that, and if all mortals needed to close their eyes against the future and what it might bring. Sister Marie, who went to prayers at four, noticed Ava on her way to the chapel. The younger nuns remained nervous in Ava’s presence, and avoided her entirely. They said she never slept and some of the sisters believed she could read their thoughts. When she pressed their garments, the younger nuns swore that she gathered information about them. How else could she know their private thoughts and desires? Why she had even made Sister Félicité a bread pudding for her birthday, when no one in the convent had known that date or had ever celebrated the sister’s birthday before.