by Sharon Maas
She’d hand him Grandma’s prescription, held by those eyes. They’d exchange a few words, if need be, but most often he’d glance at the prescription – he was always the one to break contact – nod and walk back through the door to the storeroom with it. She’d wait, heart pounding, breath shallow, for his return, browbeating herself with the internal commands: Stop it! Breathe normally! Don’t stare when he returns! It’s nothing, he’s nothing, just stop it!
She loathed this weakness of hers. This sense of her knees turning to jelly when he reappeared, this inability to make normal small talk with him: normal! That was the element missing! Why couldn’t she just be normal, her normal cool, calm, sensible self, when in this shop, when in the presence of this perfectly normal young man who obviously cared less than two hoots for her and probably couldn’t tell her apart from the other customers, who knew her simply (probably!) as the girl-who-brought-the-prescription for Madame Dolch.
The year she had first joined primary school, she had been a sheep in the nativity play, and he had been Joseph for a few rehearsals. Just for a few. Then his father had stormed into one of the rehearsals, grabbed him from the makeshift stable, railed at the teacher and stormed out of the school with Nathan in his arms. They’d had to find a different Joseph. So tall, so dark, so brooding; he’d been a perfect Joseph. But he would never have noticed a stupid little sheep.
But she had noticed Joseph, noticed him; she remembered. Even then, he had made an impression on her, and in later years, as they both attended the lycée, she’d always noticed him. But it was perfectly hopeless. She had since learned that he was Jewish, but that mattered not one bit; she might be officially Catholic, but surely Jesus was Jewish; she didn’t see what difference it made, and this whole hullaballoo going on in Germany, with Jews somehow being the target of hatred and acts of violence – it flummoxed her, and placed her irrevocably on the side of the victims. That was her nature. It was why she loved animals and was studying to be a vet. She’d always be on the side of the innocent.
Sometimes there would be other customers in the pharmacy before her, and Juliette would have to wait. She noticed that he was quite different with other customers. He might chat with them as he took their prescriptions, or even crack a joke. He’d be relaxed, and even smile; he never smiled at her. Not even when he handed over the little bottle of drops or the box of tablets; he’d give her any information with a serious face, glum even, and his eyes would burn into hers (that was, of course, just her imagination – in reality they’d just be normal; it was her eyes that weren’t normal): twice daily, after meals, on an empty stomach, with water. Occasionally, the customer before her would ask detailed questions and Nathan Levi-Blum would discuss the case with him or her, and Juliette would listen to his voice and that would be in itself so deeply satisfying: such a rich, resonant, slow voice! She herself hardly spoke a word beyond a thank-you; she dared not, for fear she might stutter, fall over the words.
Juliette, to all who knew her a confident and knowledgeable and impressive young woman who could hold her own in any conversation, reduced to a blushing, stammering mass of shyness by this one man. How had it happened? She didn’t understand it herself. She just knew that in his presence, something happened to her and she wasn’t herself, and now she’d been away too long. She longed for his presence and that state of jelly-bellied discombobulation as much as she dreaded it. It was bad enough, that visual contact over the counter when her eyes would meet his and she’d try to force herself to look away but couldn’t – always, they’d linger too long, as if trapped by his gaze, and she’d try to push away, but fail, that sense of being almost hypnotised – no, that wasn’t the right word. Too clinical. Spellbound. Dazed. Mesmerised – those were the words that sprang to mind but again, they were dangerously explicit, and explicitness was a thing she couldn’t handle. Bad enough, those eyes. She could never handle speech. Push it all away, she thought, just push it away. He doesn’t even see you, except as a loyal customer.
Today she had no prescription for Grandma. But there was always a need for aspirin, wasn’t there, and any excuse would do. The closer she came, the more her feet seemed to hurry of their own accord and her heart seemed to beat faster, audibly so, and again that mental agitation, that hovering desire to see that face again, those marching thoughts, a prayer, almost: let him be there. Let him be there. No, don’t. I can’t bear it.
She turned into rue Berthe Molly: and her feet came to an abrupt stop.
Four
Across the shop window, partly blocking the neatly arranged display of beautiful stoneware jars large and small, an ornate antique apothecary scale and decorative bottles containing seeds and dried leaves and berries, was pasted a huge paper strip displaying, in bold, black letters, the word FERMÉ. She stared at it for a moment and then drew nearer and tried the handle of the door next to it. It did not budge.
Closed? The shop had closed? But why? The pharmacie Blum was an institution in Colmar – Grandma said that even when she was a little girl, there it had stood. Juliette had a dire suspicion, a suspicion so ominous all coyness, all her customary nervousness, melted in a second. There was no help for it. This was not the time for bashful wariness and tongue-tied reserve. She knew that the Levi-Blums lived in the apartment above the shop, and that the heavy wooden door on the other side of the shop window was the entrance to that apartment. She placed her thumb firmly on the well-polished brass doorbell set into the wall beside the door and pressed. Through the open window in the half-timbered wall above her she could hear the chime; she looked up, and just a second later a head emerged through that window.
It was him.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed with palpable shock, and then, more calmly, ‘Attend… je viens.’
Through the door, descending footsteps thudded on wooden stairs, and then the creak of a key and a cautious opening and there he stood, in the doorway. It was all she could do to stop from flinging herself at him; but the moment of greeting was short and brisk.
‘Juliette!’ he said, a sharp cry of astonishment; but in the next instant, almost simultaneously, he had grasped her upper arm, pulled her into the darkness of the stairwell and shut the door behind her. They stood staring at each other in the dimness of the hall at the bottom of the stairs, and only now she realised how foolish a move this had been.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said, and she felt all the more foolish. She didn’t even know him, not really. What on earth had she done? And how did he even know her name?
‘I-I saw the sign. On the shop. I wanted to know – what has happened? When will you open again?’
‘You should not have come.’ He spoke more calmly now. ‘It is dangerous for you – though actually, I was… But now you are here, come upstairs.’
He led the way up the narrow steps, their wood shiny and worn away in their centres through the weight of footsteps over a century or two. All her shyness had returned by now; she felt ridiculous.
At the top of the stairs he ushered her through a door and then turned to her, his eyes searching, kind, haunted. ‘I’m sorry I addressed you in a familiar way, Mademoiselle Dolch. I was just so astonished to see you. What is it? Does your grandmother need some urgent medicine? I’m afraid the shop is closed, as you can see, but I could—’
‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t need anything…’ She remembered the aspirin she’d have asked for and abandoned that excuse. ‘I came because, well, I have been away and I thought, well, I thought… and then I saw the sign and I was worried. Very worried. And please call me Juliette.’
They were in a parlour at the front of the building, with several narrow casement windows opening to the street. He gestured towards an oval table of polished oak.
‘Do take a seat… Juliette. What can I bring you? I’m afraid we haven’t much, no coffee, but I can make you some tea?’
‘No, thank you, nothing. I—’ She was interrupted by the opening of a door at the back of the room. A woma
n, middle-aged, her face gaunt and bearing an expression of deep concern, entered the room.
‘Nathan? I heard the bell and— oh!’
Seeing Juliette, the woman started and stared; but only for a moment. Her face broke into a welcoming smile.
‘It’s Juliette, isn’t it! Juliette Dolch! I would recognise you anywhere: you are the spitting image of your mother, Colette. Colette Roussel. She and I were in the same class, long ago, before we were married – we were such good friends! Your mother – she was such a wonderful friend. I was devastated when… when I heard. Welcome to our home, Juliette.’
Juliette smiled and placed a hand on her sternum, fingered through the cotton of her blouse the little pear-shaped sapphire pendant she always wore. It had been her mother’s, a family heirloom; touching it always made her feel safe, protected by the mother she’d never known.
Madame Levi-Blum continued: ‘I didn’t know you were friends with Nathan. Why didn’t you come to visit before, if so? Why wait until such terrible times?’
She sighed at those last words, pulled out a chair at the table next to Juliette and repeated, this time in a whisper: ‘Terrible times. Terrible, terrible.’
‘I was just about to tell her,’ said Nathan. ‘I promised her some tea – you tell her, Maman. She wants to know why we closed the shop. I’ll be back in an instant.’
He left through the same door his mother had entered by; Juliette could see a corridor leading into the back of the building. All these timber-framed buildings in the centre of town had a similar layout: a staircase leading to the upper storeys, corridors leading to the back of the house and further rooms. Presumably, he had gone to the kitchen to make her tea. She should have insisted that she didn’t want tea. She just needed to know.
She turned to Madame Levi-Blum. ‘What has happened, Madame? Why have you closed the shop? I just returned to Colmar today and I saw the sign.’
Madame Levi-Blum shook her head sadly and laid a hand over Juliette’s.
‘Then you will not have heard… It is so awful. We have had this shop for generations. We have lived here all our lives, above the pharmacy. We mind our own business. We attend the synagogue and obey the tenets of our religion. We do no harm. We are friendly to all and polite. But now these – these Nazi salauds have said we must leave. They are sending us away, Juliette! We are not allowed to do business here. They have forced us to close down the shop, as you can see. And now we all must leave. Leave Colmar.’
‘But-but-where to? Where will you go?’
‘All Jews are being sent to Vichy France. That is what they tell us, the Boche. They are in charge now and they want to make Alsace, Colmar, free of Jews. Judenrein. We hope it is true that they are sending us to France and they are not in truth sending us in the opposite direction, into Germany. But we have no choice in the matter. No choice at all. Because if we do not go – well, I did not call them salauds by accident. We all know what they are capable of, if you have heard the stories coming out of Germany. We tried to delay it. We hoped it would not come to this. But the signs were there from the start, weren’t they. This is not a good time for Alsatian Jews. For any European Jews.’
Juliette had, indeed, followed the news; her brother Jacques had kept her up to date. A year ago, before the war, there had been about 20,000 Jews living in Alsace and Lorraine. At the declaration of war in September, the French government started a precautionary evacuation of all Jews, and had managed to relocate about 14,000 of them to Périgueux and Limoges in south-west France, far from the German border. About 5,000 more Jews fled to southern France after the German invasion of France the following May. It had been a slow, stealthy culling of the Colmar Jewish population; one by one the families had left, her friends had left, sometimes coming over to say goodbye, sometimes just disappearing into the night. The Levi-Blums had held out till the last.
Madame Levi-Blum sighed. ‘And so now, we too must leave. We have delayed it long enough. We always had hope, such hope – that the war would be over in a few months, that we could stay, keep our home, our livelihood, our lives. We held out as long as we safely could.’
‘But now the Nazis have come to Colmar and it is not safe,’ said Nathan, re-entering the salon. He placed a steaming teapot and two cups on the table, served the two women their tea, sat down opposite Juliette. She tried not to look directly at him because the anguish in his eyes was so very palpable. Never had she seen eyes as eloquent, eyes that spoke so loudly, as Nathan’s; they flummoxed her. What exactly were they saying? Was she misinterpreting something? They were so candid – but she feared what she saw, drew away, and at the same time was drawn back again and again. Now, Nathan turned to his mother and said:
‘Maman – where is Papa? Is he still in bed? You must get him up. It’s not good, this broodiness of his. It’s not healthy. You must get him up and he must face reality, help you to pack.’
Madame Levi-Blum shook her head as if in resignation. ‘Yes – he is hiding away in the darkness of the bedroom. He finds it hard to accept the truth and leave it all behind. But you are right. I must.’
She sipped at her tea, replaced the cup.
‘It is too hot. I will go and fetch Papa, and by the time I am back it will have cooled down. I will drink it cold if need be. Excusez-moi, Juliette – it was a delight seeing you and I hope that once this is over we will all see each other again and celebrate France’s victory over Germany.’
She stood up, and so did Juliette. The older woman clasped both her arms and drew her close, kissed her on both cheeks. Whispered in her ear. ‘I was so very fond of your mother, chérie. Such a tragedy. But I am glad you came, glad that I was able to meet you. Take care, little one, and do not be bowed by what is happening here. We will survive, we will win in the end.’
Tears swelled in Juliette’s eyes as she whispered her goodbye, touched at the woman’s poignant words. Such a pity that this first meeting with her might very well be the last – she was another link to her mother, and Juliette never tired of such links. She might never have known her mother, but the stories she heard of her brought her close, so close, brought her alive. Madame Levi-Blum turned and walked away, back through the door she had entered by. Juliette was alone with Nathan. And now it was not possible to avoid those eyes.
‘Juliette. I— sorry. I’m so glad you came. I was thinking of you…’
‘Of me? Really? I didn’t know… think – but why?’
‘…of you, and your brother Jacques. I need to see Jacques, urgently. Where is he?’
‘I didn’t know you knew Jacques!’
‘We were classmates in secondary school. Friends, even. You didn’t know? I lost touch when I went to university and he stayed to help run the vineyard. But we were friends, and, well, I need to see him, now, today! Where is he?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. He’s in Strasbourg, but I don’t have his address.’
‘Can you get a message to him?’
She shook her head, ‘No, not really. He left a telephone number, but Papa doesn’t have a telephone. Though I could ask Tante Margaux to help. But he said we should only call if it’s an emergency. Why do you want to see him? Sorry. I suppose it’s none of my business, but—’
‘This is an emergency,’ interrupted Nathan. And then he paused, as if deliberating what and how much to say next. Their eyes locked; in his were a thousand questions, a thousand doubts and fears, all hovering there, unformulated, reaching out to her; and more than that, something else, something intimate, personal, a question meant only for her.
‘Juliette – I’m sorry. I’m being so rude. But when I saw you, standing at the door, it was like a miracle that you had come – because, like I said, I’d been thinking of you. It is like an answer to a prayer.’
‘Because you need to find Jacques?’
‘No… yes – no. I wanted to see you, too, but you have been gone for so long. I had no hope – and yet I hoped. And then you came. And there you were! On my doorstep!�
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‘But—’
‘I know it’s not the time or the place but I need to tell you, now, before it is too late, now that you are here and nobody knows the future and – well, here you are and before you go again, I need to say it – that I think of you all the time, Juliette. I do. Every day, every minute. I don’t know how it came about. I just do. And now, now it is too late. I wish I had said something, earlier, when you used to come every week—’
‘Every day!’
‘Yes, you came often, very often, with your grandmother’s prescription, and sometimes I thought, does she really need so much medicine, or is it…’
He hesitated, and she nodded. ‘Yes! It was just an excuse! To come here. To see you!’
They beamed at each other across the table. Hands reached out, clasped each other, his fingers firm but gentle around hers; long, elegant fingers, long, sensitive hands that sent a multitude of silent but unmistakeable messages into hers, messages that all channelled into one wonderful, miraculous, unequivocal declaration that told her all she needed to know.
Now he sighed. ‘We have been so foolish, haven’t we. Wasted so much time. I have had such… feelings for you, Juliette, but I hesitated to confess them. And now… now time has run out. The train to Vichy is tomorrow, at dawn.’
The moment of intimacy, so precious, had passed. He frowned, and a cloud of despair seemed to fall upon him. His eyes, so eloquent with feeling just a moment ago, now turned opaque with distress; but a second later that anguish, too, had transformed, morphed into something else, something she could not at all interpret. An urgency, an overpowering sense of emergency flared into them, sweeping her up in its power. His grip tightened around her hands and his voice, too, filled with that desperate urgency.
He leaned forward.
‘Juliette – I’m not going anywhere. I’m not getting on that train and I won’t let my parents get on it. I don’t trust the Nazis. They say they’re sending us to France, but what if it’s all a lie? What if they’re sending us to the east, into Germany, and maybe even Poland? You must have heard the rumours? I don’t trust them one bit. That’s why I need to see Jacques. That’s why I said it’s an emergency. And I need you to help. I must see him – today!’
