The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

  As he pulled her toward him, she fit exactly into the arc of his body, the softness of her curves and the solidity of his muscular chest pieces of a jigsaw puzzle she’d never realized was there. The way he kissed her made her feel, impossibly, as if he’d always known her, perhaps better than she’d known herself. His hands tangled in her hair and then roamed her body, timidly at first, shyly, and then with more confidence.

  No one had ever kissed Eva like that before, like they knew her inside and out. She had been proper and reserved her whole life, set on making her parents proud, filled with guilt the few times she had necked with good Jewish boys at school, though she had never let things get any further than that. Now, as Rémy cupped her hips, lifting her onto the table where they worked, she wanted nothing more than to feel his skin against hers, to be as close to him as she could possibly be.

  Then, abruptly, he stopped, pulling back quickly and leaving her there, still fully clothed, her cheeks hot, her body on fire. “I—we can’t,” he said, looking away from her as he hastily tucked in his shirt.

  “But—” she whispered, at a loss. Had she done something wrong? Perhaps her inexperience had been obvious.

  “It isn’t you,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked. He still wasn’t looking at her, but as she sat up and smoothed her wild hair, she had the feeling he knew she was fighting tears.

  “Then what—?”

  “I—I can’t let another person down,” he mumbled, looking at his feet.

  “But, Rémy, you won’t—”

  “I will,” he interrupted. She could hear a faint tremor in his firm voice. “I will, Eva, don’t you see? I’ll let you down, and then I won’t be able to live with myself. I—I’m sorry. I need to go.”

  And then he was gone, running out the door of the small secret library as if the building was burning down. The only comfort Eva had was that before the door closed behind him, he looked back, just once, his eyes meeting hers. And in that split second, she read torture and sadness on his face. He was telling the truth, she knew; he was fleeing because he thought he would hurt her.

  And perhaps it would always haunt her that instead of going after him, she stayed where she was, shame and loyalty to her mother rooting her to the spot. By the time she gathered herself and made it to the front door of the church, he was long gone. His footprints in the snow, heading in the direction of the children’s home, were the only sign that he had ever been there at all.

  * * *

  Eva didn’t go home that morning; she wanted to be there to hand the new documents to Père Clément in person, and in the back of her mind, she was hoping that Rémy would change his mind and come back.

  She couldn’t face her mother, either, not with all the emotions swirling through her. When Rémy had kissed her, it felt like the best thing she’d ever done, the most natural thing in the world. But how could that be when he wasn’t Jewish? Her mother would never forgive her, and what if Tatuś wouldn’t, either? How could she betray them now? The longer she sat there on the church steps, the more confused she became. Would it be braver to follow her heart at the risk of failing her parents? Or braver to turn her back on a person she was forbidden to love so she could preserve the history being stripped from her people? Neither path seemed the right answer.

  By the time Père Clément arrived an hour later and found her sitting in the cold, Rémy’s footprints had vanished under a dusting of freshly fallen snow.

  “What are you doing out here?” Père Clément asked as he dashed up the stairs, his face red with cold. “Is something wrong?”

  “I—” How could she explain it to him without sounding like a fool? “I was just getting some air.”

  He didn’t look convinced, but he nodded and helped her up. “Come inside, Eva, you’ll catch your death of cold. Did you and Rémy complete the work?”

  She turned away before Père Clément could see her blushing. “Yes, mon Père.”

  Inside, the church was warm, but as Eva led Père Clément back toward the small library, she felt like she was still made of ice, her heart nearly as cold as her red and raw face. “My goodness, Eva,” Père Clément said, looking at her with concern once they were together in the secret room. “How long were you out there? You look half frozen.”

  “Not long,” she said vaguely. She had lost track of the minutes. She only knew it was enough time for the last traces of Rémy to be erased. “Rémy is gone.”

  “Yes,” Père Clément said, and she realized that he had already known.

  “Do you know where I can find him?” Eva hesitated. “I think there are some things I need to say to him, things I should have said last night.”

  Père Clément frowned. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Eva, he’s escorting some of the children today.”

  “He’s—what?”

  “He said he knew how close you had gotten in the past couple of months to Madame Travere’s wards, especially Anne, and he wanted to see them safely across the border.”

  Eva swallowed hard. “He went because of me?”

  Père Clément’s smile was gentle, and Eva had the sense, not for the first time, that he could see into her heart. “He went because he’s a good man, trying to do the right thing.”

  “But he didn’t tell me.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to worry you.”

  Or maybe he had known she would try to stop him. Maybe the kiss they’d shared had been his way of saying goodbye. Is that what he’d meant when he said he couldn’t let her down? Was he afraid he wouldn’t come back? A shiver ran through her, colder than anything she’d felt from the weather outside. “The passage will be dangerous this time of year,” she said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “How long do you think it will take him to make it back to Aurignon?”

  “Eva, I’m not sure he’s coming back,” he said after a moment. “I’m told the underground has other needs for his expertise.”

  “His expertise?”

  Père Clément’s eyes were filled with concern. “Before he found his way to Aurignon, he apparently worked a bit with explosives.”

  “Explosives? Rémy?”

  “He has a background in chemistry.”

  “Of course,” Eva murmured. “The lactic acid.”

  Père Clément nodded. “As I understand it, formulating explosives requires some experience with that sort of thing.”

  So Rémy would be out there somewhere, blowing things up, risking his life. Would she see him again? Suddenly, she felt as if she was sinking. “But I need him,” she said weakly.

  She wasn’t sure whether Père Clément truly misunderstood her meaning or had chosen to save her the embarrassment of a real answer. “You’ll be all right, Eva. In fact, the movement is sending another forger in his place to help you out for a while.”

  “Another forger?” Eva looked around the room in dismay. This had been the space she had shared with Rémy. She couldn’t imagine another person here, breathing air that was supposed to be his, taking up space that wasn’t meant to be filled by anyone but him.

  “In fact, I’m told she’s around your age.”

  “It’s a woman?” Somehow, Eva hadn’t expected this, but why not?

  Père Clément nodded. “She should be here within the month.”

  Slowly, Eva reached for the papers she and Rémy had forged together last night, the ones that would allow the children safe access to Switzerland if all went according to plan. As she held them out to Père Clément, she mustered her courage. “May I come with you? To say goodbye to him?”

  From the way he held her gaze, she had the feeling he could see just what was in her heart. “No, Eva, I’m afraid not. In fact, the children and the couriers are already outside the city. I’m sending someone with these documents now. It’s too dangerous to do it any other way.”

  “So you won’t see Rémy, either.”

  He took her hands
in his. “I feel certain we’ll both see him again soon. Remember, Eva—we must have faith.”

  She drew no comfort from his words, though, for she knew Catholics believed they would see each other again on the other side, once they were dead. And Père Clément had made no promises that Rémy would return to them alive. Perhaps he only meant that one day, if they all lived good lives, they would be reunited far away from here. But by then it would be too late.

  Chapter Twenty

  The new forger sent by the underground two weeks later was a twenty-six-year-old woman who went by the name Geneviève Marchand. Her short, wavy black bob reminded Eva instantly of the actress Marie Bell, and she had the sort of long legs and good looks that might have made her a star, too, in a different time and place. Here, though, her striking appearance only made her conspicuous, and Eva wondered how someone who looked like that was working for the Resistance, which relied largely on people capable of blending in, people like Eva herself.

  She had come from an area known as the Plateau, 150 kilometers southeast of Aurignon. There, she had lived in a village where forgery was big business, and more than a thousand Jews were hidden, under the direction of a local Protestant pastor working with the Resistance. It had sounded like an exaggeration when Geneviève first mentioned it, but Père Clément had explained that the story was true. “Now that the networks are beginning to become more well organized, we are in communication with them,” he’d said. “That’s how they came to send Geneviève here. The man she trained under, a man named Plunne, has forged thousands of documents.”

  It turned out that this Plunne’s methods weren’t all that dissimilar from Eva’s, though he was working on a much larger scale. It seemed that he had happened upon some of the same ideas for large-scale forgeries, including using the small copiers with the gel rollers to duplicate stamps. That meant that Geneviève fit right in immediately, and though Eva would never admit it aloud, she was better than Rémy had been, more fastidious, more careful. She sometimes caught small errors—slight misspellings or small discrepancies in details—before Eva did, and that alone was worth the price of her company. If her sharp eye saved even one person from an equally eagle-eyed German, she belonged here.

  By the time the snow finally began to thaw, Geneviève had been working in the place that had once been Rémy’s for more than a month, and Rémy still hadn’t returned. Eva worried that she would start to forget him, but every morning, in those first few seconds between dreams and consciousness, she could still taste the sweet saltiness of him on her lips, could still feel the ghost of his body against hers. And then she would be awake and those sensations would be gone, and she would be reminded anew of just how alone she was.

  But the longer he was gone, the more she began to wonder whether she’d been fooling herself thinking that her feelings for him could go anywhere. Even in a perfect world—a world where they weren’t at war with an enemy who wanted to murder people like her—he was still a Catholic, and she was still the Jewish daughter of parents who would never approve. If the past nine months had taught her anything, it was how deeply family should be valued and respected. Maybe her mother was right, and Eva should forget about him, try to open her mind to someone more appropriate, like Joseph. The only problem was that as much as Eva could manage to talk her head into it, she couldn’t persuade her heart that Rémy wasn’t worth loving.

  Still, he had left her, hadn’t he? She knew he was out there fighting, doing good—if he was even still alive—but on the darkest nights, Eva found herself thinking he would have stayed if he’d loved her enough.

  Geneviève didn’t talk much, which suited Eva just fine. And though Eva grew to trust her, she never told her about the Book of Lost Names. At the beginning, she considered it more than once, for they worked together each day, and there was no doubt that Geneviève was as dedicated to the cause as Eva. But the secret was safer if shared only with Rémy and Père Clément, so the priest agreed not to mention it in front of Geneviève, and Eva only added names to the book when the other woman wasn’t there.

  On the first truly warm day of 1943, which wasn’t until late April, long after the snow and ice had melted, Eva took off from the secret library a bit early and asked her mother if she wanted to go for a walk. In Paris, she and her mother had been comme les deux doigts de la main, like two fingers of a hand, two peas in a pod. They had shared everything, and Eva had been desperate to make her proud. Here, though, everything had shifted. Her mother didn’t approve of what Eva was doing, and in order to live with herself, Eva had to pretend that she didn’t care. But she did, and though she knew the work was important, the distance between them ate at her. Now that Rémy was gone, Eva could more clearly see the gaping hole in her life where affection and loyalty had once been.

  “You want to walk with me?” her mother had asked, pausing midway through folding a blanket to stare at Eva in puzzlement. As Eva had thrown herself more into forging documents, her mother had taken over doing all the cleaning and cooking for Madame Barbier. In the summer, Madame Barbier said, there might be guests, but for now, Mamusia was doing her a service by keeping the place tidy for a small fee. Eva wondered if her mother suspected, as she did, that Madame Barbier simply felt sorry for her and was trying to keep her occupied.

  “Is that really so strange, Mamusia?” Eva hadn’t intended the edge in her voice, but it was there anyhow.

  Mamusia resumed folding her blanket. “I was quite sure you’d forgotten about me, just as you’ve seemingly forgotten that you’re not a Catholic.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Like what? Like someone who gave up everything to give you a good life, only to be tossed aside?”

  Eva took a deep breath. “Mamusia, that isn’t what has happened.”

  Mamusia snorted, but she finally set the blanket down and turned to Eva. “Very well. We can go for a walk, I suppose. But I promised Madame Barbier I would make the stew tonight, so we must be back within the hour.”

  Five minutes later, they were walking away from the town center, in the opposite direction of the church and Madame Travere’s home, and for the first time in weeks, Eva felt as if she could breathe. Geraniums were beginning to bud in balcony boxes, soaked by the sun, and even the German soldiers dotting the streets seemed to pay them no attention. She waved to Madame Noirot, who was neatening a display in the front window of her bookshop, and to Monsieur Deniaud, who was out of his butcher’s apron today, but she avoided the gaze of the hawk-eyed gendarme, whose name she had learned was Besnard. His eyes seemed to follow her and Mamusia until they hurried around a corner.

  “Madame Barbier has been good to us,” Eva said, just to break the silence between them.

  Mamusia gave her a look. “I do good work for her. I keep the house spotless. Don’t make it sound like she pities us.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Good, because Madame Barbier is lucky to have me. In any case, she doesn’t pay me enough. Certainly not what the work is worth. Just like you’re not being paid nearly enough for what you do. They don’t value us, you know.”

  Eva sighed. The fact was, Père Clément had offered to give Eva a larger stipend, money that had filtered in from the underground, but Eva had asked that most of the money be sent to the children’s homes instead. There was already a new batch of refugees in Aurignon, waiting for safe passage to Switzerland, and a bit of extra money would help feed them. “We don’t need any more than we have,” Eva reminded her mother.

  “Of course we do. I’m putting money away for the future. We’ll need it when we reunite in Paris with your father.” Her mother was still convinced, against all the odds, that Tatuś would return home.

  “Mamusia—” Eva began.

  “You are your father’s daughter, Eva,” her mother interrupted. “And yet you seem bent on creating a life that will have no room in it for him.”

  “That’s not true. I—I will always have room for him. For bot
h of you.”

  Her mother snorted and went silent. Eva felt tears of frustration prickle behind her eyelids. “Rémy is gone, Mamusia. I just wanted you to know that.”

  Her mother was silent. “And yet you’re still thinking of him.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  Again, it was a long time before her mother spoke, and when she finally did, there was a warmth in her voice that Eva hadn’t heard in a while. “Then perhaps you haven’t forgotten who you are, after all.”

  * * *

  The next day, Eva and Geneviève were working shoulder to shoulder at the table in the hidden library, neither bothering to make small talk as they carefully smudged the fine lines of the lettering they’d just added to a batch of ration cards to make the ink look older, more worn. When they had finished with the ink, they’d need to fold and refold the papers, too, a mechanical process that required virtually no thought but was necessary to make the papers look as if they’d been carried around in someone’s pocket for quite a while.

  “What were you before you came here?” Geneviève asked abruptly, the break in the silence startling Eva so much that her hand slipped, creating an ink trail across a card that would now need to be discarded. “Sorry,” Geneviève said, giving Eva a small, guilty smile.

  “It’s all right,” Eva said with a sigh, reaching for another blank card. “That one wasn’t my best work anyhow.”

  Geneviève nodded, but she didn’t say more. Eva knew she was waiting for an answer to her question.

  “Do you mean to ask what my job was?” Eva ventured.

  Geneviève nodded again. “You’re just so good at this.” She hesitated. “Plunne, you see, wanted to be a doctor, but the laws prevented him from studying medicine, so he became a typewriter repairman in Nice instead, before he and his mother were forced out. But I think he worked with the precision of a surgeon.”