Sarah's Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

  Antoine grinned.

  "But it will be brand-new once we finish it."

  "Maybe. But to me, it will always be Mame's apartment."

  The apartment still bore Mame's imprint, even if she had moved to a nursing home nine months ago. My husband's grandmother had lived here for years. I remembered our first encounter, sixteen years back. I had been impressed by the old master paintings, the marble fireplace boasting family photos framed in ornate silver, the deceptively simple, elegant furniture, the numerous books lining the library shelves, the grand piano draped with lush red velvet. The sunny living room gave onto a peaceful inner courtyard with a thick thatch of ivy spreading out on the opposite wall. It was right here that I had met her for the first time, that I had held out my hand to her, awkwardly, not yet at ease with what my sister Charla dubbed "that kissy French thing."

  You didn't shake a Parisian woman's hand, even if you were meeting her for the first time. You kissed her once on each cheek.

  But I hadn't known that, yet.

  T

  HE MAN WITH THE beige raincoat looked at his list again.

  "Wait," he said, "there's a child missing. A boy."

  He pronounced the boy's name.

  The girl's heart skipped a beat. The mother glanced toward her daughter. The girl put a swift finger to her lips. A movement the men did not catch.

  "Where is the boy?" demanded the man.

  The girl stepped forward, wringing her hands.

  "My brother is not here, Monsieur," she said with her perfect French, the French of a native. "He left at the beginning of the month with some friends. To the country."

  The man in the raincoat looked at her thoughtfully. Then he made a quick gesture with his chin to the policeman.

  "Search the place. Fast. Maybe the father is hiding, too."

  The policeman lumbered through the rooms, clumsily opening doors, looking under beds, into cupboards.

  While he made his noisy way through the apartment, the other man paced the room. When he had his back to them, the girl quickly showed her mother the key. Papa will come up and get him, Papa will come later, she mouthed. Her mother nodded. All right, she seemed to say, I understand where the boy is. But her mother started to frown, to make a key gesture with her hand as if to ask, where will you leave the key for Papa, how will he know where it is? The man turned around swiftly and watched them. The mother froze. The girl trembled with fear.

  He stared at them for a while. Then he abruptly closed the window.

  "Please," the mother said, "it's so hot in here."

  The man smiled. The girl thought she had never seen an uglier smile.

  "We keep it closed, Madame," he said. "Earlier this morning, a lady threw her child out of the window, then jumped. We wouldn't want that to happen again."

  The mother said nothing, numb with horror. The girl glared at the man, hating him, hating every inch of him. She loathed his florid face, his glistening mouth. The cold, dead look in his eyes. The way he stood there, his legs spread, his felt hat tilted forward, his fat hands locked behind his back.

  She hated him with all her might, like she had never hated anyone in her life, more than she hated that awful boy at school, Daniel, who had whispered horrible things to her under his breath, horrible things about her mother's accent, her father's accent.

  She listened to the policeman continuing his clumsy search. He would not find the boy. The cupboard was too cleverly hidden. The boy would be safe. They would never find him. Never.

  The policeman came back. He shrugged, shook his head.

  "There is no one here," he said.

  The man in the raincoat pushed the mother toward the door. He asked for the keys to the apartment. She handed them over, silently. They filed down the stairs, their progress slowed by the bags and bundles the mother carried. The girl was thinking fast, how could she get the key to her father? Where could she leave it? With the concierge? Would she be awake at this hour?

  Strangely, the concierge was already awake and waiting behind her door. The girl noticed she had an odd, gloating expression on her face. Why did she look like that, the girl wondered, why did she not glance at her mother, or at her, but only at the men, as if she did not want to see her or her mother, as if she had never seen them. And yet her mother had always been kind to this woman. She had looked after the concierge's baby from time to time, little Suzanne, who often fretted because of stomach pains, and her mother had been so patient, had sung to Suzanne in her native tongue, endlessly, and the baby had loved it, had fallen asleep peacefully.

  "Do you know where the father and the son are?" asked the policeman. He gave her the keys to the apartment.

  The concierge shrugged. She still did not look at the girl, at her mother. She pocketed the keys with a swift, hungry movement the girl didn't like.

  "No," she said to the policeman. "I haven't seen much of the husband lately. Maybe he's gone into hiding with the boy. You could look through the cellars or the service rooms on the top floor. I can show you."

  The baby in the small loge began to whimper. The concierge looked back over her shoulder.

  "We don't have time," said the man wearing the raincoat. "We need to move on. We'll come back later if we have to."

  The concierge went to get the wailing baby and held it to her chest. She said she knew there were other families in the building next door. She pronounced their names with an expression of distaste, thought the girl, as if she was saying a swearword, one of those dirty words you were never supposed to utter.

  B

  ERTRAND POCKETED HIS PHONE at last and turned his attention to me. He gave me one of his irresistible grins. Why did I have such an impossibly attractive husband? I wondered for the umpteenth time. When I first met him all those years ago, skiing at Courchevel in the French Alps, he had been the slim, boyish type. Now, at forty-seven, heavier, stronger, he exuded manliness, "Frenchiness," and class. He was like good wine, maturing with grace and power, whereas I felt certain I had lost my youth somewhere between the Charles River and the Seine and was certainly not blossoming in middle age. If silver hair and wrinkles seemed to highlight Bertrand's beauty, I felt sure they diminished mine.

  "Well?" he said, cupping my ass with a careless, possessive hand, despite his associate and our daughter looking on. "Well, isn't this great?"

  "Great," echoed Zoe. "Antoine has just told us everything needs to be redone, which means we probably won't move in for another year."

  Bertrand laughed. An amazingly infectious laugh, a cross between a hyena and a saxophone. That was the problem with my husband. Intoxicating charm. And he loved turning it on full blast. I wondered whom he had inherited it from. His parents, Colette and Edouard? Wildly intelligent, refined, knowledgeable. But not charming. His sisters, Cecile and Laure? Well-bred, brilliant, perfect manners. But they only laughed when they felt they were obliged to. I guessed he probably got it from Mame. Rebellious, belligerent Mame.

  "Antoine is such a pessimist," laughed Bertrand. "We'll be here soon enough. It will be a lot of work, but we'll get the best teams on it."

  We followed him down the long corridor with creaking floorboards, visiting the bedrooms that gave onto the street.

  "This wall needs to go," Bertrand declared, pointing, and Antoine nodded. "We need to bring the kitchen closer. Otherwise Miss Jarmond here wouldn't find it 'practical.' "

  He said the word in English, looking at me with a naughty wink and drawing little quotation marks with his fingers in the air.

  "It's quite a big apartment," remarked Antoine. "Rather grand."

  "Now, yes. But it was a lot smaller in the old days, a lot humbler," said Bertrand. "Times were hard for my grandparents. My grandfather didn't make good money till the sixties. Then he bought the apartment across the hall and joined the two together."

  "So when Grand-pere was a kid, he lived in this small part?" Zoe asked.

  "That's right," said Bertrand. "This part through here. That w
as his parents' room, and he slept here. It was a lot smaller."

  Antoine tapped on the walls thoughtfully.

  "Yes, I know what you're thinking." Bertrand smiled. "You want to bring these two rooms together, right?"

  "Right!" admitted Antoine.

  "Not a bad idea. Needs working on, though. There's a tricky bit of wall here, I'll show you later. Thick paneling. Pipes and stuff going through. Not as easy as it looks."

  I looked at my watch. Two-thirty.

  "I have to go," I said. "Meeting with Joshua."

  "What do we do with Zoe?" asked Bertrand.

  Zoe rolled her eyes.

  "I can, like, take a bus back to Montparnasse."

  "What about school?" said Bertrand.

  Roll of eyes again.

  "Papa! It's Wednesday. No school on Wednesday afternoons, remember?

  Bertrand scratched his head.

  "In my days it--"

  "It was on Thursday, no school on Thursdays," chanted Zoe.

  "Ridiculous French educational system," I sighed. "And school on Saturday mornings to boot!"

  Antoine agreed with me. His sons attended a private school where there were no classes on Saturday mornings. But Bertrand--like his parents--was a staunch believer in the French public school system. I had wanted to put Zoe in a bilingual school. There were several of them in Paris, but the Tezac tribe would have none of that. Zoe was French, born in France. She would go to a French school. At present she attended the Lycee Montaigne, near the Luxembourg Garden. The Tezacs kept forgetting Zoe had an American mother. Luckily, Zoe's English was perfect. I had never spoken anything else to her, and she went often enough to Boston to visit my parents. She spent most summers on Long Island with my sister Charla and her family.

  Bertrand turned to me. He had that little glint in his eye, the one I felt wary about, the one that meant he was going to be either very funny or very cruel, or both. Antoine obviously knew what it suggested as well, judging from the meek way he plunged into a studious survey of his patent-leather, tasseled loafers.

  "Oh, yes indeed, we know what Miss Jarmond thinks of our schools, our hospitals, our endless strikes, our long vacations, our plumbing systems, our postal service, our TV, our politics, our dogshit on the sidewalks," said Bertrand, flashing his perfect teeth at me. "We have heard about it so many times, so many times, have we not? 'I like to be in America, everything's clean in America, everybody picks up dogshit in America!'"

  "Papa, stop it, you're so rude!" Zoe said, taking my hand.

  O

  UTSIDE, THE GIRL SAW a neighbor wearing pajamas leaning from his window. He was a nice man, a music teacher. He played the violin, and she liked listening to him. He often played for her and her brother from across the courtyard. Old French songs like "Sur le pont d'Avignon" and "A la claire fontaine," and also songs from her parents' country, songs that always got her mother and father dancing gaily, her mother's slippers sliding across the floorboards, her father twirling her mother round and round, round and round till they all felt dizzy.

  "What are you doing? Where are you taking them?" he called out.

  His voice rang across the courtyard, covering the baby's yells. The man in the raincoat did not answer him.

  "But you can't do this," said the neighbor. "They're honest, good people! You can't do this!"

  At the sound of his voice, shutters began to open, faces peered out from behind curtains.

  But the girl noticed that nobody moved, nobody said anything. They simply watched.

  The mother stopped dead in her tracks, her back racked with sobs. The men shoved her on.

  The neighbors watched silently. Even the music teacher remained silent.

  Suddenly the mother turned and screamed at the top of her lungs. She screamed her husband's name, three times.

  The men seized her by the arms, shook her roughly. She dropped her bags and bundles. The girl tried to stop them, but they pushed her aside.

  A man appeared in the doorway, a thin man with crumpled clothes, an unshaven chin, and red, tired eyes. He walked through the courtyard, holding himself straight.

  When he came up to the men, he told them who he was. His accent was thick, like the woman's.

  "Take me with my family," he said.

  The girl slipped her hand through her father's.

  She was safe, she thought. She was safe, with her mother, with her father. This was not going to last long. This was the French police, not the Germans. No one was going to harm them.

  Soon they'd be back in the apartment, and Maman would make breakfast. And the little boy would come out of the hiding place. And Papa would go to the warehouse down the road where he worked as a foreman and made belts and bags and wallets with all his fellow workers, and everything would be the same. And things would become safe again, soon.

  Outside, it was daylight. The narrow street was empty. The girl looked back at her building, at the silent faces in the windows, at the concierge cuddling little Suzanne.

  The music teacher raised his hand slowly in a gesture of farewell.

  She waved back at him, smiling. Everything was going to be all right. She was coming back, they were all coming back.

  But the man seemed stricken.

  There were tears running down his face, silent tears of helplessness and shame that she could not understand.

  R

  UDE? YOUR MOTHER ADORES it," chuckled Bertrand, winking at Antoine. "Don't you, my love? Don't you, cherie?"

  He gyrated through to the living room, clicking his fingers to the West Side Story tune.

  I felt silly, foolish, in front of Antoine. Why did Bertrand take such pleasure in making me out to be the snide, prejudiced American, ever critical of the French? And why did I just stand there and let him get away with it? It had been funny, at one point. In the beginning of our marriage, it had been a classic joke, the kind that made both our American and French friends roar with laughter. In the beginning.

  I smiled, as usual. But my smile seemed a little tight today.

  "Have you been to see Mame lately?" I asked.

  Bertrand was already busy measuring something.

  "What?"

  "Mame," I repeated patiently. "I think she would like to see you. To talk about the apartment."

  His eyes met mine.

  "Don't have time, amour. You go?"

  A pleading look.

  "Bertrand, I go every week. You know that."

  He sighed.

  "She's your grandmother," I said.

  "And she loves you, l'Americaine." He grinned. "And so do I, bebe."

  He came over to kiss me softly on the lips.

  The American.

  "So you're the American," Mame had stated all those years ago in this very room, looking me over with brooding, gray irises. L'Americaine. How American that had made me feel, with my layered locks, sneakers, and wholesome smile. And how quintessentially French this seventy-year-old woman was, with her straight back, patrician nose, impeccable coil of hair, and shrewd eyes. And yet, I liked Mame from the start. Her startling, guttural laugh. Her dry sense of humor.

  Even today, I had to admit I liked her more than Bertrand's parents, who still made me feel like "the American," although I had been living in Paris for twenty-five years, been married to their son for fifteen, and produced their first grandchild, Zoe.

  On the way down, confronted once again with the unpleasant reflection in the elevator mirror, it suddenly occurred to me that I had put up with Bertrand's jabs for too long, and always with a good-natured shrug.

  And today, for some obscure reason, for the first time, I felt I had had enough.

  T

  HE GIRL KEPT CLOSE to her parents. They walked all the way down her street, the man in the beige raincoat telling them to hurry up. Where were they going? she wondered. Why did they have to rush so? They were told to go into a large garage. She recognized the road, which was not far from where she lived, from where her father worked.


  In the garage, men were bent over engines, wearing blue overalls stained with oil. The men stared at them, silent. No one said anything. Then the girl saw a large group of people standing in the garage with bags and baskets at their feet. Mostly women and children, she noticed. Some of them she knew, a little. But no one dared wave or say hello to each other. After a while, two policemen appeared. They called out names. The girl's father put up his hand when their family name was heard.

  The girl looked around her. She saw a boy she knew from school, Leon. He looked tired and scared. She smiled at him, she wanted to tell him that everything was fine, that they could all go home soon. This wouldn't last long, they would soon be sent back. But Leon stared at her like she was crazy. She glanced down at her feet, her cheeks crimson. Maybe she had got it all wrong. Her heart was pounding. Maybe things were not going to happen like she thought they would. She felt very naive, silly, and young.

  Her father bent down to her. His unshaven chin tickled her ear. He said her name. Where was her brother? She showed him the key. The little brother was safe in their secret cupboard, she whispered, proud of herself. He'd be safe there.

  Her father's eyes went wide and strange. He grasped her arm. But it's all right, she said, he's going to be all right. It's a deep cupboard, there is enough air in there for him to breathe. And he has water and the flashlight. He'll be fine, Papa. You don't understand, said the father, you don't understand. And to her dismay, she saw that tears filled his eyes.

  She pulled his sleeve. She couldn't bear to see her father cry.

  "Papa," she said, "we are going back home, aren't we? We are going back after they've called out our names?"

  Her father wiped his tears. He looked down at her. Awful, sad eyes she could not bear gazing back at.

  "No," he said, "we are not going back. They won't let us go back."

  She felt something cold and horrible seep through her. Once again she remembered what she had overheard, her parents' faces glimpsed from behind the door, their fear, their anguish in the middle of the night.