“But the war’s almost over,” she said, new tears forming. “Why did they have to do this now?”
“Because somebody told the Germans about you,” the gendarme explained. “Somebody well placed, in Paris.” Kira nodded, at last understanding.
* * *
The janitress of the Boulevard Exelmans apartment stood with an arm around Marie, the little maid, who was sobbing. “When I returned from my day off, they’d already come,” she gasped, fresh tears appearing on the edges of her lashes. “It was horrible. Poor Madame Walton . . .”
Kira’s own eyes were dry, though red-rimmed. Next to her, Sudarskaya was wringing her hands, her face a mask of uncomprehending agony. She looked, Kira thought, like one’s stereotype of the suffering Jew, mobile features twisted with ancestral pain. The young girl’s hand reached out to grasp the gnarled, nervous fingers, to calm her old friend down. “I knew Claire before I ever met your Mama,” the old woman said. “She was thirty-seven then. She helped me obtain my first students. She was my only friend.”
“I know, Raïssa Markovna.”
“Who could have alerted the Germans? Do you know?” The small piano teacher searched Marie’s face, anxiously.
But it was Kira who answered. “It’s all right, Marie. I know who it was.” But her grim expression revealed nothing to the three expectant faces watching her.
* * *
Rosine opened the door, and when she saw who it was, let out an audible sigh and stepped back to let the two women enter. “I’m so glad it’s you, Mademoiselle Kira,” she cried. Her hat sat firmly planted on her head, as if she’d been caught on the verge of leaving. “If you hadn’t come, I don’t know what I’d have done!”
Her face was flushed, and she seemed curiously breathless. Kira said: “This lady is my friend. What’s happening here, Rosine?”
“It’s Madame Bertholet. She thinks she can treat me like a slave, putting me to wait on her day and night, with no time off and only six hours to sleep. Well . . . I’ve decided to quit, right now! I’m going to go to my brother’s house, in Vaucresson. I can’t take another day of this!”
“It’s all right,” Kira told her. “My aunt’s known to be an impossible person. I’ll see what I can do to find her a replacement. You can go, Rosine.” Turning to Sudarskaya, she said: “Wait for me in the kitchen, please, Raïssa Markovna. I’ll go speak to Aunt Marthe.”
In the master bedroom, confusion reigned. The old woman sat propped against the usual array of pillows, and a tray rested on the slipcovers. “Good morning, Auntie,” Kira said. She tried not to breathe the stale air of the sickroom. With the tips of her lips, she brushed the old woman’s cheek.
“There’s not a damned thing good about it!” Marthe Bertholet muttered. “That idiot girl says she wants to quit! Who’m I going to find in the middle of a war, will you tell me, to come work here?”
“Perhaps I can look for someone,” Kira replied.
“Everybody’s abandoned me! I came here to be with my family, and I haven’t set eyes on Claire since the day before yesterday. And your mother was supposed to come this morning—promised me to be here to check on the food! What have I done to deserve such a forgetful, selfish set of relations?”
Her voice calm but hard, Kira said: “My grandmother’s dead, Aunt Marthe.”
Aunt Marthe blinked, horrified. “Claire? Dead? What happened?”
Kira twisted her hands together, and tears came. Above all, she didn’t want to weep in front of this dreadful old woman. But swallowing didn’t help. The tears fell. “She died of a heart attack,” she said, quickly. And then: “My mother hasn’t been well, and won’t be able to come to see you for a few months. But I’m here, and I can stay, if you need me.”
The round head tilted to the side, and the slitty eyes examined her circumspectly. Finally, Aunt Marthe replied. “You’re too young, and I don’t know you well enough. But I suppose you’ll have to do. I’m tired of paying wages to a stupid servant. It’s time I had a relative to do my cooking and cleaning—not some illiterate stranger!”
Stilling a gasp, Kira nodded. “All right, then.”
“But no extended visits from anyone,” the old woman ordered, her voice edgy with petulance. “You can have an occasional hour off, or a friend to sit with you. But for no longer than half an hour. I can’t afford to feed anyone else—not even for a cup of tea. My resources are limited,” she whined, “and anyway, I don’t like strangers in my house. Rosine was enough to last me till my death. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Kira answered.
In the corridor, she stilled the anguish within her. Sudarskaya met her in the entrance hall. “Well?” she murmured.
“I’m to be her next servant. And she wants no ‘extended visitors.’ Raíssa Markovna, you’re just going to have to keep very quiet. We’re the only ones left now, and it isn’t right for us to separate.” Turning to the coat stand, she pulled down a small felt hat. “I don’t know whose this is, though I seem to remember Grandma having one of these. But from now on, during the day, you’ll keep this on your head at all times. Like this, on the off chance that she’ll get out of bed, we’ll tell her that you’re just a friend passing by for half an hour.”
“But . . . where will I sleep?”
“With me, in Rosine’s old room. It’ll be more comfortable than in Chaumontel, and you’ll be safe. But from now on, your name will be Madame Soudaire. ‘Sudarskaya’ is Russian, and the old hen is as anticommunist as she’s anti-Semitic. She can’t tell the difference between a White and a Red Russian, and we can’t run any new risks. I didn’t tell her about Mama, and the details about Grandma. She’s never to learn that we are Jews.”
Silenced by the enormity of Kira’s command, the small piano teacher simply inclined her head.
Anything was better than her mother’s fate, Kira thought, carrying the dirty tray to the kitchen sink. And she wondered how she’d deal with Henriette Bruisson, who came to visit every Friday. For she knew beyond a doubt that it was she who had set the Germans on her mother’s trail, and who was responsible for her grandmother’s death.
There had to be a way to stall her, to prevent her from coming here and learning that Kira, a fugitive from the Nazis, was now living here, with an old Russian Jewess who had miraculously escaped deportation twice, and of whose existence Aunt Marthe was totally ignorant.
She’d simply have to confide in the janitor, who’d always been fond of her mother, and who had much experience in the clandestine. Lily had told her daughter that on the first floor, an escaped prisoner lived; on the third, a British family whose existence was not known, and who should long ago have left the country; and on the top floor, two men who had been sent to Germany for forced labor, and who had escaped.
Kira fingered the small gold heart that she wore on a chain around her neck, and that her grandmother had given her on her last birthday. At its center lay a tiny diamond. It was the only thing she possessed with which she might bribe the janitor. But she’d have to trust that it would be enough.
Chapter 25
One had to train oneself not to think. Lily’s background as a Roman Catholic, dwelling among the nuns whose lives had been defined by abnegation and renunciation, by strict obedience and poverty, had perhaps prepared her better than some of her fellow deportees. She remembered staying up endless nights in her narrow stone room at the convent, reciting Hail Marys and rosaries, making lists of sins “of the mind” that prevented her from falling asleep; and with the discipline of her adolescent days, she had tried to throw her mind into another gear, so that she would cease to exist on this plane, and her five senses cease to register what was happening around her.
Otherwise, allowing herself to remember the near present, since the Gestapo captain had come to arrest her, might have reduced her to craziness . . . like the old man in the corner, whose pants had dropped, and who had repeatedly defecated over the shoes of the woman next to him. Or she might have sunk
into total despair.
A kaleidoscope of events crowded her brain. She’d spent a night in a Paris police station, and been told that if she wanted, she might alert Madame Portier to put together fifty kilograms—one hundred ten pounds—of clothing, jewelry, books, furs, and foodstuffs, which would be allotted to her for the journey. She’d felt in a constant state of panic, dislocated from her family and in terror as to where she would be taken next. Deportation. They killed the Jews, though exactly how was still a mystery. And, she now realized, she was a Jew: free choice in this matter had long since ceased to exist.
She’d shaken her head. When Misha had left, Lily’s last vestige of interest in material goods had left with him. She preferred to go alone, without any ties. And besides, she had no idea what had happened to Kira and Sudarskaya. She’d wanted to leave the house in Chaumontel as swiftly as possible, to prevent the captain from deciding to recheck the rooms. Her heart squeezed into a tight knot, she worried about her daughter, and asked herself over and over whether the young gendarme had met her and warned her.
Kira had never been alone.
After a few days, she’d been sent with other prisoners, old people in fur coats, their backs bent with fear, in a small van with grilled windows, used to transport derelicts and disorderly whores after their arrests. They’d been taken to the enormous Vel’ d’Hiv’, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a sports stadium that had been filled, not with eager spectators, but with frightened men, women, and children, who, like her, had wondered to where they were being uprooted.
Horribly alone, Lily had stood, without baggage, and for one terrible moment, had almost asked to send a message to Ambassador Abetz. Had she not been stupid to refuse Charles de Chaynisart? And then, strength had returned. Not because Lily was so valiant, so upright and noble—but because, in the crowd, she’d thought she’d seen the bright, auburn curls of Nanni Steiner, her young figure proud and light, in a trim sealskin coat, heavy for the May weather. Lily’s heart had turned over, and she’d pushed her way through the crowds, trying to guess where the person had stood that she’d assumed to be Nanni.
At long length, exhausted and perspiring, she’d elbowed herself into a dense group of wailing old people who didn’t understand her need to get through. Maybe she’d imagined Nanni; she hoped so with all the might of her heart. For if Nanni was here, her parents might be, too, and Maryse. But, if it had been Nanni ...she had to admit a wish not to be alone at this desperate time.
They’d left on buses, and had arrived a few hours later at Drancy, a suburban town that, Lily knew, had been converted by the Germans into some kind of detention station for Jews, like that of Compiègne. “A way station,” she’d been told. And it was there, finally, that she’d been reunited with Maryse and Nanni.
It was in the refectory that she’d seen them, and they her. The young girl had come running, throwing her arms around her. And later, Maryse, her face white and drawn, had burst into sobs and told her about her mother. Lily had sat like a stone, willing the pain to lift from her heart. She hadn’t wept. She’d pushed this death far back, telling herself she’d deal with it later. Because Maryse needed her. She’d seen the barely masked hysteria in her friend’s eyes, and rallied to bring forth some hope, as vain and as stupid as she knew her words to sound.
The next morning, the Germans had driven thirty-five hundred of them to a train station far removed from the beaten track, and she’d found herself being shoved to the back of a cattle car. She’d remembered Raïssa Markovna’s joy, explaining to Kira how her wish to travel on a freight train had finally been fulfilled. But this was no joke. Fifty, seventy, maybe one hundred people were being crowded into a boxcar built to accommodate eight cows or fifteen pigs. Lily had held tightly to Maryse’s hand, and to Nanni’s, feeling her back pushing against the wooden planks, and her neck onto an iron bar. And then the doors had been shut, bolted . . . and almost total blackness had come over the doomed passengers, relieved only by tiny windows, like slits, high above Lily’s head.
How many days had they traveled? They’d been pressed tight, one against the other, in a fashion so monstrous that some had begun to scream, from lack of air. And then, they’d received only fourteen ounces of food for the first three days. After that, only an isolated piece of bread. Starving had been less painful, however, than thirst. Once a day, at some station where, amid big jolts, the boxcar had come to a stop, perhaps to be hooked up to a different convoy, or to move to a side rail, a water bottle had been flung through the slit windows, and had been seized by anxious hands. Often, the will to survive had obliterated all other human sentiments, and the contents of the bottle had been gulped before it was ever passed to the ones near the door.
And the only sanitation facility had been a covered bucket, soon uncovered, soon overflowing. The worst part was that few people could ever reach it. For many hours, the young, the valiant, had held out. And then, Nanni had said: “I can’t. I have to go, here.” And Lily had told her to go ahead. There’d been no point in helping her to squat, or to remove her panties. They hardly had the room to stand. And so Nanni had wet her pants, and after that, Lily and Maryse had done the same, like incontinent animals.
Amid the pungent odors of excreta, old men vomited, and a baby suffocated. In front of them, an old woman tried to collapse, but couldn’t, her dying body maintained upright by other living bodies. We don’t even have the room to die, Lily thought. And then she wondered how she had steeled herself . . . how young Nanni had known how to steel herself, to accept death, decay, and ignominy. Perhaps the losses Lily had sustained, and her last years of poverty, had helped her; but she marveled at Nanni’s inner strength, she who was still a child, and who had always known comfort.
It had turned cold, and, standing on tiptoe, Lily had seen a bleak landscape. And now they were clanging into a station, she could feel it, and her fingers tightened over Nanni’s, and she said to Maryse: “Fresh air. We’ll have fresh air.”
Only Maryse didn’t answer. She’d long ago ceased to speak, her head on Lily’s shoulder, her blue eyes unseeing . . . dazed by hunger and shame, and abysmal fear.
All at once, the door to the outside was flung open, and the prisoners, momentarily blinded by the strong white light, stood shakily hooding their eyes. “Out!” came the brisk order in German, and slowly, the fatigued people made their way to the platform. Lily, Maryse, and Nanni, at the back of the boxcar, were among the last to leave.
They were standing on a platform set against a gray background. Across some tracks, they could see barbed wire held up by myriad fence stanchions, and, beyond, an A-frame gray house with chimneys that belched smoke. But on the platform itself, SS guards, dressed in black uniforms, with silver pistols and batons, were busy marshaling the prisoners together. And then, men in blue-and-white striped jackets and pants, with matching caps on their shaved heads, stood gathering together the luggage being heaved off the wagons.
The SS men were lining the deportees into rows of fives. Lily noticed that the women and children had already been divided from the men. She found herself pushed, between Nanni and Maryse, next to a young woman carrying a baby. In front of them, two older women, in elegant clothes, stood clutching each other’s hands. One of them turned, and asked Lily: “Why are we here? What are they going to do to us?”
“I have no idea,” Lily answered, smiling to give herself, as well as her interlocutress, courage.
“They’re selecting us for work or the family camp,” the young woman next to Lily told her.
In the ensuing silence, Nanni stood fidgeting with the buttons of her coat. Lily faced Maryse, and began to fluff up her lifeless hair, to pinch her cheeks. “Whatever this is, you’ll need to look strong,” she told her, tersely. “We all must, if we want to stay together.”
The line was moving forward rapidly, and now they could see a tall, handsome man in a formfitting uniform waving each person to the left or right with a flick of his thumb. He reminded Lily of the dandies s
he had known in Paris—younger versions of Charles de Chaynisart, always a little nonchalant and careless in their exquisite, perfumed elegance. The contrast between this man, clearly not yet forty, and the bedraggled prisoners who were parading in front of him, their throats parched with thirst and their clothes soiled and smelly, shocked her to the core of her being.
What have we done to deserve this? she asked herself, a deep revolt forming. We’ve committed no crime, any of us! And yet we’re being stripped of our dignity, brought here on cattle trains like soulless animals . . . just because we are Jewish.
A young boy, looking barely older than Nanni, was loading some luggage into a truck. He was bone-thin and dressed in the pathetic blue-and-white striped uniform, yet one could tell that his smooth, pleasant features, and his bright brown eyes, would, in a normal setting, have made him good-looking. Nanni put her hand out, and touched him. Instinctively, a fearful animal, he jumped back.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But . . . what’s going to happen to us?”
Glancing quickly around, he asked, in a low, hurried voice: “How old are you?”
“Fourteen. And you?”
He shook his head, fear making him impatient. “Just remember this: if the selector, Dr. Mengele, asks you the same question, you will tell him you are eighteen. Then he will send you with the able-bodied women to be a slave laborer.”
“But . . . isn’t he going to check the records?”
The boy laughed, but the sound was totally mirthless. “He never does. The secret in this place is never to look weak, old, or sick . . . and not to be a child.”
“Why not?” Her grave blue eyes searched his face.
The Keeper of the Walls Page 57