Those Who Are Saved

by Alexis Landau

  When Vera enrolled Lucie in the lycée, the same questioning looks crossed the teachers’ faces, and she knew that Lucie would also be marked as not quite French enough for the French.

  And yet, despite always being described as “exotic” and “foreign,” in a tone coated with false admiration, France ran through her blood: columnar cypresses lining dusty roads, cool stone churches offering shade and respite, the language she knew before any other. Soft and bending, sharp and brooding, it captured all she’d ever felt, harkening back to Agnes, who was once her own governess, singing her to sleep: “You may have taken Alsace and Lorraine, but in spite of you, we will always be French!” The language of dreams, streaming through her fingertips, into the pen, onto the page. A phrase, a certain word, provided the incendiary for all else. Without this language, this soil, what was she but a nebulous entity drifting through time and space?

  Light, shade, stone. This was her home, her self.

  But, Vera thought, forcing a smile at Sabine, who eyed her warily while pouring more coffee into the china-blue cup, a few drops spilling onto the saucer, the last time she and Max had applied for citizenship, two months ago, it was denied for the third time.

  * * *

  • • •

  After breakfast, Agnes took Lucie to the beach to allow Max and Vera time to think and plan. Max stood on the bedroom balcony, his back to her, smoking furiously. “We’ll wire Paris immediately. Figure out some way.”

  “Flames,” Vera called out from the bed.

  He turned to face her, the sunlit sea behind him. “What?”

  “That’s what Dr. Adler said. We should have listened to him then. We should have left Europe. We should have gone to America. It’s too late now.”

  Dr. Adler, a cousin of Max’s mother, was a famous psychiatrist practicing in Manhattan. With painful clarity, Vera remembered the dinner party he had attended at their newly renovated top-floor apartment. It was 1938, just after Hitler had disposed of his war minister, and rumors of another war swirled. After the other guests had left, Max and Vera bid Dr. Adler goodbye in the oval entryway, all of them bathed in the chandelier’s amber glow. “You must leave France. Immediately,” he said. Vera glanced into the adjoining living room, where she had installed Lucie on the velvet chaise, dreaming beneath a cashmere blanket the color of snow. “Come to New York,” he pressed. “I’ll write you an affidavit. Still now, you can get exit visas.” Max nodded, as if he were seriously considering such an offer, but Vera knew he wasn’t. He had just secured a new contract with the Paris Opera. She was deep at work on her novel.

  * * *

  • • •

  Perched on the edge of the bed, Vera still felt the scratchy sensation of Dr. Adler’s beard against her cheek when they hugged goodbye, and the letters he sent from New York in the following months that remained on top of the high glass table in the foyer, imploring them to leave Europe, because the Europe they knew and loved would soon erupt into flames.

  Max stubbed out his cigarette on the balcony railing and came inside.

  “We have to decide about Lucie,” Vera said.

  “Take her with us, of course.”

  She gathered up her linen skirt, fisting the fabric, her knuckles whitening. “I’ve heard in the camps children are separated from their parents. We might lose her. Or something worse could happen. And she’s not a foreign national . . . She shouldn’t have to go . . .”

  Max knelt down before her. “What do you want to do?” His gray-green eyes watered. His tan skin suddenly appeared wrinkly and old, hanging from his face in heavy folds.

  It was a plan that had been constructing itself in Vera’s mind since last night, the architecture of it forming, stone by stone, until it now blazed before her, crystallized and finished. “Agnes will stay with her here, until we’re released. Hopefully only for a few weeks. Nothing much needs to change. If things worsen for any reason, she can always bring Lucie home with her to Oradour-sur-Glane. You know she has a large family with many sisters. They all have children. Lucie will blend in. She might even enjoy it. And then, when we’re released, we’ll get Lucie back.”

  “Okay,” Max said simply.

  The pit in Vera’s stomach tightened. Was this right? Was there any idea in taking Lucie with them? But once at the camp, no one knew what to expect, and the conditions . . . She had heard they made the bread with sand and the drinking water was contaminated. People suffered from dysentery, with barely enough water for cleaning themselves.

  Shuddering, she stood up and walked into the hallway, opening the closet door to bring her empty suitcase down from the top shelf.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two days later, they were to appear at the town hall to obtain a special pass to travel from their home to the camp. Once this was issued, Vera and Max, along with the Freudenbergers, would report to Gurs camp. Max had telephoned Paul last night, urging him to at least flee to the free zone, pleading with him to take their parents, but Paul insisted that Paris was safe for Jews, lightly reminding Max that many of their friends had even returned to Paris in the last few weeks, given the recently signed armistice with Germany. Vera had also spoken to Katja, her old friend from the Sorbonne, who insisted that Paris was still Paris, the only difference being the swastika flag flying over the Eiffel Tower. But while Vera listened to Katja, her palms started to sweat, thinking that Katja’s French Catholic roots afforded her the luxury of staying in her apartment near Place Saint-Michel, commenting on the situation as if it didn’t affect her, and maybe it didn’t.

  * * *

  • • •

  Leon’s driver was due to collect them at noon. The sun glared on the whitewashed walls of the house. Vera’s eyes watered in the harsh morning light, watching Lucie standing in the garden in her black pinafore, listlessly watering the lemon trees with a dusty hose.

  Last night Lucie had practiced a song at the dinner table, her high sweet voice lucid and piercing: “France, mother of the arts, of arms and of laws, long have you nourished me with the milk of your breast. Now, like a lamb who calls out to her nurse, I fill caverns and forests with your name.”

  She sang it so seriously. In better times, Vera would have suppressed a smile, but now she asked, the question catching in her throat, “Where did you learn that?”

  Lucie shrugged, dipped a crust of bread into her milk, and then took a savage bite out of it. “Madame Agnes. We sing it on the way to the beach.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Lucie dropped the hose at her bare feet, watching the thin stretch of water filter into the dry soil. Then she strode off, in search of Camille, her doll. Vera watched her dart through the trees. The cat, Mourka, trotted after Lucie, his tail a black arrow, pointing into the cloudless sky.

  Vera didn’t hear Agnes come up behind her and was startled by her low, hoarse whisper. “I promise she will be safe with me.”

  Vera stared into Agnes’s pewter red-rimmed eyes.

  Agnes smiled hesitantly and offered Vera a handkerchief. “I only worry about the war, and what will happen to France. But Lucie, I protect as my own daughter. She is mine too, in a way.”

  “I know,” Vera said softly.

  Agnes had no children, and seldom spoke of her youth. Once, Vera was aware, she had been in love, but it had ended badly and she’d slipped into spinsterhood, as if the role had awaited her all along, although she radiated a youthful efficiency at the age of fifty-two, always tidy and lean, shunning waste of any kind, reminding Vera to be thriftier and more careful. Vera’s mother had hired Agnes when they still lived in St. Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago. All the wealthy Russian families sought French nannies to care for their children and, in the process, perfect their French, as French, not Russian, was the preferred language of the elite. Agnes stayed with the family during the revolution and fled with them to France, continuing to car
e for Vera once they began their new lives in Paris, not wanting to return to her rural village in southwestern France, where her younger sisters shared a farm with a constellation of uncles and brothers-in-law, a family brimming over with frequent clashes and disagreements, all of which Agnes was happy to escape. When Vera moved out of her parents’ apartment and married Max, it was only natural that Agnes come with her.

  Vera held Agnes’s hands. She had thin papery skin, spidery blue veins running beneath it. With renewed urgency, Vera repeated the instructions again. They’d gone over the details of the departure yesterday, but she needed to repeat it all, like a chant or a prayer: “If you must, first sell the furniture in the Paris apartment, then the furs, the silver, and, as a last resort, the jewelry. You also have the sixty thousand francs for living expenses. I’ve made arrangements with Jacques for the garden to be looked after here. There is the request for back taxes from Paris, but do not pay them. Dr. Delafontaine, you have his address. Lucie has been vaccinated for diphtheria. She has a slight case of enteritis, so no unpasteurized milk or unpasteurized cheese.” Vera paused, catching her breath. “Of course you know all of this.”

  She tugged her wedding ring over her knuckle and back down again. “I also left a letter with Maître Vernet giving you power of attorney to make all decisions for Lucie as you see fit—” Her voice broke off, and Agnes embraced her.

  She pressed her cheek against Agnes’s starched collar and instantly felt small again, crying about her mother, who had flown into another rage and slapped Vera across the face, the emerald-encrusted ring leaving a stinging scratch under her eye. Agnes’s thin arms held her in place, her insistent whisper tunneling into Vera’s ear: “Don’t worry. It will be all right in the end.”

  Max ambled down the stairs, dapper in his linen trousers and white shirt, his graying hair slicked back, still wet from the bath. He gave her an apologetic look. Last night they’d fought because Vera’s weeping had distressed him. He told her that she must remain calm about the events that were about to occur, avoiding the words “camp” and “internment.”

  “Calm!” she had screamed into the windless night, backing up against the balcony’s wrought iron railing, imagining how she might hurl herself over it, landing with a thud on the dry, dark earth. “How can I be calm in a situation like this? And you, drinking glass after glass of wine at Café des Voyageurs with Leon yesterday. I found you lying facedown on the couch, and Lucie asking why you were asleep at four in the afternoon. What was I supposed to say? That you were drunk and sunburnt? And you think I’m not acting properly!”

  Max now placed down his valise. “Where’s Lucie?” he asked, holding out the pocketbook edition of Balzac, seven novels in one, that Vera had been frantically searching for this morning.

  “She’s in the garden,” Vera said, taking the book and pressing it to her chest.

  Max strode over to the open French doors to find their daughter racing through the mazelike hedges, chasing Mourka, whose tinkling collar with its little brass bell always betrayed their location.

  Vera hovered a few inches behind Max. She fought off the pressure mounting in her throat when she said, “The car will be here any minute.”

  Lucie disappeared behind a copse of olive trees, dragging her doll by one leg, the straw-colored synthetic hair flecked with dirt.

  “Lucie!” Vera called.

  The morning grew hotter.

  Already Vera had sweat through her white crepe blouse. She fidgeted with the front button. Her clothes would turn to shreds in the camp. What was the use?

  Lucie’s thin silvery voice rang through the trees: “Come find me!”

  Vera and Max had told her about their “little vacation” and that she would stay with Madame Agnes for a bit. Lucie made them promise that she could eat ice cream every day after lunch, and that Mourka would sleep at the foot of her bed, and that they would return with presents. A blue dress and blue shoes.

  Yes, yes, they said, of course.

  After these negotiations, Lucie was content, having, in her eyes, won. It pained Vera to see how such small things mattered to her, belittling all else to abstraction. And yet this was the grace of childhood, the wondrous emphasis placed on cats and ice cream, on blue dresses and dusty coins buried in the garden, unearthed the next day and proclaimed a treasure—coins Max routinely buried the night before in preparation for Lucie’s exultant discovery.

  She reappeared between the trees, triumphantly squeezing a small silver coin between her forefinger and thumb, her dark hair a tangled halo, her cheeks flushed, tiny beads of sweat percolating along her upper lip. “Mama! I found more coins!”

  Vera knelt down, opening her arms.

  Lucie barreled into Vera’s chest, knocking the breath out of her.

  She held her tightly and whispered into Lucie’s curls, “Enough to buy ice cream.”

  Just then she heard the dreaded honk of Leon’s cabriolet, a sound that in other times had signaled motoring in the moonlight after dinner, or a trip down the coast to a neighboring town.

  Lucie touched Vera’s necklace, a heart hanging from a thin gold chain. It was an unconscious habit, something Lucie did all the time. “Are you leaving now? Can I first show Papa the coins I found? And will you tell Agnes about the ice cream after lunch? Every day?”

  “Yes,” Vera said, pressing the back of her wrist into her eyes, but insipid hot tears leaked out. She scanned the garden, the lemon trees blurring, the bougainvillea flowering over the stone wall a menacing blend of violet and apricot. And Lucie’s doll, Camille, abandoned under the green bench on the far side of the garden. The doll lay facedown, and she had heard Lucie instruct the doll, in a strict tone, that it was time for bed and that was that.

  “Let’s go show Papa the coins,” Vera whispered, noticing traces of butter smeared across Lucie’s cheek from a recent snack, and that each fingernail housed a thin line of dirt beneath it. She worried Agnes might overlook such details in their absence, while also knowing that Agnes would never neglect Lucie, as she often noticed the stray hair escaping from Lucie’s braid or a miniscule stain on Lucie’s pinafore long before Vera did.

  Together, they walked up to the circular driveway.

  Vera clutched Lucie’s hand, changing her mind.

  Lucie would come with them.

  She already felt Lucie’s weight on her lap in the crowded back seat.

  Lucie trilled, “Leon and Elsa are here!”

  The forsaken doll, Lucie’s unfiled nails, the sun and heat lightened her head, made it spin.

  Leon and Elsa sat grimly in the back seat, staring straight ahead.

  Max waited on the other side of the car, glancing down at his watch. Their suitcases were already strapped onto the car roof.

  “Oh,” Vera said, throwing up her hands. “Where’s Camille? We can’t forget her.”

  Lucie frowned. “She was naughty. I put her under the bench.”

  “Vera,” Max said, walking around the side of the car. “It’s time.” His left eye twitched. A sky blue handkerchief spilled out of his breast pocket.

  Vera whispered to Lucie, “Don’t forget about Camille under the bench. She’ll get so very cold at night.”

  Kneeling down one last time, she pulled Lucie into her and whispered that she loved her and that she must always be good with Madame Agnes, and they would return soon, with a blue dress and blue shoes. She kept whispering—she couldn’t remember now what else she said, only that it had allowed her to hold Lucie a few seconds longer, the warmth of her small body flooding into hers, Lucie’s shallow breath on her neck, her tangled curls between Vera’s fingers. She took one last inhalation of Lucie’s natural milky scent, overlaid with the rosemary bushes she had trampled through earlier.

  Agnes stood in front of the house, columnar in a navy shift, long sleeves even in this heat. She gestured for Lucie to come.
>
  “Oh, wait,” Vera said breathlessly. She undid the clasp of her necklace, her fingers working quickly, and then watched the delight unfold on Lucie’s face when she lifted up Lucie’s hair and fastened the chain around her neck.

  “Keep it safe?”

  Lucie nodded, squinting up at her before she ran to Agnes, as casually as any other day.

  Vera slid into the back seat and gently closed the door.

  Elsa gave her a pinched smile, meant to encourage, but it only made Vera’s heart beat faster. She jerked around to look through the dusty rear window and saw, to her relief, Agnes rubbing off the butter from Lucie’s cheek with a fresh white handkerchief.

  Then Agnes glanced up and locked eyes with Vera. She nodded as the car started down the road. A nod that reminded Vera of childhood evenings when Agnes administered medicine for Vera’s asthma before bed, a nod that communicated empathy but also a resolute firmness, a firmness that Vera had never dared cross. That same nod presented itself now, indicating that certain decisions were irreversible, and certain moments in time could never come undone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Vera looked down at the little black and white diamond tiles patterning the bathroom floor. Of course, she thought, I’m seeing things. Things I shouldn’t see.

  Spinning around, she examined her reflection in the mirror, willing Lucie to reappear, but Vera only caught her own dull face: sunken cheeks, blue shadows, like half-moons, under her eyes, her lower lip chapped and puffy. She tilted her head toward the doorway, listening for him, but she only heard the crashing surf and seagulls cawing at the rising sun, as if rejecting it.