Those Who Are Saved

by Alexis Landau

  “What do old women do in New York?”

  Their eyes met and they both laughed.

  * * *

  • • •

  He arrived in Los Angeles on a hot July evening in 1938, his chest loosening when he first glimpsed the Pacific, a shimmering blue that bled into the horizon. He walked along the beach, breathing in the salty air, his loafers stuffed under his arm, his bare feet sinking into the still warm sand, and the eucalyptus trees on the bluffs up above emitting that sharp, clean scent. When he’d walked far enough, he sank, fully clothed, into the sand, his mind flattening into a blank canvas, a blankness waiting to be filled.

  * * *

  • • •

  Glancing out at the lush suburban greenery of New Rochelle now, he saw they were almost at the country club, and it was too late to take off the pinching suit jacket, as his mother would only make him put it on again. He hadn’t been listening to Dubrow and his mother chitchat, but Dubrow was now saying something about how Europe wasn’t our fight to fight, parroting a speech that Joseph Kennedy had given over the radio. Maybe, Sasha thought, Dubrow didn’t understand, given that he was born deaf in one ear and couldn’t fight in the Great War.

  Leah turned around in her seat again and announced that she sided with those Philadelphia mothers who had stormed the White House in protest against the war. “They don’t want their boys sent off to fight. And quite frankly, neither do I.”

  “Joel Binaggi and Harvey Feldman already enlisted,” Sasha countered, naming his childhood friends from Rivington Street.

  Making a wide turn onto the tree-lined lane leading up to the club, Dubrow remarked that those kids didn’t have the opportunities Sasha had. They were only using the war to fill a void.

  “Feldman’s in law school, and Binaggi is taking over his dad’s grocery business,” Sasha shot back.

  The air inside the car stiffened as Dubrow pulled up to the club: a white colonial mansion with a wraparound porch, a circular gravel driveway leading both in and out, the smooth rolling golf course behind it. White-gloved valets stood at the entrance.

  Dubrow sighed heavily and turned off the ignition. “Come on, let’s have a nice time.”

  The valets approached to open the car doors. Leah rearranged her gold-and-burgundy brocade skirt and gave Sasha a tense look, her face a shade paler, and he felt a stab of guilt, realizing that she feared he would enlist, and for once, her worry was justified. He almost couldn’t bring himself to get out and walk over the pretentious gravel driveway in his hard leather oxfords into that ridiculous and imposing place where he could be sure they’d be playing Glenn Miller with a vengeance, as if such forced gaiety could help people forget the dark storm gathering over Europe. But he did it for his mother, who shot him another anxious look when the valet opened her car door.

  Together, they walked up to the club. She clung to his arm, and he felt her pressuring insistence that he at least pretend to enjoy himself, but then she added, as if it were an afterthought, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Margaret Altman is here tonight. I told her you were home from California, and she was hoping to—”

  Sasha stopped short. “Ma. Come, on. Seriously?”

  She looked at him with injured eyes. Dubrow paused, his arm extended toward the open double doors, waiting to escort Leah inside.

  Couples in evening attire passed, furtively glancing at Sasha, and a wave of embarrassment washed over him, knowing that he was making a scene, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “Sasha, please, it’s only dinner?”

  “I can’t, Ma. I just can’t.”

  He turned away, unable to take her disappointment any longer, and overheard Dubrow whisper hoarsely, “If he wants to go, let him go! The tighter you hold him, the farther he’ll run.” Leah muttered something back, and Dubrow added, “My sheifale, don’t make a storm in a teacup.”

  Sasha walked toward the sunset, streaked with pink and gold, and the spidery elms, silhouetted against the inflamed colors, and thought of California: the mountains and the sea, the dry desert winds, the lucky sunshine, and the sky, endless and blue.

  Chapter 3

  LUCIE

  August 1940, Oradour-sur-Glane, France

  She played outside with the other children, who had hair the color of clarified butter and lips stained from eating wild blackberries. Stripping the bushes of the ripe fruit, they called her “Agnes’s girl,” because they knew Agnes had worked for a wealthy family with only one child, a girl, and Lucie was that girl, and they had been instructed to now call her “Agnes’s girl” instead of “Lucie from Paris.” At first, she felt ugly compared to them, with her dark hair and white skin, but after a while it mattered less.

  Pointed cypresses lining gravel paths that led to nowhere, the brush of lavender and sage against her fingertips, the soft purr of the cat on her lap. She felt his breathing through the calico fur. And now there was a new puppy, the runt of the litter, and they’d allowed her to keep him, a small act of generosity—Agnes’s sisters were going to drown him otherwise. Lucie named him Giles. She loved to stroke his velvety ears and smell his puppyish breath, full of newly chewed grass and dirt, and feel his little pointy teeth gnawing at her knuckles. Sometimes he left regurgitated honeysuckles on the doorstep, but Lucie cleaned it up before anyone noticed.

  She fed bruised apples and old carrots to the horses and stroked the bridges of their downy pink noses. They flicked their tails in appreciation, their large liquid eyes asking for more.

  Inside, the oak floors creaked under her feet. The walls were made of stone, some light and rough, some dark and smooth, a varied landscape running beneath her palm. Chinks of light bullied their way through the recessed windows. In the drafty front room stood a piano, older than the one her parents had in Paris but still functioning. It had been in this farmhouse for over one hundred years, Agnes whispered, adding that Lucie was never to touch it.

  But sometimes, when the sisters weren’t around, Lucie played a few chords that her father had taught her. The mournful notes pierced her with homesickness, and she would gently place the heavy wooden lid back over the keys, swallowing down a hard knot. The only other time she neared the piano was when Monsieur Durand came to tune it. He gave her a conspiratorial wink and motioned for her to come over, showing her his tools, various levers and wrenches that he kept in a special black case. After he finished, he lingered in the kitchen, where Agnes served him coffee at the table and they spoke for a while, their animated talk echoing through the house, and Lucie wondered what was so interesting. Before he left, he palmed her some pastilles that she hid deep inside her pinafore pockets, waiting until she was in bed to savor them.

  At night: a blanket of stars. Orange candies dissolving under her tongue.

  The sisters’ faces were rough and red from windburn, their hands blistered and full of miniscule cuts. Lucie thought perhaps the sisters were rough with her because their lives were rough, their work often requiring their backs to bend and curve for many hours. Plucking chickens, darning socks, scrubbing floors, pulling root vegetables from the soil. Lucie thought that because they had to bend so much, they couldn’t bend any more with her, or with anyone. Whenever she came near, their faces looked like the stones that surrounded them, hard and impenetrable, but then she would creep up on them in gentler moments: feeding a baby, smoothly brushing out their daughters’ hair, the flaxen strands gleaming in the firelight as they murmured little stories about lost treasures and cats that could talk. While she listened, a desolate sadness permeated her, knowing that she must carry something within herself that they found repellent.

  * * *

  • • •

  A long time had passed since her parents went on vacation, the longest time ever, but it had only been one month, Agnes explained.

  “Mama said they were only going away for two weeks,” Lucie retorted, monitoring the small muscles twitching al
ong Agnes’s neck when she replied, “You misunderstood. Not two weeks. Two months.”

  Lucie also wondered why they had left Sanary. They were supposed to stay there until her parents returned. But a few days after her parents left, Agnes suddenly decided that they should leave too when a French officer visited and spoke the entire time in a reassuring tone, suggesting that they should vacate, given that other officers would visit them tomorrow morning, quite early. The cook and the gardener looked pale and frightened, but Lucie did not understand why because the officer had kind eyes and a large mouth, and spoke with his hands, and ate all of the biscuits that Sabine had set out on the porcelain plate.

  Before he left, he knelt down and stroked her cheek. “You look just like my little girl.”

  Immediately after this, Agnes made preparations for them to catch the afternoon train to Limoges. From there, they would stay with her sisters on a farm in Oradour-sur-Glane. “Just for a bit,” Agnes kept repeating as she tore through drawers and shelves, stuffing clothes and shoes into suitcases. She did not pack in the orderly fashion she always did before big trips, folding the clothes first on the bed and then eliminating what they didn’t need. She was sweating, wisps of hair sticking to her temples, and her hands shook when she snapped the suitcases closed. Lucie watched, frozen in the doorway, touching the golden heart pendant that hung from her neck. She knew not to speak, as one more question might cause Agnes to start sobbing or screaming—she couldn’t tell which—but she kept wondering why they were leaving, and how her mother and father would find her. They were supposed to remain here, she kept wanting to remind Agnes, but Agnes’s flustered, quick movements and exaggerated sighs, the way she seemed to see and not see Lucie, gave her pause. It was the same expression Agnes wore when Lucie asked her a question while she was reading the newspaper and she mumbled an answer, her eyes glazed-over with distraction.

  It was the same, but with more fear in it.

  Chapter 4

  VERA

  August 1940, Gurs Internment Camp, Southwestern France

  Her hands trembled as she tore open the thick cream envelope. Agnes’s familiar handwriting slanted across the page, and Vera devoured the words that would have to sustain her until the next letter arrived. Vera and Elsa had been here for a month, and this was the second letter from Agnes. Vera knew she was lucky to get it. People complained that letters weren’t coming through, or if a letter arrived, it often took months, especially if a letter was traveling from the occupied zone to the free zone. At least Oradour was in the free zone, but tucked just below the Maginot Line. Gurs camp, also in the free zone, was much farther south, the blue Pyrenees rising up in the distance.

  Agnes wrote: The weather is clement. L. loves sleeping with the older girls in the big bed. She got a new puppy today, we tied a blue ribbon around its neck. Camille was left outside in the downpour overnight, now we are drying her by the fire—she is safe and warm. Sincerely, A.

  The stone farmhouse, the new puppy with its soft dark pelt, the sky blue ribbon Lucie had tied around its neck swam before Vera’s eyes. She walked around in a daze, not registering the camp’s ugly bareness, the letter a salve, a palimpsest obscuring the surroundings: barbed-wire fence up against purple mountains, rows of unheated barracks with corrugated roofs, piles of stones they had assembled yesterday, only to be commanded to disassemble them today for no other purpose than to instill a sense of deprivation and meaninglessness within them.

  Vera wondered if Max and Leon were suffering the same conditions, as the men had been detained in a nearby camp. Crude pipes ran alongside the barracks that they used to wash themselves. The toilet a slab of concrete with a hole in it, separated by low partitions. The unbearable stench as she squatted over the concrete hole, staring up at the changeable sky, thankful at least that Lucie had fresh air and plenty of milk, unlike the children here, who roamed the camp in packs, lawless, scavenging for food or for some cheap trinket: a filched marble, a toy soldier, a broken yoyo. These child gangs hoarded black bread, ersatz coffee, scraps of meat, lost coins, their lice-ridden heads peering into the huge pot where the daily watery soup simmered. Over the last two weeks, the children had transformed into cunning thieves, adapting to the camp, as opposed to their bourgeois mothers, who shuffled around, frightened and indignant, demanding to know when they would be released, demanding to send letters and make phone calls, requests the guards casually dismissed while chewing tobacco, waiting for the right moment to hurl the wad, glistening with saliva and spit, at anyone who asked for too much.

  The women grew depressed and lethargic in the face of these daily injustices, while their children grew more daring, their elbows sharpening, their once plump faces angular.

  Vera listened to the mothers lamenting their children’s former selves. Jean Paul, who had always sat obediently at his school desk, his beautiful cursive streaming across the page, and now look at him. A bare-chested savage leading a pack of savages, face smeared with dirt, blond hair matted, depositing at the end of each day a bruised apple or a few split-open figs onto his mother’s pillow, the same way their family cat used to drag in dead birds and expect a reward for it.

  “Well,” another mother interjected, “you must have seen my Claudette scratching her legs like a flea-ridden dog, scratching until she bled, and then running after the boys in her stained pinafore, all those years of piano and ballet lessons discarded in an instant.”

  Some of the women envied Vera for having managed to stow Lucie away somewhere safe and clean. When they noticed Vera staring at their children, they would say in their light chattering way, “Oh, but it’s really better. This place is a disgrace. Just look at this soup, nothing but diluted broth,” holding the half-filled spoon under Vera’s nose. For a few moments, Vera felt consoled, even flattered, that perhaps they thought she was a better mother, a more cautious mother, for having sent her daughter to the country, but doubt always returned.

  What had she done?

  It was a huge mistake. She should have kept Lucie with her no matter what.

  * * *

  • • •

  Once, in the early dawn, while the women dressed and she lay still on her pallet, feigning sleep, she overhead them.

  “Poor Vera. Can you imagine?” one of them whispered.

  “Absolutely not,” another mother hissed. “I would never leave my child, not under any circumstances. I must see him, touch him. How else can you know if your child is truly well?”

  The question hung in the air long after the women finished dressing and left. It hung there every night as Vera tossed and turned. After many wakeful hours, she often fell into a deep sleep just before dawn broke. This morning, Elsa was shaking her, repeating that they were here in the camp, it was time to wake up and wash, but Vera kept staring into Elsa’s browned face, both seeing Elsa and not seeing her, both knowing that they now lived in this cement room full of strange women and also that she held Lucie close in the garden at Sanary, sun filtering through the treetops, Lucie prattling on, her voice soft and lilting, reciting a story Vera had now forgotten.

  A dull gray light shone through the one dirty window. Vera stumbled around the little makeshift bed, searching for her shoes, not wholly believing she was here. If Lucie had felt so real in her arms, only to melt into a mirage, then perhaps these old clothes she wore day after day, the dirt between her toes, the metallic taste in her mouth, this camp with its surly French soldiers, wasn’t real either. Perhaps this was a dream, and she would soon find herself next to Max in their four-poster bed, while he munched on a croissant, reading the paper, spectacles having slid down the bridge of his nose, buttery flakes of breakfast decorating his furry chest. She imagined telling him about this dream. No, a nightmare, she would correct herself, describing how they’d been separated and interned at different camps. Agnes had taken Lucie to Oradour-sur-Glane because it was no longer safe in Sanary. She would include that Elsa was as
industrious and clever as ever, even in dreams.

  She thought about this with a half smile, watching Elsa magically produce a bottle of cold milk for a pregnant woman who slept a few beds away. Then Elsa helped with the woman’s bedding, expertly tucking the sheet under the loose hay. Following this, in one continuous motion, Elsa slipped a stolen apple into a nearby woman’s apron. Later, Vera saw the woman cutting the apple into quarters for her children, and Vera considered how Elsa did so much and she so little. Within their first days here, Elsa had instructed the women to arrange their beds in rows, and told them where to store their shoes, and explained how to keep the ever-present dust at bay by shaking out their belongings every day, to stave off disease, lassitude, filth. She seemed to know when a woman’s labor was coming and arranged for her admission into the infirmary. After a child was born, she could tell, even before the mother could, if the child had fever or jaundice, just by the touch of her palm.

  Waiting for the toilet, the line coiling and infinite under the punishing sun, Vera and Elsa glanced around, increasingly aware of the German soldiers, elegant in their gray-green field uniforms, who, over the last week, had multiplied and replaced the French ones.

  Fresh rumors circulated that, due to the recent armistice, all prisoners could be surrendered on demand to German officials. Over the last few days, the German prisoners had been released, except for the German Jews, leaving behind Elsa and Vera and other foreign nationals, such as a young Dutch mother, an Algerian grandmother, a slew of Englishwomen, the supercilious Russians (whom Vera avoided), and the Spanish Loyalists who had escaped the civil war in Spain and were now interned here, as well as many Frenchwomen who for one reason or another were under suspicion. Perhaps they had communist husbands, or had married foreigners.