The wind lifted up her hair from her neck, and he saw that she had left her hat and handbag on a bench nearby. Something about those abandoned belongings made him approach her, to see if she was all right, but in that moment, she swiftly turned away from the ocean and knocked into him, their shoulders colliding.
He apologized, and she said it was her fault, she wasn’t looking where she was going. Her French accent sounded like gold twinkling in the dark, and her smudged eyeliner lent her a forlorn intensity, her dark eyes boring into his. She shivered in the wind and then glanced away.
He gestured to her purse and hat. “Are those yours, over there?”
“Oh, I forgot . . .” She paused, hugging herself. Goosebumps rose up on her flesh. She wore a wedding ring, a delicate gold band that flashed against her olive skin. Looking back out at the ocean, she continued, “It’s hard to imagine that Pearl Harbor is that way, not so very far. And yet we’re standing here as if nothing has happened. But we’re surrounded now, on all sides.”
She looked at him earnestly, expecting him to agree with her sentiments, of which he felt uncertain. Did she want him to share in her frustration because the fisherman was still fishing, the couple still cajoling each other over some private joke, the sunset still beautiful, while the Germans marched on Moscow, and only hours ago Japan had attacked America?
“I don’t think nothing has happened.” He paused. “I joined up today.”
She gripped his hand, her palm alive against his, but then her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and she withdrew it.
An expectant pause hung between them, his pulse hammering through his veins. The wind rippled through her blouse, and with the light falling so softly and perfectly over her face, he could see why directors called this the magic hour.
He wanted to know why she was all alone on a day like this. But he was unable to think of what to say, his mind jumbled from the heady jasmine perfume that rose up from her skin and the delicate blue veins pulsing beneath her neck.
“The light’s fading.” She gestured to the last slice of sun sinking into the ocean. “I should go.” Glancing up at the sky, she seemed to fear that Japanese paratroopers might land on the pier any minute. She shook her head. “But I don’t want to go; time stops here. It’s peaceful.” He thought she must have a husband waiting for her somewhere. Maybe he was sitting in a restaurant booth, starting to worry. Or maybe dinner stood on the dining room table, growing cold.
“I know,” he said, meeting her gaze, and he saw her eyes flicker with something lost. “When I first moved out here, I couldn’t believe that when I drove down Wilshire Boulevard, I could see the ocean, even from miles away, between buildings, and over buildings. I love it out here too, on the pier. At the edge of the world.”
She smiled politely, and he felt her retreating.
He picked up her things, and when she took her hat and purse from him, their fingertips brushed, and he wondered if she also noticed that sharp current passing between them. Walking away, she crushed her purse and hat to her chest, thanking him again, before breaking into a half run. He watched her cream blouse and dark hair recede into the purple twilight.
* * *
• • •
That evening, after a simple dinner at the Green Cat, Sasha dialed his mother. He anticipated her shrieking at him for joining up, after all she had sacrificed, and here he was, volunteering for an early death.
Instead she said, “This war will be even more terrible than the last one. I feel it in my bones.” She fell silent, which was something he had witnessed many times. She could be cooking, or ironing a shirt, or sharply complaining about the upstairs neighbors, and then she would just stop and stare out the window. Sighing heavily into the phone, she added, “War stirs up so many old ghosts. I don’t want you to become a ghost too.”
“Come on, mamele. Don’t get so morbid.”
“I’m gonna send you a keepsake in the mail, something for good luck, something from the old country . . . God knows you’ll need it.”
“I still have a few weeks before training camp.”
“Where’s that?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“You’ll visit me beforehand, yes?”
He said of course, and then she grumbled, “What kind of son wouldn’t see his own mother before going off to war?”
“Hey, Ma, the call is getting expensive—I’ll see you soon. Promise.”
Gently placing down the receiver, Sasha lingered over his desk, feeling the weighty silence that always followed a phone call with his mother, her disappointment and worry palpable, even from such a distance. His notes scrawled on sheets of yellow lined paper for a crime picture he’d been tossing around appeared silly to him now, as if he hadn’t dashed it all down yesterday in a fervor of misguided confidence. Already, he felt these notes had been written by a naïve, younger self, even if this self had existed only twelve hours ago, before he pulled over to the side of the road and listened to the world change, before he stood in a line that snaked around the draft office, sharing cigarettes with all the other guys who carried the same pounding urgency to fight.
Chapter 13
VERA
November 1942, Santa Monica, California
The strangeness of those first months in Los Angeles stayed with Vera, even though two years had passed. It was as if she’d taken a new lover but still found parts of his body surprising and foreign, despite having acclimated to his overall newness. She was occasionally unsettled by the empty wide boulevards and withered palms, and the gnarled cacti that peppered the steep hills rising up along Roosevelt Highway.
She was often uncertain of the time of day, as well as the season, which engendered a dreamy rootlessness as months slipped through her fingers like sand. Many of their friends had surrendered to time’s fluidity here, but she resisted it, knowing that in Europe, which held Lucie in it, the war raged on.
And people asked so many questions here: Where do you live? How much do you pay in rent? Where do your children go to school? Before she could answer, they gave her advice: Join a church or a social group, don’t complain or criticize, abandon your mother tongue and never look back.
“Never look back” was a particular favorite because Eleanor Roosevelt had said it. Yesterday, when she was standing on the corner, weighed down by net bags filled with groceries, waiting for Max to pick her up, an older man with matted hair and a rucksack approached her. He said he was a traveler. She couldn’t take her eyes off his bottom teeth, which were all bashed in and broken, like a pile of rubble. He asked if she was a movie star and if he could have her autograph. When she said no, he started to guess where she was from. “Georgia? Alabama? Mississippi? Kentucky? I bet you’re from Kentucky. No, I take it back. Georgia. A Georgia peach.”
She kept shaking her head, feeling slightly threatened, but she thought it was better to smile. If she said anything more, he would pounce on her French accent, and she didn’t have the energy for the bevy of questions that would surely follow, about why they had left France, how long the war might last, and so on—none of which she thought suitable to discuss with a perfect stranger, whether it be this vagabond or the waiter at their favorite Chinese restaurant who often chatted them up as though they were old friends, asking about Max’s work at the studio, and if he had met any big stars. A European waiter would never do this, as there were certain unspoken rules everyone followed. Here, an amiable openness permeated every encounter, and she never knew exactly how to react or what to say.
But sometimes it was nice, how people smiled all the time, even if they didn’t mean it. Better than that perpetual Parisian scowl, Vera thought. And the women, the way they brightly chirped hello and kept smiling long after the conversation ended—their white gleaming teeth almost sent Vera into a trance, and she found herself smiling back, baffled by their persistent cheerfulness coupled with this American co
mpulsion to compliment. During the process of making “small talk,” the interaction proved incomplete without a compliment, and only later on did Vera realize she must dutifully return the compliment, after which the woman would inform her that her Bakelite bangle, intricately carved in the Oriental style, had been purchased on sale, at a great discount, and sometimes she might even name the exact price, which left Vera confounded, as if the woman was both chastising herself for wearing something new, while praising herself for striking a bargain. In Paris, if a woman liked your handbag, she might bestow it with a fleeting, appraising glance before ignoring it completely. Any mention of where it was purchased, or the cost, was unimaginably uncouth.
Nonetheless, everyone from the neighbors to the mailman was so friendly and welcoming, she felt touched by their natural playfulness that held so few barriers; she marveled at how easily they accepted her, a refugee, with her bad accent and her shyness. And even if such friendliness was superficial, as some of their European friends grumbled, what did it matter? When Pauline walked outside in her robe and bare feet to fetch the paper and saw Vera doing the same, she stood on tiptoe and waved energetically to Vera over the hedge, her unfixed hair catching the sun, and in that moment, Vera’s heart lifted, so grateful to say hello back, as though she belonged here too, among the wet grass and hummingbirds and the low drone of lawn mowers. Fanning herself with the morning edition, Pauline had called out yesterday, “Oh, Vera, I just love your robe. Is it from Paris?”
She nodded, slightly embarrassed by the attention. And then she forced herself to say, “Where did you find that charming turban? It suits you perfectly.”
* * *
• • •
And even though she still couldn’t get rid of her thick accent, her English was improving with the help of her tutor, Peter, Salka’s son. She couldn’t believe that the boy had been born in Dresden as there wasn’t a touch of Europe on him, collegiate and winning in his pressed khakis and confident smile. After an hour of halting but good-humored conversational English at the kitchen table, he often left her in a lighter mood.
But there was no accounting for the hollow absence of work. Last year, she’d finally abandoned the World War I novel, after multiple drafts, with Leon’s words ringing in her ears: Historical novels should reflect the present state of things. If not, then why write them? She attempted to write a few short stories, but the sentences felt as thin and colorless as water, the characters inconsequential, and she abruptly stopped midway through, disgusted with her efforts. It was grinding, putting pen to paper, frozen at her desk, gazing out the window at a hummingbird, sentences as fickle and flitting as the hummingbird she watched, which never settled on any one branch, choosing another and then another. Sitting here, grasping at straws, as an American would say, she missed that momentous stream of productivity, her fingers tapping down on the keys, that punchy definite sound steadying her.
Lately, she had been writing various observations in her notebook, wondering if the details would ever cleave into a narrative, or even spark the possibility of a poem, but they remained lines strung absently across the page, as mundane as the bedsheets Hilde hung up to dry in the sun. And when she reread what she had written the following day, she hated it:
Bulbous geraniums burst from their troughs, voracious for admiration.
When the unfiltered sun shines, it punishes me, exposing every flaw,
But once in the shade, I am chilled.
Among all this bracing beauty, there is no comfort.
* * *
• • •
To avoid confronting those fallow hours, when thoughts of Lucie would often send her into an anxious spiral, Vera did the shopping, even when the icebox was fully stocked, distractedly wandering through the grocery aisles filled with citrus fruits. She was learning to drive, and took coffee with Pauline in the afternoons, and played a weekly round of golf with Elsa and some other women from the neighborhood, but none of this provided the old sensation of time suspended, when she was lost in a silky cocoon of her own making, creating worlds within worlds, multiplying her singular life into many lives: the lives of old men, disgruntled servants, or boyish German soldiers who didn’t know why they were fighting. When interrupted, she used to look up from the page and stare vacantly into the middle distance; it took her a moment to tear herself away from those other realms and ask, “Yes, what is it?”
She knew that if she couldn’t write, she must do something else. Something to at least help the war effort. One afternoon, she waited in line at city hall to join the Women’s Auxiliary Forces, thinking perhaps there was a secretarial role where she could type and take dictation. She imagined getting lost in the monotonous work, submerged in the din of typewriters clacking away, ringing telephones, the shuffle of papers, and hoped this work would provide a kind of comfort. Nothing close to the ecstasy of inhabiting other minds and worlds, but a clear defined task to focus on besides her own personal plight. She could no longer tolerate her overwhelming uselessness, which induced a thick self-loathing that nearly choked her.
She stood in line for a long time, out of place among all the confident, outspoken American women, thinking about how Max teased that she’d be assigned to some canning factory out in Riverside or asked to operate a sewing machine, when they both knew she couldn’t sew, but she brushed aside his jabs, straightening her shoulders, getting ready for her turn at the front of the line. But when she uttered her name, the older woman sitting behind the folding table barked: “American citizen?”
Vera’s face fell.
The woman said hurriedly, “I’m sorry, honey. Maybe you can sell war bonds.”
In the end, Max helped her get a job volunteering for the European Film Fund, an organization to help European immigrants relocate and settle in the United States. The fund was run by director Ernst Lubitsch and Paul Kohner out of the Paul Kohner Talent Agency on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Vera worked there three days a week, settling behind a typewriter to compose letters on behalf of European refugees who had moved to Los Angeles and were in need of money, jobs, or affidavits. She wrote to filmmakers who agreed in advance to donate one percent of their fees to the fund, and she called the Hollywood Canteen and other venues after their benefit performances to collect the promised donations. She often had to telephone the heads of major studios, her voice shaky over the line, fearing her accent would cause them to hang up, but the secretaries were solicitous, and after speaking to their bosses, they said to expect a check in the mail. Sometimes, they put Vera through to one of these powerful men, brusque and harassed over the phone, but willing to write a check. Many of them were Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe, and writing checks alleviated their guilt.
Driving slowly home from work, she felt her cheeks burn with shame, realizing how lucky she and Max were compared to these struggling refugees, many of whom would receive barely enough money to survive, compared to Max’s generous salary and five-year contract, which allowed them to live comfortably in a house overlooking the sea.
And then, of course, there were those still in Europe, begging to get out, but everyone knew nothing could be done for them. At least, she reminded herself, staving off panic, Lucie was safe with Agnes.
* * *
• • •
Many of their friends and family were trapped in France, writing letters bloated with hope, gliding over the fact that they couldn’t leave, their tone sounding as though they had chosen to stay, to avoid disrupting a child’s schooling, or because an ailing parent could not be easily moved. Max’s brother, Paul, had been fired from his position at Banque Lazard, and yet his letters remained flippant and casual, just the way he always was.
Elsa had heard barely any news of her mother in Berlin, but last week she received a short note from a friend by way of England that her mother had been rounded up in a truck with many other Jews and deported to the east. “She won’t be able to endure th
e harsh conditions of the work camp,” Elsa worried. “She’s already in poor health, with her asthma, her lungs are weak, I can’t imagine her lifting stones, or whatever it is they have them do there.” Katja, one of Vera’s only friends who had remained in Paris during the occupation, wrote that there were mass deportations from Drancy, but she hadn’t heard of any other deportations in the rest of France, and for this coded message, Vera was relieved.
Other people from the past that she used to know visited her at odd moments, as though they were figures in a dream, such as the flower seller on the corner who used to put aside peonies wrapped in brown paper for Vera, knowing it was her favorite flower, or Lucie’s primary school teacher, incredibly strict about handwriting, who once made Lucie cry because she kept reversing her b’s into d’s. What had happened to all those people? And did they wonder what had happened to her?
* * *
• • •
Yesterday an army truck had hauled away the neighbors’ donation of bronze animal figurines that had decorated their front lawn, and Vera watched while the men picked up the mother doe and baby fawn, along with a reclining cherub, his head tilted coquettishly to the side. She noticed the sandbags piled up outside of Santa Monica city hall in case of an air raid, along with the multiplying number of military trucks cruising the main boulevards, and the placards that had sprung up overnight directing citizens to bomb shelters.
She bought war bonds and planted a victory garden, although her tomatoes refused to ripen, remaining stubbornly green even after Pauline showed her how to prepare the soil, explaining about fertilizer and planting schedules.
Those Who Are Saved Page 11