They were all crying and laughing at the same time, while Lucie sucked her thumb. She watched the reunited family from behind the massive black habit of Sister Ismerie, who was also overcome with emotion, describing the events leading up to this point in a flustered, excited tone. Suddenly, Camille had transformed into someone else: a daughter in her father’s arms, her head pressed against his chest, her face relaxed, her mother stroking her hair, which gave off a lustrous sheen in the early summer morning. To Lucie, her old friend appeared beautiful and foreign, locked in their embraces. Everyone spoke at once, except Lucie, who became a shadow, a faint smudge on the wall, invisible even to herself.
Sister Ismerie ushered Camille’s parents into the vestibule and closed the front door, shutting out the exuberant shouting and music coming from the town square.
“Now,” Camille’s father began, trying to assume a serious tone, although he couldn’t stop smiling, “France has not been entirely won yet. We’re still pushing the Germans across the Rhine, and pushing them into Berlin might take some time yet. Many more months, possibly.”
He paused, running a hand through his thick hair.
Camille stared at her parents. She didn’t even notice Lucie anymore, standing there pitifully behind Sister Helene.
Her mother continued, “What we’re trying to say, Camille, is that we can’t take you home yet. There are militiamen and collaborators all over. It’s still unsafe.”
She turned to Sister Ismerie. “It would be best if she stayed here and began the school year with the rest of the girls in the fall.”
* * *
• • •
In Sister Ismerie’s office, they discussed the recent liberation of Paris, and how hopefully now the rest would go quickly, God willing. Lucie lingered near the open door, waiting to see if they would mention when her parents were coming. Or maybe Camille’s parents had news of Agnes, who hadn’t written in such a long time. Agnes might retrieve her first and deliver Lucie to her parents, who were probably waiting nearby. Or maybe her parents had moved back into the Paris apartment, putting everything in place for her arrival. Yes, Lucie thought, that seemed sensible. Lost in the swirl of her thoughts, she faintly heard Camille’s mother say, “And I hear you have been a great friend to our Camille.”
Camille beamed at her. “Lucie is my best friend.”
Lucie smiled dumbly back at them.
“And where are you from, dear?” her mother asked.
“Oh,” Sister Helene interrupted, “she came to us about two years ago, delivered by her governess.”
Camille’s parents nodded.
Sister Ismerie lowered her voice: “From Oradour-sur-Glane.”
“Oh,” the mother gasped, her gloved hand flying to her mouth.
The father lowered his head.
Lucie swallowed, wondering if they could hear her heart thrashing in her chest.
Camille sat on her mother’s lap, her eyes half closed, her bare feet skimming the green carpet.
“Would you know anything about the deportees, about those who were interned?” Sister Helene asked in a hushed and hopeful tone, as if asking for more sugar when there was none.
Camille’s father sighed and shifted positions in the creaky wooden chair. Then he said, from what he’d heard, the deportees, including many political prisoners caught fighting in the Resistance, were located in camps across Germany and Poland, and they would not be back for some time.
He shook his head and ended his little speech with a dry cough.
Sister Helene sat there staring, her hand on her heart. Camille’s mother continued to nod, as if the conversation still continued.
Instinctually, Lucie wiped her saliva-coated thumb on her nightgown, unable to tear herself away from the horribly silent scene, and at the same time, she wanted nothing more than to run to her secret place, the dry, cool hay-filled cabinet where she had hid many times before today.
* * *
• • •
Lucie knew the convent. Even if the meals consisted of lentils with little rocks in them, tightly rationed milk and casein cookies, that terrible pumpkin compote and desserts made with colored gelatin, she suddenly wanted to stay here with Camille, eliding the question of the future. A natural affinity coursed between them: Lucie following Camille, like a distorted shadow, and Camille the bright blazing light that everyone praised.
Of course, it hadn’t always been easy here. When the nuns saw Lucie, they sometimes crossed themselves as if she were the devil because of her knotted hair, a halo of tangles, along with her perpetually ink-smudged collar, and those questions she posed during religious lectures, such as: If God is so powerful, why did he let Jesus die? And: Where is God now, during the war?
But Lucie had Camille. On the weekends and during holidays, the other boarders returned to their homes, leaving Lucie and Camille alone together. The nuns allowed the girls to skip Mass, and supplied them with old Catholic propaganda magazines, which they consumed on their cots, lying on their stomachs, their stocking feet lolling back and forth.
The convent buzzed with news of the Allied landings in France and the German defeats on the Eastern Front. Sister Ismerie and Sister Helene shut themselves into Sister Ismerie’s office every evening, removed their coifs, and listened to the old crackling radio broadcast the Free French; unbeknownst to them, Lucie and Camille crouched on the other side of the door, trying to hold back their laughter at having escaped their beds unnoticed. During the day they flew down the long corridors and stairwells, cheeks feverishly red, too excited to eat or sleep. They couldn’t sit still to peel vegetables or embroider, and between the heat and their mosquito bites and scabies, they were constantly itching and moving, willing the moist stone walls to crumble.
But the conversation she’d witnessed in the office, between Sister Ismerie and Camille’s parents, kept running through Lucie’s head, and she feared what had happened to Agnes, and why Camille’s parents were so upset by the mention of Oradour-sur-Glane.
But what haunted Lucie the most was their silence.
After Camille’s parents left, Sister Helene’s concern for Lucie intensified. She tried to brush out Lucie’s hair when it was wet, she promised it would hurt less, but Lucie still jerked away. At bedtime, she lingered next to Lucie’s cot, sometimes laying a cool hand over her forehead, sometimes smoothing her hair back from her temples in a rhythmic calming motion. She urged her to eat more, to stroll the beautiful parks, to see the goldfish in the ponds. “You should go outside, take some air,” Sister Helene kept saying. “It’s not a danger anymore.”
Lucie felt too tired even though she slept for hours at a time. A hollow, dull pang replaced her former defiance, and she stared listlessly at the sun-bleached curtains in the dormitory, never bothering to push them aside.
Finally, Camille and Sister Helene persuaded her to take a walk one evening. “Down to the Garonne River, just for an hour,” they chimed. It was still warm in those first days of September. Lucie didn’t have the energy to protest, and the wispy pink clouds appeared magical against the purpling sky.
On the street, the crowds and the noise distracted her. To focus, she stared down at her worn sandals and noticed how ugly they looked, thinking about how many times the sandals had been repaired only to break again. Camille picked up the pace, pulling her past the bombed-out rail station. Sister Helene walked a few feet behind them, calling out, “Girls, look at the reblooming roses! And those hats in the window: Which one is the prettiest?”
Lucie nodded, overwhelmed by all the different faces on the street, the clack of wooden heels striking the cobblestones, the women with their rouged cheeks and strong perfumes.
On Quai de Paludate, she noticed a mother with a small child. They walked down the street swinging hands and singing a nursery rhyme, and the sad familiar song about a little lark cut through her: “Alouette, gentille alouett
e, alouette, je te plumerai.” It was a song her own mother used to sing when she bent down to tie Lucie’s shoelaces. Her mother didn’t sing often, except when performing certain tasks, such as tying laces or blotting out a stain from a blouse, because she found such things tiresome and irritating, so it was better to sing, she always said. The faint image of glancing down at her mother’s upswept hair, her white neck bent over Lucie’s shoes while those verses floated above them, gave her a shock. “Je te plumerai le bec, je te plumerai le bec,” the woman continued, pulling the child along.
Lucie watched them go, entranced by the fluttering black ribbon attached to the woman’s straw hat. Then heat flooded through her, and she was taken aback by the sharp invasion of such a specific memory when she couldn’t even recall her mother’s face.
She started running, bumping into people as she went. Distantly, she heard Sister Helene calling after her, but all that mattered was the faithful rush of her own ragged breath.
The cobblestone streets and little storefronts, the streetlamps and soft sky, blurred at the edges of her vision. She focused only on the forest up ahead, yearning for the cool pines redolent with sap and resin, and the relief it would bring to throw herself onto the shaded ground and scream into the dirt.
Chapter 21
SASHA
September 1944, New Rochelle, New York
Gray morning light filtered through the wooden shutters. The early-morning fog, thick and soupy, cradled him. His eyes involuntarily closed again, hurtling him back to Omaha Beach, the sky lit up with machine gunfire. His chest hit wet sand, and then a dismembered ear washed up on the shore next to him, carried inland by the rough and bloody surf.
Sasha moaned, instinctually palming his shoulder, where he’d gotten shot six weeks ago by a German sniper hiding in one of those hedgerows when they started their advance into the Longny forest. He was lucky; the bullet didn’t hit any bone, organs, or major blood vessels, but it left pieces of itself in there, pieces he could still feel. His CO sent him home early on medical discharge, arguing that he couldn’t do much fighting with his arm in a sling, suffering from a nasty infection that set into the wound ten days later. Languishing on clean white sheets in the field hospital, he pictured his infantry division pushing the Germans back across France, all the way to Aachen in a relentless offensive, while he lay there, useless, listening to battle updates on the radio, or overhearing the nurses talk in promising tones while they changed his dressings. It was during this time, his mind restless, itching to jot down tidbits of scenes, lines of dialogue that might turn into something more, when he started to think about his next script.
He wanted to make a film about the war, but not the war itself; he had no idea how to capture the vastness and scale of what he’d seen, and everyone knew war was hell. They didn’t need a movie to remind them. More interesting was the war’s psychological effect on those who returned, on their morality and their sense of justice after witnessing so much senseless bloodshed. How could they all live in the world again, after years of violence, willfully forgetting their humanity to survive? Turning this over in his mind, Sasha began to sweat, remembering the men in his unit who were hit by friendly fire a few days after Normandy, and how they had to swiftly bury them and move on. Or the time his friend Nick killed an Italian soldier who was running toward them, surrendering, yelling with his hands up, but Nick, in a panic, started shooting, and when they went over to the body, they saw the soldier was only a kid, fifteen at most. How, Sasha wondered, would these guys return to their office jobs, pushing paper across a desk, looking presentable in a gray flannel suit, after what they’d seen?
He asked the same thing of himself, but writing had always been his way out, and it would be the way out now, if only he could use both of his hands. He would call it The In-Between Man, he thought. In that moment, he jerked up in bed and asked if they had a pen and paper lying around that he could use. One of the younger nurses smiled at him indulgently, but then the head nurse, an older wisecracking lady, pulled the curtain aside and said, “To do what? Write the Great American Novel? Rest is what you need. Not paper.”
* * *
• • •
Unlike so many others, he survived the war, but it had nothing to do with any particular skill, or cunning, or talent. Death was a random selector, and the thought of this, along with a rotating host of disturbing images, plagued him relentlessly in those first weeks, when he was staying at Dubrow’s house, his mother nervously fluttering around him, everyone asking if he was all right, coupled with that constant refrain: Look forward, not back.
It must have worked. He only looked back in dreams, his mind careening with land mines and hedgerows, lost children and dead horses, and that shaved woman with the baby, the way he had left her in an empty doorway. Before they mobilized, he saw her again, sitting in the back of an open truck with a bunch of other women, all of them half naked and shaved, their eyes lowered as people shouted, throwing rotten fruit and garbage at them. The truck moved slowly, allowing everyone a good look, but the sight of her made Sasha shudder, thinking about what kind of life her child would endure, with such a heavy past; he would never be able to outrun it.
* * *
• • •
His mother had made up a bedroom for him, with a desk for his typewriter and clean new socks neatly balled in the top dresser drawer. But sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at his bare feet sinking into the rose carpet, he was more unsure than ever of his place in the world. He felt like a caged animal, undomesticated and restless, pacing from one end of the room to the other, glaring out at the placid greenery while everyone moved silently and carefully around him, as if he were a grenade that might come unpinned at any moment, as if he might start screaming at the slightest irritation. The comfort was plush, suffocating. Sure, he enjoyed lighting a cigar at night, and he no longer slept with his rifle, but he was uneasy, plagued by headaches, sleeping in short spurts and then up in the middle of the night, drinking scotch in the kitchen under the bright light of the bulb. And he wanted to start writing The In-Between Man, but his arm was still in a sling. He took it out and typed down a few lines, but instantly that fiery ache returned in his shoulder, spidering down his arm, forcing him to stop. “Sasha, what are you doing?” his mother barked from the hallway. Always she had this innate sense of when he was causing trouble. Wincing, he put his arm back into the sling just as she appeared in the doorway.
She eyed the typewriter. “You were typing.”
He shrugged, and even that small movement hurt.
“Why can’t you just rest?”
Sasha stared at the typewriter. “I want to work. It’s all I want to do.”
Leah marched into the room, and from the desk drawer, she took out a pencil and a sheaf of lined paper. “Tell me what you want to write. I’ll take dictation.”
“Okay,” Sasha said hesitantly. “But you won’t like it.”
Leah brushed away his comment and set the paper over a book on her lap, the pen poised in her hand.
“The thing is,” Sasha began, “the hero is as bad as the bad guys. You see, Jack, he fought in the Pacific and grew close to two other guys in his unit. Now they’re back in New York, trying to fit into society again, but there’s not much that separates the bad from the good after what happened to them in a Japanese POW camp, where they used to fantasize about robbing a bank, describing how they’d do it, down to the very last detail. After a big bank robbery happens in Midtown, Jack instantly knows his war buddies did it, and he has to decide whether or not to turn them in. In the end, he helps his buddies escape out of the country, because if given the chance, he would have done the same thing. That’s what I want to say. Because that’s the truth. It’s called The In-Between Man.”
Leah was still writing when Sasha finished talking. After a few minutes, she looked up at him. “Why would you want to make a picture like that?”
&
nbsp; “Why not?” Sasha asked, trying to mask his irritation.
“It’s like there’s no difference between right and wrong.”
“I’m not saying that . . . What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated than the way I used to think about things, with bad guys who were all bad, and good guys who were all good. That’s not reality. That’s not human nature, and it’s not how the world works . . .” He stopped himself when he saw his mother’s distraught expression, as if she might start crying, and he couldn’t bear it when she cried.
Rarely did she let him see her cry, but the times that she did, especially when he was little, he would stand there motionless, watching her, his arms hanging limply at his sides, racked by the sense that he had caused it, and that he was unable to make things better again. Her face, suddenly distorted by sadness, made her inaccessible, and he felt afraid, as if he bobbed in a vast ungovernable ocean, a tiny lone speck compared to her crashing emotion that threatened to swallow him whole.
Just then the phone rang and she sprung up to answer it, deftly leaving the room.
“Oh, hello, Charlie,” he heard her say from the hallway, relieved that the charged moment had dissipated. He got up from his desk to take the call.
When she handed him the phone, her eyes still flickered with injury, as if they had argued, over what he wasn’t sure, but then Charlie’s jovial voice filled the line. “Sasha! When are you coming home?”
“What do you mean? I’ve been home for two weeks, trying to recuperate, but my damn shoulder—”
“I mean when are you coming back to LA!”
Those Who Are Saved Page 17