Those Who Are Saved

by Alexis Landau

  He frowned, looking down. “Little things. The smell of his boots. A song he whistled. Being lifted up into the air . . .”

  She sat down next to him on the edge of the bed. “Does your mother ever talk about him?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, and she worried that perhaps she had asked too many questions too soon. The clarinet now played the main theme, the room stirring with tranquil melancholy.

  “I wanted to ask her about him . . . many times.” He paused. “But she worked so hard to protect me, to make me feel like any other kid whose father died in the war, because that’s what happened to most of the fathers in our village. But mine was different, and so I was different. It started to get obvious, the way people belittled her, the way they shunned me. We would walk into a store, greeted by whispers, disparaging glances. Even her own family held us apart. That’s why we left Russia. For a new life, you know?”

  “Yes, I know,” she said quietly, thinking of Max, how he grasped after this new life, refusing to look back, as if the past were a trap. She drew a breath, choosing her next words carefully. “But it seems as though your mother loved your father. That it was real love, and not something she regretted.”

  He picked up the lighter from the nightstand, observing the flame’s flickering appearance and disappearance subject to the pressure of his thumb. “Why?”

  “She took a very long time to remarry. Perhaps she was waiting for him. Even if he eventually died, or they lost track of each other after the war, maybe she couldn’t let him go, afraid that if she remarried, and started over, he would fade away.” The violins swept into the melody, liberating the clarinets, lightening the emotion, making it more fluid. Tears sprung into her eyes. She had listened to this piece countless times over the years, the music conveying all that she had lost, and the hope she still harbored. “And it was probably painful for her, to come to America. By doing so, she severed the possibility of ever seeing him again. It’s quite final, to come here.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Hey,” Sasha said lightly. “Shouldn’t I be the one crying here?”

  She laughed half-heartedly and cupped his cheek, wondering if he looked like his father, and if his mother saw traces of him in Sasha’s face, and if this was a comfort to her, or a torment, or something in between.

  Dabbing her eyes, she motioned to the map on the wall. “I see you’re also tracking the war. I have the same one spread out on my desk. That way, I can better understand . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What’s happening in France.”

  She nodded. “Are we close?”

  “Getting closer,” he said, walking over to his desk. “Another month, maybe two, at most.”

  She bit her lip, trying to suppress that searing anticipation that flashed through her with every Allied victory, shortening the time between now and when she could return and search in earnest. As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Maybe she’s alive. Somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Vera whispered, peering at him.

  Perhaps she wasn’t crazy. Perhaps this wasn’t a fiction she’d created in her mind, “to cope,” as Max said. Her heart lurched into her throat, and she started shaking. He held her to his chest, and the pressure of his body made her choke up. She started to say that she was terrified to go back, because hope was a trap, and as long as she resisted it, she could protect herself, but only a guttural yelp tumbled out.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few moments passed, and then she looked at the photograph of his mother again, her enigmatic smile, dark hair framing her white oval face. “Your mother looks happy there, but also slightly sad, as if she knows it can’t last forever, that intense pure feeling.”

  Sasha moved behind her, and she let the sheet fall away from her body. He wrapped his arms around her, his mouth resting in the crook of her neck. Together they looked out at the silhouette of rooftops and palm trees, with slices of dark ocean in between.

  “You saying this can’t last forever?” he teased, but she also heard the seriousness in his voice.

  She smiled sadly, reminded of how naïve he was for believing anything could last forever.

  Chapter 32

  SASHA

  April–May 1945, Los Angeles, California

  A gathering dread hung over the short time they had left, until ships would start transporting civilians back to Europe, while at the same time, a beginning stirred between them, however fragile and short-lived. The days leaned into summer, the evening sky full of lingering twilight, and the air grew soft, burgeoning with newness, with possibility. On Saturdays, they sometimes rode bikes along the beach, and as he watched her pedal ahead, her silk blouse billowing in the wind, another image overlapped this one: the day he’d seen her on Ocean Park Pier, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind, the same cream-colored blouse.

  They often met in the early evening after work. He’d finish writing for the day and drive over to Beverly Hills to pick her up from the EFF, where she volunteered, trying to relocate displaced persons recently released from the camps, desperate to leave Europe behind. She would tell him about the cases, her voice hushed with hope, these survivors indicators of life after the war, a life that might hold Lucie in it.

  He would then talk about some of his new ideas, running them by her, and she listened, asking questions he hadn’t considered before, about a character, or about why he wanted to tell that particular story. When his answer proved unsatisfactory, she would purse her lips, shrugging imperceptibly, and he knew he had to explain it better, make it more compelling, until her eyes lit up with recognition that yes, this was a story worth telling.

  He joked that she was harder on his ideas than his mother, a real feat, but then he quieted, remembering how his mother’s voice had sounded abstracted the last time they spoke, as if she were wrapped in a cloud, her usual chutzpah muted.

  When Vera asked about The In-Between Man, he felt a sharp twinge of failure, admitting that it was his favorite idea but it had never panned out. In a few weeks, Clementine would be released in theaters, and before that, a premiere. She wondered why he wasn’t more excited, and he told her that in his business, things moved fast, he had to start the next project, there wasn’t time to linger on past ones, masking the real reason: he could only think of her.

  And yet he knew it was a dream, being with her. Of course, like everyone else, he wanted this terrible war to end, but he feared losing her, and feared what she would find in France. Gently, he warned her about the thousands of displaced persons scrambling across Europe, trying to reach North America or Palestine, but she knew the situation from the very letters she wrote, and reminded him of this. Still, he worried she might get swept up with all the refugees, stranded in some DP camp or detention facility, unable to return to America, but he didn’t try to dissuade her from going, or forbid it, as Max had done.

  And so he began making a mental list of who had useful information about Oradour-sur-Glane, about hidden Jewish children in France and how to find them now. Starting with Gussie, he typed out a short telegram, knowing he had returned to Paris:

  Need help locating a French Jewish girl. Mother in Los Angeles, daughter was hiding in Oradour-sur-Glane, last seen there. Any ideas? Much thanks. Yours, Sasha.

  If he got a lead on what had happened to Lucie, he would start digging, like the way he used to as a cub crime reporter. In the meantime, he tried his best to contain Vera’s fears, but it felt like catching a shadow, her thoughts catapulting into worse ones. He often found her up in the middle of the night, smoking, staring out at the dark shifting ocean, deep in thought, and he would sit next to her on the window seat and hold her hand. She seemed grateful that he didn’t talk, or try to cajole her into believing the best, as so many others did, given the surging optimism of those days. Instead, he let the stillness encircle them, the silent night a comfor
t, and it reminded him of childhood, the way his mother sometimes sat, as quiet as a statue, staring out a window, the past vibrating through her every particle.

  Chapter 33

  VERA

  April–May 1945, Los Angeles, California

  They tracked the news reports, listening to the radio in his living room as they followed the Allied advancement, unstoppable at this point, Sasha said, reminding her that it was different now, the war really was ending, unlike after D-Day nearly a year ago. What they didn’t talk about was the uncovering of the concentration camps, the thousands of bodies, the crematoriums, the evidence of torture, or how those found alive hovered on the brink of death from disease and starvation. Vera knew Sasha avoided it for her sake, focusing only on the victories and the captured cities, repeating that the Germans had lost all resolve, it was only a matter of days.

  * * *

  • • •

  Last month, Max had found out that his parents died at Auschwitz, but his brother, Paul, had miraculously survived Treblinka, escaping with a group of others on the day of the camp uprising, in August of ’43. He ran thirty kilometers before finding shelter in a hay loft belonging to Polish farmers who agreed to hide him. Hearing the story, Vera pictured Paul’s long lean legs sprinting through the forest, his insouciant manner charming the farmers, buying him time. Paul now longed to immigrate to America—the only place, he wrote, for any of us.

  Max now clung even more fiercely to life here, recoiling from Europe because it had taken everything from them, and he believed the taking would only continue, agreeing with Paul’s sentiment. Apparently, according to letters from friends who had survived, Jews were still at risk, especially those who were returning to their homes in Poland, where pogroms had broken out. In Paris, Jews were met with indifference at best, or received as unwelcome reminders of the occupation, and when they tried to reclaim their property, they experienced a hostile resistance on the part of the French people, who refused to return what they had taken.

  She went back to the house in Santa Monica Canyon to comfort Max, sitting with him in the still living room, holding his hands in hers, the only sound the ticktock of the varnished grandfather clock in the corner. Hunched over, he stared at the elaborate pattern in the Oriental rug, unable to look at her, saying very little. The shock of his parents’ deaths had paralyzed him; he could barely hear what she was saying. Gently, she explained that she was going back to France when the war ended, hopefully in a few weeks, given the recent news reports. “If you want to go back there, go back. But I can’t go with you,” Max said, his voice breaking. She nodded, unable to absorb his loss as hers already felt so great; it left no room for his, and she felt guilty about this, while at the same time she resented him for not sharing more in her grief, and she sensed that he also resented her for the same reason. She recalled that day in October, standing on the sidewalk after the session with Dr. Bettelheim, when a certain rigidity formed between them, their relationship turning from a liquid to a solid.

  * * *

  • • •

  At Villa Aurora, the émigré group still gathered for weekly cocktails and literary salons, and Vera purposefully left Sasha out of these engagements. The idea of parading him around in front of Max was unseemly and cruel. With the old crowd, a jagged freneticism ran beneath their conversations; they rejoiced in the war ending, while staving off a deep dread as they learned who had died, whose house was no longer standing, whose neighborhood had been reduced to dust. They commiserated over Roosevelt’s sudden death, all of them shaken, and then a few days later, the beloved war correspondent Ernie Pyle was shot down in the Pacific. They’d read his columns religiously, along with the rest of America, and Vera feared these deaths, two in a row, signaled a waning victory, but Sasha reassured her it didn’t.

  Sometimes, a good piece of news lifted everyone’s spirits: Leon’s niece had come out of hiding in Lille; in Vienna, Michel’s family home was still standing. Elsa’s cousin had survived Auschwitz and recently wrote from a DP camp that he was trying to come to America, but it would take a very long time to get a visa. Reading the letter, Elsa couldn’t believe his optimism, given that his wife and two children had died early on in the war.

  “He’s still alive,” Leon reminded her, his eyes twinkling with irony. “Maybe he has already found a new wife.”

  But then some darker piece of news would surface, punishing their momentary levity. “The death toll will be more devastating than we can even imagine,” Max warned Leon, after hearing that Alain, an architect they had all known in Paris, had died after Dachau was liberated.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, when Elsa and Leon asked her how long she would stay in France, and what would happen if she didn’t find Lucie, she said she didn’t know, and she could tell they thought such a move was rash and inexplicable, that she was throwing herself into an abyss. “Will you be there for . . . the foreseeable future?” they wondered, trying to grasp a semblance of a plan.

  Foreseeable future. She considered the term. Was anything ever foreseeable? Of course, they wanted to think of life in predictable little steps, one event leading to another, success following success, punctuated by the occasional failure, but still expecting an overall arc of progress. Most people thought about the future in this way. She used to be one of them, sailing through her days blindly confident in all their plans for Lucie, staying up late with Max discussing whether or not to spend the summer holidays in Sanary, or on the northern coast with friends, infusing exaggerated importance into such decisions while engorged with the conviction that each day would follow the next, filled with these tidy little plans she had arranged, as though sliding clear glass beads onto a string, the clink-clink-clink of the beads never failing.

  * * *

  • • •

  Vera still secretly hoped to find Lucie in the mirror again, waiting for another sign. One morning, when Sasha was still asleep, she went into his bathroom and noticed his regiment badge attached to the bottom corner of the mirror with a russet ribbon pinned to it. She asked him about it over black coffee and strawberries. “Is it from a girl, back home? Someone you were in love with?” She’d read a spread in Life magazine about what soldiers carried with them during the war: letters, snapshots of sweethearts, a tiny cross attached to a string of rosary beads small enough to fit into the palm of one’s hand.

  He stood up to put his coffee cup in the sink and then leaned against the kitchen counter, facing her. “My mother kept it as a good-luck charm; I think it’s from my father. I kept the ribbon pinned to the inside of my fatigue jacket the whole time.” He paused. “But I want you to have it now.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, leaving the room for a moment.

  Sitting down again, he placed the ribbon on the table. “Take it with you, back to France. Maybe it’ll give you good luck too.”

  She shook her head, letting out a disbelieving sigh. Yesterday, the discussions at Villa Aurora had been particularly dispiriting; all seven of Leon’s brothers and sisters had been killed at Buchenwald, and Elsa’s mother was shot on arrival at Auschwitz. Vera had started to fear that Lucie had ended up in one of these camps, harboring the morbid image of the heart necklace lost in one of those immense piles she’d seen photographs of, piles of jewelry, or shoes or eyeglasses, published in the newspaper to demonstrate the Nazi terror.

  Pressing her hands into her temples, she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I don’t know what I’ll find. It could be worse than I imagined. Worse than Oradour. Maybe Max is right . . . It will be like running into hell.” She touched the ribbon, as though it were a sacred object, the only link to his father. “I can’t take it from you.”

  “Please. Let me give it to you . . . It’s the least I can do.”

  His comment brought tears to her eyes. Sasha didn’t shut out her suffering or change the subject wh
en she became difficult, circling the same worries over and over again even as the words remained words that couldn’t change anything. She often burst into frustrated tears, and he told her that he understood, looking unflinchingly into her eyes, without trying to ease her into a better mood, something Max had often done. Max used to undermine her fears by explaining it wasn’t so dire when it actually was. She would resent him for his false optimism, but at the same time, she would wish he was right. For Max, her grief proved a burden, causing him to lash out in weaker moments, making her feel guilty about her guilt, or sad about her sadness, one painful emotion weighing down another. Vera still recalled Max closing his office door in the evenings after dinner, letting his music embrace him, disappearing into the sound when all she wanted was to disappear too.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sasha placed the ribbon in the center of her palm and then closed his hand over hers. “Do you ever think about finding your father one day?” she asked him. She often imagined Sasha as a little boy, his mother pretending he had a different story, for his protection, to shield him from shame. And yet, even though he and his mother left their little village behind, Vera sensed that Sasha still carried this buried story beneath the one he had been instructed to tell. Did Lucie, she feared, also feel ashamed of herself, and of who her parents were? She must have been asked to erase certain parts of her story to survive. Was she ashamed of being Jewish? Did she even know that she was Jewish? Did she remember anything from before?