“You always knew that I would go back, the minute the war ended, and now it’s over, so I’m . . .” She stopped, seeing Max’s eyes flash.
He stood up, gesturing with disgust. “You think I don’t love her as much as you do? Is that it? That I don’t mourn her?”
She tried to swallow.
Hilde stood a few feet away, holding the cake.
“You cling to this fantasy that she’s still alive, as though you’re the only one who loves her, so that you can be the forever suffering one, while I’m the happy opportunist, glibly living here in paradise.”
Vera’s cheeks burned, shamed by his contempt for her, as if he had kept it hidden all these years but now brandished it about, blinding her with it. She couldn’t look at his face. It was too startling, his features contorted, rendering him unrecognizable.
His voice broke. “I still dream about her. Teaching her chords on the piano, singing to her every night before bed, walking her to school in the mornings, and then she points to the faint moon, left over from the night. ‘The moon and the sun only share the sky for a short time,’ I explain, and she always thinks it’s funny, the idea that the sun dislikes the moon because the moon is more beautiful and mysterious. She loved my stories.”
He sat down again and stared at his hands, which lay perfectly still on his lap.
Hilde swiftly placed down the cake, the pieces fanned out on the plate, and retreated into the house.
Vera knelt down next to Max, gripping the chair for balance, and with her other hand, she cupped his shoulder. She wanted to say so many things: how wrong she was for blaming him, for making him into the one who didn’t care about Lucie, when it was the world that didn’t care.
Chapter 38
SASHA
June 1945, Los Angeles, California
A thick mist settled over the coast, accompanied by a chilly damp wind that blew through the palm trees. Sasha shivered in his sweater vest, and felt as though the bright beauty of this place evaporated once the sun was gone, revealing its true ugly self: the rash of stucco buildings, low, squat, and hastily constructed; the dying grass; the plaintive cries of gulls echoing off the bay. Or maybe the city just looked ugly because Vera was no longer in it. She’d left two days ago.
Right now, she was on the train en route to New York. For the next two weeks, she would be in transit, so he couldn’t reach her, which left him unsettled. She’d given him a forwarding address, Katja’s, so he could write her, at least, but this offered little comfort. Part of him still wished he’d gone with her, while at the same time, he was relieved that she had wanted him to stay here and focus on his movie. And yet he ached to see her again.
Driving over to Charlie’s office for lunch, he rubbed his eyes, exhausted. He hadn’t slept well since she left, the bed suddenly empty and too big, and then his thoughts traveled back to Gussie. Underground operations and Resistance groups had emerged from hiding—mainly focused on capturing war criminals, but also to help victims and former prisoners. Still waiting to hear back from Gussie, Sasha had sent a telegram regarding war orphans to his old colonel, Taylor, who was stationed in Paris at the Hotel Bedford.
A week later, Taylor wrote back:
Utter chaos here. Thousands of DPs released from camps, flooding back into France. Organizations to contact regarding war orphans: Circuit Garel, EIF, and perhaps the Federation of Jewish Societies of France. Good luck, Sasha. Yours, Col. Taylor.
It wasn’t entirely impossible. But pretty impossible, given how overwhelmed and understaffed the refugee organizations were, scrambling to tend to the crisis of liberation, with the homecomings and shifting borders as thousands fled from east to west. Bracing himself for the devastation she would have to face, he missed her even more, treasuring the traces of her presence strewn all over his house: a misplaced bobby pin he’d fished out of the drain this morning, a pair of tan leather sandals she’d forgotten in the back of his closet, a few of her silky hairs that still clung to the pillowcase. Their final evening together involuntarily flooded back: the darkening sky that broke apart into a sudden downpour; her suitcases standing neatly by the front door, side by side. When she packed her last small things, she asked him if she should really take the ribbon—it was his father’s after all.
She looked at him imploringly, and when she held the ribbon in her hand like that, it was as if she touched the past, jolting it with the present, making it alive and fluid again. Before Vera, he had shoved any memory of the old country and his father into a distant, untouchable corner. It was what his mother did, banishing the past to protect him, so he wouldn’t suffer. But what was left unspoken flickered with undeniable heat and regret; he’d always felt it, pulsing through him, waiting to be known.
Touching her collarbone absently, Vera had added, “I gave Lucie my heart necklace before we were separated. Every day, I pray she’s still wearing it, because if she’s still wearing it, it means she’s alive.”
He had sensed her superstition forming the equation in her mind that if she took his father’s ribbon, Lucie might lose the heart necklace, and she would never find her daughter, just as he might never know the story of his father, as if the two objects and these two histories could interact, porous and transmutable.
They’d embraced. “When you find Lucie,” he whispered into her hair, “you can give the ribbon back to me.”
* * *
• • •
At a stop sign, he lit his second cigar of the morning. Almost forgetting to turn onto Wilshire Boulevard, he half listened to the news broadcast: An estimated four million people had turned out to cheer General Eisenhower in a thirty-five-mile motorcade through New York City, Japanese warships had sunk the American submarine Bonefish off of Okinawa, and a French politician was sentenced to death for collaborating with the Third Reich. Then they replayed a speech Pope Pius XII had given to the Sacred College of Cardinals a few days ago, and his weary tone, speaking in Italian overlaid by the halting English translation, depressed Sasha even more: “In Europe, the war is over. But what wounds we have inflicted upon each other! These wounds fester with the desecration of a mankind’s sacred ideals, shattering our faith. Our Lord in Heaven warns: ‘All that take the sword shall perish with the sword’ . . .” Static cut into the broadcast before the monotone voice resumed: “We must not grow complacent as danger still very much lurks in Europe. Mobs of dispossessed, disillusioned, and hopeless men swell the ranks of revolution and disorder in search of new false idols, no less despotic and tyrannical than what they have just overthrown.”
* * *
• • •
Sasha accelerated through a yellow light, and a barrage of horns trailed him. He tried to push away the thought of Vera in Paris, a rogue city turning in on itself. From what he’d read, the city was rife with summary executions carried out by the FFI military tribunals, former collaborators now posing as Resistance members, Allied soldiers hungry for a joyride, the general air of criminality and chaos.
* * *
• • •
The persistent ringing of the telephone woke him up the next morning around four a.m. Dubrow’s hysterical recounting of events flooded the line as he explained that Leah had fallen into a coma after they went to seek a second opinion in Rye yesterday afternoon. He was crying, tripping over his words; it was hard to fully understand what had happened. Dubrow cursed himself. “I should have told you about the cancer, but Leah insisted it was nothing. She was walking around, arguing, cooking, going about her business . . . She didn’t seem that sick. A little weak, maybe. And then, suddenly, after we went to see Dr. Erlich . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Okay, calm down,” Sasha said, his palms slick with sweat, his voice shaking. “I’ll get on the first train and be there as fast as I can.”
“Okay, Sasha, okay,” Dubrow muttered, and then he dropped the phone on the carpet, which resulted in a static thud, until Dor
is bustled into the room, her concerned voice in the background, before she sighed heavily, placing the receiver back into the phone.
Chapter 39
VERA
June 1945, Paris, France
On her first night in Paris, the dream of Lucie’s drowning revisited her. She woke with a start, the sheets damp, listening to the odd clanging pipes. Staring into the pitch-black hallway, she realized that the electricity had gone out again. She wanted a glass of water, but hesitated. This was not her house, and she didn’t feel as though she could freely spring up from bed and putter around the kitchen. At the last minute, instead of staying with Katja, she thought it better to use her publisher’s empty apartment, as Antoine was on holiday in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Katja’s husband had just returned home and Vera didn’t want to intrude on them, further burdening Katja. The only other alive thing here was a gray kitten that slept at the foot of Vera’s bed, a silver curl of fur.
She pulled the sheets around her, careful not to disturb the cat, but her heart throbbed.
The next morning, she planned to return to their old apartment. She dreaded it, a sickening fear spreading through her, thinking that Max was right. This was all a terrible mistake, she would find nothing, and nothing would come from it. Even so, she felt the necessity of going home, although most property had been seized under the Möbel-Aktion in ’42, the Germans having shipped off all domestic items to the colonized east. Other apartments were looted, even by neighbors. Rarely did homes remain intact. But then again, she had heard that the Germans took over the more luxurious apartments, delighted to find the rooms fully furnished, sleeping on the sheets, dining on the china, and wearing the clothing of those they had murdered.
Quickly, she dressed, imagining what she might find: Would her home be stripped bare, sconces ripped out, grand piano gone, with only a few picture hooks on the walls and an empty chamber pot? Or would she find it untouched? Just thinking about it made her break into a sweat.
On the way out, the concierge commented that the wisteria and lilac had bloomed early this year, and Vera remembered her concierge, Didier, making similar commonplace remarks as he swabbed the entrance hall.
Stalled cars and honking horns, wrought iron balconies cradling flower beds, the plane trees and untouched monuments and wide-open boulevards rolled out before her. She gripped her purse, afraid to walk these same streets and bump into people she used to know, but she also feared not seeing anyone she knew. She feared the city’s familiarity, how even the smallest of details snapped her former life back into focus, as though everything could resume if she only let it. She nearly collided with a young girl who zigzagged toward her on a bike, her bare legs flashing beneath a lampshade skirt.
She kept walking, worried that another bicyclist or pedicab would leap in front of her. A group of American soldiers lounged on a bench, their easygoing voices loose with liquor as they propositioned her. Hurrying past, she pretended not to hear them, and then a gang of children approached, badgering the soldiers for chocolate bars.
Crossing the intersection, she saw a group of boys clamoring onto a German military truck smashed in on the side and abandoned in the street. The boys were using it as a kind of fort, shaking their fists in the air. One of them stood on the hood, saluting people. She passed a bakery that still had bullet holes starring the front window. A long line of women waited in front of it, fanning themselves. They held their children’s hands, some of whom twisted away, scowling in the summer heat.
Across the way, racing through Place de la Madeleine, a bicyclist pulled a bride and groom in a wooden cart. They had just been married at the church there, her veil fluttering in the wind, people cheering as they went. Vera stopped a moment to watch them pass. The bride gazed down shyly at the bouquet of roses in her lap while the groom cheered along with the people, as if he had won a prize.
At the edge of the square, an old man was selling used books on a makeshift stand, and the children’s book Les Rêves de Rikiki jumped out at her. They used to read it over and over, trying to teach Lucie letters and numbers until Max made up funny little poems, waltzing her around the room. The sight of the pale blue book, dusty and abandoned on the cart, made her want to touch it.
The man called out, “If you don’t like what you see, I have more to show you, at lower prices.”
Hands shaking, she fumbled for her cigarette case and lighter, trying not to think about whether Lucie had ever learned her letters. She had struggled with it, and Vera had been impatient. She smoked, averting her gaze from all that swarmed around her lest a particular café or metro stop unleash an unwanted memory, but she couldn’t help but see the English pub where she used to meet Max and his brother, Paul, after work. Yes, this is Avenue Henri-Martin, she thought, and an evening leapt into her mind when Paul had discussed the impossible task of joining the Jockey Club, a club that didn’t admit Jews, and as the evening wore on, he grew more animated, his determination to become a member comic. Afterward, in the cab, the sky hushed with pastels, Max’s coat was thrown over his shoulder, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and she, in her tweed suit and cloche, described the structure of her latest book; he half listened, composing in his head. He cupped his stubbly cheek, his eyes tired as the cab driver pulled up to their apartment, where Lucie was tucked into bed, and he paid the driver over Vera’s half-finished sentence about what Agnes had given Lucie for dinner—bacheofe, again, but she loved it.
Someone’s shoulder bumped hers, and the recollection skittered away. The man said something under his breath, regarding her in a strange, threatening manner before passing, and Vera realized she looked different from everyone else in her American dress and silk trench coat, her pretty hat set at an angle. He might have assumed that she had benefited from the war by collaborating or black-marketeering, or that she was an arrogant American strolling these streets because America had won the war. She quickened her pace and recalled a heated conversation at a cocktail party, just before she left, between Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. Brecht described Mann as morbidly salivating over how the Germans should be punished now. Then a friend of Elsa’s chimed in that she would never return to Germany. She gestured wildly, her heavy gold bracelets clinking. “For all I know, I might sit next to my father’s murderer on a tram, or my grocer could have been in the SS.”
“Probably,” Brecht agreed. “But the question is whether or not we can disentangle the Nazis from the ordinary German people. Are there really two Germanys? One immune to evil and the other infected by it?” The woman’s husband, a famous playwright, then bellowed out, “Now every German has a sad story to tell, as if they had no choice and we should all feel sorry for them.” The woman admitted that no nation should cast the first stone, given the collaborators in France, the racist behavior of the English, and how the Russians treated their own people; no one escaped unscathed. “Do you feel shame as a German?” Brecht had asked, assuming the tone of an interrogation officer. “As a human being, I am ashamed,” the woman replied.
* * *
• • •
Vera paused before the wrought iron door of her old apartment building, shaken by the general air of mistrust and blame in Paris, by how collaborators now posed as heroes, denouncing the occupiers whom they formerly embraced. She squinted up at her balcony, where she used to think and smoke, the same gnarled ivy flowing over the balustrade. And the same June air, a mixture of cigarettes and dog shit, linden blossoms and petrol. Gripping the brass door handle, she felt its familiar coolness, and considered her image reflected in the plate glass: green shantung dress, her hair coiled into a chignon, golden peacock brooch and white gloves.
She didn’t look as though she had come back to beg.
The door suddenly opened and Vera backed away.
A young man stepped out. He began sweeping the street, occasionally glancing over at her. He had acned cheeks and dark unkempt hair, and swept his little patch of concrete
as though the broom were a nuisance designed to torture him.
Vera peered down the street as if expecting someone, focusing on the copse of trees across the way. Then she pretended to check her watch. What a performance, she thought. This is nonsense.
“Madame?”
“Yes?” she said brightly, masking the tight nervousness spreading through her.
“Aren’t you Madame Volosenkova?”
She hesitated.
“You used to live here, before the war? Flat 8F?” He smiled shyly. “Etienne.”
Of course. The concierge’s son. “I barely recognized you.”
He blushed. “I’m studying at the university now.”
She nodded, fiddling with her gloves.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“No, I’m . . .” She stopped, distracted by the sound of a window opening from above. Instinctually, she checked the top floor. A maid fluttered a sheet from a second-story window.
He gestured toward the open door. “Would you like to come inside?”
She didn’t move. “Is your father or mother at home? I should speak to them.”
“They’re at Mass.” He propped up the broom against the wall. “Please, come in.”
It felt like a dream. She wanted to say yes, the word alive on her tongue, if only she could utter it. Instead, she started to walk away.
“Listen,” Etienne called after her. “No one is there now. The tenants went on holiday.”
“Tenants?”
“The Russian ambassador, Boris Bogomolov.” He paused. “No one has returned. It’s quite difficult to reclaim property.”
Those Who Are Saved Page 27