“I didn’t come for that.” Again, her own voice startled her. Hoarse and full of emotion, revealing too much. She dabbed her eyes with the back of her glove. “I’m searching for Lucie, my daughter. I thought perhaps someone might have come, with some news, or—”
He interrupted, his cheeks reddening. “No one has come, Madame.” Then he extended his hand. “But please, follow me.”
* * *
• • •
The apartment smelled strange, as though someone had recently broiled a roast, unlike the scent of blooming lilies she had expected. She had always filled the apartment with lilies or roses in springtime, but there were no flowers here. The living room had been entirely rearranged, the piano covered by a tattered bedspread she didn’t recognize. An air of mistreatment and carelessness permeated the rooms, with coats flung over armchairs, a threadbare Oriental rug embarrassingly too small for the sitting room, a dirty glass left on the dining table with the dregs of oxidized wine. Another glass evidenced traces of lipstick along the rim. Wandering through the rooms, she randomly touched objects to confirm this was real, despite the surreal scene: a woman’s comb with a tangle of blonde hair, a pair of cuff links in an ashtray, a long rectangular couch with scuff marks on the bottom. I shouldn’t be here, she thought, staring at the pale green curtains and Max’s old desk in the next room. But somehow, she found herself in the ridiculous position of trespassing on her own life, recognizing things she had long forgotten: the miniature oil painting of Mourka, the gold-leaf wallpaper in the study, the cracked mirror in the foyer. Even the mirrored glass and gilt sconces still hung on the walls, white stumps of wax embedded in the candleholders.
Etienne hovered behind her. “Madame Volosenkova, would you like some tea?”
“Are you going to serve it to me on my own china?”
He shook his head, unable to look her in the eye, and she realized she had embarrassed him. “I’m sorry.”
He tried to smile and told her that downstairs, in his parents’ apartment, they’d kept her wardrobe with the trousseau and linens, and the sideboard with the silver. She barely heard him, feeling the ghostly pull of other rooms: her bedroom and office.
Lucie’s room.
“It’s all right, Etienne. I don’t mind if they keep it.” Her body moved on its own accord toward Lucie’s room, her heart hammering in her chest, faintly aware of Etienne following her, asking if it was really all right to keep everything.
The door was ajar. The walls were blank except for a more saturated cream square where the watercolor of the Tsarskoye Selo gardens in St. Petersburg had hung. A pair of boy’s shoes were kicked off next to an unmade bed. The smell of dirt, grass, and restlessness hung in the air. A leather satchel dangled from the arm of Lucie’s rocking chair. The needlepoint ballerina pillow that always had rested there was gone.
She squinted, trying to conjure the rarified nursery of cream walls, delicate lace, the crystal chandelier refracting morning light, china dolls lined along the shelves.
Reaching for the door, she found Etienne’s arm instead. “If she comes back,” Vera whispered, “if she returns . . . if anyone comes here with any news . . .”
“Yes, of course, Madame Volosenkova. I will contact you immediately.”
* * *
• • •
Coming down the stairs, she saw her old neighbor Madame Allard on the landing. Lucie used to play with her daughter Matilde, and the shrill sound of their childish voices scolding their dolls momentarily rang in her ears.
Madame Allard stared at Vera. She held a potted plant, in the process of discarding it, the door to her apartment half open. Then, remembering herself, she put down the pot and rushed to embrace Vera. “You look so well. We were sick with worry. So wonderful to see you again.”
Vera pulled back and noticed Madame’s short patchy hair partially covered by a scarf. She had always worn it long, in lustrous auburn waves.
“I heard you were in Sanary?” Madame Allard asked, smiling oddly.
“For a short time. Then we went to California.”
“California,” she repeated, her eyes glistening at the sound of it. A mawkish cry interrupted them. A little boy, around three years old, stood in the doorway, his cheeks smeared with jam.
“Oh,” Vera said, relieved by the distraction. “Who’s this?”
Madame Allard stiffened. “Jacquard.”
Vera bent down and beckoned to him. “Hello, Jacquard.”
The boy stared at her blankly.
“He’s lovely. Such golden curls,” Vera offered.
Madame Allard tugged on the edges of her hair. “Jacquard, go back inside.”
She sighed when the boy didn’t move, and in that moment, Vera realized he was a German war baby, with his pug nose, rosy northern complexion, his mother’s newly shorn hair. And the boy looked nothing like Madame’s husband, whom she remembered as dark and Gallic.
The child still stood there, sucking his thumb, but then Matilde, now nine years old, the same age Lucie would be, came and dragged him into the next room. Fleetingly, they exchanged glances, Matilde’s clear mineral eyes full of questions. Of course she didn’t ask after Lucie, but the agreed-upon silence made Lucie seem even more dead.
* * *
• • •
The next day Vera was supposed to go to Oradour, and had already booked a chauffeur, but she decided against it, still shaken by yesterday, her old apartment turned into something else, where strangers now lived. Instead, she would go straight to Hotel Lutetia, where everyone told her to look first.
Coming down the marble staircase, she changed her mind again; she shouldn’t be weak and avoid the pain of witnessing where her daughter might have died. She had to go now; otherwise she would lose courage.
After a short bout of conversation in which the chauffeur explained that the only way to get to Oradour was by car, all the rail lines had been blown up, they barely spoke the rest of the way, leaving her to her thoughts. She felt the inside pocket of her purse, where she kept Sasha’s ribbon, and made sure it was still there.
During the long drive, she kept revisiting something Elsa had said before she left. They had stood in Elsa’s kitchen. In the next room, the cocktail party dwindled. The maid was washing dishes in the sink, humming a Viennese waltz. Elsa stared down at her hands, which she pressed against the kitchen counter, her voice faltering. “I’m sorry for telling you the day we crossed the Pyrenees that you would get Lucie back after the war. That by leaving her, you were saving her.” Vera reassured Elsa that it wasn’t her fault. None of them could have imagined what would happen, but she couldn’t admit that she had often replayed that exact moment in her mind: the blue haze of the mountains, sitting there on the scattered pine needles, sharing green pears, listening to Elsa convince her that she was doing the right thing, and Vera’s own desire to believe her because it was convenient to believe her in that moment.
* * *
• • •
When they arrived, he parked outside of the town, as though the place were contaminated. It was late in the day, the low-hanging sun casting a celestial pinkish glow over the ruins. Vera gripped the door handle, afraid to open it and step out. The driver stared in the opposite direction, toward a copse of trees in the distance, his face turned away from the town. Suddenly, she was extremely thirsty, her throat knotting up, and she managed to say, “I won’t be long,” hoping for some consolation from him, such as I’ll be right here or Not to worry, but he only caught her eye in the rearview mirror.
* * *
• • •
She made her way over corrugated tramlines running through the streets, touching things as she went: the crumbling brick facade of a boulangerie, the metal sign hanging over the gaping doorway, dust coating her fingertips. Biblical phrases involuntarily reverberated through her: Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, God gave and God has taken away
. She had never thought of these lines before, but now they found her, demonstrating that this was the way of the world and she must learn it. She tried to imagine Lucie standing in line here at the boulangerie, the way she used to in Paris, jumping on one foot, impatient to get a little treat, before the baker would palm her a sugar cookie in the shape of a heart, Lucie acting as though it were a great surprise, even though she had expected it. Staring into the bombed-out building, Vera saw nothing of Lucie, nothing of anyone. Nothing of nothing.
She forced herself to keep walking, passing by a Singer sewing machine in the middle of a razed courtyard. A singular fireplace, lined with broken tile, stood nearby next to a rusted-out car. She shivered in the strong sun, feeling as though she shouldn’t be here, as though it were a bad omen to witness the aftermath of so much killing.
Rounding the corner, she caught her breath at the rows of white porcelain ink pots, realizing that a school must have stood here.
All of these abandoned objects reminded her of the Roman ruins she had studied at university, but fresh violence festered in these stones, and she sensed, gingerly stepping over the rubble, the ungodliness of this place.
* * *
• • •
She walked a bit farther on, leaving the town behind, searching for Agnes’s address. Burnt fields stretched on without a hint of life. Even the sky seemed empty, a flat expanse of blue with no dimension to it. Her feet hurt, swelling up in the unforgiving shoes, and her breath grew shallow the farther on she walked, even though it seemed a short distance. She stopped in front of a few stone walls, coated in ivy, and a hearth. It was impossible to tell if it was Agnes’s house or not, given that all the farms had been burned down. There was nothing left to distinguish one pile of rubble from another. Staring ahead at the long empty road, she didn’t know if she should move forward or go back, and from all directions, she only saw dark razed fields. She set her palms on her knees, steadying herself, letting the blood rush to her head to stop the dizzying sensation of the earth tilting upward.
This place had swallowed up Agnes and her daughter, and the crashing sensation of being left motherless and childless—coupled with the stabbing guilt that Agnes had hidden Lucie for her, and perished for it, when Vera had gone free, sailing across the ocean—left Vera breathless. If Vera hadn’t asked Agnes to hide Lucie, she might not have returned home to this village. She might have found work with a new family, or she might have taken up an entirely different occupation altogether. She might have even fallen in love or moved to London, a city she adored but had never seen. She might have done so many things.
* * *
• • •
Returning to the town, Vera carried the grim knowledge that the church remained. Romanesque, red brick, and low to the ground, it was even more modest now without a roof. Blue sky spread above her. Shadows filtered into the nave, light and dark shapes playing across the altar. Someone had left a small bouquet of wildflowers there, now wilted.
This was the place: the last place where Lucie was definitely alive. In the late-afternoon light, the stone and brick appeared flesh-colored, radiating a silent warmth.
Vera closed her eyes, trying to feel Lucie, but all she felt was desertion, and a violence so brutal it shattered time.
Backing away, she held herself close, clutching the sleeves of her blouse, as if she wanted to rend them, to bring the fabric to her teeth and bite through it.
Then she noticed bullet holes in the altar, because the Germans had fired low, to kill the children first.
* * *
• • •
The chauffeur leaned against the passenger door, chewing tobacco, his arms crossed over his chest. He squinted up at the electrical lines running overhead. A few blackbirds perched on the wires, squawking into the still air. He spit his tobacco into a nearby bush and then opened the car door for her.
On the way back, he considered her in the rearview mirror, as if only a sick person would want to visit that place.
Chapter 40
SASHA
June 1945, New Rochelle, New York
The living room was hot and crowded, the long dining table laden with fruit and pastries, knishes, pots of herring, pickled vegetables, and thinly sliced black bread. On the train, Sasha had imagined sitting at his mother’s bedside, stroking her cheek, saying some last words. But Leah had died at dawn, and he arrived hours too late.
All Sasha had seen of her death was the elaborately carved wooden coffin lowered into the earth while the rabbi intoned uplifting words about her character, a rabbi he had never met before, but someone, Dubrow reassured him, whom Leah had felt very close to at the end of her life. Surrounded by strange faces, many of them tearful, Sasha felt a whistling absence rip through him. These people mourned another Leah, a woman Sasha didn’t know, who had served on the Peaceful Use of the Atom committee and organized bridge games and attended poetry mornings at the country club. They nodded knowingly, as the rabbi praised her charitable service to the community, how she had tirelessly organized food drives for the DPs in the camps, collecting sweaters and socks and bedding for the children.
The mother he knew cleaned the apartment every Friday afternoon before the Sabbath, and sprinkled mint leaves in the steaming bath because she loved the smell, and worked long days as a seamstress in a sweltering shop so that he could attend the neighborhood heder after school.
* * *
• • •
Sasha lay down on his twin bed, staring up at the ceiling, exhausted, listening to the last guests saying their goodbyes. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, and only wished that he could see his mother again, with her ball-busting comments and anxious kibitzing. He remembered the day before he left for California for the first time. Leah had appeared in the dusty doorway, holding a jar of spicy pickles and a loaf of brown bread, saying he’d better take this for the journey, her eyes filling with tears when he reassured her that there was a dining car on the train. He wasn’t going to starve. They hugged then, and he patted her smooth black hair streaked with gray and closed his eyes, his chin resting on the crown of her head, and he imagined the little town where she was from, where he had been born, and how far they had come together.
* * *
• • •
Sasha covered his face with his hands, breathing into the warm dark. Just then he heard a timid knock on the door and Dubrow’s muffled voice calling out, “Sasha? You in there?”
He got up from the bed and opened the door to find Dubrow standing in the hallway. Sasha motioned for him to come in, but he paused on the threshold, clearing his throat. “Listen, Sasha, I’ve got something to tell you.” He shifted on his feet, his eyes combing the walls, as though he didn’t know where to look. Then he took out an envelope from his breast pocket.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a letter for you.” He paused. “Your mother wrote it just before she died.” He tried to say something, but the words caught in his throat. “It’s about your father.” Dubrow started pulling on the moth-eaten edge of his sweater and took a few steps in Sasha’s direction.
Sasha stared down at his shoes, focusing on the tiny perforations above the cross-stitching of his wingtips, instinctively doing what he had done during the war: when he had to focus, he would stare at whatever was at hand—for instance, tree bark, its ripped-up roughness, the white underneath the dark outer skin—to stop his mind from racing. He clenched his knees.
Dubrow stood there uncomfortably. “All Leah wanted was to protect you.” He dabbed his eyes with a tissue, his voice trembling. “She was always like that, you know, putting everyone else first.” He held out the envelope.
“Yeah,” Sasha said, taking the letter and slipping it into his back pocket. “She was.”
* * *
• • •
He left New Rochelle as soon as he could after that. It was nearly dark, the train car rattling. T
he encroaching Manhattan skyline stretched ahead, but tonight it looked foreign and unforgiving, as though he hadn’t grown up among those spires and rooftops and flashing neon billboards.
He felt the letter in his breast pocket like a hot iron, willing him to reread it, the rattling train car triggering flashes of the long train journey he took with his mother from Riga to Hamburg: the smell of onions and sweat on their clothing, wide flat wheat fields flitting by, the expectant hope reflected on everyone’s faces.
When the train stopped in Berlin, the city blazed with light, the immaculate modern buildings cutting geometric shapes into the sky, the billboards and marquees glowing against the night, the trundling taxis and automobiles honking at irregular intervals coupled with a policeman’s strict whistle, and the elegant couples descending beneath the earth to travel in a tunnel, his mother explained, from one end of the city to another. Most of all, he remembered his mother straining to see out the window amidst the crescendo of Yiddish, Russian, and Polish rising up around them like water. He tugged on her coat. It seemed as though a subterranean pull beckoned her off the train, and into the vast wide boulevards lined with majestic trees. Sasha stared out too, watching the well-dressed men striding down the sidewalks as efficiently as machines, briefcases swinging with the utmost confidence, pointing toward the future.
His mother sank back into the seat and pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. Then she pulled Sasha into the heavy folds of her coat and whispered, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
It hit him now, that moment rushing back to him, the moment his mother recounted in her letter, breeding the crushing disappointment that she never forgot: Berlin, at night, his mother staring through the train window, hoping that he was waiting for them on the crowded platform.
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