Sister Helene continued to hold her arm.
Vera extracted herself, dabbing her eyes with the back of her glove, trying to hide the crushing feeling tearing her up inside. Another dead end. Another failure. Another place where Lucie hadn’t been.
“You must take care,” Sister Helene said, looking at her with too much feeling, a suffocating sympathy that made Vera want to sprint to the car. “May God go before you, and lead you.”
* * *
• • •
Sister Helene waved to them from the stone steps.
Vera waved back through the dusty windshield while Sasha struggled with the gearshift. She leaned into the seat. The Mother Superior’s obdurate moonlike face, which seemed to will Lucie’s existence away, had filled her with a tinny hollowness.
Sister Helene continued to wave from the steps.
“She’s still watching us,” Vera said.
Sasha thrust the stick into reverse, and the car made a guttural noise, resisting the sudden movement. He jerked it back into drive and then into reverse again, saying with effort, “That Mother Superior didn’t like all our questions.”
“Do you think she knows something, about Lucie?” Vera asked as she jerked down the window to let in some air.
He steered the car back out of the long driveway, straining to see the road behind him, which was obscured by shadows and foliage. The tendons in his neck stuck out, pulsing with effort.
“Honestly, I can’t tell. But she protested too much, about not hiding any Jewish kids. What’s that expression again?”
“‘The lady doth protest too much’ . . . ” Vera’s voice trailed off as they backed out into the main road. She caught the last glimpses of the church steeple slicing into the sky.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Sasha said. “Kind of reminds me of when you write a scene, and a character is overcompensating for something, so they come across as too happy, or overly righteous . . .”
“So, is this just another story idea for you?” she lashed out, that sharp anxiety vengeful, wanting to punish someone because St. Denis had been the last convent on their list. From here, she’d have to start over. Contact the EIF again, go back to the OSE, locate those Protestant priests in the Le Chambon region who had hidden children in the mountains, but the thought of that made her want to scream—more uncertainty, more obstacles, more people who didn’t know anything or just looked at her as if she were mad, searching for one girl out of thousands.
He kept driving, not taking the bait. This incensed her more. “And your idea to write a whole movie dedicated to Madeleine. Are you trying to compare her to me? Because I left my own daughter behind when Madeleine wouldn’t leave even one child during the war, risking her life countless times? Is that what you’re implying, with all this talk of her? That it’s my fault I lost her? Because I’m a selfish, terrible mother who left my daughter behind to save myself?”
“No, I’m not.”
Infuriated by his calm refusal to fight, she pounded her fists on the leather dashboard. She wanted to cry, but no tears came, only a hot, white rage, reminding her of those early days after the massacre, when she couldn’t cry. She could only scream, filled with hatred for herself.
“Vera,” he said, reaching over to her. “Stop.”
He pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. The stillness of the countryside filled the small car.
Pressing her damp forehead into the dashboard, she whispered, “St. Denis was supposed to be it. When we were driving there, I felt closer to Lucie, somehow. I felt her in the trees, in the air. And then nothing, nothing again, nothing so many times . . .” Her voice broke and she burst into sobs, boring her forehead into the dashboard again, trying to calm herself against the solid surface, as if it would stop the continuous stream of self-lacerating thoughts.
She murmured into the leather, “We’re in a stupid desperate search that will never end, and you don’t even have the heart to tell me.”
“Vera,” he said, taking her hands in his as she sat up. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the truth.”
She leaned her head against the window, exhausted.
Sasha started the car again.
The hollowness returned, so callow and numb, urging her to accept that Lucie was really gone.
He shifted the gear back into drive, refocusing on the road. “We’ll keep searching. I promise you.”
Catching a glimpse of herself in the car window, she flinched: her smudged eyeliner, blotchy skin, and pained, distraught expression made her unrecognizable. In that moment, a line from Akhmatova swam back to her, forceful and true: Motherhood is a bright torture. I was not worthy of it. Akhmatova wrote this about her little boy, Lev, who was separated from her, and Vera now understood this bright torture was a kind of prize that only mothers who actually raised their own children could claim to endure. Not mothers who abandoned their children, or allowed their children to be taken from them. Those mothers had neither torture, nor brightness. Only a relentless negation, like the sound of cranes crying across an empty field.
Chapter 51
SASHA
August 1945, Paris, France
The passage of time began to weigh on him with its own special density, and he started to fear that they wouldn’t find Lucie. He felt this increasing doubt at dinner, when Vera retreated into long pauses, silently obsessing over where she should search next, or what she was overlooking or looking too hard at. And he felt it in bed at night, when the lights went out and she rolled onto her side, pulling the coverlet over her body, her eyes fluttering closed while whispering “I love you,” the whisper of something ending between them.
* * *
• • •
Today, when the phone rang and the long-distance operator asked to put Mr. Friedman through, Sasha tensed. Over a month had passed since he left LA, and he knew that’s why Charlie was calling. When Charlie came on the line, jazz played in the background. It sounded like Duke Ellington, and he pictured Charlie pacing his bedroom, wearing that velvet smoking jacket with the embroidered lapels. A muffled wet cough flooded the line before Charlie asked, “Sasha, you there?”
“Yeah. You all right?”
Charlie hesitated. “Jean left me yesterday.”
Sasha had always pictured them together, despite their fights. Worried, he asked, “Her clothes still in the closet?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’ll come back this time.”
“What happened?”
“She heard that I was carrying on with Mary Howard.”
“Well, were you?” He felt sorry for Charlie’s tragic, self-sabotaging nature, realizing that Charlie would never be able to hold on to the one woman he loved.
“Yes,” Charlie admitted. “So I called her friend Victoria, who finally admitted that Jean went to Vegas to file for divorce. She’s been threatening it for a while.” He paused, taking another sip of his drink. “I didn’t think she’d actually go through with it, though, especially with the baby on the way.”
“Why don’t you go get her?”
“Sasha, I’m not like you, crossing continents for a woman. And for Christ’s sake, what in the hell are you doing over there? You don’t even speak the language. I thought you’d be back by now.”
“I’ve got to find out what happened to Lucie. That’s what I’m doing here.”
Charlie let out a frustrated sigh. “You’re out of time, Sasha. Bogie is getting antsy about his script notes. Screen tests are about to start. You can’t be missing right now.”
“So then, where are Bogie’s notes?”
“Sasha. Bogie isn’t going to write up notes just for you and mail them over in a cute little envelope. He expects to sit down and talk it out, face-to-face. That’s how this works.”
In an attempt to fend off the sinking feeling that Ch
arlie was right, Sasha shot back, “Everyone’s got their panties all twisted up over nothing.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’re closer than you think to blowing this whole thing.”
After the call, Sasha went for a coffee at the bar next to the apartment, needing space to think. Even though he didn’t want to admit it, Charlie’s words stung. He could feel his chance, not just to direct but to direct his own film for MGM, unimaginable a few months ago, slipping through his fingers. Sure, The In-Between Man had a start date, and theoretically, he still had time to get back two weeks before shooting, but he also knew Charlie was right. He needed to be there. Then again, Charlie had just blown his marriage because he didn’t know how to sacrifice, and Sasha vowed not to fall into the same trap. But it wasn’t another woman drawing him away from Vera; it was his movie, his career; it was everything he’d put stock into before he met her. He couldn’t simply throw that all away; it would feel like flushing his beating heart down the toilet, but then again, if he wanted to stay with Vera, he didn’t see another way forward without doing so.
* * *
• • •
Two months had passed since his mother’s death, but he often caught himself taking out a piece of stationery to write to her before putting down the pen. Twice, he even picked up the telephone and asked the operator to place a long-distance call to New Rochelle, New York, before realizing his error. And sometimes, he pictured her in miniature, sitting on his shoulder, passing judgment like a moody guardian angel, and this feeling, that she was still in the air, spread a sudden tight pain through his chest. He wondered if she sensed, from beyond the grave, that he had gone back to Europe, to his father’s Europe, and was now in his milieu, Vera’s milieu too, he realized: educated, assimilated, of a certain echelon, and entirely unprepared for what had happened here, the systematic, borderless violence unimaginable, though he didn’t know anyone who could have imagined it; it was beyond the pale of conception.
Sometimes, Vera wondered about his father, and they wondered together, spreading a blanket onto the grass in the Tuileries Garden, a place she reminisced often about taking Lucie on summer days. In the strong sun, the shards of grass appeared greener and more vibrant up close. Lying on her side, she tugged at the grass, watching an errant balloon float upward, only to get tangled in a tree’s branches. “It must have been terribly hard for him to leave you and your mother, but he also had this other family—he couldn’t abandon them either. It was an impossible choice,” she added, and Sasha knew she often thought of her own decision to leave Lucie behind as impossible, and at the same time unforgivable; she tortured herself over it, and she believed his father had undergone a similar torture.
Vera thought aloud, “Maybe he’s in South America,” faintly recalling the many refugees, on her first voyage to America, who praised the merits of Brazil’s climate, while others were intent on Chicago, or Palestine. She turned over onto her back, shielding her eyes from the sun. “And I wonder about his children, if they were able to escape somehow, given their Gentile mother, or if . . .” She sat up and studied the small pile of grass that she had gathered in her palm, as if reading tea leaves. “Maybe they got out in time.”
“Maybe,” he said, pinching the piled-up grass in her palm and scattering it over the lawn, careful not to upset her with his own misgivings. She had cried when she read his mother’s letter, especially when Sasha told her about the moment in the Berlin train station, when his mother had hoped he would come, and when he didn’t, the sense of having been so fully forgotten and abandoned, of not having mattered enough to him, crushed her.
“Once,” Vera began, “I was chasing Lucie through the mazes of hedges over there”—she gestured in the direction of it—“and suddenly, she was gone. All I could see was a whirl of green, and the concerned faces of passersby as I screamed her name. Tearing up and down those paths, minutes felt like hours, but it must have been only five minutes until I found her crouching behind a spherical-shaped bush, so happy to have tricked me, but then her face fell when she saw my expression, contorted with so much raw emotion, probably unrecognizable. She started to cry, and I collapsed before her, holding her so tight, I think my ferocity scared her; I didn’t want to let her go, ever. Afterward, we walked home in the failing light, and she never hid from me again—” Vera stopped short. “Until now.”
The summer wind carried bits and pieces of conversation, errant phrases distracting them for a moment. A woman laughed loudly and then her laugh dissolved into the bright day. A flock of pigeons cooed, pecking at some bread crumbs scattered beneath a park bench. Yesterday’s telephone call nudged its way back into his mind. Charlie had ripped into Sasha for still being in France, jeopardizing his career, pissing off Bogart and Mayer, and frankly, Charlie was pissed off too. Before he hung up, he had reminded Sasha that pre-prep started in two weeks. “This movie is gonna fall apart if you don’t get back here.” And then the line went dead, leaving Sasha fuming, but at the same time, Charlie was right: he was running out of time.
Vera looked at him with uncertainty, as if she could guess his thoughts.
“Have you thought about the DP camps?” he asked. “Hénonville. Landsberg. Gussie said those camps are teeming with orphans. And he knows someone at Hénonville who might be able to help us.”
“DP camps, children’s homes, convents, orphanages . . . there are thousands of displaced children in France now. Thousands.”
“Okay, so, begin with Hénonville, and then—”
“I can’t bear to see more places where Lucie has never been.”
“You can’t be sure,” Sasha managed, but for some reason, he felt the same way, that she wouldn’t be there.
Vera regarded him intently. “And here I am, dragging you into this endless search, when you should be getting back to your film, back to LA.” She paused, her voice catching. “And maybe he’s waiting for you to find him.”
Hesitantly, he met her eyes, and she embraced him. “Sasha,” she whispered, hugging him tightly. “He will love you, as she loved you, as I love you.”
He pressed his face into her hair, releasing the hiccuping sobs that rippled through his chest, the old wound of fatherlessness, inherited and unspoken, tunneling him back to when he used to sit at the kitchen table across from his mother, the sun streaming through the small dirty window, her unnamable sadness, the unrequitedness of it, stretching across time and space, collapsing into now.
Chapter 52
SASHA
August 1945, Paris, France
The phone rang when he opened his eyes.
Vera had left an hour ago to spend a few days in the country with Katja while Sasha packed up his things. Last night, she had convinced him to return to Los Angeles and make his movie. They both agreed that it was for the best to separate in her absence; otherwise it would be much harder for him to leave. They each had to go their own way, she had reasoned, and even though he agreed, the decision felt wrong, betraying his natural impulse to never capitulate, no matter how unsolvable a crime seemed from the outset. Because there was always a loose thread hidden in the fabric of other details. He only had to find it.
Hating to admit that he’d failed, and now he had to pack it in and go home, he still pictured Vera’s face hovering above his when she leaned over to kiss him goodbye. Katja’s cabriolet hummed on the curb—they heard it through the open window. Then Vera kissed him on the forehead, a sweet kiss, almost chaste, and he watched her walk away, disappearing through the bedroom door.
When the front door closed, the silence of the apartment rushed in and he welcomed sleep, not wanting to face the day without her.
But then, as he drifted back into dreams, the phone rang again.
He stumbled out of bed, picking up. The operator announced Gussie Lustiger.
“Sasha,” Gussie said. “I finally got you in to see the DP camp at Hénonville. Annie Hirsh, she’s an America
n with the UNRRA. I told her you’d be there at noon.”
Sasha rubbed his eyes, his head pounding. Next to the phone, he noticed Vera had left the ribbon on the desk, carefully held down by a bronze paperweight in the shape of a cat. He knew she meant for him to take it, perhaps hoping he would share it with his father, if he ever found him. But he decided to leave it here, as a reminder that he loved her, that he would wait for her in a distant city, in another country—it didn’t matter how long; he would wait.
“You there?”
“Yeah.”
“How about ‘Thank you, Gussie’? Or ‘That sounds terrific, Gussie’?”
He smiled and lit a cigarette, leaning into the edge of the desk. “Thank you, Gussie. That’s really terrific, and it’s absolutely the last thing I feel like doing right about now.”
“But I thought . . .”
“Vera left for a few days while I pack up my things. I’m going back to California.”
“To be honest, Sasha, I think that’s a good idea. I mean, what are you doing here anyway?”
Sasha took a long drag and then pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk drawer. “So. What’s this girl’s name? Annie something?”
* * *
• • •
The camp, just outside of Paris, was a miniature city. Across the main entry gate, a banner in Hebrew read, Kibbutz Hénonville. Wide unpaved streets, bleak and utilitarian, led to different parts of the camp, all of its various factions attempting to inject some form of masticated hope into its inhabitants. Occasionally, a JDC truck sped by, beeping to signal the arrival of more provisions. Along the main road leading into the camp, a young girl, the hem of her dress torn, pushed a baby carriage. Sasha couldn’t tell if an actual baby lay inside of it, or just a bundle of blankets. In the distance, they heard cheering and clapping followed by an outbreak of music that sounded distinctly Eastern European.
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