The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  Ettie placed her glass on a highly polished tabletop. “I don’t like to be laughed at.”

  “Of course not,” Dr. Girard allowed.

  “I’m here for my murdered sister,” Ettie said. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

  Victor and Girard exchanged a look. An obsession was what this girl had, not just a belief, but a true passion. It made them both respect her, even though she looked little older than a child. Her hair was tangled into knots and she hadn’t washed her clothes for weeks.

  “First, you have to do something about your hair,” Victor said.

  Ettie scowled and threw him a dark look. “What difference does that make?”

  “Oh, it makes a difference,” he assured her.

  “I can fix it,” Dr. Girard said. “It’s not so different from surgery.”

  While Victor went to unpack the car, Girard asked Ettie to sit in a chair meant for patients. She faced an old desk strewn with books, along with a blood pressure cuff and a black doctor’s bag. On the walls were posters of the digestive system and a chart of the ventricles of the heart along with his framed degrees.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” Ettie had noticed a pile of freshly laundered white smocks reserved for patients’ examinations.

  “Whatever is necessary. A country doctor is a specialist in nothing and an expert in everything.”

  “So why do you put yourself at risk in working with us?” she asked. “You’re not Jewish.”

  “That’s my business,” he faltered. “I can only say, I have my reasons.”

  From his tone, Ettie could tell the topic of their conversation stung. The doctor brought out one of the white smocks to toss around Ettie’s narrow shoulders. He held a pair of small sharp scissors. “I’ll tell you what I tell my surgery patients. Don’t move.”

  Ettie ran a hand over her hair before he began. “What difference does it make how I look?”

  “Well you certainly can’t tell you’re beautiful when you hide it like this.”

  Ettie threw him an indignant look.

  “I’m stating an empirical truth.” He took up the scissors and began to even out her choppy tresses. She shivered but sat still when he told her to stop fiddling. “Have you ever looked at yourself in a mirror?” he asked.

  “No. I was a rabbi’s daughter. I was taught such things are nonsense.”

  “Well, you may have to forget some of what you’ve been taught. You may have to go directly against everything you were taught. Especially if you are a rabbi’s daughter.”

  Ettie made a face, but she thought of Esther, how she had used her beauty, as though it were a weapon. Some people believed she should be shamed for winning over a king with her wiles, but she had been responsible for the deliverance of her people.

  The doctor was studying his handiwork approvingly. He was the sort of man who inspired confidence. He had held the hands of those who were dying, he had removed tumors, set broken bones, welcomed lives into the world.

  “So tell me,” Ettie said. “What do I need to forget?”

  The doctor put one hand on her shoulder. “Thou shalt not kill.”

  Ettie nodded, her chin out. “I’m already aware of that.”

  The doctor handed her a mirror. “And you may have to occasionally look at yourself.”

  She did so and was surprised. She had mysteriously turned into the other person, the girl Nicole who she pretended to be.

  “I know you want vengeance,” the doctor said. “But remember, this is also about the future of others.”

  The doctor fixed them a meal that was simple, but good. An omelet with mushrooms, some brown bread and butter, white wine, which they insisted she drink. People might ply her with alcohol and what then? Would she remain sober or give herself away? She nodded and drank, and came to appreciate the taste by the end of her second glass.

  There was a room in the barn where Ettie would stay. It had been built for a groom, but there were no horses now. Victor said good night, ready to return to the farm. He’d be back when he knew more of his mission.

  “Which we won’t discuss with anyone. It’s between us.”

  “For which I had to cut my hair.”

  “I’ll cut mine, too, if that makes you happier.”

  “It will.” Ettie grinned.

  “Then it will be done.” He went out the door, calling over his shoulder, “I was planning on cutting it anyway.”

  Ettie was tipsy as she walked out in the chilly dark toward an old chair outside the barn. She sat to breathe in the mountain air. She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. When she closed her eyes, her sister was beside her, as she would always be.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE SILVER ROSE

  RHôNE VALLEY, NOVEMBER 1942

  WHEN THE MOTHER SUPERIOR WAS a girl of eight, and her name was still Madeleine de Masson, her mother and father were killed in an auto accident and no one told her. Suddenly, her parents weren’t there. Her mother did not come to kiss her good night, and there was such great sorrow attached to that loss, the mother superior still could not put her emotions into words. She understood why the girls at her school wept for their mothers at night.

  The scent of Madeleine’s mother’s perfume vanished, and soon it seemed as if she had only been a dream, not a real flesh-and-blood person. Madeleine was rushed about by the governess and not allowed to see her grandfather, a very old man who lived in the attic. His name was Raoul Salomon, and he had sometimes joined the family for dinner; otherwise he was upstairs, in bed, with his books. He was nearly ninety, and anyone could tell he had been a dashing, handsome man. He was six foot three, so very tall, even though he stooped, and Madeleine had been frightened of him; he still had a mane of beautiful hair, black when he was young, snow white as he aged. He was guarded and rarely looked anyone in the eye. People had disappointed him. His expression was tragic, but as a child Madeleine had merely thought he had stomachaches, something with which she occasionally suffered, so she was well aware of the pain they could cause. Her grandfather was so very old, and all by himself, speaking to almost no one other than the maid who brought him his meals on a tarnished silver tray.

  When she tried to climb the stairs to see him after her parents’ funeral, the governess had locked her in her room. A few weeks later her aunt, her father’s sister, along with her entire family, moved in. Madeleine then knew something was terribly wrong. The dogs were all given away. She was told it was best for her not to see her grandfather. She would only be annoying him and, anyway, he didn’t like children.

  But she’d had a dream about him, and in her dream her grandfather was sitting beside an angel and he could speak the angel’s language, something no other mortal could do. She went to see her grandfather despite the governess’s smacks, sneaking up to the third floor when everyone else was at dinner, which was formal, so that thankfully little girls weren’t invited. She had some sugar cookies in her pocket she intended to give him as a gift, but once she’d opened the door she found she was unable to say anything. They had never spoken directly. The old man was in a chair and he stared at her as she approached. He recognized her but he didn’t quite remember her name. She introduced herself. “Ah, Masson,” the old man said thoughtfully. Madeleine’s father’s family had come from Algeria just as the old man had, but they’d arrived two hundred years earlier, and had changed their name from Hasson, a Jewish name they did not wish to have associated with them.

  He took the cookies and ate them all without offering any to her. “I came from Algeria,” he told her.

  She had no idea where that was, but she nodded.

  “I’ll go for a walk with you tomorrow,” he told her. “Bring my coat.”

  The next afternoon they went to the garden. He used a cane but still had to lean on her when there was a stair. He hadn’t been outside in over a year, but he wished to speak to her privately. He told her that he h
ad made his money in diamonds, smuggled to France in his stomach.

  “That’s impossible,” Madeleine remembered saying. She knew a thing or two about stomachaches. Swallowing things that were hard, like rocks, was not humanly possible. Even too many cakes eaten too quickly could make you sick. “They’d have to cut you open to get them and you’d be dead.”

  “You know very little,” her grandfather told her. “Things go into your body and things go out.”

  That sounded distressing, but Madeleine thought it over.

  There was a frog in a garden bed near a clutch of blue bellflowers. Monsieur Salomon reached down and caught it. Before Madeleine could blink he swallowed it whole.

  Madeleine nearly fell down.

  “You can train yourself to eat almost anything if you must,” her grandfather said to the shocked little girl. She had never been as surprised in all her life, but there was more to come. Her grandfather proceeded to burp up the frog, whole and alive and equally stunned. He laughed, then plopped the creature back into the dirt.

  He did his best to explain her parents’ deaths. He told her that love was everlasting and that her mother was now with the angels. Her father, who was so stern and loved his horses more than anything, was there with her. This should have brought Madeleine some peace of mind, but it didn’t.

  Madeleine’s grandfather told her a list of reasons not to be a Jew. Though he didn’t care for her father’s family, he understood why they had converted. Whatever happened, he told her, people would blame their kind, they would say Jews had secret societies, ran the world, were thieves, wanted to take their houses from them, were the reason they led miserable lives. That was why he had at last converted as well, for the sake of his children. Both Madeleine and her mother had been born Catholic, to ensure that they would not be persecuted. Now her grandfather wanted to see how good a Catholic she was. He wondered if she would recite the Lord’s Prayer, and she was proud to do as he asked.

  Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

  After he praised her, her grandfather surprised her by reciting a prayer in a strange language.

  Modeh ani l’fanecha, melech chai v’kayam schehechezarta bi nishmati b’chemla raba emunatecha.

  I offer thanks to You, living and eternal King, for You have mercifully restored my soul within me: Your faithfulness is great.

  Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheynu melech HaOlam, asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu.

  Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments.

  “They have the same meaning,” she said to the old man.

  “Yes, they are the same, and a world apart. Say one, and you are applauded. Say the other and you’re condemned.”

  Madeleine was confused, especially when she asked the governess what a Jew was. She was curious after her conversation with her grandfather, for she had never heard the term Jew before. The usually docile governess struck her face so hard her cheek had stung for days afterward. “You have no need to know about what is wrong with the world and all the evil it contains,” her governess scolded. “Don’t mention that word again.”

  Madeleine heard her aunt speak of her grandfather as the old Jew in the attic. She wished to be rid of him, but it was his house, and they could not throw him out. At least not yet. A lawyer came to tell them so. They would have to wait for him to die.

  No one could stop them from walking in the garden, so Madeleine and her grandfather began to meet on a daily basis. Madeleine always asked him if he would eat a frog again, but he always shook his head and refused. One day, while he drowsed in the sun on the bench, she went to the pond, which was stocked with fish and rife with yellow and magenta water lilies. It was a beautiful sunny day. She had a bucket and she managed to catch five frogs, and had gotten her petticoat good and muddy in the process, which she knew she would pay for later when the governess spanked her with a hairbrush. She ran over to her beloved grandfather and presented him with her catch. He woke from dozing and looked at her, resigned, but with a glow of pride in his eyes.

  “You’re a very smart girl. This is exactly the weight of the diamonds I carried to this country from Algeria.” He reached for the pail, which he set on his knee, and then, to Madeleine’s great shock, he proceeded to swallow all five frogs, one after the other. Madeleine scarcely breathed as she watched. He wasn’t a monster, but now she was convinced he knew magic. “If you cannot protect yourself, you are at their mercy,” her grandfather said. He burped up all five frogs, each alive and perfect, then he returned the bucket to Madeleine so that she could replace the creatures into the mud at the edge of the pond. As they went back to the house, they held hands. Each felt fortunate to be in the company of the other. The rest of the world and its cruelties didn’t matter as much when they were together.

  Everything was covered with ice that winter and the last time Madeleine saw her grandfather he couldn’t get out of bed. He hadn’t eaten for weeks, though Madeleine had brought him sugar cookies every day. She sat beside him, pale and unassuming, her face pinched with worry.

  “I think I made a mistake,” he told her one day when they were together. The old man found Madeleine quietly endearing. He patted her head, for he had come to care deeply for her, and he knew that she cared for him in return; he had also come to see his past quite differently and had regrets that he hadn’t expected to have. He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth. “You cannot hide who you are without doing great damage. Just remember that you’re my granddaughter. Think about others before you think of yourself.”

  They said the wrong prayers when he was buried, but he would likely not have minded. The meaning was the same.

  God our Father, Your power brings us to birth, Your providence guides our lives, and by Your command we return to dust.

  He left Madeleine everything, but because she was a minor, her aunt took charge and sent her to a convent school. She was sad at first, for she was in mourning, but she soon came to love the rigor of her classes. She studied Latin and Greek and was a natural student, a favorite of the sisters. She was told early on that she should consider joining the order, and it had always given her great pleasure to succeed as a teacher who was known for her kind heart and her extraordinary patience, learned, perhaps, from the time she had spent with her grandfather.

  She had been thinking of him more often of late, now that the world seemed as heartless as he’d warned it might be. She could have sworn her grandfather was there on the iron bench, in his fine clothes, with his beautiful head of hair, his one true vanity. In her own time she had studied Hebrew, which she could read perfectly so that she could know the prayers her grandfather had known as a boy in Algeria. She closed her eyes and prayed for his soul and then she said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, which he had taught her so that when he died there would be someone to mourn properly.

  Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chirutei.

  May His great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which He created according to His will.

  When the baker, Monsieur Favre, arrived at the convent, the mother superior was waiting for him in the garden. He had always believed she thought she was too good to deal with him, but now she went so far as to invite him into her office.

  “Is there a problem, Sister?” he asked as they walked inside. His hands were sweating. Once before there had been weevils in the wheat and it had nearly ruined him. “The wheat is not what you expected?”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” the mother superior said. She was still thinking of frogs. She thought she had spied one in the garden and the memory now brought a smile to her face.

  The baker had heard that Sister Marie came from a noble family north of Paris. Perhaps they were Jews, one never knew. He had been told that the Jews controlled the banks and the newspapers
, and for all he knew they had bought this position for Sister Marie. There was gossip about her in the village, for the students she took in were often dark with foreign accents. Now she looked worried, and she leaned forward as if to confide in her wheat supplier. He sat back in his chair, suspicious. He had never trusted nuns; the way they all lived together with no men around, how they seemed to put themselves above all others, taking such pride in their education and dedication to God. Who were they to claim that the heart of Jesus belonged to them? Now that German troops had come to Vichy, such people would pay for their vanity.

  “I was wondering if we could pay you half this month and the second half next month,” the sister said.

  Monsieur Favre stared at her, openmouthed. Now she was crying poor.

  “It’s just the current situation,” she explained. “The finances.”

  He noted that her office was very well appointed. There was a hand-knotted rug on the floor, dyed with vegetable dyes in the old-fashioned manner. There were several paintings of the saints on the wall. On her desk was a crystal vase filled with cut roses that were a strange pale metallic color, among the last of the season, although they often bloomed until the first snowfall. There was a silver pen and pencil set on her desk. A lone bee hit against the window glass, trying to get in, for the weather was changing. Favre felt something changing between them as well. Her eyes were lowered. His were not.

  “If we could have a little more time,” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. He gazed at the rug and the marquetry floor. She was probably used to getting everything she wanted and took all of these luxuries for granted. He wondered if her family was even French. “That will not be possible.”

  “I see,” the sister said. She went to her desk and drew out her checkbook.

  “Cash,” he said. When she looked at him blankly, he shrugged. “The bank has closed.”