The World That We Knew

by Alice Hoffman

  “Has it?” Her mouth tightened. “Has it really?” Her grandfather had always told her to trust no one but herself. But the truth was, she had trusted the old man completely.

  The baker was convinced that a woman like the sister had her head in the clouds and knew nothing, not even the price of wheat, so he charged her a bit more this time.

  “What unusual roses,” he said as she looked through her drawer for francs. The flowers were silver, which made sense, why would she have plain pink blooms?

  “Yes,” she said, barely listening. The financial situation was horrible. Perhaps she could go to the doctor who had helped her in the past.

  “Would you mind if I cut some flowers to bring to my wife?” Favre asked. Why shouldn’t his wife have something so beautiful? “My wife cooks in the café and has no time for things that bring her pleasure.”

  He was told there were shears in the garden and that he was free to cut flowers to take home to his wife, so he said goodbye, his money in his pocket. He went down the corridor paved with polished bluestone, then into the courtyard. The gate to the garden was wrought iron, and he pushed through into the sunlight. His shadow fell before him. Two girls sat on a bench near the silver roses, one blond and one dark and small with a foreigner’s features, both so intent in conversation they did not look up. Such strange flowers, these roses, looking as if they had dropped down from the moon, with their silver sheen and black, leathery leaves. Most of the other flowers were long past their bloom, and he thought these might be the sorts of roses that Jews grew; perhaps they were fed with the blood of children and that had caused their unusual color, for since medieval times Jews were thought to be magicians, suspected of sorcery. He had no idea that the flowers were a strain of roses created by a woman more than three hundred years earlier whose husband was so jealous of her beauty he wouldn’t allow her to leave their house. She could only go as far as her garden, and often she sneaked out while he was asleep so that she might work in the moonlight. She wanted a bloom the color of the moon, a hybrid between a white Bourbon and a black climbing rose. After years of cross-pollinating and covering the plants with white burlap bags so the bees would not play havoc with her plans, she at last completed her task. When her husband found her with her silver roses, he locked her in the house, commanding her maid to dig up the rosebushes. They were given the name la Lumière Volée, stolen light.

  The maid couldn’t bring herself to do as she was told. She kept two specimens in her own garden, and when the husband died she returned them to their rightful place. From these plants six more grew, and then another six, and then six more, so that an entire section of the garden looked silver at certain times of day.

  There was a pair of green-tinged iron shears left on a stone table. Monsieur Favre could hear the girls speaking now, and after a moment he realized the brunette with the hawk nose spoke German. The few words in French that she said were guttural, a crime against the language. The pretty blond one spoke German as well. They were both dressed in blue convent dresses, wearing black stockings and laced shoes. The blond was so pretty she caught Favre’s eye and his dark imagination. She was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, nearly a woman. He would never guess she was thinking about murder as she sat there in the lemony light. How to kill someone in the least painful way possible was on her mind. Would it be drowning or poison? The way to destroy Ava seemed painless enough according to her mother’s instructions. She was to remove the aleph in the word emet drawn on Ava’s arm, a single letter that turned emet into met, truth into death.

  “What are you thinking about?” Rachel asked when she saw the faraway look in Lea’s eyes. They had become quite close, and although both were too wary to have a friend, they had formed a bond. She could tell when Lea was preoccupied.

  “Would you kill someone if you were asked to?”

  Rachel shrugged. “It would depend on who they were and what they’d done to deserve it.”

  Rachel looked up to see the man observing them. She stopped talking and tugged on Lea’s dress. Perhaps she could guess what he assumed by the way he was staring at them, with a dark, wary expression.

  He saw a Jew right here, right in front of his eyes, one who ate bread made with his flour at every meal. She had the nerve to raise her eyes, as if she were better than he.

  The girls often broke away from the other students so they might converse in German, which made them feel as if they were back home. At first they had both wept at night, longing for their mothers, but they had become accustomed to their situation. Most hours were accounted for, and that gave them less time to mourn what they had lost.

  “Act naturally,” Lea said in a hushed voice. She hoped they hadn’t given themselves away as refugees. “Can I help you?” she called to the fat man glaring at them.

  “I’d like to ask your friend a question,” he said, gesturing to the brunette.

  “I’m so sorry, but she has a sore throat and cannot speak.” Lea spoke brightly. Her French was excellent. By now there was not the slightest German inflection.

  Monsieur Favre considered the blond girl. He felt sure that she was telling a blatant lie, but one so well spoken that for a moment he almost believed her. It was the look of terror on the other girl’s face that gave them away.

  “You were speaking German.”

  “We’re studying it in class so that we can read our texts in the language in which they were written.” He was still staring at her. “Perhaps I can help you?” the pretty liar said cheerfully.

  “I’m here for the flowers,” Favre told her. He sounded unfriendly, even to himself, not that it mattered. He knew what was going on here. Just what the rumors implied.

  The girls watched him cut far too many of the blooms, leaving a gash in the rosebush. They had grown to love this garden, and all of the girls without parents felt a special connection with the beauty of this place. Favre left the shears splayed open on the white gravel path. When he was gone, Lea and Rachel ran to the mother superior’s office and told her that they feared a man in the garden had overheard them speaking German. They wanted her to say it was nothing to fret about, very likely he hadn’t heard them at all, and what if he had? Everything would remain the same, as it always did in this convent.

  When she heard about how Monsieur Favre had questioned them, the mother superior went to the window, frowning as she watched him walking to his old van. She thought of all the reasons her grandfather had told her not to be Jewish, but the truth was there was only one. The way people let themselves fill with hate. Some of the flowers he had taken were falling apart in his grasp, petals strewn on the walkway. He was careless and he didn’t mind leaving a path of ruined flowers. Still, the petals seemed to glow. He stopped and regarded the convent, and the mother superior knew that look, she had seen it on other men’s faces. It was greed.

  The nun turned back to the girls. “Go upstairs and tell the others. You must leave today.”

  As there was no time to bake bread and no one to make breakfast, the mother superior joined Ava in the kitchen while the other sisters were packing up the girls’ belongings, as well as their own. It was too dangerous for anyone to stay on.

  The mother superior put up water for tea, then found a large pot in which to make porridge. Fortunately, Ava soon took over so the children would have a decent meal before leaving. They could always count on Ava. She was a wonder today as she was every day. Lea and Rachel were sitting together, knowing they would have to say goodbye. It had already been decided that Rachel would go with Sister Félicité. Lea would leave with Ava. The mother superior suggested they go to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town on a high plateau in the Haute-Loire known for its tolerance and acceptance of refugees. There was a school of several stone buildings at the end of a road that was impassable in winter and difficult to find in all other seasons. When the time came to leave, Rachel embraced Lea. Just this once, she said, and they both laughed, although there were tears in their eyes.

  The m
other superior hoped decent people would prevail and the convent’s paintings, along with the silver and the rugs, would still be here when they returned. Still, she had faith that they would someday resume their work here even if all their worldly possessions disappeared. She sat in the rose garden and thought of the years when she was Madeleine de Masson. She had been left a great deal of money when her grandfather died, some of which her aunt had appropriated, the rest of which she had given to the church when she entered the convent. She did so to be true to her faith and give back to the world. She wondered now how she had been so sure of herself at such a young age.

  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.

  It was the end of something. She was certain of it. She wrote a note to the monsignor, thanking him for his kindness and good deeds, not daring to say more in case the note was intercepted after it was posted. When the sisters went to say prayers in the chapel, it was the last time they would do so. The mother superior was not with them; instead she was at work in the kitchen, and much to their surprise she presented them with breakfast at the appropriate hour. Ava had taught her to add goat’s milk to the pot to stretch the porridge. Students and teachers ate standing up, for there was no time to get comfortable, and they all had their suitcases with them. Ava, always a hard worker, washed and dried the plates and pots, although it was possible they wouldn’t be used again.

  When all had gone, the mother superior waited for the soldiers. She looked back fondly on the fact that the sisters had never questioned her when she brought the girls to the school. They had done their work in good faith. And when it was over, and she said they must leave, even the reluctant ones took off their black habits and dressed in the clothes they had collected for the poor before going across the field toward the woods. Sister Félicité escorted the Jewish girls she watched over to a convent near Annecy. Even the heron that had nested in the chimney for so long took flight on that day. Sister Marie wished her grandfather were beside her, for his presence had always given her comfort. She saw the frog in the garden once more and thought perhaps this was a sign that her grandfather was watching over her. She had locked away some of the more important things: a very old Bible that was said to have come from Jerusalem. The silver chalice in the chapel. The book that each novice signed when she entered the convent. But such things would be stolen, most likely, and they were not what mattered most.

  They came that afternoon, throwing open the gate, walking with muddy boots through the halls and up the stone stairs. The soldier who interrogated her called her by her given name, Madeleine Salomon Hasson. She was a Jew. The police had never noticed before, but it was right there in front of them. After Favre’s report, the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn’t know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. He had been twenty-four when he came from Algeria with his wife, Milah, and when she died he had donated a large bequest to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where roses were planted in his wife’s name. He had made donations to many schools and synagogues and began a fund for the poor who were newly arrived from Algeria. These facts were read aloud, as if they were criminal acts, but they were simply the small truths that allowed the mother superior to understand why she had come to this place to teach and to accept girls no one else would take on, and why she had loved this rose garden so well, for it was in her lineage to favor beauty and knowledge, as it was to have regrets, now, at the end of her life.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN THE FOREST

  ARDèCHE, NOVEMBER 1942

  THEY SLEPT IN THE TREES or beneath bowers of the tall, plumy underbrush, waking with leaves in their hair. The air was crisp and fragrant, the moon a silver slip that grew fatter and more orange every night. Sometimes they spied other people in the woods, living as best they could, Jews and refugees and young French men escaping from forced labor. Ava gave away half their food to starving families who had nowhere to go but the caves. When these refugees saw a tall woman followed by a huge heron, they were astonished and hopeful. It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world.

  When they were alone in the mountains, they might have been a million miles away from Paris. The pastures were turning brown and the leaves were yellow, as if the stars had fallen from the sky. As long as they stayed away from cities and towns, the world felt as it had for hundreds of years, pure and elemental. The rivers and streams went along beds of stone and granite, the water a pale blue-gray.

  Night after night, in the trees or in the grass, Lea dreamed of her mother. She heard Hanni’s voice in the wind, in birdsong, in falling leaves.

  I was with you when the roses bloomed with silver petals, when you saw Paris for the first time, when that boy looked at you, when you learned prayers in the convent, when you ran through the woods.

  Every time Ava took your hand, it was my hand you held.

  They were protected and hidden, while all across the continent there was the Shoah, an attempt at the total destruction of the Jews, as had been recorded time and again in the Torah. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of Shoah and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. By now millions of Jews had been murdered. They had been sent to the death camps; buried deep in the forests of Poland, body upon body, fragile and naked, twisted and torn. There were souls that had turned black with horror who now perched in the trees, trembling and stunned by what some men were capable of, unable to move on from the spot where they had been murdered, incapable of entering the World to Come. They had been tortured, separated from those they loved, made to dig their own graves, castrated, humiliated, with the gold removed from their teeth, gassed at a rate of six thousand a day in Auschwitz. The Destruction hung across the world in darkness, in a cloud. When Lea dreamed of her mother, Hanni was shoeless, her hair shorn. But her eyes were shining. Like Rachel in the Torah, who wept with grief over the loss of her children, Hanni wept in these dreams. She was without words, without a mouth, without a body, beneath the dirt, none of which stopped her love.

  You were with me when we discovered we were not hunters, but wolves, when the world was taken away from us, when they believed we were worthless, when we were sent away on trains, when the souls of our brothers and sisters rose with no place to go. You were with me every minute. You are my triumph, the one thing they could never take away.

  What mattered in the forest was simple, and had nothing to do with the cruel perversions of men. A rock, a leaf, a star, a dream. Time stood still here. When a leaf fell it took forever until it landed on the forest floor. Winter would come, but not now, not yet, not in this place where if you fell asleep you dreamed for weeks. Wildflowers grew out of season; angels walked through the yellow grass and left their footprints for men to follow if they cared to see what was right in front of them, the path of the righteous, the forgiving, the faithful. Sometimes, at night, Lea would awake to see Ava dancing with the heron. He was staying later than he should. Sweeps of birds had left for warmer climates, but every day he was there, and every night they danced. Lea watched, entranced, well aware that she was seeing magic being made. Ava looked luminous as she danced barefoot, and sometimes she threw her head back and laughed with delight.

  If a golem was made of clay, how was it possible for her to feel? Lea soon devised a test. She went out and gathered thorny branches and placed them on the ground beneath the bushes where they slept to see if Ava could feel pain. That night Ava curled up among the sharp branches and she didn’t cry out once.

  The next night, Lea took a glass bottle, broke it, then spread the shards in the grass. That night Ava danced as if nothing was wrong.

  On the third ni
ght Lea left a heap of biting red ants in Ava’s garments, but when Ava dressed she had no reaction, not an itch or a cry, nothing at all.

  These tests proved that Ava felt nothing, and yet there was that look on her face when the heron bowed to her in the moment before the dance began. It was the gaze of someone who loved you, the same look Lea had seen when her mother kissed her good night, when her father was at home and there was laughter in the kitchen, when her grandmother told her stories. Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.

  They were so well hidden that Ava allowed Lea the freedom to wander. She was going for water from the nearby stream when she saw a wolf, just as Bobeshi had when she was a girl, not much older than Lea was now. At first Lea thought it was a dream she had never woken from and she was likely still sleeping, curled up under the bushes. But she reached down and pinched herself, and the pinch stung and she knew she was awake, and then she was certain that what had happened to Bobeshi was now happening to her. The wolf was black with yellow eyes. It was said such creatures had been hunted to extinction in this region, that they had been shot and hung on posts, murdered one by one by royal hunting parties. But some things cannot be destroyed so easily.

  Lea lifted her eyes to look into his. He had been so quiet she hadn’t heard him approach, though she should have known. There were no birds singing. The leaves refused to fall. She thought of Julien. Even if no one else believed her, he would.

  She had to stay alive. She had made a promise. How to do so was the question.

  Don’t run, her grandmother had told her. Do not be afraid. Be who you are, and know that he will be who he is.