“How much do you know?” Monsieur Schäfer asks. “Do you know about Vel d’Hiv?”
Alex nods. “And Beaune-la-Rolande. I know you rescued her. And that you hid her in your factory. With a Sinti family. But after that—I have no idea.” He leans forward. “What happened?”
Monsieur Schäfer drops his eyes to the flickering flame. “Someone at the factory informed the French police. The gendarmes came when I was out, and took Charlie. The gypsy family, too.”
“Where to?”
He stirs his tea with taut circular turns of the spoon. “At first I do not know. But then a few months later I received a letter. From her.”
Alex sits up. “From Charlie? Where is she?”
“She wrote from a camp. A camp in Auschwitz.”
“Auschwitz? What’s there?”
He pauses. “It’s a … a very bad camp. In Poland. Terrible things happen there. People die.”
For the first time Alex can hear the faint ticktocking of a clock from an adjacent room. Five seconds pass. Ten.
“The letter was written in her bad German,” Monsieur Schäfer says quietly. “And very censored. But now I knew where she is.” He picks up his teacup, brings it to his mouth. But barely sips anything.
“I traveled there. Immediately. It was dangerous for me, yes, but I went. I have a friend in a high position at that Auschwitz camp. I thought maybe I could use that connection.”
“To get her out?”
“But it was impossible. Because she was in some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“There was a … how to say? I do not know English word. A révolte.”
“A revolt.”
“Yes, of course. A revolt. At the camp. Four women prisoners were arrested for trying to steal gunpowder. They were trying to use the gunpowder to make big explosion. To destroy … the fireplace.”
“Fireplace?”
“Where they burn bodies.”
The kitchen seems darker now, the candle flame flickering, weakening.
“These four women. Charlie was one of them?”
“No. But she was involved. She was helping them somehow. To start a revolt.”
Oh, Charlie, thinks Alex.
“The four women were … attacked. No, the word is … tortured. They were tortured. But they refused to give up any names. Including Charlie’s.”
He puts down his teacup, pulls out his packet of smokes. Lights it with a slightly trembling hand.
“The four women were then hanged. But the camp guards didn’t stop there. They killed hundreds more.”
“Hundreds?” Alex finds it impossible to breathe. “What about Charlie?”
“When I got to Auschwitz, my friend would not release Charlie to me. He said she was a suspect. She was part of the revolt. She was about to be executed.”
“They killed her?”
Monsieur Schäfer shakes his head. “I was able to get her out.”
Alex’s heart skips a beat. Then begins to race. “What?”
“I spoke to my friend, the one in high position. I asked him to give her to me. He said, impossible. But then I insist. I say this girl’s father cheated me in a business deal. And now I want revenge. I have come all this way because I must have revenge. My friend said don’t worry, they will kill her for me. But I said I want more than just death. I said this girl is pretty, I always had my eye on her, such a pretty girl. Just give her to me only a few hours, and then I will give her back to be killed. It will make my revenge better.”
He stops, catching the expression on Alex’s face. “I had to make it real. You must speak ugly to ugly men if you want to seem real.” He takes a long, quivering pull on the cigarette.
“He brought her to me. Said do what I want, but bring her back in half an hour.” His voice, trembling now. “She was so thin. Her hair gone. A skeleton. I did not recognize her.”
“But you got her out? You—”
“Only past the front guards. And then there was nowhere to hide her. No car, nothing. If I took her back into the camp, she dies. For certain. So I put her in the only place I can find. On a train.”
“A train?” Hope leaps up in Alex. “To where?”
“It was just leaving. But at least it gets her away from Auschwitz. From certain death.”
“To where?”
“I didn’t know it at the time. But now I know. The train went to Dachau.”
“Dachau?”
“A camp in Germany. A bad camp. It is like Auschwitz.”
“But you can get her out of there? You got her out of Beaune-la-Rolande before, you got her out of Auschwitz, surely you can get her out of this Dachau camp—”
“Oh, taisez-vous, vous êtes stupide!” he shouts, his hand slamming the tabletop, rattling the teacups sharply. The candles wobble, throwing flickering light across their faces.
Monsieur Schäfer clutches his fist, takes a few drawn-out breaths. “I am sorry. I apologize.” He rubs his face, hand calluses scratching against his scruff.
“A week later,” he continues after a moment, in a quieter voice. “I tried to find her in Dachau. But there is no record of her. No, of course not. Now it is impossible.” Ashes fall off the end of his cigarette. “You asked me if she is still alive. I do not know. Maybe she died in camp. Maybe she died on train even.” He stubs out the cigarette into the ashtray. “Or maybe she is alive still. I do not know.”
He stands up suddenly, the chair tipping over backward, the crash of it jarring. He stumbles to the sink. Leans over it, then lifts his head to the framed photo. Stares at that moment captured in time: his arm around Charlie’s father, invincible in their youth. “Back in Paris, I should insist more. I should have yelled more, Jacob, escape with me now to Nice. And then maybe we all flee to Switzerland. Then he is alive today. And Naomi. And Charlie, too. But I did nothing.”
“You didn’t do nothing. You did a lot for this family. Everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.” He turns and looks at Alex, his eyes half lidded, as if ashamed of their deep blue. “Nothing is enough now.”
“You believe Charlie is dead?”
“Yes.” He looks at his hands. “But sometimes no. What do you believe?”
“I think she’s a fighter. I think she loves life too much. I think she’ll do anything to stay alive.”
Monsieur Schäfer stares at Alex with a hard-to-read expression. Perhaps pity. “It is good to be young, to have such hope.”
“She’s alive. In my gut, I know she is. And I will find her.”
From the room next door, the clock starts to chime. Six times.
“I know, I know,” Monsieur Schäfer says, observing Alex turn to the clock. “I see this happen every day at six. The American jeep come to town to pick up American soldiers. And so you must go now. If you hurry you will catch it.”
Alex shakes his head. “I want to know more. I don’t care about the pickup.”
“There is nothing more to say. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore. So please leave me now.”
* * *
At the door he hands Alex a folded letter.
“She was writing this when the police came for her in my factory. They broke down the door and took her and the gypsy family away. I found this letter later on the floor where it fell.”
Alex stares at the letter in disbelief. A letter from Charlie.
“I kept it all this time,” Monsieur Schäfer says. “Because I always think maybe this will happen.”
“What will happen?”
“That you will come. Looking for her. Because you have such strong friendship.” He holds out his hand. “And now you must go. Read the letter later. Or you will miss the jeep.”
The two men shake hands.
And there is something else that still must be said.
“Thank you for carrying our letters all these years,” Alex says. He grips the man’s hand for a moment longer. “Whenever I received a letter from Charlie—it f
elt like the best thing in my life.”
For the first time the man smiles. “And Charlie, too. She always talked about you. Always said how funny you were, your jokes, your wonderful drawings. You were a joy to her. Especially toward the end, you meant so much to her.”
“I did?”
“Of course, but you know this already.” He swings open the door, and as Alex steps out, Monsieur Schäfer holds up his hand, remembering something. “On the day I pulled her out of Auschwitz. She said something to me. Something so curious.”
“What?”
“It was the last thing she said. I put her on the train, and she turned around. And she said, ‘If you see Alex, tell him this. Tell him I said, I am still the leaping frog.’”
“I am still the leaping frog?”
Monsieur Schäfer nods. “What does it mean?”
Alex closes his eyes, feels them wet and shimmering behind his eyelids.
64
* * *
Dearest Alex,
Day 93. Here I am, still hiding in this small room in the factory. Speaking in whispers. Constantly shushing Djangela, the little Sinti boy. Walking with soft careful feet. I have lost track of the date. I have lost track of who I am. I am a ghost.
It is unbearable.
There is only one thing I can do to keep sane: I think of the future. I imagine myself in that world. When this war is finally finished. When I no longer have to hide in this tiny room. When I will be free, when I can walk the streets without fear, without shame, without the star, with my face tilted upward to take in the full sunshine. When my life is restored.
Oh, Alex, promise me one thing: when this war is over, come to Paris. Join the Cité Internationale Universitaire program in the 14th arrondissement. They offer excellent fine arts classes for talented artists. Many American exchange students studied there before the war, and they all lived in a beautiful residence called the Fondation des États-Unis. Sorbonne is not far from there.
I will show you Paris. I will take you everywhere. Because even now, even after all Paris has done to me, all the ways she has failed me, hurt me, even arrested me and let me be taken away, all the ways she has betrayed me—I still love her. Maybe Alex, maybe loving a city, a country, is like loving a person: you love her despite her faults, you forgive her constantly, you always believe in her, fight for her, you never give up on her.
And in my beloved Paris I will take you to the bookstalls along the Seine and we will bargain fiercely with the bouquinistes. I’ll take you to the Ile Saint Louis in the summer and we’ll sit on a bench and share ice cream. We will go to the Île aux Cygnes and stare at the replica Statute of Liberty and pretend we have gone to Manhattan together. I will take you under all the bridges where I painted the leaping frog as resistance graffiti, the Pont Alexandre III, the Pont des Arts, and you will laugh at my horrible painting skills, how my leaping frog looks more like a squashed escargot.
In the autumn we will go to the Jardin des Tuileries and drink hot chocolate and eat crêpes. When the cold of winter arrives, we will go to one jazz club after another in the Latin Quarter, and drink in the music until sunrise. We will sit on the grass of the Square du Vert-Galant on beautiful spring afternoons and there I will look at your latest drawings, and you will read my latest stories. We will talk about your classmates, and gossip about my Sorbonne classmates, about our professors, those we admire and those we hate. Sometimes I will force you to speak to me in French to help you improve. Or we won’t talk at all; we’ll sit side by side in an intimate silence and drift in and out of lazy naps. I will take you to the theater, to the exact seat where I once whistled in the dark at a Nazi newsreel.
All these places in the city I love, Alex. I can almost feel myself already there with you, the sun warm on my face, the gentle breeze in my hair, the smells of a boulangerie surrounding us, the sound of a street musician in the background, and your presence next to me, your hand in mine. It will be so good to be warmed under the same sunlight as you, to later lie under the same moonlight.
Oh, Alex, forgive me for this. For letting my imagination get ahead of me. But it is the only way I can escape my lonely existence, and this awful small room, and my
And there the letter ends: the very moment when the French police must have barged into the room and snatched her and the Sinti family away. He stares at the blank rest of the page, the sheer shock of white, the violent, vulgar emptiness of it. A decisive snip, a string cut, Charlie vanished.
65
APRIL 1945
BAVARIA, GERMANY
Defeat hangs in the air.
It is everywhere in Germany, this sense of closure, permeating every city and town and village. In the countryside, the German army is teetering, barely putting up any resistance.
Alex is on the side of the victors, but in his heart he feels as defeated as the Germans. He is as joyless and dejected as this miserable cold spring. The barren land is as hard as ice, and instead of the fragrance of blossoming Palmkätzchen and crocuses in the air, there is the stink of rot and wet ash. Alex feels a bleakness in his bones he cannot rid himself of. He is tired all the time. He has not smiled in weeks, in months.
In late April, Alex and a second lieutenant named Clay Ohtani—who’s been in Europe so long he claims to be conversant in French, Italian, and now German—come upon a farmhouse. Smoke tendrils rise from the chimney. A German soldier is sitting outside in a lounge chair, dozing in the sun.
“We’ve got the building surrounded,” Clay announces, awakening the soldier in crude German. “Tell your mates to come out with arms raised.”
The German soldier rubs his eyes, then rises and saunters inside with all the casualness of a man going to take a long piss. A minute later, a dozen haggard German soldiers file out with arms raised. They surrender without fuss, only wanting to know how far the prison is, and does Clay have any chocolate to spare?
* * *
In late April, C Company from the 522nd Artillery Battalion peels off from the 442nd Regiment, and crosses the Danube River into Bavaria. There are rumors that they’re headed to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s private alpine retreat in the mountains of Berchtesgaden.
“There’s one reason, and one reason alone why we’ve been ordered there,” Clay says, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding down the mess kit bouncing in his lap. “Hitler’s up there, I’m telling you.”
“Hope so,” Chuck Yamazaki says from the front passenger seat, chewing loudly. “God, I’d love to wring his little neck.”
“Listen,” Clay says with seriousness. “If Hitler’s really up there, I’m calling dibs. I’m the one who’s gonna put a bullet in his head, understood? No one else touch him.”
Stanley Sakamoto laughs from the back seat. “Tell you what we should do. Before we slit his throat, we tie him up. Then shave off that silly moustache. Then we say, Die, Führer!” He smacks his thigh, laughing. “That’ll really put us in the history books.”
“You’re such an idiot, you know that?”
Clay turns to Alex in the back seat. “What about you? Any ideas how we should do in Hitler?”
Alex taps the map spread out on his lap. “Let’s just focus on the assignment. Reconnoiter the area for possible howitzer targets.”
“Always the killjoy, Maki, I swear.” He opens his mess kit, stuffs a piece of bread into his mouth, chews loudly. “And whatever the hell does ‘reconnoiter’ mean?”
Over the next hour, they drive quickly through the German countryside. Snow covers the fields even this late in April beneath a drab, overhanging gray sky.
Clay says, “What’s that?”
“What?”
“Over there.” He points at a mound of snow by the road.
“Probably just a dead horse under there.”
Less than a minute later, Clay points again. “Look. Another one.” He slows the jeep.
“Don’t stop,” Stanley says. “Just keep going.”
But at the next mound, Clay
slows to a stop. This mound the largest of the three. The four soldiers disembark the jeep, approach the mound carefully.
“What do you think? Two horses?”
Clay pokes the mound with the butt of his rifle. Chunks of snow fall away.
A human face stares out.
“Oh!” he flinches, jumping back.
Cautiously, they brush off the top layer of snow. Beneath it, bodies clothed in striped outfits. Others are naked, their clothes ripped off, their arms and legs entangled like broken-off bare tree branches.
“Let’s go.”
“God, there must be a dozen bodies in here.”
“Let’s go.”
They hop on the jeep, drive away.
But they come across more mounds, with growing frequency. Some are large, others small, the size of a single person. Or a child, perhaps. A dog, they tell themselves. Just a dog.
“What the hell happened here?” Clay turns to Alex. “Where are we exactly?”
Alex bends over the map. “Near this town called Hurlach.”
“Hurlach. Never heard of it.”
“It’s just south of a place called ‘Da-chow.’”
Clay shakes his head. “Never heard of ‘Da-chow,’ either.”
Ten minutes later. “What’s that over there?” Alex says.
Clay slows the jeep.
None of the men says anything. It’s a camp. Enclosed by barbed-wire fences, and filled with rows of black barracks. Something is just wrong about this camp. They all feel it instantly.
“It’s off our route,” Clay says. “What do we do?”
“Drive to it,” Alex says.
“Germans, though.”
Alex peers through his binoculars. “I don’t see any. The camp looks unguarded.”
They drive slowly to the gate. Stanley radios in to headquarters for instructions. A dead horse lies in a roadside ditch.
Alex gets off.
“Hey, Maki, we should wait.”
He ignores them, walks to the gate. There are people on the other side of the fence. Standing in bare feet in the mud and snow. Staring back at him listlessly. He looks past them deeper into the campgrounds. More people standing or lying in the snow. Everything so still, like a black-and-white photograph.
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