“How do you identify the children?” I asked.
“Each is assigned a number. This number is printed on a small disk pinned to the chest. Some children came with names. Many did not.” Madame placed her bowls on a chair. “During the war, some mothers wrote their child’s name on a paper note and pinned it to the child before they dropped them here, but most notes fell off or were blurred in the rain. Some sewed trinkets to their children’s clothes so they could identify them later, but many children changed clothes and swapped names with others. We still get several anonymous drop-offs daily.”
“Surely some children remember their own names.”
“The older ones, perhaps, but many arrive here mute from their terrible experiences, and a baby doesn’t remember its name, does it? So we assigned them. We named them after their birth month if they knew it…You will find many Mais and Juins here. We named some after the patron saint of their birth month or after our friends and relatives…even pets.”
“Can you at least check which children came in on that day?” I asked.
“It is not consistently noted. These children are coming from all over. Safe houses. Boarding schools. From farmers who’ve found them sleeping in haystacks. Some brought here by the only parents they’ve ever known find out for the first time they are not who they think they are.”
“You must be overrun with parents searching.”
“Some, but most of the children here will not be placed. Their parents are long gone. Or don’t want them.”
“No one would not want their own child.”
“Really, Mademoiselle? You are an expert on this? Over one quarter of the children here are mixed. German father, French mother. Kraut kids, they call them. No one will be picking those children up. Others were born in Lebensborn production homes, Hitler’s baby factories where racially good mothers anonymously gave birth to illegitimate children of SS men.”
“But those homes were only in Germany—”
“No, Mademoiselle. There was quite an active one here in France. We’ve heard of them in Denmark, Belgium, and Holland as well. Several in Norway. Those babies are now pariahs. And who knows how many of these little blond ones were kidnapped from their mothers’ arms—hundreds of thousands from Poland alone, meant to be raised as German. There is no record of their parents.”
“I will check the list myself, Madame, if it would spare you the trouble.”
Mme Bertillion stopped short and turned to me.
“You are used to getting your way, I can see.” She picked up the tin bowls and thrust them into my hands, the pile tall and cold against my chest, reaching almost to my chin.
“If you distribute these, only one to a child—and they will try to get two out of you—I will look through my list, Mademoiselle. I will fetch you if I find a match. I am not doing this to help you because you came from the consulate, but because I have been on my feet since five this morning.”
“Thank you, Madame. Where do I distribute the bowls?”
“Out there, of course,” she said, holding an open palm toward a pair of doors.
“What do I do with the extra bowls?” Surely there were too many.
“There will be no extras,” Madame said and bent her head to the list.
I pushed through the doors to a vast hall wainscoted in oak, probably once used for dancing and parties. The ceiling rose up one hundred feet, trompe l’oeil painted to give the impression of radiant summer sky, a nice substitute for the actual heavens that day. There must have been fifty refectory tables there, at which girls sat grouped by age from toddlers to teens. They sat still on their benches, hands in their laps, each quiet as a picture. Behind them, six white-frocked women stood beside steaming vats of soup, ready to serve once my bowls were distributed.
As I approached, all eyes were on my bowls and me. I stood for a moment, overwhelmed, and then recovered. These children were hungry.
I placed a bowl before the first child at the table.
“Merci, Madame,” a child said.
I placed a bowl before the next child.
“Merci, Madame.”
I checked the faces for any trace of Rena or Paul, but my task was soon overwhelming. Who knew if the child favored her parents? Was she even still alive?
I became skilled at handing out bowls and worked my way to the teens. At the beginning of the row, a girl of no more than thirteen sat with a toddler on her lap. The child was dressed in a periwinkle blue velvet shirt, its mother-of-pearl buttons still holding fast. Mother’s handiwork. She would be happy.
“You are taking good care of her,” I said to the girl.
“No need for two bowls, Mademoiselle. We share.”
The toddler on her lap watched me go by as a stargazer watches a shooting star, and I continued down the row with my bowls.
Before long, Madame hurried down one row toward me.
“You are in luck, Mademoiselle.” She paused to catch her breath, one hand to her lace collar. “We have a few children with that drop-off date, one girl that age.”
I followed Madame down one row and up the next to a table of four-year-olds eating their soup, the only sound the scrape of their spoons against tin. The noise in the room magnified as I followed Madame. Colors sharpened. Would this be Paul’s child? Finding her would mean extreme happiness for her parents but the opposite for me.
“A child born on April 1, 1941, would be in our four-year-old group, here,” Madame said, as she checked a child’s tag and presented her with a flourish. “Now, we have Bernadette.”
She was a towheaded sparrow of a child, her skin almost translucent. She glanced up at me with a wary look.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to say, but I don’t think so.”
“That is the best I can do,” Madame said. “I will keep an eye out for that birth date. Have the parents come in when they are well.”
I lingered in the great hall that day and helped serve the rest of lunch. Madame and I ladled fragrant onion soup, thick with carrots and turnips, into the children’s bowls and handed each child a small piece of bread. Their only words, “Merci, Madame,” were tremendous thanks. A plane flew overhead, and some hid under the tables, thinking they were still at risk. Many were shod with wooden blocks tied on with rope. I made a note to send shoes. And money.
I did my best to peer into the face of every child of about the right age, looking for any familiar sign. As Madame and I finished collecting the empty bowls on a tray, a teenager handed me hers. The child at her hip stopped me short.
“Madame, could you come?” I asked.
I set the tray down on the table. “Would you please look up the number of this child?”
Madame noted the child’s number and went for her clipboard.
I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the child. She was dark-haired and had almond-shaped eyes like Paul’s and also his coral lips, but everything else about her was Rena. The copper skin, the curve of her nose—down to the ears peeking out from her hair.
“This child has no drop-off date,” Madame said. “I am very sorry.”
“This is the child, Madame. I’m certain of it.”
“Her name is Pascaline,” the teen said.
Mme Bertillion forced in a quick lungful of air.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I hate to admit it, but your intuition may be right, Miss Ferriday,” Madame said, almost smiling.
“How so?” I asked. The room closed in on us.
“The child’s name is Pascaline,” Madame said, as if I had missed something obvious.
“So what, for heaven’s sake?”
“Every good French Catholic knows the name Pascaline means born on Easter.”