THIRTY-SEVEN
Even on this blue-skied March day, the apartment on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais felt like a mausoleum. Dust covered every surface and layered the floor. Vianne went to the windows and tore the blackout shades down, letting light into this room for the first time in years.
It looked like no one had been in this apartment for some time. Probably not since that day Papa had left to save Isabelle.
Most of the paintings were still on the walls and the furniture was in place—some of it had been hacked up for firewood and piled in the corner. An empty soup bowl and spoon sat on the dining room table. His volumes of self-published poetry lined the mantel. “It doesn’t look like she’s been here. We must try the H?tel Lutetia.”
Vianne knew she should pack up her family’s things, claim these remnants of a different life, but she couldn’t do it now. She didn’t want to. Later.
She and Antoine and Sophie left the apartment. On the street outside, all around them were signs of recovery. Parisians were like moles, coming out into the sunshine after years in the dark. But still there were food lines everywhere and rationing and deprivation. The war might have been winding down—the Germans were retreating everywhere—but it wasn’t over yet.
They went to the H?tel Lutetia, which had been home to the Abwehr under the occupation and was now a reception center for people returning from the camps.
Vianne stood in the elegant, crowded lobby. As she looked around, she felt sick to her stomach and grateful that she’d left Daniel with Mother Marie-Therese. The reception area was filled with rail-thin, bald, vacant-eyed people dressed in rags. They looked like walking cadavers. Moving among them were doctors and Red Cross workers and journalists.
A man approached Vianne, stuck a faded black-and-white photograph in her face. “Have you seen her? Last we heard she was at Auschwitz.”
The photograph showed a lovely girl standing beside a bicycle, smiling brightly. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.
“No,” Vianne said. “I’m sorry.”
The man was already walking away, looking as dazed as Vianne felt.
Everywhere Vianne looked she saw anxious families, photographs held in their shaking hands, begging for news of their loved ones. The wall to her right was covered with photographs and notes and names and addresses. The living looking for the lost. Antoine moved close to Vianne, put a hand on her shoulder. “We will find her, V.”
“Maman?” Sophie said. “Are you all right?”
She looked down at her daughter. “Perhaps we should have left you at home.”
“It’s too late to protect me,” Sophie said. “You must know that.”
Vianne hated that truth as much as any. She held on to her daughter’s hand and moved resolutely through the crowd, with Antoine beside her. In an area to the left, she saw a gathering of men in dirty striped pajamas who looked like skeletons. How were they still alive?
She didn’t even realize that she had stopped again until a woman appeared in front of her.
“Madame?” the woman—a Red Cross worker—said gently.
Vianne tore her gaze from the ragged survivors. “I have people I’m looking for … my sister, Isabelle Rossignol. She was arrested for aiding the enemy and deported. And my best friend, Rachel de Champlain, was deported. Her husband, Marc, was a prisoner of war. I … don’t know what happened to any of them or how to look for them. And … I have a list of Jewish children in Carriveau. I need to reunite them with their parents.”
The Red Cross worker, a thin, gray-haired woman, took out a piece of paper and wrote down the names Vianne had given her. “I will go to the records desk and check these names. As to the children, come with me.” She led the three of them to a room down the hall, where an ancient-looking man with a long beard sat behind a desk piled with papers.
“M’sieur Montand,” the Red Cross worker said, “this woman has information on some Jewish children.”
The old man looked up at her through bloodshot eyes and made a flicking motion with his long, hair-tufted fingers. “Come in.”
The Red Cross worker left the room. The sudden quiet was disconcerting after so much noise and commotion.
Vianne approached the desk. Her hands were damp with perspiration. She rubbed them along the sides of her skirt. “I am Vianne Mauriac. From Carriveau.” She opened her handbag and withdrew the list she had compiled last night from the three lists she’d kept throughout the war. She set it on his desk. “These are some hidden Jewish children, M’sieur. They are in the Abbaye de la Trinité orphanage under the care of Mother Superior Marie-Therese. I don’t know how to reunite them with their parents. Except for the first name on the list. Ari de Champlain is with me. I am searching for his parents.”
“Nineteen children,” he said quietly.
“It is not many, I know, but…”
He looked up at her as if she were a heroine instead of a scared survivor. “It is nineteen who would have died in the camps along with their parents, Madame.”
“Can you reunite them with their families?” she asked softly.
“I will try, Madame. But sadly, most of these children are indeed orphans now. The lists coming from the camps are all the same: mother dead, father dead, no relatives alive in France. And so few children survived.” He ran a hand through the thinning gray hair on his head. “I will forward your list to the OSE in Nice. They are trying to reunite families. Merci, Madame.”
Vianne waited a moment, but the man said no more. She rejoined her husband and daughter and they left the office and stepped back into the crowd of refugees and families and camp survivors.
“What do we do now?” Sophie asked.
“We wait to hear from the Red Cross worker,” Vianne said.
Antoine pointed to the wall of photographs and names of the missing. “We should look for her there.”
A look passed between them, an acknowledgment of how much it would hurt to stand there, looking through the photographs of the missing. Still, they moved to the sea of pictures and notes and began to look through them, one by one.
They were there for nearly two hours before the Red Cross worker returned.
“Madame?”
Vianne turned.
“I am sorry, Madame. Rachel and Marc de Champlain are listed among the deceased. And there is no record of an Isabelle Rossignol anywhere.”
Vianne heard deceased and felt an almost unbearable grief. She pushed the emotion aside resolutely. She would think of Rachel later, when she was alone. She would have a glass of champagne outside, beneath the yew tree, and talk to her friend. “What does that mean? No record of Isabelle? I saw them take her away.”
“Go home and wait for your sister’s return,” the Red Cross worker said. She touched Vianne’s arm. “Have hope. Not all of the camps have been liberated.”
Sophie looked up at her. “Maybe she made herself invisible.”
Vianne touched her daughter’s face, managed a small, sad smile. “You are so grown-up. It makes me proud and breaks my heart at the same time.”
“Come on,” Sophie said, tugging on her hand. Vianne allowed her daughter to lead her away. She felt more like the child than the parent as they made their way through the crowded lobby and out onto the brightly lit street.
Hours later, when they were on the train bound for home, seated on a wooden banquette in the third-class carriage, Vianne stared out the window at the bombed-out countryside. Antoine sat sleeping beside her, his head resting against the dirty window.
“How are you feeling?” Sophie asked.
Vianne placed a hand on her swollen abdomen. A tiny flutter—a kick—tapped against her palm. She reached for Sophie’s hand.
Sophie tried to pull away; Vianne gently insisted. She placed her daughter’s hand on her belly.
Sophie felt the flutter of movement and her eyes widened. She looked up at Vianne. “How can you…”
“We are all changed by this war, Soph. Daniel is your brother now that Rachel is … gone. Truly your brother. And this baby; he or she is innocent of … his or her creation.”
“It’s hard to forget,” she said quietly. “And I’ll never forgive.”
“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”
Sophie sighed. “I suppose,” she said, sounding too adult for a girl of her age.
Vianne placed a hand on top of her daughter’s. “We will remind each other, oui? On the dark days. We will be strong for each other.”