“And your Paul? He is excited about Lucie?”
Juliette’s eyes misted over. “He’s over the moon. For both of us, I think it feels like a second chance. After Antoinette…” She trailed off, and both women bowed their heads. “I wish Lucie could have known her sister.”
“I wish I’d known her, too.” Elise knew no other reply; to lose a child would be unimaginable, and she held Mathilde a little closer, vowing once again never to let her go.
* * *
In the coming weeks, there were many changes within the apartment on avenue Mozart. Foremost was the transformation Olivier seemed to be undergoing. After having mostly avoided his daughter for the first several days of her life, he seemed to have suddenly realized not only that Mathilde was here to stay but that she was his own flesh and blood. He had even begun sketching her, in broad, soft, indistinguishable strokes first, and then in more finite detail, getting the pitch of her forehead, the point of her chin, the curve of her cheeks, the line of her tiny nose just right. And Mathilde, in turn, seemed enamored with her father; she cooed each time he held her, and she stared at him in wonder, tracing the shape of his face with her eyes.
“Are you still disappointed that she’s a girl?” Elise asked a month after their daughter had been born.
Olivier looked up at her in shock. “Disappointed? Certainly I never felt that way, Elise.”
The infant had, it seemed, given him a case of amnesia, but Elise knew better than to argue. Instead, she stole away to her studio whenever Olivier felt the urge to rock their daughter to sleep, and she used those fleeting moments to begin carving again.
The birds she’d made a few months ago still sat on the shelf, where they reminded Elise that when her heart was awakened, she could do incredible things. And now, just as Olivier sketched the curves of Mathilde’s features, Elise had begun to carve them, too, the gentle bow of her daughter’s lips, the twin crescents of her brows, the rounded almonds of her eyes. What emerged from the wood during Mathilde’s first few months was breathtaking; not only were there nearly endless studies of her daughter’s face, which seemed to mature by the day, but there were also carvings of running water, great forests, wise owls, silent doves. There were intricate bowls, elaborate renderings of children playing, lanterns suspended over the earth. Elise felt grounded in a way she hadn’t since marrying Olivier, and she wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was a sign that good things were coming, that her world was righting itself. Mathilde was a light in the darkness, a flame in the cold, a magnet drawing Olivier back from the edge.
By the time spring arrived, Elise had almost come to believe that praying away the darkness would be enough, that this would be the year the war ended, that the world might return to normal, sparing France, sparing her, sparing her child.
Maybe for once, hope would be enough. But at night, when Mathilde awakened, mewling for milk, Elise would nurse her daughter at the window, the blackout curtain lifted just a bit, and she’d peer east into the impenetrable darkness, wondering what was out there, what was coming. She could feel danger lurking on the horizon, just out of sight.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the tenth of May, just after Lucie turned four months old, the Germans invaded Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, catching troops by surprise and overrunning their forces almost immediately. By the time the French army made it across the border to try to hold off the onslaught, it was too late; the Dutch were already in full retreat. Four days later, the Netherlands surrendered, followed two weeks afterward by Belgium. Now, nothing stood between the Germans and the French border but the Maginot Line, which the French government continued to proudly tout as the solution to everything.
But there were many who didn’t believe it, including Paul, and Ruth Levy, who appeared at the doorway to Juliette’s shop on the first of June, her face white, her hands trembling. Juliette set Lucie down in her small wooden playpen behind the counter, the same one Claude and Alphonse had used, so she could assist a shaky Ruth in entering the store. Georges and Suzanne scrambled behind their mother, attempting to hide in the folds of her skirt, until Claude beckoned them away by holding up a copy of Babar en Famille, featuring the elephant king all the children had fallen in love with.
“What is it, my friend?” Juliette asked, showing Ruth to a chair beside the counter and returning to Lucie to pick her up. Ruth sat down heavily and wiped damp eyes before reaching out her arms for little Lucie.
“Please,” she said. “Let me hold her. It always puts me at ease.”
Juliette handed Lucie over and watched with concern as Ruth put her nose to Lucie’s head and inhaled deeply, pressing the girl to her bosom. Lucie whimpered a bit but then seemed to adjust to the generous curves of the older woman’s body, sighing contentedly. Juliette could feel herself relax a bit, but the grief on Ruth’s face was enough to keep her mostly on edge. “What has happened?” she asked.
Ruth’s eyes filled. “It is not what has happened, but what is about to.”
“But Prime Minister Reynaud says—”
“Pfft.” Ruth cut her off with a dismissive burst of air. “The government tells us what they want us to hear.”
Juliette didn’t say anything. The store’s grandfather clock ticked the seconds loudly in the quiet, and behind her, she could just hear the soft cadence of Georges’s voice as he read the Babar book to the other children. She gazed at Lucie, held in her friend’s arms, and felt a pang of deep worry.
Ruth’s gaze never left Suzanne and Georges. “In Germany,” she said, “the only way to save the children was to send them away.”
Her voice was barely audible, but it sent a shiver of foreboding down Juliette’s spine anyhow. She reached for Lucie, and Ruth handed her back wordlessly. Juliette pulled her daughter to her chest as if holding her close could protect her from what was to come. “Away?” she finally echoed.
“There are organizations,” Ruth continued, her voice flat and so soft that Juliette had to strain to hear her. “They give the children false identities and take them somewhere safe.”
“But how are they reunited with their parents, then?”
Ruth studied her hands. “Juliette, the parents are not returning. But the hope…” She drew a ragged breath. “The hope is that the children live. That they will survive and tell the world who they really are one day. In that, they will honor their families.”
Juliette stared at her friend. The things she was saying couldn’t be true. She tried to imagine handing Claude, Alphonse, and Lucie off to a stranger, knowing she might never see them again. But how could she do such a thing? How could anyone? A mother’s job was to stay with her children, to protect them at all costs, wasn’t it? “The world has gone mad,” she whispered. The grandfather clock ticked into the quiet, and Juliette could just hear the cheerful cadence of Georges’s voice, reading about elephant royalty, an imaginary world that suddenly seemed more reasonable than the real one. “Such things will not happen here, though,” she added with more ferocity than she intended.
“Juliette,” Ruth said, her tone as gentle as if she was talking to a child. “Such things can happen anywhere as long as good people look away. It is what happened in Germany. By the time anyone thought to stand up on any large scale, it was too late.”
“But here, we still have a chance.”
Ruth looked away, to where Claude, Alphonse, and Suzanne sat crowded around little Georges. “Here, we still have a chance,” she repeated, but the sound was hollow, and Juliette feared that perhaps the words were, too.
* * *
That night, Juliette lay beside Paul in bed, Lucie’s bassinet beside them. Lucie was whimpering in her sleep, and the sound made Juliette want to awaken her daughter, to soothe her, to promise that everything would be all right. She wanted to tell them all—Claude and Alphonse and even Paul—that she would protect them from whatever was coming. But could she?
“I have been hesitating to say this, my darling, but I think perhaps you should leave France,” Paul murmured into the darkness sometime past midnight, and Juliette startled at the sound of his voice, which had broken the silent flood of her own worries. She had known that he was awake beside her, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she was also staring at the ceiling, wondering what would come.
“Paul, you can’t mean that,” she said, rolling to face him.
He, too, turned onto his side, and they searched for each other’s eyes in the darkness. She could feel his breath on her cheek. “There might still be time.”
Juliette closed her eyes, feeling a familiar stab in her gut, the sharp blade of regret and indecision. “I cannot, Paul. Even if there was a way…”
“You could save yourself.” His voice was barely audible.