“How many pieces did they take?” he continued.
She bit her lip; it was still painful to think about. “More than two hundred.”
“The Germans stole more than two hundred wood carvings from your apartment?”
He looked like he didn’t believe her, so she added in explanation, “Most were small.”
“I don’t understand why there were so many of your pieces being stored there. Were you unable to sell them?”
“Monsieur Bouet was not supportive, nor was my husband.”
He looked at her for a long time. “I see.” He seemed to be considering something. “Well, Madame LeClair, I will send you some wood. Do you still have your tools?”
She thought of the chisels and gouges lying under a layer of dust in her studio and nodded.
“Well then, make me something new. If you’re as good as the Germans evidently believed you to be, perhaps we’ve both found a solution to our problems.”
* * *
A shipment of limewood blocks arrived at Elise’s door the next day, delivered by a blank-faced young man who rolled the large box through her door on a cart and then scurried backward down the hall.
“What is this?” Georges asked, jumping up from his place on the couch to help her. He and Suzanne had been reading in silence, but this was more interesting. Elise opened the studio door for him, and with dust particles hanging in the air, illuminated by slanted light, Georges wheeled the cart in.
“Limewood,” she told him, her heart thudding. She reached for a knife and sliced into the box, then she inhaled deeply, nearly knocked off her feet by the way the fresh, leafy scent of the familiar wood brought her back to another life.
“What will you do with it?” Georges asked, watching her with a perplexed expression as she bent to breathe the wood in, closing her eyes.
It struck her then that neither he nor Suzanne knew that she had once been an artist, had once coaxed form and substance from wood. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “I’m not entirely sure yet. But I used to carve things all the time. I will see if I remember how.”
He looked at the wood and then back to her. “What will you make?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you make things from this?” he asked, stepping back as he wiped his hands on his trousers.
“Those are my tools.” She gestured to the chisels and gouges lined up like a surgeon’s implements on her workbench, waiting to be brought back into service. “Maybe I will teach you someday.”
“I think we won’t be here much longer. My mother will be back for us. I know she will.” He held Elise’s gaze. “But you don’t believe she is coming back, do you?” His voice broke on the last word.
“Georges, I’m not sure what to believe.”
“But I would feel it here, you see.” He tapped his chest. “Suzanne would, too. We would know it. We would feel it in our bones if she was dead.”
Elise took a deep breath. She had wanted to believe, too, that we could feel it when our loved ones slipped from the earth, that she would have known it the moment her daughter had died. But she hadn’t felt a thing, hadn’t sensed the ripping of the cord, the shifting between this world and the next.
“I know that our mother is alive,” Georges said after a moment. “You must believe me, Madame LeClair. Please, you must believe it, too.”
She forced herself to smile. “I pray every night, Georges, that she will return to you and Suzanne.”
He nodded, relief in his eyes, but as he turned away, she let out a sigh. The H?tel Lutetia, she had heard, would be closing as a center for returnees soon, for the flow of prisoners returning home had slowed to a trickle. If Ruth Levy had indeed survived the war, she would almost certainly be back by now, and there had been no trace of her at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
At first, the limewood refused Elise’s advances, failing to give beneath the sharpness of her tools, obstinately standing still when she needed so desperately for it to dance. She tried to re-create Juliette’s birds, thinking now of the Foulon family rising up in a flock toward the sky, but the result was so childish that she chiseled straight through it in frustration, splintering it into lifeless chunks, and then slammed her fists on the table.
Next, she tried something simpler—to shape the farmhouse where she’d stayed near Aurignon. She could still remember each angle and curve, could see it clearly in her mind’s eye, but the wood continued to taunt her. She tried the faces of Georges and Suzanne, the face of Olivier, even the faces of Bernard, Madame Roche, and Père Clément, but they emerged looking like theater masks, false and empty-eyed. She tried the bedraggled mutt that lived within the florist’s stall on the corner, a pigeon on the terrace rail, even a garden of poppies, which should have been simple.
But everything she did looked like it had been created by a first-year art student, someone who hadn’t yet learned how to work with the grain rather than against it. Each evening, she emerged from her studio, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks streaked with tears, and Georges and Suzanne politely averted their eyes and bustled about, setting the table for dinner, while she washed up.
On her eighth day with an unyielding block of wood, her failures splintered around her on the floor, there was a light knock on her studio door. She slammed down the piece she’d been working on—her attempt at a tangle of trees in the Bois de Boulogne—and called, “Yes?”
The door cracked open and Suzanne slipped inside, her eyes downcast. “We can get jobs, you know,” she said without bothering with pleasantries. “Georges and I. We have talked about it. It’s not right that you’re here trying so hard to make money, while we do nothing.”
“You’re eleven,” Elise said. “That is all you two should be focusing on. Being children.”
Suzanne smiled sadly. “Madame LeClair, we have not been children for some time.”
“That is a tragedy, Suzanne, and one that I won’t contribute to. I don’t want you to worry about a thing. It is time to begin again.”
“Is that what you are doing, Madame LeClair? Beginning again?”
Elise looked pointedly around at the ruins littering the studio floor. “I think it’s quite clear I’m not certain what I’m doing.”
Suzanne looked at the carving Elise was working on. “What are you making now?”
“I had intended this to look like trees.”
“Did you always carve trees?”
Elise chuckled. “No.”
“What did you make, then?”
“Different things.”
Suzanne blinked at her, waiting.
“Before Mathilde was born, it was whatever inspired me,” she added after a few seconds. “I tried to give shape to the words people said, the things I’d read. I carved faces, expressions, the way a mouth turns up at a lie, and down with sadness. I tried to soak in life and to let it out through my hands into the wood.”
“And after Mathilde was born?”
“The war had started by then. There was a sense of false comfort, a forced calm, but we could feel the storm coming. It was right there, on the horizon, the clouds looming, electricity crackling. Sometimes I sculpted that—things that represented the storm, the way we all felt about it.” She paused and touched the block of wood before her. “But mostly I carved Mathilde.”
“When she was a baby?”
“I carved everything. I would sit down to create something different, and instead, I would find the curves of Mathilde’s face. I carved her as she was—but I also found, in the wood, what she might be one day. I carved her as an older girl, imagining the future she would have.” Elise paused and blinked a few times to clear her vision. “I let the wood show me what she would look like as a woman. I saw her whole life ahead of us.”
“Were those the carvings that were stolen?”
Elise hung her head and nodded. They were all she had left of her lost daughter, and the Germans had taken them all, every last one, in one final, horrific blow.
“So why not try again? You see her all the time, don’t you? In your dreams?”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it is where I see my mother, and sometimes, my father, too. They’re so real that sometimes I reach out to touch them, but they always disappear. But you, you can bring Mathilde back. Carve her, Madame LeClair. Don’t let the Germans take her from you forever.”
Elise looked down at her useless hands. “But I need to make money. If I carve Mathilde, I won’t be able to part with her. I won’t sell those pieces.”
“Then start with Mathilde. And let her lead you into something else. But begin with her.”
Elise stared at Suzanne. “How did you become so wise?”
“The war made us all wise, Madame LeClair.”
Elise swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry, Suzanne. I’m so sorry for all the things that have happened to you. None of it is fair.”