“This isn’t the life any of us were meant to have. But we are still the people we used to be. Don’t you think we are?”
She slipped out before Elise could reply, and in her wake, Elise felt a surge of power. We are still the people we used to be, the girl had said. How had Elise forgotten that? Once upon a time, she had been strong. She had known how to let life flow from her fingertips. She had been able to pick up a block of wood and see the potential within it.
She sighed and returned to the sculpture that was meant to be a cluster of trees. Slowly, her hands roamed over the surface, feeling the swirls in the grain push back against her fingertips, stubborn and with a mind of their own. This time, though, rather than letting her conscious thought dictate shape, she took a large, curved gouge and let her body do what it knew how to. Tapping her mallet against the base again and again, she cleaved off the treetops she’d already hewn, took the branches away in big chunks until she had reduced the wood to a shapeless lump, much smaller than the one she’d started with. And then she set the mallet aside, picked up a smaller gouge, and began to slice in tiny, gentle strokes, letting the grain itself guide her.
The wood was warm and responsive, forgiving under the sweeping cuts, and she found herself breathing more quickly as she chiseled and refined the slope of a forehead, the aquiline slope of a nose, the roundness of eyes that had once looked back at her with such trust. Her gouge found the bow of lips, the line where the mouth had once parted to make the sweetest sounds Elise had ever heard. She shaped cheeks that were as full as apples, and she peeled away layers to reveal the waves and curls of a silky cascade of hair.
Elise had learned long ago that while clay went wherever one’s fingers led it, sculpting in wood was a dance between two masters. The wood-carver always led first, working in broad strokes and big lines, but as the shape emerged, the wood itself took over, pushing back, objecting when it didn’t want to be led. Sometimes the wood broke, and sometimes its protests were softer—a refusal to yield the right angles against the grain. It had taken years for Elise to learn the complicated tango, the way she needed to listen not just to what she wanted to create, but to what the wood itself was willing to become.
This particular block, though, seemed happy to acquiesce now that it was no longer destined to be a tangle of trees. It had pushed back as her blade forced branches and leaves, but now, as her chisel zipped over the last familiar angles, the wood gave itself up entirely to her, letting her know that this time, it was a willing partner in the dance.
When she stepped back hours later to look at her progress, her breath caught in her throat. She had done it. There, before her on the worktable, lay her daughter’s face, just as she had looked when Elise last saw her. The lines were right, Mathilde’s mouth forming the beginning of a smile, her eyes wide and inquisitive. Elise slowly ran her thumbs over her daughter’s cheeks, and she choked on a sob.
“You came back to me,” she whispered. The wood was smooth, alive. It was Mathilde, gone forever, but still, somehow, right here. She stared, tears clouding her vision, as hope fluttered up in her chest. She could bring Mathilde back, and knowing that opened a floodgate within her, letting a river of pain and regret pour out, washing her clean.
Finally, setting the piece aside, Elise reached for another block of wood and began anew, something in her untethered from the present. This time, her gouge found Juliette’s birds of grief, and quickly, they soared up from the wood—a father bird at the head, the baby birds flying behind, safe and free, their beaks pointed to the heavens.
* * *
The fifth of August began like any other day. Elise walked to the cemetery alone in the morning, knelt and spoke to Mathilde, and then returned to the apartment. She took the carvings she’d done the week before and brought them to Monsieur Vasseur, who gave her a small handful of francs from the previous two weeks’ sales. Her pieces never brought in much money, and he insisted on paying her on commission rather than purchasing her pieces outright as Constant Bouet had done with Olivier, but it was enough to pay for new wood, as well as the food and milk the children needed, and the other bills she had fallen behind on. Her most precious work, her Mathildes, she kept for herself, but collectors on a small budget were interested in her birds and her trees, her solitary forms on horizons, and the faceless dancing girls she had begun to create. As her chisels and gouges found her way over their forms, she imagined an older Mathilde, her face always obscured by windswept hair, twirling in the breeze, the wind ruffling their dresses. This is how her daughter came to her now in dreams, always dancing, her face always turned away, and when Elise brought those forms to life, she didn’t feel guilty about giving them away, for Mathilde was meant to be in the world, dancing through life.
“Shall we go?” she asked Georges and Suzanne after she’d put the money away in the box where she kept it, hidden behind her blocks of wood.
The children followed her out of the apartment and down the stairs, into the sunlight. This was their routine; each afternoon, they walked down the rue de l’Assomption, crossed the Seine, and turned left on the avenue ?mile Zola, making their way through the fifteenth and seventh arrondissements, over to the H?tel Lutetia, which loomed like an oversize ship on the corner of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Sèvres. The art deco–style palace had once been a haunt for artists and writers; she’d heard that Joyce had written Ulysses while staying in the hotel, and that de Gaulle had reportedly honeymooned there before he was the hero of France.
Now it was a place of both joyous reunion and repeated tragedy. While at first the place had bustled with people, today it was much quieter, awash in sadness rather than hope, resignation rather than desperation. People still milled, checking lists, sighing to themselves, trudging away in despair. Returnees moved up and down halls, many of them with haunted eyes that had seen too much, all of them with sallow skin that hung limp from protruding bones.
While Elise scanned the lists, looking for the name of Ruth Levy, the children searched faces, trying to recognize something familiar in features that had been forever changed by horror, grief, and starvation. Once, they’d spotted a man all three of them had known, a shoemaker from Boulogne, who had been arrested early in the Occupation and had never come back. Georges had let out a yelp and run to embrace the man, almost knocking him over. It had taken Elise much longer to realize who it was, but when she did, she had stepped forward, tears in her eyes.
“Monsieur Kopelman,” she’d said, and he had looked at her with empty eyes.
“Do I know you?”
Georges’s arms were still wrapped around the shoemaker, but he didn’t seem to notice. Beside him, Suzanne was shifting from foot to foot, her arms hugging herself.
“I am Elise LeClair. A friend of Juliette and Paul Foulon.”
When he continued to stare at her blankly, she clarified, “They owned the bookstore near your shop.”
Something in his eyes flickered and he looked away. “That was another life, madame. One in which my family existed. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He slipped from Georges’s grasp and moved past Elise. If he hadn’t brushed against her, she might have wondered whether he was real at all, or whether they’d all just seen a ghost. She wanted to run after him, to tell him that her family had been lost, too, that she understood him, that she was here to help if he needed anything. But she knew from the look in his eyes—from the look in all the returnees’ eyes—that their loss was different, the well of their grief and suffering deeper than she could imagine.
It had been more than a month since they’d seen Monsieur Kopelman, and there hadn’t been another familiar face since then. The few refugees who trickled through now, most of them scanning the faces of waiting family members with terror, afraid of whom they wouldn’t see, were mostly those who had been too ill to travel home at first.