The Book of Lost Names(103)

“Did they take our book? The Book of Lost Names?” she whispered.

He nodded slowly.

Tears filled her eyes again. It was another staggering blow. Now, not only would she never see Rémy again, but she would never know if he’d died realizing that she wanted to marry him. Nor would she have a record of the hundreds of children whose names were changed, the ones whose pasts she wanted so desperately to preserve. The loss of the book felt like a death of hope. “May I have a few moments alone in the library?” she asked.

“I changed the lock and closed it tight when I returned to Aurignon,” Père Clément said. “It’s been too painful to go inside. It made me think of you and Geneviève and Rémy and all the things we accomplished here—but also all the things we lost.”

Eva bowed her head. “That’s why I need to say goodbye.”

Père Clément nodded and led her toward the familiar room. He withdrew a key from beneath his robe, unlocked the door, and opened it for her. “I’ll be just outside,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “Stay as long as you like.”

It took a few seconds for Eva’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting; she hadn’t thought to ask Père Clément for a lantern. Still, sunlight spilled in narrow ribbons from the stained glass windows overhead, just as it always had, and Eva found a bit of comfort in the familiar glow.

But that was the only thing that felt the same about the room. The table where she had once worked was gone, as were the chairs that had anchored it. The shelves were nearly bare, with only a hundred or so books remaining from the thousands that had once lined the room. A fine layer of dust made everything look haunted, and as Eva ran her hands over the remaining volumes, sadness swept through her.

The Germans had taken everything of any conceivable value, leaving only newer-looking volumes behind. There were some church missals that had been printed in the 1920s, some newer Bibles, and a collection of scholarly texts with spines too ragged to be of any use to anyone. They seemed lonely on the shelves by themselves, devoid of the brothers and sisters they’d spent years with, and Eva felt a surge of grief for them that she knew was illogical.

She ran her hands over the books, saying what she knew was a final goodbye to these old friends that rested in a place she knew she’d never see again. But as she neared the end of a row of familiar Bibles, she stopped abruptly, her fingertips on the tattered spine of a volume that didn’t belong there.

She pulled it out and stared at the cover. It was an English-language edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book she had once mentioned to Rémy as they worked side by side, two months after she’d arrived in Aurignon. He had asked about her father, and she had told him about all the books that had once lined his beautiful library at home. Did you know, she had asked him, that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was among the first novels written on a typewriter? It was one of my father’s favorite things. We had a copy, but I had to leave it behind Is it strange that it’s one of the things I miss most from home?

Slowly, she opened the front cover of the book, and her breath caught in her throat. There, on the title page, in Rémy’s scratchy handwriting, was a note.

For E: I found this in Paris. One day I’ll buy you a better copy. R

4 June 1944

She read the message once, twice, three times, searching for a meaning, a code, but the words were just words, one final gesture of kindness from a man who’d been thinking of her before he died. But had he left her a message in the Book of Lost Names, too? Or had he been in a hurry, stopping only long enough to drop off this gift? And why had he left it here if he’d known she had already fled to Switzerland? Was it because he knew she would come back if she lived through the war?

Hours later on a train bound for Paris, after she had said goodbye to Père Clément for the last time, she was leafing absently through the Twain book, Rémy’s last gift to her, when she stopped abruptly on a passage in chapter seventeen. There was a mark—a tiny dot—above the first letter of the first word, which is what had caught her eye, for it reminded her instantly of the markings they’d left in the Book of Lost Names.

First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear! They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon!

Eva stared at the page, her heart pounding. In the story, Tom and his friends fake their own deaths, a plotline Eva had forgotten about entirely, since it had been a decade and a half since she’d last read the book. Was it crazy to wonder whether Rémy had meant to leave her a message, a subtle sign that he planned to do the same if things went wrong? Was he trying to tell her that he might still be out there, that she shouldn’t give up on him?

Then again, if he was alive, he would have come for her by now. He would have met her on the steps of the Mazarine Library, as he’d once promised to. At the very least, he would have returned to Aurignon to see Père Clément. No, it was impossible, wasn’t it? The speck of ink over the first word in the passage could just as easily have been an errant smudge of dirt or a meaningless mark from the pen of a stranger years before. Maybe it wasn’t a sign at all.