The Book of Lost Names(104)

Still, hope was a dangerous thing. It grew like a field of wildflowers within Eva, blossoming in all the spaces that had been filled with darkness and despair, until she began to believe with all her heart in the possibility that Rémy might have lived through the war after all. And so she returned to the Mazarine Library, where she waited each day in vain for her prince, reading and rereading the Twain passage and praying for a miracle.



* * *



It was a year later, in June 1946, that her father lay on his deathbed and begged her to stop dreaming of a reunion that would never come.

“Please, Eva,” he said between gasps of air. He was dying a slow and terrible death, his lungs deteriorating from a cancer that had crept in to take what the Germans had left behind. “You must let go of your sadness, of your hope for your Rémy, or you will never have a life of your own.”

“How can I give up on him?”

“Oh, my dear Eva, he’s gone.” Tatu? coughed again, long and hard. “And that book he left for you is just a book. You’re holding on to a ghost. That isn’t what I want for you. It’s not what your mother would have wanted. And I never knew him, Eva, but Rémy wouldn’t have wanted that, either.”

“But what if—?”

“Eva, please. You must promise me that you will come back to life.”

She held his hands in hers, and as he passed from this world to the next, she leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, her teardrops falling like rain. “I promise, Tatu?.”

And then she was alone in the world, as alone as she’d ever been. She buried him, and with him the hope that impossible dreams can come true. She visited the Mazarine Library just once more, on a sunny afternoon that autumn, and when she stopped at Les Deux Magots on a whim for a coffee on the way home, she found herself in an animated conversation with a book-loving Jewish tourist from America who had come to Paris to follow in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway.

Before she could second-guess herself, Eva had offered to show the man—who introduced himself as Louis Abrams—around her city, and by the end of the second day with him, she realized she was enjoying herself. It was wonderful to practice her English, and being around someone else who respected the written word as much as she did was exhilarating.

He kissed her for the first time between the shelves of the Sainte-Geneviève Library, where she had taken a job. On the fourth day, just before he was scheduled to leave, he dropped to one knee in the Jardin des Tuileries and asked her to come to the United States with him, to be his wife. “I know we don’t know each other very well, yet,” he said. “But I will try for the rest of my life to make you happy.”

She saw in him a man who would be her friend, a companion with the same interests who could appreciate her love of books. And in his offer of marriage, she saw the chance for a fresh start. Tatu? was right, Rémy wasn’t coming back. Eva knew that she would never find peace here in France, where the shadows of all she had lost still loomed so large. And so she said yes, and a month later found herself on a ship to America bound for a new life.

And as the years went by, she did grow to love Louis, though never the way she had once loved Rémy. Some chapters must be finished, though, some books closed. And when, years later, she had a son, she knew her transformation was complete. Her child saw her only as a ghost of the person she had once been. Her family had no idea she had been a fighter for France, a forger who had saved hundreds of lives, a woman who had once loved with her whole heart.

It was better that way, she told herself. The past was in the past. But never once, in all those years, did she love Rémy any less than she had on the day she saw him last. Nor did she stop wondering about the fate of the Book of Lost Names—or whether Rémy had seen her message within its pages before he died.





Chapter Thirty-One




May 2005

The German librarian, Otto Kühn, looks just as he did in the photograph that accompanied the New York Times article. I like him instantly; his eyes are kind, his English nearly perfect.

“I’m so very sorry for the things the Germans did, the things we took,” he says once I have introduced myself and he’s leading me through the library toward his office. “And I wish to apologize profusely for the theft of this book that meant so much to you.”

I want to race ahead of him, to grab the book, to open it to the page that has been mine since 1942, but I force myself to breathe, to slow down. I’ll have my answer soon enough, and it might just break my heart. “Sir,” I reply, “we are only responsible for the things we do—or fail to do—ourselves. You owe me no apology.”

“Still,” he says, “it was all a tragedy. There are so many books, Mrs. Abrams, millions of them. I won’t live long enough to find their owners. And, of course, so many of the people whose books were taken have been dead for years. In so many cases, it’s too late.” He opens the door to his office, and suddenly my heart is racing, because there, on the center of his cluttered desk, is my book. I would know it anywhere. My heart is in my throat, making it hard to breathe, hard to speak.

“It’s real,” I whisper. “It’s really here after all these years. The Book of Lost Names.”

“Ah, yes, Nicola—our receptionist—mentioned that you had called it that.” He crosses behind his desk and picks up the book. “Why? And what is the meaning of the code inside? I’m very eager to know.”