The Book of Lost Names(105)

I gather myself. “And I will tell you. But please, Herr Kühn, may I look at the book first? I’ve waited a very long time for this.”

“Of course, of course, ma’am. I’m so sorry.” He hands the book to me, and for a few seconds, the world seems to freeze, and I simply stare at it, feeling its warm, rich leather beneath my fingertips.

I run my thumb down the familiar gilded spine and touch the worn spot in the bottom right corner of the cover, and suddenly, the memories rush back in. I can feel Rémy’s hand brushing mine over this very cover on the day I met him. I can hear his voice whispering in my ear, an echo from a long-vanished chapter. It’s been more than sixty years since I last saw this book—since I last saw Rémy—but the past feels like it is here again, here in this room with me, and I choke up. Without meaning to, I raise the book to my lips and kiss it. I look up and see Kühn watching me. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Please, don’t apologize. These are the moments I live for. Reuniting a book with its rightful owner can be magical.”

I nod, and then slowly, carefully, my heart leaping with hope I thought I’d buried forever, I open the book and turn to the first page. My page. The one with the star over the e and the dot over the v, the star over the J and the dot over the e Eva Traube. I will return to you. I stare at the unadorned words, despair sweeping over me.

There is no third star. No new message from Rémy.

I flip to the second page, Rémy’s page, just in case, but it looks just as it did the last time I saw it. A star over the first r, a dot over the first é. And a star and a dot for the first two letters of épouse-moi.

Marry me. I love you, I wrote in code a lifetime ago, hoping that Rémy would read the message, but now I know he didn’t, and as I close the book and press it to my chest, I’m shaking. The love of my life went to his grave without knowing how I felt. It is something I can never fix, never repair, and it makes me feel suddenly as if all the things I’ve done in my life since then have been meaningless.

“Mrs. Abrams?” Kühn’s voice breaks through my grief, and I look up to see him regarding me with concern. “Are you all right? Do you need some water, perhaps?”

I wipe away my tears, tears I have no right to cry. “No, I’m sorry. I’m fine.” I shake my head, trying to rid myself of the ghosts that are suddenly here with me. It is 2005, not 1944, and I owe this kind man some answers. It’s the least I can do. “Now, about that code.”

He leans forward eagerly. “Yes, but take your time, ma’am. Whenever you’re ready.”

I draw a deep breath. “The stars and the dots are the lost names, the names of the children too young to remember, the names we had to erase so they could survive. I hoped that one day, when the war ended, I could help them to reclaim who they’d once been. But we aren’t defined by the names we carry or the religion we practice, or the nation whose flag flies over our heads. I know that now. We’re defined by who we are in our hearts, who we choose to be on this earth.”

He listens in silence, his eyes wide, as I tell him about how I learned to be a forger, how I met Rémy and Père Clément, how we worked so hard to help people escape from the tightening clutches of the Nazis. I explain Rémy’s idea of using the Fibonacci sequence to encode names so we could make sure that the war’s youngest victims were never forgotten.

I tell him that after the war, years after I’d moved to America, my husband told me one day about an organization called Yad Vashem that had been founded in Jerusalem, the first Israeli memorial to victims of the Holocaust. Its title, Hebrew for memorial and a name, made me think of the names I’d lost along with the book, and slowly over the next few months, while Louis slept soundly beside me, I lay awake at night and made a mental list of the ones I could remember. There were over a hundred. When I finally contacted the people at Yad Vashem in the spring of 1956 with the real and false names I had been able to pull from the depths of my memory, they promised me they would try to find the children who had made it to Switzerland, in hopes that some of them might rediscover where they’d come from.

“And did they?” Kühn asks. “Did they find any of the children?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. I refused to tell them my name or give them my contact information. They wanted to recognize me for what I had done, but I didn’t want that. I was never a hero. I was just a young woman trying to do the right thing. In the end, though, I got it all wrong.”

Kühn studies me for a minute, and when he finally speaks, his tone is gentle. “Mrs. Abrams, a very wise woman once told me that we are only responsible for the things we do—or fail to do—ourselves.” That earns him a small smile, and he smiles back before going on. “And it seems to me that you spent the war trying to help innocent people.”

“But I lost the people I loved most.” I hesitate and whisper, “I got my mother killed. And Rémy died, too, Herr Kühn. It doesn’t matter how many people I helped if I couldn’t do right by them.”

“You’re not the one who wronged them, Mrs. Abrams.”

I’m crying now, blubbering like an old fool, and then Kühn is comforting me by pulling me to his chest, and it feels just like being held—and forgiven—by Père Clément all those years ago. When I finally pull away and look up at him, he holds my gaze.