The Book of Lost Names(2)
So it gives me great pleasure to look her right in the eye, smile, and say, “Yes, Jenny, thank you ever so much. I think I’ll do just that.”
I grab the newspaper and go.
* * *
As soon as I arrive at my house—a cozy bungalow just a five-minute walk from the library—I log on to my computer.
Yes, I have a computer. And yes, I know how to use it. My son, Ben, has a bad habit of pronouncing computer terms slowly in my presence—in-ter-net and e-mail-ing—as if the whole concept of technology might be too much for me. I suppose I can’t blame him, not entirely. By the time Ben was born, the war was eight years past, and I’d left France—and the person I used to be—far behind. Ben knew me only as a librarian and housewife who sometimes stumbled over her English.
Somewhere along the way, he got the mistaken idea that I am a simple person. What would he say if he knew the truth?
It’s my fault for never telling him, for failing to correct the error. But when you grow comfortable hiding within a protective shell, it’s harder than one might expect to stand up and say, “Actually, folks, this is who I am.”
Perhaps I also feared that Ben’s father, my husband, Louis, would leave me if he realized I was something other than the person I wanted him to see. He left me anyhow—pancreatic cancer a decade ago—and though I’ve missed his companionship, I’ve also had the strange realization that I probably could have done without him much sooner.
I go to the website for Delta—habit, I suppose, since Louis traveled often for business and was part of the airline’s frequent-flier program. The prices are exorbitant, but I have plenty stashed away in savings. It’s just before noon, and there’s a flight that leaves three hours from now, and another leaving at 9:35 tonight, connecting in Amsterdam tomorrow, and landing in Berlin at 3:40 p.m. I click immediately and book the latter. There is something poetic about knowing I will arrive in Berlin sixty years to the day after the Germans signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies in that very city.
A shiver runs through me, and I don’t know whether it’s fear or excitement.
I must pack, but before that, I’ll need to call Ben. He won’t understand, but perhaps it’s finally time for him to learn that his mother isn’t the person he always believed her to be.
Chapter Two
July 1942
The sky above the Sorbonne Library in Paris’s fifth arrondissement was gray and pregnant with rain, the air heavy and thick. Eva Traube stood just outside the main doors, cursing the humidity. She knew, even without consulting a mirror, that her dark, shoulder-length hair had already doubled in volume, making her look like a mushroom. Not that it made a difference; the only thing anyone would notice was the six-pointed yellow star stitched onto the left side of her cardigan. It erased all the other parts of her that mattered—her identity as a daughter, a friend, an Anglophile working toward her doctorate in English literature.
To so many in Paris now, she was nothing but a Jew.
She shuddered, feeling a sudden chill. The sky appeared foreboding, as if it knew something she didn’t. The shadows cast by the gathering clouds seemed to be the physical embodiment of the darkness that had fallen over the city itself.
Courage, her father would say, his French still rough around the edges, with the vestiges of a Polish accent. Cheer up. The Germans can only bother us if we let them.
But his optimism was unrealistic. The Germans were perfectly free to bother France’s Jews anytime they wanted to, whether Eva and her parents acquiesced or not.
She looked skyward again, considering. She had planned to walk home in order to avoid the Métro and the new regulations—Jews were to ride only in the last, sweltering, airless car—but if the skies opened up, perhaps she’d be better off belowground.
“Ah, mon petit rat de bibliothèque.” A deep voice just behind Eva jarred her from her thoughts. She knew who it was before she turned, for there was only one person she knew who used “my little book rat” as a pet name for her.
“Bonjour, Joseph,” she said stiffly. She could feel the heat creeping up her cheeks, and she was embarrassed by her attraction to him. Joseph Pelletier was one of the only other students in the English Department who wore the yellow star—though unlike her, he was only half Jewish and nonobservant. He was tall, his shoulders broad, his hair thick and dark, his eyes a pale blue. He looked like a film star, a sentiment she knew was shared by many of the girls in the department—even the Catholic ones, whose parents would never allow their daughters to be courted by a Jew. Not that Joseph seemed the type to court anyone. He was more likely to seduce you in a shadowy corner of the library and leave you swooning.
“You look awfully pensive, little one,” he said, smiling at Eva as he kissed her on both cheeks in greeting. His mother had known hers since before she was born, and he had a way of making her feel as if she were still the small child she’d been when she first met him, though she was now twenty-three to his twenty-six.
“Just wondering if it will rain,” she replied, inching away from him before he could notice that the physical contact was making her blush.
“Eva.” The way he said her name made her heart skip. When she dared look at him again, his eyes were full of something disquieting. “I’ve come looking for you.”