The Book of Lost Names(64)
“So you won’t see Rémy, either.”
He took her hands in his. “I feel certain we’ll both see him again soon. Remember, Eva—we must have faith.”
She drew no comfort from his words, though, for she knew Catholics believed they would see each other again on the other side, once they were dead. And Père Clément had made no promises that Rémy would return to them alive. Perhaps he only meant that one day, if they all lived good lives, they would be reunited far away from here. But by then it would be too late.
Chapter Twenty
The new forger sent by the underground two weeks later was a twenty-six-year-old woman who went by the name Geneviève Marchand. Her short, wavy black bob reminded Eva instantly of the actress Marie Bell, and she had the sort of long legs and good looks that might have made her a star, too, in a different time and place. Here, though, her striking appearance only made her conspicuous, and Eva wondered how someone who looked like that was working for the Resistance, which relied largely on people capable of blending in, people like Eva herself.
She had come from an area known as the Plateau, 150 kilometers southeast of Aurignon. There, she had lived in a village where forgery was big business, and more than a thousand Jews were hidden, under the direction of a local Protestant pastor working with the Resistance. It had sounded like an exaggeration when Geneviève first mentioned it, but Père Clément had explained that the story was true. “Now that the networks are beginning to become more well organized, we are in communication with them,” he’d said. “That’s how they came to send Geneviève here. The man she trained under, a man named Plunne, has forged thousands of documents.”
It turned out that this Plunne’s methods weren’t all that dissimilar from Eva’s, though he was working on a much larger scale. It seemed that he had happened upon some of the same ideas for large-scale forgeries, including using the small copiers with the gel rollers to duplicate stamps. That meant that Geneviève fit right in immediately, and though Eva would never admit it aloud, she was better than Rémy had been, more fastidious, more careful. She sometimes caught small errors—slight misspellings or small discrepancies in details—before Eva did, and that alone was worth the price of her company. If her sharp eye saved even one person from an equally eagle-eyed German, she belonged here.
By the time the snow finally began to thaw, Geneviève had been working in the place that had once been Rémy’s for more than a month, and Rémy still hadn’t returned. Eva worried that she would start to forget him, but every morning, in those first few seconds between dreams and consciousness, she could still taste the sweet saltiness of him on her lips, could still feel the ghost of his body against hers. And then she would be awake and those sensations would be gone, and she would be reminded anew of just how alone she was.
But the longer he was gone, the more she began to wonder whether she’d been fooling herself thinking that her feelings for him could go anywhere. Even in a perfect world—a world where they weren’t at war with an enemy who wanted to murder people like her—he was still a Catholic, and she was still the Jewish daughter of parents who would never approve. If the past nine months had taught her anything, it was how deeply family should be valued and respected. Maybe her mother was right, and Eva should forget about him, try to open her mind to someone more appropriate, like Joseph. The only problem was that as much as Eva could manage to talk her head into it, she couldn’t persuade her heart that Rémy wasn’t worth loving.
Still, he had left her, hadn’t he? She knew he was out there fighting, doing good—if he was even still alive—but on the darkest nights, Eva found herself thinking he would have stayed if he’d loved her enough.
Geneviève didn’t talk much, which suited Eva just fine. And though Eva grew to trust her, she never told her about the Book of Lost Names. At the beginning, she considered it more than once, for they worked together each day, and there was no doubt that Geneviève was as dedicated to the cause as Eva. But the secret was safer if shared only with Rémy and Père Clément, so the priest agreed not to mention it in front of Geneviève, and Eva only added names to the book when the other woman wasn’t there.
On the first truly warm day of 1943, which wasn’t until late April, long after the snow and ice had melted, Eva took off from the secret library a bit early and asked her mother if she wanted to go for a walk. In Paris, she and her mother had been comme les deux doigts de la main, like two fingers of a hand, two peas in a pod. They had shared everything, and Eva had been desperate to make her proud. Here, though, everything had shifted. Her mother didn’t approve of what Eva was doing, and in order to live with herself, Eva had to pretend that she didn’t care. But she did, and though she knew the work was important, the distance between them ate at her. Now that Rémy was gone, Eva could more clearly see the gaping hole in her life where affection and loyalty had once been.
“You want to walk with me?” her mother had asked, pausing midway through folding a blanket to stare at Eva in puzzlement. As Eva had thrown herself more into forging documents, her mother had taken over doing all the cleaning and cooking for Madame Barbier. In the summer, Madame Barbier said, there might be guests, but for now, Mamusia was doing her a service by keeping the place tidy for a small fee. Eva wondered if her mother suspected, as she did, that Madame Barbier simply felt sorry for her and was trying to keep her occupied.