The Book of Lost Names(77)

She blushed and looked away. “I want to be at the place where we rendezvous, just in case. I don’t know how long it will take him to get to the forest and back, but if he is able to return home, he might need comfort.”

“He’s lucky to have you, Geneviève. Please, be safe.”

With a murmured merci, Geneviève left, and Eva turned back to her stack of ration cards with a sigh.



* * *



By the end of the week, Joseph had returned with good news: he had reached the maquisards in time, and though the leader still didn’t seem to entirely trust him, he had accepted the documents with gratitude and agreed to move.

But Rémy hadn’t been there, Joseph told Eva, and he didn’t know where he’d gone. It had been nearly four months since Eva had seen him last, and she wondered if he was still thinking of her, or if he had settled in another town somewhere, perhaps even found another woman to help fight the Germans, a Catholic woman, one who wouldn’t push him away because of religion and family loyalty. If she had lost him, she had only herself to blame.

You have to trust in God and wait for him to send you a sign. Père Clément’s words had continued to ring in her ears, but she had begun to wonder whether God would even have the time to give someone like her a second thought. There were much more important things to be worrying about than a woman who had realized too late that she loved a man who might never know how she felt, might never come back.

Five weeks later, Eva was alone in the secret room finishing up the identity papers of eight children due to be moved across the Swiss border the next day. As she flipped to page 233 in the book to start a record for the 231st child they’d helped, her heart skipped. There was a dot on the page—over an à halfway down—that she was sure she hadn’t put there herself. And she knew the page was part of her own sequence—one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three—numbers so familiar she could recite them in her sleep.

She stared, her hand frozen on the page. The dots that spelled Traube had ended on page thirty-four, and though there were dots that made up letters of a few children’s names, and a triangle from her own backward sequence, those marks ended in the first paragraph. Who would have added an additional dot on this page? Was it an error? A drip of ink she hadn’t noticed? Or had Rémy left her another message in the book without her realizing? Hands shaking, she flipped back to the first page and found a second star that was brand-new. The first one—over the e in Le—and the dot over the v in l’Avent were familiar, but the star over the J in Jean several lines down was not, nor was the dot just beside it over the e in the same word.

Quickly, her pulse racing, she flipped to page two and found a new dot over the r in car, and another new dot over the e in de on the second line of the next page. She turned to the pages in the sequence she now knew by heart, all the way to page 610, and by the time she had jotted down the letter under each new dot, the message was clear.

Je reviendrai à toi. I will return to you.

She stared at it through eyes blurred with tears. Rémy had left word for her after all, a promise, a vow to come back.

It was just the kind of sign Père Clément had urged her to look for. And now, as it sat in front of her in crisp black and white, she believed. She looked heavenward, closed her eyes, and murmured, “Thank you, God. Thank you for the sign. And please, please bring him back to me.”





Chapter Twenty-Four




May 2005

My flight lands in Berlin just past eleven in the morning. I should be exhausted—it’s only five in the morning back home in Florida, and I slept fitfully on the plane—but being in Europe for the first time in decades does something strange to me. I feel young again, and as I stare out the window at airport vehicles that are boxier and stouter than the ones in the States, I can’t help murmuring a line from a movie I haven’t thought of in years: “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The words remind me of a little girl who was six the last time I saw her, the child whose real name—Frania Kor—I recorded on page 147 in the Book of Lost Names. I wonder if she ever made it back to France, if her parents made it home, if she ever got to see the film based on the book she loved so much. Not knowing which of the children survived, or found their families again, has been a source of heartbreak for sixty years, and now my tears spill over. I retrieve a handkerchief from my bag to wipe my wet cheeks.

The woman in the seat beside me, who didn’t speak at all during the flight despite my attempt to exchange pleasantries, gives me a strange look and inches away, as if my grief might be contagious.

As we exit the plane into Berlin’s bustling airport, I’m swept along by a crowd. All around me, people speak to each other in German, and I have to remind myself that Hitler is long dead. Evil doesn’t live here anymore; this is just a place, and the people around me are just people. And isn’t that the moral of the story anyhow? You can’t judge a person by their language or their place of origin—though it seems that each new generation insists upon learning that lesson for itself. I think fleetingly of Erich, whose face I’ve tried desperately to both forget and remember over the years, and my eyes cloud with unexpected tears. I stumble, and the man who catches me is young and blond with piercing blue eyes.