The Book of Lost Names(78)

He says something in German, and despite myself, despite the fact that the war has been over for sixty years, I flinch, my heart hammering. He looks startled and moves away as soon as I’m steady on my feet.

“Danke!” I call after him, but it’s too late; he’s already gone.

After a blissfully short stop at passport control, and another at a currency exchange window, I queue in the taxi line and step into a waiting cab a few moments later. The driver asks something in German, and again, I have to swallow a thick feeling of unease.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak German,” I tell him as I pull the door closed behind me.

“Ah, English.”

“Yes.”

“I was asking where your luggage is.” His accent is thick, but I’m relieved that we can communicate. He’s perhaps a decade younger than I am, and he has a comb-over that reminds me of my late husband, Louis.

“I brought only this overnight bag.” I gesture to the tote on the seat beside me. “I’m not staying long.”

“Am I taking you to your hotel, then?”

“Actually, I’m going to a library, the Zentral-und Landesbibliothek.” I pull a scrap of paper from my purse and read the address aloud.

He nods and glances at me in the rearview mirror after he has pulled away from the curb. “And what brings you to Berlin?”

I consider the question. “I suppose you could say it is to see an old friend.”



* * *



Berlin is modern and bustling, more beautiful than I had imagined it to be. I know it was shattered in the waning days of the war, just as France was, and I marvel at the rejuvenation around me. One would never know that six decades ago, the city was rubble. I wonder how Aurignon looks now, whether it, too, was rebuilt, whether any of the old scars remain. And what of Père Clément’s church? Does it still stand?

By the time the cab pulls up in front of the library thirty minutes later, I’m emotionally spent. But the siren song of the Book of Lost Names is getting stronger, and I’m powerless to stop the memories from rolling in like waves.

“Enjoy your visit with your friend,” the driver says cheerfully after I’ve handed him a few crisp bills and he has helped me out of the back seat. As the cab pulls away, I finally turn to face the library, my heart thudding.

It’s enormous and lined with hundreds of identical windows, and even though this building is modern, angular, there’s something about it that reminds me of the Mazarine Library in Paris. I try to push from my mind the number of times I stood waiting on those steps, waiting for a future that never came. But of course forgetting is impossible. The memories are all around me. Slowly, I ascend to the front door and pull it open.

Inside, I breathe deeply as my eyes adjust to the dim lighting. It’s incredible how familiar the place feels, though I’ve never been here. Once you’ve fallen in love with books, their presence can make you feel at home anywhere, even in places where you shouldn’t belong. I walk up to the desk at the end of the long entry hall, and the young woman seated there looks up with a smile.

“Guten Tag, gn?dige Frau,” she says. “Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry, but do you speak English?”

Her forehead creases. “My English, it is not so good.”

“Fran?ais?” I ask, though it’s been ages since I spoke my native tongue. “Um, franz?sisch?”

Her face lights up. “Oui,” she says. “Je parle un peu fran?ais. Puis-je vous aider?”

How strange, I think, to be speaking French in Germany, a country that not so long ago tried to wipe my people from the map. I tell her in French that I’m here to see Otto Kühn, and I’m surprised to hear the tremor in my own voice.

“Certainement.” She reaches for her phone and asks me if she can tell him who is here to see him.

I take a deep breath. It feels suddenly as if everything has been leading to this moment. “Je suis…” I hesitate, because it doesn’t matter who I am. It matters what I am here to do. So instead I tell her simply that I’m here for the book.

She tilts her head to the side. “Le livre, madame?”

“Oui.” The world seems to stop spinning. “I’m here,” I tell her in French, “for the Book of Lost Names.”





Chapter Twenty-Five




January 1944

By January 1944, darkness had fallen on Aurignon, and Rémy still hadn’t returned. The winter was cold, one of the coldest Eva could remember, and rations were in short supply. Germany was suffering losses now, with the Allies heavily bombing Berlin and the Red Army entering Poland, pushing the Germans back from the east. The worse the situation became for them, the more they seemed to take their anger out on the French. Here, in the mountains of southeast central France, there was never enough fuel, never enough heat, never enough food. Even the farmer who had supplied Madame Barbier had vanished, meaning that the days of occasional roast chicken feasts at the boardinghouse were long gone, too. Most of the people Eva knew in the underground gave up a portion of their rations each month to keep the residents of the children’s homes nourished for the eventual journey they would take across the mountains, and that meant that they all seemed to be withering to skin and bones. Eva looked in the mirror sometimes and hardly recognized the sharp lines of her own narrowing face.