The Storyteller of Casablanca (78)

Nina puts her hand over Josie’s at this point, and I see how it trembles, but she takes a shaky breath to steady herself and continues.

‘I only pieced together what happened later, of course, from what others told me. The force of the blast knocked me unconscious and threw me into the water. Felix was still there and he saw what had happened. He jumped in to save me. If I hadn’t gone up on deck and if he hadn’t raced to the port to try and warn us of the imminent attack on Casablanca itself, I wouldn’t be here telling you this today. So it’s funny, isn’t it, that indirectly it was my journal that saved me?’ She strokes the leather cover with her henna-painted fingers.

‘The water was covered in a sheet of flames, with all the fuel leaking from the sinking ship, and I was badly burned, as you can see.’ She draws the edge of her shawl a little closer to the side of her face that’s most badly damaged.

‘What about your mother and Annette?’ I ask, although I already know what she’s going to tell me. Nina squeezes her hand a little tighter.

‘They were trapped in their cabin when the ship went down, along with most of the other refugees who were leaving that day. None of them made it.’

We’re silent for a few moments and Nina reaches to pour the tea, providing a welcome distraction from the pang of grief I feel at hearing these words from Josie. How she must have suffered, and not just from her physical injuries. It must have been terrible for her, in a way, to have been the only member of her family to have survived.

When she’s ready, she continues. ‘Anyway, Felix leapt into the burning water and pulled me out. He was lucky he only suffered minor burns himself, the foolish boy. He managed to find a navy medic on the quayside, who did enough to save my life. I was in hospital for many months.’

‘The same one Josephine Baker was in?’ I ask.

She laughs. ‘No, hers was a very smart private clinic. I was in a far more modest hospital. And then, when I was well enough, Kenza and Nina came and brought me here to their home. We’d always felt like sisters, hadn’t we?’ She smiles at Nina. ‘And, after all, the dreamseller had always insisted that I was part of the family – remember, she’d seen it when we first met.

‘Miss Ellis and Hélène Bénatar tried to track down other members of my parents’ families who might take me in, but everything was in such chaos that it was impossible.’

‘What about your uncle and aunt and the annoying cousins who fled Alsace before you left Paris? You mentioned them at the very start of the journal.’

Josie’s eyes cloud with sadness. ‘Theirs was one of the threads Madame Bénatar followed, which ended with deportation to the camps in the east. Joseph, Paulette and their two sons died in Belsen. It was certainly not a time for me to return to France, and attempting to get to America again was impossible by then. No one came looking for me. I suppose my mother’s American relatives – if they were even expecting us – would have read about the attacks on Casablanca and assumed we’d all been killed.’

As I listen, I’m reminded of the story of ‘The Dream’ from the Thousand and One Nights. ‘So you didn’t need to seek your future elsewhere after all? It was right here, all along, just as the dreamseller had seen.’

Josie chuckles. ‘You know how the story goes, don’t you, Zoe? That’s right – and secretly I was relieved. I didn’t want to have to face leaving Casablanca again. Having already gone through that twice was more than enough. In any case, once the Americans were here everyone was even more preoccupied with fighting the war. I felt safe and happy with Kenza and Nina, who were all the family I had left, so here I stayed.

‘Nina spent hours reading to me while my body and my mind mended. She’d go on the bike to the library and take out books.’

I nod. ‘I saw your name recorded in the ledger at the library. I thought it might be Nina.’

She chuckles. ‘I think we reread every single one of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels during that time and it was a comforting distraction for me. Something familiar when my mind wasn’t able to make much sense of anything else. My memory seemed to be full of holes.’

‘Is that why you didn’t tell Kenza where you’d hidden the journal and box so she could fetch them from your old house?’ I ask her.

She nods. ‘I was in the hospital for so long and my mind shut out a lot of what happened – there were places I just couldn’t reach, even though I kept trying because I had a sense of certain important things being missing. Besides, the house was very soon let to new tenants and Kenza no longer worked there because she was so busy caring for me, so even if I had remembered it would have been difficult to gain access and retrieve my things.’ Once more she pats the cover of the journal, which lies in her lap. ‘It’s been wonderful reading this all over again. You’ve given me back so many happy memories and reminded me what my papa and I did. We weren’t just helpless little white mice, after all.’

‘And Felix? What happened to him?’

She smiles broadly. ‘He and his parents got out in the end. They went to America. And guess what? He became an orthodontist! He spent the rest of his days fixing people’s smiles, having had his own fixed first, of course. I have a photo here, look.’

She rifles through a folder of letters and postcards and draws out a photo printed on to a card along with the words Happy Hanukkah from the Adlers! In it, a grey-haired man stands with his arm around a smiling woman and they’re flanked by three children, all with perfect white American teeth. ‘Sadly, he passed away a couple of years back. His wife still writes occasionally, though. They visited – when was it, Nina? About ten years ago? That’s right, it was a special trip they made for the millennium. He wanted to show his wife and kids where he’d been in the war years. They retraced the whole journey, from Vienna to Casablanca.’