The Winemaker's Wife(95)

“I can’t believe it.” Now, when the sobs came again, they were for Inès, too, for another young life lost too soon. None of them deserved what had come their way.

Céline’s father and grandparents were long dead—she knew now that they had been gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz in 1942—and any future she had dared dream of had been snatched from her trembling fingers. She looked down at her spindly arms, at the numbers inked just above her left wrist, numbers that were meant to take away her humanity, her name.

But without Michel and without David, she had no identity anyhow. How could she ever return to being Céline Laurent, the wife of a cold winemaker, the lover of a warm man who had never really been hers, the mother of a child whose death she had failed to prevent?

So she wiped away her tears, and with Madame Foucault’s support, she struggled to her feet. She turned to Monsieur Berthelot, whose eyes were wet. Her story had moved him, and she knew he would help her. “I’m very sorry, monsieur, but would it be possible for you to drive me to Paris?”

“To Paris? Well, yes, of course, madame.” He dashed off to get his keys.

“What will you do in Paris?” Madame Foucault asked.

Céline gazed out the barn door, where a sliver of the vineyards, of the rolling hills, of the magic of Champagne, was just visible. She wanted to remember this place, to fix it in her mind. “In Paris,” she murmured, “I will disappear.”

Life was no longer worth living as Céline Laurent. That woman—the woman who fell in love, the woman who still didn’t regret it, the woman who had fallen asleep one night in her lover’s arms and awoken to lose everything—didn’t exist anymore.

If David was gone, then the last pieces of herself, the ones she had clung to in Auschwitz, had disappeared forever, too. And so she climbed into the passenger seat of the new winemaker’s car and closed her eyes. When they arrived in Paris, and Monsieur Berthelot insisted on pressing some francs into her hand, she thanked him and said goodbye.

But the farewell wasn’t for him, not really. It was for the life that would be forever behind her the moment he drove away. She would go as far from Reims as she could. She would blend in with all the other refugees returning from the grave. She would become someone new and hope that somewhere, there was a life ahead of her after all.





thirty-two


MAY 1945





INèS


By the time the war in Europe ended, with the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich’s armed forces signed right in the center of Reims on May 7, 1945, everything had long since changed for Inès.

After she had left Edith’s apartment in 1943, she had gone first to Paris, but no one knew her there, and it was difficult to find her way into any sort of underground network. Desperate to help, she made her way south, finally arriving in the Auvergne, where she found a group of maquisards willing to let her join them in the Forest of Tron?ais. She learned to shoot and became good at planting explosives under railway tracks to disrupt German transports. She thought sometimes that Michel might have been proud of her.

Inès was a dedicated, selfless soldier, and in return, she asked only one thing of the group’s leader, a man named Tardivat, whom she’d grown to both respect and fear. “There is a man named Antoine Picard in Reims,” she said as the war in France wound down in the summer of 1944. “I’m to blame for my husband’s death, but Michel’s blood is on Picard’s hands, too. I want him to pay.”

Tardivat had smiled wearily. “Consider it done. And try to forgive yourself, would you, Inès? We’ve all done things we regret.”

Inès had looked away. “I don’t deserve forgiveness, sir.” The only way she would ever be able to live with herself was if she managed to reunite Céline with her son one day. It was a hope she had clung to over the long and painful months with the Maquis.

In the fall of 1944, two months after the liberation of Reims, Inès returned to Champagne and went straight to the Brasserie Moulin. But it was under new management, and all that the waiter at the front would tell her was that Edouard Thierry was still living in the apartment above the restaurant, rarely venturing out. “What about Edith?” Inès asked, bile rising in her throat. “What about the baby?” The man had only shaken his head and pointed upstairs.

Inès took the stairs two at a time and knocked on the door to the apartment, then pounded when no one came. She barely recognized the man who finally answered. Edouard had lost at least twenty pounds, his body concave now, and he had aged a decade since she’d last seen him a year and a half earlier. His hair had gone almost fully gray, his stubble white, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. “You’re alive?” he rasped.

“Where is Edith?” Inès asked, grasping his hands. He seemed to rock with the weight of her touch. “Where’s David?”

From within the apartment, she heard crying, the sound of a child, and Edouard looked over his shoulder and then back at Inès.

Inès pushed past him and found a toddler, two years old now, standing up in a rickety crib, reaching out his chubby arms. He stopped crying when he saw her, and they stared at each other. In the time she’d been away, he had grown to look even more like his father. He had Michel’s light hair now, his narrow nose, his crystal-blue eyes. But the shape of his face, the pitch of his chin, were all Céline. Inès bit back a sob and went to him. “Sweet David,” she murmured, and as she lifted him up and held him to her, he babbled into her shoulder and buried his small fingers in her wild hair. “Oh, thank God.”