The Winemaker's Wife(97)

For two and a half months, she went every day to the H?tel Lutetia on the boulevard Raspail, searching for some sign that Céline had found a way to survive. But day after day, Inès walked home empty-handed to her small apartment on the rue Amélie. Some days she went east instead and strolled David through the flowers and greenery in the Luxembourg gardens; other days, she walked him past the gold-domed building that housed Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides. But always, always, she told the little boy stories of his mother and his father, brave heroes of France. His father, she said, had left on a journey and would not be coming back, but they were still waiting for his mother, who would surely return.

But the months passed, and in the third week of August, Inès finally found a hollow-eyed woman who said she had known Céline at Auschwitz. “Do you know if she has returned yet?” Inès asked, shifting David to the opposite hip and leaning forward eagerly. “We haven’t been able to find her, though we’ve come here every day.” The woman was emaciated, her fuzzy gray hair clinging to her head in patches, her body covered in rags.

“Madame,” the woman croaked, “I’m afraid your friend is not coming back.”

Inès had stopped breathing. She put David down, held his hand, and moved in front of him so that her body was blocking his. He understood nearly everything the adults around him were talking about these days. “What do you mean?” Inès whispered as David giggled and squirmed behind her legs.

The woman’s eyes pooled with tears and she shook her head. “We were together in the barracks for a time. She came from a village near Reims, yes? Ville-something?”

“Yes, that’s right. Ville-Dommange.”

“My dear, she died in the winter, just before the camp was liberated. It was January, the second week, I think.”

“Are you certain?” Inès swallowed hard, trying to fight the wave of guilt crashing over her. “Wh-what happened?”

“Tuberculosis,” the woman said. “At least I believe so. It’s not as if we could simply walk into a clinic to be diagnosed, you know.” She laughed hoarsely and then sobered. “It was snowing outside the night she died, and she was coughing up blood. We all knew it was the end for her, and in the morning, she was gone.”

“But she hasn’t been on any of the lists of the deceased.”

“The weeks just before liberation were chaos. I’m quite certain the Nazis were more concerned with covering their tracks than updating their records. Besides, to them, she was just a number, never a person. None of us were.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I envy her, going before they marched us out into the wilderness. Besides, my whole family is dead. There’s no one. Sometimes at night I ask God why he did not take me, too.”

“I’m very sorry for you,” Inès said. “But Céline wasn’t alone. She had a child.”

The woman’s eyes flicked behind Inès and widened. “He is Céline’s? Well, that is a tragedy indeed. She spoke of a son, but I never believed he had lived.”

Inès glanced back at David, who was now pretending his hand was a truck and zooming it up and down her calf, making engine noises. He was completely oblivious to the woman’s words, to the way they forever changed his world. “You’re absolutely sure it was Céline? Céline Laurent from Ville-Dommange? There’s not a chance you are wrong?”

“None,” the woman said without hesitation. “She spoke sometimes of the champagne house she left behind, the man she had loved there.”

Inès’s heart lurched. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “But now it is time to rebuild, is it not? To try to make a future? You must make sure her child finds a good home, parents who love him.”

Inès turned and bent to David, kissing him tenderly on the forehead before lifting him into her arms. “Maman!” he said excitedly, and the term of endearment made Inès begin to cry, for though she had tried to make him call her Tante Inès instead, to explain that his real mother was coming back for him, he still slipped from time to time.

“His home,” Inès said, turning back to the woman, “is with me. And I’ll love him with all my heart for the rest of my life.”

“Well, then,” the woman said. “I suppose you are his mother now.” And then she was gone, vanished back into the crowd before Inès could even ask her name.

Inès continued to take David back to the H?tel Lutetia each day until the center for returning deportees finally closed, just in case the woman had been wrong, just in case there was a chance. But Inès knew she was living in denial. Finally, when Céline’s picture was taken down from the board of the missing, Inès left the Lutetia with David for the last time, determined to begin a new life, a life in which the mother in the boy’s fairy tales wasn’t coming back, a life in which the woman left behind—a woman who didn’t deserve to be the only one who lived—was all he had.

? ? ?

Inès returned to Reims just once, in 1946, and then only to ensure that the Maison Chauveau was not sold out from under her. She had intended to visit Monsieur Godard, the attorney who had initially presented her with the paperwork after Michel’s death, but on her way from the train station, as a three-year-old David hurried behind her, clinging to her hand, she happened to see a plaque affixed to an unassuming door on the rue du Trésor. Samuel Cohn Société d’Avocats, it read. There was almost no chance it was the young lawyer she and Edith had helped shelter in 1943, was there? But what if fate had spared him the way it had spared her?