The World That We Knew(19)

“It’s best to get some sleep,” Ava advised, for this is what Lea’s mother would have said.

“And what will happen to me?” Lea ventured to ask.

The train lurched forward. They were leaving behind scores of people in the tall grass. Some were living, some were dead, some would be arrested, some would do anything in order to survive, and one was in the forest, running toward the blue mountains. Ava looked out to where her maker had disappeared. She saw the souls of the lost in the trees, side by side with the angels. She saw the future, but the future could change at the angels’ commands.

“We must hope for the best,” she told the girl.

She might have said more if she’d had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn’t been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season’s bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world.





CHAPTER SIX


IN ANOTHER COUNTRY




PARIS, SPRING 1941

THE FRENCH COUSINS LIVED IN a tall stucco house that had been in the family for three generations. There were two yellow brick chimneys, a wrought-iron fence, green shutters on every window, and an enormous garden, now in ruins. No one had time to take care of a garden, for there was no help and no money to pay the gardener, a fellow named Edgar, who had worked for the family for over a decade. France had declared war on Germany in September 1939, and by June 1940, the Germans had entered Paris. By that time two million Parisians had fled, and those who stayed saw the city grow dark and silent, with food shortages. Of the 150,000 Jews in Paris, a third were foreign refugees, but soon enough that number dropped by two thirds. Many people fled or were arrested. For those who remained, there was no fuel or coffee or soap or shoes, and the increasing fear and hatred of the Nazis was expressed behind closed shutters.

This past winter the Lévis had been forced to cut down the lime trees to burn in the fireplace. There was no coal, and bundles of wood were no longer sold on the streets. Even in spring the world was surrounded by gloom. Markets were closed, people didn’t venture outside, parks were empty.

The Lévis had not been among the hordes of people who left the city when a radio announcement was made by the government that accepted France’s collusion with Germany. The local politicians knew Professor André Lévi and made an allowance, permitting him to keep his house and go on with his work, which might be useful to the military. Many residents went west and south, many to Toulouse, where the archbishop, Monsignor Jules-Gérard Saliège, was one of the first Catholic priests to speak out against the treatment of foreign-born Jews. The government itself had moved to the center of France in the city of Vichy, which they promised would remain an unoccupied area. Yet people wondered what that freedom meant. Free to do as they were told? Newspapers were censored, a curfew was put down, and residents were lifted off the street and never seen again.

For three generations, the Lévis had never thought of themselves as anything but French. Their tall house had a fish pond and, until they had recently been cut down, the oldest lime trees in Paris, and was hidden away on a tiny street on the Left Bank. The third Monsieur Lévi, André, was a mathematician who had been a child prodigy in the field of rational numbers and algebraic geometry and for two decades had been an eminent professor at the école Polytechnique, until Jews were asked to leave. He thought the next few years under the Germans must be navigated as a maze would be, and at this he was expert. There was a small maze of hedges in the garden, and it was here the professor first taught his son Julien about spatial analysis. He had often brought him to the garden at the Chateau de Villandry, where a Renaissance maze signified the progression of life. He would blindfold Julien so that the boy could feel the geography and learn to visualize spatial relationships. In time Julien became astoundingly good at running the maze without stumbling over the hedges, excellent practice for a mathematician who must be willing to believe there is a logic to all things.

In his everyday life, André Lévi continued to think of number theory, the study of whole numbers that traced back to the Babylonians. His special professional interest was the speed with which the universe was expanding, in part by refining the use of Cepheid stars as yardsticks. For him the world was divided, and because of this he often didn’t see human beings, not even those he knew intimately, whether they were his wife or his two sons, Julien and Victor, or the young housemaid, Marianne. Professor Lévi had managed to keep the house by paying off a local magistrate. Each week more of their belongings were sold in order to do so, first the paintings off the walls, then silverware from the table, then the cameos in Madame Claire’s mirrored jewelry box.

The professor did his best to continue with his life’s work, published in several groundbreaking papers in France and Germany, coauthored with several renowned German mathematicians who were working on Fermat’s last theorem, proposed by Pierre Fermat in 1637, the most famous but not yet proven theorem in number theory. But now his wife had come to his study to tell him two strangers claiming to be cousins had arrived, interrupting his thoughts about the length of the solar system. It often seemed that his wife, Claire, was speaking an entirely different language, one in which household details played a great part. There was so little food to be had that she had begun a vegetable patch in the garden, tearing out the bellflowers and vivid pink roses in order to plant leeks and cabbages and escarole. She let the rest of it go to seed, and the wilder sections of the garden near the old and beautiful greenhouse, where jasmine and all manner of exotic plants once grew, had become home to glis glis, large dormice that were usually only to be found in the countryside. Madame was practical at all times. She had come to prefer a scraggly plant laden with tomatoes to a fragrant peony, and a mouse to a rat. But cousins were another matter entirely.