The World That We Knew(32)

CHAPTER TWELVE


THE HERON




PARIS, SPRING 1942

THE HERON HAD GONE TO Spain and then to Africa. He simply couldn’t tolerate the cold; his bones were hollow and he needed light and food. But at last he came back for her and one warm night he called to her. Ava heard his voice and she could feel his cry echo inside of her. When she knew Lea was safely asleep, she rose from the blanket on the floor, which served as her bed. She went out the window, through the garden that was covered with blue squill, and then climbed over the garden gate Madame Lévi kept locked. She ran to the river, her breath coming hard. This was what freedom felt like, escaping the bonds that tied her, doing as she pleased, if only for a few hours. It was wrong, and she knew it, but she could not deny herself this one pleasure. She spied the heron in the shallows, in the place where she most wanted to be. Every night she went there, at the same hour, and every morning she returned with her hair streaming down her back, wet from the river.

One night, Lea woke to find Ava gone. Lea had been dreaming of her mother, and when she had such dreams it was as if she’d had a visitation, as if the dream was real and her waking life was imagined. In her dream, they’d sat together on a bench in their courtyard, and Hanni had leaned close to whisper. She is not who she thinks she is, she was made to love you, but she doesn’t know that yet. Every time she looks at you, I see you. Every time she embraces you, you are in my arms.

This spring Jews in Paris had been made to buy yellow stars to be sewn onto their clothing. They had been given food cards imprinted with the word Jew. All public places were now forbidden.

Lea went into the garden to wait for Ava. She felt as though her mother had woken her for a reason. She thought of all her mother had done for her and all she had sacrificed.

If what she’d read was true, Ava would not refuse her one wish.

At last, near dawn, the golem returned with mud on her bare feet and her hair wringing wet. She leapt over the wall as if she were a deer and landed in an overgrown bed of ivy. When she saw Lea, she was embarrassed to appear as a wild creature, hands patchy with river silt, nearly flying into the garden. She came to sit beside Lea on the bench. The hem of her dress was wet; it was the same dress the housemaid had worn before she’d run away, but Marianne had kept her clothes starched and pressed, and now the fabric was streaked with mud.

“You should be asleep,” Ava told Lea.

“So should you.”

“But here we are.”

“I won’t ask you where you’ve been,” Lea said.

Good. Ava was surprised by her own thoughts. I won’t tell you.

“But I need you to save my mother,” Lea went on. “We must go back to Berlin.”

It was impossible. Ava was made to do as she was told and she had been told to keep Lea safe. “I must do as your mother instructed.”

“Would you do anything my mother told you?”

“I’m here to keep you safe” was all Ava would say.

Here because you have to be, Lea thought. Because you are a slave and I am your burden. I am your duty and nothing more. We are yoked together and we’d best not speak about it, or look into each other’s eyes, in case we find that nothing at all is there.

The golem knew that Lea’s neighborhood in Berlin had been emptied of Jewish residents. Thousands had been sent east to Poland to the killing camps, Hanni Kohn among them. Soon after they had left for France, on an ordinary afternoon, the soldiers came. Bobeshi had been shot as she lay in her bed; she’d been too infirm to be taken from the apartment, too much trouble, too unimportant, not a person, not a soul, not a woman who spoke to God as she was murdered, turning to the angel in the black coat when he came to offer her comfort and take her in his arms.

“There’s nothing to go back to,” Ava said.

It was a dark dream, Hanni whispered in her daughter’s ear. Lea did not need to be asleep to hear her mother’s voice. It was nothing like the world that we knew. Stones, murder, lice, greed, horror, birds falling from the sky, the grave you made for others, the grave you made for yourself. There were more demons every day, so many, there was no longer any room for them in the trees or on the window ledges. They walked through the streets as if they were men, ready to own the world. And where were the angels, the ones who walked so near to mortals you could sometimes feel them beside you? There was only one angel left in all of Berlin, the one with the black coat and the book of names. There were as many names as there were demons. The book was filled in a matter of days. There was another book needed, and then another, until there were three hundred, and then three thousand, and then the books were piled upon each other until they reached to heaven.

Keep her safe.

That was her last thought as she stood in the cavernous hole she had been forced to dig, in a country where she didn’t belong. Those were the words Ava had heard at the moment Hanni arose into the World to Come. Those were the words Lea heard now.



Lea went to hide behind the greenhouse. She was there crying when Julien found her. The whole city of Paris was crying, but hers was the only voice he heard.

“I want to go home,” she told him.

“All right.”

“But I can’t. I can never.”

“Of course you can. I’ll go with you.” When she gave him a look, Julien insisted. “Why not? Who’s to stop us?”