The World That We Knew(34)

In her groggy state, Lea didn’t think to be defiant when Ava said they must leave. She dressed quickly, while Ava tossed the suitcase out the window, then they both climbed out. There was a stream of pale moonlight, like the moonlight in a dream. It was already spring. The world was green and pulsing and beautiful.

“Hurry,” Ava told Lea, who lagged behind.

Lea now stopped on the path, refusing to go any further. “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re not my mother.”

Ava was not made to have emotions, but the remark hurt, as if she had pricked her finger on glass.

“You’re nothing to me,” Lea went on, furious with Ava ever since her refusal to go back to Berlin. “You go! Leave me here.”

Ava put down the suitcase. “I may not be your mother, but I act on her behalf. Do as I say.”

Lea’s eyes were blazing. “I won’t. I don’t want to go because I don’t want to be with you!” she cried.

“You can come with me,” Ava said, “or I can take you with me.”

“How? With a rope around my neck?”

“If I need to, yes.”

Their breath came hard in the cool, foggy night. Ava seemed even taller in her black boots.

“There is no rope,” Lea said uncertainly. “And, anyway, you wouldn’t dare.”

Ava nodded at the shrubbery that was covered with burlap, tied with heavy rope. It was a lilac and the leaves were growing right through the burlap. The rope was slack.

Lea knew what her mother would say if she had been there.

She has been sent to you to save your life. Don’t throw everything away.

“Fine,” Lea said grudgingly. “But first I say goodbye.”

The heron was waiting in what had once been a sapling the first Monsieur Lévi had planted, a cutting from the oldest locust tree in Paris, which had stood on the Rive Gauche for more than four hundred years at an ancient Roman crossroad. It was said that good luck would belong to anyone who ran their hand over the locust’s bark, but Ava could see demons massing in trees all over Paris, in the cherry trees that surrounded Notre-Dame, the sequoia brought from California that stood in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the huge ginkgo biloba planted in the Parc Monceau in 1879.

Ava let Lea have the one thing she wanted, such a small request, really, when she would lose everything else. Their time here was over, it was already in the past, and they both knew it.

Lea rushed to take some pebbles from the ground to toss against Julien’s window. He woke and looked out, rumpled with sleep. When he saw her, he knew. Julien pulled on his clothes and took the stairs two at a time. He brought his rucksack with him. He had decided that if they should leave, he would go with them and had already written a note for his parents, wherein he did his best to explain his disappearance. But when he reached the kitchen, there was his mother, waiting for him. Since Victor had vanished she hadn’t once slept through the night. Now she’d heard stones flung up to his window.

“What are you doing?” she asked him. “Do you think you’re going somewhere?”

“Mama,” Julien said. He could see that her hands were shaking. “I must.”

“And do what your brother did? Abandon us?”

He came to sit beside her. She was brokenhearted. He had never seen her cry before, and now tears streamed down her face. “It’s not like that.”

“It’s that girl,” Claire said.

“Not at all.”

She gave a short bitter laugh. “You’re too young for such things anyway. You’re a baby.”

“It’s time to go. You know it’s true.”

“When your father says it’s time, it’s time!” Claire’s expression was set, her eyes bright with hurt. If she lost her children she lost everything. The house and all the time she’d spent on keeping up appearances meant nothing. This was her heart, sitting beside her, the boy who looked anxiously through the window, so ready to leave. “Go on,” she said. “Go! But you tell your father, not me. Wake him up and tell him. Look at his face while you do so. Then you can leave.”

Julien thought of the look on his father’s face as he’d buried his papers. Most likely all of his writings would rot in the ground before anyone could dig them up again. He was well aware that his father cried late at night, alone in the library. There were hardly any books left, and the empty shelves haunted him.

“Tell him right now!” Julien’s mother said. “And then you can break my heart because we will never see each other again.”

Because he could not do that to her, Julien left his rucksack on the chair and went into the garden. As soon as Lea saw his expression she knew he wasn’t going.

“My parents,” he said. “My mother.”

His mother was in the doorway now, watching. Even from a distance Lea could tell she was crying.

“I’ll write to you,” Lea told Julien.

Julien smiled, a weary look on his face. She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he was wrong. She would find a way. Julien was so tall Lea was forced to stand on tiptoe as she leaned closer. There was only one thing he had to do and they would surely see each other again.

“Stay alive,” she told him.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN