The World That We Knew(53)

The mother superior hoped decent people would prevail and the convent’s paintings, along with the silver and the rugs, would still be here when they returned. Still, she had faith that they would someday resume their work here even if all their worldly possessions disappeared. She sat in the rose garden and thought of the years when she was Madeleine de Masson. She had been left a great deal of money when her grandfather died, some of which her aunt had appropriated, the rest of which she had given to the church when she entered the convent. She did so to be true to her faith and give back to the world. She wondered now how she had been so sure of herself at such a young age.

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chirutei.

May His great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which He created according to His will.

It was the end of something. She was certain of it. She wrote a note to the monsignor, thanking him for his kindness and good deeds, not daring to say more in case the note was intercepted after it was posted. When the sisters went to say prayers in the chapel, it was the last time they would do so. The mother superior was not with them; instead she was at work in the kitchen, and much to their surprise she presented them with breakfast at the appropriate hour. Ava had taught her to add goat’s milk to the pot to stretch the porridge. Students and teachers ate standing up, for there was no time to get comfortable, and they all had their suitcases with them. Ava, always a hard worker, washed and dried the plates and pots, although it was possible they wouldn’t be used again.

When all had gone, the mother superior waited for the soldiers. She looked back fondly on the fact that the sisters had never questioned her when she brought the girls to the school. They had done their work in good faith. And when it was over, and she said they must leave, even the reluctant ones took off their black habits and dressed in the clothes they had collected for the poor before going across the field toward the woods. Sister Félicité escorted the Jewish girls she watched over to a convent near Annecy. Even the heron that had nested in the chimney for so long took flight on that day. Sister Marie wished her grandfather were beside her, for his presence had always given her comfort. She saw the frog in the garden once more and thought perhaps this was a sign that her grandfather was watching over her. She had locked away some of the more important things: a very old Bible that was said to have come from Jerusalem. The silver chalice in the chapel. The book that each novice signed when she entered the convent. But such things would be stolen, most likely, and they were not what mattered most.

They came that afternoon, throwing open the gate, walking with muddy boots through the halls and up the stone stairs. The soldier who interrogated her called her by her given name, Madeleine Salomon Hasson. She was a Jew. The police had never noticed before, but it was right there in front of them. After Favre’s report, the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn’t know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. He had been twenty-four when he came from Algeria with his wife, Milah, and when she died he had donated a large bequest to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where roses were planted in his wife’s name. He had made donations to many schools and synagogues and began a fund for the poor who were newly arrived from Algeria. These facts were read aloud, as if they were criminal acts, but they were simply the small truths that allowed the mother superior to understand why she had come to this place to teach and to accept girls no one else would take on, and why she had loved this rose garden so well, for it was in her lineage to favor beauty and knowledge, as it was to have regrets, now, at the end of her life.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


IN THE FOREST




ARDèCHE, NOVEMBER 1942

THEY SLEPT IN THE TREES or beneath bowers of the tall, plumy underbrush, waking with leaves in their hair. The air was crisp and fragrant, the moon a silver slip that grew fatter and more orange every night. Sometimes they spied other people in the woods, living as best they could, Jews and refugees and young French men escaping from forced labor. Ava gave away half their food to starving families who had nowhere to go but the caves. When these refugees saw a tall woman followed by a huge heron, they were astonished and hopeful. It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world.

When they were alone in the mountains, they might have been a million miles away from Paris. The pastures were turning brown and the leaves were yellow, as if the stars had fallen from the sky. As long as they stayed away from cities and towns, the world felt as it had for hundreds of years, pure and elemental. The rivers and streams went along beds of stone and granite, the water a pale blue-gray.

Night after night, in the trees or in the grass, Lea dreamed of her mother. She heard Hanni’s voice in the wind, in birdsong, in falling leaves.

I was with you when the roses bloomed with silver petals, when you saw Paris for the first time, when that boy looked at you, when you learned prayers in the convent, when you ran through the woods.

Every time Ava took your hand, it was my hand you held.

They were protected and hidden, while all across the continent there was the Shoah, an attempt at the total destruction of the Jews, as had been recorded time and again in the Torah. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of Shoah and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. By now millions of Jews had been murdered. They had been sent to the death camps; buried deep in the forests of Poland, body upon body, fragile and naked, twisted and torn. There were souls that had turned black with horror who now perched in the trees, trembling and stunned by what some men were capable of, unable to move on from the spot where they had been murdered, incapable of entering the World to Come. They had been tortured, separated from those they loved, made to dig their own graves, castrated, humiliated, with the gold removed from their teeth, gassed at a rate of six thousand a day in Auschwitz. The Destruction hung across the world in darkness, in a cloud. When Lea dreamed of her mother, Hanni was shoeless, her hair shorn. But her eyes were shining. Like Rachel in the Torah, who wept with grief over the loss of her children, Hanni wept in these dreams. She was without words, without a mouth, without a body, beneath the dirt, none of which stopped her love.