Odette's Secrets (21 page)

One spring day, Europe's Lost and Found

finds something to return to French Jews …

a small box.

The box contains the ashes of Jews who died in terrible places,

places called concentration camps.

No one really knows for sure,

but they might be the ashes of our friends and relatives.

We will bury the box at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Père Lachaise is near where my cousins used to live.

But when I go there, I always think of Madame Marie.

She spent her Sundays at the cemetery.

She liked the tall trees, the fine statues,

the prowling cats.

She paid her respects to the famous at Père Lachaise,

like the writers Balzac and Molière.

Her favorites were the actress Sarah Bernhardt

and the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise.

But she never limited herself to them … oh, no!

She liked to see that all the tombs were in order.

If she found one that wasn't, she tidied it.

Straightened an old photograph, lined it up on an altar,

dusted cobwebs away with Monsieur Henri's handkerchief.

Cemeteries were my godmother's hobby.

But there are huge crowds of people at Père Lachaise today …

Madame Marie will not be here.

She stays away from crowds.

I miss her so much I ache inside.

Sometimes, in the middle of my days in Paris, I feel confused.

I still wonder who I
really
am

and where I
really
belong!

In the city?

In the country?

At church?

Or at my Jewish youth group?

If only I could talk to my godmother about this.

But since she moved away,

I don't see her as often as I would like.

If I did see her and could tell her I'm not sure who I really am,

I think I know what she would say.

“The war is over now.

You are the Jewish child of Jewish parents.

You don't have to be Christian anymore.

In the eyes of God,

it doesn't matter where you live.

It's
how
you live that is important.

Be a decent person who lives by her heart.”

But how do I do this?

How do I live by my heart?

Mama and I come to Père Lachaise early.

We're there when the leaders of the march arrive,

the skinniest men and women I've ever seen.

These silent survivors gather in the thin rain.

They are Jews who returned from the concentration camps.

Their worn striped uniforms

look like pajamas that are too big for them.

Their eyes are much too large.

They walk as if they only half remember how to do it, or why.

They seem sacred … set apart from ordinary people.

Only one outsider, God Himself,

could ever understand their thoughts and feelings.

Finally the leaders disappear into the cemetery,

carrying the small wooden box.

It's the size of a baby's coffin.

Mama and I, with groups of people our own ages, follow them.

We walk in silence under the weeping sky,

past sorrowful stone angels.

Some of us weep too.

Around us are grand tombs

carved with the last names of single families.

First names, dates, and places have been carefully recorded.

But all we have left of our loved ones is this small box of ashes.

It may be these ashes are not even theirs.

Suddenly, out of the crowd, a woman rushes up.

She reaches for me,

draws me to her, and hugs me until it hurts.

I don't know her.

I've never even seen her before.

I'm sure she doesn't know me.

But here she is, holding me as if she'd lost me,

missed me terribly,

and then found me again.

Should I push her away?

Should I call Mama?

In pain and joy the woman cries, “I had a daughter like you!”

Was her daughter my age?

Did she look like me?

The mother repeats again and again,

“I had a daughter like you!”

She strokes my hair, presses my face into her chest.

My heart tells me what to do …

it's so simple.

Let this woman be your mother.

Be her daughter.

So I hug her.

I stroke her back as a lost-and-found daughter would.

I am every Jewish daughter who has died.

She is every Jewish mother who has lost a child.

Slowly, she begins to run out of tears.

Her friend takes her by one hand.

Covering her eyes with the other,

the woman staggers away.

I lie awake that night in my bed,

the bed that's grown too small for me.

I finger my yellow blanket, thinking.

I belong to my family.

To Mama, of course.

To Papa too, if he ever returns.

To my godmother, Madame Marie, and to Monsieur Henri.

But the tears of the woman I met today

have washed away every speck of dust in my heart,

every trace of fear.

I'm a child of my family,

a child of France.

But, more than these,

my heart tells me now

I'm a child of my people.

The dead we buried today in the small wooden box,

the living brothers and sisters who have survived.

I don't need to hide anymore,

and I don't want to keep any more secrets.

Secrets stand in my way.

They stop me from knowing who I am.

I am a Jew.

I'm sure of it.

And I will always be one.

The Present

It's a hot, dull day in July,

just before school lets out for the summer.

Our class is copying a map

when a knock sounds at the schoolroom door.

It's the skinny new caretaker,

the one who's taken Madame Marie's place.

She speaks to my teacher.

My teacher smiles

and calls me forward.

“Your father has returned,” she tells me.

“You may go home to see him.”

I take my time walking there.

I should feel happy, I know.

The trouble is,

I don't really know who my father is anymore.

I was only a little girl

when he went away.

Except for that one visit in the hotel room,

I haven't seen him in five years.

We haven't had a letter from him

in more than a year.

What will we have to say to each other?

He doesn't know me and I don't know him.

What if he doesn't like me?

What if I don't like him?

Will we have to live together anyway?

Many of my friends,

including Esther,

have lost mothers or fathers,

brothers or sisters.

Now our family will be whole again.

I'll be different from my friends.

Slowly, I open the door to our apartment.

The electricity is turned off in the daytime.

A man sits in the shadows at our table,

wearing a soldier's uniform and cap.

I stand near the table with my back to the wall.

The man tries to talk to me.

I try to answer.

Out of the man's pocket comes a chocolate bar.

But even the enemy soldiers

tried to make friends with children, didn't they?

They offered us candy too.

The man acts just like every other soldier.

How can I be sure he's my father?

The man begins to tell me stories.

He tells me the Red Army liberated his prison camp.

What is the Red Army?

Did the soldiers wear red uniforms?

The man ran away through vast forests

with other Jewish prisoners.

The war was over, but they were far from France.

They had to walk most of the way back,

through empty bombed-out villages and farms.

All along the way,

they heard gunshots

and the sound of unmilked cows, mooing in pain.

His journey home took eight months.

As the man speaks,

I begin to remember my father,

the man who read stories to me so long ago.

I'm hungry for more details,

for richer stories.

“How did you survive?” I ask.

“We'd find food,” he said,

“chickens and vegetables on abandoned farms.

We'd make ourselves a feast and rest …

then move on.”

I nod, asking for more.

“And I had poetry,”

he says,

“reading poems helped me survive.”

Poetry?

So the beauty of words kept him alive,

just as it comforted Leon,

and just as it gave me my voice back!

“I have a present for you,” the man says,

opening his knapsack.

“In one empty house,

I found a jewelry box.

In it was a necklace,

a single strand of small pearls,

just right for a young girl.

I hadn't seen anything so beautiful for so long

that I decided to put it in my knapsack for you.”

For me?

So this man brought home

a pearl necklace for me?

He must be my real father

or why would he do that?

No one else I know has a real pearl necklace.

How will I feel when I wear it?

Proud?

Embarrassed?

“But the next morning I changed my mind,”

the man says.

“I thought about the girl who owned it.

What if she came back?”

My heart sinks.

My fingers have already touched the smooth pearls.

I've already seen them shining around my neck.

And now they're gone.

The man reads my face.

“Never mind,” he says.

“Later on, I found something even better.”

Even better?

What could that be? I wonder.

My eyes travel to the man's brown knapsack.

Is it the one Madame Marie made for my papa?

I just can't remember.

The man begins to take things out.

Clothing, food … a worn-out dictionary!

The dictionary has lost its cover,

so I can't tell if it's the blue one.

But maybe this really is my papa after all!

Who else would carry a dictionary for five long years?

At last the man finds the package he's looking for.

He hands it to me.

The package is small,

but too big for jewelry, I think.

I can barely breathe.

Slowly, I unwrap it.

Inside is a fine leather notebook.

It looks like a diary

but with no lock or key,

so it's not a place for keeping secrets.

I run my fingers across the paper,

smooth as the skin of a newborn baby.

I smell the leather,

rich and spicy.

“What's this for?” I ask.

“For you to write in,”

the man replies.

For me to write in?

I lean over and kiss him on the cheek.

“Thank you, Papa,” I say.

Yes, telling my story is what I must do.

I'll write it down here

in the most beautiful words I can find.

The story of bombs and broom closets,

of stars and soldiers,

of cats and cousins,

of family and friends,

of heaven and hell.

The story of all the secrets I kept …

and the story of my lost-and-found heart.

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