Sarah's Key (21 page)

I looked back toward the village, the sinister dark spire of the church on my left.

Sarah Starzynski had toiled up that very road. She had walked past where I was standing now, and she had turned left, into the camp. Several days later, her parents had come out again, to be taken to the station, on to their deaths. The children had been left alone for weeks, then sent to Drancy. And then to their solitary deaths, after the long trip to Poland.

What had happened to Sarah? Had she died here? There had been no sign of her name in the graveyard, on the memorial. Had she escaped? I looked beyond the water tower, standing at the edge of the village, heading north. Was she still alive?

My cell phone rang, making us both jump. It was my sister, Charla.

“Are you OK?” she asked, her voice surprisingly clear. It sounded like she was standing right next to me, and not thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. “I had a feeling I should call you.”

My thoughts dragged away from Sarah Starzynski to the baby I was carrying. To what Bertrand had said last night: “The end of us.”

Once again, I felt the sheer heaviness of the world around me.

THE TRAIN STATION AT Orléans was a busy, noisy place, an anthill swarming with gray uniforms. Sarah pressed against the old couple. She did not want to show her fear. If she had made it all the way here, that meant there was hope left for her. Hope back in Paris. She had to be brave, she had to be strong.

“If anybody asks,” whispered Jules, as they waited in the line to buy the tickets to Paris, “you are our granddaughter Stéphanie Dufaure. Your hair is shaved off because you caught lice at school.”

Geneviève straightened Sarah’s collar.

“There,” she said, smiling. “You do look nice and clean. And pretty. Just like our granddaughter!”

“Do you really have a granddaughter?” asked Sarah. “Are these her clothes?”

Geneviève laughed.

“We have nothing but turbulent grandsons, Gaspard and Nicolas. And a son, Alain. He’s in his forties. He lives in Orléans with Henriette, his wife. Those are Nicolas’s clothes, he’s a little older than you. Quite a handful, he is!”

Sarah admired the way the old couple pretended to be at ease, smiling at her, acting like this was a perfectly normal morning, a perfectly normal trip to Paris. But she noticed the quick way their eyes darted around constantly, always on the watch, always on the move. Her nervousness increased when she saw soldiers checking on all passengers boarding the trains. She craned her neck to observe them. German? No, French. French soldiers. She had no identification on her. Nothing. Nothing except the key and the money. Silently, discreetly, she handed the thick wad of bills to Jules. He looked down at her, surprised. She pointed with her chin toward the soldiers barring the access to the trains.

“What do you want me to do with this, Sarah?” he whispered, puzzled.

“They are going to ask you for my identity card. I don’t have one. This might help.”

Jules observed the line of men standing in front of the train. He grew flustered. Geneviève gave him a dig with her elbow.

“Jules!” she hissed. “It could work. We must try. We don’t have any other choice.”

The old man drew himself up. He nodded to his wife. He seemed to have regained his composure. The tickets were bought, then they headed toward the train.

The platform was packed. Passengers pressed against them from all sides, women with squealing babies, stern-faced old men, impatient businessmen wearing suits. Sarah knew what she had to do. She remembered the boy who got away at the indoor stadium, the one who had slipped through the confusion. That was what she had to do now. Make the most of the pushing and squabbling, of the soldiers shouting orders, of the bustling crowd.

She let go of Jules’s hand and ducked. It was like going under water, she thought. A tight, compact mass of skirts and trousers, shoes and ankles. She clambered past, pushing herself on with her fists, and then the train appeared, right in front of her.

As she climbed on, a hand grabbed her by the shoulder. She composed her face instantly, molding her mouth into an easy smile. The smile of a normal little girl. A normal little girl taking the train to Paris. A normal little girl like the one in the lilac dress, the one she had seen on the platform, when they had been taken to the camp, on that day that seemed so long ago.

“I’m with my granny,” she said, flashing the innocent smile, pointing to the inside of the carriage. With a nod, the soldier let her go. Breathless, she squirmed her way onto the train, peering out of the window. Her heart was pounding. There were Jules and Geneviève emerging from the throng, looking up at her with amazement. She waved at them triumphantly. She felt proud of herself. She had gotten on the train all by herself, and the soldiers hadn’t even stopped her.

Her smile vanished when she saw the number of German officers boarding the train. Their voices were loud and brutal as they made their way through the crowded corridor. People averted their faces, looked down, made themselves as small as possible.

Sarah stood in a corner of the carriage, half hidden by Jules and Geneviève. The only part that was visible was her face, peeping out between the old couple’s shoulders. She watched the Germans draw nearer, gazed at them, fascinated. She couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Jules whispered at her to look away. But she couldn’t.

There was one man in particular that repelled her, tall, thin, his face white and angular. His eyes were such a pale shade of blue they seemed transparent under thick pink lids. As the group of officers passed them by, the tall thin man reached out with an endless, gray-swathed arm, and tweaked Sarah’s ear. She shivered with shock.

“Well, boy,” chuckled the officer, “no need to be afraid of me. One day, you too will be a soldier, right?”

Jules and Geneviève had painted, fixed smiles that did not waver on their faces. They held on to Sarah casually, but she could feel their hands trembling.

“Nice-looking grandson you have there.” The officer grinned, rubbing his immense palm over Sarah’s cropped head. “Blue eyes, blond hair, like the children back home, yes?”

A last appraising flicker of the pale, heavy-lidded eyes, then he turned and followed the group of men. He thought I was a boy, thought Sarah. And he didn’t think I was Jewish. Was being Jewish something that one could immediately see? She wasn’t sure. She had once asked Armelle. Armelle had said she didn’t look Jewish because of her blond hair, her blue eyes. So my hair and my eyes have saved me today, she thought.

She spent most of the trip nestling close to the old couple’s warm softness. Nobody spoke to them, nobody asked them anything. Staring out of the window, she thought of Paris edging nearer by the minute, bringing her closer to Michel. She watched the low gray clouds gather together, the first fat drops of rain splatter against the glass and trickle away, flattened by the wind.

The train stopped at the Austerlitz station. The station she had left from, with her parents, on that hot, dusty day. The girl followed the old couple out of the train, heading up the platform to the
métro.

Jules’s step faltered. They looked up. Directly ahead, they saw lines of policemen in their navy uniforms, stopping passengers, demanding identity cards. Geneviève said nothing, gently pushed them on. She walked at a firm pace, her round chin held high. Jules followed in her wake, clasping Sarah’s hand.

Standing in the line, Sarah studied the policeman’s face. A man in his forties, wearing a wedding band, a thick, gold one. He looked listless. But she noticed that his eyes darted back and forth from the paper in his hand to the person standing in front of him. He was doing his job, thoroughly.

Sarah let her mind go blank. She didn’t want to think of what might happen. She did not feel strong enough to visualize it. She let her thoughts stray. She thought of the cat they used to have, a cat that made her sneeze. What was the cat’s name? She couldn’t remember. Something silly like Bonbon or Réglisse. They gave it away because it made her nose tickle and her eyes go red and swollen. She had been sad, and Michel had cried all day. Michel had said it was all her fault.

The man held out a blasé palm. Jules handed him the identity cards in an envelope. The man looked down, shuffled through it, eyes shooting up at Jules, then at Geneviève. Then he said:

“The child?”

Jules pointed to the cards.

“The child’s card is there, Monsieur. With ours.”

The man opened the envelope wider with a deft thumb. A large banknote folded into three appeared at the bottom of the envelope. The man did not budge.

He looked down again at the money, then at Sarah’s face. She looked back at him. She did not cower or plead. She simply looked at him.

The moment seemed to drag on, endless, like that interminable minute when the man had finally let her go from the camp.

The man gave a curt nod. He handed the cards back to Jules and pocketed the envelope with a fluid gesture. Then he stood aside to let them pass.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” he said. “Next person, please.”

CHARLA’S VOICE ECHOED INTO my ear. “Julia, are you serious? He can’t have said that. He can’t put you into that situation. He has no right.”

It was the lawyer’s voice I was hearing now, the tough, pushy Manhattan lawyer who wasn’t afraid of anything, or anyone.

“He did say that,” I replied, listless. “He said it would be the
end of us
. He said he would leave me if I kept the baby. He says he feels old, that he can’t deal with another child, that he just doesn’t want to be an old dad.”

There was a pause.

“Does this have anything to do with the woman he had the affair with?” asked Charla. “I can’t remember her name.”

“No. Bertrand did not mention her once.”

“Don’t let him pressure you into anything, Julia. This is your child, too. Don’t ever forget that, honey.”

All day long, my sister’s sentence had echoed within me.
“This is your child, too.”
I had spoken to my doctor. She had not been surprised at Bertrand’s decision. She had suggested that maybe he was going through a midlife crisis. That the responsibility of another child was too much for him to bear. That he was fragile. It happened to many men coming up to fifty.

Was Bertrand really going through a crisis? If that was the case, I had not seen it coming. How was that possible? I simply thought he was being selfish, that he was thinking of himself, as usual. I had told him that, during our talk. I had told him everything that was on my mind. How could he impose abortion after the numerous miscarriages I had gone through, after the pain, the crushed hope, the despair? Did he love me? I had asked, desperate. Did he truly love me? He had looked at me, nodding his head. Of course he loved me. How could I be so stupid? he had said. He loved me. And his broken voice came back to me, the stilted way he had admitted his fear of growing old. A midlife crisis. Maybe the doctor was right, after all. And maybe I hadn’t realized it because I had so many things on my mind in the past few months. I felt totally lost. Incapable of dealing with Bertrand and his anxiety.

My doctor had informed me I did not have much time to make my mind up. I was already six weeks pregnant. If I was to abort, I would have to do it within the next two weeks. Tests had to be done, a clinic had to be found. She suggested we talk about it, Bertrand and I, with a marriage counselor. We had to discuss it, we had to bring it out into the open. “If you abort against your will,” my doctor had pointed out, “you will never forgive him. And if you don’t, he has admitted to you how much this is an intolerable situation for him. This all needs to be worked out, and fast.”

She was right. But I could not bring myself to speed things up. Every minute I earned was sixty seconds more for this child. A child I already loved. It wasn’t even bigger than a lima bean and I loved it as much as I loved Zoë.

I went to Isabelle’s place. She lived in a small, colorful duplex on the rue de Tolbiac. I felt I just couldn’t come home from the office and wait for my husband’s return. I couldn’t face it. I called Elsa, the babysitter, and asked her to take over. Isabelle made me some
crottin de chavignol
toasts and threw together a quick, delicate salad. Her husband was away on a business trip. “OK,
cocotte,
” she said, sitting in front of me and smoking away from me, “try to visualize life without Bertrand. To imagine it. The divorce. The lawyers. The aftermath. What it would do to Zoë. What your lives will be like. Separate homes. Separate existences. Zoë going from you to him. From him to you. No longer a real family. No longer breakfast together, Christmas together, vacations together. Can you do this? Can you imagine this?”