Sarah's Key (8 page)

“The Gestapo hadn’t asked for those children?” I said.

“No,” he replied. “Not at first. Deporting children would have revealed the truth: it would have been obvious to all that Jews were not being sent to work camps, but to their deaths.”

“So why were the children arrested?” I asked.

Guillaume took a sip of his
limoncello
.

“The police probably thought that children of Jews, even if they were born in France, were still Jews. In the end, France sent nearly eighty thousand Jews to the death camps. Only a couple of thousand made it back. And hardly any of the children did.”

On the way home, I could not get Guillaume’s dark sad eyes out of my mind. He had offered to show me photographs of his grandmother and her family, and I had given him my phone number. He had promised to call me soon.

Bertrand was watching television when I came in. He was lying flat out on the sofa, an arm under his head.

“So,” he said, barely taking his eyes off the screen, “how were the boys? Up to their usual standards of refinement?”

I slipped off my sandals and sat on the sofa beside him, looking at his fine, elegant profile.

“A perfect meal. There was an interesting man. Guillaume.”

“Aha,” said Bertrand, looking at me, amused. “Gay?”

“No, I don’t think so. But I never notice that anyway.”

“And what was so interesting about this Guillaume guy?”

“He was telling us about his grandmother, who escaped the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, back in 1942.”

“Hmm,” he answered, changing channels with the remote control.

“Bertrand,” I said, “when you were at school, were you taught about the Vel’ d’Hiv’?”

“No idea,
chérie.”

“That’s what I’m working on now for the magazine. The sixtieth anniversary is soon.”

Bertrand picked up one of my bare feet and began to massage it with sure, warm fingers.

“Do you think your readers are going to be interested in the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” he asked. “It’s the past. It’s not something most people want to read about.”

“Because the French are ashamed, you mean?” I said. “So we should bury it and move on, like them?”

He took my foot off his knee and the glint in his eye appeared. I braced myself.

“My, my,” he said with a devilish grin, “yet another chance to show your compatriots how devious we Frogs were, collaborating with the Nazis and sending those poor innocent families to their deaths. Little Miss Nahant bares the truth! What are you going to do,
amour,
rub our noses in it? Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers. Write about something else. Something funny, something cute. You know how to do that. Tell Joshua the Vel’ d’Hiv’ is a mistake. No one will read it. They’ll yawn and turn to the next column.”

I got up, exasperated.

“I think you’re wrong,” I seethed. “I think people don’t know enough about it. Even Christophe didn’t know much about it, and he’s French.”

Bertrand snorted.

“Oh, Christophe can hardly read! The only words he deciphers are Gucci and Prada.”

I left the room in silence, went into the bathroom, and ran a bath. Why hadn’t I told him to go to hell? Why did I put up with him, again and again? Because you’re crazy about him, right? Ever since you met him, even if he’s bossy, rude, and selfish? He’s clever, he’s handsome, he can be so funny, he’s such a wonderful lover, isn’t he? Memories of endless, sensual nights, kisses and caresses, crumpled sheets, his beautiful body, warm mouth, impish smile. Bertrand. So charming. So irresistible. So arduous. That’s why you put up with him. Isn’t it? But for how long? A recent conversation with Isabelle came back to me. Julia, do you put up with Bertrand because you’re afraid of losing him? We were sitting in a small café by the Salle Pleyel, while our daughters were attending ballet class, and Isabelle had lit up her umpteenth cigarette and looked me straight in the eye. No, I had said. I love him. I really love him. I love the way he is. She had whistled, impressed, but unconvinced. Well, lucky him then. But for God’s sake, when he goes too far, tell him. Just tell him.

Lying in the bath, I remembered the first time I met Bertrand. In some quaint discothèque in Courchevel. He was with a group of loud, tipsy friends. I was with my then-boyfriend, Henry, whom I’d met a couple of months earlier at the TV network I worked for. We had a casual, easygoing relationship. Neither of us was deeply in love with the other. We were just two fellow Americans living it up in France.

Bertrand had asked me to dance. It hadn’t seemed to bother him at all that I was sitting with another man. Galled, I had refused. He had been very insistent. “Just one dance, miss. Only one dance. But such a wonderful dance, I promise you.” I had glanced at Henry. Henry had shrugged. “Go ahead,” he had said, winking. So I got up and danced with the audacious Frenchman.

I was rather stunning at twenty-seven. And yes, I
had
been Miss Nahant when I was seventeen. I still had my rhinestone tiara tucked away somewhere. Zoë used to like playing with it when she was little. I’ve never been vain about my looks. But I had noticed that living in Paris, I got much more attention than on the other side of the Atlantic. I did also discover that French men were more daring, more overt, when it came to flirting. And I also understood that despite the fact I had nothing of the sophisticated Parisian—too tall, too blond, too toothy—my New England allure appeared to be just the flavor of the day. In my first months in Paris, I had been amazed at the way French men—and women—stare overtly at each other. Sizing each other up, constantly. Checking out figures, clothes, accessories. I remembered my first spring in Paris and walking down the boulevard Saint-Michel with Susannah from Oregon and Jan from Virginia. We weren’t even dressed up to go out, we were wearing jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops. But we were, all three of us, tall, athletic, blond, and definitely American-looking. Men came up to us constantly.
“Bonjour, Mesdemoiselles, vous êtes américaines, Mesdemoiselles?”
Young men, mature men, students, businessmen, endless men, demanding phone numbers, inviting us to dinner, to a drink, pleading, joking, some charming, others much less charming. This did not happen back home. American men did not tag after girls on the street and declare their flame. Jan, Susannah, and I had giggled helplessly, feeling both flattered and dismayed.

Bertrand says he fell in love with me during that first dance in the Courchevel nightclub. Right then and there. I don’t believe that. I think, for him, it came a little later. Maybe the next morning, when he took me skiing. “
Merde alors,
” French girls don’t ski like that, he had panted, staring at me with blatant admiration. Like what, I had asked. They don’t go half as fast, he had laughed, and kissed me passionately. However,
I
had fallen for him on the spot. So much so that I had hardly given poor Henry a departing look as I left the discothèque on Bertrand’s arm.

Bertrand talked almost immediately about getting married. It had never been my idea so soon, I was happy enough being his girlfriend for a while. But he had insisted, and he had been so charming, and so amorous, I had finally agreed to marry him. I believe he felt I was going to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother. I was bright, cultivated, well-schooled (summa cum laude from Boston University), and well-behaved—“for an American,” I could almost hear him thinking. I was healthy and wholesome and strong. I didn’t smoke, didn’t take drugs, hardly drank, and believed in God. And so back in Paris, I met the Tézac family. How nervous I had been on that first day. Their impeccable, classic apartment on the rue de l’Université. Edouard’s cold blue eyes, his dry smile. Colette and her careful makeup, her perfect clothes, trying to be friendly, handing me coffee and sugar with elegant, manicured fingers. And the two sisters. One was angular, blond, and pale: Laure. The other auburn, ruby-cheeked, and voluptuous: Cécile. Laure’s fiancé, Thierry, was there. He hardly spoke to me. The sisters had both looked at me with apparent interest, baffled by the fact that their Casanova of a brother had picked out an unsophisticated American, when he had
le tout Paris
at his feet.

I knew Bertrand—and his family, too—were expecting me to have three or four children in rapid succession. But the complications started right after our wedding. Endless complications that we had not expected. A series of early miscarriages had left me distraught.

I managed to have Zoë after six difficult years. Bertrand hoped for a long time for number two. So did I. But we never talked about it anymore.

And then there was Amélie.

But I certainly did not want to think about Amélie tonight. I had done enough of that in the past.

The bathwater was lukewarm, so I got out, shivering. Bertrand was still watching TV. Usually, I would have gone back to him, and he would have held out his arms to me, and crooned, and kissed me, and I would have said he was just too rude, but I would have said it with a little girl voice, and a little girl pout. And we would have kissed, and he would have taken me back to our room and made love to me.

But tonight I did not go to him. I slipped into bed and read some more about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children.

And the last thing I saw before I turned off the light was Guillaume’s face when he had told us about his grandmother.

HOW LONG HAD THEY been here? The girl could not remember. She felt deadened, numbed. The days had mingled with the nights. At one point she had been sick, bringing up bile, moaning in pain. She had felt her father’s hand upon her, comforting her. The only thing she had in mind was her brother. She could not stop thinking about him. She would take the key from her pocket and kiss it feverishly, as if kissing his plump little cheeks, his curly hair.

Some people had died here during the past days, and the girl had seen it all. She had seen women and men go mad in the stifling, stinking heat and be beaten down and tied to stretchers. She had seen heart attacks, and suicides, and high fever. The girl had watched the bodies being carried out. She had never seen such horror. Her mother had become a meek animal. She hardly spoke. She cried silently. She prayed.

One morning, curt orders were shouted through loudspeakers. They were to take their belongings and gather near the entrance. In silence. She got up, groggy and faint. Her legs felt weak, they could hardly carry her. She helped her father haul her mother to her feet. They picked up their bags. The crowd shuffled slowly to the doors. The girl noticed how everybody moved slowly, painfully. Even the children hobbled like old people, backs bent, heads down. The girl wondered where they were going. She wanted to ask her father, but his closed thin face meant she was not going to get an answer now. Could they be going home at last? Was this the end? Was it over? Would she be able to go home and free her brother?

They walked down the narrow street, the police ordering them on. The girl glanced at the strangers watching them from windows, balconies, doors, from the sidewalk. Most of them had empty, uncompassionate faces. They looked on, not saying a word. They don’t care, thought the girl. They don’t care what is being done to us, where we are being taken to. One man laughed, pointing at them. He was holding a child by the hand. The child was laughing, too. Why, thought the girl, why? Do we look funny, with our stinking, wretched clothes? Is that why they are laughing? What is so funny? How can they laugh, how can they be so cruel? She wanted to spit at them, to scream at them.

A middle-aged woman crossed the street and quickly pressed something into her hand. It was a small roll of soft bread. The woman was shooed off by a policeman. The girl just had enough time to see her return to the other side of the street. The woman had said, “You poor little girl. May God have pity.” What was God doing, thought the girl, dully. Had God given up on them? Was he punishing them for something she did not know about? Her parents were not religious, although she knew they believed in God. They had not bought her up in the traditional religious fashion, like Armelle had been by her parents, respecting all the rites. The girl wondered whether this was not their punishment. Their punishment for not practicing their religion well enough.

She handed the bread to her father. He told her to eat it. She wolfed it down, too fast. It nearly choked her.

They were taken in the same town buses to a railway station overlooking the river. She didn’t know which station it was. She had never been there before. She had rarely left Paris in all her ten years. When she saw the train, she felt panic overcome her. No, she couldn’t leave, she had to stay, she had to stay because of her brother, she had promised to come back to save him. She tugged on her father’s sleeve, whispering her brother’s name. Her father looked down at her.

“There is nothing we can do,” he said with helpless finality. “Nothing.”

She thought of the clever boy who had escaped, the one who had gotten away. Anger swept through her. Why was her father being so weak, so gutless? Did he not care about his son? Did he not care about his little boy? Why didn’t he have the courage to run away? How could he just stand there and be led into a train, like a sheep? How could he just stand there and not break away, and not run back to the apartment, and the boy, and to freedom? Why didn’t he take the key from her and run away?