Page 13 of The World That We Knew

She might have said more if she’d had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn’t been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season’s bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world.

CHAPTER SIX

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

PARIS, SPRING 1941

THE FRENCH COUSINS LIVED IN a tall stucco house that had been in the family for three generations. There were two yellow brick chimneys, a wrought-iron fence, green shutters on every window, and an enormous garden, now in ruins. No one had time to take care of a garden, for there was no help and no money to pay the gardener, a fellow named Edgar, who had worked for the family for over a decade. France had declared war on Germany in September 1939, and by June 1940, the Germans had entered Paris. By that time two million Parisians had fled, and those who stayed saw the city grow dark and silent, with food shortages. Of the 150,000 Jews in Paris, a third were foreign refugees, but soon enough that number dropped by two thirds. Many people fled or were arrested. For those who remained, there was no fuel or coffee or soap or shoes, and the increasing fear and hatred of the Nazis was expressed behind closed shutters.

This past winter the Lévis had been forced to cut down the lime trees to burn in the fireplace. There was no coal, and bundles of wood were no longer sold on the streets. Even in spring the world was surrounded by gloom. Markets were closed, people didn’t venture outside, parks were empty.

The Lévis had not been among the hordes of people who left the city when a radio announcement was made by the government that accepted France’s collusion with Germany. The local politicians knew Professor André Lévi and made an allowance, permitting him to keep his house and go on with his work, which might be useful to the military. Many residents went west and south, many to Toulouse, where the archbishop, Monsignor Jules-Gérard Saliège, was one of the first Catholic priests to speak out against the treatment of foreign-born Jews. The government itself had moved to the center of France in the city of Vichy, which they promised would remain an unoccupied area. Yet people wondered what that freedom meant. Free to do as they were told? Newspapers were censored, a curfew was put down, and residents were lifted off the street and never seen again.

For three generations, the Lévis had never thought of themselves as anything but French. Their tall house had a fish pond and, until they had recently been cut down, the oldest lime trees in Paris, and was hidden away on a tiny street on the Left Bank. The third Monsieur Lévi, André, was a mathematician who had been a child prodigy in the field of rational numbers and algebraic geometry and for two decades had been an eminent professor at the École Polytechnique, until Jews were asked to leave. He thought the next few years under the Germans must be navigated as a maze would be, and at this he was expert. There was a small maze of hedges in the garden, and it was here the professor first taught his son Julien about spatial analysis. He had often brought him to the garden at the Château de Villandry, where a Renaissance maze signified the progression of life. He would blindfold Julien so that the boy could feel the geography and learn to visualize spatial relationships. In time Julien became astoundingly good at running the maze without stumbling over the hedges, excellent practice for a mathematician who must be willing to believe there is a logic to all things.

In his everyday life, André Lévi continued to think of number theory, the study of whole numbers that traced back to the Babylonians. His special professional interest was the speed with which the universe was expanding, in part by refining the use of Cepheid stars as yardsticks. For him the world was divided, and because of this he often didn’t see human beings, not even those he knew intimately, whether they were his wife or his two sons, Julien and Victor, or the young housemaid, Marianne. Professor Lévi had managed to keep the house by paying off a local magistrate. Each week more of their belongings were sold in order to do so, first the paintings off the walls, then silverware from the table, then the cameos in Madame Claire’s mirrored jewelry box.

The professor did his best to continue with his life’s work, published in several groundbreaking papers in France and Germany, coauthored with several renowned German mathematicians who were working on Fermat’s last theorem, proposed by Pierre Fermat in 1637, the most famous but not yet proven theorem in number theory. But now his wife had come to his study to tell him two strangers claiming to be cousins had arrived, interrupting his thoughts about the length of the solar system. It often seemed that his wife, Claire, was speaking an entirely different language, one in which household details played a great part. There was so little food to be had that she had begun a vegetable patch in the garden, tearing out the bellflowers and vivid pink roses in order to plant leeks and cabbages and escarole. She let the rest of it go to seed, and the wilder sections of the garden near the old and beautiful greenhouse, where jasmine and all manner of exotic plants once grew, had become home to glis glis, large dormice that were usually only to be found in the countryside. Madame was practical at all times. She had come to prefer a scraggly plant laden with tomatoes to a fragrant peony, and a mouse to a rat. But cousins were another matter entirely.

“They can’t stay here,” Madame Lévi told her husband. “We’ll be the ones to pay if they’re caught.”

Foreign Jews had begun to be arrested, and now the cousins had come from Berlin, presumably with falsified identity papers. You could tell they were refugees with one look: the battered suitcase, the exhaustion in the girl’s eyes and her short, ragged haircut, the set of the young woman’s mouth, as if nothing they said or did could make her go. Madame Lévi had always managed the household despite the circumstance, but cousins appearing out of the blue, like beggars at their door, was too much. The young woman was especially strange. Although she spoke flawless French, she possessed a shifty look, taking in every detail with her pale gray eyes. She wore a plain dress and heavy boots fit more for a man than a woman, a style that was definitely not French. It was impossible to gauge what her emotions were, let alone her intent. The girl was well mannered, but something was off there, too. She first called herself Lea, then stammered and asked to be called Lillie, as if confused by her own name. Were they thieves or impostors? Was their plan to steal what little the Lévis had left? The professor’s wife resolved to have her husband’s help in the matter despite her vow never to interrupt him while he worked.

“When I asked them to leave they refused,” Claire complained. “They sat down in the hallway and there they are!”

“It’s all a mistake,” André assured her with a grimace. He had been measuring algebraic curves and barely knew what his wife was talking about. He had on a white shirt and black pants held up with suspenders. He wore his father’s gold watch, a family treasure, but in fact time meant little to him; in his opinion, it was an untrustworthy measure of the universe. All the same, the real world he had always avoided had slowly been creeping into his calm office for weeks. His sons had been dismissed from school, a senseless measure, for the family had supported their elite private school near the Place Voltaire for three generations. But perhaps in this new world it made sense. Jewish professors, himself included, had been asked to leave the university. Still, he remained convinced that life would eventually assume its natural course.

“Well, if it’s a mistake, go talk to them,” said his wife, still agitated.

He had no choice but to go. No matter what was happening in the country, between husband and wife, a truce must be achieved at all costs.

The visitors in the front hallway were amazed by their surroundings. Here, it was almost possible to forget the homeless men sleeping in tents along the river and in the Bois de Boulogne, refugees camped out beneath the bridges that crossed the Seine, soldiers collecting such people in mass arrests of undesirables. The entranceway floor of the Lévis’ house was patterned with black and white marble, and the walls were Italian plaster mixed with cinnabar-colored paint. There were pale pink peonies in a tall vase, the last from the garden, and stray petals had drifted over their shoes.

The Lévis’ younger son, Julien, came downstairs, surprised to see guests seated on the bench beneath the portrait of his grandfather, the war hero. He stopped dead in his tracks. If he wasn’t mistaken they were refugees, something his mother was particularly suspicious about, insisting that foreign Jews would only bring trouble upon them.

Julien was fourteen, tall, lanky, darkly handsome, and completely unaware of his good looks. Lately, he was in a constant state of fury. Apparently, no one cared what he thought or felt or wanted. It was expected he would become a mathematician, like his father, but he had other ideas. He had always wished to be a painter, but since the German occupation, all he could think of was joining the Resistance. His mother had thrown a fit at the very idea. He was too young, and, anyway, he was needed at home. To do what? he wondered resentfully. Chase the mice in the garden, collect plums from their fruit tree, study the universe from the confines of his grandfather’s library? He pretended to be who he wasn’t to appease his mother, as he had since he was a small child, for she took his good behavior for granted, not knowing his rebel soul resented every minute. His brother, Victor, called him a mama’s boy and an enfant gâté, a spoiled child.

“And you?” Julien had snapped at Victor, who was seventeen and did little but sit around the house in a state of gloomy rage, forced to hide in the attic whenever anyone came to the door, because his mother feared he would be taken to a forced labor camp. “What makes you more of a man?”

They’d almost come to blows then, but fortunately Victor, afraid he might hurt his brother if they had it out, stalked away. “She’ll always tell you what to do, until you refuse to listen. That’s when you’ll know you’re a man.”

Julien watched the visitors from the corridor, glad that Victor wasn’t here to take over, as he so often did. There was something about the girl that struck Julien immediately, her long legs, her short cropped hair, her luminous, intelligent face, the immense sadness in her eyes. He had no idea who she or her companion might be, but at least something interesting was happening. Something that might wake up this sleepwalking household in which they were not to discuss burning bridges, or the convoys of soldiers, or the signs on restaurants that declared No admittance to Jews.

Julien ducked into the kitchen, where he grabbed a handful of plums meant for that evening’s dessert. His mother was not yet aware that their housemaid, Marianne, had vacated her position that morning, leaving notes for Julien and Victor. She had been deeply attached to the household, and to the boys in particular, for she wasn’t much older than Victor, four or five years at most. Her destination was the Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, near the farm where her elderly father lived alone. Before going, she had scrubbed the stove in the kitchen and made up the beds with fresh linens. You should leave, she had written to both boys. It’s not safe here anymore.

When Julien found the nerve to introduce himself to the strangers, the young woman gave him a dark look that was so off-putting he took a step back. The girl studied him with a reserved gaze. However, when they realized he was offering food, they quickly turned their attention to devouring the plums. It was the first fruit Ava had eaten, glorious and delicious, grown in the Lévis’ garden on an old twisted tree. Lea was starving, having barely eaten since leaving Berlin, and she ate two, one after the other, before spitting the pits into the palm of her hand. Julien was pleased that his offering was appreciated, and even more pleased when the girl threw him a grudging smile. She had a chipped tooth that made her look enchanting. Everything changed when she smiled.

“We’ve been traveling,” she blurted. She’d been told by Ava to say nothing at all, but her stomach was growling. “There’s been nothing to eat. Is there anything more?” The young woman elbowed the girl, who immediately stopped talking, but not before glaring at her companion resentfully.

When the young woman shifted her gaze to look down the hall, Julien nodded to the girl and rolled his eyes conspiratorially. Lea covered her mouth, so as not to laugh aloud. They looked at each other with a tacit understanding, for then and there they made a secret pact against adults, especially the ones who told them what to do.

Julien was often arrogant and standoffish, always the smartest in his class, a far better student than his older brother, but in the past year he had changed. His emotions had been raw ever since he’d been requested to leave school, as all Jews were. As a further injury his closest friend, Bernard, had stopped speaking to him, and instead passed him on the street as though he were a stranger.

He’s showing his true colors, Victor had said. He’d never liked Bernard anyway. You’re better off without him.

But Julien had suffered after the dissolution of the friendship. He’d gone to speak to Bernard at his home, thinking it only right that he be granted an explanation. For years they’d been inseparable, but when Julien came to call, he was not allowed in the house. They’d stood in the street in the fading light and Bernard had seemed jittery, fearing they might be seen together. I don’t associate with criminals, he’d finally blurted.

How am I a criminal? Julien knew he sounded even more arrogant than usual, ready for a fight, but Bernard had shrugged, unfazed.