Page 21 of The World That We Knew

“Of course,” Bettina agreed.

Ettie made dinner that night, she was as good a cook as any of them. Afterward she went outside as she always did. Arno came out as well.

“We’ll have to move back into the woods soon,” he said.

He’d been nearby when the bomb had gone off and had seen what it had done to his friend. He now had ringing in his ears, but more than that, he seemed changed. He had a gun that he played with, as if he could never be ready enough for an attack. He’d brought in some rifles from the trunk of the car.

“All of those people on the convoy we couldn’t stop will die because we made a mistake,” he said. “I made the mistake. It was my plan.”

“We all make mistakes,” Ettie told him. It was better to make a mistake than to do nothing. “I think you should teach me some things.”

He looked at her, confused. “Bettina is teaching you to be a printer.”

“That’s not what I want to be.”

He took her in, then handed her the gun.

Vengeance was just beneath her skin, a shadow self, her true self, the one who had been holding her sister’s hand, the one who ran into the woods, who wanted to learn everything she could be taught, starting now.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HERON

PARIS, SPRING 1942

THE HERON HAD GONE TO Spain and then to Africa. He simply couldn’t tolerate the cold; his bones were hollow and he needed light and food. But at last he came back for her and one warm night he called to her. Ava heard his voice and she could feel his cry echo inside of her. When she knew Lea was safely asleep, she rose from the blanket on the floor, which served as her bed. She went out the window, through the garden that was covered with blue squill, and then climbed over the garden gate Madame Lévi kept locked. She ran to the river, her breath coming hard. This was what freedom felt like, escaping the bonds that tied her, doing as she pleased, if only for a few hours. It was wrong, and she knew it, but she could not deny herself this one pleasure. She spied the heron in the shallows, in the place where she most wanted to be. Every night she went there, at the same hour, and every morning she returned with her hair streaming down her back, wet from the river.

One night, Lea woke to find Ava gone. Lea had been dreaming of her mother, and when she had such dreams it was as if she’d had a visitation, as if the dream was real and her waking life was imagined. In her dream, they’d sat together on a bench in their courtyard, and Hanni had leaned close to whisper. She is not who she thinks she is, she was made to love you, but she doesn’t know that yet. Every time she looks at you, I see you. Every time she embraces you, you are in my arms.

This spring Jews in Paris had been made to buy yellow stars to be sewn onto their clothing. They had been given food cards imprinted with the word Jew. All public places were now forbidden.

Lea went into the garden to wait for Ava. She felt as though her mother had woken her for a reason. She thought of all her mother had done for her and all she had sacrificed.

If what she’d read was true, Ava would not refuse her one wish.

At last, near dawn, the golem returned with mud on her bare feet and her hair wringing wet. She leapt over the wall as if she were a deer and landed in an overgrown bed of ivy. When she saw Lea, she was embarrassed to appear as a wild creature, hands patchy with river silt, nearly flying into the garden. She came to sit beside Lea on the bench. The hem of her dress was wet; it was the same dress the housemaid had worn before she’d run away, but Marianne had kept her clothes starched and pressed, and now the fabric was streaked with mud.

“You should be asleep,” Ava told Lea.

“So should you.”

“But here we are.”

“I won’t ask you where you’ve been,” Lea said.

Good. Ava was surprised by her own thoughts. I won’t tell you.

“But I need you to save my mother,” Lea went on. “We must go back to Berlin.”

It was impossible. Ava was made to do as she was told and she had been told to keep Lea safe. “I must do as your mother instructed.”

“Would you do anything my mother told you?”

“I’m here to keep you safe” was all Ava would say.

Here because you have to be, Lea thought. Because you are a slave and I am your burden. I am your duty and nothing more. We are yoked together and we’d best not speak about it, or look into each other’s eyes, in case we find that nothing at all is there.

The golem knew that Lea’s neighborhood in Berlin had been emptied of Jewish residents. Thousands had been sent east to Poland to the killing camps, Hanni Kohn among them. Soon after they had left for France, on an ordinary afternoon, the soldiers came. Bobeshi had been shot as she lay in her bed; she’d been too infirm to be taken from the apartment, too much trouble, too unimportant, not a person, not a soul, not a woman who spoke to God as she was murdered, turning to the angel in the black coat when he came to offer her comfort and take her in his arms.