Page 37 of The World That We Knew

It was the end of something. She was certain of it. She wrote a note to the monsignor, thanking him for his kindness and good deeds, not daring to say more in case the note was intercepted after it was posted. When the sisters went to say prayers in the chapel, it was the last time they would do so. The mother superior was not with them; instead she was at work in the kitchen, and much to their surprise she presented them with breakfast at the appropriate hour. Ava had taught her to add goat’s milk to the pot to stretch the porridge. Students and teachers ate standing up, for there was no time to get comfortable, and they all had their suitcases with them. Ava, always a hard worker, washed and dried the plates and pots, although it was possible they wouldn’t be used again.

When all had gone, the mother superior waited for the soldiers. She looked back fondly on the fact that the sisters had never questioned her when she brought the girls to the school. They had done their work in good faith. And when it was over, and she said they must leave, even the reluctant ones took off their black habits and dressed in the clothes they had collected for the poor before going across the field toward the woods. Sister Félicité escorted the Jewish girls she watched over to a convent near Annecy. Even the heron that had nested in the chimney for so long took flight on that day. Sister Marie wished her grandfather were beside her, for his presence had always given her comfort. She saw the frog in the garden once more and thought perhaps this was a sign that her grandfather was watching over her. She had locked away some of the more important things: a very old Bible that was said to have come from Jerusalem. The silver chalice in the chapel. The book that each novice signed when she entered the convent. But such things would be stolen, most likely, and they were not what mattered most.

They came that afternoon, throwing open the gate, walking with muddy boots through the halls and up the stone stairs. The soldier who interrogated her called her by her given name, Madeleine Salomon Hasson. She was a Jew. The police had never noticed before, but it was right there in front of them. After Favre’s report, the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn’t know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. He had been twenty-four when he came from Algeria with his wife, Milah, and when she died he had donated a large bequest to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where roses were planted in his wife’s name. He had made donations to many schools and synagogues and began a fund for the poor who were newly arrived from Algeria. These facts were read aloud, as if they were criminal acts, but they were simply the small truths that allowed the mother superior to understand why she had come to this place to teach and to accept girls no one else would take on, and why she had loved this rose garden so well, for it was in her lineage to favor beauty and knowledge, as it was to have regrets, now, at the end of her life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IN THE FOREST

ARDèCHE, NOVEMBER 1942

THEY SLEPT IN THE TREES or beneath bowers of the tall, plumy underbrush, waking with leaves in their hair. The air was crisp and fragrant, the moon a silver slip that grew fatter and more orange every night. Sometimes they spied other people in the woods, living as best they could, Jews and refugees and young French men escaping from forced labor. Ava gave away half their food to starving families who had nowhere to go but the caves. When these refugees saw a tall woman followed by a huge heron, they were astonished and hopeful. It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world.

When they were alone in the mountains, they might have been a million miles away from Paris. The pastures were turning brown and the leaves were yellow, as if the stars had fallen from the sky. As long as they stayed away from cities and towns, the world felt as it had for hundreds of years, pure and elemental. The rivers and streams went along beds of stone and granite, the water a pale blue-gray.

Night after night, in the trees or in the grass, Lea dreamed of her mother. She heard Hanni’s voice in the wind, in birdsong, in falling leaves.

I was with you when the roses bloomed with silver petals, when you saw Paris for the first time, when that boy looked at you, when you learned prayers in the convent, when you ran through the woods.

Every time Ava took your hand, it was my hand you held.

They were protected and hidden, while all across the continent there was the Shoah, an attempt at the total destruction of the Jews, as had been recorded time and again in the Torah. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of Shoah and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. By now millions of Jews had been murdered. They had been sent to the death camps; buried deep in the forests of Poland, body upon body, fragile and naked, twisted and torn. There were souls that had turned black with horror who now perched in the trees, trembling and stunned by what some men were capable of, unable to move on from the spot where they had been murdered, incapable of entering the World to Come. They had been tortured, separated from those they loved, made to dig their own graves, castrated, humiliated, with the gold removed from their teeth, gassed at a rate of six thousand a day in Auschwitz. The Destruction hung across the world in darkness, in a cloud. When Lea dreamed of her mother, Hanni was shoeless, her hair shorn. But her eyes were shining. Like Rachel in the Torah, who wept with grief over the loss of her children, Hanni wept in these dreams. She was without words, without a mouth, without a body, beneath the dirt, none of which stopped her love.

You were with me when we discovered we were not hunters, but wolves, when the world was taken away from us, when they believed we were worthless, when we were sent away on trains, when the souls of our brothers and sisters rose with no place to go. You were with me every minute. You are my triumph, the one thing they could never take away.

What mattered in the forest was simple, and had nothing to do with the cruel perversions of men. A rock, a leaf, a star, a dream. Time stood still here. When a leaf fell it took forever until it landed on the forest floor. Winter would come, but not now, not yet, not in this place where if you fell asleep you dreamed for weeks. Wildflowers grew out of season; angels walked through the yellow grass and left their footprints for men to follow if they cared to see what was right in front of them, the path of the righteous, the forgiving, the faithful. Sometimes, at night, Lea would awake to see Ava dancing with the heron. He was staying later than he should. Sweeps of birds had left for warmer climates, but every day he was there, and every night they danced. Lea watched, entranced, well aware that she was seeing magic being made. Ava looked luminous as she danced barefoot, and sometimes she threw her head back and laughed with delight.

If a golem was made of clay, how was it possible for her to feel? Lea soon devised a test. She went out and gathered thorny branches and placed them on the ground beneath the bushes where they slept to see if Ava could feel pain. That night Ava curled up among the sharp branches and she didn’t cry out once.

The next night, Lea took a glass bottle, broke it, then spread the shards in the grass. That night Ava danced as if nothing was wrong.

On the third night Lea left a heap of biting red ants in Ava’s garments, but when Ava dressed she had no reaction, not an itch or a cry, nothing at all.

These tests proved that Ava felt nothing, and yet there was that look on her face when the heron bowed to her in the moment before the dance began. It was the gaze of someone who loved you, the same look Lea had seen when her mother kissed her good night, when her father was at home and there was laughter in the kitchen, when her grandmother told her stories. Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.

They were so well hidden that Ava allowed Lea the freedom to wander. She was going for water from the nearby stream when she saw a wolf, just as Bobeshi had when she was a girl, not much older than Lea was now. At first Lea thought it was a dream she had never woken from and she was likely still sleeping, curled up under the bushes. But she reached down and pinched herself, and the pinch stung and she knew she was awake, and then she was certain that what had happened to Bobeshi was now happening to her. The wolf was black with yellow eyes. It was said such creatures had been hunted to extinction in this region, that they had been shot and hung on posts, murdered one by one by royal hunting parties. But some things cannot be destroyed so easily.

Lea lifted her eyes to look into his. He had been so quiet she hadn’t heard him approach, though she should have known. There were no birds singing. The leaves refused to fall. She thought of Julien. Even if no one else believed her, he would.

She had to stay alive. She had made a promise. How to do so was the question.

Don’t run, her grandmother had told her. Do not be afraid. Be who you are, and know that he will be who he is.

How many wolves were left? Three or four? Half a dozen? Or was it just this single wolf watching her from the edge of the stream, ready to leap if she was the sort of human who had a gun, or a knife, or an eye for murder? Soon enough he saw that she was just a girl sitting by the stream. They were themselves and they knew each other and they could feel one another’s loneliness. When you are a wolf, no place is safe, no one can be trusted. Unless they are what you are. Hunted.

Lea was not as afraid as she had been in the alley. Her heart had stopped then and every breath hurt. She remembered how it felt to bite the soldier, how she had struggled with him and would have done anything to be free of him. But the wolf seemed more reasonable than the soldier.

“Hello,” Lea said. Her voice sounded hollow and pure.

The wolf came toward her.

We were wolves in the forest, chased until there was nowhere to go. When you are not considered human, you learn how to run.

He was bigger than a dog, and ragged. Lea was motionless. When he came close his breath was warm and he smelled like grass, a sweet, deep, dark scent of the woods. He was not young, and he was weary, for he had seen enough of men to last him a lifetime.

Bobeshi had been carrying a pail of water when the wolf came to her. She could have thrown it at him, instead, she had stood unmoving as Lea stood here now. Bobeshi had taken a deep breath and spoken the truth to the creature in the woods.

Brother Wolf, I am not your enemy. You are not the beast that I fear. I fear men and their bloodshed, I fear soldiers with guns, I fear those who hate for no reason, those who leave bodies behind them like fallen leaves, in the grass, in the earth, on the streets of cities that were filled with life, but are empty now. We can walk through those cities together in silence, leaving no footprints, looking for the teeth they pulled from our mouths so that we can plant them in the earth and we can grow up from the dirt despite what they did to us, hanging us by the feet until the blood runs out of our mouths, taking us into alleys, shearing our hair, leaving us naked in the rain.