Page 16 of The World That We Knew

Marianne caught a ride to Lyon and sat in an office filling out a questionnaire. She didn’t think she did a very good job; she didn’t have much to say about herself, after all. It was too late to return and collect the cows, and she assumed her father was furious as he stumbled through the dark. She slept on a cot in a shabby room of the office, where country girls like herself came to search for work. Soon enough Professor Lévi sent her a train ticket and a cash payment for the organization’s fee. Before she knew it there she was, in the professor’s house. She couldn’t tell which was the dream, her life before Paris or this other life, wherein she planted the garden and watered the rosebushes. She pretended everything that bloomed was hers, every rose and peony, flowers she wouldn’t have had time to bother with had she been on the farm, for her father expected everything they did to serve a purpose and a rose had no purpose other than its own beauty.

She appreciated her life with the Lévis, her lovely pressed uniforms, her new coat and boots, a bureau filled with undergarments and scarves the lady of the house had offered when she’d grown tired of them. A girl who had had only cows for company had come to reside in the most beautiful city in the world. She spent hours walking in the Jardin des Tuileries and along the boulevards with their heavenly shops, buying ice cream on summer evenings and eating all manner of cakes, all more delicious than any of the ones she had ever baked. Sometimes she forgot that the house where she worked was not her own. Nothing was, really, not the kitchen, or her clothes, or the boys she had come to care for, perhaps, in Victor’s case, too much. In the last year, when she’d realized he’d become a man, it was awkward to be with him, especially when she noticed the way he looked at her. Perhaps her thoughts of leaving began then.

Or perhaps it was on the day she heard the professor’s wife speaking about her. Madame had called Marianne la fille, the girl, as if she had no name, and all at once she realized that, indeed, she had nothing of her own. Hadn’t that been why she’d left her father’s farm in the first place? To find something that belonged to her and her alone? That hadn’t happened here, and what was worse, the city had gone dark, all of the initial light she had been so amazed by disappearing day by day.

The Lévis did not understand their slow disenfranchisement and the erosion of their rights, but Marianne came from a line of people who had been persecuted by the Catholic majority; she’d grown up sitting in the town hall, hearing stories of mistreatments and murders. The residents of this region knew that people must seek protection before it was too late, and Marianne began to sense it was too late for the Jews. She heard what people were saying in the markets and was privy to displays of hatred that would have stunned the Lévis. All Jews were refugees, people said, even those whose parents and grandparents considered themselves French and had fought in the Great War. None were truly French, and all should be deported to Germany and Poland. Jews weren’t really people, they baked blood into their loaves of bread; their children were brought up to be thieves. No one wanted the Germans in Paris, but surely they would not be marching on France if not for the Jews.

Marianne hadn’t seen her father for five years, although they’d written letters all this time. Now, with the Germans on the streets of Paris, the guilt of leaving home struck her. Perhaps she had thrown the last few years away, dreaming. Certainly, she’d left her father with the work she herself should be doing to spare him a miserable old age.

Marianne had enough money for the train to Lyon, so she left, without speaking to Victor, who always got his way, to ensure she couldn’t be talked out of her decision. She had left behind notes for the boys. She wrote to Julien she would always be proud of him. Victor’s message took more thought, for he would be far more hurt when he found her gone. Marianne had told him stories about her father’s farm, the bees he kept, the road that was impassable in winter, the stars she gazed at each night. She wanted to say what she felt, she wanted to give away her feelings, but she told herself it was wrong.

In the end she wrote a single sentence.

Always remember me, as I remember you.

She took the train to Lyon, a bustling city that seemed even more crowded than she remembered. There was then a smaller train to the station in the center of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. She still had to walk several miles in the hilly terrain. Theirs was an isolated community and the farm was even more isolated. It had been so long since she had been in the countryside that blisters formed on her feet. The weather was hot for the time of year, and there were bees buzzing in the air. Her father would likely be wondering what had happened to this week’s letter. He had never reprimanded her or asked why she’d left. Perhaps he understood she had reached a marriageable age and still was at home and that she wanted more. He often wrote about his bees, how much honey had been produced, how much he had sold at the market. When she thought of him she imagined him in his beekeeping attire, the frothy netting, the white cloak. He never wore gloves as she did; he said he needed his hands so that the bees would see he was indeed human and not a monster in their midst.

When Marianne arrived at the farm, her father was standing in the yard with his favorite goat, Bluebell. When he saw his daughter it was as if she had never been away. In an uncharacteristic display of emotion this rough-hewn man embraced her, then he wiped his eyes, and told her she was in time for dinner.

She settled in quickly. In less than a week, Bluebell became used to her when it was time for milking, and the chickens returned to be fed grain every evening when she called to them. Only the bees never became accustomed to her. As a girl she would let them hover near to perch on her arms. Now she had been stung several times.

“Bees are the least forgiving creatures on earth,” her father told her. She understood this was his way of letting her know that he forgave her for leaving, and that, all this time later, although he never said so and though he never would, he was overjoyed that she had come back at last.

CHAPTER NINE

THE REALM OF THE SHADOW

PARIS, SUMMER 1941

LEA HELPED AVA WITH CHORES in the mornings, but her afternoons were spent in the library with Julien. They were in a world of their own. Easy enough, as Victor ignored them. He had been in a foul mood ever since Marianne left, and had never had an interest in reading, even though the selection of books was quite incredible. The first Monsieur Lévi had been a collector of Greek and Hebrew texts, and the second Monsieur Lévi had followed suit, although he favored mythology, folktales, and novels. Lea and Julien read for hours, stretched out on the floor, each extremely aware of the other’s presence, though they both pretended not to be. What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. Often they could finish each other’s sentences, and then they would laugh, embarrassed, lying on the floor, side by side, feeling the heat of one another’s body.

Lea read novels, one after the other, and then science books, texts about the natural world, psychology, and the miracle of the human body. In the mornings, Julien took lessons with his father. He was already ahead of most students his age, at the university level due to his father’s tutoring and his own innate ability to problem-solve. But he had very little interest in mathematics, a fact he had yet to reveal to his father. He preferred a blank notebook so that he could sketch. He could mimic most things found in nature with ease: a rose, a bird, a single leaf. It might be their own garden that inspired him one day, then the plane trees in the Jardin des Tuileries, or the imaginary landscapes he conjured, islands that were made of rock, rivers that were green as glass. Lea was the first person to whom he showed his work, and her reaction was all he could have wished for. She sat for him so that he could sketch her portrait, and in those hours a door opened for both of them, insight into one another, a close bond.

When Lea looked at the finished product of Julien’s sketch, however, she laughed.

“I don’t look like that!” The girl in the drawing was beautiful, and she hadn’t been that girl since she’d chopped off her hair in Berlin. He had even made her chipped tooth look attractive, when she was well aware of how horrible it was.

As far as Julien was concerned, he’d captured her completely. “Of course you do,” he said.

He knew she was homesick. He’d stood outside her door at night and heard her crying. One night Ava came up behind him, surprising him. Julien felt a shiver go through him. She was so quiet, even wearing those heavy boots of hers. There was something vaguely off about her. She had stood there glowering at him, as if he were a criminal.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” Julien told her. Then why did he feel caught?

“Why would you be?” Ava said, her silver eyes narrowed.

“I wouldn’t be.”

“If you ever do, you will regret it.” That she had no expression on her face made her threat all the more chilling.

“What do you consider wrong?” Julien asked.

Ava shrugged. “You’ll know when I consider it to be so. So be careful.”

“Your cousin is very protective,” he told Lea after his encounter with Ava. “She reminds me of a guard dog.”

Lea had often thought of the name one of the sisters had used for Ava on the train. A golem. One morning, she sneaked into the library before anyone was awake. There was a book she had spied days earlier, one she had been waiting to get her hands on. It was an ancient book of Jewish magic the second Monsieur Lévi had bought from a famed French kabbalist. She found the passage referring to a creature noted as a golem in Psalm 139, verses fifteen and sixteen, praising God. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

She read on, shocked to discover that a golem came to life after an elaborate and secret ritual, wherein the maker must have a deep understanding of the spiritual and physical manifestations of the Hebrew alphabet. The creature was activated by magical incantations. It might look human, but it was a sort of changeling, stronger and more fearless and imbued with supernatural abilities, to speak with birds and angels, to see dreams and predict the future. More than anything, it was a warrior. Its goal was to protect the Jewish people, yet it was said not to have a soul, or even a heart.