Page 28 of The World That We Knew

She had no idea that Ava had already asked the heron to do this one kindness for her. And so he allowed her to tie the metal canister to his leg, though he was no one’s servant, and looked the other way as she did so.

Her script was tiny and neat. She’d used pale blue ink she’d found in the mother superior’s office when Ava sent her to deliver bread and jam and a pot of tea. She’d taken a pen as well, for she’d been taught to be a thief when the need arose.

I am fine, but no one knows me as you do. Please stay alive.

The heron returned a week later. He perched on the ledge and pushed the window open. The other girls in the attic thought they were dreaming, for what they saw was impossible, and so they went back to sleep. They thought that birds and mortals lived in the same world, but only the world of men mattered. Julien had thought the same thing when he found the heron in the yard in Paris. By now the military had taken over the house, and the family lived in the greenhouse with the domed skylight. When the rain fell it sounded as if rocks were falling. Julien and his father had been taken as forced labor. They cleaned the streets, scrubbing stones. They had blisters on their hands and they didn’t speak to Madame Claire about their humiliation. They didn’t have to. Claire now cleaned the house for the German captain who lived there. When she thought of Marianne and how she’d treated her, she closed herself in the linen closet and cried. The German professors and their families were still on the third floor, behind a brick wall, mice who no longer dared to speak. Where would they go if they left? Wasn’t it best to hide in plain sight where no one would think to look? Claire brought them food whenever she could, the leavings from their own table or from the captain’s dinner.

When Julien saw the metal cylinder attached to the heron’s leg, he approached cautiously and untied it, then crouched behind the greenhouse to read Lea’s message. His hands shook and he read it three times before he could make sense of it. He was grateful and confused. He told himself not to have hope for the future. The life that he knew had ended, and what else was there for him? He told himself he was part of a dream in which a huge gray bird allowed him to tie a message to its leg before rising into the sky. For an instant he remembered who he was. I know exactly who you are, he’d written back. Je sais qui tu es.

Je suis ici.

I’m here.

When the roses bloomed, the garden was a sea of silver. Before Ava knew it, summer would be gone. This is the way time moved in the human world. Slowly at first, and then much too fast. The heron still nested on the rooftop, but she knew that in a few months’ time he would leave for Spain or Africa. She tried not to think about his parting, and she wondered if love was like that, and if all mortals needed to close their eyes against the future and what it might bring. Sister Marie, who went to prayers at four, noticed Ava on her way to the chapel. The younger nuns remained nervous in Ava’s presence, and avoided her entirely. They said she never slept and some of the sisters believed she could read their thoughts. When she pressed their garments, the younger nuns swore that she gathered information about them. How else could she know their private thoughts and desires? Why she had even made Sister Félicité a bread pudding for her birthday, when no one in the convent had known that date or had ever celebrated the sister’s birthday before.

The mother superior paused in the courtyard in the dim light of morning to listen to Ava sing to the heron in a voice that brought tears to the sister’s eyes. They danced in the courtyard, bowing and circling one another, singing as if their hearts would break. Spying this on her way to prayers, Sister Marie knew enough of the world to know what she was seeing.

When Lea received the note from Julien she went behind the kitchen to be alone to read it. She sank down near the old stone water troughs, for the kitchen had once been a large stable. There was chervil and mint growing wild, and the scent would ever after remind her of him. His message was brief, but she read it again and again. All she needed was a word or two. A young sister came and shouted at her to come in to her studies, and although she did so, she took her time so that she could savor his message. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought or said or did.

He was there.

In class, they were studying Jeanne d’Arc, and during these lessons Lea often thought of Ava. The Maid of Orléans had been born to fight, chosen by God. Even though she was a woman, she looked upon war as another woman might rejoice on her wedding day. She was made for battle, and was so fierce that when the British captured her they had to burn her three times, for once was not enough. She had only been thirteen when she was visited by the archangel Michael in her father’s garden, and nineteen when she was burned at the stake. The cinders and ashes from her burning were said to have been thrown into the Seine, although a vial was later discovered in a jar in the attic of an apothecary in Paris. They remained illuminated, as if sparked by fire. In class, they spoke her sainted name in low tones, as if her name had a power of its own.

After class, Lea and Renée sat on their beds in the attic and Lea helped her practice her French. “Not everyone can be Jeanne d’Arc. Sometimes you can’t fight,” Renée told Lea. “Sometimes they cut you open and do terrible things to you.” She let Lea hug her even though she never wanted to be touched. “Nur einmal,” she said. Just once.

They both wished their mothers had not been on trains. They wished there were happy endings. This was why Lea kept the note from Julien under her pillow. So she could dream about another world and another life. At school they were called Renée and Lillie, but when they were alone they called each other by their true names, Rachel and Lea, as in the Bible. We’ll escape, they promised each other. We’ll start new lives, they said. But neither one could look at her reflection, for if they did the girls they had once been might stare back at them, and those girls, they both agreed, were gone.

Ava spent late afternoons in the kitchen, before going out to see to the garden. Time was moving faster all the time. It was the season to clip back the roses. They must be carefully tended, for they wilted in hot weather. The plants had black, leathery leaves and dark thorny branches, and were especially difficult to cut back, not that that would be a problem. Ava was always a hard worker; the nuns commented to each other that she was tireless and could complete one task after another.

But on this day her thoughts were elsewhere, beyond the garden. She was experiencing emotions she wasn’t made to have. She worried over Lea in a profound way that caught her by surprise, acting not out of duty but from someplace inside of her. Why this should be, she had no idea. She was so deep in thought she didn’t notice when she caught her finger on a thorn as she cleared away a twisted, black branch. A single bead of blood formed, crimson in the early morning light. She stared at it, confused. Was she meant to have blood rather than water and clay?

Lea had been sprawled out on her bed, studying her lessons, but she had put down her book and she spied Ava from the window. She knew her caretaker was not like other women, but she marveled at how human she could seem, more so all the time. She had noticed Ava crying when the heron left to go fishing in distant lakes, an unwanted ability she had learned without trying. Lea wished Ava could turn herself into a heron, then she could leave and never return. She wished that she was an angel that couldn’t be seen by mortal eyes and could disappear into the clouds. But here she was, at work in the garden. They were bound together. Where you found one, you would find the other. Every day Lea tried not to think about the moment when her locket fell open, when she read the message she wasn’t yet meant to see. But it was too late then and it was too late now. She had read her mother’s instructions. She knew exactly what she must do.

When the war is over, and you are safe, you must kill her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE GATHERED

PARIS, JULY 1942

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE month, on the sixteenth day of July, when the plane trees were a brilliant green, an ordinary day, the French police came knocking on doors. This past spring, Jews were made to wear yellow stars and were only allowed to ride in the last car of the Métro and were forbidden in restaurants. It was known that at least one synagogue had been converted into a brothel for Nazi soldiers. But now there were mass arrests. There was a sweep of Jews; refugees and French citizens alike were taken to the cycling stadium, Vélodrome d’Hiver, in the 15th arrondissement. The Nazi-planned event had the code name Opération Vent printanier, Operation Spring Breeze, meant to exterminate an entire population. In all, more than thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up over two days, four thousand of them children. Anyone under the age of fifteen would be handed over to the Union Générale des Israélites de France and sent to foundations and children’s homes.

They found the professors and their families on the third floor behind the brick wall, the children in the wardrobe, the wives beneath the beds. All were immediately arrested, but the police considered the real criminals to be the Lévis. What argument could they offer for breaking the law? There was none to be given. Still, when the Lévis were told they must come with the police immediately, Claire was shocked. “We’re French,” she argued. She had known nothing good would come of having foreigners in their house. She’d never wanted them in the first place.

The professor quickly stepped in to calm his wife. Of course they would accompany the police and answer any questions. There was no harm in that. Tempers were high and it was best to do as they were told.

The whole family. Bring your son.

Madame Lévi looked at her husband through tears.

“It will be fine,” he said, but the German professors and their families had already been led away. They had not been allowed to take their belongings or, in the case of the children, put on their shoes.

Julien was in the greenhouse when they called for him. He thought about scrambling over the garden wall. How this could be accomplished flashed through his mind—the lift into the air, the steep drop to the alley below. Victor had leapt from the roof of their house once, why couldn’t Julien do the same now from the top of the wall? But when he spied his parents at the door with the police, he couldn’t leave them. They didn’t even look like his parents, they had become two older, confused people. His father had put on his hat, as if he were going to a meeting and must look his best. Julien went to the door and did as the police asked. The family took nothing with them. Already, a soldier had taken the purse his mother carried, stealing the gold coins and her favorite earrings, scattering the baby teeth she had saved on the ground.

Julien saw the heron in the sky above them, but he threw his arms into the air and warned him away. The note Lea had written to him would never be received, and the one he had written was crumpled in the grass.

There are almost none of us left in the city. If not for Hardship Soup we would have starved.