Page 41 of The World That We Knew

“My mother used to deliver babies on our kitchen table,” Ettie told him. “I suppose I learned a thing or two from her.”

Still, Ettie felt uncomfortable whenever she was alone with Dr. Girard. She was accustomed to the world of women and had only known the boys in her community, all of whom she seemed able to outthink and talk rings around. She had no experience with men, or maybe it was more than her lack of experience. She had tender feelings toward the doctor, especially after watching his work with wounded Resistance members and refugees. He was such a good man, measured and deliberate, allaying his patients’ fears. When their work was done, and their clothes bloodied, he would guide her back to the car with his fingers against her back, and the heat of his touch had both comforted her and enflamed her.

Tonight, after their chess game, the doctor had unexpectedly suggested they go upstairs. Ettie had immediately felt nervous. She had fleeting thoughts of all the men who had approached her, the fellow who ran the laundry, the owner of the café. She avoided the doctor’s gaze, and had a moment of doubt as to what a man such as himself would want from her.

All the same, she followed him to the second floor, and as it turned out Dr. Girard wasn’t after anything inappropriate. He simply went to the closet and opened the door, then turned to Ettie and motioned her forward. There were his wife Sarah’s clothes, neatly displayed on wooden hangers. She had been gone for several years, lost to cancer. The fact that her disease had been incurable was a personal affront. He was meant to cure, and could do nothing at all. Girard often imagined that Sarah was in the kitchen, making coffee or reading a book at the table as sunlight came through the window, waiting for him at the end of the day. Darling, she would say when he walked in, I’ve missed you.

He could not save her, he could only watch her die, and so he rarely opened the closet where her clothes were still stored, for he was reminded of all he was incapable of accomplishing each time he saw anything that had belonged to her. But since Ettie’s arrival he had been thinking what a waste it was to have Sarah’s belongings locked away, when Ettie had nothing. He stood back, so that Ettie could get a good look. She had never seen more beautiful clothing. There were linen summer dresses and silk evening clothes, along with piles of sweaters in jeweled colors. At the rear of the closet there was a black coat with a fur collar.

“My wife liked beautiful things,” Girard told Ettie. “She worked for a designer in Paris long ago. Try some of it on,” he suggested. “It’s not doing anyone any good in a closet.”

Ettie reached for a simple shift. The soft fabric rustled in her hand.

“No,” the doctor said. “Take something that you find to be truly beautiful.”

So she chose a pale blue taffeta dress the color of an afternoon sky that Madame Girard had worn in Paris to an engagement party for one of the doctor’s cousins. It was chic and fashionable without being too much. The doctor left the room so Ettie could try it on. She stared at herself in the full-length mirror. She was no longer the rabbi’s daughter, but even in this glorious dress she was still the sister of a girl who had died in a yellow field. That was the one true part of her that remained. Nothing could hide that.

She went to the hallway, where the doctor was waiting, nervous again. He was slightly taken aback by her sudden intense beauty, but he smiled when she spun around. He remembered that night in Paris with Sarah. How cold it had been as they walked to the party, how he’d kept his arm under her coat so that he could feel her heart beating.

“It’s perfect,” Ettie said.

“One thing is missing.”

They went back into the bedroom and Girard took out a pair of black heels. Ettie, however, had taken note of a pair of red shoes at the rear of the closet. They were exquisite, highly polished leather. “Perhaps these.”

“Ah.” The doctor nodded. “Her favorites.”

The shoes were tight at the toes, but they would do. Ettie practiced walking in them out in the barn until, at last, she didn’t stumble.

All the rest of the night, the doctor thought about the red shoes. He couldn’t sleep, and sat up thinking about Sarah. He had felt her tumor when he held her breast, but he told himself he was wrong. He had been wrong before, so why not now? But in truth he was a good diagnostician, and he had gone outside to be alone that night after his wife fell asleep. He walked in the woods and wept. He knew he was right, and yet he, who had told patients the state of their health time and time again, even when the news was bad, couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

In the end she was the one to come to him. She had felt the lump while bathing.

“It’s like a stone,” she told him.

He brought her to the hospital in Lyon, where they removed her breast and a good deal of tissue surrounding it, down to her ribs. Sarah was in terrible pain after the surgery, but said nothing. She wouldn’t look at him after that, or let him see her. She locked herself in the bedroom, filled with shame. He had been her husband for nearly fifteen years, but there were things that were impossible to share with a husband, even after all that time. Her savaged beautiful body was now kept secret from him.

There were rumbles of the war during her illness, but he didn’t hear them, he only heard her crying. She made him sleep on the couch because she couldn’t bear to have him near and not be intimate. He was a doctor, he had seen the worst wounds, the most horrible tumors, but this was different. He made up a bed on the couch in the library, but he didn’t sleep. He continued to see patients for a while, but he couldn’t stand to hear their complaints, and in time, he sent them away, to another doctor in Lyon, though it was farther for his neighbors who had so relied upon him. He could not focus and he feared his preoccupation with Sarah’s illness might cause him to make some terrible error in handling their care. He would not be able to live with himself if he made a mistake because he was more concerned with his wife than with any of them, men, women, and children alike. All the same, people from the village brought cakes and bread and stews. They left the covered platters of homemade food on the doorstep. They came at dusk so he wouldn’t see them and feel he must politely engage them. It was clear they felt there was no need for him to thank them. That was when he understood that his wife was dying.

Finally, Sarah gave in and let him come back to their bedroom to sleep beside her. When he held her in the dark, he could feel another lump in her other breast, and another under her arm. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew. That was why she had allowed him back. Nothing mattered anymore, not how she looked or how frail she had become. This was the only time they had, this and nothing more.

“I’m filled with stones,” she told him, and it was true. Often a patient knew more than her doctor, especially when the doctor didn’t wish to know. When he brought her back to Lyon, her surgeon X-rayed her and discovered the cancer was in many other places, her lungs, her liver, her spine. This doctor was a younger man, and he thought because he was dealing with another doctor there was no need to mince words. “A few months at most,” he said to Girard.

She was still his beloved wife, but she was already leaving him. Sometimes when she slept he could see an illumination, as if the light was seeping out of her. He felt worthless and helpless. The reason he became a doctor was to possess the ability to change a person’s fate, as he’d seen his father do with his patients. He wanted to heal, not to idly sit at her bedside with cups of tea and stories to read to her. Even books, which he’d always loved, seemed like silly, unimportant things. There was only one thing that mattered now. The single moment they were in.

As a boy he had often gone to see patients with his father. At first he had been made to sit outside, but as time went on he’d been allowed into sickrooms. By the age of fourteen he’d seen more than most medical students would see in their first year. He had observed his father as he cared for those who were dying with great kindness and compassion, and afterward they would go out walking the steep paths in the Ardèche, where the air was thin and clear.

We’re shepherds, the older man had told his son. All we can do is tend to them.

The doctor couldn’t believe he was losing his wife, and yet every day he had more of an understanding of what she meant to him. They’d been fortunate to have had many years when they hadn’t thought about time at all, and had just greedily and happily lived their lives, having breakfast, walking in the woods, working, quarreling over inconsequential things, making love in their old bed, which had belonged to his parents. And then time was blown up altogether. Her disease was incurable, so he put away the clocks and removed his wristwatch, which he left in the night table drawer. They had six months, and then three months, and then, suddenly, a single day. A single day to look at her so that he would never forget the smallest details. The mole on her neck, the way she bit her lip when she was in pain, for she never complained.

Now, the Germans forced every Jewish woman to use the name Sarah after her own name on every official document. Girard was unwilling to let another woman die if he could save her. Each person who had slept in his barn, each he had given refuge, each Resistance worker he had helped, was for Sarah. It was always her, she was with him still, as if she were waiting in the kitchen, ready to embrace him as soon as he walked in the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HIDDEN

IZIEU, APRIL 1944