Page 47 of The World That We Knew

“Are you sure you are?” Ettie responded, her tone dark.

Victor was quick to take offense. “Meaning?”

She wasn’t questioning his courage, rather his willingness to throw away his life. “You probably have something to live for. Some woman.”

Victor shrugged, but of course, it was true.

“I have no one,” Ettie told him. “Therefore I’m more ready.”

Victor grinned then. Ettie amused him. She liked to win every argument, and was especially scrappy with men, perhaps to prove she could be fiercer and more willing to do battle. Still, Victor was hesitant to bring her into a mission where the object was murder. And now he cautiously let her know that there might be certain circumstances where she would have to allow the captain to do as he liked.

“You think I didn’t understand why my hair was cut? Why I was given beautiful clothes to wear? I know I’m not pretty, but you made me so. I understand I may have to draw him to us. So now, go ahead, make me hate him.”

“You hate him already,” Victor said.

“I want to hate him more.”

So he told her more of what he knew, that their target liked torture as much as he loathed Jews.

“How so?”

The captain had ingratiated himself with the Nazi commanders, including the commander and chief of the secret police, Klaus Barbie, who had sent two thousand five hundred Jews to extermination camps and had executed eight hundred others, personally torturing and murdering them. When Jews were picked up and taken to the prison in Lyon, Barbie allowed the captain to stand outside their cells, built for two, but often packed with fifty people or more, men, women, and children, so that he could delight in their misery. The captain was known to carry a Star of David made from the flesh of a Jew in his pocket, a gift from Barbie.

Ettie shot Victor a look of disbelief.

“What?” he said. “You don’t believe in evil?”

“Oh, I do. But now you’ve done your job and I hate him more. That will help.”

She thought of her sister holding her hand as they leapt from the train, her face focused on Ettie with absolute trust. How could her beautiful sister exist in the same world as this monster they were to kill? There in the woods, Ettie began to recite a section of the Amidah, the standing prayer that is to be recited three times a day by Orthodox men. It was the twelfth benediction, which deals with the fight against enemies. May all evil be destroyed in an instant.

“May you be abundantly manifest as one who breaks enemies and humbles deliberate sinners,” Ettie recited.

“You’re Orthodox,” Victor said, surprised. He himself had not been bar mitzvah and had never learned Hebrew.

“Not anymore. By now, I’ve offended God in every way possible. I’m amazed I’m not dead already.”

Victor grinned. “What could a girl like you do that would be so terrible?”

She understood that he really didn’t know her at all. He regarded her as a slight girl that he was instructing in the art of rebellion and murder, and had no idea of what she might be capable of. She had brought inanimate matter to life, she had forsaken her faith and her family, she had lost her sister, she had changed her name, she was willing to give up everything to rid the earth of a monster. When she didn’t answer, Victor was wise enough to let it go. He, too, had committed acts he never wished to speak of. The bombings had taken lives, some by accident, and he could not put back together that which had been destroyed, nor would he have wanted to, for he had missions that must be completed for the greater good, for the good of all. He would not speak of such things, just as Ettie would not speak of the golem she had created, the affront to God that she had to bear. Had her father known what she’d done, he would have wept and torn out his hair. He would never have spoken to her again.

Now, riding through the dark, she wondered what had happened to the creature who had no choice but to do as she was commanded. She wondered if she should have kept the golem so that her duty was to watch over not one woman’s daughter but all children: the brothers who crouched down in the rosemary before they were arrested, the boy left weeping at the door while his mother was brought to the captain’s bedroom, the children separated from their parents who had been sent on the trains to the East. Perhaps she should have created a hundred golems, perhaps a thousand, an army to fight on their behalf, each one stronger than a hundred horsemen, all with the mission of saving their people. Perhaps her father regretted the very same thing, when it was already too late, when he was on the train and a sin such as the one she was responsible for no longer mattered.

Victor delivered Ettie to the doctor’s house, assuring her that he would be back as soon as he had the materials he needed. She was surprised to feel a wave of sadness about his departure; she had come to think of him as a brother.

“If anything happens, what would you miss most in this world?” she asked.

“Nothing will happen.” His expression was set. Doubt was something neither of them could afford.

“You must have it. The one thing you live for.”

He flushed and looked annoyed. “You want me to look like a fool,” he said.

“No, not at all. I don’t know the answer for myself. But you’re different than I am. Surely there must be something.”

She looked so vulnerable in the dark, her nervous, chalky face flecked with freckles, so unlike her usual fierce self. Because of this Victor was moved to tell her the truth, whether or not he seemed a fool.

“Marianne,” he answered. “Nothing else matters.”