Prologue
Mediterranean Sea
October 1946
SHE CROUCHES ON the top deck, surrounded by hundreds of people squeezed together. All have fallen silent since the ship arrived at the easternmost reach of the Mediterranean Basin. In the moonless night, the sky and sea merge into one inky darkness. Judith’s eyes strain to penetrate it and glimpse the shoreline. Oh, how her parents and sisters had prayed for this safe haven when trying to flee the Nazis’ clutches. I’m doing it for you, she mouths, careful not to utter a sound. The ship’s engines are quiet now. The hum that filled Judith’s ears for nine days in this ancient vessel doesn’t subside; it echoes in the pounding of blood in her temples. She has known fear. Terror has been her constant companion these past six years, since she was eleven. Now there’s a new fear: of being intercepted by the British, who control Palestine and block the entry of Jewish refugees. Her yearnings to reach Eretz Israel might come to naught. What will happen to her then? The land is so close that Judith can almost taste the juice of its oranges.
A heavy chain is lowered with a muffled clatter, and Judith jolts with the ship as its anchor latches onto the bottom of the sea. Next to her, an eight-year- old girl whimpers. Judith hugs her against her side and places her finger on the girl’s lips. They have practiced every night for this long hour of silence. The most difficult part is yet to come. The next steps will be filled with great risks—their only hope to reach freedom.
Anxiety hangs like a cloud over the passengers’ collectively held breath. Judith passes her hand over the heads of the twelve children clustered around her like frightened birds. She mothered them in the Marseille displaced-persons camp and has bonded with them through her games and storytelling and playing her flute. They are all eight-to ten-year- olds except for one four-year- old boy, who is smart and obedient. The coming hour is the test that no one is allowed to fail. A child who panics and loses control puts hundreds of passengers in peril.
Salty mist rolls in. The ship bobs in the quiet night; the only sound is the lapping of waves against its sides. The calm is deceptive, auguring danger. The threat of discovery lurks in the soft breeze that caresses Judith’s burning face and the sleek surface of the water—either might carry the faintest of voices to a British patrol boat.
In the tight space, Judith pulls the little boy onto her lap. He clings to her for comfort, opening in her an equal measure of love. Her lips brush his hair.
The muted strokes of paddles below the ship make her raise her head. Her group, composed of herself and the youngest children, will debark first. Someone touches her shoulder, and Judith rises, readjusts the straps that tie her bundle and the canvas bag holding all their shoes to her back. She lifts the boy and takes the hand of the nearest child; the rest of her charges form a tight chain behind her. The boy’s father, one of the organizers, will be among the last to leave the boat, and Judith prays that he will make it to shore before they are spotted. In the darkness, a young man climbs up the ladder on the side of the ship and carries the boy down. At the railing, an Israeli woman silently directs Judith’s other children to scramble down themselves. Judith follows.
Strong arms grab her back at the last rung and lower her gently onto a bench in a rowboat. More children and their leader quickly fill the boat. Two men her age take the oars, and Judith’s heart swells with pride at the sight. These are Haganah members. Heroes. She trusts each one. Whatever else she does in her new home, she will strive to join their ranks.
First, though, she must guide her charges over the next crucial hurdles. If the British detect them on water or on land, soldiers will descend on them, force them back onto the ship, and send them back to the cursed Europe that loathes those it hasn’t killed. Or the British will lock them up behind barbed wire in their newly built camps on the island of Cyprus.
After barely escaping the gas of the extermination chambers, they would be back in a concentration camp with no hope of escape.
Three empty rowboats skim by in the near darkness, bound for the ship to collect immigrants, as her small vessel makes its way toward the shore. Each swoosh of breaking water increases the thumping of Judith’s heart. Will any of them reach safety before they are exposed?
Her journey began so long ago, on that summer day in Lyon when the police raided her Jewish school. Judith had been in the lavatory. She’d heard cries and peeked out to see her classmates being shoved into the yard. She ran up three flights of stairs to the roof. Below, parents rattled the locked school gates, screaming. As blood pumped through her veins, Judith vaulted onto the roof of the adjacent building. Her long, thin legs carried her from one roof to the next, past her neighborhood, until she no longer heard the screaming. She pried open an attic window and hid there for a day and a half, until hunger and worry for her parents and sisters sent her back over the rooftops.
The street was quiet when she reached her family’s building. Light shone in the kitchen window. Her parents cried with relief and covered her with kisses. The Vichy government had a quota of Jews to deport, they’d told her, grief-stricken. Her twin sisters, two years younger, had been taken.
Next morning, their housekeeper bleached Judith’s dark hair blond and took her to her own village. A business associate had made arrangements to hide her parents elsewhere, she was told.
After the war, Judith waited for them to come for her. They knew where she was. But they never showed up.
Suddenly, light floods the shore. A shudder runs through Judith at the sight of a searchlight bathing the white sand and gliding slowly across its expanse. Fear of discovery stifles her awe at this first glimpse of the land of her dreams. The light ascends a cliff, caresses its fissures, and casts ghostly shadows under boulders and clusters of shrubbery. The beam is still lingering on the cliff, searching, when Judith hears the lapping sounds of swimmers beside her boat. The four men and women each grab two of the smallest children and dash through the shallow waves to the shore. Judith tucks the hem of her skirt into her waistband, raises the bag of shoes, and lowers herself into the thigh-high water. It welcomes her with a surprising warmth. She quickly helps the rest of her children debark, then wades to the shore.
Their saviors are counting the seconds, she knows, so when a young man carrying the little boy guides them onto the sand and whispers to her in Yiddish, “I’ll be in front, you’ll bring up the back—run fast,” she sprints with her well-trained children across the sand to the cliff, where he ushers them into a deep crevice.
She’s dreamed of the moment when her feet touch the soil of the Holy Land, but now that it is happening, there’s not a second to spare for a prayer of thanks. Her heart pounding, Judith squeezes the children against the sandstone rock. The wet, half-naked body of their rescuer is pressed against them as a new searchlight crawls along the beach they’ve just crossed. A thin rivulet of sand cascades onto Judith’s shoulder. The seconds tick away in her head.
When the searchlight begins its arc upward, away from them, the young man touches Judith’s hand. “Ready?” he whispers. His breath is warm, and a pleasant shiver travels through her as he hands her the boy. He scrambles up the steep crevice and stops on the first ledge to take the boy back from her, then grabs the arm of the next child that Judith pushes up. She climbs last. The cliff slopes away, and they crawl fast toward the flat surface.
They’ve just reached the top when their leader whispers, “Down!” and they all flatten themselves on the pebbly ground between clusters of knee-high prickly shrubs. Just then, a new beam of light bursts to life and plunges across the top of the cliff. It grazes their backs. They all hold their breath, their arms tucked underneath themselves, the curvatures of their bodies blending with the uneven surface. No one moves. A stone pricks Judith’s cheek, breaking her skin. Her heart hammers so hard, she’s afraid it might explode. She prays that the children will tolerate the stones’ rough edges. If her group is exposed, it will doom all those who follow.
The searchlight goes dark, and blackness drops on her like a lead cape. She touches the nearest child, the agreed-upon signal, and they all get up. With no time to dust off the sand and pebbles, they break into a run across a plowed field. As her eyes readjust to the darkness, she sees the nearby silhouettes of more people rushing in the same direction.
A pinprick of a flashlight beam directs them to a waiting truck. Quickly, their rescuer helps them climb onto its bed. The wooden benches are not screwed to the truck bed. She places the boy on the floor, props him up between her legs, and puts her arms, like protective wings, around the kids beside her. We’re here, she tells herself, hardly believing it. Thank You, God. She breathes in a lungful of the Holy Land air. The first of many millions to come, she knows.
More groups scramble up; children squeeze together to make room for arriving adults. Another truck rumbles away. The rescuers run back; hundreds of passengers are still waiting to be led to safety.
As the young man shuts the truck’s low tailgate, Judith reaches over and touches his fingers.
“My hero,” she whispers. “Thank you.”
“Welcome home,” he replies, and she can hear the warm smile in his voice.
Chapter One
SHARON
Tel Aviv, Israel
July 1968
SHARON ENTERS HER grandmother’s apartment—her home—expecting to escape the scorching heat outside, but the air that greets her, aromatic with the smell of baking, is warm. The radio is playing “Jerusalem of Gold,” the passionate song that became Israel’s unofficial national anthem following the liberation of Jerusalem the year before. Sharon drops her carpet satchel and kicks off her sandals to soak in the chill of the marble floor. Her skin feels sticky from the bus ride back to Tel Aviv from the suburban home of her dead fiancé.
She’s barely closed the door when Savta, her grandmother, steps out of the kitchen. “Someone from the navy was here to see you.”
Sharon swivels on her heel. “Why didn’t he go to the Golans’?” Since she hadn’t yet become Alon Golan’s wife, his parents are the next of kin. Thirty hours after the submarine Dakar sent its last signal, the commander in chief visited their house to deliver the troubling news. “The navy knows where they live,” Sharon adds.
“He left a phone number.” A bit of flour is smeared on Savta’s forehead. Sharon reaches out and wipes it off.
“Did he say what this was about?” Sharon is exhausted from six months of mourning, of waiting for the sunken Dakar to be found and for a proper burial to take place. “It must be a mistake.”
“Are you going to call?” Savta holds out the note.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Sharon mumbles. Haunting images of Alon struggling for air, his fingers clawing at the iron walls of his tomb, rush through her mind. She’s just spent another day in the only place she finds solace: his parents’ home, where dozens of friends and relatives take turns dropping by daily, bearing platters of food. They brew coffee, serve cakes, empty ashtrays, refill bowls of nuts and pickles, and pass around pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice. The television is kept on day and night for any breaking news. The Golans’ heavy silence in the midst of this activity suits Sharon’s mood. The hollow gouged in her middle is unprepared to accept her friends’ invitations for an outing of falafel and ice cream, a beach paddleball game, or a night’s campfire, where she used to play her flute.
“The officer was clear that he needed to speak with you,” Savta insists.
All Sharon wants to do now is drop on her bed and give herself over to a long cry. She kisses Savta’s cheek in a pretense of a light mood. Despite the heat, Savta’s skin is clammy and cold, smelling of vanilla. A flood of love washes over Sharon. These past two years, she’s been wrapped up in her own life: her two-year intelligence service, the Six-Day War. Operationally, the war took not a mere six days but six months of her working around the clock, rarely having time to sleep, let alone come home. Now her mourning is a bottomless sorrow, a black hole from which no light—or emotion—escapes. She has given little thought to Savta’s deepening loneliness following Grandpa Nathan’s passing.
What would a naval officer want with her? Only once, within two weeks of the Dakar’s disappearance, did an officer come here rather than to the Golans’ home. That social worker from headquarters, a woman, inquired whether Sharon was, by any chance, pregnant. No, Sharon wasn’t, and she was glad not to be faced with the dilemma. She wouldn’t have wanted to raise a child without a father. She was an orphan herself, and although her grandparents were devoted to her, they had already reared seven children and spent many days babysitting their sixteen grandchildren. Then, in 1948, in the middle of the War of Independence, between sirens, there was a knock on the door. Their twenty-three- year- old son, Amiram, and his young refugee wife, Judith, had been killed in battle defending their kibbutz. During a brief cease-fire, Sharon’s devastated grandparents rushed to pick up the six-week- old orphan from Haifa, where the kibbutz’s children had been evacuated.
“Have you eaten today?” Savta’s fingers pinch the excess fabric of Sharon’s calf-length dress. “You can’t keep losing weight.”
Sharon forces a smile. “It’s the summer heat.” She tasted only a few morsels from the plate someone at the Golans’ pressed into her hands.
The phone in the kitchen rings. She lets Savta step in and pick it up. If it’s any of Sharon’s friends, Savta will take a message. Sharon will not call back.
“That officer.” Savta’s palm covers the mouthpiece.
Sharon groans. Just take a message, she mouths impatiently, but Savta holds out the phone.
A deep voice says, “Good evening, Sharon. This is Commander Daniel Yarden.”
“I got your message. I’m sure you want to speak with the Golans.”
“I’d like to speak with you. You and I met at their home.”
Since late January, every week, officers of the various branches of the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, have been dropping in at the Golans’ house. Some sit silently, soaking in Alon’s parents’ grief; some engage in conversation with other visitors, all of whom have military experience in their past.
Sharon has been oblivious to the visitors. “What’s this about?”
“It needs to be discussed in person.”
“I told your social worker six months ago that I wasn’t pregnant.”
He chuckles. “How about I come by in an hour?”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow? Or next week?”
“If it’s okay with you, I’ll be over at twenty-one hundred.”
She’s puzzled by his persistence. She wants nothing to do with the navy. With a sigh, she stretches out the words, “All right.”
“Is that about your intelligence unit?” Savta asks after Sharon hangs up.
“If they needed me, they’d send a telegram, not a naval commander.” Sharon kisses Savta’s cheek. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Two carp are swimming in the tub in the bathroom. Today must be Wednesday, which is when Savta begins shopping for Friday-night dinner. Friday morning, she’ll kill, gut, and stuff the carp for her gefilte fish.
“Hello to you too,” Sharon says to the pair as she wiggles out of her dress. Rather than spending another day at the Golans’, she should stay home on Friday and help Savta cook the meal for whichever family members show up—usually about twenty. Since Grandpa’s long illness, Savta can’t afford the daily Arab maid.
When Sharon steps into the adjacent shower stall, she realizes that for a whole three minutes, she hasn’t thought of Alon’s torturous death.
THE UNIFORMED VISITOR is tall, almost gangly, and wears rimless glasses. He politely refuses Savta’s offer of coffee and a slice of poppy-seed cake.
The living room has a frosted-glass door and he asks Sharon’s permission to close it. He pulls over a chair to face her while she settles on the sofa. Her long hair is still wet from the shower, and the dampness spreads across the back of her cotton frock.
He leans forward. His face is long, like the rest of him, and pleasing, except for the bulbous tip of his nose. His green eyes are enlarged by his glasses. A shadow in his cleft chin hints of a hidden stubble. He appears to be around twenty-seven. “Sorry to press you for this meeting, but I am about to go overseas.”
“Spill it,” she says. “I can’t imagine what this is about.”
“What are your plans for the coming months?”
“Are you serious? I’m waiting for you guys to find the Dakar—if you’re even bothering to look for it any longer.”
“I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. The Eilat and then the Dakar hit us all very hard.”
The destroyer Eilat was sunk last October by Egyptian missiles; forty-seven men were killed and a hundred wounded. Alon had trained with some of the Eilat’s seamen, and she accompanied him on shivah visits to the bereaved families. At least they had the consolation of burials. At least many of the boys who were injured survived. How could she have imagined that four months later she would be similarly devastated? The two stupendous losses extinguished the exhilaration over the unprecedented victory of the Six-Day War.
“Is that what you came to talk about?” Sharon asks.
“Indirectly, yes.” His eyes meet hers. “We are rethinking naval warfare, overhauling the navy.”
Why is he looking at her as if she has anything to do with naval warfare? Since he is, Sharon can give him a piece of her mind.
“I never understood the strategy of defending our long shoreline primarily from the air, treating the navy as a bastard child.” Her tone heats up. “Which is also evident in the way you stopped searching for the Dakar.”
“For the record, the navy and air force have not given up, but this is outside my work. I am in the process of recruiting people for another project.”
She shoots out of her seat and paces the room. “Not me, that’s for sure. First, I finished my IDF duty. Second, the only women in the navy are secretaries, and I can’t type. Third, if you don’t mind my being blunt, I hate your navy.”
“Just listen, please.” He gestures for her to sit down and waits until she lets out an impatient groan and settles against the sofa’s cushions. “We’ve checked you out. You graduated from Alliance Française.” Sharon nods, perplexed at the mention of her French-language high school. He continues. “We know that in Intelligence, you worked in Arabic, which we don’t need at the moment. Besides English, don’t you also know some German?”
She crosses her arms. Why is any of that this commander’s business? Her eyes are drawn to the framed photo on the wall behind him: her parents on their wedding day. They stand in front of Grandpa Nathan’s synagogue, the svelte bride holding a bouquet of white anemones against her straight, buttoned, and belted dress. The fabric is cream-colored, not as blinding in the sunny black-and- white photo as Amiram’s white shirt. Savta told Sharon that Judith had no relatives and was attended by only one girlfriend. Relieved for two days of their duties at the kibbutz, the couple and the friend had taken the hours-long bus ride to Tel Aviv for the wedding.
Who was this woman, her dead mother, the Holocaust refugee? She must have had a knack for languages too, because when Amiram brought her to meet his parents a mere seven months after Judith Katz arrived in Israel, Savta was astonished at how fast the newcomer had learned Hebrew. Her mother must have also been musical; Sharon’s musical talent certainly didn’t come from her father’s tone-deaf family.
How had her mother’s touch felt on her six-week- old skin, the last time she’d held Sharon?
Sharon is stroking her own exposed arm as the commander’s words pull her back. “The results of your psychometric exams before you joined Intelligence were later confirmed by your performance there,” he says. “You are extremely resourceful, you work well independently, and you are detail-oriented without being bogged down by minutiae. You’re able to juggle several pieces of information while assessing a situation. What others might call intuition seems to have led you to uncover crucial intel during the Six-Day War, right?”
Blood rushes to her face. Isn’t she a civilian now with the right to privacy? “Presumably, my unit’s projects were highly confidential. How did the navy get access to them?”
“We didn’t. Only to the personnel file. And we spoke to your commander.”
“Why? Are you recruiting a Mata Hari?”
His laughter is rolling, pleasant. “It’s only the Cherbourg project.”
“What’s that?”
“The Saar boats being built in France.”
Of course. When the twelve boats were ordered a few years ago, there were some write-ups in the newspapers. Sharon only noticed that the first five had arrived because Alon pointed them out to her when they drove past the Kishon port on the way to Carmel Mountain.
A familiar surge of grief swells in her at the memory of that picnic in the forest. They’d made love on a bed of dry pine needles and fallen asleep to the music of the breeze rustling in the treetops. The pines’ resinous aroma now rises in Sharon’s nostrils. Doesn’t this commander grasp that she is too distraught—and angry—to care about the revamping of his fleet?
She collects herself. “Cherbourg, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?” she asks. The musical film starring Catherine Deneuve was a bore, yet it and its theme song had become international sensations.
“That’s the one. It’s a port city in Normandy. The Titanic sailed from there.”
“Normandy has lots of cows,” she says, recalling her introductory French textbook.
He laughs. “Sheep too.”
She scratches her cheek. “Let me get this straight, Commander Yarden—”
“Call me Danny.”
She won’t fall for this tactic of familiarity. “Are you offering me a job in France in the middle of nowhere?”
“I didn’t get to that yet, but yes, except that it’s a lovely place—and only a five-hour train ride from Paris.” He grins as if aware of the absurdity of touting such a long distance as a plus. “Most important, the navy needs you for a very interesting position.”
His audacity infuriates her. “Are you kidding me?”
His left eyebrow arches. “Why else would I be here talking to you?”
“I’m not remotely interested in working for the navy that killed my fiancé. We were going to get married this October.”
“Hear me out.”
“What kind of job could your navy possibly offer that would make me want to be part of it?”
His tone turns persuasive: “We want you to take over some complicated, highly classified tasks that are too confidential for me to outline right now. Also to act as a liaison with our foreign contacts.” He examines her face. “We are about twenty Israelis living there, some with families. A warm little community. You might find the change of scenery refreshing.”
Sharon stands up. “Thanks for thinking of me. I’m flattered and horrified to have been the subject of such an extensive investigation. I can’t imagine leaving Israel while I’m waiting for a funeral—nor having anything to do with your navy.”
Equally, she’s scared of traveling abroad, of the unknown. Grief has become a familiar landscape.
AFTER YARDEN DEPARTS, Savta tiptoes in. She wipes her hands on her apron. “What did he want?”
“Apparently, the naval brass met me at the Golans’, did some digging about me, and came up with a ridiculous idea to get me out of here—for reasons I’m yet to figure out.”
“Out of here to where?”
“France, but not Paris. Some job in a remote port.” Sharon pauses. “I’m surprised that they have a rehabilitation program for fiancées, not just widows.”
Savta sits next to Sharon on the sofa and takes her hand. Her brown irises are almost hidden under her drooping upper lids. Sharon reminds herself to pluck Savta’s two stubborn chin hairs. “Listen to yourself,” Savta says. “When did you become so cynical? This is a chance to change atmosphere, to see the world.”
“It’s not seeing the world. There are just cows and boats there, not the Paris Opera.”
“Nothing is happening for you here. You’ve missed the university’s registration deadline. While you’re waiting for the Dakar to be found, you need to do something. Anything. Just don’t spend more months sitting on the Golans’ couch. It’s killing me to see you so defeated by grief.” Savta tucks a stray strand of hair behind Sharon’s ear. Her glance shifts to the photo on the wall. “Even though you were a newborn then, you carried their loss in your heart. When you were little, you used to speak to them, tell them about your kindergarten friends.” Savta’s eyes redden. “You played your flute for them and twirled around to show them every new dress I sewed for you. Now Alon’s death has broken you. What is there to do but pick up the pieces and soldier on? I lost a son, the apple of my eye. God forgive me, but Amiram was my favorite of the seven I was blessed with. I had to learn to breathe again. You helped—you gave me a new purpose. You’re only twenty years old; the world is open for you. Find a purpose. You have choices that women of my generation never even dreamed of. Open yourself up to opportunities. Say yes to life.”
Sharon lies down, pulls up her knees, and rests her head on Savta’s ample thighs. How can she leave her grandmother? Savta strokes Sharon’s now-dry hair, and tears that have been dammed behind Sharon’s lids soak Savta’s skirt.
“To be a Jewish woman is not to accept defeat,” Savta says.
[Chapter Two—Please read it in the novel, which you may preorder. We’re skipping chapter two here in favor of introducing another character.]
Chapter Three
CLAUDETTE
Loire Valley, France
Spring 1940
THE WINDS OF WAR in the east, where Germany had invaded Poland, were distant. They had nothing to do with France, Claudette thought. What felt real to her were the upcoming summer festivities. Young village women flocked to her grandmother’s cottage, where Claudette refashioned and embellished old dresses. Come July, the village of La Guerche-sur-l’Aubois would celebrate both Bastille Day and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Fête de la Fédération.
Claudette sat on the upholstered chair in the front room stitching, her cursed left leg hidden under the sewing table. Three girls her age chatted excitedly about the young men with whom they hoped to dance. For one of those girls, Claudette would salvage an embroidered bodice from an old dress and attach it to a newer organza skirt. For another, she would stitch pearls around the neckline to emphasize the girl’s alabaster skin. For the third, Claudette would alter the girl’s mother’s bridal dress by weaving colorful ribbons into the white lace.
Claudette kept her head down, bent over the silk roses she was cutting, and wallowed in her sorrow. No one, including herself, expected a cripple to participate in the merriment. She wouldn’t even watch the dance from the sidelines with her grandmother Mémère and be subjected to looks of pity and the mockery of young men. Come the night of the festival, girls wearing her dresses, her creations, would twirl in the plaza and be courted and swooned over by handsome lovers.
All Claudette could do was stitch her sorrow into beautiful embellishments.
Just before nightfall, she grabbed her cane, hobbled out to the garden, collected ripened tomatoes, and unlocked the back gate for the peddler, a Jew, who made weekly rounds with his cart selling women’s toiletries, detergents, sewing supplies, medicines, small tools, and kitchenware. When she was little, Claudette had feared this strange man with the funny accent who never took off his brimmed hat, whose face was covered with a beard, and whose eyes were hidden behind glasses. His people had killed Christ, so what was he capable of? Her suspicion had melted after he had cured Mémère’s coughs with his elixirs.
Claudette was twelve when he began his weekly visits and discovered that, due to her disability, she had never been to school—it was too far to walk. He taught her to read. This medicine man had also given her holy water and instructed her to dab it on her knee twice daily, then lift her cursed leg ten times. Miraculously, the holy water worked and her leg strengthened. Unfortunately, once Claudette turned sixteen and her body filled in, the additional weight made her lose her balance. Her left leg, twisted at birth, had been further damaged from repeated muscle tears. In one of her falls, she had broken two of her front teeth. Since then, Claudette covered her mouth with her hand when she smiled.
The Jew led his cart into the barn, where his horse would keep Rosette the cow company. Claudette had concealed the man’s overnight stays from her best friend, Solange, who claimed that all Jews were crooks. Since he slept in Mémère’s bed, Claudette had a greater reason to keep mum about the Jew’s visits. He was a widower with three kids, he had told them, and Claudette looked forward to the gifts he brought each week.
“I have something special for you,” he told Claudette after he entered the house and politely accepted Mémère’s offer of a meal as if it hadn’t been their routine for years. He unwrapped a contraption of metal and leather buckles. “It’s a brace. It will allow you to put weight on your leg.”
The brace had two flat metal rods. A cobbler had fixed them to a shoe and added three buckled leather straps to circle Claudette’s thigh and calf. After Mémère finished helping Claudette strap it on behind the dressing screen, the Jew presented the matching right shoe with a flourish of his palm.
Smiling, he watched Claudette take her first tentative steps. “You see? You’ll stand straighter, and it will ease the pain in your back.”
The contraption was heavy, and Claudette couldn’t bend her knee, but she could put weight on her cursed left leg without it buckling under her. She loved how the new leather shoes shone. She sent the Jew a happy smile of thanks, but the word merci failed to convey the gratitude she felt for his care these past several years.
“Wear it in good health. May God be with you,” he said.
His mention of God used to confuse her. The Jew didn’t seem concerned about being punished for killing God’s son. But Claudette had long since stopped trying to reconcile what the priest said about the evil Jews with this man’s gentle ways.
“Does your son wear this brace too?” Mémère asked him while Claudette paced around the room, basking in the new freedom to move about.
He had told them that his son was afflicted with a similar disability, but Claudette had never met the man’s three children. “Of course,” he said. “At his job apprenticing with a printer, he must stand for hours setting up letters.”
“Would you please bless Claudette?” Mémère said. “To help her walk.” She had told Claudette that Jews, the Chosen People, were close to God.
Claudette stopped pacing. The Jew’s hand hovered over her lowered head. “May God bless you and keep you. May God shine light on you and be gracious to you. May God turn toward you and grant you peace.”
IN THE MORNING, as Claudette milked the cow and collected the eggs from the chicken coop, she thought about the Jew’s son. Perhaps, sharing her infirmity, that boy would like her? If he was like his father, his gray, penetrating eyes would gaze at her with fondness, and his soft voice would be filled with kindness.
The warmth that ran through her at the image was like nothing she’d ever felt before.
Later, alone at home, Claudette fixed daisies to a blue chiffon dress and dared to try it on. The airy, sheer fabric felt soft against her skin, rich and sensual. She examined herself in the mirror that the Jew had installed for their customers. A longing swept over her. Her mind leaped into a fantasy starring his crippled son.
In her daydream, the two of them sat at the edge of a vineyard and just talked. If he was like his father, he would be wise and tell her anecdotes about the world outside this village.
She would be wearing this chiffon dress, and away from prying eyes, their bodies would sway in a slow dance. Or they might even kiss.
~~~~
A CART HEAPED with woven baskets of all sizes stopped in front of the house, and Solange climbed down from it. “Wait! I’ll get you,” Claudette called out, happy to show her blind friend her newfound mobility. “Feel my new brace.” She brought Solange’s hand down to the metal rods, then guided her from the sidewalk into the yard and up the three steps to the porch.
“And I got so many new booklets,” Solange exclaimed as they sat down. She withdrew from her skirt pockets novellas with tantalizing pictures on their covers.
Claudette had met the feisty Solange when she had first arrived in La Guerche to learn sewing from Mémère. Her father knew that no one would ever marry his lame child, and his seamstress mother could help Claudette find a way to earn her keep. Now, picking up the first booklet, Claudette was certain that the Jew’s teaching her to read had been an act of benevolence directly from God. She could read to her blind friend the titles of the new booklets and describe the cover art of each. The Stranger’s Touch, A Rogue and a Pirate, Love’s Tender Fury, Velvet and Fire, Unlikely Lovers, Blazing Hearts, A Night to Cherish, and Once More Forever.
“Start with Blazing Hearts,” Solange said. “Like when our princes will come and set our hearts on fire. Figuratively speaking,” she added in a high-society prissy voice. Claudette burst out laughing at the words that Solange seemed to collect while her fingers were forever weaving.
When Claudette finished reading the story, the two of them dissected it and speculated about jealousy and love. Yet hovering in the background was Claudette’s knowledge that neither of them would ever experience any of it. Only heartaches.
MÉMÈRE HAD LOST two sons in the Great War and was less insouciant than their young customers about the war raging outside of France’s borders. There were mothers there too, mothers who were losing sons, she said, and they were all crying. When she and Claudette went to fetch beer at the tavern, Mémère questioned Monsieur Lefebvre about the battles. He had fought in the Great War, and since winter he had begun to wear the frayed military jacket that marked him as an expert on military strategy.
He hung a large map on the tavern’s wall. “We need not worry about the Germans,” he told Mémère. “No enemy will ever again invade France from the east.” He tapped on the squarish shape that he said was France, and his gnarled finger traced a red line. “Here is the northeastern forest. Absolutely impenetrable. South of it, the rest of France’s long eastern frontier is protected by the Maginot Line.”
“What’s that?” Claudette asked, alarmed. The distance shown on the map between that border and La Guerche was shorter than her forearm.
“An immense line of concrete fortifications, bunkers, and cannons stretching for thousands of miles to our southern shore. No enemy will ever again enter France from the east.” Mémère’s mouth pulled down in sadness. Claudette knew that memories of war were forever vivid in her head.
Indeed, horrible news arrived in May. The German tanks had plowed through the supposedly impenetrable northeast forest, and suddenly the war exploded inside France. Two million French soldiers were taken prisoner. Overnight, all the young men with whom the village girls had planned to dance enlisted. Probably the Jew too, because he stopped coming. Although he wasn’t young, he wasn’t too old to fight.
Mémère cried again for her two boys and for the French mothers who were wretched with worry and fear. The last of the Jew’s elixir failed to lessen her anguish. Claudette stared at the grainy newspaper photo of captured French soldiers, and her lungs burned as if she had inhaled the smoke of gunfire.
La Guerche hummed with rumors of advancing German troops. Life was conducted in hushed tones among women and the few old men who remained in the village. In the tavern, Monsieur Lefebvre led the old men in devising military strategies to defeat the enemy. On his map, green pins marked the advancing Germans. A large blue pin marked La Guerche-sur- l’Aubois. He showed Claudette the Loire River, which, after heading north, made a sharp turn westward to reach the Atlantic Ocean. Their Aubois River was one of its many tributaries.
Like Claudette, Monsieur Lefebvre must have been dismayed by the proximity of the blue pin to the green ones because he organized the old men to patrol the streets at night. They donned their battered helmets and tattered military wool jackets and carried their tarnished rifles.
Claudette lay upstairs in the dark, her dog, Belle, curled against her, and listened for the guard. Only after she heard his tired footfalls on the cobblestones did she fall asleep, trying to believe that Monsieur Lefebvre’s squad could keep the German tanks away.
The Germans went on to conquer Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The newspaper Claudette read in the tavern reported that the French government had abandoned Paris and relocated to Bordeaux. The pins on Monsieur Lefebvre’s map shifted westward and southward. The Germans had conquered all of Normandy’s shore with its strategic ports.
“The Brits are our only hope against the Nazis. The Brits and the Canadians.” Monsieur Lefebvre dropped his head, probably planning a new military strategy.
Since spring, the word Nazis has been uttered with fear, the speaker’s voice lowered a notch. It wasn’t just the word Germans in newspaper headlines. Nazis were worse. They were so powerful that the only countries able to stand up to them were England and Canada. But Claudette knew that Canada was as far away as China, where the finest silk came from, and India, whose silk was sturdier and more colorful.
And counting on the Brits? Everyone ridiculed the ways of France’s long-standing enemy. Claudette was vaguely aware of a centuries-old history of bloodshed between the two nations. Why would the Brits bother to save the French?
