Hartmuth stammered, "A-l-ll I c-could do was save your life and love you, I couldn't save the others, we had to f-follow orders, it was war. I was eighteen and you were the most beautiful being that I had ever t-touched. I wrote poetry after I'd see you. Dreams swam in my head. I wanted to take you to live in Hamburg."
"You've living in the past," she said.
He took her face in his hands. "I love you, Sarah."
She turned her head away for the first time. How could he make her feel like that again? That longing! She almost reached out to him but her parents' faces floated in front of her. She shook her head. "Your mind is in a past we never had."
"You don't have to speak, I know your heart. You feel guilty that you still love the enemy," he said. "What we have doesn't recognize borders or religion."
"Rutting in the dirt?" she said. "Eating like pigs while others starved? Hiding in the catacombs, always hiding, afraid to be seen. . .what was that?"
He hung his head. "I never wanted you to have pain, n-never. Even when there was no hope that you were still alive, you haunted me."
Her voice quavered. "I want to kill you, I planned to do it but"—she put her head down, defeated—"I can't."
"Sarah, can you f-ff-orgive me?" Hartmuth sobbed, his head in his hands. When he finally looked up, she was gone. He had never felt more alone.
Monday Evening
SARAH BOLTED HER GARRET door and curled up on the bed. Several hours were left until her shift began the next morning. She clutched the spot where her yellow star had been and tried not to remember. Tried to forget but she couldn't.
It was 1942, the stickiest and most humid day recorded in a September for thirty years. Not a breath of air stirred. School, already started and with compositions due, had settled into a tedious routine. As routine as the Nazi Occupation allowed. Only she and Lili Stein wore yellow stars embroidered on their school smocks.
"Want to see something?" Lili, plain and pigeon-toed, asked her after school.
Surprised that a sixteen-year-old would deign to notice her, she'd nodded eagerly and followed. At fourteen, she felt proud that an older girl wanted her company. Cool air wafted from darkened courtyards as they passed quiet rue Payenne. Lace curtains hung lifelessly from windows normally shuttered against the heat.
At the Square Georges-Cain they sat on benches in the shade of plane trees, by the Roman pillars. No one was out, it was too hot. There was no petrol for cars and horse carts clomped over cobblestones in the distance. Fetid, dense air clung over the Seine in a wide band.
They took off their white pinafores and dipped them in the urnlike fountain. Giggling, they swabbed their sweaty necks and faces with cool, clear cistern water. Lili sat back, her small eyes full of concern.
"Something fell out of your satchel before mathematics," Lili said. "But I picked it up so no one would see it."
She pulled a almond-shaped calisson, a speciality of Aix-en-Provence, from her pocket.
Sarah stirred guiltily.
"Where'd this come from?" Lili asked.
"Look, Lili," Sarah said.
"Stop." Lili interrupted her. "Don't tell me because then I'd have to turn you in. I might have to do that anyway, Sarah Strauss!"
Sarah pulled a box out of her satchel and thrust it into Lili's palm.
Lili squealed in delight, "I can't believe it." She opened the box and popped a sweet in her mouth, moaning. "Luscious!" Savoring the taste, she grabbed some more. "The pink ones taste the best."
Sarah let Lili finish the sweets in the Provencal metal box painted with fruit and vines. Their legs dangled in the cool, bubbling water. Dragonflies buzzed in the green hedge. Everything felt smooth, peaceful—as if the war wasn't happening.
Lili's eyes narrowed. "What else do you have?"
"I can get more if you keep this between us," Sarah said. "Are you ready to leave Paris if Madame Pagnol finds a way to help us escape to the unoccupied zone?"
"Of course, I'm waiting for her to give the word, she said it might happen next week," Lili confided. "Madame told me trains are still running down south but you have to hike over the mountains to get to the free zone. Village scouts will take you but they want a lot of this." Lili rubbed her fingertips together and gave her a knowing look.
"Money?" Sarah asked naively.
"Of course, or jewelry, maybe even food," Lili said.
Sarah tugged her satchel nervously. She had never traveled outside of the Marais, let alone Paris. "Will we go together?"
"Two yellow stars at once? Hard to say." Lili eyed her. "Bring more of these. I need to keep the welcome warm with my concierge."
"But that might draw attention." Uneasy, Sarah shook her head. "I don't want that."
"You'll get Gestapo attention, Sarah Strauss, if I can't shut her up!"
The next day at school, their teacher, Madame Pagnol, informed them that an escape opportunity might occur at a moment's notice. So for several weeks after school, they met at the Square Georges-Cain to discuss plans.
Lili's identity card, with the J for Jewish, had been issued on her sixteenth birthday, as was the custom in France. Sarah knew if Lili claimed ration coupons, the Nazis would demand her identity card and then ship her directly to Drancy prison. She also realized Lili subsisted on whatever food she shared with her.
Every night Helmut reassured Sarah that he had checked the holding camps for her parents. He promised to find them and do his best to get them food. But he was so generous, she felt guilty. Guilty in taking the food even though she fed Lili and others in her old building.
Most of the time she succeeded in ignoring her warring emotions—her guilt versus her growing feelings for him. She didn't like to admit to herself how handsome he looked, his dark eyes glowing in the candle-lit cavern, like those of film stars she'd seen in her older sister's cinema magazines before the war. She told herself he'd understand when she escaped. As a Jew, it was her duty to escape.
Most of Helmut's food was quite exotic, especially for Jews who were raised kosher. She didn't care much for the foie gras in the Fauchon tins.
"My concierge says Fauchon is the fanciest food store in Paris," Lili said one day, munching eagerly. "The rabbi will excuse us for eating food not kosher, won't he?"
She heard doubt in Lili's voice for the first time. "There's not much choice. Anyway, it's goose liver, not pork."
Lili had looked away but not before Sarah saw relief on her face.
That night another roundup occurred in the Marais. Bottle green open-backed buses rumbled through the dark streets, full of Jews clutching crying babies and suitcases. She and Lili grew nervous. Every day it became more dangerous to walk on the street with a yellow star.
An unusual orange dusk had painted the sky, she remembered, in late October. One afternoon after Sarah had said goodbye to Lili she returned to the catacomb. She had always liked coming back to its dark, cool safety. She had even discovered another exit to the Square Georges-Cain and some large marble busts poking through the dirt. One looked like the picture of Caesar Augustus Madame Pagnol had pointed out in their history book. Like the bust they'd seen on a class field trip to the park when Madame took their photo.
Behind a wooden post, she heard crackling and looked up. Lili stood, wedged in a niche littered with femur bones. "Who are you informing on?" she said matter-of-factly, her mouth half-full of nougat.
Sarah stood bolt upright in surprise, bumping her head on the earthen ceiling. "How did you get in here?"