She thought of her brother in the dark, deep cupboard. She wanted to take his hot little body in her arms, to kiss his curly blond hair, his plump neck. She gripped the key as hard as she could in her pocket.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” she whispered to herself. “I’ll find a way to go back and save him. I’ll find a way.”
AFTER DINNER, HERVÉ OFFERED us some limoncello, an ice-cold Italian liqueur made with lemon. It had a beautiful yellow color. Guillaume sipped his slowly. He had not said much during the meal. He seemed subdued. I did not dare bring the Vel’ d’Hiv’ up again. But it was he who turned to speak to me as the others listened.
“My grandmother is old now,” he said. “She won’t talk about it anymore. But she told me everything I need to know, she told me everything about that day. I think the worst thing for her was having to live on without the others. To have to continue without them. Her entire family.”
I could not think of what to say. The boys were silent.
“After the war, my grandmother went to the Hotel Lutétia on the boulevard Raspail, every day,” continued Guillaume. “That’s where you had to go to find out if anyone had returned from the camps. There were lists and organizations. She went there every day and waited. But after a while, she stopped going. She began to hear about the camps. She began to understand that they were all dead. That no one would come back. Nobody had really known before. But then, with survivors returning and telling their stories, everybody knew.”
Another silence.
“You know what I find most shocking about the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” Guillaume said. “Its code name.”
I knew the answer to that, thanks to my extensive reading.
“Operation Spring Breeze,” I murmured.
“A sweet name, isn’t it, for something so horrible?” he said. “The Gestapo had asked the French police to ‘deliver’ a certain number of Jews between sixteen and fifty years old. The police were so intent on deporting the maximum number of Jews that they decided to ameliorate the orders, so they arrested all those little children, the ones born in France. French children.”
“The Gestapo hadn’t asked for those children?” I said.
“No,” he replied. “Not at first. Deporting children would have revealed the truth: it would have been obvious to all that Jews were not being sent to work camps, but to their deaths.”
“So why were the children arrested?” I asked.
Guillaume took a sip of his limoncello.
“The police probably thought that children of Jews, even if they were born in France, were still Jews. In the end, France sent nearly eighty thousand Jews to the death camps. Only a couple of thousand made it back. And hardly any of the children did.”
On the way home, I could not get Guillaume’s dark sad eyes out of my mind. He had offered to show me photographs of his grandmother and her family, and I had given him my phone number. He had promised to call me soon.
Bertrand was watching television when I came in. He was lying flat out on the sofa, an arm under his head.
“So,” he said, barely taking his eyes off the screen, “how were the boys? Up to their usual standards of refinement?”
I slipped off my sandals and sat on the sofa beside him, looking at his fine, elegant profile.
“A perfect meal. There was an interesting man. Guillaume.”
“Aha,” said Bertrand, looking at me, amused. “Gay?”
“No, I don’t think so. But I never notice that anyway.”
“And what was so interesting about this Guillaume guy?”
“He was telling us about his grandmother, who escaped the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, back in 1942.”
“Hmm,” he answered, changing channels with the remote control.
“Bertrand,” I said, “when you were at school, were you taught about the Vel’ d’Hiv’?”
“No idea, chérie.”
“That’s what I’m working on now for the magazine. The sixtieth anniversary is soon.”
Bertrand picked up one of my bare feet and began to massage it with sure, warm fingers.
“Do you think your readers are going to be interested in the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” he asked. “It’s the past. It’s not something most people want to read about.”
“Because the French are ashamed, you mean?” I said. “So we should bury it and move on, like them?”
He took my foot off his knee and the glint in his eye appeared. I braced myself.
“My, my,” he said with a devilish grin, “yet another chance to show your compatriots how devious we Frogs were, collaborating with the Nazis and sending those poor innocent families to their deaths. Little Miss Nahant bares the truth! What are you going to do, amour, rub our noses in it? Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers. Write about something else. Something funny, something cute. You know how to do that. Tell Joshua the Vel’ d’Hiv’ is a mistake. No one will read it. They’ll yawn and turn to the next column.”
I got up, exasperated.
“I think you’re wrong,” I seethed. “I think people don’t know enough about it. Even Christophe didn’t know much about it, and he’s French.”
Bertrand snorted.
“Oh, Christophe can hardly read! The only words he deciphers are Gucci and Prada.”
I left the room in silence, went into the bathroom, and ran a bath. Why hadn’t I told him to go to hell? Why did I put up with him, again and again? Because you’re crazy about him, right? Ever since you met him, even if he’s bossy, rude, and selfish? He’s clever, he’s handsome, he can be so funny, he’s such a wonderful lover, isn’t he? Memories of endless, sensual nights, kisses and caresses, crumpled sheets, his beautiful body, warm mouth, impish smile. Bertrand. So charming. So irresistible. So arduous. That’s why you put up with him. Isn’t it? But for how long? A recent conversation with Isabelle came back to me. Julia, do you put up with Bertrand because you’re afraid of losing him? We were sitting in a small café by the Salle Pleyel, while our daughters were attending ballet class, and Isabelle had lit up her umpteenth cigarette and looked me straight in the eye. No, I had said. I love him. I really love him. I love the way he is. She had whistled, impressed, but unconvinced. Well, lucky him then. But for God’s sake, when he goes too far, tell him. Just tell him.
Lying in the bath, I remembered the first time I met Bertrand. In some quaint discothèque in Courchevel. He was with a group of loud, tipsy friends. I was with my then-boyfriend, Henry, whom I’d met a couple of months earlier at the TV network I worked for. We had a casual, easygoing relationship. Neither of us was deeply in love with the other. We were just two fellow Americans living it up in France.
Bertrand had asked me to dance. It hadn’t seemed to bother him at all that I was sitting with another man. Galled, I had refused. He had been very insistent. “Just one dance, miss. Only one dance. But such a wonderful dance, I promise you.” I had glanced at Henry. Henry had shrugged. “Go ahead,” he had said, winking. So I got up and danced with the audacious Frenchman.
I was rather stunning at twenty-seven. And yes, I had been Miss Nahant when I was seventeen. I still had my rhinestone tiara tucked away somewhere. Zoë used to like playing with it when she was little. I’ve never been vain about my looks. But I had noticed that living in Paris, I got much more attention than on the other side of the Atlantic. I did also discover that French men were more daring, more overt, when it came to flirting. And I also understood that despite the fact I had nothing of the sophisticated Parisian-too tall, too blond, too toothy-my New England allure appeared to be just the flavor of the day. In my first months in Paris, I had been amazed at the way French men-and women-stare overtly at each other. Sizing each other up, constantly. Checking out figures, clothes, accessories. I remembered my first spring in Paris and walking down the boulevard Saint-Michel with Susannah from Oregon and Jan from Virginia. We weren’t even dressed up to go out, we were wearing jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops. But we were, all three of us, tall, athletic, blond, and definitely American-looking. Men came up to us constantly. “Bonjour, Mesdemoiselles, vous êtes américaines, Mesdemoiselles?” Young men, mature men, students, businessmen, endless men, demanding phone numbers, inviting us to dinner, to a drink, pleading, joking, some charming, others much less charming. This did not happen back home. American men did not tag after girls on the street and declare their flame. Jan, Susannah, and I had giggled helplessly, feeling both flattered and dismayed.