Sarah's Key (12 page)

W

E’RE HAVING ONE OF our ‘good’ days today, Madame Tézac,” said Véronique, beaming at me as I walked into the sunny, white room. She was part of the staff that looked after Mamé at the clean, cheerful nursing home in the seventeenth arrondissement, not far from the Parc Monceau.

“Don’t call her Madame Tézac,” barked Bertrand’s grandmother. “She hates it. Call her Miss Jarmond.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Véronique seemed crestfallen.

“And anyway, Madame Tézac, that’s
me,
” said the old lady with a touch of haughtiness, and total disdain for the other Madame Tézac, her daughter-in-law Colette, Bertrand’s mother. So typical of Mamé, I thought. So feisty, even at her age. Her first name was Marcelle. She loathed it. No one ever called her Marcelle.

“I’m sorry,” said Véronique humbly.

I put a hand on her arm.

“Please don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t use my married name.”

“It’s an American thing,” said Mamé. “Miss Jarmond is American.”

“Yes, I had noticed that,” said Véronique, in better spirits.

Noticed what? I felt like asking. My accent, my clothes, my shoes?

“So, you’ve been having a good day then, Mamé?” I sat down next to her and covered her hand with mine.

Compared to the old lady on the rue Nélaton, Mamé looked fresh-faced. Her skin was hardly wrinkled. Her gray eyes were bright. But the old lady of the rue Nélaton, despite her decrepit appearance, had a clear head, and Mamé, at eighty-five, had Alzheimer’s. Some days, she simply could not remember who she was.

Bertrand’s parents had decided to move her to the nursing home when they realized she was incapable of living alone. She would turn on a gas burner and let it burn all day. She would let her bath run over. Or she would regularly lock herself out of the apartment and be found wandering in the rue de Saintonge in her dressing gown. She had put up a fight, of course. She hadn’t wanted to come to the nursing home at all. But she had settled in nicely enough, despite occasional outbursts of temper.

“I’m having a ‘good’ day.” She grinned as Véronique left us.

“Oh, I see,” I said, “terrorizing the entire place, as usual?”

“As usual,” she said. Then she turned to me. Her affectionate gray eyes roamed over my face. “Where’s that good-for-nothing husband of yours? He never comes, you know. And don’t give me any of that ‘he’s too busy’ business.”

I sighed.

“Well, at least you’re here,” she said gruffly. “You look tired. Everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

I knew I looked tired. There wasn’t much I could do about it. Go on vacation, I guess. But that wasn’t planned till the summer.

“And the apartment?”

I had just been to see the work being done before coming to the nursing home. A hive of activity. Bertrand supervising everything with his usual energy. Antoine looking drained.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” I said. “When it’s finished.”

“I miss it,” said Mamé. “I miss living there.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said.

She shrugged.

“You get attached to places, you know. Like people, I suppose. I wonder if André ever misses it.”

André was her late husband. I had not known him. He had passed away when Bertrand was a teenager. I was used to Mamé speaking of him in the present tense. I never corrected her, never reminded her that he died years ago of lung cancer. She loved talking about him. When I first met her, long before she started to lose her memory, she would show me her photo albums every time I came to see her at the rue de Saintonge. I felt I knew André Tézac’s face by heart. The same gray-blue eyes that Edouard had. A rounder nose. A warmer smile, maybe.

Mamé had told me lengthily how they had met, how they had fallen in love, and how everything had become difficult during the war. The Tézacs were originally from Burgundy, but when André had inherited a family wine business from his own father, he had not been able to make ends meet. So he had moved to Paris and started a small antique shop on the rue de Turenne, near the Place des Vosges. It had taken him a while to establish his reputation, for the business to flourish. Edouard had taken over the reins after his father’s death and moved the shop to the rue du Bac in the seventh arrondissement, where the most prestigious antique shops in Paris were found. Cécile, Bertrand’s younger sister, was now running the place and doing very well.

Mamé’s doctor—the mournful but efficient Docteur Roche—once told me it was excellent therapy to ask Mamé about the past. According to him, she probably had a better perception of what went on thirty years ago than that very morning.

It was like a little game. During each of my visits, I would ask her questions. I did it naturally, not making a big thing out of it. She knew perfectly well what I was driving at, but pretended to ignore it.

It had been amusing finding out about Bertrand as a young boy. Mamé came up with the most interesting tidbits. He had been a gawky adolescent, not the cool dude I had heard of. He was a reluctant scholar, not the brilliant student his parents had raved about. At fourteen, there had been a memorable fight with his father about the neighbor’s daughter, a promiscuous bottle-blonde who smoked marijuana.

Sometimes, though, it wasn’t fun delving into Mamé’s faulty memory. Often, there were grim, long blanks. She could not remember anything. On “bad” days, she shut up like a clam. She would glower at the television and set her mouth so that her chin jutted out.

One morning, she couldn’t figure out who Zoë was. She kept asking, “Who is this child? What is she doing here?” Zoë, as ever, had been adult about it. But later on that night I had heard her crying in bed. When I gently asked her what was the matter, she admitted she couldn’t bear seeing her great-grandmother growing older.

“Mamé,” I said, “when did you and André move into the rue de Saintonge apartment?”

I expected her to screw up her face, looking like a wise old monkey, and come up with an “Oh, I can’t remember at all . . .”

But the answer was like a whiplash.

“July 1942.”

I sat up straight, staring at her.

“July 1942?” I repeated.

“That’s right,” she said.

“And how did you find the apartment? There was a war going on. It must have been difficult, surely?”

“Not at all,” she said breezily. “It had been suddenly vacated. We heard about it through the concierge, Madame Royer, who was friendly with our old concierge. We used to live on the rue de Turenne, just above André’s shop, a cramped, poky little apartment with only one bedroom. So we moved in, with Edouard who was ten or twelve at the time. We were thrilled to have a bigger place. And it was a cheap rent, I remember. In those days, that
quartier
was not half as fashionable as it is now.”

I watched her carefully and cleared my throat.

“Mamé, do you remember if this was the beginning of July? Or the end?”

She smiled, pleased to be doing so well.

“I remember perfectly. It was the end of July.”

“And do you remember why the place was vacated so suddenly?”

Another beaming smile.

“Of course. There had been a big roundup. People were arrested, you know. There were lots of places that were suddenly vacant.”

I stared at her. Her eyes gazed back at mine. They clouded over when she saw the expression on my face.

“But how did it happen? How did you move in?”

She fussed with her sleeves, working her mouth.

“Madame Royer told our concierge that an empty three-roomed apartment was free on the rue de Saintonge. That’s how it happened. That’s all.”

Silence. She stopped moving her hands and folded them in her lap.

“But Mamé,” I whispered, “didn’t you think these people might ever come back?”

Her face had sobered, and there was something tight, painful, about her lips.

“We knew nothing,” she said finally. “Nothing at all.”

And she looked down at her hands and did not speak again.

T

HIS WAS THE WORST night. The worst night ever, for all of the children and for her, thought the girl. The sheds had been entirely looted. Nothing was left, no clothes, no blankets, nothing. Eiderdowns had been ripped in two, white feathers covering the ground like fake snow.

Children crying, children screaming, children hiccuping with terror. The little ones could not understand, kept moaning for their mothers. They wet their clothes, rolled on the ground, shrieked with despair. The older ones, like her, sat on the dirty floor, their heads in their hands.

No one looked at them. No one took care of them. They were rarely fed. They were so hungry, they nibbled dry grass, bits of straw. No one comforted them. The girl wondered: These policemen . . . didn’t they have families, too? Didn’t they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn’t understand.

The next day, the girl noticed a handful of people watching them through the barbed wire. Women, with packages and food. They were trying to push the food through the fences. But the policemen ordered them to leave. Nobody came to look at them again.

The girl felt like she had become someone else. Someone hard, and rude, and wild. Sometimes she fought with the older children, the ones who tried to grab the old stale bread she had found. She swore at them. She hit them. She felt dangerous, savage.

At first, she had not looked at the smaller children. They reminded her too much of her brother. But now, she felt she had to help them. They were vulnerable, small. So pathetic. So dirty. A lot of them had diarrhea. Their clothes were caked with shit. There was no one to wash them, no one to feed them.

Little by little, she came to know their names, their ages, but some of them were so small they could hardly answer her. They were thankful for a warm voice, for a smile, a kiss, and they followed her around the camp, dozens of them, trailing after her like bedraggled sparrows.

She would tell them the stories she used to tell her brother, before his bedtime. At night, lying on the lice-infested straw, where rats made rustling noises, she would whisper the stories, making them even longer than they usually were. The older children gathered around, too. Some of them pretended not to listen, but she knew they did.

There was an eleven-year-old girl, a tall black-haired creature called Rachel, who often looked at her with a touch of contempt. But night after night, she listened to the stories, creeping closer to the girl, so that she wouldn’t miss one word. And once, when most of the little children were at last asleep, she spoke to the girl.

She said in a deep, hoarse voice, “We should leave. We should escape.”

The girl shook her head.

“There is no way out. The police have guns. We can’t escape.”

Rachel shrugged her bony shoulders.

“I am going to escape.”

“What about your mother? She will be waiting for you in the other camp, like mine.”

Rachel smiled.

“You believed all that? You believed what they said?”

The girl hated Rachel’s knowing smile.

“No,” she said firmly. “I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe anything anymore.”

“Neither do I,” said Rachel. “I saw what they did. They didn’t even write down the little children’s names properly. They tied on those small tags that got mixed up when most of the children took them off again. They don’t care. They lied to all of us. To us and to our mothers.”

And to the girl’s surprise, Rachel reached out and took her hand. She held it tight, the way Armelle used to. Then she got to her feet and disappeared.

The next morning, they were woken very early. The policemen came into the barracks, pushing at them with their truncheons. The smaller children, hardly awake, started to scream. The girl tried to calm the ones nearest to her, but they were terrified. They were led into a shed. The girl held two toddlers by the hand. She saw a policeman holding an instrument in his hand. It had a strange shape. She didn’t know what it was. The toddlers gasped with fear, backed away. They were slapped and kicked by the policemen, then dragged toward the man with the instrument. The girl watched, horrified. Then she understood. Their hair was being shaved off. All the children were to be shaved.

She looked on as Rachel’s thick black hair fell to the floor. Her naked skull was white and pointed, like an egg. Rachel gazed at the men with hatred and contempt. She spat on their shoes. One of the gendarmes knocked her aside brutally.

The little ones were frantic. They had to be held down by two or three men. When it was her turn, the girl did not struggle. She bent her head. She felt the cold pressure of the machine and closed her eyes, unable to bear the sight of the long, golden strands falling to her feet. Her hair. Her beautiful hair that everyone admired. She felt sobs welling up in her throat but she forced herself not to cry. Never cry in front of these men. Never cry. Ever. It’s only hair. Hair will grow back.