The Keeper of the Walls (70 page)

“Well, come in, don't stand there like an overgrown oaf,” Aunt Marthe called. “Your mother didn't come yesterday.”

“Mama's been ill,” Kira responded, deciding that she, too, hated the petulant old relative. But she forced herself to walk to the bed, and to kiss the withered cheek. It allowed her to compose herself for the other. When she made her way to the seated woman, she was smiling politely. “Madame,” she said, extending her hand.

“I'm your Aunt Henriette. Don't you remember? We met when you were younger than Alain, at the Carlton. And I thought then that you were the most exquisite little girl I'd ever seen. You've turned into a stunning woman.”

Not knowing what to say, Kira smiled again, her mouth twitching in a nervous spasm. Why was this woman being so pleasant? She'd always wondered about the feud, but now pushed the whole business resolutely away, with sudden frenzy. She wished that she might exit immediately, to avoid any further complications. Still, her heart thumped erratically, and she was grateful for the cup of steaming tea that Claude's widow was proffering her.

Aunt Marthe then entered into a series of complaints, followed by ceaseless questioning. All the time that she was answering, Kira felt Henriette's eyes upon her. Kira wished that Nicky were with her, for she knew that he, loyal to the bone, would have found a graceful exit line. At length, she noticed that the old woman's head had fallen forward, wobbling like a large marble on the end of a stick, and that snores were escaping her lips. “Aunt Marthe has this habit of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence,” Henriette remarked sotto voce. “Come. I'd like a chance to talk with you, Kira. We'll go to the kitchen.”

There was no way to refuse, short of being rude. Alain darted ahead of them, calling Rosine, and disappeared into the young maid's room. “Good,” Henriette stated. “That way, we'll be alone. The kitchen's comfortable, like a parlor furnished by Frankenstein . . . but we can sit there, a bit.”

Kira, feeling like a puppet without a will of its own, nodded. She wanted to escape, for myriad reasons . . . yet, now that she was trapped, her old curiosity about this woman flared up. Henriette took a seat by the large table, and she sat kitty-corner, her hands folded in front of her.

“So now you know,” Henriette began. The amber eyes stayed on Kira's face, not letting go.

Kira blushed. “I—”

“I could see it painted on your beautiful, expressive, Russian face. You saw Alain. Another might have ignored the facts, but
you
couldn't. Because you saw your own face in his face: your own face, so exactly like
his
face . . . your father's face.”

Kira's throat was parched, her temples beating. “But—”

“I was his mistress for many years. He was my lifeblood. When he rejected me, I married your uncle. The only thing Claude asked was that Misha not be told he was Alain's real father.”

Trembling, the young girl said: “But—Papa was married to my mother then. Wasn't he?”

“I came before he even met your mother. And it wasn't fair. She left him, yet he refused to have anything to do with me. I wasn't young, Kira: almost forty. I'd taken a great risk, to have his child. Because I loved him more than life itself, and because I thought that he loved me, too.”

Henriette's voice, low and calm, hit a nerve inside Kira. She remembered so many things, haphazardly: herself, naked in the small wood, with Pierre, willing him to leave her pregnant; her mother, suffering in Vienna; her mother, suffering again, alone, in Paris. And her own anger, her stubborn refusal to accept Mark MacDonald. “Your grandmother tells me that you, too, are in love, with a young man of twenty-one,” Henriette was saying. “You aren't a child anymore. You
have to try to understand!”

“Why?” Kira whispered.

“Because Claude is
dead,
and Alain is your brother. And because you're both so much like Misha, that you have to be my friend, you have to help me!”

Kira plunged her fingers through the pins to her scalp, scouring the soft skin as if to punish herself for being caught here, listening to this dreadful, painful story—painful for all. “My grandmother: does she know?” she asked.

“Claire is a strange, reserved woman. But I'd say yes, she's guessed. Before, the resemblance was only on the surface. Alain was a small boy, plump and rosy. But now, he's begun to grow lean and tall, and to take on some of the mannerisms of Misha. Claire would have had to be blind not to notice. But she's never brought it up.”

“What is it you actually want of me?” Kira demanded.

Henriette was staring at her, her long, narrow eyes gleaming with a strange, unremitting passion. “Claude told me
everything,
” she murmured. “Before he left for Russia. About how your grandmother . . .
that great lady
. . . gave birth to him illegitimately, just as I did to Alain. And about how she was a Jew, and Claude's natural father was one, too.”

Kira didn't answer, but she could feel new waves of shock unfurling inside her. She repeated, her voice suddenly like her father's, haughty and cold: “What's your point, Aunt Henriette?”

“I want you to promise to help me. The tide is turning, Kira, and my side is losing. Surely your mother's told you about how Claude and I ...collaborated with the Germans. There will be severe reprisals . . . and I could lose everything. Everything I ever worked for!”

Revulsion was twisting Kira's stomach. “If reprisals come, it's going to be important to have you on my side. I know all about the young officer you're in love with. He's a Rublon. His family's always been prominent. I want you to vouch for me, to deny to one and all that I ever collaborated.”

Now the anger exploded from within Kira. “Why should I protect you?” she cried. “My whole family has stood in danger because of people like you and my uncle Claude! Why should I lie for you?”

Henriette's reply came, unexpectedly soft, belying the strange gleam in her eyes. “Because,” she whispered, “I've been lying for
you.
When this is all over, I thought we might be friends. It would be to the advantage of all of us.”

Kira's expression remained defiant.

Henriette breathed in slowly, straightening her shoulders. She was shorter than Kira, but the latter was still seated, and so she looked down at her, deeply into her eyes. “I see I placed my bet on the wrong horse,” she declared, and walked proudly out of the room.

Slowly, like a sleepwalker, Kira stood up and went to the entrance hall to retrieve her books and her bag. Then, without going back into the house, she opened the front door and slipped out, shutting the large black panel quietly behind her. Outside, darkness had fallen, and she knew that it was past six o'clock, and that she'd get home late.

She'd invent a story to tell Lily: that Aunt Marthe had not let her go home in time, and that, thirsty for companionship, she'd pried and prodded until she'd made Kira miss her train. But she would make no mention of Henriette Bruisson.

The following Wednesday, Kira took the train from Luzarches, on her way to school, as was her custom. She left Lily and Sudarskaya bringing water in from the fountain in the courtyard, while Madame Portier cleaned the kitchen.

At eleven that same morning, while Lily and the landlady were peeling potatoes and Sudarskaya quietly sewing in the bedroom, there was a persistent knocking at the front door. When Madame Portier opened, Lily behind her, drying her hands on her apron, they saw the two nice policemen from Luzarches, and, between them, a captain of the German Gestapo. Lily's fingers numbed over the clean cotton of the apron. The Germans never came to Chaumontel, a peasant village of no consequence to them. “We're sorry to have to disturb you, Madame,” one of the
gendarmes
told the landlady. “But there was no avoiding it.”

His face seemed to be pleading forgiveness. Madame Portier, her chin defiantly jutting forward, swung the door more widely to let them through. Lily still stood, stunned, in the hallway.

“We've come to check your papers,” the captain of the Gestapo stated, his metallic eyes narrowed at her. “We've heard you didn't register at Luzarches. You
are
Liliane Brasilova?”

Lily nodded, and went into the bedroom. As soon as she saw her, Sudarskaya realized that something was terribly wrong. Lily pressed her finger to her lips, and took her bag out of the closet. Then she left, closing the door behind herself. Sudarskaya, alarmed, cowered on the bed, listening for sounds.

Extracting her identification card from her wallet, Lily handed it to the captain in the hallway. “It's not in order,” he declared. “You don't have a
J
stamped across it. And I see you're not displaying the yellow star on your clothing.”

“Madame Brasilova isn't Jewish,” Madame Portier countered.

“Then why didn't she register for food cards?”

“She just came here for a short vacation.”

“Our information is different. The Princess Liliane Brasilova is a Jew, and she came here to hide, with her daughter. Where is Princess Kira?”

“She went into Paris.” Lily wondered who had given them away, and hoped that there would be a way to contact Kira, to prevent her from returning home. There was obviously no escape. Even the nice policemen, their eyes betraying compassion, no longer could help her. “I have a certificate of baptism,” Lily announced.

“It makes no difference. You are half a Jew. Your daughter is one-quarter Jewish. By law, you both should wear the Star of David. You have broken the law by not registering your religion. You are to come with us right away, Princess—as soon as I've searched the grounds for any further evidence of your daughter's whereabouts.”

Lily felt a tremendous calm spreading through her body, after the sudden burst of adrenaline. It was over. There was nothing left to do now, except hope to save Sudarskaya. But . . .
how?
It looked as though her old friend was doomed, as she herself was. She'd find some way of alerting Kira—maybe through the nice policemen at the Luzarches station. But already the German officer was marching through the corridor, throwing doors open.

When she heard the strange, martial footsteps outside their room, Sudarskaya, like a terrified animal, leaped from the bed and behind the door. When the captain pushed it open, the tiny piano teacher pressed herself against the wall. “There's nobody here,” she heard, and then she glimpsed, through the crack, the retreating form of the Gestapo man. He hadn't checked her hiding place!

In the living room, one of the policemen was murmuring to Lily: “We did all we could, Madame. But we had no choice.”

Urgently, her voice a mere whisper, Lily said, her fingers pressing the sleeve of the young
gendarme:
“My daughter will come home by the last train, to Luzarches. If you could meet her there, and send her back immediately . . .”

“Consider it done.”

The Gestapo captain was reentering the room, his face impassive and hard, like a closed door. “Very well,” he announced. “I'll be back in the morning, for the young one. We are leaving now.”

Outside, between the captain and one of the
gendarmes,
Lily walked, her head bent, her legs moving mechanically over the dirt road that she had come to know by heart. It was over.
Over.
She shut her eyes against the memory of Wolf, bald and skeletal, falling on the platform at Compiègne. And she hoped that he had died on the way.

Sudarskaya had been saved, for the second time, by Providence. And she knew that the young
gendarme
would meet Kira at the station, and warn her not to come home.

W
hen the doorbell sounded
, Jacques, in his shirt sleeves, went to open it. Four officers of the Gestapo stood on the threshold. “Jacob Walter?” one of them demanded.

The seventy-four-year-old man's eyes widened. Slowly, it dawned on him that they knew all about him, and he nodded. When they came in, he went to sit down on the living room sofa, and watched as they took several plastic bags into the master bedroom. He understood what they had come to do, and waited for them, resting against the soft cushions. It was the maid's day off, and Maryse and Claire had gone together to pick Nanni up from school. He was absolutely alone in the apartment, but he was not afraid, simply expectant, feeling in his bones that his peaceful, dignified existence was about to be irrevocably violated.

He could hear them prying open the floorboards in his and Claire's room. Obviously, the maid had finally told on them. She was a young girl from Brittany, whose brothers had joined the Resistance, and he found it difficult to accept her betrayal. But no further explanation presented itself.

My God, he thought: I have to stop Claire and Maryse, somehow! On tiptoe, he walked from the living room onto the balcony, and stood leaning over the railing. And then he felt a hand clamping down on his shoulder, and a German voice saying: “It's no good, Herr Walter. We have two men stationed downstairs, in front of the elevator. They'll have taken them by now.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked, calmly.

“With you? There isn't much we
can
do, Herr Walter. You're Swiss. We'll just have to send you back home, on tomorrow's first train, with a minimal sum of money in your pocket. We've found your silver, and your wife's jewelry, and all the money and gems Frau Steiner hid around the house. But we can't touch you, because of Switzerland's neutrality.”

“And ... my wife?”

“Your wife is French. She is a citizen of a country the Reich is occupying. That's a different story.”

They walked back into the living room, and Jacques sat down, his whole body trembling, tears gathering in his eyes.

Mere moments later, it seemed, Claire and Maryse were led into the Walters' apartment, a Gestapo man on each side of them, while Nanni stood between her mother and Claire, her face ashen. “Jacob!” Claire cried, when she saw her husband coming toward her, tears streaming down his face. Throwing off the officer's hand, she ran across the room and hurled herself into Jacques's arms, hugging him tightly.