The Keeper of the Walls (79 page)

She heard Cornelia screaming: “Lily! Get back!” and then fell forward, her wooden clog catching on a bramble. She felt the ground rise up to meet her just as the SS bullet went through her shoulder. At the same instant that Magda Gaspar was choked to death by the hangman's noose, Lily Brasilova lost consciousness, her blood seeping like India ink into the eternal gray of the German
Lager
yard. She missed hearing the sudden, shrill sound of an air raid siren, and seeing the German guards scamper for cover.

W
hen she opened her eyes
, she had a sensation of infinite softness, of a cleanliness only dreams could be made of. She blinked, saw the unknown female face bending over her, and heard strange words in a strange voice. American English. It had been years since she had heard that kind of accent. The truth was that she spoke very little English, only enough to get along . . . an
American accent
?

“Hospital,” the unknown woman was saying, intonating for her.
“Hôpital?
You're French, aren't you?”

Lily nodded, and tried to move her right hand to touch her face. But a terrible pain went through her, and she realized that something was resisting her freedom of movement. The woman said, in hesitant French: “You're in an American hospital, in the American sector of Berlin. You were found among a handful of survivors, in the courtyard of a Nazi munitions factory. You were delirious, you had pneumonia, and your shoulder had been damaged by a bullet. But you were alive. The Red Cross brought you first to the Russian sector, and then, three weeks ago, they sent you here, thinking we might have more success finding out who you are.”

Lily shook her head, and started to form a scream. But the woman touched her face with gentle fingers, and said: “I know. We saw the number tattooed on your forearm. They used fake Red Cross ambulances to take the condemned to the gas chambers. But this time, a real ambulance took you to a real hospital. We've been feeding you intravenously, and this is the first time you've regained consciousness. We knew only that you were French, because, in your delirium, you said a lot of things in your language.”

Lily could see the woman's face, better than she had seen her own hands during the last months in Auschwitz and Ludwigschutz. She opened her mouth, to ask. But ...for
whom?
Maryse was dead, Nanni was dead, Magda was dead. Her mother was dead, and her husband had ceased to live for her many years before. This kind woman would know nothing of Kira, or of Nicky or Mark.

She felt the tears come, oceans and oceans of tears, and the woman knelt before her and put two strong arms around her. “It's all right,” she murmured, over and over again. “You'll be all right. Try to tell us who you are. We'll do what we can for you, to help you to go home.”

T
he American journalist
, his curly gray hair tousled and disheveled, his shirt rumpled and stained with perspiration, let his raincoat drop on the counter, and leaned forward, eagerly. “Tell me about her,” he demanded.

“She doesn't seem to want to tell us who she is. She's been wounded in the shoulder. She was so emaciated, at first we couldn't tell how old she might have been, or even if she'd be likely to recover. Her eyesight is still blurred, but she seems able to focus. And she's been gaining weight. Before all this, she must have been a beautiful woman. She still has marvelous brown eyes.”

The journalist felt a moment of dizziness, and used the wall to steady himself. He was exhausted. From the time when he'd found Kira, in Paris, and been told what had happened, he hadn't stopped long enough to rest properly. All their friends had tried to talk them both out of finding Lily; in all probability, she hadn't survived. But for Mark and Kira, nothing had seemed impossible. And so she'd gone her way and he'd gone his, stopping at all the hospitals of Western Europe where they had heard that camp survivors had been sheltered.

In the process, he'd seen so many ravaged women, barely more than breathing skeletons, that he was almost afraid to think of the condition she'd be in if she
had
survived. But he had to continue, until all leads had been followed. And there had been so many moments of hope, so many times he'd
thought
it might be she, and instead, he'd been faced with a total stranger with eyes that had begged for him to claim her . . . not to abandon her. He owed it to all these women that nobody would claim, owed it to them too to pursue the trail to the woman who belonged to him.

“What makes you think she might be the Princess Brasilova?” he asked.

“Those names she kept repeating, in her delirium. The same as those you mentioned: Kira, Nicky, Maryse.” The middle-aged nurse chewed on her lower lip. “And once, at the beginning, she called out ‘Mark!'”

He couldn't speak. And so she led the way, into the long hospital dormitory. Her crepe-soled shoes made squeaky noises on the linoleum floor. She wove between beds until she was standing in front of a screen. “She doesn't like anyone to see her,” she whispered. And she tapped. “It's me, Nurse Angela. And I brought a friend.”

With expert fingers, the nurse moved the screen so that they might both pass through. She let Mark go first, and remained only for a minute behind him. Because when he saw the patient, and fell to his knees to clasp her to him, Nurse Angela Pryor knew that, at last, her “dark lady” had been found.

T
he elegant middle
-aged woman
made a stunning impression on the head nurse in the maternity ward of the Beth Israel Hospital, in New York. She was tall and extremely slender—a touch too thin, actually. Her raw silk duster, its large collar turned back to reveal a pearl choker at her neck, was belted at the narrow waist, and its sleeves were becomingly cuffed just above her elbow. The duster was of deep emerald green, and her small, veiled hat matched perfectly. The elbow-length kid gloves did not obstruct the length and grace of her tapered fingers, now closed over a large bouquet of springtime flowers.

The woman, whose face, beyond the delicate netting of her hat, was definitely exotic with its large, almond-shaped eyes the color of rich coffee, hesitated in front of the glass windows of the nursery. The head nurse tiptoed over. “Which one are you trying to find?” she asked, kindly.

The woman turned, and smiled. Before, her face had been touched with a strange, mysterious sort of sadness, like an unconscious grief in spite of her will. But now there was a glow to it. “The Brasilov baby,” she said softly.

“That's him—over in the corner. He's kept us all quite busy, I can tell you. Jacob, isn't it? Are you . . . ?”

“His grandmother. Would you ask someone to hold him up? He doesn't seem to be asleep, and I've never been alone with him.”

The head nurse nodded, sympathetic. The elegant woman spoke with a French accent. The head nurse went inside, and after a moment, returned with a bundle in her arms. “Here,” she said. “I've done one better. You can hold him, Grandma.”

With infinite care, the two women exchanged flowers and baby. The French woman held the tiny infant, wrapped in his blanket, and cradled him with absolute awe and parted lips. “He's beautiful, isn't he?” she said. “He looks like my son.”

The head nurse laughed. “He looks like
you.
I've seen your son, and he's just like you, too. He's such a pleasant, considerate young man ... so attentive to his wife, so loving to his baby. We chatted together, yesterday. His wife's parents were with her, and he didn't want to crowd her. He told me about his import-export business, and about how he met his wife at a party, two years ago. Is Jacob your first grandchild, Mrs. Brasilov?”

The woman smiled, looking up from the baby. “It's ‘MacDonald': Lily MacDonald. Jacob is my first grandson. But I have a two-year-old granddaughter, in Paris. My daughter's child. Her name is Marie-Claire . . . Marie-Claire Rublon.”

The head nurse hesitated. Then, wetting her lips, she plunged in. “I'm sorry if I'm nosy,” she declared. “But ... I think I've seen your photograph, in the society section of the
Times.
Aren't you the novelist Mark MacDonald's wife?”

Her face bent close to the tiny face of her grandson, the woman asked, softly: “Have you read his books?”

“All of them.”

The baby began to cry. Again, the two women exchanged charges, and, apologetically, the head nurse made her exit back into the nursery. The elegant woman resumed her walk toward her daughter-in-law's room, her face once again setting into its serene yet melancholy expression.

“Lily.”

She heard the voice, and turned, not really surprised. Misha Brasilov, as elegant as always in his dark blue spring suit, had aged since the last time she had seen him. His thick crest of hair was now completely white. But this was normal; after all, if, this May of 1952, she was forty-seven, he was a good sixty-one. He'd borne up well, she thought, and was surprised at how little bitterness she could summon up at this point in her life . . . in both their lives.

“I'm sorry. But I hadn't thought to find
you
here, alone.” A certain awkwardness had edged into his voice. “I knew how you must feel; it's why I didn't attend Nicky's wedding. I'm sure I'm the last person you wanted to see.”

“Adina's a dear, sweet girl,” Lily said after a brief pause.

“I'm fond of her too.”

“Even if she's one hundred percent Jewish?”

Misha bit his lower lip, and glanced away. “Lily,” he said. “I never really understood, in those days. But you weren't fair, either: you never told me.”

“You'd never have accepted. But it was wrong of me to have lacked the courage to be open about it. In those days,” she added, “I was a much weaker person.”

It was an awkward moment. Misha took her hand. “I'm the one who made the mistakes,” he said softly.

She let him hold her hand, but her eyes were oddly veiled, and he knew that she was thinking of the baby that had never been born to them. “Lily, Lily,” he said, his voice full of pain. “I made every effort to find you and the children, during the war. Didn't Nicky, or Varvara, ever tell you? But it was impossible at the time.”

She nodded. “Nicky told me.”

“I wanted you back! I didn't leave you because I'd stopped loving you. I left because I was ashamed of the mess I'd made of our life ... of all our lives. And I didn't want you to keep paying for my troubles.”

Her brown eyes fastened on him, and she smiled ... a smile that was bittersweet, and that pierced through his anguish. “I know why you left. I wept for you and wanted to die, but of course I didn't. I had Nicky, and Kira. But you were wrong, Misha, not to have given me a chance to come through for you. If you'd given me the opportunity to be a real wife, and not a porcelain doll, both our lives would have ended up differently.”

He dropped her hand, and turned aside. “My life's been empty,” he declared. “I've never wanted to remarry. In my heart, you'll always be my wife.”

She could feel a burning sensation in her eyes. Quickly, to lighten the atmosphere, she said: “Your life will never be empty. We have grandchildren, Misha. Jacques lives on in Nicky's son, and both our mothers in Kira's daughter. She called her ‘Marie-Claire,' you know, after my mother and Princess Maria. You'd be so proud of Kira, if you saw her now! She makes Pierre a tender, loving wife.”

Misha fumbled with a button of his jacket, and cleared his throat. “One thing that I have never quite understood is why she's taken your brother's son under her wing. She has enough responsibilities with her own family, doesn't she?”

Lily's mouth hardened, but only for an instant, then relaxed again. “She and Pierre felt sorry for the boy. Henriette, you know, endured a public shame. She was paraded around the city, and her head was shaved, like the other women who'd been collaborators. And Kira, who has more heart than either you or I, felt that Alain needed to know that the rest of his family had not forgotten him.”

The air was thick with unspoken memories, and she was glad then that she'd never told him what had really happened between her and Rirette. Somehow, what had seemed cataclysmic then, now appeared almost unimportant. After the camps, she'd learned to put aside all her old ideas of right, wrong, good or bad. She would never be the same, nor would she ever feel the need to share, absolutely, in the life of another human being. Her experience in Auschwitz had set her apart, and no one, not even Mark, could now penetrate to the core of her being. She couldn't help this: she had changed.

“Do you think you'll ever really forgive me?” Misha was asking her. “And what about our children?”

Lily MacDonald looked directly into his green eyes. “We've all forgiven you,” she replied. “Perhaps it's time you forgave yourself.”

And she held out her graceful, gloved hand to the man who had been her first love, nearly thirty years before, on another continent, in another life, before the veil of her innocence had been snatched from her.

She could forgive, because there was a God who had kept her alive, and who had given her two precious children and two grandchildren. And inwardly, she smiled at the ultimate irony of this family. For her first grandson, who would continue the line of Brasilov, was a living link in the unbroken chain of Judaism.

The keepers of the walls had wounded her, as they had all the Jews of Europe. But she had survived, in spite of them, to help bring forth a new generation.

Yet she would never stop mourning the ones who should have been alive to share in her triumph.