فصل 38

THIRTY-EIGHT

Isabelle stood at attention. She needed to stand up straight for roll call. If she gave in to her dizziness and toppled over, they would whip her, or worse.

No. It wasn’t roll call. She was in Paris now, in a hospital room.

She was waiting for something. For someone.

Micheline had gone to speak to the Red Cross workers and journalists gathered in the lobby. Isabelle was supposed to wait here.

The door opened.

“Isabelle,” Micheline said in a scolding tone. “You shouldn’t be standing.”

“I’m afraid I’ll die if I lie down,” Isabelle said. Or maybe she thought the words.

Like Isabelle, Micheline was as thin as a matchstick, with hip bones that showed like knuckles beneath her shapeless dress. She was almost entirely bald—only tufts of hair grew here and there—and she had no eyebrows. The skin at her neck and along her arms was riddled with oozing, open sores. “Come,” Micheline said. She led her out of the room, through the strange crowd of silent, shuffling, rag-dressed returnees and the loud, watery-eyed family members in search of loved ones, past the journalists who asked questions. She steered her gently to a quieter room, where other camp survivors sat slumped in chairs.

Isabelle sat down in a chair and dutifully put her hands in her lap. Her lungs ached and burned with every breath she drew and a headache pounded inside her skull.

“It’s time for you to go home,” Micheline said.

Isabelle looked up, blank and bleary-eyed.

“Do you want me to travel with you?”

She blinked slowly, trying to think. Her headache was blinding in its intensity. “Where am I going?”

“Carriveau. You’re going to see your sister. She’s waiting for you.”

“She is?”

“Your train leaves in forty minutes. Mine leaves in an hour.”

“How do we go back?” Isabelle dared to ask. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“We are the lucky ones,” Micheline said, and Isabelle nodded.

Micheline helped Isabelle stand.

Together they limped to the hospital’s back door, where a row of automobiles and Red Cross lorries waited to transport survivors to the train station. As they waited their turn, they stood together, tucked close as they’d done so often in the past year—in Appell lines, in cattle cars, in food queues.

A bright-faced young woman in a Red Cross uniform came into the room, carrying a clipboard. “Rossignol?”

Isabelle lifted her hot, sweaty hands and cupped Micheline’s wrinkled, grayed face. “I loved you, Micheline Babineau,” she said softly and kissed the older woman’s dry lips.

“Don’t talk about yourself in the past tense.”

“But I am past tense. The girl I was…”

“She’s not gone, Isabelle. She’s sick and she’s been treated badly, but she can’t be gone. She had the heart of a lion.”

“Now you’re speaking in the past tense.” Honestly, Isabelle couldn’t remember that girl at all, the one who’d jumped into the Resistance with barely a thought. The girl who’d recklessly brought an airman into her father’s apartment and foolishly brought another one into her sister’s barn. The girl who had hiked across the Pyrenees and fallen in love during the exodus from Paris.

“We made it,” Micheline said.

Isabelle had heard those words often in the past week. We made it. When the Americans had arrived to liberate the camp, those three words had been on every prisoner’s lips. Isabelle had felt relief then—after all of it, the beatings, the cold, the degradation, the disease, the forced march through the snow, she had survived.

Now, though, she wondered what her life could possibly be. She couldn’t go back to who she’d been, but how could she go forward? She gave Micheline a last wave good-bye and climbed into the Red Cross vehicle.

Later, on the train, she pretended not to notice how people stared at her. She tried to sit up straight, but she couldn’t do it. She slumped sideways, rested her head against the window.

She closed her eyes and was asleep in no time, dreaming feverishly of a clattering ride in a cattle car, of babies crying and women trying desperately to soothe them … and then the doors opened and the dogs were waiting—

Isabelle jolted awake. She was so disoriented it took her a moment to remember that she was safe. She dabbed at her forehead with the end of her sleeve. Her fever was back.

Two hours later, the train rumbled into Carriveau.

I made it. So, why didn’t she feel anything?

She got to her feet and shuffled painfully from the train. As she stepped down onto the platform, a coughing spasm took over. She bent, hacking and coughing up blood into her hand. When she could breathe again, she straightened, feeling hollowed out and drained. Old.

Her sister stood at the edge of the platform. She was big with pregnancy and dressed in a faded and patched summer dress. Her strawberry blond hair was longer now, past her shoulders and wavy. As she scanned the crowd leaving the train, her gaze went right past Isabelle.

Isabelle raised her bony hand in greeting.

Vianne saw her wave and paled. “Isabelle!” Vianne cried, rushing toward her. She cupped Isabelle’s hollow cheeks in her hands.

“Don’t get too close. My breath is terrible.”

Vianne kissed Isabelle’s cracked, swollen, dry lips and whispered, “Welcome home, sister.”

“Home,” Isabelle repeated the unexpected word. She couldn’t bring up any images to go along with it, her thoughts were so jumbled and her head pounded.

Vianne gently put her arms around Isabelle and pulled her close. Isabelle felt her sister’s soft skin and the lemony scent of her hair. She felt her sister stroking her back, just as she’d done when she was a little girl, and Isabelle thought, I made it.

Home.

“You’re burning up,” Vianne said when they were back at Le Jardin, and Isabelle was clean and dry and lying in a warm bed.

“Oui. I can’t seem to get rid of this fever.”

“I will get you some aspirin.” Vianne started to rise.

“No,” Isabelle said. “Don’t leave me. Please. Lie with me.”

Vianne climbed into the small bed. Afraid that the lightest touch would leave a bruise, she gathered Isabelle close with exquisite care.

“I’m sorry about Beck. Forgive me…” Isabelle said, coughing. She’d waited so long to say it, imagined this conversation a thousand times. “… for the way I put you and Sophie in danger…”

“No, Isabelle,” Vianne said softly, “forgive me. I failed you at every turn. Starting when Papa left us with Madame Dumas. And when you ran off to Paris, how could I believe your ridiculous story about an affair? That has haunted me.” Vianne leaned toward her. “Can we start over now? Be the sisters Maman wanted us to be?”

Isabelle fought to stay awake. “I’d like that.”

“I am so, so proud of what you did in this war, Isabelle.”

Isabelle’s eyes filled with tears. “What about you, V?”

Vianne looked away. “After Beck, another Nazi billeted here. A bad one.”

Did Vianne realize that she touched her belly as she said it? That shame colored her cheeks? Isabelle knew instinctively what her sister had endured. Isabelle had heard countless stories of women being raped by the soldiers billeted with them. “You know what I learned in the camps?”

Vianne looked at her. “What?”

“They couldn’t touch my heart. They couldn’t change who I was inside. My body … they broke that in the first days, but not my heart, V. Whatever he did, it was to your body, and your body will heal.” She wanted to say more, maybe add “I love you,” but a hacking cough overtook her. When it passed, she lay back, spent, breathing shallow, ragged breaths.

Vianne leaned closer, pressed a cool, wet rag to her fevered forehead.

Isabelle stared at the blood on the quilt, remembering the end days of her mother’s life. There had been such blood then, too. She looked at Vianne and saw that her sister was remembering it, too.

Isabelle woke on a wooden floor. She was freezing and on fire at the same time, shivering and sweating.

She heard nothing, no rats or cockroaches scurrying across the floor, no water bleeding through the wall cracks, turning to fat slugs of ice, no coughing or crying. She sat up slowly, wincing at every movement, no matter how fractional. Everything hurt. Her bones, her skin, her head, her chest; she had no muscles left to hurt, but her joints and ligaments ached.

She heard a loud ra-ta-ta-tat. Gunfire. She covered her head and scurried into the corner, crouching low.

No.

She was at Le Jardin, not Ravensbrück.

That sound was rain hitting the roof.

She got slowly to her feet, feeling dizzy. How long had she been here?

Four days? Five?

She limped to the nightstand, where a porcelain pitcher sat beside a bowl of tepid water. She washed her hands and splashed water on her face and then dressed in the clothes Vianne had laid out for her—a dress that had belonged to Sophie when she was ten years old and bagged on Isabelle. She began the long, slow journey down the stairs.

The front door was open. Outside, the apple trees were blurred by a falling rain. Isabelle went to the doorway, breathing in the sweet air.

“Isabelle?” Vianne said, coming up beside her. “Let me get you some marrow broth. The doctor says you can drink it.”

She nodded absently, letting Vianne pretend that the few tablespoons of broth Isabelle’s stomach could hold would make a difference.

She stepped out into the rain. The world was alive with sound—birds cawing, church bells ringing, rain thumping on the roof, splashing in puddles. Traffic clogged the narrow, muddy road; automobiles and lorries and bicyclists, honking and waving, yelling out to one another as people came home. An American lorry rumbled past, full of smiling, fresh-faced soldiers who waved at passersby.

At the sight of them, Isabelle remembered Vianne telling her that Hitler had killed himself and Berlin had been surrounded and would fall soon.

Was that true? Was the war over? She didn’t know, couldn’t remember. Her mind was such a mess these days.

Isabelle limped out to the road, realizing too late that she was barefoot (she would get beaten for losing her shoes), but she kept going. Shivering, coughing, plastered by rain, she walked past the bombed-out airfield, taken over by Allied troops now.

“Isabelle!”

She turned, coughing hard, spitting blood into her hand. She was trembling now with cold, shivering. Her dress was soaking wet.

“What are you doing out here?” Vianne said. “And where are your shoes? You have typhus and pneumonia and you’re out in the rain.” Vianne took off her coat and wrapped it around Isabelle’s shoulder.

“Is the war over?”

“We talked about this last night, remember?”

Rain blurred Isabelle’s vision, fell in streaks down her back. She drew in a wet, shuddering breath and felt tears sting her eyes.

Don’t cry. She knew that was important but she didn’t remember why.

“Isabelle, you’re sick.”

“Gaëtan promised to find me after the war was over,” she whispered. “I need to get to Paris so he can find me.”

“If he came looking for you, he’d come to the house.”

Isabelle didn’t understand. She shook her head.

“He’s been here, remember? After Tours. He brought you home.”

My nightingale, I got you home.

“Oh.

“He won’t think I’m pretty anymore.” Isabelle tried to smile, but she knew it was a failure.

Vianne put an arm around Isabelle and gently turned her around. “We will go and write him a letter.”

“I don’t know where to send it,” Isabelle said, leaning against her sister, shivering with cold and fire.

How did she make it home? She wasn’t sure. She vaguely remembered Antoine carrying her up the stairs, kissing her forehead, and Sophie bringing her some hot broth, but she must have fallen asleep at some point because the next thing she knew night had fallen.

Vianne sat sleeping in a chair beneath the window.

Isabelle coughed.

Vianne was on her feet in an instant, fixing the pillows behind Isabelle, propping her up. She dunked a cloth in the water at the bedside, wrung out the excess, and pressed it to Isabelle’s forehead. “You want some marrow broth?”

“God, no.”

“You’re not eating anything.”

“I can’t keep it down.”

Vianne reached for the chair and dragged it close to the bed.

Vianne touched Isabelle’s hot, wet cheek and gazed into her sunken eyes. “I have something for you.” Vianne got up from her chair and left the room. Moments later, she was back with a yellowed envelope. She handed it to Isabelle. “This is for us. From Papa. He came by here on his way to see you in Girot.”

“He did? Did he tell you that he was going to turn himself in to save me?”

Vianne nodded and handed Isabelle the letter.

The letters of her name blurred and elongated on the page. Malnutrition had ruined her eyesight. “Can you read it to me?”

Vianne unsealed the envelope and withdrew the letter and began to read.

Isabelle and Vianne,

What I do now, I do without misgiving. My regret is not for my death, but for my life. I am sorry I was no father to you.

I could make excuses—I was ruined by the war, I drank too much, I couldn’t go on without your maman—but none of that matters.

Isabelle, I remember the first time you ran away to be with me. You made it all the way to Paris on your own. Everything about you said, Love me. And when I saw you on that platform, needing me, I turned away.

How could I not see that you and Vianne were a gift, had I only reached out?

Forgive me, my daughters, for all of it, and know that as I say good-bye, I loved you both with all of my damaged heart.

Isabelle closed her eyes and lay back into the pillows. All her life she’d waited for those words—his love—and now all she felt was loss. They hadn’t loved each other enough in the time they had, and then time ran out. “Hold Sophie and Antoine and your new baby close, Vianne. Love is such a slippery thing.”

“Don’t do that,” Vianne said.

“What?”

“Say good-bye. You’ll get strong and healthy and you’ll find Gaëtan and you’ll get married and be there when this baby of mine is born.”

Isabelle sighed and closed her eyes. “What a pretty future that would be.”

A week later, Isabelle sat in a chair in the backyard, wrapped in two blankets and an eiderdown comforter. The early May sun blazed down on her and still she was trembling with cold. Sophie sat in the grass at her feet, reading her a story. Her niece tried to use a different voice for each character and sometimes, even as bad as Isabelle felt, as much as her bones felt too heavy for her skin to bear, she found herself smiling, even laughing.

Antoine was somewhere, trying to build a cradle out of whatever scraps of wood Vianne hadn’t burned during the war. It was obvious to everyone that Vianne would be going into labor soon; she moved slowly and seemed always to have a hand pressed to the small of her back.

With closed eyes, Isabelle savored the beautiful commonness of the day. In the distance, a church bell pealed. Bells had been ringing constantly in the past week to herald the war’s end.

Sophie’s voice stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.

Isabelle thought she said “keep reading,” but she wasn’t sure.

She heard her sister say, “Isabelle,” in a tone of voice that meant something.

Isabelle looked up. Vianne stood there, flour streaking her pale, freckled face and dusting her apron, her reddish hair bound by a frayed turban. “Someone is here to see you.”

“Tell the doctor I’m fine.”

“It’s not the doctor.” Vianne smiled and said, “Gaëtan is here.”

Isabelle felt as if her heart might burst through the paper walls of her chest. She tried to stand and fell back to the chair in a heap. Vianne helped her to her feet, but once she was standing, she couldn’t move. How could she look at him? She was a bald, eyebrowless skeleton, with some of her teeth gone and most of her fingernails missing. She touched her head, realizing an awkward moment too late that she had no hair to tuck behind her ear.

Vianne kissed her cheek. “You’re beautiful,” she said.

Isabelle turned slowly, and there he was, standing in the open doorway. She saw how bad he looked—the weight and hair and vibrancy he’d lost—but none of it mattered. He was here.

He limped toward her and took her in his arms.

She brought her shaking hands up and put her arms around him. For the first time in days, weeks, a year, her heart was a reliable thing, pumping with life. When he drew back, he stared down at her and the love in his eyes burned away everything bad; it was just them again, Gaëtan and Isabelle, somehow falling in love in a world at war. “You’re as beautiful as I remember,” he said, and she actually laughed, and then she cried. She wiped her eyes, feeling foolish, but tears kept streaming down her face. She was crying for all of it at last—for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive.

“Don’t cry.”

How could she not? They should have had a lifetime to share truths and secrets, to get to know each other. “I love you,” she whispered, remembering that time so long ago when she’d said it to him before. She’d been so young and shiny then.

“I love you, too,” he said, his voice breaking. “I did from the first minute I saw you. I thought I was protecting you by not telling you. If I’d known…”

How fragile life was, how fragile they were.

Love.

It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between. It didn’t matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him. All her life she had waited—longed for—people to love her, but now she saw what really mattered. She had known love, been blessed by it.

Papa. Maman. Sophie.

Antoine. Micheline. Anouk. Henri.

Gaëtan.

Vianne.

She looked past Gaëtan to her sister, the other half of her. She remembered Maman telling them that someday they would be best friends, that time would stitch their lives together.

Vianne nodded, crying now, too, her hand on her extended belly.

Don’t forget me, Isabelle thought. She wished she had the strength to say it out loud.