“There are perks to working abroad, and the chance to get a license easily and cheaply is one of them,” Danny says.

Obtaining a license is a fantastic perk, Sharon thinks, but can she commit to staying long enough? It’s been nine months since the Dakar’s disappearance, and it will surely be found any day. In the meantime, her bank account in town is growing. She was able to splurge and join her downstairs neighbors Naomi and Pazit for a girls’ weekend in Paris. Naomi was hoping that a trip to the City of Light would help shake the melancholy out of the forlorn teenager. After the three of them toured Montmartre and its Sacré-Coeur cathedral, took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and clicked photos of the Arc de Triomphe, Sharon feasted her eyes on the splendor of Champs-Élysées fashion. For actual shopping, though, Naomi led them to the flea market. Even Pazit woke up at the abundance of inexpensive merchandise and copied Sharon’s selection of corduroy pants, sweaters, and a short jacket for the changing weather.

At one point, Pazit went into a record store, and Sharon and Naomi sat in a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain watching the passersby. “What was the drama involving the family on the first floor of our building?” Sharon asked.

Naomi sipped her coffee. “The daughter of Yaniv’s predecessor—she was about your age—came to visit her parents for a week. Danny made the mistake of taking her out a couple of times. Maybe there was more. The kid fell in love, stayed on, and badgered everyone to ‘talk to him,’ as if we could convince him to love her back.”

“Must have been awkward all around.”

“Her father was embarrassed by her behavior. Since his tour here was about to end anyway, he transferred earlier. Then Danny met Dominique, who’s closer to his age and more levelheaded, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.”

The story makes Danny seem more human, Sharon thinks now as he punches the radio dial. Yves Montand’s voice comes through, then the signal is lost.

“Let’s talk about you,” Danny says after a while. “Since you’re doing drafting, any plans to study it?”

Between assignments, she helps Elazar, who instructs her on how to use drafting instruments. “I would have liked to study architecture, but I majored in social studies, so I didn’t take the math classes I’d need to apply to the Technion.”

“Not too late.” Danny draws on his cigarette. “Winter here is long, cold, and dark. Plenty of time to hit the books.”

“How exciting. I need tutoring, and I don’t even have a math textbook.”

“Mine is at my parents’ home. I’ll ask them to mail it.” He smiles. “We’re not short of engineers who can tutor you. I’ll help when I can.”

“Thanks.” The time alone with Danny has lost its pressing purpose. Her hopes to penetrate the mystery of his past have capsized like a dinghy in a storm. But she likes their growing friendship. “To be accepted in the Technion, I’ll need more than a passing grade in calculus,” she says.

“You’re smart. Give it a shot.”

Instead of a reply, she tries turning on the radio again. This time Edith Piaf’s sonorous voice is clear: “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

With the wind teasing her hair, Sharon thinks that she doesn’t regret coming to Cherbourg even if her original quest has come to naught. She’s growing, coming into herself—she will even learn to drive. Becoming an architect was such an elusive aspiration, she never considered it possible. Even today she would rather have married Alon.

Life has its own story arc. A huge hand drops from the sky to yank you out of your orbit and throw you into another. And here she is, part of history in the making, although its events are yet to unfold.

Chapter Twenty

Sharon

Cherbourg, France

October 1968

Shabbat morning brings brightness and warmth, as if yesterday’s rain and chill were a mistake and now summer has reclaimed its spot on the calendar. The office is closed, and Sharon’s four new roommates are out in a rented car touring the region. Sharon rose early and baked an almond cake for Rina and a poppy-seed cake for Naomi. The radio is playing “Indian Summer,” and the words about a lost love swell up in Sharon. Longing for Alon rushes in to fill the space of his absence. She checks her map. To while away the coming hours, she plans to ride her new motorized bike out of town.

She walks down to Naomi and Elazar’s apartment to deliver the cake. “Hey, I’m going to a scallop festival,” she tells Pazit when the teenager opens the door. “Would you like to come along?”

“No, thanks.”

The British TV station blares in the background. “C’mon. It will be fun to see something new together, like we did in Paris.”

“No. I have homework.”

Sharon sympathizes with the misery of this lonely teenager, cut off from her boyfriend and school and drowning in a new language. “May I help you with your French homework?”

“What part of the word no don’t you understand?”

Sharon climbs the stairs back to her apartment. She can’t imagine how hard it must be for Pazit’s parents. Are Naomi’s sacrifices to support her husband worth the cost of her resigning from her job running a lab at a Haifa hospital, leaving a son in the IDF without his family, and making her daughter miserable?

Merely a few years ago, Sharon was a teenager, and she recalls the license some of her friends took with their parents. It dismayed her to hear them talk back. Rebellion and impertinence were never an option for her. As frustrating as her aging grandparents could be, so out of step with her fast-moving world—Grandpa Nathan forbade her to play Elvis Presley and Beatles music, claiming it corrupted the soul of Israel’s youth—Sharon was forever cognizant of the efforts her grandparents made to raise her. Luckily, since age thirteen, she’d had Alon’s parents as her second family. In their laughter-filled home, the latest Top 10 songs always blared in the background. Of course, Sharon was also on her best behavior. Perhaps there’s some unexpressed pent-up angst and rage hidden in each teenager, like noxious fumes slithering under the surface in search of an opening.

Are insolence and impudence the luxury of only those who grow up with their own biological parents and feel safe lashing out?

When she enters her apartment she hears honking from the street that sends her to the window. Danny is standing by his car. The canvas of the roof is rolled away, and Dominique waves through the opening. Another feminine hand joins the wave, but that second woman remains hidden.

“Come join us for a picnic,” Danny calls to Sharon.

“Bring your bathing suit,” Dominique adds. “It’s warm enough.”

The beautiful Dominique is a reporter for the regional paper; she covers women’s interests, from news on market days to the openings of beauty salons. Her column also offers recipes and beauty tips. Sharon is in awe of the Frenchwoman’s chic.

She is touched by Danny’s efforts to include her. This week he left an Eiffel Tower snow globe on her desk along with a list of places she should visit on her next trip to Paris.

She puts on a bikini, a cotton shift, and a cardigan and runs downstairs. In the bag she uses for food shopping, she has a rolled-up towel. She's thrown in the cake she baked for Rina, a water canister, and two apples, the only fruit left in the bowl; her new roommates devoured everything else.

The day is indeed unseasonably warm. Sharon wants to throw her arms up in the air and let the sun envelop her.

“Meet Rachelle, a colleague of Dominique at La Presse de la Manche,” Danny says, then adds with emphasis, “She’s researching her Jewish family history.”

The small, full-figured woman greets Sharon with la bise—the French double air kisses—and tells Danny, “Don’t start with that nightmare.”

The subject piques Sharon’s interest, but with the Beatles blaring on the radio and then the wind blowing through the car’s open roof, no further conversation is possible.

Danny drives east to a beach cove nestled among massive boulders. There, he opens an umbrella for the fair-skinned Dominique to sit under. The olive-skinned Rachelle slathers her body with tanning oil and stretches out in the sun. Sharon spreads her towel between the two women, her head and shoulders in the shade, her body exposed to the sun. Danny shucks off his clothes down to his bathing trunks and sprints into the sea, his arms aloft as he plunges in.

Unlike Dominique, whose beat for the newspaper takes her out of the office, Rachelle stays inside; she does research and fact-checking. Both women are four years older than Sharon, and she is intimidated by their sophistication.

The two women chat about colleagues, bosses, and male reporters. In her staff role, Rachelle knows about all the plum assignments the men get. Lying between them, her eyes closed, soaking in sun, Sharon breathes in the coconut scent of Rachelle’s suntan oil. The women’s chatter drones on, broken by the screeching of seagulls against the steady rolling of the waves.

The ocean, stretching all the way to Australia, is Alon’s burial place. Sharon sits bolt upright, drawing the women’s curious looks. Their conversation stops.

“Did you get stung by a bee?” Dominique glances about.

Sharon stares ahead to where Danny is bobbing in the water. Judaism doesn’t recognize burial at sea. Somewhere, three thousand miles away in the Mediterranean, Alon’s body is floating inside the iron tomb of his sunken submarine. It’s the same water she’s now looking at, so deceptively calm, with the same silvery froth contouring small waves.

“Did you have a cauchemar?” Rachelle asks. “I got them after I searched records of refugees.”

The comment pulls Sharon back. “What refugees?”

“Before and during the war, you know, thousands of Jews fled Europe right through Cherbourg.” Rachelle waves toward the harbor west of them.