“Danny said that you’re researching your family’s history.”

“My father’s family could afford only one ticket to America, so his father sailed there with the idea that he would send for the rest of them. My grandmother stayed here to wait.” Rachelle makes a sad face. “She’s still waiting.”

Sharon’s skin feels hot. She dares not ask how this man’s wife and children survived once the Nazis broke through the Maginot Line and took over Normandy.

Danny surfaces near the shore, his sleek, military body dripping water. “Come on! Join me,” he calls.

The three women rise. Dominique runs ahead and throws herself into his arms. Laughing, holding on to each other, they stumble into the water. Moments later, their heads and shoulders are pressed together. Sharon wants to shrink back into the towel.

“Let’s go.” Rachelle reaches for her hand, and they run and fall into the water. The cold shock numbs Sharon for a few seconds, then, invigorated, she hurls her body forward. Her arms curve and hit the water as she slices through it, and she and Rachelle swim parallel to the shore. When a high wave threatens to break over them, they duck under it. Sharon’s eyes sting, but she likes the power of her stroke, the rhythmic movements, the exertion of her muscles. Her mind is in a trance, emptied of all other thoughts, focused on pushing forward.

She could swim like this until she reaches Le Havre, she thinks, but then Rachelle signals to her, and the two of them turn ninety degrees to the shore.

When they reach the beach, the umbrella is a far dot against the wall of boulders, and the sky above it pulses bright blue. Their feet scrunch tiny pebbles packed tight by the lapping waves.

“By the way, you have a perfect body for your string bikini,” Rachelle says, her eyes taking in the three front triangles Savta crocheted.

Sharon glances down at Rachelle’s full breasts. “Thanks, but I’m too skinny.”

“I’m too ethnic. My coloring stands out.”

“You’ll fit well in Israel.” Sharon redirects the conversation. “I want to ask whether you know anything about the underground. The people who hid Jewish children during the war?”

“That’s how my father’s younger brother was saved. My grandmother and my father were caught and sent to a transitional labor camp here in France. They were supposed to go to Auschwitz next, but thankfully, a priest issued them faked baptism papers, and they were released. Still, it was years before they reunited with my uncle.”

“Where was he?”

“He got lost. The underground shuffled him around for his safety. Out of fear of discovery, no one wrote anything down. In that system, only one person knew the identity of the next in the chain.”

“Then what happened?”

“At thirteen, when he should have been bar mitzvahed, the family that sheltered him baptized him.” She pauses. “Fortunately, he knew his former name and address. When the war ended, he was fifteen and ran away.”

“Thank God.”

“It wasn’t so simple. It took another two years of heartache before the three of them were united.” Rachelle looks at the sky as if to pluck some facts. “It drives him nuts that he can’t be ‘unbaptized.’ To snub the church, he became a practicing Orthodox Jew.”

“What would happen to a young child who didn’t know his name?” Sharon asks, not expecting an answer. “Such a tenuous chain.”

“Thousands of Jewish children must have gotten lost. It was wartime. Chaos galore: bombs leaving millions of French families homeless and fleeing; Nazis seizing all farm produce; defeated French soldiers wandering about wounded and dazed; the Vichy government yanking half a million Frenchmen from their families and sending them to labor in Germany; fierce fighting among the Communists, the collaborators, and the Maquis. In the midst of that, who knew or cared about Jewish children?”

The salt water dries on Sharon’s skin, tightening it. Her face stings when she rubs it. How had her mother survived? “What about monasteries?”

“It wasn’t hard to hide one child or two or three, but you couldn’t hide hundreds of them. Some orphanages operated, but most shut down during the war.”

Sharon wonders how Youth Aliyah found thousands of children all over Europe after the war. Did its agents knock on doors of monasteries and farmhouses and ask to take the Jewish orphans to another country whose language the children did not speak? Her mother was almost an adult and could decide for herself, but who gave away the four-year-old Danny?

Then it occurs to Sharon: If Danny was four at the time he arrived, the year must have been 1946. It was pre-Israel, the same year her mother arrived—and many thousands of refugees in dozens of clandestine voyages.

When Sharon and Rachelle reach the umbrella, Danny and Dominique are not there, nor are their heads bobbing in the water. Sharon assumes that they are beyond the curve of boulders, making love, and Rachelle’s silence about their absence tells her that she shares the same assumption.

Rachelle takes out a rattan picnic basket and begins to spread its contents on a red-checkered tablecloth. A fresh baguette, sliced tomatoes, salami, dried figs, and three kinds of cheese. A salad of beans and grains in a bowl lined with lettuce leaves. She places the cheese on a cutting board and decorates the arrangement with a cluster of green grapes. The plates are china, the utensils stainless steel, and the wineglasses are stemmed. Sharon admires anew the way the French do everything with style, even a beach picnic, down to the matching red-checkered napkins that Rachelle hands her to fold into triangles.

Sharon adds her cake, still in its baking pan, mulling over their conversation. Even if records of hidden children were kept, babies became attached to their caretakers, and teens must have matured in the four or five years of war and moved on.

“The orphanages,” she says. “Were they like in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist?”

“Better, allowing for severe wartime shortages. At first, a Jewish humanitarian organization was permitted to operate as long as the Vichy government controlled it. OSE—that’s Œuvre de secours aux enfants—smuggled many children to Switzerland. Then its leaders were arrested. Some children escaped. Others were sent to concentration camps.”

Escaped and all alone in a hostile world. Where did her mother hide for years? Or had she survived a camp? Sharon pours water into the glasses.

Rachelle sips some. “There were also many state orphanages—not Jewish—and more opened after liberation. The country was in shambles, and parents couldn’t feed their children, so they let the state take care of them.”

“The ‘orphans’ weren’t actually orphans? They had living parents?”

“Seventy-five percent of institutionalized French children had at least one living parent. Non-Jews might have lost their farms, but Jewish survivors of concentration camps didn’t even have a change of clothes or the tools of their previous occupations. They’d been away from their children for years, tortured, and they were often too broken to bond anew with them.”

Seventy-five percent. Could one or both of Danny’s parents be alive? Sharon looks at the coarse sand around her. The Allies had landed on these serene beaches several kilometers east of this spot. She always assumed that with that audacious campaign, so costly in human lives, the misery ended. In fact, another stage of misery and anguish had begun.

When Danny and Dominique reappear, their arms are so tight around each other that they keep tripping. Danny drops onto the sand, plucks up the bottle of red wine and a corkscrew, and deftly opens it.

They chat while eating. Danny and Sharon can’t mention even the most innocuous details of their work or joke about an anecdote. Disparate pieces of information and coincidental stories might be woven together to reveal a scheme not intended to become public. Dominique, though, is a charismatic talker.

“You have no idea what went on here just five months ago. The students’ revolution in Paris spread nationwide to labor unions. The whole country came to a dead stop. Here in Normandy, all the shipyard workers went on strike. Grievances bubbled up. School boards agreed to overhaul our archaic education system, but around here, they did nothing about it all summer. I begged my editor to let me expose their apathy.” She flings back her blond curls and ties them in a knot. “He stole my idea and assigned it to a male reporter. The piece was so lame! It didn’t address the fact that classes have resumed with the same old dogmatic and idiotic methods.” She turns to Sharon. “You know what first-graders write on? Slate.”

“Why slate?”

“Exactly. They are not taught to hold a pencil, only chalk to scratch on a Stone Age slate.”

Were records of hidden Jewish children also written in chalk on slate?

After lunch, Danny and Sharon play beach paddleball, a popular Israeli game. They position themselves on the water’s edge, where ripples flirt with the sand, leaving it tightly packed. The familiar thwack of the hard, small ball brings Sharon memories of long beach days with Alon. The two of them could volley back and forth in a long play reminiscent of their lovemaking.

Sharon begs off, claiming fatigue, and calls Rachelle to take her paddle.

She lies down under the umbrella, and she must have dozed off, because when she opens her eyes, Rachelle is resting nearby. The slow rhythmical rising and falling of the breasts that spill out of her tiny bikini top indicate that she is sleeping. The sun has moved in the sky, and Dominique and Danny are lying across from them, their upper bodies in the shade cast by the boulders. Only their feet are in the sun, their soles facing Sharon.

Her eyes are not fully open when she notices a blue stain at the bottom of Danny’s foot. A jellyfish sting?

Alarmed, she calls, “Danny! Your foot!”

He sits up slowly and unhurriedly clears the sand off the blue stain. “Oh, yes, my foot.”

Sharon stares at a tattoo of a Star of David.

Part II