“Give him more wine.” Madame Duchamp dipped the needle in the ink again. “Two more lines, then we’ll be finished. One more. Voilà!”
Claudette pulled Benjamin to her breast. He latched on, stopped to bray, then latched on again. The bottom of the foot raised toward her was a swollen, bloody mess. Distorted by the curvature of the foot and the swelling, the Jewish Star of David was larger than a one-franc coin.
Bile rose in Claudette’s throat, and her breakfast threatened to burst out of her. What had she done, marking her baby for danger? She gulped the rest of the red wine.
Perhaps this was God’s way of bringing her baby into the covenant with his Jewish side?
Chapter Nineteen
Sharon
Cherbourg, France
October 1968
Outside the Le Havre customs house, Sharon helps Danny haul boxes into a rented van. Yellow shipping forms in German are affixed to them next to green French customs forms she filled out. If anything about this Saars project seems bizarre, it’s that a mere twenty-five years after Germany and France conspired to exterminate the Jews, the two nations are working together to ensure that the country of the Jews survives.
And survive they must. Intelligence Sharon glimpsed in the mail she opened for the team’s head, Admiral Yaniv, reported that the Russians had increased land, sea, and air munitions to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. Yaniv is a gruff man who often checks the envelope on Sharon’s desk for the stamps she keeps for him from her Italian and German correspondence with suppliers of electronics and engine parts. He scoops them up while barely acknowledging her. With each report she reads, Sharon wishes even more to escape to a place that is free of the despair Israelis feel, of the fear of another Holocaust barreling down. Even if France relents and eases its sanctions, what are a dozen small new boats against all these huge armies with war machines?
Sharon climbs into the van and pulls the boxes from inside while Danny pushes them in. Even though these engine parts are relatively small compared to some refrigerator-size components Sharon has seen, they are heavy. Despite the autumn chill, perspiration soaks the band tied across her forehead.
She sits on the tailgate to catch her breath and looks up at the blue sky. All week she’s been suppressing the sadness that threatens to drown her. Today, Tuesday, she and Alon were supposed to get married in his parents’ backyard. Even to secular Israelis like them, Tuesday is known to be a blessed day because on the third day of Creation, God said “It is good” twice. Sharon had fantasized about the moment Alon would be waiting for her under the chuppah, his sheepish smile betraying his discomfort with formalities. Rather than wear his naval uniform, he planned to wear an open-collared white shirt. She, in her long white silk dress—a simple line, she had instructed Savta, no lace—would walk toward him barefoot, to feel the moist grass. An accordionist would have played the notes of “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” the popular bridal song.
In her mind, she hears, “An evening of roses / let’s go down to the orchard.” A lump forms in Sharon’s throat as the next line runs in her head.
“Are you all right?” Danny takes her wrist and presses a finger against her pulse. “You look pale.”
He lets go of her, and she swallows hard and pushes herself back to her feet. She straightens her long cotton skirt, wishing Danny’s hand stayed on her wrist. Her mind must be playing tricks on her—it’s Alon’s hand she misses. “I’m fine,” she mumbles. “Just hot.”
Danny bangs shut the van’s double doors and turns the handle to secure them. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee before heading back.”
This is the first time she’s been alone with him outside the office. Some evenings they socialize in the combined circles of Israelis and French—including his girlfriend, Dominique—fun-filled occasions that were not conducive to personal conversations. She’s been waiting for a chance to tease out the details of Danny’s past.
They settle at a corner table with a view of their loaded van. Sharon’s gaze travels to the buildings in the street perpendicular to the port. In Cherbourg style, the houses are three or four stories high, creatively using the fieldstone she so likes or sporting leaves and pilasters carved into the limestone. She can never get enough of the charming old-fashioned construction. She loves the farmhouses they passed on the way here and imagines the interior coziness that turns each into a home: rough wooden ceiling beams, a large fireplace with an iron grille, and copper pots hanging over the kitchen counter.
“Does any of this seem familiar from your childhood? What kind of house did you live in?” she asks Danny.
He lets out a chuckle. “A filthy one, I heard.”
“Where was that?”
“I have no idea. I was only four.”
Only four? When he told her that the captain of his immigration ship had let him hold the helm, she assumed he had been older. Her entire reason for taking the job was to probe his memory. Her agenda is now blown to pieces.
“Did you know your last name? I assume it wasn’t Yarden.”
“Hey, what’s with all the questions?”
She sits back, composing herself. “It’s a good history lesson.” She doesn’t want to shift the conversation from him by mentioning that her mother was a French Jew and that she had no clue which village or city she’d come from. “In school we focused on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Three million Jews were exterminated in Poland alone. It happened all over Europe, but I don’t recall a specific chapter about France.”
“What was different here is that the Jews were rounded up by the Vichy police, not by the Nazis, and sent to a bunch of transit camps right here on French soil.” Danny takes a sip of his coffee, then lets out a sigh. “Today, the French pride themselves on the fact that only a quarter of their Jews were sent to their death. They conveniently forget to mention that none would have been murdered if not for them. The French executed the entire operation—rounding up Jews, setting up four dozen transfer camps in France, and loading captured Jews onto trains to Auschwitz—without a single Nazi present.”
She knew none of it. A shiver runs through Sharon. In Poland, Hungary, Austria, and other countries, although local populations served as Hitler’s willing minions, the Nazis were always in charge, instigating. “Are you saying that anti-Semitism here was so deep that French people did that on their own?”
“The Nazis didn’t even ask for the children. For extra points, the Vichy police deported thousands of them to be exterminated.”
The hair at the back of Sharon’s neck stands on end. This is what her mother must have escaped. Judith might have had siblings who perished. Danny could have been one of the children sent to be killed. She averts her gaze, looks at the shoppers walking in the street, then at the older couple seated at a nearby table. Her fingers are locked together tight, and her knuckles turn white.
“Are you unwell today?” Danny asks.
If he’s referring to her menses, she wouldn’t allow it to minimize what is really bothering her. “Such hatred. They unleashed such brutality on an entire group of people living in their midst.”
“It’s over. Don’t take it so personally.”
“How can you not take it personally, since they killed your parents?” And her own mother’s entire family.
“Not only do I not forgive, I don’t forget. But what good does dwelling on the past do me—or the Jews?”
Sharon hides her agitation by breaking off the crunchy corner of a croissant, and her fingers peel off the flaky center layer by layer. The older she gets, the more incomprehensible the Holocaust becomes—and the more important her unknown mother’s life and experiences grow.
Danny gulps the last of his coffee. “In spite of it all, we established our own state so such atrocity will never happen again, and I’d rather dwell on the good things these former Nazi sympathizers are doing for us now.”
“Are you referring to Félix Amiot?”
“Have you met him yet?”
“Just glimpsed him at CMN.” She recalls an aging man of medium build, on the short side, with a full head of graying hair.
