Monsieur Vincent? “He promised me—” Claudette broke into a deep sob.
Father Hugo let her cry for a while before he said, “Stay here tonight. Rest from your travels. For now, let’s go to the sanctuary and pray for guidance.”
In her grief, she was too broken to resist the comfort of Jesus and Mary. She asked for forgiveness for having forsaken them.
“I hope that my suffering is not Your reprisal,” she added. “Will You please, in all Your benevolence, help me find Benjamin?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Uzi Yarden
Loire Valley, France
September 1946
In front of a store, Uzi noticed a used bicycle with a price tag. Riding a bike would be more dependable and faster than taking a bus or hitchhiking.
He bought it and rode to the town hall, a low, one-story stone house with rosebushes along its front. A pleasant woman his age with a flowery bow holding back blond curls was just unlocking the door. She welcomed him and sat down at her typewriter, and he stepped over to the map on the wall.
Uzi was absorbed in copying a section of the map when he noticed that the typing had stopped. Glancing back, he saw the woman studying him. A sense of unease crept over him. Was she suspicious of him? Not long ago, strangers had terrorized this village. She must think that this stranger, copying the map, was up to no good.
But catching his eye, she smiled broadly, as if she knew him. She said something, and when he replied, “Je ne parle pas français,” she slid a finger beneath her dress’s neckline and stroked herself under the fabric.
Heat flooded Uzi’s face. Zehava had often teased him that his strong cheekbones and square jaw hinted at a Slavic ancestry that had been injected into the genes of Ashkenazi Jews. He exhaled and returned to his task but could sense the woman’s eyes examining his back and shoulders. He forced himself to finish locating the farms and noted the number of kilometers between points.
“Merci.” He started toward the door. “Bonjour.”
She came around her desk to walk him out. She reeked of flowery perfume. “A bientôt?” She raised her face as if for that double air kiss.
He shook her hand instead and rushed out.
Today he was chasing a pair of siblings who had been moved: Martha, now twelve, and her brother, Manuel, now eight. Uzi hoped this search wouldn’t turn out to be futile.
“I’m worried about them,” Hilda had said when she gave him the details. “We can’t assume that all our hidden children are in loving environments. Too many are being exploited as free labor. They receive no schooling or medical care if they are sick or injured.”
At the start of the war, Hilda had deposited this pair of siblings with two widows, Madame Fournier and her sister, then sent them seven hundred francs a month for their care. However, when the Nazis invaded the free zone, the underground moved the children to a safer home. Since then—almost four years ago—no one had contacted Hilda for the monthly maintenance.
Madame Fournier’s home was two hours away by bicycle. If this search failed, Uzi thought, at least it took him through breathtaking countryside. Narrow roads were bordered by overgrown hedges as high as city walls, alternating with muddy paths that cut through plowed fields and forests of birch, maple, and oak. Uzi stopped to pluck a cluster of barberries and savored their tartness. Why hadn’t God led the Israelites another forty years and brought them to this fertile part of the world?
Uzi got back on a road that wound through vineyards stretching to the horizon and was awed when a fairy-tale castle popped into view, its pitched roofs made of solid gray slate. “Land of a Thousand Châteaux,” Pastor Gaspard had said. Uzi pedaled along the wide moat hugging ancient, chiseled rocks and eyed the chained drawbridge over water on which water lilies floated. In previous centuries, the château had withstood armies’ attacks from the ground. This century, it was only by chance that it had been spared attacks from the air.
What mysteries were hidden in the turrets and towers? Were there Jewish children forced to labor in fields and orchards, underfed? Were they housed in drafty barns?
He reached Martha and Manuel in the nick of time. Apparently, a year after the underground moved them, the children landed again with the aging Madame Fournier and her sick sister. Martha was now taking care of the women and her brother, cleaning and cooking. Madame Fournier had no recollection of how the children had first arrived, but she and her sister were about to move into her son’s home, and he planned to deposit the children in a state orphanage.
The old women released the children to Uzi’s care so quickly that he felt bad for the kids, yanked yet again from the life they knew. Madame Fournier summoned a neighbor with a truck, said a tearful goodbye, and coaxed the children gently onto the truck bed. Uzi climbed in too, hauled in his bike, and settled with his back against freshly hewn lumber. He held the weeping Manuel close. “You’ll have a good life,” he said in Yiddish to Martha, who sat at a distance. He couldn’t express how exalted he felt about rescuing her and her brother from the horrors of a state orphanage. “You’ll have a home and school and friends.”
She nodded sadly, then dropped her head between her knees.
As the truck bounced on the rutted road, Uzi sang Manuel a Yiddish lullaby that his own grandmother used to sing to him. Perhaps something in the boy’s memory would connect to it. From the slight tilt of Martha’s hidden face, Uzi suspected that she recognized the song. After a while, she looked up. Uzi gestured to her, and she edged closer, her hunger for affection clearly outweighing her reserve. He covered the three of them with a rough wool blanket against the cold wind, and the two children fell asleep resting in the crooks of his arms.
The rolling hills Uzi gazed at were shrouded in the mist of the descending darkness. How had meeting Tobias and Elias, Sarah, and now Martha and Manuel changed him? he mused. He had begun his mission bewildered by logistics. Now his heartstrings were interlaced with the past and future of his charges. He was committed to healing these uprooted, lost little souls.
The thought brought him back to the little boy whose laughter rang in his ears even now over the chugging of the truck’s wheels. How had he gotten his tattoo? Uzi had never heard of such a practice; to his knowledge, tattooing was strictly prohibited in Judaism. However, it was wartime, so perhaps the boy’s parents had done the only thing available to them while in hiding. They’d wanted to be able to identify their boy upon their return. Unfortunately, two years after liberation, they weren’t back. Whoever that drunkard the boy lived with was, he wasn’t the biological father.
Uzi had told Hilda about the boy, and as expected, her response was emphatic: their organization had neither the facilities nor the staff for such a young child. She would inform OSE, she said. They would check the legal status of his adoption and explore the possibility of a still-living relative. “You’re not the first agent to fall in love with a child,” Hilda said. “You also must erect an emotional fence, like a doctor whose patient’s case is outside his medical knowledge.”
Except that Uzi couldn’t forget the feel of that boy’s little needy arms around his neck. How could he walk away and leave him in that neglected state? How could he subject the boy to the lengthy bureaucracy of OSE? It would be many months before his status was clarified, months during which the boy would be as lonely and unloved as he was now.
It was dark when the truck pulled up in front of Pastor Gaspard’s church. Uzi joined the children for a late supper of soup and bread. As the minister’s wife prepared to lead them to the dorm house, Uzi asked, “May I help tuck them into bed? It’s their first night with strangers.” When he was little, the rustling leaves of the eucalyptus tree, the screeching of cats in heat, and the shadows cast on the wall by the night guard’s jittering flashlight made him quake in fear and wet his bed. What nightmares stalked these children who had already met the monsters that other children only imagined?
He woke up in the morning feeling energized. A storm had seized the world overnight, and it had left a peculiar silence of damp air so charged that it kept even the birds and insects quiet. Like after lovemaking, Uzi thought, wishing he could hold Zehava now and share his extraordinary stories with her.
In good spirits, he went to the home the boy shared with the drunkard. The kitchen was quiet, cold, and dark. He placed wood and newspapers in the stove and lit a fire. While the surface heated, he scrubbed a pot, poured in fresh milk from Madame Therrien’s kitchen, and added semolina porridge he’d bought. Then he walked to the front room in search of the boy.
He found him curled up in the lap of the man, both asleep. Snoring loudly, his arms hanging at his sides, dressed in his shabby clothes, the man seemed inebriated. Uzi’s heart contracted at the boy’s pitiful need to draw security from an indifferent adult, passing the night with him without even a blanket covering them from the chill.
“Boker tov.” Uzi stroked the soft cheek. Good morning. “I have breakfast ready for you,” he added in Hebrew.
The boy opened his eyes, and at the sight of Uzi, he smiled and stretched. “Maman?” he asked, his voice hopeful.
“It’s me.”
The man stirred; his snoring stopped. He didn’t wake up as Uzi scooped up the boy in his arms and carried him outside to relieve himself. Then he led him back to the kitchen.
“Maman?” The boy scrambled up the stairs. His voice turned frantic. “Maman?” Upstairs, he broke down crying. “Maman!”
