“Abba, Abba.” Daniel laughed, repeating the word he must have learned in nursery school. Uzi lifted him in his arms and threw him up in the air.

“All set.” The clerk entered the information in his ledger. “His photo should be developed tonight. Come back tomorrow for his travel pass.”

“Is this travel pass a French passport?”

The man chuckled. With a wide sweep of his hand, he indicated the camp outside. “How many of these refugees do you think have the original documents needed for legal passports? And do you see here the consuls of Hungary or Poland to issue them? We make do with great artists.” He crooked his finger at the people standing behind Uzi. “Next.”

A couple in their late forties approached, holding hands. As Uzi walked away, he heard the woman say to the clerk, “We got married last night, and I need to change my last name.”

“Mazel tov,” Uzi called, and a chorus of others in the queue joined in. Within seconds, a small circle of people were dancing the hora, sweeping in the newlyweds and the clerks. “Mazel tov,” Daniel echoed, repeating the new words while his little feet followed Uzi’s in the dance.

Uzi stopped to root in his backpack. He pulled out a small shiny object and handed it to the woman. “This mezuzah was on the threshold of a house right here in Marseille. The neighborhood is no more. May your marriage symbolize the continuity of our people in Eretz Israel.”

Chapter Fifty

Sharon

Tel Aviv, Israel

September 1969

September is still hot, and the dreaded loss has happened. It’s been two weeks since Savta’s passing and a week since the end of the shivah—the seven days of mourning for a loved one. Sharon’s aunts empty cabinets and shelves, breaking up the only home she ever had. The six siblings will sell this large apartment and give Sharon one-seventh of the proceeds, her late father’s share. It won’t be enough for her to purchase even a tiny apartment of her own. She’ll have to move in with Uncle Pinchas and his wife.

From the dining room, Sharon hears the heated voices of her aunts challenging Dvora’s claim to the oil painting of red anemones. Sharon packed away two of Savta’s framed needlepoints before they became the family’s property. Nothing is hers in the only home she’s ever lived in.

She steps out to the veranda and closes the door, grateful for a passing motorbike’s accelerating vroom. This second-floor oasis filled with clusters of cacti and blooming plants was Savta’s perch. Her agile hands never stopped crocheting or knitting as she watched the street, ready to chat with passing neighbors.

The swallows are chirping on the ancient sycamore tree. Savta complained about the figs dropping from the tree onto her terrace. They rotted fast, staining the Moroccan tiles and drawing flies, thus requiring twice-daily sweeping. But Savta had basked in the shade of the saucer-size leaves. Now Sharon sits in Savta’s caned rocking chair, her feet on the ottoman, inhaling the figs’ familiar sweet, dusty smell.

Unlike Alon’s life, which was cut short, Savta’s had been long and rich, filled with joys and sorrows. Instead of fighting the cancer, she accepted her inevitable demise. “It’s all right to say goodbye,” she told Sharon toward the end. “That’s the natural cycle of life.” Her heart breaking, Sharon understood. Yet after months of grueling days of caring, the freedom from the responsibility is not a relief but a burden. Sharon has no more excuses; she must make a decision about her next steps and her long-term path. It’s called growing up.

On the street below, a bus pulls out of the station just as a soldier with a rifle strapped across his chest runs to catch it. The driver stops the bus, something he would never do for a civilian. He waits for the soldier and lets him in.

Sharon can’t allow such nonevents to constitute her days. She needs to set a goal for herself. She’s a capable woman. Her rising to the challenges in Cherbourg proved it. But what can she do? The Dakar has not been found. Three other submarines sank this past year under mysterious circumstances—one French, one Soviet, and one American. A widow of one of the Dakar sailors has already remarried. This past week, friends have invited Sharon to picnics, discos, and concerts. As if trying to swim up to the surface of a lake of sadness, Sharon joined them a few times in order to remind herself what normal life felt like. Last night, around a campfire on the beach, her friends talked about their university studies and promising new jobs.

She picks up today’s newspaper. She circled some help-wanted ads earlier but hasn’t made any calls. Should she try to get a one-year drafting certificate? Take an advanced math course? Why not study both at the same time?

How scared she had been a year ago to travel abroad, yet within twenty-four hours, she was hopping from one European capital to another. She did it because Danny trusted her abilities. She should trust them too. When she’s ready, that is.

Uncle Pinchas steps onto the terrace and places his hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t turn, but she raises her palm and rests it on his hand. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart,” he says. “Our home is your home. Forever.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll send two guys from my factory to haul your stuff from here.”

“I need them to move Savta’s dinner set to the Golans’ basement,” she says. Savta willed her the entire twenty-person china set with Grandpa’s initials, but Aunt Dvora already commandeered the tea- and coffee-pots. “If it’s not stored, the cups and saucers will disappear too,” Sharon adds.

The two of them listen to the birds chirping and warbling, then he says, “I remember the night I drove my parents to pick you up. A temporary cease-fire had been negotiated, but no one trusted it. Snipers acted on their own. The road from Tel Aviv to Haifa was only two unmarked lanes then, and with my car’s headlights painted over, I might easily have veered into a ditch. On the way back, my parents sat with you in the back seat and cried. I asked to adopt you—Mina and I already had our three boys and we wanted a girl—but my parents wouldn’t hear of it.”

Aunt Mina is a talkative, birdlike woman, well intentioned but overbearing. Sharon is grateful to have had Savta as a mother. “Thank God Aunt Dvora didn’t claim me,” Sharon says, and they both laugh. In their family circle, Dvora, who studied law and became a judge, is the one who sows discord, as the raised voices in the living room testify.

Uncle Pinchas points to the newspaper with the circled help-wanted ads. “It would be a great help to me if you filled in for my secretary when she takes her six-month maternity leave.”

“Sorry. I’d like to help you, but I can’t commit for that long.” Sharon lets her hand drop. She hates the idea of doing payroll and bookkeeping in the low-ceilinged office over Uncle Pinchas’s machine factory. The screeching of the iron grinders in the tight space gives her a headache. Similar noises from machines in Félix Amiot’s hangar, a much larger, busier place—and immaculately clean—inspired awe.

Cherbourg. During her four months there, she was filled with a sense of purpose. She took part in a project of national importance. For all she knows, work on the boats has ceased and the hangar stands empty. Pompidou was elected president in June, and despite his promises during the campaign, he clamped down on the embargo in a televised anti-Semitic rant. He banned selling any military materials “to the Middle East,” a cynical act affecting only Israel because Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt were being equipped by Russia. Since then, no new Saar has arrived in Israel.

She wrote to Danny. His response was warm, albeit brief; he told her about taking a fun trip to Vaudéville. Of course he couldn’t reveal any details about his work, but couldn’t he have written more than a few lines in response to her two-page letter?

Then she received a letter from Rachelle, who gushed about her wedding plans; she and Ehud would be married in his moshav in the Negev as soon as her parents finalized their early retirement and immigrated to Israel. She added that Danny and Dominique had broken up when she’d pressed him for a marriage commitment but said she wasn’t about to make Israel her home.

As much as Sharon liked Dominique, she felt a twinge of triumph at the news. Danny has begun to fill her romantic fantasies, and she often has to remind herself that she is not in his league. He’s probably already found another sophisticated girlfriend like Dominique.

In his next brief letter, he made no mention of his personal life or whom he had taken to the concert he’d attended at the Paris Opera, but after describing it, he added, I wish you could hear the amazing voices and see the exquisite set.

He didn’t write I wish you were there with me, she thought. He signed it With friendship, but there was nothing personal in their uneven correspondence. Danny liked her as his former efficient employee; she shouldn’t presume there was more to it than that. She should stop deluding herself. She did not write back.

When the apartment finally empties of visitors, Sharon walks through the bare rooms where she no longer belongs. She’ll take the bus to visit the Golans. She wants to suggest a ceremony by the beach to help them reenter the world, even if they’re merely going through the motions. The images of Alon suffocating will forever play in all their heads. For Sharon, the pain of his loss hasn’t subsided as much as expanded to all parts of her body, its load redistributed to make it bearable.

Indeed, in feigning normalcy, since her return from Cherbourg, she has spent an occasional night with Tomer, either in his room or hers. This past Shabbat afternoon, they sat at a café by the seashore over lemonade and cake and watched the luminous sunset. It should have felt romantic. As they held hands over the table, Sharon wondered why she even bothered.

In her room, a box of books sits on the floor. She spots the math textbook on top and plucks it out. If she puts her mind to it, could she reach the stellar grade needed to go to the Technion?

Holding the tattered textbook, she recalls asking Uzi Yarden for it.

And then it hits her. A loose end that was too far-fetched to follow. Yet—

She places a call to Ayelet HaShachar and asks the secretary to leave a message for Uzi Yarden to call her.

A few hours later, he does. She recognizes his smoke-cured voice. “Uzi Yarden here. Someone left a message for me?”

“Thanks, it’s Sharon Bloomenthal. We spoke last year when I worked with Danny in France. Thank you for sending the math book and the letter.”

“Did it help?”

“I left before I had a chance to follow up on the letter. Something else came up, though. I think you might have some information for me.”

“What is it?”

“Danny told me that you were a Youth Aliyah agent in 1946. I know that there were dozens of clandestine voyages with hundreds of passengers each,” she says, her tone apologetic. “But just in case—” She pauses, feeling silly. “Would you happen to recall whether you met a young woman—a seventeen-year-old, really—by the name of Judith Katz?”

“Of course! I remember her well.”

Sharon gasps. “You do? She was my mother!”

“You were the baby she left? So sorry. Such a tragedy. Your father too.” Sharon hears the catch in his voice. “We lost so many comrades in the battles around here.”

She slides along the wall to the floor and twists the phone cord around her finger. Incredulity spreads through her. The first and only person she’s ever found who knew her mother turns out to be Danny’s adoptive father. “What do you remember about her? What kind of person was she?”