They spoke, husband and wife taking turns, using short sentences as if that might help Uzi understand. What he understood clearly was what was in front of him: a picture of love and the promise to protect Eloise. He sensed that they had been expecting a stranger to show up one day and claim her.
An image flashed through his head of the neglected Daniel. If he were in a loving home like this, Uzi would never consider removing him. And then he heard Hilda’s voice telling him, It’s us or them. If you don’t take her, another organization will, because in today’s atmosphere, national identity overrides family.
What’s the right moral judgment? Uzi looked at Eloise’s eyes. They widened in fear the more her parents talked. He couldn’t be the one whose presence filled a child with terror. He wouldn’t manipulate the word parent to crush the security she had found after her previous world shattered.
He pressed his palms together in supplication and looked at the girl, trying to convey that he wouldn’t cause her harm. He pushed himself away from the table. Eloise would never become Leah again, would never reclaim her Jewish identity for the collective good of her people. Already ignorant of the traditions of her dead parents, she was one more child lost to their tribe.
When he departed, he wished he could say in French “God be with you.”
At six o’clock, Uzi joined the knife sharpener. He rolled his heavy equipment to a nearby shop to store it for the night, then began his trek out of town, Uzi following. They crossed a wide field and entered the woods.
As they walked deeper, trepidation crawled into Uzi’s heart. His experience in the tavern was still fresh in his mind. What if the man was part of a gang conspiring to kill this Jewish man somewhere his body could never be found? Uzi picked up a straight, short branch. Walking on, he broke off leaves and offshoots, stripping the stick bare. He was ready for a kapap fight if needed.
At the line where the trees ended, the earth opened onto a limestone quarry gouged into a hill. The sun cast orange-pink hues on the chiseled, whitish walls that dropped into a low basin. Excavated years ago for the construction of houses and mansions, the quarry had long ended its usefulness. Now pigeons flew in and out of fissures where seeds had sprouted into shrubs and trees.
Uzi followed the knife sharpener on the downward slope toward a shack tucked against the side of a wall. Three men were idling outside, smoking. The knife sharpener stopped, and Uzi, perplexed, did too.
“Enfant juif?” Uzi whispered, and the man nodded.
When a man emerged from the shack buttoning his pants, Uzi tasted blood in his mouth; he had bitten the inside of his cheek. His mind caught up with the rest of him when the next man deposited coins into the palm of a stocky man with a thick neck standing to the side of the shack, then entered.
* * *
Living in the house adjacent to the church for the week gave Uzi time at the end of each day to spend with his new charges, which included a boy and a girl brought in by local people. He loved getting to know the children rather than depositing each one and rushing back the long distance to Madame Therrien’s to prepare for the next day’s hunt. He taught them Hebrew songs and the hora dance and played tunes on his harmonica for them. In Father Patrick’s office, he showed them on the world globe the pinprick dot that was Eretz Israel.
He asked the Yiddish-speakers among them to translate for the others when he described how, in the lowland reaching the Mediterranean, settlers had created cultivatable land by drying up the swamps of foul standing water that had been a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “It was backbreaking work, digging drainage channels. But you know what? They planted eucalyptus trees to drink up excess water, and little by little, since the start of the century, Jews have been reclaiming the land with their sweat.” His grandparents and parents had salvaged the land of their people. He was working on the next chapter—bringing in the people to live there.
When no words existed to communicate with those children who didn’t know Yiddish, Uzi’s hugs did. Zehava would have been as surprised as he was to see him this engaged. He’d never been particularly interested in children, but these were his children. In his head, he replayed the moment each had been found. Each one felt like a birth. The young features were carved into his memory, though he was aware that he saw only the outside. He couldn’t begin to fathom the agony each had to be suffering. The rock lodged in each little chest would never lift, even if it grew lighter with time and the new ideology that would fire up their young spirits.
And then there was Daniel, whose absence here was a void. Uzi missed the radiant smile and the feel of his underfed body. The boy had suffered the wrath of the entire village because of his adoptive mother’s transgression or his Jewish tattoo—or both.
On Uzi’s fifth morning, as he was crossing the garden, Rivka, the sixteen-year-old he had rescued in the quarry, signaled for him to approach. He sat down at the far end of her bench and registered that some color had returned to her pallid cheeks. Four evenings earlier, he had paid her captor two thousand francs, entered the shack, and wrapped the scrawny, naked body in his jacket. He carried Rivka in his arms the entire long trek back to the church, all the while assuring her in Yiddish that he wouldn’t hurt her, that there were good people who were committed to helping her. When they arrived at the church, the priest summoned a doctor, who said that she could benefit from a new drug called penicillin, still unavailable to the public in France. Uzi placed a phone call to Hilda, and late that night, Robert Weintraub showed up in his jeep. He brought penicillin and a box of food. “I also threw in here iodine, aspirin, sulfa powder, and bandages,” he said.
“Thanks,” Uzi said, laughing. “We’re not in a combat zone. Our kids only scrape their knees.”
Robert had pointed to the box. “There’s chocolate for that.”
“Are you eating?” Uzi asked Rivka now, treading carefully with his questions. He was acutely aware of the harm men had caused her. In time, he hoped, she would learn that there were also decent men in the world.
“What if he comes looking for me?” she asked.
Uzi understood that she hadn’t seen the financial transaction that had taken place outside her prison shack. “He won’t. You’re safe. And in a couple days, we’ll start the long journey to Eretz Israel.”
“I just want to get very far away from here,” she whispered.
“Can you tell me about your family?”
She looked up at the sky as if plucking memories from the slow-moving clouds. When she spoke, her voice was so low that he had to lean forward to hear her.
“We were six. My oldest brother and sister were born in a town outside Krakow. My second sister, Bettina, and I were born in Paris a year apart. My parents had a candy shop, and we lived above it. All the girls in my class were my friends because they loved coming over after school.” The little sad smile that graced Rivka’s face faded quickly. “We escaped Paris when the Nazis came. Lived on the road. Once we rented a house for a while. Then we had to leave, and we slept in our covered cart. That’s when we got caught and were sent to the Drancy labor camp.” She stopped and closed her eyes.
“Go on,” he said softly.
“I don’t know how long we stayed there. Maybe weeks or months. We heard that we were going to be deported to Germany or Poland—no one told us anything. There was no food. Everything smelled so bad, even my parents.” Tears streamed down her face. Uzi handed her his handkerchief. “I was so stupid that when a guard offered to take me to be a companion to his sick mother, I begged my parents to let me go. I was conceited about having been chosen over Bettina, who was always the smart one. All I wanted was to get away from their stink.”
“You were eleven years old?”
She sniffled and nodded. “The guard’s mother’s house was near the camp. I heard the trains and knew—I just knew that my family had been taken away. I felt remorse. I missed them so much and regretted leaving. I wanted to be deported on a train, too, so I could find them in their new camp.” Rivka sobbed. “I was bored without Bettina. There was not even a piece of paper and a pencil to draw.”
“Do you like to draw?”
“I was good at it once.”
Uzi made a mental note to ask Robert Weintraub for a sketch pad and colored pencils.
She went on. “I took care of the guard’s mother for about two years, until she died. I didn’t know then how lucky I was that the old woman had been kind to me, and her son brought us food from the camp’s kitchen.”
She blotted her eyes with Uzi’s handkerchief.
“The guard always warned me not to be seen by the police. He said that they shot Jews. For my protection, after his mother died, he found me a new job with another family.” Rivka’s shoulders shook. “They had five older boys.”
Cold traversed Uzi’s spine. He imagined the vicious Vichy police outside and the beasts of men inside, and this child, then
thirteen, repeatedly raped with no relief. He wished he could gather her in his arms. “You’ll love Eretz Israel,” he said,
“and you’ll make a new life.” Was healing possible for a girl whose childhood had been eviscerated so cruelly?
Chapter Forty-Three
Sharon
