Tell No One Who You Are (16 page)

But the soldiers’ celebrations turned out to be premature. When winter came, the Germans launched a counteroffensive in the Ardennes mountains and reoccupied large areas in the southeast of the country, including the province of Liège and the hamlet of Lagrange. This counteroffensive became famous as the Battle of the Bulge. Régine and the Wathieus were again forced to flee into the woods. Since it was winter, they sometimes had to stand for hours in the cold, wrapped in their heavy coats and boots.

The old dog Marquis died. He had worked to the last day of his life, bringing in the cows with Régine. Pierre buried him in the orchard behind the farmhouse and told Régine to go to a nearby farm to pick up a new dog. All the arrangements had been made, he told her. Régine went to get the puppy and carried him inside her coat back to the farm.

“What name shall we give him?” asked Régine.

Pierre scratched his head. “You choose one. I leave it up to you.”

Régine thought for a moment. “I know,” she said. “Let’s call him Tommy.”

I
N JANUARY OF 1945
, the last German troops were driven out of Belgium. The liberation brought the long-awaited return of prisoners and survivors of the war. Everyone in Lagrange knew someone who had been reunited with a missing son or grandson. The names of those who returned were broadcast on the radio. Every day, Régine leaned close as the announcer read out the long lists. The lists were broadcast at various times during the day and night. Sometimes she did not move from her chair for hours, even if it meant missing a meal or not milking La Blanque.

“If your father comes back, you will certainly hear about it,” Sylvie told her.

But she kept listening, even when the same list was read out a second time, in case she had somehow missed his name the first time.

At the end of April, the radio reported the hanging of Mussolini in Italy. Then the suicide of Hitler as Berlin collapsed before the advancing armies. Finally, at long last, on May 7, 1945, the German commanders surrendered to the Allied leaders. The war in Europe was now officially over. The streets were filled with people celebrating the victory. Soon the returning prisoners and survivors were joined by a stream of soldiers returning from the battlefields. The whole world breathed a sigh of relief that six years of madness and destruction were finally at an end.

And every day, Régine continued to sit by the radio long after the announcer had run out of names. She didn’t want to leave the chair even to come to the table for food.

The Wathieus lost patience with her.

“Tell me, what do you hope to accomplish by sitting there?” Pierre asked one night. “You’re just making it harder for yourself.”

Régine did not respond. How could they say this? Didn’t they know her father had promised to come back for her?

Once Sylvie said the most unspeakable thing of all. Though she asked the question gently, with her hand on Régine’s shoulder where she always put it as a gesture of comfort, the words were still terrible: “What if your father doesn’t come back?”

Régine exploded. “Of course he will!”

Sylvie was taken aback. “I didn’t mean to hurt …” she said, her voice trailing off. But it was too late. The hurt had been done. The question Régine had never asked herself had been asked. As if to ask it was to make it happen.

She had to believe that her father would come back. He would come back and explain everything that had happened. Then she would be with him forever. She had thought of the stories he would tell her of how he had been hiding all this time, how it was too dangerous for him to come looking for her any sooner. Or of how he was captured and had only recently escaped.

There were so many reasons why her father was away longer than anyone. Maybe he had been fighting with the soldiers at the front. Maybe he had been injured and lost his memory for a while. Maybe it was even simpler than that: maybe her father had been searching for her all during the war, but could not find out where she had gone after leaving Madame André.

The stories changed but the ending was the same: her father always came back.

And her brother. Somehow, although she never imagined how as she did with her father, somehow he too would return, even though Monsieur Gaspar’s remark about her mother and brother hung in the back of her head like a weight.

“Aren’t you happy here with us?” Pierre asked.

Régine did not answer. She just looked at Pierre. Surely he understood. He was not her father. She loved him and Sylvie and was grateful to them both for risking their freedom and maybe their lives to keep her, but only her father’s return could make her happy. As time passed, the lists of names of those returning grew shorter and shorter, and Régine became more and more depressed.

Late in May, they were having breakfast one day when someone knocked at the front door.

Pierre turned to Sylvie with a questioning look. It was unusual for a visitor to come to the farm so early in the morning. Régine put down her piece of bread. A strange feeling welled up inside of her, just like a premonition.

The knock came again — loud, confident and somehow familiar.

Pierre got up to answer it. The new puppy, Tommy, followed him. Sylvie got up, too, but Régine stayed at the table and listened.

She heard the front door open.

“Yes?” Pierre said.

“Good morning,” said the familiar voice. “My name is Nicole. I’ve come to fetch Augusta.”

R
ÉGINE
did not want to hear a word of it.

“I’ll wait here until my father comes back,” she repeated. “I’m not coming back until then.”

They were walking up and down the dirt road in front of the house, Régine in her farm clothes and wooden clogs, Nicole in high heels and an elegant skirt and jacket. She had insisted that they go outside to talk so the Wathieus would not overhear what she had to say.

Pierre and Sylvie were as shocked as Régine when Nicole appeared. Perhaps they sensed what was coming. Who was this young woman who carried a briefcase and smoked a cigarette in their presence? They relented a bit when Nicole explained that it was she who had arranged for Régine to live on their farm in the first place, and that she was an old friend of her parents.

Now, away from the house, she explained her plan to take Régine back to the city.

But Régine was not convinced. She, too, was suspicious of Nicole. More than eighteen months had passed since they had parted at the bus station in Brussels. Sometimes Régine had wondered if Nicole had been arrested and deported, too.

It was four months since the last Germans were pushed out of Belgium. Why had it taken her this long to come?

“Why did you never send me a note, a message?” she asked.

Nicole smiled. “There were other children. Hundreds of them. Babies even. I had to find places for them and check they were looked after. And when the war ended, there was the work of getting them back to … to …,” she paused, “to relatives. But I knew you were all right.”

Régine stopped being angry but it was still a fact that Pierre and Sylvie were the only people who had made her welcome since she left her parents’ home three years before.

“I don’t want to leave,” Régine repeated. “I want to wait here until my father returns.”

Nicole did not ask her the forbidden question. Instead she asked her something else: “What have you been learning in school?”

“School?”

“Yes. You have been going to class, haven’t you?”

Régine explained how the teacher at the village school had sent her home because there was nothing more she could learn there.

“That is why you should come back to Brussels,” Nicole said. “Your father would want you to continue your education. You know that, don’t you?”

Régine did not answer. Nicole was right about her father, but how could the Wathieus be left just like that?

Nicole continued: “There’s a place waiting for you in Brussels,” she said. “It’s a hostel for Jewish girls called Les Hirondelles. You’ll make friends there.”

“Friends?” Régine exclaimed. “That’s what you said when I went to the hairdressers’. And you were wrong.” Régine looked down at the muddy road. “Pierre and Sylvie are my friends. I love them. And they care about me.”

Nicole took hold of Régine’s hands and turned the palms upward to show the calluses. “You should be in school, Régine.”

“I’m just helping out,” Régine insisted, burying her hands in the pockets of her sweater. “They work much harder than I do.”

She felt something with her hand in her right pocket. It was small and round and hard like a coin. Then she realized what it was: the blue-enamel medal of the Virgin Mary that Sylvie had given her for protection. Régine’s fingers curled around it. It was not something she could show to Nicole, just as she did not dare mention the cross over her bed and the dish of holy water at the top of the stairs and the weekly sermons by Monsieur Le Vicaire. She did not want to give Nicole any more reasons for taking her away.

“No,” Régine continued. “I won’t go back to Brussels. I’m staying here with Pierre and Sylvie …,” she said, then added defiantly, “until my father comes back.”

They stopped in front of the house. Régine was sure the argument was over but Nicole did not give up. “Why not at least try Brussels?” Nicole said. “If you don’t like it, you can come back here. How does that sound?”

Régine drew a line in the dirt with the toe of her wooden clog. People were always asking her to believe that they knew what was best for her. This time she would be the one to choose.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Nicole said. “Take some time to think about it. I’ll come back in two weeks. Then you’ll let me know.”

F
OR TWO WEEKS
Régine went over Nicole’s words.
Why do I keep calling her Nicole? I don’t have to anymore. Her name is Fela. Fela Mucha
. She lay awake for hours in the dim light of her room, looking up at the Madonna and child on the opposite wall. The more she thought about it, the more she felt Nicole had a point.

School was not the only reason, but it was an important one. She remembered the conversation she’d overheard years ago in the hallway at the
école primaire
, before Jewish children were banned from public schools. Mademoiselle Descotte had remarked to the other teachers that they would be losing some of their top students. She was one of these. Her father would be pleased to find her in school when he returned. Nicole was right.
Would she ever stop calling her Nicole?

She also looked forward to meeting other girls. Irene was a good friend, but she was nineteen years old. Régine wanted to meet friends her own age — especially Jewish friends. She missed so many things Jewish: the Yiddish spoken in her home, its stories and songs, her mother’s kosher kitchen. All of her father’s friends at Solidarité were Jewish — that was the other way to be Jewish, her father’s way. It was also Nicole’s — Fela’s — way. It meant trying to make life better for others. Three years had passed since she was last among her own people. Les Hirondelles would be a good place to start.

But there was another reason to go back to Brussels, and
it was the most important of all. Régine knew from reports on the radio that the Red Cross was working to locate people who had disappeared during the war. If there was any hope of finding her father and brother, of finding out what happened to her mother, surely this international organization could help. She could go to their office in Brussels. She could keep in closer touch, she felt, maybe even meet people who knew something.

After two weeks of thinking this through in the darkness of her room, she made her decision. The next morning she told Pierre and Sylvie.

The couple listened carefully and did not interrupt. They sat, staring at the bread, butter, jam and cottage cheese that were spread on the table. Neither of them touched a bite while Régine spoke. They did not try to change her mind. Instead they showed their usual kindness and understanding.

When she was finished, Pierre said, trying to smile, “If you are not happy there, come back.”

“Maybe it won’t be forever,” Régine added at the end. “If I don’t like it, I will come back.”

“There will always be a place for you here,” Sylvie added.

She promised to write regularly and to let them know immediately if she needed anything.

Régine saw that the Wathieus did not believe she would ever come back.

Régine sat at the kitchen table waiting for Nicole to arrive. Would she ever remember to call her Fela? Would the Wathieus stop calling her Augusta and use her real name? She wore her best dress, and her packed duffel bag lay near the front door. The bag contained all her clothes and her copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. In her pocket was the blue-enamel medal
of the Virgin Mary, a memento that would always remind her of Sylvie.

Pierre and Sylvie tried to keep busy as they waited along with Régine. Pierre went in and out of the house on his chores. Sylvie washed and put away dishes and glasses. It was unusual for the Wathieus to look so sad. Even Tommy seemed to be sulking at her feet, as if he, too, felt that she was abandoning him.

Nicole arrived in the early afternoon in a car driven by a friend from Solidarité. She saw immediately that Régine had decided to come to Brussels.

“Ready?” she asked, smiling.

“Ready,” said Régine.

Saying good-bye to Pierre and Sylvie was not as painful as Régine had feared. She hugged them and kissed them on both cheeks. Then she turned and walked quickly out the door. She had succeeded in not crying but she did not dare look back. Nicole’s friend held open the back door of the car and she climbed in. Nicole joined her in the back seat, and the car made its way along the dirt road past the little village.

For a long time no one said a word. Régine looked out the window at the passing countryside, and felt very alone with her thoughts of the good people she was leaving behind. She told herself that she had made the right decision in leaving Lagrange, but somehow that did not make her feel any better.