Lilac Girls (33 page)

Each day I served Paul an old family remedy my great-grandmother Woolsey gave her soldier patients at Gettysburg: one egg and soda water beaten into a glass of wine. Several other Woolsey remedies were on the menu as well, including beef tea, milk punch, and rice with molasses. I told Paul they were old New England favorites from my distaff side. Thanks to them, he grew stronger every day.

“Would it help to talk about the camp?” I asked one night.

“I can't talk about it, Caroline. You have good intentions—”

“You have to at least try, Paul. Maybe start with the night you left here. Baby steps.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“They came for me with no warning thinking I might be good for their cause. Rena was sick in bed with the flu. Took me to headquarters and told me very nicely they wanted me to film some things: propaganda, of course, but I wouldn't do it. They kept me in Paris for a while and then sent me to Drancy. I guess they came back later to get Rena and her father. That was the beginning of the roundups, taking the Jews.”

“How did they know Rena was here?”

“They knew everything. Maybe from the visa application. I don't know. Drancy was horrible, Caroline. They took the children from their mothers.”

Paul bent his head, chin to chest, and pressed his palm to his mouth.

“I'm sorry, Paul. Maybe this is too much for you.”

“No, you are right. I have to talk about it. You would not have believed the camp—Natzweiler.”

“In Alsace? Roger thought you might be there.”

“Yes, in the Vosges Mountains. Many died from the cold and the high altitude alone. I was such a coward. I prayed I would die. We built part of the camp. New barracks and…” He tried to take a sip of tea but put the cup back in the saucer. “Maybe we can finish later.”

“Of course,” I said. “Doesn't it help to talk about it?”

“Perhaps.”

I tucked Paul into bed that night, happy to be making progress.

T
HE AFTERNOON OF
M
AY
8, I was ankle deep in the stream behind Paul's house picking watercress from the banks, marveling at the chestnut blossoms and emerging wisteria. Purple foxglove, a flower I'd had to pamper back in Connecticut, sprang up everywhere like weeds. I could hear Paul whistling in the house, and it made me smile. Men only whistle when they are happy. At least that was true for Father.

All at once the whistling stopped, and Paul called out.

“Caroline…”

I ran through the grass toward the sound of his voice. Had he fallen? Heart pounding, I raced into the kitchen, tracking wet footprints.

“De Gaulle is on,” Paul said.

I found Paul, right as rain, standing near the radio. I caught my breath, relieved, just in time to hear General De Gaulle announce the end of the war in Europe.

Forever honor our armed forces and their leaders. Honor our people that terrible trials could not reduce or decline. Honor the United Nations, which have mingled their blood with our blood, their sorrows our sorrows, their hopes our hope, and now triumph with us.
Ah, vive la France!

Paul and I hurried to the front garden and heard the cathedral bells.

“It's hard to believe it,” I said.

Though the first act of the German capitulation had been signed in Reims the day before, it wasn't until we heard General De Gaulle and our neighbors in their cars, honking horns and flying a
tricolore
out the window, that it all sank in.

The war in Europe was over.

I threw on one of Mother's scarves and drove us to her apartment in Paris. We flung the windows open wide expecting to hear a great celebration, but Paris was strangely quiet that afternoon considering the momentous news of the war's end. All that changed, however, as the afternoon wore on, and young people streamed out into the parks and squares.

“Let's go to the Place de la Concorde,” Paul said.

“Why don't we just listen to the radio here?” I said. “The crowds may be too much for you.”

“I'm not a cripple, Caroline. Let me enjoy this.”

It was a lovely warm day, and we walked to the Hôtel de Crillon at the Place de la Concorde. The lovely old building rose up from the square, the
tricolore
flying between the columns. It was all so surreal, to celebrate a free France, in the same square where King Louis XVI was guillotined.

As the shadows in the square grew long, the crowds thickened, and American military police wearing white helmets appeared here and there in the crowd, making sure people made it in and out of the American Embassy. We pushed through the crowds, the din of horns and singing all around us, waving white handkerchiefs above our heads, jostled and knocked as American army jeeps rode by. Young French men and women on the running boards popped champagne and threw flowers to the crowd.

As the sunlight waned, the lights came on at the Place de la Concorde for the first time since the war started. A cry from the crowd went up as the Fontaines de la Concorde were turned on once again and the fountains' sculpted fish, held by bronze sea nymphs, sent great plumes of water into the night sky. People danced in the fountain fully clothed and soaked to the skin, mad with happiness that Paris was back.

Paul dropped his handkerchief, and a teenaged girl stooped to retrieve it for him.

“Here you go,” the girl said. “For a minute, I thought you were Paul Rodierre.”

“He is,” I said.

The girl danced off. “Very funny,” she called over her shoulder.

“She doesn't know what she's saying,” I said, but Paul knew the truth. He was barely a shell of his old self.

The wind seemed to go out of Paul's sails after that, and we left after sunset to head home. As we drove toward Rouen, fireworks exploded over the Seine.

Once home, we changed into comfortable clothes, me in Paul's soft trousers and an oversized shirt and Paul in his favorite ivory flannel pajamas. He seemed withdrawn and more tired than usual. He sat slumped at the kitchen table as I prepared dinner.

“Are you sad Rena's not here?” I asked.

“It doesn't help to bring it up. As it is, you can't stop trying to be her.”

“I'm not,” I said.

“Cooking her recipes, dressing like her. Please don't do that.”

“Because I wore a
scarf
today?” I asked.

“Just relax and let it be like it was in New York.”

“I've never been happier,” I said.

It was true. We had our differences, but since I stopped typing up medication and exercise schedules for Paul, our relationship strengthened every day. Plus, thanks to the Woolsey remedies, Paul was finally filling out.

“Then why don't you move in? For good, I mean.”

“Oh, I don't know, Paul. It would help to hear how you feel.”

“I'm crazy about you.”

“How so?”

Paul thought for a second. “You are a very hard worker. I respect this.”

“That's it?”

“And I like the way you speak French with your American accent.
Very
sexy.”

“Certainly that isn't—”

“And I never tire of being with you.”

He stood and came to me at the sink.

“I like your imperfections. Your lopsided smile.”

I touched my lips. Lopsided?

“And you don't have a giant handbag you're always pawing through.”

He took my hand. “I like that you wear my clothes.” He unbuttoned one button at my chest. “And your white skin. So smooth all over—I thought of that a lot while I was away.”

He wrapped his arms around my waist. “But my favorite thing about you is…”

“Well?”

“…the way you kiss. Sometimes I think I may not recover when I kiss you. It's like going to another place.”

Paul pulled my shirt collar aside and kissed my neck.

I smiled. “Funny, there's one word you never use.”

Paul stepped back. “Why do Americans have to have every detail spelled out? You say ‘I love you' to the garbageman.”

“I believe the phrase was invented here.”

“If that's all it takes, I
love
you. I can't imagine a life without you. Now move your things in, your clothes, your books. Make the house ours.”

“You mean not go back to New York?” It was too wonderful to imagine, being with Paul for good.

“Yes. Make this your home. We can always visit New York. And your mother can move here. You already have the apartment.”

“I'll miss the consulate, but Roger has Pia.”

“He certainly does.”

“Of course I'll stay,” I said.

“Good then,” Paul said with a smile. It was like medicine to see that smile again.

Was it too late to have a baby together? I was over forty years old. We could always adopt. There was a file in my suitcase full of darling French babies who needed homes. We'd have a real family. Mother would be thrilled to have a wedding at last. Roger had wrangled her a visa, and she was on her way to Paris for a visit after all. I could tell her in person.

“Why not start tonight?” he said.

“I'll go get my things.” Was this really happening? Did I have any silk stockings at Mother's apartment?

“Don't bring any makeup,” Paul said. “You are perfect as is.”

“Not even a lipstick?”

“Hurry. I'll finish making dinner.”

“Please don't, Paul,” I said. “Dr. Bedreaux says…”

Paul stood and walked to the counter. He scooped a few dusky new potatoes, the color of violets, from the bowl. Would it be too much for him to make a meal?.

“Don't say another word, or I will change my mind,” he said.

I grabbed my purse. “Nietzsche said a diet predominantly of potatoes leads to the use of liquor.”

“Good. Bring a bottle of your mother's wine. We're celebrating.”

In the almost two-hour drive back to Paris, I made a mental list of what to pack. Capri pants. Silk stockings. My new lingerie. I would eventually need a proper French driver's license.

At the apartment, I drew the shades, threw a suitcase together, and headed out. As I locked the door, the phone rang in the kitchen, and for once in my life, I ignored it. If it was Mother, I needed more time to tell her the whole story.

On the trip back I stopped at our favorite market and found one sorry-looking baguette, small, but a good omen. I stopped again to stoke the engine with wood and headed for Rouen, the car radio turned up, windows open, as Léo Marjane sang “Alone Tonight.”

I am alone tonight, with my dreams….

The papers all chastised the cabaret singer for having entertained the Nazis a little too enthusiastically during the occupation, but no song captured the war like that one. I sang along.

I am alone tonight, without your love….

It was wonderful not to be the one alone for once. Sad songs are not so sad when you have someone who loves you. I turned onto Paul's street singing with abandon. Who cared what the neighbors thought?

I rounded the bend and saw a white ambulance parked at the curb outside Paul's house, engine running.

Time stopped. Was it parked at the wrong house? I drove closer and saw a nurse standing outside the front door, a navy-blue cape over her white uniform.

My God. Paul.

The car barely stopped moving before I jumped from it.

I ran up the walk.

“Is Paul hurt?” I said, my breath coming in great gulps.

“Come quickly,” the nurse said as I followed her into the house.

“A
m I dreaming?” Zuzanna said as the ferry docked at Gdansk, the salt air filled with the wild cries of gulls and terns. I lifted my hand to shield my eyes, for the sparkling water, alive with diamonds, blinded me.

We had spent two months in Malmö, Sweden, the place for which God saved all the most beautiful things in nature. The greenest grass. Sky the color of cornflowers. Children who seemed born of that landscape, their hair spun from white clouds, eyes of cobalt sea.

We were sorry to leave, for we were treated like royalty there, feasting on princess cake and
pitepalt
dumplings with butter and lingonberry jam. Once we regained our strength (both Zuzanna and I were up to forty kilos), many of us wanted to get home to wherever that might be. Poland. France. Czechoslovakia. A few women with little left to go home to stayed in Sweden to start new lives. Some waited to see what would happen with the proposed new elections in Poland before they ventured back. We'd heard the repressive Soviet law enforcement agency NKVD was in charge in Poland, but Zuzanna and I never hesitated. We ached to see Papa.

While I was grateful beyond words for my rescue, the stronger I became, the angrier I got. Where was the joy at being rescued? I watched women around me recover, eager to resume their old lives, but for me, the rage just grew, black in my belly.

Once we'd made it to the northern coast of Poland by ferry, a driver met us at the landing. He was a young man from Warsaw, one of more than one hundred former Polish Air Force pilots who'd joined Britain's Royal Air Force and risked their lives fighting the Luftwaffe. He was only a few years my senior, but at twenty-two, I had the limp and posture of an old crone.

He reached for Zuzanna's cloth sack and helped us into the car. I felt the leather of the backseat, cool and smooth. How long had it been since I'd been in an automobile? It may as well have been a spaceship.

“So what is happening in the world today?” Zuzanna said once we were under way, opening and closing the little metal ashtray in her door handle. I opened my own and found two crooked cigarettes stubbed out there. What they would have given for those in the camp!

“Heard what's going on with the government?” the driver asked.

“There are to be free elections?” Zuzanna said. We drove through the port of Gdansk, bombed heavily during the war.

“The government-in-exile wants to come back,” the driver said. “So the Polish Workers' Party says there will be a vote.”

“You believe Stalin?” I said.

“The Polish Workers' Party is—”

“
Stalin.
Just what we need.”

“They say we'll be our own free and independent country. People are hopeful.”

“Why do we keep believing liars?” I asked. “The NKVD will never let go.”

“Don't let anyone hear you say that,” the driver said.

“That sounds free and independent,” I said.

Zuzanna and I slept much of the way to Lublin and woke once the driver stopped at our front door.

“Time to wake up, ladies,” the driver said as he pulled on the hand brake. We sat in the backseat and stared at the bare lightbulb next to our front door, bright in the darkness, inviting a frenzied party of fat moths and other bugs. At Ravensbrück prisoners would have happily eaten those.

“Can you believe we are here?” Zuzanna asked.

We stepped out of the car as if we were arriving on the moon. I circled Zuzanna's waist with my arm. She leaned against me, and her hip bone knocked mine. The pain in my bad leg spiked as I climbed those beautiful front steps.

We had sent Papa a telegram. Would he be waiting with poppy-seed cake and tea for us? I turned the old porcelain knob of our apartment door. It was locked. Zuzanna fished the extra key out of the old hiding place behind the brick. Still there!

One step into the kitchen, and the realization knocked the wind out of me: My mother was gone. The room was dark, save for a small lamp on the kitchen table and the halo of a candle flame on the fireplace mantel. Too-happy yellow curtains hung at the windows, and a new family of red canisters stood on Matka's wooden counter. Yellow and red. Matka loved blue. Someone had hung a painting of a field of wildflowers over the wall where Matka once pasted her bird pictures. A few sparrows peeked out from behind the painting, the mucilage holding them to the wall yellowed with age. I walked to Matka's drawing table. Someone had laid it flat and covered it with a cheap lace tablecloth, atop it a Virgin Mary picture from a shrine in Gietrzwald and a china frame containing a picture of an old woman waving from a train.

I stepped to the mantel, to Matka's picture there, the one where she looked quite serious and was holding her little dog Borys. Someone had set a black bow beneath the photo, the curled ends hanging down off the mantel. I felt dizzy standing there looking at my mother's solemn face as it danced in the candlelight. A dog barked in the bedroom, and Zuzanna caught her breath.

Felka?

“Who is there?” Papa said, creeping down the hall from the back bedroom.

He came toward us in his striped underwear. His hair, thinned and gray as a squirrel's coat, poked out in all directions, a black revolver I'd never seen before in his hand. Felka emerged behind him, her tail beating quite a rhythm. She was all grown up and fatter than the last time I'd seen her, right in that kitchen with Matka
.

“It is just us, Papa,” Zuzanna said.

Papa stood as if struck dumb, his mouth open. How had he aged so? Even the hair on his chest was gray. Felka came to us and ran back and forth from Zuzanna to me, digging her wet nose into us.

“We're home,” I said. My eyes pricked with tears. Papa opened his arms wide, and we went to him. He set his gun on the counter and hugged us both as if he would never let us go. How happy we were to be there in his embrace! Zuzanna and I both cried on his bare shoulders.

“Did you not receive our telegram?” I asked.

“Who receives telegrams these days?”

“You got a letter about Matka?”

“Yes, the handwriting on the envelope looked like hers, so I thought it was a letter from her. But it was a form letter. They said it was typhus.”

I took his hand. “It wasn't typhus, Papa.”

“What then?” He was like a small child. Where was my strong papa?

“I don't know,” I said.

He stepped back, hands on his hips. “But were you not together?”

Zuzanna led Papa to a kitchen chair. “They moved her to a separate block, Papa. She worked as a nurse—”

“And drew portraits for the Nazis. That's what got her killed. Getting too close to them.” Why did I say such a thing? I knew too well that her bringing me a sandwich that night at the movie theater had gotten her killed.

Zuzanna knelt next to Papa. “You received Kasia's letters. How did you know how to read them?”

“It took the whole postal center to figure it out. We knew there was some sort of code, but none of us knew how to read it. I dabbed water on the first letter. But then we figured it out. I told certain people, and they got the message to our underground in London, who spread the word. But it was Marthe who said we should iron the letter. That it was a trick from a book she knew.”

Marthe?

I knelt at Papa's other side. “Thank you for the red thread.”

“I got the word out as best I could. Did you know the BBC broadcast it? What they did to you both…” Papa dissolved into another pool of tears. How hard it was to see our strong papa crying!

I took his hand. “Have you seen Pietrik? Nadia?”

“No. Neither of them. I post the lists every day. Red Cross Center does too. I wish we'd known you were coming.” Papa took up a linen dishcloth and dried his tears. “We've been frantic with worry.”

We?

Zuzanna noticed her first, in the shadows of the bedroom doorway, a thickset woman in a dressing gown. Zuzanna went to her and put out her hand.

“I am Zuzanna,” she said.

A woman in Papa's bedroom?

“I am Marthe,” the woman said. “I've heard so many nice things about you both.”

I stood, took a deep breath, and considered the woman. Marthe was a few inches taller than Papa, her dressing gown belted with twine. Brown hair worn in a braid hung down over her lapel. A country woman. Papa had certainly lowered his standards.

Marthe came to stand near to Papa, but he made no move toward her. “Marthe's from a village outside of Zamosc. A great help to me these years you've been away.” Papa looked embarrassed Marthe was there. Who wouldn't, introducing his girlfriend to his dead wife's children?

“Why don't we sit?” Marthe said.

“I would like to go to bed,” I said. It was like a swap out at the market. My eyes went to Matka's picture on the mantel. Did Papa not miss her? How could he do it?

Papa waved me to him. “Sit with us, Kasia.”

Marthe sat on Matka's favorite chair, the one she had painted white, with the calico pillow seat. I watched Zuzanna bond with Marthe. Papa looked on, happy to see them connect.

“I wish we could offer you something to eat, but we just finished the last of the bread,” Marthe said.

Papa felt the stubble of his beard. “It is worse than ever now. Since the Russians came, there is barely any food at all. At least the Nazis kept the bakers in flour.”

“So we've traded Nazis for Stalin?” I asked. “Even trade if you ask me.”

“I get on well with them,” Papa said. “They have let me keep my job at the center.”

“Let you?” I asked.

“You can get all the Russian cigarettes you want now,” Marthe said, a little too brightly. “But few eggs.”

“It is just a matter of time before we are all calling one another ‘comrade,' ” I said.

“We'll get on just fine,” Zuzanna said.

“They are looking for former underground members,” Papa said with a pointed look at me. “They took Mazur last week.”

A volt of current went through me, and all of a sudden I could barely breathe. Mazur? He was Pietrik's childhood friend, a most skilled agent at the highest ranks of the underground. He'd read me my AK oath. A true patriot.

Big breath in, big breath out.

“I'm done with all that,” I said.

“They took us from the camp on a Swedish bus,” Zuzanna said. “You should have seen it as we crossed the border to Denmark, all the people gathered there with welcome signs. They were very nice to us in Sweden too. We flew the Lublin Girl Guides banner someone had found in the Ravensbrück booty piles as we drove in, and you should have heard the cheers. We spent the first night on the floor of a museum.”

“With dinosaurs with big teeth crouched over us,” I said. “No different from the camp.”

Zuzanna fetched her cloth sack. “Then we stayed with a princess at her mansion. Look what they gave us before we left Sweden.” She opened the sack, set a white box on the table, and opened it. “They gave each of us one. Tinned sardines. White bread and butter. Berry jam and a piece of chocolate.”

We had each taken only nibbles of the food, saving it.

“And evaporated milk?” Papa said. “It's been so long.”

“How kind of them,” Marthe said. “I have a flour ticket I've been saving. I can make—”

“Don't trouble yourself,” I said.

Papa bowed his head and ran his fingers through what was left of his hair.

“I am sorry about your mother,” Marthe said, standing.

“It looks like it,” I said.

“Kasia,” Papa said.

I picked up the white chair, the cushion still warm from Marthe's rump.

“Good night, Papa,” I said. “Good night, Zuzanna.”

I carried Matka's chair toward my room, passing the mantel, careful to avert my eyes from Matka's picture there. It was too hard to look at her face, a new knock to the belly every time. I entered my room and closed the door. No mistress of my father's would park in my mother's seat, no matter how much help she was to him.