anxious. We wanted for him to give us details of Papa. Monique kept advising us that perhaps we did not want to know. It was clear that she did not want to know. We realized that Monique had had to be strong while we were away—living daily with uncertainty and fear and no news at all. Maman and I, who had seen everything, thought we could not be shocked. But we became distressed for dear Monique and Robert.”
She leaned lightly against Marshall. “Telling about coming home is for me as hard as telling what happened in the war.”
“Do you want to save the rest for another time?”
“No.” She smiled, sitting erect again and sipping her cognac. “If you live in Cognac, you must drink cognac. Or so they tell me. Is it well with you?”
“It has an after-burn!”
Bernard moved from his bed in the corner, circled in front of them, then threw himself down on the rug. Annette bent forward to pat his head. Then she resumed.
“When we returned to Paris, it was an anticlimax. We had been taken away ten days before the liberation of the city. Paris was happy. It had celebrated! De Gaulle had marched down the Champs-Elysées to Notre Dame. Even though the war continued through the winter and spring, Paris was free of the dreadful Nazis. And now the war was truly over, everywhere. Most of the déportés had already returned some weeks before we arrived, and we felt that we had been passed by. It was as if the déportés—and the awful knowledge that was beginning to surface about what had really happened—had disrupted the way of life for everyone else. Paris didn’t want to know what we had been through. They did not want to hear about us. Since then, all my friends have been the déportés and those who were in the Résistance. There is a deep bond. We don’t have to speak of the deportation because we know. There is that bond of memory.
“We had to resume our lives. We had very few resources, and it was two years before we received anything from the government. Maman returned to teaching, and she cared for Monique and me. She was strong again. Something in her was destroyed—do not misunderstand. She never overcame the loss of my father. But she went forward. Of course, what else was there to do?
“As for me, I attended special classes for the déportés and the Jews who had been hidden. I passed the bac, then studied at the Sorbonne, and then I met Maurice! And here I am now.”
She turned to Marshall and smiled.
“There is not a day when I don’t rejoice,” she said. “It’s the small things that give me most pleasure. I can see a butterfly on the window and think I’m in heaven. And yet … I don’t know how to explain. I know I am never quite myself ever again. I am not her.” She gestured at a portrait on the far wall. “I am not the woman she would have been, if life had been different.”
Marshall arose and crossed the room to study the portrait, a framed drawing.
“It’s you,” he said. “That’s how I remember you. That’s how I see you now.”
In the drawing, made with free-flowing charcoal lines, she was lovely and delicate—her twinkling eyes, the teeth he loved.
She shook her head and stared at her hands, folded in her lap.
IT SEEMED NATURAL that they would lie in each other’s arms that night. It was what they both wanted. They needed to be together. Physical comfort was what he had to offer her, not words. He sank into her, in her downy bed, alighting smoothly, rushing and then slowing, and she was affectionate and generous. For a long time afterward, they clasped each other tightly. They couldn’t get close enough. He had no sense of what came next.
“It is warm with you,” she said.
“I want to protect you.”
“You are good to me.”
“You are nice to hold.”
“Just hold me.”
49.
WHEN MARSHALL AWOKE NEXT MORNING, SHE WAS NO LONGER beside him. It was late, past nine. The kitchen was cleared of last night’s dishes, and the cat was at the door. He found a box of pellets for the cat, a striped gray thing with a notched ear, and filled her dish on a shelf on the terrace. When Bernard greeted him with an elegant bow, Marshall talked to him like a friend. The day was calm and clear. The chickens were out, scratching