was worked off her feet and lived cheek by jowl with fear; she’d lost weight and the glow from her cheeks, and sometimes thought she’d commit murder for a good cup of coffee—but she slept with a smile and woke each morning with the one individual thought she allowed herself before becoming Marguerite for the day.
This is where I belong.
Eve wasn’t the only one to feel that way. “Putain de merde,” Lili sighed one evening as she shuffled her handful of identity cards, trying to decide whether to become Marie the sewing girl or Rosalie the laundress when she left tomorrow. “However shall I manage when the war is over and I have to go back to being just me? How boring that will be.”
“You’re not b-boring.” Eve smiled up at the ceiling, lying flat on her back on the bony mattress. “I’m boring. I f-f-filed letters and l-lived in a boardinghouse sharing my supper scraps with a cat.” She couldn’t believe she ever managed to live that way.
“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”
“Will we be bored to death when this w-war is over and so are our jobs?” Eve wondered idly. The war loomed so all-encompassing, she couldn’t imagine it ever being over. Last August everyone swore it would be done by Christmas, but being here just a few miles from the trenches, with the boom of guns in the background and the clocks permanently turned to German time, told a very different story.
“We’ll have different jobs when the war is over.” Lili shuffled her handful of identity cards like a fan. “I should like to do something splendid, shouldn’t you? Something extraordinary.”
Lili already was extraordinary, Eve thought. Not like me. The thought held no envy—it was what made them both good at what they did now. Lili’s job was to be anyone, to shift with a few tricks of posture or grammar from one persona to another, whether seamstress or laundress or cheese seller. And if Lili’s job was to be anyone, Eve’s was to be no one, to be unobserved and unnoticed at all times.
And as the weeks passed, that became worrying. Because someone had taken notice of her.
René Bordelon lingered in the restaurant that night after the last guest departed. He sometimes did, lighting a cigar and enjoying it alone as his staff silently cleaned up around him. He played bon vivant host among the Germans, but of his own accord he seemed to swim as solitary as a shark. He lived alone, he sometimes left the restaurant to the headwaiter’s charge and attended plays or concerts, he took the afternoon air in a flawless cashmere coat and swinging a silver-headed walking stick. Eve wondered what he thought about on those nights when he let the restaurant close about him, smiling at the black windows. Perhaps he simply smiled at his profit margins. Eve steered clear. Ever since he guessed her accent and forced her to give up her birthplace, she’d given him a wide berth.
But he didn’t always allow that.
“Put away the record,” he said as Eve came out to clear the tables. The gramophone in the corner that occasionally provided discreet background music for a German patron with a fondness for the music of his homeland was hissing at the end of a recording. “One grows tired of Schubert.”
Eve crossed to the gramophone at the edge of his vision. It was past midnight; her employer sat in a pool of candlelight at the corner table with a glass of cognac. All the other tables were empty, their pristine cloths splashed with wine and tart crumbs and a few scattered glasses. The bustle of the cooks straightening the kitchens filtered in faintly, barely disturbing the silence. “Do you want another record, monsieur?” Eve murmured. All she wanted was to finish her shift, get home, and write down the train schedules for wounded troops coming in from the front, a nugget she’d heard just this evening . . .
He set aside his cognac. “Why don’t I provide the music instead?”
“Monsieur?”
There was a piano in the corner, a baby grand draped in a fantastically embroidered shawl and adorned with candles, giving the impression that Le Lethe was not a restaurant at all, merely a private home with