Ava learned new skills in the blink of an eye. She began to cut up cabbage for Bobeshi’s Hardship Soup, an easy recipe that took ingenuity and little else. Lea looked for spices in the cabinets, then chopped up celery discovered in the larder. She continued to dwell on what a strange companion she had. Her hatred had been replaced by curiosity and mistrust. “Do you really know how to cook?” she asked Ava.
“It’s simple enough.”
Still, Lea was wary as she thought of Ava sinking to her knees, kissing the hand of the girl she had called her maker. Why would her mother send her away with such a person? “Have you ever cooked before?” she asked.
“Having done something doesn’t mean you’re good at it.”
Lea touched the locket she wore. She suddenly felt as though she were a little girl, abandoned on a street corner or in a marketplace, straining to see through the crowds so she could find her mother. She heard her mother’s voice inside of her.
Heart of my heart, love of my life, the one loss I will never survive.
“You’ve stopped working,” Ava said, motioning to Lea. “Carrots are next.”
Lea rinsed a bunch of small carrots and began to chop. The red-haired girl on the train had told Ava to act like any other woman. Lea gazed at Ava now, who tasted a pinch of salt, her mouth puckering slightly, before she spat the salt into the sink. She did not seem like any other woman.
Julien was leaning in the doorway, his face thoughtful. How could he not take note of the girl? There was something beneath Lea’s reserved demeanor he thought he understood. He was that way himself, hiding his true nature, in his case with bravado and sarcasm. Ava caught him watching Lea. She didn’t like what she saw inside him, a wild, reckless heart that spelled trouble. “You can go,” she told him.
“This is his house, not ours. Of course he can stay, although I don’t know why he’d want to,” Lea said with feigned indifference. The truth was, she had noticed him as well.
Julien came to sprawl in a kitchen chair, his long legs extended so that Ava and Lea had to dodge around him. “I can’t cook a thing,” he confided to Lea.
“Why are you proud of that?” Ava said as she cast a wary eye on him. It was difficult to read this boy as she could most people; his thoughts were such a jumble, but his interest in Lea was evident.
“Oh, I’m not,” Julien said. “I just admire anyone who can.”
There was some flour in a canister, which Ava mixed with water, doing her best to make a crust without butter. Trying to charm her was pointless. He had better watch his step if he knew what was good for him. “You might as well be useful,” she told him, suggesting he cut the fruit in thin slices.
Julien seemed pleased to be asked. It was a good excuse to stand beside Lea at the counter. They looked at one another and laughed in a way Ava didn’t understand. Nothing was funny, but such was the behavior of mortals. Illogical, impractical, emotional.
That was how it began.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ARRIVAL
VIENNE, SPRING 1941
THE RABBI’S DAUGHTER FOUND HERSELF in the outskirts of the small city of Vienne in the Rhône-Alpes region, a little more than twenty kilometers from Lyon. This was the city where Hannibal had arrived and the Romans held chariot races around La Pyramide, an ancient obelisk, an artifact that some local people vowed contained the bones of Pontius Pilate. Ettie was someone else now. She had named herself Nicole Duval, with no proof but her word, for her smudged papers had been worthless, and she’d tossed them away.
She had been traveling from place to place, always going toward Vichy, though she had discovered the so-called free zone was in the hands of a government collaborating with the Germans. At first she had lived hand to mouth, searching for food in trash bins behind markets, sleeping in the woods. When she hitched a ride she always climbed into the truck bed, or, if she had no choice and had to sit beside the driver, she kept a hand on the door handle in case she was forced to jump out at a turn in the road. She had discovered that men often felt a young woman traveling alone was a target for unwanted advances.