Eva felt a surge of guilt. “Mamusia,” she said gently as her mother wailed in her arms. “They were also here for you. And me.”
Mamusia sniffled. “That’s impossible. You are French.”
“I am a Jew. That is all they see.”
Just then, a sharp cry came from the girls’ bedroom. “Maman? Where are you, Maman?” It was the older daughter, Colette, her voice high and scared.
Mamusia looked up at Eva in anguish. “We have to go after your father,” she whispered. She grabbed Eva’s hands, her grip like a vise. “We have to save him.”
“Not yet,” Eva said firmly as Colette cried out for her mother again. “First, we must figure out how to save ourselves.”
Chapter Three
Dawn broke an hour later, and with it, silent chaos. The street below the Fontains’ window filled with people, but there was hardly a sound. Neighbors clustered together, whispering, none of them wearing the yellow star. The Jews of the Marais district had vanished last night.
“We must go look for your father,” Eva’s mother said, hugging herself as she rocked back and forth on the Fontains’ sofa.
The two little girls, still in their nightgowns, sat on the floor, staring at her with wide eyes. Eva finally took a deep breath, turned from the window, and crossed the room to kneel between them. She put one arm around Colette, the other around Simone. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said with forced cheer, squeezing the girls’ shoulders. “Not until Madame Fontain returns.”
“When is Maman coming back?” Colette whimpered. It was clear that she could read the fear in the room, though she couldn’t understand it.
“Soon, my dear.” Eva forced a smile. “There’s no need to worry.”
“Then why is Madame Traube so afraid?”
Eva glanced at her mother, who was pale as an unbaked baguette. “She’s not,” she said in a tone firm enough to get her mother’s attention. Mamusia looked up, her gaze unfocused, as Eva added, “She’s simply not feeling very well. Are you, Mamusia?” Her mother still didn’t respond.
Colette searched Eva’s eyes for a minute, and then her face relaxed. “Shall I get her something to help her to feel better?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea, Colette. Why don’t you take Simone with you?”
Colette nodded solemnly before grabbing her sister’s hand and leading her toward their shared bedroom.
Eva turned to her mother as soon as the girls had disappeared. “You need to pull yourself together.”
“But your father…”
“Is gone,” Eva said firmly, though she couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. Fear always found its way in through the cracks. “We will come up with a plan to secure his release. I promise. We can’t do anything if we’re arrested, too, though.”
“But—”
“Please. I just need to figure out how—”
“Madame Traube?” Colette’s voice interrupted their hushed conversation, and they turned to see the four-year-old standing in the doorway, wearing a paper crown and clutching a little metal tiara in her hand. She held the tiara up. “When I’m feeling blue, sometimes I like to play dress-up. If you want, you can be the princess and I can be the queen.”
“Dress-up?” Mamusia looked dazed.
“It’s a game where you pretend to be someone you’re not.” Colette frowned. “Don’t you know what dress-up is, Madame Traube?”
Mamusia didn’t answer, but Eva felt as if a lightbulb had gone on in her head. “Yes, of course,” she murmured, her heartbeat suddenly accelerating. She thought of her father’s words about Monsieur Goujon. If her father’s boss had been paid to help her, surely he could do something for Mamusia, too. She and Mamusia would just have to become different people, on paper at least—a dress-up game with the highest stakes.
“Mademoiselle Traube? Do you want to play, too?”
Eva knelt beside the little girl. “No, Colette, but you’ve just given me a wonderful idea. Look out for Madame Traube, will you?” She turned her attention to her mother and added, “If Madame Fontain returns, Mamusia, you stay right here in her apartment, no matter what she says. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
“But where are you going?”
“To see someone who will help us.”
* * *
In her own apartment, Eva groped her way through the darkness, thankful for the bit of daylight filtering in through the shades, enough that she could see the outlines of their furniture. She knew the rooms well enough that she could probably find her way in pitch blackness under normal circumstances, but her head was spinning, and she didn’t trust herself. Nor did she trust that her neighbors wouldn’t betray her if they heard her moving around inside rooms that were meant to be empty.
Had one of them reported on her family? It made some sense that the names of her parents, both of whom had emigrated from Poland in their early twenties, would be among those to be taken away to labor camps; Joseph’s dire warning had been about foreign-born Jews. But who had added her name to the list? Someone who wanted her gone, too, so her family’s apartment would become available? The Traubes had lived here for more than twenty years, and there was no denying that theirs was one of the nicest units in the building, twice the size of most of the other apartments. Could jealousy and greed have turned a neighbor into a traitor?
Eva pushed the dark thought away. There wasn’t time to be consumed by anger. No, her only job now was to get her mother safely out of Paris. After the roundups, they couldn’t walk around with the yellow stars on their chests, of course, but simply discarding them would be even more dangerous. The second they ventured out, they would be at risk of encountering a French policeman or a German soldier, and if asked for their papers, they would be immediately arrested for the crime of leaving their stars at home. No, they had to become other people entirely, and the key to that lay in the typewriters that sat, silent and hulking, in their living room.
She would bring one back to Monsieur Goujon, using it as her ticket into the prefecture. TatuĊ had said that his old boss had promised to make false documents for her; she would need to persuade him to do the same for Mamusia. It was their only hope.
Eva moved silently into her parents’ bedroom, where she pulled out three of her mother’s best dresses, several blouses and skirts, an extra pair of shoes, and a heavy coat, though the July day was sweltering. But who knew how long they’d be gone? She placed all the items carefully into the family’s beat-up leather suitcase.
In her own bedroom, she added three dresses, a pair of trousers, a skirt, a few blouses, a coat, and a pair of boots to the suitcase, then picked up her carte d’identité, stamped with the word JUIVE in bold capital letters. Her mother’s card was even worse, for it immediately marked her as a foreign-born Jew, prohibited from travel.
She zipped up the suitcase and moved back into the living room, where she folded one of the typewriters into the carrying case, her identity card and her mother’s tucked beneath it. Perhaps Monsieur Goujon would need them to help craft their false documents.