Eva leaned in. “I’m making us false papers.”
“Forgery? You don’t know how to do such things!”
Eva swallowed hard and tried to muster confidence she didn’t feel. “I will learn. But there’s not much time, so I need you to listen. You will be Sabine Fontain.”
Mamusia gasped. “You are giving me Madame Fontain’s name?”
Eva had been thinking about it since leaving Monsieur Goujon’s office. They would need names of real people, just in case they were detained and an official decided to check their identification cards against records. “I think it’s safer that way,” Eva said. “The name Sabine could be Russian, too, and I think that’s important. It would explain your accent. If anyone asks, you emigrated from Russia after the revolution in 1917. Of course, you married Madame Fontain’s real husband, Jean-Louis Fontain, a French patriot missing in action at the front.”
Her mother blinked at her. “What about you?”
“I’ll be Colette Fontain.”
“But the real Colette is just a child.”
“By the time anyone thinks to verify a birth year, we’ll be long gone.”
“But how will you make these papers?” Mamusia persisted.
Eva briefly explained her visit to Monsieur Goujon and the blank documents and supplies he had given her. “I’ll do the best I can,” she concluded.
“There’s no way this will work,” Mamusia said.
“It has to, Mamusia.”
In the kitchen, Eva opened the typewriter case, lifted the machine, and pulled Monsieur Goujon’s envelope from beneaththe keys. Inside, there were three blank identity cards, three blank travel documents, a blank naturalization certificate and birth certificate, and four pens, in navy, bright blue, red, and black. The envelope gave up perhaps its greatest prize last: adhesive stamps with images of coins on them, the only part of the documents that would have been impossible to forge with limited supplies. There was no way she could have purchased stamps at a tabac today without arousing suspicion.
She closed her eyes, whispered a thank-you to Monsieur Goujon, who had come through in at least a small way for her, and spread all the materials on the table in front of her alongside the real identity cards belonging to her and her mother. She took a deep breath. She could hear her father’s voice in her head. One day, you will appreciate God’s gifts.
She began with her mother’s identity card. First, Eva had to convincingly forge the handwriting of a busy but efficient clerk at the prefecture. She carefully examined her mother’s real card, reminded herself that her own flowing, meticulous script had no place here, and dove in. With the black pen Monsieur Goujon had given her, she filled in the blanks in short, neat block letters. Nom: Fontain née Petrov. Prénoms: Sabine Irina. Née le: 7 août 1894. à: Moscou.
She continued, filling in her mother’s real hair color, eye color, height, and more. She gritted her teeth at the blank for Nez, nose, which was included to help authorities pick out Jews. She wrote moyen, medium, and moved on, penning a false address and a false registration number and finishing with the grand and sweeping signature of someone who spent the day putting his name to other people’s lives.
She sat back for a second and studied her work. The handwriting looked very much like the one on her mother’s original documents, certainly official enough to convince a stranger. Eva pulled the photograph she’d cut earlier from her parents’ anniversary frame and placed it in its spot on the card. Carefully, using the stapler Monsieur Goujon had added to the typewriter case, she attached the picture and sat back to make sure the document looked authentic.
It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. She affixed her own photo to a second identity card, added the adhesive stamps to both cards, and quickly filled in the blanks for the false Colette Fontain, born 1920 in Paris, with brown hair, brown eyes, and of course a medium nose. By the time she was done forging the signature of an imaginary clerk, the ink was dry enough to begin forging the documents’ official stamps, the part of the process Eva was most worried about, for it required a sure but light hand and left no room for error. The marks couldn’t look hand drawn, and they had to exactly match the mass-produced ones the French police and German soldiers would have seen thousands of times.
She began with her own identity card, figuring that if she made a mistake, she might be less suspicious than her foreign-born mother. The stamp on her real document was patchy and uneven, evidence that the ink pad had been running dry. There was no way to fake that kind of fading, Eva thought, but if she could mimic the exact lines of the stamp, it should appear real, if slightly too bright.
She started with carefully drawing perfect blue circles on both the top and bottom of her card, making sure that the higher one slightly overlapped her photo, and then she carefully filled in the logo of the Police Nationale. The hardest part of the stamp was the lettering, but Eva steadied herself and carefully wrote out the characters, allowing herself a few seconds to admire her handiwork when she finished. She duplicated the stamps on her mother’s card, and then used the darker blue pen to forge a date stamp. On both identity cards, she blotted the ink with one of Madame Fontain’s hand towels, sighing in relief as the sharp lines softened and smudged just a bit, as if they’d been placed there with real rubber stamps.
By the time she sat back to gaze at the cards, she was breathing hard, but the terror that had been a weight in her chest since she’d watched her father being hauled away had been squeezed aside by something buoyant, something that felt like a tiny bubble of hope. She had done it. The job wasn’t perfect, but the cards might just pass muster if they weren’t examined too closely.
The travel documents were easier; all Eva had to do was fill in the blanks—name, date and place of birth, profession, address, nationality, etc.—using the typewriter, so she quickly set that up and went to work. The only piece of art necessary on the documents was a forgery of the black stamp of the Reichsadler, the heraldic Nazi eagle. Eva carefully copied the spread-winged bird sitting atop a swastika, as well as the German lettering that arced across the top of the round image. Over the eagle’s body, she carefully handwrote the words Dientstempel: Cachet in what she hoped looked like stamped letters. For Lieu de Destination—place of destination—she hesitated and then wrote down the name of the town Monsieur Goujon had mentioned: Aurignon. My God, she wouldn’t be able to find it on a map if asked; she knew nothing about the place. But she silenced her doubts and reminded herself that Monsieur Goujon wouldn’t have risked helping her with the cards only to steer her wrong at the end.
The naturalization and birth certificates were the easiest of all; she simply had to vary her handwriting, making her script tall and narrow, and fill in the blanks with false details. The required stamps, one in blue and one in black, felt like child’s play after the more complicated ones she’d drawn on the other documents. She was done in no time.
She was just about to start on her father’s false documents—which she had saved for last in case she ran out of time—when she heard a key scratching in the front door’s lock. She leapt up, stuffing all the supplies and false cards down her shirt and staining herself with blue ink in the process.