The Sweetness of Forgetting (27 page)

“But why are there no records of any of this?” I ask after a moment. “It’s so brave and heroic what your family did. What other people at the Grand Mosque did.”

Monsieur Haddam smiles. “At the time, we could not keep any sort of written record,” he says. “We knew we were tying our fate to that of the people we saved. If the Nazis, or the French police, had raided the mosque and found even one piece of evidence, it could have been the end of us all.

“So we helped quietly,” he concludes. “It is the thing I am proudest of in all my life.”

“Thank you,” Alain whispers. “For what you did. For saving my sister.”

Monsieur Haddam shakes his head. “There is no need to thank me. It was our duty. In our religion, we are taught, ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.’ ”

Alain makes a strange strangled sound. “In the Talmud, it is written, ‘If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world,’” he says softly.

He and Monsieur Haddam look at each other for a moment and smile.

“We are not so different, then,” Monsieur Haddam says. He looks at Henri and Simon, then back at Alain. “I never understood the war between our religions, or the war with Christianity. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent
with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.”

The words sink in as we look at one another in silence.

“Your sister,” Monsieur Haddam continues, turning to Alain, “she suffered every day, because she left her family. She never believed she did enough to save you. But you understand, of course, she did what she had to do. She had to save her baby.”

In the silence that follows, you could hear a pin drop. “Her baby?” Alain finally asks, his voice an octave higher than it should be. My mouth is suddenly dry.

“Yes, of course,” says Monsieur Haddam. He blinks at us. “It is why she came here. She was with child. You did not know?”

Alain turns to stare at me. “Did
you
know this?”

“Of course not,” I say. “It’s . . . it’s not possible. My mother wasn’t born until 1944.” I turn back to Monsieur Haddam. “And my mom didn’t have any siblings. My grandmother couldn’t have been pregnant in 1942.”

He pauses and stands up. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says. He disappears into his bedroom, while Alain and I go back to staring at each other.

“How could she have been pregnant?” Alain asks.

“Well, she and Jacob were in love . . .” Henri says, his voice trailing off.

Alain shakes his head. “No, absolutely not. She was very religious,” he says. “She would never have done such a thing.” He glances at me and adds, “Things were different in those days. People did not have relations before marriage. Certainly not Rose.”

“Maybe Monsieur Haddam is remembering wrong,” I say.

But when he emerges from his bedroom a moment later, he’s carrying a photograph, which he hands to me. I recognize my grandmother immediately; she looks just like I looked when I was sixteen or seventeen, and her head is wrapped in a scarf. She
has one arm around a dark-haired, smiling boy and the other around a middle-aged woman.

“That is my mother and me,” Monsieur Haddam says softly. “And your grandmother. The day she left. The last time I ever saw her.”

I nod, but I can’t seem to speak, because I can’t look away from the bulging belly in the photograph. There’s no doubt that my grandmother is pregnant. She gazes into the camera with wide eyes that broadcast extraordinary sadness, even in grainy black and white. Alain sinks down beside me on the couch and stares at the photo too.

“She knew that if she was taken to one of the camps, she would be killed as soon as they found out she was with child,” Monsieur Haddam says softly after a moment. “She knew she had to protect herself in order to protect the baby. It was the only reason she let Jacob separate her from her family.”

“My God,” Alain murmurs.

“But what happened to the baby?” I ask.

Monsieur Haddam frowns at me. “You are certain that the baby was not your mother?”

I nod. “My mother was born a year and a half later to my grandfather, Ted, not Jacob.” I turn to Alain. “The baby must have died,” I say softly. Even saying the words aloud horrifies me.

Alain hangs his head. “There is so much we do not know. What if she does not wake up?” he murmurs.

His words send me hurtling back from a past we can’t understand to a present we can’t control. But we
can
control whether we leave for the airport on time. I look at my watch and stand up.

“Monsieur Haddam, I’m sorry, but we have to leave,” I say. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

He smiles. “Young lady, you do not have to,” he replies. “Knowing that Rose lived, and went on to have a happy life, is thanks enough for a million years.”

I wonder, in that moment, whether my grandmother’s life
was
happy. Had she ever let go of the sadness she must have felt when she believed she’d lost Jacob and her family forever?

“Please,” Monsieur Haddam says, “tell your grandmother that I think of her often. And that I thank her for helping me to believe in finding love. She changed my life. I will never forget her.”

“Thank you so much, Monsieur Haddam,” I murmur. “I’ll tell her.”

He kisses me on both cheeks, and as I follow Alain, Henri, and Simon back out to the street to hail a cab to the airport, I find myself wondering whether this is why Mamie sent me here. I wonder whether somewhere deep down, she wanted me to hear the story of her first love, and of the lost child she gave everything to protect. I wonder whether I’m supposed to learn something about love from all of this.

Or perhaps it’s too late for me. Alain and I are silent on the way to the airport, both of us lost in our own worlds.

Chapter
Sixteen

Rose

Something was terribly wrong, and Rose knew it. All afternoon, she had been sitting in front of her television, watching daytime reruns of programs she knew she had seen before. But it didn’t matter; she couldn’t remember the plots anyhow. She had grown very tired, and back in her room, she realized she could no longer feel her body. Then, everything had gone black.

The world had still been dark as night when they came for her, the people from the home. She heard them saying
unconscious
and
stroke
and
barely hanging on,
and she wanted to tell them that she was fine. But she found that she could no longer use her tongue, nor could she open her eyes, and it was in this way that she realized her body was failing her, just like her mind was. Perhaps it was time.

And so she let go and drifted further into the past. As the ambulance sirens sounded in the distance, as the doctors shouted and gave orders from very far away, as the small voice of a child cried near her bed, she released her grip on the present and let herself float, like jetsam on a wave, back to a time just before the world fell apart. There were voices then too, in the darkness, just as there were now. And as the present disappeared, the past came into focus, and Rose found herself in her father’s study, in the apartment on rue du Général Camou. She was seventeen again, and she felt as if she had a crystal ball and no one believed her.

“Please,” she was begging her father, her voice hoarse from endless hours of fruitless persuasion. “If we stay, we will die, Papa! They are coming for us!”

The Nazis were everywhere. German soldiers filled the streets, and the French police followed along like lemmings. Jews were no longer permitted to go out without the yellow Star of David sewn over their left breast, a brand marking them as different.

“Nonsense,” said her father, a proud man who believed in his
country and in the goodness of his fellow man. “Only criminals and cowards run.”

“No, Papa,” Rose whispered. “It’s not just criminals and cowards. It’s people who want to save themselves, who don’t want to blindly follow, hoping that everything will be okay.”

Her father closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Beside him, Rose’s mother rubbed his arm comfortingly and looked at her daughter. “You are upsetting your father, Rose,” she said.

“But, Maman!” Rose exclaimed.

“We are French,” her father said tersely, opening his eyes. “They are not deporting French.”

“But they
are,
” Rose whispered. “And Maman is not French. To them, she is still Polish. In their eyes, that makes her—and us—foreigners.”

“You are talking nonsense, child,” her father said.

“This roundup is going to be different,” Rose said. She felt like she’d said it a thousand times before, but her father wasn’t hearing her because he didn’t want to. “They are coming for all of us this time. Jacob says—”

“Rose!” her father interrupted, slamming his fist on the table. Beside him, Rose’s mother jumped, startled, and shook her head sadly. “That boy has a runaway imagination!”

“Papa, it’s not his imagination!” Rose had never spoken against her parents before, but she had to make them believe her. This was life and death. How could they be so blind? “You’re our father, Papa. You have to protect us!”

“Enough!” her father roared. “You will not tell me how to run my family! That boy, Jacob, will not tell me how to run my family! I
am
protecting you children, and your mother, by following the rules. Do not tell me how to be a parent! You know nothing of such things.”

Rose fought back the tears in her eyes. She put her right hand on her belly, without intending to, and she quickly moved it back to her side when she saw her mother look at her curiously and
frown. She wouldn’t be able to hide it from them for much longer, and then they would know. Would they forgive her? Would they understand? Rose thought not.

She wished she could tell them the truth. But now wasn’t the time. It would only complicate matters. Before she did anything, she needed to save them.