Jacob pulled her to him once more, for one more long kiss good-bye. As Jean Michel led her away, she pulled away from him. “Jacob?” she called softly into the darkness.
“I’m here,” he said. He reappeared from the shadows.
She took a deep breath. “Go back for them. Please. My family. I can’t lose them. I can’t live with myself if they perish because I did not try hard enough.”
Jacob stared into her eyes, and for a moment, Rose wanted to take the words back, because she knew what she was asking. But there wasn’t time. He nodded and said simply, “I will go back. I promise. I love you.”
And then he was gone into the inky darkness. Rose stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot, for what felt like an eternity but was only a few seconds. “No,” she murmured to herself. “What have I done?” She took a step after Jacob, meaning to stop him, meaning to warn him. But Jean Michel wrapped his arms around her and held tight.
“No,” he said. “No. It is in God’s hands now. You must come with me.”
“But . . .” she protested, trying to pull away.
“It is in God’s hands,” Jean Michel repeated as sobs began to rack Rose’s body. He held her more tightly and whispered into the darkness, “For now, all we can do is pray and hope that God can hear us.”
It was torture, after that, to live in Paris in secret, knowing that within a mile or two, her family or Jacob might also be in hiding. Knowing that she could not reach out to find them, that her one responsibility now was protecting the child within her, made her weep with helplessness every night.
The people who took her in, the Haddams, were kind, although she knew the mother and the father did not want her there. She was, after all, a liability; she knew her very presence put them in danger. If not for the baby she had vowed to protect, she would have left long ago, out of politeness. Still, they were hospitable, and over time, they seemed to accept her. Their boy, Nabi, reminded Rose of Alain, and this was what kept her sane most days; she could talk to him the way she had once talked to her little brother, and in that way, this new home felt a little more like the one she’d left behind.
She and Madame Haddam spent many hours in the kitchen, and after a while, Rose had the courage to offer Madame Haddam some of the recipes from her own family’s ashkénaze bakery. Madame Haddam, in turn, taught Rose to make many delicious pastries that she’d never heard of before.
“You should know how to cook with rosewater,” Madame Haddam had told her one day. “It is only fitting for a girl named Rose.”
And so Rose fell in love with the almond crescents and the orange blossom baklava and the rosewater cookies that crumbled in her mouth like magic, and these were the foods that nourished the baby within her. Her father had often said negative things about the Muslims, but Rose knew now that he’d been just as wrong about religion as he had been about the intentions of the Nazis. The Haddams had put their own lives at risk to save hers. They were some of the best people she had ever known.
Furthermore, Rose knew that in order to make pastries like the ones the Haddams made, one had to be good and kind. One’s heart always came out in the baking, and if there was darkness in your soul, there would be darkness in your pastries too. In the Haddams’ pastries, though, there was light and goodness. Rose could taste it, and she hoped the baby growing inside her could too.
Sometimes, Madame Haddam would let Rose accompany her to the market, as long as Rose vowed not to speak and veiled herself with a scarf. She liked the anonymity it gave her, and at the market, even though the Haddams shopped in a Muslim neighborhood, Rose would scan the crowd desperately, hoping for a glimpse of someone from her old life. One day on the street, she saw Jean Michel, but she couldn’t yell for him because of the sudden lump in her throat. By the time she could make a sound again, he was long gone.
One evening, after saying the Salah in Arabic with the Haddams, Rose was in her own room praying in Hebrew when she turned around and saw Nabi watching her. “Come, Nabi,” she said to the boy. “Pray with me.”
He knelt beside her while she finished her prayers, and then they sat together in silence. “Rose?” he asked after a long while. “Do you think God speaks Arabic or Hebrew? Can he hear your prayers or mine?”
Rose considered this for a moment and realized that she did not know the answer; she had begun to doubt recently that God could hear her at all, no matter what language she spoke. For if he could hear her, how could he allow her family and Jacob to vanish from her life? “I do not know,” she said finally. “What do you think, Nabi?”