“Do you? Right now everyone in Europe is trying desperately to get their papers in order. For those in occupied territories, it’s literally a matter of life and death. You’re fortunate, Marthe. Your papers are in order. Just let them stay that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you’re not listening.”
“I’m hanging on your every word!”
“You’re not hearing me, then.” An inexplicable pit of dread opens in my belly as she explains, “When Beatrice arranged for the purchase of this chateau, we were trying to find homes for thousands of orphaned and refugee children. We were overrun with sobbing French village girls. Little lost Belgian boys. Abandoned babies. Serbs, Armenians, stateless children. We were determined to save as many as we could, regardless of where they came from, and we didn’t know if they’d be allowed to stay. Beatrice never allowed a scruple about official paperwork to get in her way.”
I blink. “Are you saying—are you trying to say she might have falsified my birth record?”
“If she did, I can only speculate as to her reasons, but remember that at this very moment—right here in France—there are people suffering in lice-infested detention camps because they were born in the wrong place or to the wrong mother.”
That pit of dread in my stomach widens into an abyss, and as I absorb the implications of her words, I find myself teetering on the precarious edge. Mon Dieu. Is it possible I’m not French? To find that out would be like being orphaned twice over! A smaller, more distant voice wonders . . . could I have Jewish blood?
My panicked silence makes her soften her voice. “Right now, you’re Marthe Simone, Catholic, born in Paris, 1916. A relatively safe person to be. Now isn’t the time to risk finding out if you’re someone else. Certainly not in a phone call or telegram or letter; the censors are monitoring them all.”
I swallow. “I can’t just pretend I didn’t see this file.”
“At least keep this to yourself until the baroness gets back; she might be able to answer your questions.”
The baroness is in Marseilles, about to leave for America for her daughter’s wedding. She won’t be back until after summer. The idea of having to wait to learn the truth even one more day, one more hour, one more minute makes me want to grab things and hurl them at the tall widows. But fear has also started to sink in.
Now isn’t the time to risk finding out if you’re someone else . . .
To think how frustrated I was when Monsieur Kohn resisted getting medical care for his daughter because he was scared of a name on a piece of paper. Now I’m scared of a name on a piece of paper too.
Fear, it seems, is a contagion as virulent as measles.
I sit there paralyzed with it, staring at the photos on the desk. One shows Madame LeVerrier posing with an Allied soldier from the last war, when she was still young enough to put a boot on a truck ledge and a saucy hand to her hip. She’s with another woman, who wears a bright-eyed smile of wry amusement. It takes me a moment to realize it’s the baroness because she’s so changed . . . it’s almost difficult to believe she could have ever smiled that way.
Another photograph features Madame Simon in the backseat of a large touring car amidst a group of orphaned boys—one of whom is Henri. My Henri. He’s a little gap-toothed child in a side cap that one of the American doughboys must’ve given him to keep his shaved head warm. Henri had been like me: a child who needed help. And he got help from the women of this castle. I miss him so much; Henri would understand how upsetting all this is. He’d hold me and tell me, Relax, blondie, just breathe . . .
But he’s in a German prison camp now, and since there’s nothing we can do to help each other, maybe I can help another kid . . .
Merde. Some of that claptrap about how I’m a guardian of the nation’s youth must have soaked in, because I find myself asking Madame Simon, “Do you ever let a scruple about paperwork get in your way?”
I explain the situation of the Jewish boarders at Madame Pinton’s farm and ask if we can treat the sick girl on the side. “Maybe we could admit her under a nom de guerre.” Madame Simon gives me a sharp look, but she doesn’t say no, which encourages me to argue, “Dr. Boulagnon could submit her medical records with a more French-sounding name.”
“Impossible,” she says. “Dr. Boulagnon and the family might go along, but what of the school certificate?”
“How hard could it be to make one?” All we’d need would be an official stamp. And, with a very fine paintbrush and ink . . . I think of an easier way. “Just admit her without the certificate. Pretend it was part of the application, but got misplaced. Who’s to know?”