Sarah’s Key

Zoë sat on my knees, pressing her slim back against me. I took a whiff of her thick, shiny hair, the familiar sugary Zoë-like smell that always reminded me of when she was a toddler, and smoothed a couple of unruly strands down with my palm.

I thought of Sarah Starzynski, who had been Zoë’s age when horror came into her life.

I closed my eyes. But I could still see the moment when the policemen tore the children from the mothers at Beaune-la-Rolande. I could not get the image out of my mind.

I held Zoë close, so close she gasped.

ODD, THE WAY DATES go. Ironic, almost. Tuesday, July 16, 2002. The Vel’ d’Hiv’ commemoration. And precisely the date of the abortion. It was to take place in some clinic I had never been to, somewhere in the seventeenth arrondissement, near Mamé’s nursing home. I had asked for another date, feeling July 16 was overloaded with meaning, but it had not been possible.

Zoë, fresh out of school, was leaving for Long Island via New York with her godmother, Alison, one of my old friends from Boston, who often flew between Manhattan and Paris. I was to join my daughter and Charla’s family on the twenty-seventh. Bertrand did not take his vacation till August. We usually spent a couple of weeks in Burgundy, in the old Tézac house. I had never fully enjoyed my summers there. My parents-in-law were anything but relaxed. Meals had to be eaten on time, conversations kept mild, and children were seen and not heard. I wondered why Bertrand always insisted that we spent time there instead of going on a vacation, just the three of us. Luckily, Zoë got on well with Laure and Cécile’s boys, and Bertrand played endless te

“They’re just jealous French cows. You look too damn good in a bikini,” scoffed Christophe, whenever I complained of those painful summers. “They’d talk to you if you were riddled with cellulite and varicose veins.” He made me guffaw, yet I could not quite believe him. But I did love the beauty of the place, the ancient quiet house that always felt cool even during the fiercest summers, the large rambling garden full of old oak trees and the view on the curvaceous river Yo

The rue de Saintonge apartment, according to Bertrand and Antoine, would be ready in early September. Bertrand and his team had done a great job. But I had not yet envisaged living there. Living there now that I knew what had happened. The wall had been pulled down, but I remembered the secret deep cupboard. The cupboard where little Michel had waited for his sister to come back. In vain.

The story haunted me, relentlessly. I had to admit I was not looking forward to living in the apartment. I dreaded nights there. I dreaded bringing back the past, and I had no idea how to prevent myself from doing so.

It was hard not being able to talk to Bertrand about it. I needed his down-to-earth approach, longed to hear him say that despite the awfulness, we’d get over it, we’d find a way. I could not tell him. I had promised his father. What would Bertrand think of the whole story, I wondered. And his sisters? I tried to imagine their reaction. And Mamé’s. It was impossible. The French were closed up, like clams. Nothing must be shown. Nothing must be revealed. Everything was to remain unruffled, undisturbed. That’s how it was. How it had always been. And I found it increasingly tough to live with.

With Zoë gone to America, home felt empty. I spent more time at the office, working on a witty piece for the September issue about young French writers and the Parisian literary scene. Interesting and time consuming. Every evening, I found it harder and harder to leave the office, put off by the prospect of the silent rooms that awaited me. I took the long way home, reveling in what Zoë called “Mom’s long shortcuts,” enjoying the city’s fiery beauty at sunset. Paris was begi

Yes, I loved Paris, I had always loved it, but as I strolled at dusk along the Pont Alexandre III, with the golden dome of the Invalides gleaming like a huge jewel, I missed the States with such poignancy that the pain seared right to the pit of my gut. I missed home-what I had to call home, even if I had lived in France for more than half my life. I missed the casualness, the freedom, the space, the easiness, the language, the simplicity of being able to say “you” to each and every person, not the complicated vous and tu I had never perfectly mastered and which still threw me. I had to admit it. I missed my sister, my parents, I missed America. I missed it like I had never missed it before.

As I neared our neighborhood, beckoned by the tall brown grimness of the Tour Montparnasse that Parisians loved to hate (but that I was fond of because it allowed me to find my way back from any arrondissement), I suddenly wondered what Paris had been like under the Occupation. Sarah’s Paris. Gray-green uniforms and round helmets. The implacability of curfew and Ausweis. German signs posted up in Gothic lettering. Huge swastikas plastered over the noble stone buildings.

And children wearing the yellow star.

THE CLINIC WAS A well-to-do, cushy place, with beaming nurses, obsequious receptionists and careful flower arrangements. The abortion was to take place the following morning, at seven. I had been asked to come in the night before, on July 15. Bertrand had gone to Brussels, to clinch an important business deal. I hadn’t insisted for him to be there. I somehow felt better with him not around. It was easier to settle into the dainty apricot-colored room alone. At another moment, I would have wondered why Bertrand’s presence seemed superfluous. How surprising, considering he was part and parcel of my everyday life. Yet here I was, going through the severest crisis of my life, without him, and relieved at his absence.

I moved like a robot, mechanically folding my clothes, putting my toothbrush on the shelf above the basin, staring through the window at the bourgeois façades of the quiet street. What the hell are you doing? whispered an i