'Luna?' breathed Yves.
Aimee's throat caught before she could answer.
'You left without saying goodbye.'
Aimee paused, what do I do?
As if he could read her thoughts, he said, 'Get back over here. The entry code is 2223. I'm waiting.' He hung up.
He sounded so sure of himself that it made her angry. Well, she wouldn't go. How could a coherent, rational woman voluntarily want to sleep with a member of an Aryan supremacist group?
Quickly, Aimee unzipped her dress, tossed her pearls in the drawer, and pulled on her ripped jeans and black leather jacket. 'You're going to stay with Uncle Maurice,' she told Miles Davis. She grabbed his carrier, throwing in extra dog biscuits. 'Help him mind the kiosk. You like his poodle, Bizou, don't you?' He jumped in his bag, eagerly wagging his tail. 'I thought so.' She ran back down her stairway and hailed a taxi.
HARTMUTH SAT WAITING ON the bench in the Square Georges-Cain and watched the shadows lengthen. He'd bought Provencal sweets, the same fruit
What would she look like? He'd been eighteen and she fourteen the last time he'd seen her. Now they were in their sixties and briefly he wondered if he'd still be attracted to her. But all these years he'd dreamed of her, Sarah. Only her. The one woman who had entered the core of his being.
He had to take this second chance, no matter what. He refused to die full of regret. He'd draft a letter of resignation to the trade ministry citing ill health. Somehow he'd escape the Werewolves. He'd camp on her doorstep until she accepted him.
There was a slight rustle and thump in the bushes near him. He went over to investigate and found only pebbles. When he returned to the bench a figure sat huddled in a large cape. He nodded and sat back down. Then Hartmuth turned back to look.
Those eyes. Cerulean blue pools so deep he started to lose himself again and the years fell away. There was no doubt.
For a moment he was as shy and awkward as when they'd first touched. A stuttering, gangling eighteen- year-old.
Wrinkles webbed in a fine pattern from the corners of her eyes. Dark hollows lay under them and her pale skin glowed translucently in the dim streetlight. Exactly how he remembered: pearl-like and shining. A hooded cape covered all but her eyes and prominent cheekbones. And she was still beautiful.
His plastic surgery hadn't fooled her, he knew. She would notice the deep lines etched in his face and the crepey folds in his neck. And his hair, once black, had turned completely white.
She searched his face, then spoke quietly. 'You look different, Helmut.'
No one had called him Helmut in fifty years.
'Your face changed but your eyes are the same. I could tell it was you.'
'Sarah,' he breathed, hypnotized again by her eyes. 'I've l-looked for you.'
'You lied, Helmut, you deported my parents.' She lapsed into the jumble of French and German they'd spoken. 'They were dead and you knew all the time.'
He'd expected anything but this. In his dreams she was as eager as he. He realized she was waiting for him to say something.
'W-we d-deported everyone then. I found out later that they were gone but I s-saved you. I kept looking for you after the war, but it was always a d-dead end, because I'd erased your r-records myself.' He reached for her hands.
She pulled away and shook her head. 'Is that all you can say?'
'You're the only one,' he said softly, reaching again for her hands. '
'You ruined my life,' she said hoarsely. 'I stayed here. Saw 'Nazi whore' written in everyone's eyes. Fifteen years old and I gave birth on a wooden floor while the concierge used metal ice tongs as forceps to pull our bastard out. At Liberation, they threw us in the street. The mob tried to lynch me while I clutched the baby and they screamed, '
She paused and took a deep breath. 'Of all the collabos, I was the one they hated the most, even though I'd shared your food with them.'
Her eyes glittered in the dim glow of a far-off streetlight. 'I stood on a statue's pedestal for eighteen hours. They tarred my forehead with a swastika. Jeering, they asked me how I could sleep with a Nazi while my family burned in the Auschwitz ovens.'
He shook his head in disbelief. 'We had a baby? What happened?' he rasped in pain.
'The baby died when my breast milk dried up. You know, Helmut, I've had so many reasons to hate you it's hard to pick the crucial one. After Liberation, I hid in a freezing farm cellar and fought with the hogs for their food because collaborators with shaved heads had to hide. After a year, the swastika on my forehead finally began to heal. But for years, constant infections occurred. I had to leave Europe, go away. There was nothing here for me. Nothing. No one. The only ship leaving Marseilles was bound for Algeria, so I—once a strict Kosher Jew—ended up cooking for
She slowly pulled the hood off until it draped in folds on her shoulders. Short, white bristly hair surrounded her head like a halo, highlighting the jagged, pinkish swastika scar on her forehead. It glowed in the dim light.
Hartmuth gasped.
Her voice wobbled when she spoke again. 'I never really liked men to touch me, after you and after the baby. At first, it was hard even with my husband. He was a good, patient man and put up with me until I was ready. My insides had been butchered with those tongs, I couldn't have children.'
Hartmuth listened in anguish. He took her hand and caressed it but she was oblivious, determined to finish.
'Algeria changed, I'd grown no roots there. But now I had papers, a little money. After my poor husband died this year, I felt so lonely that I returned to France. In Paris, at least I felt that any ghosts would be ghosts I knew. I wanted to live in the Marais again, the only home I knew. I could walk by my parents' apartment every day, even if another generation born after the war lived there. But it's so expensive here. With my references I found a job. I found out what happened to my family. I found out what you did to the tenants in our building.'
Hartmuth stammered, 'A-l-ll I c-could do was save your life and love you, I couldn't save the others, we had to f-follow orders, it was war. I was eighteen and you were the most beautiful being that I had ever t-touched. I wrote poetry after I'd see you. Dreams swam in my head. I wanted to take you to live in Hamburg.'
'You've living in the past,' she said.
He took her face in his hands. 'I love you, Sarah.'
She turned her head away for the first time. How could he make her feel like that again? That longing! She almost reached out to him but her parents' faces floated in front of her. She shook her head. 'Your mind is in a past we never had.'
'You don't have to speak, I know your heart. You feel guilty that you still love the enemy,' he said. 'What we have doesn't recognize borders or religion.'
'Rutting in the dirt?' she said. 'Eating like pigs while others starved? Hiding in the catacombs, always hiding, afraid to be seen. . .what was that?'
He hung his head. 'I never wanted you to have pain, n-never. Even when there was no hope that you were still alive, you haunted me.'
