In the dark cavern of the boat’s belly, she understood nothing of what was going on. Her tiny bear pressed to her tearstained face. The other children crying as the boat rocked back and forth, the lights of the airplanes circling overhead, the sound of sirens, the crush of the boat’s bow breaking through the ice.
In Stockholm, she was the last of the children to be chosen. A little blond girl in a bright blue dress, holding nothing but a small bear and a red, round valise. Pinned on her jacket was a piece of paper with the name Kaija inscribed in neat black letters.
The childless Swedish families who had arrived with the expectation that there would be a Finnish boy or girl there for them with bright eyes and a wide smile, each came and left with a toddler matching their wish. The throng of children who had arrived off the boat and stood with their names attached to their coats whittled down to one. One little girl by the name of Kaija.
She stood there alone. Her eyes betraying her confusion. She did not understand the bustle of the administrators and families around her or the strange language they spoke. Men searched for their fountain pens to sign the necessary papers so their wives could bring home the new children, who now dangled from their arms, as quickly as possible and make them their own.
Only one couple remained. Having arrived late, they had missed the selection. The husband was the first to remark about the sweet little girl who stood all alone, somewhat frightened, clutching her bear.
“There seems to be one child left, Astrid,” the man hollered out to his wife, who was rushing only a few steps behind. “Aren’t we lucky!”
The tall man, slender and modestly dressed in his Sunday finest, pushed through the departing crowd to the ropes that had been set up to corral the children. He had already taken off his hat and was wiping the perspiration from his brow when he knelt down to get a closer look at the little girl. “She certainly looks sweet,” he called back to his wife, who was now close enough to see for herself.
“She looks sad and sickly, Hugo! We arrived too late!” Her annoyance at her husband was obvious and her voice cranky and stale.
“Look at her, Astrid,” he said pointing to Kaija, “she’s only frightened. She’s all alone.”
“I thought we agreed we wanted a boy.”
“I never said that; any child will do.”
“I wanted a boy. We can come back next week when the next boat arrives. Next time we’ll be on time.”
But her husband had already made eye contact with the little girl, and he felt that it would be cruel to abandon her.
“Come on, Astrid,” he pleaded. “I think having a little girl around would do us a world of good.”
The shiny blue car drove home, the handsome driver smiling triumphantly, the two female passengers lost in dissimilar sadnesses. The little girl in the blue dress holds her bear to her cheek, her two blond braids, like two woven ropes of straw, pushed back behind her ears. She no longer weeps, her tears having dried on the bear’s paws hours before. Yet, now she is gripped with the most terrifying fear. She does not recognize the two faces who are taking her away. She does not know where she is going. She wonders where her mother is.
In the large rearview mirror, Kaija sees the handsome man who less than an hour before reached out to hold her small, pink hand, smiling at her. Beside him, his wife stares out the window, her small, veined hands rocking restlessly in her lap.
The lids of the woman’s blue eyes are heavy and forlorn, her thin lips feathered with fine lines. A bullfinch cloaked in a brown coat, a pinched mouth that in profile resembles a tiny wooden beak. She looks distantly out the window, into the snow-swallowed birches. Her gaze cut in ice, her pupils cast in the blue-gray frost. She fumbles as she buttons her coat up to her chin, her fingers, stiff like icicles, pull at the loops.
And the little girl stares at the woman’s head from behind, wishing that she could instead see the beautiful and familiar face of her mother. Hoping that when this long and winding car ride finally ends, her mother will be waiting for her with her arms outstretched and her scarf blowing around her pale white face.
She wants to will herself home. She tightens her thin arms around her small bear and recalls the sensation of her mother’s embrace. How her mother’s blond hair wove into her own. How she was gently kissed at night and how her mother’s clothes smelled like fresh air and melted snow.
Yet, the scent of home has already begun to recede from her memory. Blue-spruce and white-fir branches crackling on the fire. Now, she is enveloped by the smell of fresh leather seats and thick walls of carpet. Years later, even when she is a grown woman of twenty, she will be struck by the poignancy of this smell. For, every time she steps inside a new automobile, she will always see herself as a girl of barely two years of age, sitting in the backseat of a 1942 Volvo, struggling because she is unable to articulate her feelings into words. Struggling because she is incapable of communicating her overwhelming sense of loss.
Eight
KARELIA, FINLAND
JANUARY 1944
She had written to her daughter several times, carefully inscribing the envelopes with the address that the war agency had sent her in the mail a few days after her daughter had been transported to Stockholm.
Sirka realized that the child was too small to read or even to understand these letters. But she wrote them anyway, hoping the family in Sweden might reply to them even if they wrote to her in a language she couldn’t comprehend. Yet, as many letters as Sirka wrote, she never received a response.
Still, for nearly two years, Sirka continued to write. The letters remained a one-way dialogue between her and her only daughter, the little green-eyed girl whom she still carried closely in her heart.
Ironically, life had been no easier for them since the little girl was taken. The family still remained hungry and the fighting continued. At Sunday services, when Toivo and the boys would travel to the church only a few kilometers away, the priest’s list of boys who had perished in the fighting continued to lengthen. Now, as the fourth year of fighting ensued, with little chance of peace in sight, Sirka began to worry that, in a few years, her own sons might be drafted.
It sickened her to pass by the cemetery now: the rows of iron crosses for the lives already lost, the red flowers that grew from underneath the snow. All those young boys, their fathers—those husbands—it was too many to count.
Sirka continually reminded herself that, despite her hardship, at least her husband had returned from the front alive. Despite his wounds, she had to be grateful for that.
She had given up hoping that Toivo would return to his former self. Before the war, he had been larger than life. A robust man with a contagious laugh and a passion for the wilderness. Not to mention a passion for her. But he had returned not only with a physical wound, but with one far deeper in spirit. Incapable of fighting with his fellow soldiers, he sank deep into depression. He lost all of his physical strength, his muscles atrophying so that the flesh hung like wet linen on his bones. For hours, he would sit on the narrow wooden chair by the fire, his crutch propped against the corner, his fingers trembling at his sides.
As her husband was now incapable of fishing, Sirka and the three boys became responsible for obtaining what little food they could harvest during the cold, long winters. Three days a week, she would place birch woven shoes over her reindeer-skin-lined feet and tread through the snow. A basket slung over one shoulder and a fishing pole slid under her arm.
Her body had become more stocky over the past year, as she was required to do far more physical work than she had done when Toivo was in full health. Now, sometimes when she would go to fish on the lake, she would wear his old army parka and hat—the white ones that blended with the snow.
She had gone to the lake all by herself that afternoon, as the boys had yet to return from school. Dressed in white, her blond hair tucked underneath the fur-lined cap, she made her way into the wilderness. The Karelian birches were heavy with snow, their white trunks b
lending in with the drifts that had piled high. She sang softly to herself as she walked through the forest and raised her chin to gaze at the steely gray sky.
Walking carefully on the frozen lake, she treaded over the ice with footsteps as delicate as a deer’s. She punctured the ice slightly to insert her tackle. She wiggled the line to lower her bait.
The enemy must have seen her sitting there, her back bowed over the hole where the fishing line floated gently underneath. Yet, from the rear, she appeared very much a Finnish soldier dressed to fight.
They opened fire on her without hesitation. Five Russian bullets hitting her from behind. Only meters from where she had once given birth, her blood spilled once more. But this time, there was no blanket, no hand of her beloved, as her pale white face fell against the ice.
A band of Finnish soldiers found her three hours later. They had seen the body lying on the frozen lake, and in her pale white parka and cap, they had believed they had come across one of their own.
But, as they drew closer, they noticed her pale blond curls, delicate nose, and soft, pink mouth.
“She’s a woman,” one of the soldiers remarked, his voice echoing with regret. He knelt down and took hold of her small, ring finger. Her thin gold wedding band sparkled in the descending light.
They scooped her up like a fallen, white swan and carried her several kilometers to the church. There, the priest identified her as the wife of Toivo Laakso, a mother of three.
“Or was it four?” he pondered aloud, a thin white finger tapping against his bearded mouth.
“In times like these,” he told the three soldiers, his pale blue eyes staring blankly, “it’s difficult even for me to remember.”
Nine
LIMA, PERU
SEPTEMBER 1968
Samuel Rudin had his guilt that he took with him wherever he went. He had only a few memories of prewar France: the images of his mother scrambling to pack their suitcases and the piles of clothes that would not fit inside; the objets d’art his father told her to leave and forget, saying that, God willing, they would have new ones soon.
In his child’s eye, he saw her in her black clothes that contrasted with white satin cuffs nipped with a single pearl button, and a collar trimmed in silk. He could conjure up the sound of her footsteps, softly treading over the oxblood carpets, her fingers threading one last time through the curtains that veiled Paris from view.
In his memory, she kneels and whispers to him and his two brothers not to be afraid. She holds him by his shoulders and buries her face in his small five-year-old chest. When she rises, she leaves an imprint of her powder on his jumper and quickly instructs him to change. The image of her tear-streaked face, the scent of gardenia faintly clinging to her neck, always made him cry even at the age of thirty-four.
He never knew exactly how his father had obtained the fake passports, but he knew that his aunts and uncles had not agreed with him and had refused to go. “They’ll never come here,” Tante Rosa had insisted. “Besides, our family has been French citizens for over one hundred years!”
“The German Jews said the same thing!” Samuel’s father responded. His fist hit the dining-room table with a thud. “Shall we too wait until we are corralled up like animals, or worse?”
“We’ll take our chances,” Samuel’s uncle said softly. “Peru is on the other side of the world to us. We will have nothing when we arrive. We don’t speak the language, we will be treated like immigrants. Rosa and I will wait and see how things unfold.” He paused, raised his glass of wine, and nodded to his wife and then to the rest of the family that huddled around the table. “If things get worse, we can always come later.”
“You’re a fool, Jacob,” Samuel’s father muttered into his wine, clearly annoyed by his brother’s stubbornness. And Samuel’s mother looked at Tante Rosa, her eyes speaking in octaves: Come with us, her brown irises pleaded. But Rosa just smiled and bowed her head, her pursed lips delicately saying to his mother, “I must do as my husband wishes.”
Isaac Rudin and his wife, Justine, left France in November 1939, on a steamer bound for Peru with their three children, Samuel, André, and Théo. “We will have a new life, children,” Samuel’s father told them as they boarded the boat in Marseille. “Be good, children,” he said as he patted each of them on the back. “The first few months will be difficult for all of us, but particularly for your mother. So, let us not give her any unnecessary trouble.” He stroked his beard and watched as the tip of the French coast faded from view. Behind them, Justine lay wrapped in blankets, her long, lean legs stretched over the deck chair, her black calfskin pumps carefully shined and polished. Even with the wool blanket draped over her, Samuel recalled how elegant his mother appeared then. Her makeup was fastidiously applied—pale skin and a perfect red mouth. She had packed in only a few days, leaving so much behind. But, as the boat sailed farther from the shore, she was not thinking of her closets full of dresses, her ermine fur, or her twenty-four-person set of bone china that she had left untouched. She was thinking of her parents, of Rosa and her family. Those whom she couldn’t pack neatly away. Those whom she had left behind.
The Rudins settled in a modest home not far from the gates of Miraflores in the bustling capital of Lima. Nearly every week, Justine wrote to her sister-in-law begging her to reconsider her decision and pleading with her to convince her husband that they must come.
At night, she slept poorly. Dreaming of her parents, of Rosa and the others. It was as if she could anticipate the horror that would befall them, yet she remained powerless some hundred thousand miles away.
She tried to convince Isaac that he must act, that he must be stronger with his brother, Jacob, and insist that he and the others come before it was too late.
“What can I do, Justine?” Isaac cried. His thin, wiry body looked like a violin that was having its strings plucked every time his wife insisted he wasn’t doing enough.
“They all refused to come! And your parents…Justine, they insisted they were too old to make such a journey.”
In the end, by the time Isaac’s younger brother realized he had made a mistake in not joining his brother and his family, it was too late. Less than a year and a half later, they received their last letter from Jacob. Not even the money Isaac had sent could buy them new passports and a ticket to Peru. The Nazi soldiers had already taken the neighbors, and perhaps, within hours, they too would be taken. The irony of the last line of Jacob’s letter was even too much for Isaac to bear.
“I close this letter, dearest brother, with the admission of my foolishness. Isaac, I wished I had listened to you. In the end, dear brother, you were right.”
For months after that, Justine and Isaac prayed for another letter to arrive. But nothing came.
“We need to begin mourning them,” Justine whispered one night after it was clear that there would be no more letters, that the headlines of what was happening back in Europe were true.
The night they began their official period of grieving, she tore the children’s clothes as tradition dictated and covered the mirrors with heavy black cloth. That evening, as she and Isaac traveled to the small Sephardic synagogue to say the kaddish, Justine’s eyes were red from crying. Her willowy frame appeared haggard and concave. From underneath her black crepe dress, Samuel could see the trembling of his mother’s limbs, the high relief of her collarbone, the two round knobs so pronounced that her pearls seemed to hang like a rope strung across two pegs.
His father appeared defeated. His suit hung like wasted wool, as if it lacked the necessary form to fill its lines and seams. The old man’s face appeared frozen. As if he could not contain his disbelief that he was mourning for a family that he could not bury. Without a proper burial, without going through the rituals of death—the interment of the coffin, the throwing of dirt on the grave—it was tempting to believe that he could maintain the fantasy that his brother and his brother’s family were still alive and safe.
Both Justine?
??s and Isaac’s guilt consumed them. It fed off their bones; it harvested the light from their eyes. They were no longer capable of having a conversation between them. They could not even enjoy their food.
“This has no taste,” Isaac would say as he pushed his plate away from him. “I have too much work to do to eat.” He would then leave his wife and three sons and retreat to his office, where he would not do a single shred of paperwork. He would simply stare at the ceiling for hours.
Samuel’s mother, however, would remain at the dining-room table while her three boys ate their dinner. Her attendance was not derived from any sense of maternal duty, but could rather be attributed to the catatonic state she had slipped into after the arrival of Jacob’s last letter. Like her husband, she hardly touched the food on her plate, and she remained silent as the servants entered the dining room serving and clearing the dishes with care. On the few occasions she did speak, Samuel recalled that it was always about how they should be grateful, that their cousins and other relatives were far less fortunate than they. His two brothers would always grumble as their mother spoke. As young boys, they were far more eager to shovel the food into their bellies and be out of the house where they could meet friends and be where things were far less strained. Samuel, however, rarely left the table until his mother stood up from her seat. He thought if he was good enough—if he waited patiently enough—that one day the mother he had had back in France would return.
That day never came. With each passing month Samuel’s mother seemed to retreat further from him and the rest of the family. The chic woman who had sat on the boat dreaming of the faces of her loved ones had been replaced by a ghost who spoke little and cared even less for her appearance. Fine lines channeled through her once porcelain skin. And the smile he had known as a child vanished and was replaced by a permanent expression of strain.
Unlike her husband, who was able to mask his grief, she appeared to be ravished by hers. It was as if she would have preferred to die rather than to live with her guilt at her good fortune of having survived. And even though she never spoke of it aloud, her face betrayed her. The flesh of the eyelids ebbed downward, her mouth was tense, her lips permanently pursed. Every day, from the moment she rose until the time she lay down in her bed, she wondered why it had been her destiny to marry the wiser brother.