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48.

“IT WASN’T UNTIL LATE JUNE THAT WE RETURNED TO PARIS,” ANNETTE said later, after the dinner was finished and they were again in the sitting room. “We were in a Polish hospital for three months. From there, we traveled through Germany, then Holland, then Belgium. The journey was slow because of all the destruction. We were in a camion, a transport truck, and the route was difficult, with many detours. In Germany, the people regarded us with awe. They were reserved and subdued, their land so beaten, but the ordinary people were kind.

“We arrived at the Hôtel Lutetia, where the lobby was now a center for returning déportés.” She paused. “The Germans had used this fine hotel for interrogations. But now the boulevard Raspail, with all its air of normality and ease and bonheur, was our lovely prewar Paris again. Yet we felt out of place, so humiliated and crazed and ashamed. There were very nice people at the Lutetia, and they tried to be helpful. They had set up tables in the lobby by the fireplace, under a magnificent chandelier, but the place clashed with the memories fresh in my mind such that I was in shock. We were desperate for news of my father and Monique. We had to fill out forms. We put notices on the wall. We read all the notices, people searching for loved ones, wanting news of the returning prisoners. Pictures and pleas. An agreeable young woman at the desk said, ‘Oh, yes! We had news of a Monsieur Vallon, returned from one of the camps.’ Oh, we were so happy! I clasped my mother. We embraced in the lobby and wept. It was an eternity before the young woman returned, and with a long face she apologized again and again. She had made a mistake. It was not Monsieur Vallon, she said. It was Monsieur Ballon.”

Annette lowered her head.

“But soon we learned certain things.”

She ticked off a list on her fingers.

“We learned that my father died at Buchenwald on February 6, the very day the Russians had liberated my mother and me at Koenigsberg.

“That the abbé, Father Jean, had died there too.

“That Robert had survived Buchenwald and was in Paris.

“Much later we learned that the aviateurs who had been arrested with us, as I had suspected, went to the stalag and were liberated at the end of the war.”

She paused and looked into the air, as if trying to remember more. Robert. Buchenwald. The words sank into Marshall’s mind. After a moment she shook her head and went on.

“Not long after we arrived, Monique came to the Lutetia to find us. We had managed to send a letter to her, carried to the embassy by a French officer who arrived in Poland when the war ended. For weeks, Monique had come by Métro from Saint-Mandé to meet the arrivals of the déportés. Our hope of seeing her had helped my mother survive in the hospital. When we saw her we could hardly speak. She had not only grown tall and elegant—now eleven!—but we could see the suffering on her sweet face, as if it had been continuously taut with tears and worry. Her embrace was so tender, as if she thought we might break. We were still extremely thin and weak, and she could not hide her shock.

“Monique had been with our friends, the Mauriacs, and they had cared for her, and she had continued in school. The Mauriacs had managed to retain our apartment, and thus we were able to return to the same home where you were sheltered. The Germans had plundered only the paintings and some of the furniture.

“When we walked into that apartment, my mother, for the first time in the year since our arrest, broke into tears. All her emotion of the year—her fear and worry—had gone into survival, into protecting me, keeping up my spirits, calculating means of survival, enduring the diverse hardships, hating our tormenters. She had never allowed her grief and sorrow to flow until now. My mother dropped to the floor, swooning with release but also with grief—for Papa.

“For some time I had been mother to my mother, and now I found I had to be the mother still and to hold her and caress her