Seated at Julien’s desk, Sylvie opens Clara’s jewel case, releasing the dormant aroma of cedar into the air. She takes out the contents—three smooth pebbles, an Alsatian bonnet of black lace, a folded sheet of onionskin paper sealed with a drop of wax and addressed to my daughters—and wonders if Marie had kept the letter from Julien to spare him pain or because she hoped it might yet be claimed by the lost children. The lost children! If they had lived, they would be as old as Sylvie now, but the dead never age.

She pulls out Clara’s photograph from the desk drawer and studies once more that young countenance. The bright eyes, the parted lips. Again she seems on the verge of speaking. But what Clara has to say is not meant for her eyes, it is addressed to my daughters. It’s not for Sylvie to unseal the secrets of that letter; and as for the secrets of the envelope marked with the letter M, she has done what she can, she can do no more.

Sylvie hears a knock next door and wonders who can be calling on the Americans. She sticks her head out and finds the judge on the landing. Monsieur de Cheroisey hands her a magazine he has brought for Will. He sounds disappointed that the Taylors aren’t home.

“I was just clearing out some papers and found this issue from last summer. I think the American will find it interesting.”

Sylvie is surprised the judge has chosen to bring the magazine up himself instead of leaving it with Ana Carvalho. Perhaps like herself he finds it refreshing to be around the Taylors. And, of course, their impermanence makes such overtures of friendship perfectly safe; by summer’s end they will be gone. “I believe they’ve driven down to the Loire.”

“Ah, the châteaux,” he says approvingly. “But one needn’t go that far, the most dazzling one is only fifty kilometers from here. For true connoisseurs, Vaux-le-Vicomte outshines them all, even the palace of the Sun King. But then Le Vau was the architect, so no wonder, and we’re fortunate to be surrounded by his masterpieces without even crossing the bridge.”

Sylvie smiles at being included in the “we” and wonders again whether the arrival of fresh outsiders has led to this acceptance, or merely the passage of time. The judge turns to leave and Sylvie goes back inside. The cover strikes her as vaguely familiar, and she is sure she has seen it before. Flipping through the glossy pages of La Vie Française, she sees the article earmarked for Will, about a billionaire collector who had recently acquired some bottles from Thomas Jefferson’s famed wine collection. She glances at the remaining articles, all lavishly illustrated: Belle Époque interiors in Paris, famous recipes from Relais et Châteaux hotels, an interview with Georges Simenon. About to put the magazine away, her attention is suddenly arrested.

She looks closely at the black-and-white photograph on the last page, accompanying a regular feature called “I Remember…” The photograph shows a scene at a railway station, nothing remarkable about it, there must be thousands of photographs like it in family albums all over the country, children leaving for a summer holiday at a colonie de vacances up in the mountains, waving as the train pulls out of the station. The only thing that sets it apart from those innocent family photographs is a young boy on the platform, looking up at German soldiers in uniform.

Sylvie reads the accompanying essay, no misty stroll down memory lane, no lament for the snows of yesteryear, but words written at white heat, burning themselves on the page:

Yes, I remember. I had just turned thirteen that summer of 1942, an age to prepare for my bar mitzvah in normal times. But these were not normal times, and nothing could prepare me for this hard coming-of-age. My father was rounded up the winter before and since then his employer, a wine merchant named Jacques Laferrière, had shown us extraordinary kindness, above and beyond what one might expect from someone linked to us neither by blood nor friendship, but simply as one human being to another.

When rumors of a great roundup reached us, no one believed it would include women and children. But Monsieur Laferrière insisted on hiding us in the wineshop, huddled in the same small room where my father had done his accounts in more “normal” times. Even after the raid was over, we could not go home, the police had sealed off our apartment. In any case, Monsieur Laferrière said it was dangerous for us to remain. He arranged false papers, bought us tickets to the unoccupied zone, and volunteered to accompany us. My little brother and I spoke faultless French, but we were afraid our mother’s strong accent might give us away, so we filled her mouth with gauze and bandaged her face as if she was recovering from dental surgery.

Monsieur Laferrière instructed us to separate and act as though we did not know each other. I sat at the far end of the carriage across from my mother. Monsieur Laferrière and Benjy were near the front. The carriage was filled with children leaving for their summer holidays, some being dropped off by their parents, some accompanied by schoolteachers, and Benjy and Monsieur Laferrière looked unremarkable among them. Our papers were checked without incident, and as the whistle sounded, I let out a sigh of relief. Too soon. Three German officers boarded the train with their dogs, and all we could do was watch in horror as they took Benjy and Monsieur Laferrière off. My mother moaned and tried to tear the bandage from her mouth, and people all around commiserated with her agony. A pulled tooth, quelle douleur! But Benjy got down holding Monsieur Laferrière’s hand, and did not cast a single glance at us as the train pulled away without him.

My mother and I made it to Nice, where we took refuge with her cousins. Monsieur Laferrière wrote to us that the Germans roughed him up and took away the boy. The wine merchant was released after six weeks in prison, but he had no further news of Benjamin. We learned my brother’s fate once the war was over, that he had been sent to the death camps with a group of orphans. My mother never got over it. She had fled Russia for France, but now she could not bear to live here any longer and left for Israel, the only place she said where it was no trespass to be a Jew.

But I chose to come back to Paris and shout Monsieur Laferrière’s heroism from the rooftops, as much to thank him as to shame others. He was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor Israel bestows on gentiles who helped a Jew during the dark years of the Occupation at great risk and with no thought of reward. I later married Jacques Laferrière’s granddaughter, and he is truly my family now, great grandfather to my children. He is proud that when they ask what he did during the war, he can look them in the eye and say, I was among Les Justes Parmi Les Nations.

Thanks to him, I am alive today, no longer a boy on the verge of manhood, but a man of almost sixty. But one thing has not changed in all the intervening years: in my dreams my hand still reaches up to pull the safety chain, forcing the train to stop, to return time to that instant, so that it is I who hold my brother’s hand and descend with him to the platform, and each time at the moment of waking I realize that no train and no clock on this earth can take me back, that I can only keep moving forward, relentlessly forward.

Dazed, Sylvie looks again at the old photograph, examines each face with close attention, not just the little boy, but the stocky man with him, squaring up to the soldiers, the faces looking out of the windows of the moving train with expressions of surprise, pity, indifference. She rereads the author’s note, which says Ari Wolkowsky lives in Paris and is working on a documentary film for the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine. And then she is struck by a notion so daring that it hardly seems credible.

She rushes to Julien’s desk but finds only a pile of his scientific journals, neatly stacked and freshly dusted by Ana Carvalho. In a frenzy she looks through the boxes of books and papers she and Alexandra had moved from Julien’s study during the recent remodeling. Sylvie cannot explain why she feels this sense of urgency. She empties out the boxes, rummages through the papers, until at last she is ready to admit defeat. Maybe she hadn’t seen it in Julien’s study at all, it’s not the kind of magazine he would have bought. Perhaps she had seen it at a newsstand, or at someone’s house. But whose? She hasn’t visited anyone since last summer, not after the quick progression of Julien’s disease, from diagnosis to death in a matter of months. In any case, she had better start putting away the books and tidying up the papers, she doesn’t want Ana Carvalho to see the room in such disarray.

She sighs and picks up one of Julien’s books. Freud’s L’Interprétation des rêves. She places it back in the box with as much reverence as Julien himself accorded his teacher. Though the windows are closed, a slight gust of air blows some papers across the floor, and as she bends to pick them up, she notices a folded-over periodical that had fallen behind one of the boxes. She unfolds it and smooths it out. Yes, it is the same cover, she wasn’t mistaken after all.

Hardly daring to breathe, Sylvie opens it to the back page, which is dog-eared with Julien’s characteristic fold. And at the bottom of the page, in his unmistakable hand, is a telephone number. Feeling she is being guided in some mysterious way, Sylvie goes to the phone and dials the number. It is indeed the CDJC.

She asks for an appointment with the documentary filmmaker. She can’t explain why she has this strong impulse to connect with him, what can he tell her, after all? But in any event, she feels compelled to tell him that she has been pierced to the heart by his story, that his sorrow has helped her to understand Julien’s sorrow, to grasp the scale of the Shoah, that there were six million such stories, and so few left now to remember.

She puts away the magazine, strangely impatient to meet Ari Wolkowsky, haunted by the words which continue to echo in her mind over the following days: Each time at the moment of waking I realize that no train and no clock on this earth can take me back, that I can only keep moving forward, relentlessly forward.