The next day Sylvie waits for Christine by Julien’s grave, and when she comes, Sylvie hands her the wooden box. Finally, she thinks, a legitimate claimant for Clara’s jewel case. Her fingers trembling, Christine opens the lid and looks at its meager contents: three pebbles, a lace bonnet, the letter sealed with a drop of wax. She slides her nail under the seal, smooths out the creases, and reads the first words out loud: My darling girls. Her voice falters and she tries again: My darling girls. Tears blind her eyes, and she shakes her head and hands it to Sylvie. My darling girls, reads Sylvie. Her voice trembles as well, but she does not pause, carried along by the urgency of Clara’s words.

My darling girls,

How you press me for another story, and another, and another…the ones you like best are tales from my childhood, so distant from your lives that they seem like fairy tales, and I find comfort in those dear scenes as well. You are already asleep, and I look at you, your curls glinting in the candlelight, and long to fondle your hair like a miser gloating over his gold. But I am afraid to wake you, so I write to you instead by the sputtering light of the candle. They are rationed now, we can only buy one or two at a time, not a whole box. Everything is scarce this year, even more than last. Too little meat to fill out your cheeks, too little milk to strengthen your bones. Marie does her best with what she can find in the streets, and when I see you choke down sparrow meat and stale bread, I would give anything to serve you my mother’s kugelhopf.

I used to eat it fresh from the oven and always burned my tongue because I couldn’t wait for the raisins to cool. Those days in Alsace, we had enough bread and enough firewood for the cold nights when Papa would work on his furs, quickly marking them with a blue chalk, then cutting along the lines with his razor, he had a very sure hand, you can’t afford to make mistakes with fur. Even when times were hard, Papa always had work, the rich continued to order his coats.

Julien…

Sylvie stops abruptly. Seeing his name written on paper instead of carved in stone makes Julien seem suddenly alive. The lines blur before her eyes, and she blinks away her own tears to continue reading for Christine’s sake, whose face is bathed with tears as she listens hungrily to her mother speaking to her from beyond the grave.

Julien would read aloud to us, always in French, my father did not allow us to speak German at home even though we were taught German in school until the war ended, the earlier war, I mean, not this one. My father asked us who is the French hero you admire most, and wanting to be first with the answer, I shouted out, Napoleon, Papa, it’s Napoleon, but Julien thought for a while and then said Zola, and I could tell Papa was better pleased with my brother’s answer than mine.

I loved the summer evenings when women would gather by the fountain of St. Hune—the saint of washerwomen according to local lore—and we children would play in the endless twilight until it was time for bed. But what I miss most are the storks that came every year to Hunawihr. You point to the pigeons on the rooftops and say, we have birds here, maman. Such city girls! Used to manicured parks and signs that say keep off the grass. When I was a girl, I ran barefoot on the grass around our house, it was soft and wild and scented with chamomile.

I hated the thought of leaving home, but my mother had enrolled me at Madame Weil’s pensionnat for Jewish girls in Nancy, where cousin Rebekah had studied. She later married a classmate’s brother and my mother told me I must also marry a Jew, friends are all very well, but only Jews are family, no one else stands by you when trouble comes. I wish she had met Bernard, she would know that isn’t true.

But I can’t blame her for her distrust, not after what happened to Julien. Some boys from our village beat him so badly that he lost sight in one eye. And no one came to commiserate, not any of the women with whom my mother washed clothes in the fountain, not any of the men whom my father had helped when they needed an extra hand with the harvest. Only the schoolteacher stopped by to shake his head and say times were hard and trouble was spreading, we had better find somewhere safe. My father said, “We won’t let them drive us from here, we’ll fight back,” but my mother said, “I can’t sleep here another night, this isn’t the first time they’ve attacked us, why wait for the next time, it might be Clara.” I cried, “But why would they hurt me? I haven’t done anything!” My father looked at me, then rose to his feet and pulled an old valise from under the bed. “But why, Papa?” I persisted. He stroked my hair and said, “Sometimes people hate you not for what you do, but who you are.” “But Papa, who are we, that they should hate us?” “We are Israelites, chérie.” “But Papa, I thought we were French.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “we are as French as anyone can be.”

My father went into his workshop and rolled up the furs, packing them in the valise to give us a start in the big city. Strasbourg, I asked, because it was the biggest city I could imagine. No, they said, Paris. Paris! At first I was excited and then it struck me that Minou might not like it, but my mother said nonsense, we can’t possibly take the cat with us, and then I started thinking how Minou would have taken up with another family by the time we came back. I always thought that we would return, sometimes I think it still. The train ride made me sleepy, but when I put my head down on a bundle, the cat started meowing and my mother slapped me because I had smuggled Minou in place of the fur hat that would have kept me snug that winter.

How I wish I had it now, to bring you a little warmth. I dread the coming winter, there’s no wood, no coal, nothing, nothing, nothing, how will we manage?

But you have your own urgent questions: Why can’t we play in the park anymore? Why can’t we go to the library? Why do we wear yellow stars? Why must we always ride the last car in the metro? Your smooth foreheads are wrinkled with perplexity, and you are right to be puzzled. But even those questions have stopped since your father left and we hid up here. There is only one question which preoccupies you now: “Where is he,” you ask, “where is Papa?” I turn my face away, I cannot answer. “In London?” you ask. For you, everyone who is not here is across the Channel, fighting for France. And I say yes, and I would give anything to be by his side. But then I think of you, and I would willingly stay here for the rest of my life if only it would keep you safe.

Oh, my darlings! What good girls you are, uncomplaining even though there is so much for you to lament. You quietly play your childish games and I overhear you whispering to each other about pitchipoi, and I wonder what that is. And then one day I understand it’s a special playground where you run freely with the other children, where you find once more everything you have lost, your friends, your toys. Most of all your father, whom you greet with such joy. I feel my heart will burst when I think of Bernard, but I must be strong for your sake, you are all I have left now.

So I close my eyes and I dream of pitchipoi, too. I walk into our little house in Hunawihr, which is just as I remember. My brother is reading by the fireplace, his eyes unharmed. A kugelhopf is baking in the oven, Minou is asleep on the windowsill, and through the open window I can see the ruined fortresses of Ribeauvillé.

Ah, how suffocating this room is, no windows, no light. When will this darkness be over? But then I look at you and I think, for you I would bear much worse. On my knees I pray for God to send all the suffering upon me, but spare my girls.

The candle is almost burned down now, and before it goes out, I hold it up to gaze at you, to look at your precious faces, so beautiful, so innocent. Even when I close my eyes, that is what I see, that is what I will always see, the last thing before I sleep.

Sylvie puts her arms around Christine, who is sobbing uncontrollably. The shadows lengthen around them, alone now among the tombstones. The caretaker walks past, jingling his keys, it’s already past closing time, and they can come back another day, his charges aren’t going anywhere, not until the trumpets sound on Judgment Day. Christine wipes her eyes and replaces the objects in the box: the letter, the square of black lace, the three pebbles. Then she changes her mind, takes out the stones and arranges them on Julien’s grave.

Watching her, Sylvie thinks that one day Christine will know what Julien knew, that no one escapes unscathed, it is the lot of the survivor to bear scars both visible and invisible, but you honor the life you’ve been spared to live by admitting into it the possibility of happiness. And then she thinks about Isabelle, preoccupied with wills and bequests, rushing to rue Elzévir in pursuit of a valuable painting, but it is Sylvie who has stumbled across the children’s true inheritance, the story of their father’s past. Julien’s silence was meant as a shelter, but might equally one day prove an affliction, just as it has for Lilou, hollowed out for so long by not knowing. They need to know, she thinks, they deserve to know. It is part of their story, part of who they are.

And as she looks around the graveyard, she feels the strangest sensation, her heart expanding within her, growing larger and larger and larger until it seems to contain all these stories that are not separate at all but connected in strange and marvelous ways, herself and Christine and Clara and Julien, and Charles and Alexandra, and Marie and Mathilde, and yes even Isabelle, and all the living and all the dead, and still it continues to expand until it is as vast as the sky and she feels that for this moment, at least, she is what Julien called her, Sylvie, coeur de lion.