Serge encouraged her to go out alone. Each day she went in a different direction. By Monday she had already visited the Champs Elysées, the Champs de Mars, and the Jardins du Luxembourg and found herself drifting off the end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and into the Rue Mouffetard.
Early in the evening she sat in the window of Les Hérons Rouges, a small café about halfway down the Mouffetard. She would have liked coffee but they had none, so she sipped at a weak black tea. She would have sold her soul for a croissant but they had none of those, either. Instead, she found a phrase of her father’s popped into her head like a warning from the dead and she deployed it—she counted her blessings. August in Paris—a Paris that might get too hot and was pitifully short of everything—but so what?
It was around half past six in the evening. There had been a human surge up and down the street for the last hour that was beginning to thin. It had been the best free entertainment she had ever seen that didn’t involve music.
She had looked out fascinated, and now she was aware of someone looking back at her from the street, seemingly equally fascinated. A thin man in a shabby olive-coloured cotton suit that hung badly on him. It was Georges Pasdeloup, the roofer who had fed her dried fruit and wrinkled apples in Auschwitz.
He came into the café, stood a moment in silence before saying, “It is you isn’t it? I never knew your name.”
Every hair on her head bristled but there were only two things she could possibly say.
“I’m Méret Voytek. Please, won’t you join me?”
He waved to the bartender, mouthed vin rouge, and sat down.
“You’ve . . . you’ve gained w . . . w . . . weight,” he said. “Not that I would normally comment on a lady’s w . . . w . . . weight. But we were all of us so thin a year ago. I . . . I . . . have not.”
He tugged at his bag of a suit.
“This was still in my w . . . wardrobe where I had left it when the boche came for me. I used to fill it. Somehow, I cannot seem to. No m . . . m . . . matter what I eat.”
Another phrase sprang to mind, not one of her father’s generous helpings of homespun philosophy but one of her mother’s scathing criticisms. He looked, as she would have said, “like death warmed up.” And she could not recall that he had stammered.
“Georges, is it not?”
He nodded as though uttering any more might be an effort.
“When did you get back, Georges?”
“In May. The B . . . B . . . British took the camp I was in. The Germans had abandoned us already. We were starving. I thought nothing could be worse than Auschwitz. I was wrong.”
She listened to Georges’s tale—how he had survived the journey from Auschwitz to Belsen; how the British found so many dead they had buried them with a bulldozer; how, on their return, the French had deloused them en masse at the Gare d’Orsay not thinking that that was exactly what the Germans had done at the other end of their journey—and she had agreed that yes, they could meet again.
And all the way back to the apartment she had regretted the promise, knowing all the while that she was bound to keep it.