In This Hospitable Land (5 page)

The train pulled into Ostend close to schedule. André rose reflexively and made his exhausted way onto the platform, then walked the short distance to the station for the tram that ran along the coast between the French and Dutch borders. It would be at least twenty minutes before he reached Le Coq. Yet seated almost alone on the electric transport he felt oddly at ease. Physically and emotionally drained, lulled by the tram’s rocking and clacking, André wondered whether Einstein hadn’t been right. Maybe André needed to consider rejoining the Belgian army to do battle with the Nazis.

And maybe not. Though he felt too tired to be certain of anything it occurred to André that the moment when one’s ideals are most sorely tested is the moment one must cling to them most strongly.

Three hours after leaving Brussels, André struggled uphill on foot from the Flemish-style tram station to reach the villa, his family, and rest.

What worried him most now he had no intention of sharing with anyone, especially those he loved best. Recent arcane developments in the study of the elements had made an atomic bomb a distinct if highly theoretical possibility. André suspected Hitler already had his best scientific minds and technicians hard at work making that potential actual. Fascists were splitting the world. Physicists were splitting the atom. It was hard to guess which was more dangerous. But nothing could be more fateful than the two combined.

Denise was standing by the door willing André’s return. When he finally walked up out of the gloom, she ran to him and pressed her face against his, holding him tight.

“I’m home,” he said simply.

“Thank goodness,” Denise whispered with deep emotion.

She led him into the villa and through the gathered family. André greeted each in their special way. Then Denise guided him to their room where he collapsed gratefully onto the bed and instantly fell asleep.

Friday had started well for Denise as she rose to the cheerful sounds of children playing.

Easing into the living room she marveled again at her surroundings. Compared to her previous homes this villa was cramped and threadbare, but with its low dunes and long smooth beach, Le Coq was a delightful retreat. At the height of summer Belgians arrived there in astonishing numbers to swim, sunbathe, and play ball. The rest of the year it was more desolate, but even in the continued cold of early May, Denise reveled in the resort’s stark, elemental nature.

“Tea!” her eldest daughter, Ida, called out gleefully, abandoning her composition book and racing to the antique toy chest jammed into the less-than-commodious space. At five and a half Ida read constantly and worked hard at learning to write, frequently camping out in a corner of the couch, knees pulled up to brace her notebook as she traced and retraced her letters, the pale-pink tip of her tongue protruding in concentration. Ida’s younger sister Christel, who had turned two the previous Sunday, raced to join the sibling she idolized and adored. Small for her age, Christel shared the family’s wavy chestnut-colored hair, clear white skin, and glow of good health. Smiling her cherubic smile by her sister’s side, she clutched the well-hugged doll she took everywhere.

Their cousins Katie and Philippe had come across from their villa next door a little earlier than usual. Katie, who would turn six the next week, brushed her soft dark hair with her ever-present hairbrush, avoiding the clips holding the longest strands behind her small, delicate ears. Adorable-looking fourteen-month-old Philippe, the only male Sauverin in the next generation, held his sister’s hand and clutched one of the miniature lead cars and trucks that absorbed him. They were wonderful children whose faults—hers to whine when she didn’t get her way, his to act the pampered prince—were due to their parents’ indulgence.

Denise took pride in them all. How lovely the girls looked in the dresses she had sewn for them and how handsome Philippe was in his beloved sailor suit, which she had made by hand.

Overseeing this happy scene, Rose Sauverin, André and Alex’s sixty-one-year-old mother, hardly looked her age despite a few slight wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes surrounded ever-bright hazel eyes and her thin smiling lips were made up prettily with just a hint of red. Rose possessed an especially fine sense of style and retained much of the beauty attested by her wedding pictures.

Denise found her father-in-law Louis munching gaufrettes in the kitchen. Tickled as always to see him, she was shocked to discover Geneviève at the counter in her nightclothes compulsively gobbling fresh strawberries—a rare, prized item.

“Geneviève! After all the trouble I went to get those for your birthday dinner tomorrow, why are you eating them now?”

Mouth half full, Geneviève answered flatly, “Ask him,” nodding toward her husband.

Denise locked eyes with Alexandre Sauverin’s blazing eyes and stifled a cry.

Like his brother, Alex had awoken that morning in the dark. After a week and a half in his rented villa he still wasn’t sleeping well, unable to adjust to the murmurous crash of the surf though used to Brussels’s street noise, ever present in his grand apartment on the fashionable Avenue Émile Duray and in the smaller place on the Rue du Magistrat he and his family had moved to before coming here.

Annoyed, Alex got up and pulled the drapes aside, careful not to rouse Geneviève who, always sensitive and delicate, was still weak from a bout of scarlet fever. Running his fingers through strands of brown hair thinning less quickly than those of his two-year-older brother, Alex watched the sea wash against the beach, listened to the harsh winds buffet the stuccoed walls of the villa, and worried about the grievous international situation. What would this day bring? Anything? Nothing? No matter. Alex needed distraction, which he always found in work as a dealer in rare and fine stamps, particularly the French Empire and Swiss Canton issues in which his expertise was unsurpassed.

Focusing on his work improved his humor slightly, but Alex was constitutionally irritable. Alex couldn’t help it if the world was mostly comprised of fools!

“Excuse me. Monsieur Alex?”

Speaking of fools: the temerity of the maid breaking his concentration by coming in from next door without even knocking, and speaking Flemish, a sound he recoiled from even though it was his father’s native tongue. Not that Juli had a choice.

“I was about to start breakfast,” she continued, oblivious of Alex’s anger. “Is there anything you would like?”

“Privacy and quiet!” Alex snarled.

The maid left with newly risen Katie and Philippe in tow, but Alex still couldn’t concentrate. He turned on the radio hoping music would soothe him. But there wasn’t any music. Only very bad news.

His chest seemed to close in on his heart. Alex switched stations seeking confirmation and help in comprehending the extent and depth of the disaster. One after another—in French, Flemish, and English—rapid-fire BBC announcers relayed accounts of German assaults on Belgian military installations. Armories had sustained the worst damage and there had been massive casualties. Obviously the Germans had extremely accurate location information, which could only mean spies—and that the Nazis had deliberately targeted civilians.

Unsurprised by this brutality, Alex worried about his brother. Suddenly he had the creepy feeling of being watched.

How long had Geneviève been standing there? How much had she heard?

Geneviève covered her mouth and raced across to the other villa.

Wiping perspiration from her forehead, Denise decided to devote the remainder of her day to willful blindness. It was important to keep the news from the children.

Alex said, “I need a breath of air,” turned on his heel, and walked out the back door.

Denise asked Juli to take the children out to the beach to play. Then she, her sister, and their in-laws sat around the radio fretting. They started and stopped talking about what they must do, knowing nothing could be decided without André and Alex.

If only André would call!

When Alex got back, the rest of the grown-up Sauverins were finishing a dispirited late lunch.

“Any word from André?” Alex asked.

Denise looked down and shook her head.

Alex went on. “I walked toward Zeebrugge and Knokke-Heist, to those wooded dunes dotted with pine trees—Wenduine I guess. At least five kilometers. Hardly saw a soul or any cars along the road. I suppose everyone’s indoors, glued to their radios.” He paused to see if his family had anything to say. They didn’t, but he still did. “Peering out at the waves, I half expected to see a U-boat’s periscope. Who called this war ‘phony’?” Again there was silence. “The prime minister claims Fort Eben-Emael will protect us. But the prime minister is wrong and we all know it. The Germans are too strong.”

“The prime minister speaks for the government,” Rose said gently, having long ago learned that her second son was quick to anger and an alarmist.

“I have never trusted the government,” Alex barked, “and particularly not now!”

“But it is
our
government.”

“Mother!” Alex retorted, not even trying to master his temper. “If you have such faith in the government why did you change your name from Rachel to Rose? Why did father change his from Levie to Louis?”

Geneviève wept quietly. Rose’s eyes filled with tears she was too disciplined to shed.

Every Sauverin knew the answer to Alex’s question: in late 1935, after the German promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race, Louis and Rose had tried to obscure their Jewish roots. The gesture had shocked their other relatives…except for Denise and Geneviève’s father, Josiah-Jacob Freedman, who had changed his name to Jack.

Alex turned up the radio. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had announced his resignation and recommended Winston Churchill as his replacement. Denise translated for Louis and Rose, for though Louis spoke French, Flemish, and Dutch and Rose spoke French, German, and Polish, neither spoke English as their sons and daughters-in-law did.

As he listened, Louis’s pale skin looked sallow and his gnarled hands knotted and unknotted convulsively. “What will we do?” he muttered. “What will we do?”

“Leave,” Alex replied bluntly. “Isn’t that why we came to Le Coq? To be ready?”

Denise focused on her role model, Rose—an exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable, wise woman with an unshakable devotion to her loved ones. Rose’s gentle personality belied the steely determination with which she would support any decision André and Alex reached.

Her sons would have to decide this because Louis—handsome and distinguished with his white hair, moustache and goatee, and fine black suit—had never taken a firm stand on anything. In seventy years his only show of independence was moving away from his birthplace and most of his family.

Those concerns and more filtered into Denise’s dreams after her husband’s return Friday night. When she awoke early Saturday next to still-sleeping André, she drifted mentally to thoughts of her father.