But Antoine, he wanted her. It wasn’t obligatory, and his mind wasn’t elsewhere. He wasn’t thinking to himself that he had more important things to do, or that she was not his intellectual equal. No, Inès could sense it in the deliberate way he unfastened her dress, his long, manicured fingers working their way carefully over each button. She could see it in his eyes when he turned his gaze to hers, could feel it in his touch as he peeled her slip away from her body and stroked her shoulders gently, could taste it in his mouth as he covered hers once again. It was wrong, and she knew it, but for the first time in her life, she could feel her body screaming at her that this was what she’d been missing.

So when at last her dress lay in a puddle on the floor, and he pulled away to ask, “Inès, may I take you to bed?” she only hesitated for a moment before saying yes. She thought of Michel just once, with a quick stab of guilt, as Antoine led her gently to the bedroom, but then she pushed her husband from her mind and focused instead on the man before her, who made love to her with finesse, and then fell asleep holding her tightly in his arms, like she was something to be cherished.

sixteen

JULY 1942

CéLINE

Since the morning in February when Inès had broken a plate and driven off in a rage, she had been increasingly absent from Ville-Dommange, visiting her friend Edith once every two weeks, which suited Céline just fine. Céline could breathe when Inès was gone; she didn’t have to worry that an innocent laugh shared with Michel would be taken the wrong way, or that Inès’s anger at something insignificant would overshadow a whole day of work.

Inès had been more pleasant, too, her mood sunnier, which made everyone a bit more relaxed.

“Each time she goes to Reims, she comes back a new person,” Céline marveled to Michel in the caves one day. “It’s like magic.”

“Time with Edith is good for her, I think,” Michel replied with a small smile. “They’ve been friends since they were girls. Edith is the closest thing she has to a family.”

“Except for you,” Céline reminded him.

Michel looked startled. “Well, yes, of course.”

But Céline wondered whether the thought had actually crossed Michel’s mind before she pointed it out. After all, the gulf between Michel and Inès seemed to have widened. In contrast, the polite distance that had existed between Michel and Céline had long since vanished, and she felt closer to him than ever—close enough by mid-July to finally work up the courage to ask again to become involved in his work against the Nazis.

“No,” Michel said immediately. “Absolutely not. If there were to be any suspicion of illicit activity here, there’s at least the chance that the Germans would accept an explanation from me—or from Inès or Theo. But you . . .”

She bit her lip. “I’m half Jewish, so they would be all too happy to deport me.”

“We cannot take that risk.”

“But don’t you see? That’s just why I can’t sit idly by. Besides, they haven’t been deporting Jews from the rural regions yet, have they?”

But the next Monday, the Germans swept through Champagne and arrested forty-three foreign-born Jews, simply for the crime of being Jewish. The roundups came on the heels of mass arrests in Paris just three days earlier, in which more than thirteen thousand Jews were taken—including more than four thousand children.

It was almost too terrible to be believed, but by the end of the week, more horrific news had trickled in. According to Michel’s sources, seven thousand Jews had already been quietly removed from France and sent to concentration camps somewhere in the east. She’d received no further word about her father and grandparents from Michel’s friend Louis, and she was terrified that they were among the deportees.

“I don’t think you are in any danger,” Theo said the night after the arrests in Champagne, as he and Céline lay in bed, both of them wide awake. “It was just foreign-born Jews.”

“Foreign-born Jews,” she repeated flatly. “Like my family.”

“We don’t know that anything has happened to them,” Theo said.

But Céline knew, with a certainty she couldn’t explain. There was no chance the Germans would have allowed them to remain in prison in France when they were clearly stepping up deportations. The question now was what would become of them. Her father was relatively hearty and could probably bear the backbreaking work that would be required of him in a labor camp. But what about her aging grandparents? Especially her grandmother? “No one is safe anymore,” she said.

Theo was silent for a while. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Céline was glad for the darkness, glad that he couldn’t see the expression on her face. “It wouldn’t be up to you, Theo, if they came for me.”

“I would put up a fight.”

“And wind up dead? There would be no point.”

In the silence where his reply should have been, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine Theo standing up to a handful of French policemen, or maybe a few uniformed Germans. She couldn’t visualize it, but she could see Michel there in her mind’s eye, one of his contraband rifles trained on the officers. “Run,” he would urge her in that low, confident voice. It was enough to make a tear slip down her cheek, for as sure as she was that he would defend her, she was equally sure he would be executed for it. She could never live with herself if she let that happen.