Page 38 of One of Them

T here she was. Her mother. Sophie. Seated at a small metal table, she looked up when the tent flaps parted.

“Delia?” Then she was darting across the tiny space and flinging her arms around Delia, who stumbled backward and did not, could not, reciprocate right away.

Pressed against her, Sophie felt delicate, even breakable.

She smelled unfamiliar, of something bracing, almost medicinal. Peppermint? Wintergreen?

“I can’t believe it,” Sophie said into Delia’s hair and then released her.

“Let me look at you.” Delia submitted to the gaze.

Sophie was thinner, much thinner, and her once-abundant hair was short, cropped in the back, with little wispy bangs.

It was a shock. Sophie’s long, wavy hair had always been so essential to her look, her very being.

She’d worn it loose, worn it up in a variety of ways, adorned it with silk flowers or scarves, tortoiseshell combs, jeweled barrettes.

And now it was essentially gone, and what was left was streaked with gray.

But her face was still the face Delia remembered: the angled cheekbones, the elegantly curved nose, the thin lips.

Her eyes were the same steely blue, the gaze penetrating, even unnerving.

Her clothes, like those of everyone else here, were nothing more than utilitarian, yet she managed to make the white cotton blouse and pleated pants—so faded that the black had become a smudged gray—look elegant.

And she still looked beautiful, albeit in some haunted, ravaged way.

Sophie was crying now, and Delia realized that she was too.

“Come,” Sophie said, leading Delia to the hard-backed chair where she’d been seated.

“Sit down.” Sophie perched on the cot, her arms wrapped around herself as if to contain all that she was feeling.

“You’re all grown up.” She took in Delia’s two-piece silk dress.

Then she looked down. “But your shoes!” Delia was wearing black suede pumps.

“No one wears shoes like that here. Let me lend you another pair.”

“Shoes?” Delia couldn’t believe it. “After leaving us, and all those years of silence, and—”

“That’s not fair, I wrote to you, I tried—”

“What? Three times in, what, eight years? I’d hardly call that trying. And now you want to talk about shoes ? What’s wrong with you?” Abruptly Delia stood, knocking over the chair. “You haven’t changed a bit. You’ll never change.”

“Darling, I’m sorry, I just—” Sophie had gotten up too and was moving toward her, but Delia took a step back, and then another. And then she was outside the tent and walking away as quickly as she could.

“Delia!” Sophie called out. “Delia, please come back!”

Her mother’s voice trailed behind her, but Delia didn’t turn around.

She had no idea where she was going or what to do next.

She saw the glances she attracted—she clearly didn’t belong here—but no one said anything, they just went about their business.

She wove her way through the tents, back past the dining room, and then past another crude structure—a barn, it seemed; several skinny cows stood outside.

She kept walking, faster and faster, fueled by her anger.

Now she was actually hot, and also thirsty.

God, what a wretched, unforgiving place this was; she still couldn’t understand why Sophie had chosen to be here.

And then all at once she did: her mother wanted to be punished.

What a thought. Delia had to stop to consider it.

She’d wanted to excoriate Sophie, to hurt her the way she’d been hurt.

But Sophie had already assumed that burden. She was here seeking penance.

Delia turned and started back toward the tent that was Sophie’s.

Even if she wasn’t ready to forgive her mother, she would listen to what she had to say.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the hole in the dry earth; her foot slid into it, and as she tried to pull it out, the heel of her shoe snapped right off, leaving a jagged edge.

Looking down, she stared at the now useless piece before scooping it up.

Then she hobbled, as best she could, to her mother’s tent.

Sophie was once again seated at the table when Delia walked in for the second time that day. She took in the ruined shoe, along with the shredded stocking on Delia’s foot, but said only, “You came back.”

“I did.” Yet Delia was still angry. “You didn’t follow me. Or try to find me.”

“What would have been the point? Either you want to talk to me, or you don’t.”

“Do you blame me for being angry? Not trusting you? You’re the one who left us.”

“I know. But I wrote to you. Several times. You didn’t answer.”

“I didn’t get the letters. I didn’t even see them until a couple of months ago. Papa never gave them to me.”

“Then how—”

“I found them in his office. They weren’t opened.”

“Then you probably don’t know that I wrote to him too, telling him that I wanted to be in touch with you. He wrote back and said you didn’t want to see me. That you’d adjusted to life in New York and that communicating with me would only upset you.”

“And you believed him? How convenient for you. How easy.”

“Delia, he threatened me with legal action—a restraining order. I thought it would be best to let things cool down for a while and then try again. And...”

“And what?”

“And I was going through a very difficult time.”

“And I wasn’t? When you left, you didn’t think of the consequences, of what might happen. Of how we would feel. We thought you were dead.”

“Dead?” Sophie looked surprised. “Why did you think I was dead?”

“Marie-Pierre said so. She said you and... Serge had been working for the Resistance and been caught.” It was hard for Delia to say his name; it felt foul in her mouth. “And that you’d been... shot.”

Sophie shook her head. “No, that wasn’t true. But it easily could have been.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sophie released her daughter’s arms, leaned forward, and took Delia’s hands in her own.

A gentle squeeze, and then she let go. “It was never my plan to just vanish from your life. Yes, I was going to leave your father, but not then, and not like that. And once I was settled, I would have written to tell you where I was.” Delia looked unconvinced as Sophie went on to recount things she already knew and had been over a hundred times: the quarrel, her angry flight from the apartment.

But then Sophie started filling in the blanks, telling Delia things she hadn’t known.

After storming out that day, Sophie had gone to Serge’s apartment, thinking she would come home later that night, or early the next morning.

“But the police were already at Serge’s, yanking out drawers, pulling things down from shelves, from the closets.

Serge looked terrified—of course. He thought he’d been found out.

” Sophie said that they took him in for questioning, and they took her too.

The police kept them for two days, and in the end, let them both go.

By then, Delia and her father had sailed.

“There were no more boats. You and Simon were on the last one.”

“I thought you’d abandoned us. That you’d abandoned me.”

“Of course you did,” Sophie said. “Simon...” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Serge was already deeply involved with the Resistance, and since I was with him, I became involved too. I thought that the work we were doing would help end the war sooner. Then I could find my way back to you.” After their release, Sophie explained, they didn’t return to his apartment.

Instead, they went to a workshop on the rue Richard Le Noir, near the Bastille.

It had belonged to the grandfather of one of the women in the group.

“This grandfather, he’d been in the furniture business—repairing, recaning, something like that.

But he’d left Paris, and the place was empty, and it seemed safe, or at least safe enough.

There was one member of our group, Guillaume.

No one really liked him. But for Serge, it was more than that—he suspected that Guillaume was working as a double agent and feeding information to Vichy officials.

There was a day early in 1942 when Serge was able to confirm this hunch.

He had the proof. We knew we had to act, but we also didn’t want to let Guillaume know we were onto him.

Serge went out for a while. Guillaume and I were alone in the building.

We were supposed to be working on the wording for some new leaflets—they had to say enough to make the message clear, but not enough to implicate or endanger anyone.

I was so nervous. Did Guillaume know that I knew?

What would he do if he did? Serge had been gone a long time—too long.

” Sophie’s voice dropped, but rather than ask her to speak louder, Delia leaned in closer.

“I heard something outside the door,” said Sophie.

“Footsteps on the stairs, shouting. Then the door was kicked in, and there they were—four German soldiers in uniform, screaming, their guns trained right at us. Their words were only noise to me, nightmarish noise. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying.

But I did understand that they were going to shoot me. That I was going to be murdered.”