Sarah's Key Read Free Page B

Bertrand smiled. “You want to bring these two rooms together, right?”
    “Right!” admitted Antoine.
    “Not a bad idea. Needs working on, though. There’s a tricky bit of wall here, I’ll show you later. Thick paneling. Pipes and stuff going through. Not as easy as it looks.”
    I looked at my watch. Two-thirty.
    “I have to go,” I said. “Meeting with Joshua.”
    “What do we do with Zoë?” asked Bertrand.
    Zoë rolled her eyes.
    “I can, like, take a bus back to Montparnasse.”
    “What about school?” said Bertrand.
    Roll of eyes again.
    “Papa! It’s Wednesday. No school on Wednesday afternoons, remember?
    Bertrand scratched his head.
    “In my days it—”
    “It was on Thursday, no school on Thursdays,” chanted Zoë.
    “Ridiculous French educational system,” I sighed. “And school on Saturday mornings to boot!”
    Antoine agreed with me. His sons attended a private school where there were no classes on Saturday mornings. But Bertrand—like his parents—was a staunch believer in the French public school system. I had wanted to put Zoë in a bilingual school. There were several of them in Paris, but the Tézac tribe would have none of that. Zoë was French, born in France. She would go to a French school. At present she attended the Lycée Montaigne, near the Luxembourg Garden. The Tézacs kept forgetting Zoë had an American mother. Luckily, Zoë’s English was perfect. I had never spoken anything else to her, and she went often enough to Boston to visit my parents. She spent most summers on Long Island with my sister Charla and her family.
    Bertrand turned to me. He had that little glint in his eye, the one I felt wary about, the one that meant he was going to be either very funny or very cruel, or both. Antoine obviously knew what it suggested as well, judging from the meek way he plunged into a studious survey of his patent-leather, tasseled loafers.
    “Oh, yes indeed, we know what Miss Jarmond thinks of our schools, our hospitals, our endless strikes, our long vacations, our plumbing systems, our postal service, our TV, our politics, our dogshit on the sidewalks,” said Bertrand, flashing his perfect teeth at me. “We have heard about it so many times, so many times, have we not? ‘I like to be in America, everything’s clean in America, everybody picks up dogshit in America!’”
    “Papa, stop it, you’re so rude!” Zoë said, taking my hand.

 
     
    O
    UTSIDE, THE GIRL SAW a neighbor wearing pajamas leaning from his window. He was a nice man, a music teacher. He played the violin, and she liked listening to him. He often played for her and her brother from across the courtyard. Old French songs like “Sur le pont d’Avignon” and “À la claire fontaine,” and also songs from her parents’ country, songs that always got her mother and father dancing gaily, her mother’s slippers sliding across the floorboards, her father twirling her mother round and round, round and round till they all felt dizzy.
    “What are you doing? Where are you taking them?” he called out.
    His voice rang across the courtyard, covering the baby’s yells. The man in the raincoat did not answer him.
    “But you can’t do this,” said the neighbor. “They’re honest, good people! You can’t do this!”
    At the sound of his voice, shutters began to open, faces peered out from behind curtains.
    But the girl noticed that nobody moved, nobody said anything. They simply watched.
    The mother stopped dead in her tracks, her back racked with sobs. The men shoved her on.
    The neighbors watched silently. Even the music teacher remained silent.
    Suddenly the mother turned and screamed at the top of her lungs. She screamed her husband’s name, three times.
    The men seized her by the arms, shook her roughly. She dropped her bags and bundles. The girl tried to stop them, but they pushed her aside.
    A man appeared in the doorway, a thin man with crumpled clothes, an unshaven chin, and red, tired eyes. He