Tatiana Rosnay - Sarah’s Key

“How old are they?”

“Stefania is twenty-one and Giustina, nineteen.”

I whistled.

“You sure had them young.”

“Too young, maybe.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I sometimes feel awkward with the baby. I wish I’d had her earlier. There’s such a gap between her and Zoë.”

“She’s a sweet baby,” he said, taking a healthy bite out of his cheesecake.

“Yes, she is. The apple of her doting mother’s eye.”

We both chuckled.

“Do you miss not having a boy?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. Do you?”

“No. I love my girls. Maybe they’ll have grandsons, though. She’s called Lucy, then?”

I glanced across at him. Then down at her.

“No, that’s the toy giraffe,” I said.

There was a little pause.

“Her name is Sarah,” I said quietly.

He stopped chewing, put his fork down. His eyes changed. He looked at me, at the sleeping child, said nothing.

Then he buried his face in his hands. He remained like that for minutes. I did not know what to do. I touched his shoulder.

Silence.

I felt guilty again, felt as if I had done something unforgivable. But I had known all along this baby was to be called Sarah. As soon as I had been told it was a girl, at the moment of her birth, I had known her name.

There was no other name my daughter could have had. She was Sarah. My Sarah. An echo to the other one, to the other Sarah, to the little girl with the yellow star who had changed my life.

At last he drew his hands away and I saw his face, wrecked, beautiful. The acute sadness, the emotion in his eyes. He was not afraid of letting me see them. He did not fight the tears. It seemed that he wanted me to see it all, the beauty and ache of his life, he wanted me to see his thanks, his gratitude, his pain.

I took his hand and pressed it hard. I could not bear to look at him any longer, so I closed my eyes and put his hand against my cheek. I cried with him. I felt his fingers grow wet with my tears, but I kept his hand there.

We sat there for a long time, till the crowd around us thinned, till the sun shifted and the light changed. Till we felt our eyes could meet again, without the tears.

Thank you:

Nicolas, Louis and Charlotte, Hugh Thomas,

Andrea Stuart, Peter Viertel

Thank you too:

Valérie Bertoni, Charla Carter-Halabi, Suzy Cohen,

Valérie Colin-Simard, Holly Dando, Abha Dawesar, Violaine and

Paul Gradvohl, Julia Harris-Voss, Sarah Hirsch, Jean de la

Hosseraye, Tara Kaufmann, Laetitia Lachmann, Hélène Le Beau,

Agnès Michaux, Jean-Claude Moscovici, Emma Parry, Laure du

Pavillon, Jan Pfeiffer, Susanna Salk, Karine and Ariel Tuil-Toledano

Thank you especially:

Heloïse d’Ormesson and Gilles Cohen-Solal