Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Kristina

Nice, June 1946

There were times since being liberated from the camp when Kristina left her body, and this was one of them. Only a moment before she had been sitting in a chair in what had been her father’s observatory, while Eve Archer had paced the floor relating everything Serge Lavertu had told her about what had happened during the war.

‘The Resistance?’ Kristina had asked incredulously. ‘We were in the Resistance?’

Everything that she knew about herself before her memory stopped in 1923 – and even more so of her mother – seemed to indicate that the courage required to stand up against the Germans during the war would have been beyond either of them. In the hospital in Switzerland where she had been sent to recuperate, she’d heard story after story of the most abject brutality. She’d only had to look at the scar on her head and her own skeletal body to believe them.

‘Yes,’ Eve said, looking out the windows towards the sea. ‘That’s why you were sent to the camp. Someone betrayed you.’

Kristina knew she lived in the body of a woman who had been a mother. She could feel her daughters, but she couldn’t remember their faces or voices. Lorenzo had told her things about Nadia and Ginette, but with great reluctance for fear of distressing her. But the love was strangely still there, the deepest love of a mother who cannot lose the connection to her children.

A terrible thought occurred to her.

‘Is that why the Nazis—’

Then whoosh! Kristina was out of her body and across the other side of the room, observing her physical self still sitting in the chair. It was a terrifying sensation, as if time was all happening at once and the world was spinning. Although each experience frightened her, Docteur Gabriel had assured her it wasn’t an entirely unusual phenomena. ‘Especially in those who have sustained head injuries or suffered great traumas. It sometimes occurs right before they remember something too devastating to recall. The American writer Ernest Hemingway wrote about his own experiences of this after suffering mental distress from shellfire in the Great War.’

‘Possibly,’ Eve was saying, still with her back towards the physical Kristina who was staring blank-eyed in front of her. ‘Serge didn’t say anything about it.’

As Eve continued to speak, the disembodied Kristina remembered the time when she had thought there was no point to living anymore. She had lost everything and was only a burden to Lorenzo, who should have been living his twilight years in peace. One evening at sunset, she’d gone to the rooftop terrace and stood at the corner where it overlooked the side of a sheer cliff. All she had to do was step out and all her troubles would cease. But something – or someone – had pulled her back. She’d heard a female voice whisper, ‘No, it’s not your time, Kristina. You still have things to do.’

After that experience, she’d wondered if it had been an angel that had spoken to her. At the time she thought perhaps the angel had meant that she still had a masterpiece to paint and that her life’s work was not yet finished. But now as she watched the distressed Eve pacing, she believed that perhaps the sole purpose left to her was to save Serge Lavertu. Maybe it was possible that in this disembodied state, rather than in her physical body with its damaged brain, she could find the past again.

But then Eve turned around and saw that Kristina wasn’t moving and let out a cry.

‘Madame Bergeret!’ she screamed and shook Kristina’s shoulder desperately.

Kristina heard Lorenzo’s footsteps lumbering up the stairs.

I must go back now , she thought. I’m scaring her .

Then whoosh! Kristina was back in her body staring out at the concerned faces of Eve and Lorenzo. She was panting and weeping. She felt nauseous and the pain in her head felt like she was being suffocated.

‘It happens sometimes,’ Lorenzo told Eve. ‘Docteur Gabriel says that when she has one of these seizures, she must have nothing but bed rest for at least a day.’

After bringing her water and letting her catch her breath, and seeing she was too weak to move, Lorenzo and Eve brought up a mattress for her. Then they carted up another mattress, and Kristina understood that Eve intended to watch over her.

The young woman placed a cool compress on Kristina’s forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause you harm. I didn’t know you had seizures.’

The past is somewhere , Kristina tried to say, but she couldn’t get the words out. Her tongue felt thick. She must have bitten it.

Her whole body felt heavy and she was starting to drift into sleep. As her eyelids fluttered, it was no longer Eve watching her. It was Max. But he wasn’t the fresh-faced Max she remembered. He was older. Harder.

‘What happened?’ she asked him. ‘What happened to you and our daughters?’