He shook his head. What words could there be now? So he said only one, his brother’s name, and that word was so sad, so tragic, so beloved, that he needn’t say more for her to know that Victor was gone. Not that she believed it.

“No, no,” she insisted. Already, she felt turned inside out. “He’s coming back at the end of the week. He’s going to stay here, with me. We decided that.”

She turned from him so he wouldn’t see her cry.

“He never loved anyone but you. He told me he didn’t care what my mother would have thought.”

She laughed at that, through her tears.

“I know exactly what she would have thought,” she managed to say.

Marianne’s laughter became a sob, and she sank to the ground. Julien knelt beside her, his arms around her. She cried for a very long time, and then she nodded and said he was surely starving, which he was. They went inside and he sat at the table below the beam where Monsieur Félix had been hanged, and he wolfed down an omelet and toast with jam. Marianne stood by the window and looked out. She could not believe Victor would never walk up the road again, that he would never shout with joy, or tell her she was beautiful, or come upstairs with her to bed.

After Julien slept for a while in the parlor, she asked him to tell her everything, and he told her all that he knew. Victor had been on the last train to Auschwitz, where everyone had been gassed to destroy the evidence that they had ever existed. But here were two people who knew Victor had existed. They lit a candle and Julien recited what he could remember of the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world.