The Book of Lost Names

Sixteen months later, France has been freed from the German grip, and Eva returns to a Paris she hardly knows. She waits daily on the Mazarine steps hoping Rémy will return to her, but as months pass, she knows that he, along with everyone else she knew, probably did not survive the war. Freed Jewish prisoners return from concentration camps, shadows of their former selves. Something compels Eva to search for Tatuś daily, until the day when a familiar voice calls her name. It is Tatuś, barely recognizable but alive, and Eva falls into his arms and confesses that Mamusia did not make it. She shares with him the story of Rémy, and Tatuś encourages her to return to Aurignon to look for answers.

A week later, she steps off the bus into an Aurignon that looks just like it did when she and Mamusia first arrived. The church has been rebuilt and restored, and Père Clément is there, frail and skeletal but alive. After a short conversation, Eva brings herself to ask about Rémy, but the answer is not one she is ready to hear. She collapses upon learning that he died in a fight while trying to capture a German officer. There was no burial, and the location of his remains are unknown. Eva asks for the Book of Lost Names, to see if Rémy got her message, but Père Clément sadly tells her that the Nazis took all books of great value. Eva then knows that everything she loved and worked for has been lost. Yet when she goes into the library to say goodbye to the books left behind, she notices the addition of a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one of the books from her childhood that she had shared with Rémy. She opens the cover to find an inscription from him, but there is nothing there. Later on the train, as she flips through the book, she notices a small black dot over a word—the same dots that she and Rémy used to code the Book of Lost Names. It is over a passage about Tom Sawyer faking his own death. The potential message here fills Eva with hope, and she continues to wait each day on the steps of the Mazarine for Rémy to return.

A year later, as Tatuś lies dying of cancer, he begs her to stop “holding on to a ghost” (364) and let her memory of Rémy go. As he dies, she promises him that she will move on with her life. She visits the Mazarine one more time, and on her way home stops at a coffee shop and meets Louis Abrams, the man who will become her husband. He proposes to her after four days and asks her to come to America with him. As the years go on, she finds that she loves Louis, but not the way she loved Rémy. Her son Ben grows up never knowing that his mother fought in the resistance for France, and she becomes an old woman never losing sight of the fact that Remy may have “seen her message [...] before he died” (366).