The Girl You Left Behind

clearly. I remember it because I
     couldn’t work out what it meant. It said, in chalk: ‘
Pour Herr
     Kommandant, qui comprendra: pas pris, mais donné
.’ She pauses.
     ‘To Herr Kommandant, who will understand: not taken, but given.’

36
    Liv hears the noise rise up, like a cloud
     of birds, around her. She sees the journalists crowding round the old lady, their pens
     waving like antennae, the judge talking urgently with the lawyers, banging his gavel in
     vain. She stares up at the public gallery, at the animated faces, and hears the strange
     trickle of applause that might be for the old woman or for the truth: she isn’t
     sure.
    Paul is fighting his way through the crowd.
     When he gets to her he pulls her to him, his head dipped against hers, his voice in her
     ear. ‘She’s yours, Liv,’ he says, and his voice is thick with relief.
     ‘She’s yours.’
    ‘She lived,’ she says, and she
     is laughing and crying at the same time. ‘They found each other.’ From his
     arms, she gazes around her at the chaos, and she is no longer afraid of the crowd.
     People are smiling, as if this has been a good result; as if she is no longer the enemy.
     She sees the Lefèvre brothers stand to leave, their faces as sombre as
     coffin-bearers, and is flooded with relief that Sophie will not be returning to France
     with them. She sees Janey, gathering her things slowly, her face frozen, as if she
     cannot believe what has just taken place.
    ‘How about that?’ Henry claps a
     hand on her shoulder, his face wreathed in smiles. ‘How about that? No one’s
     even listening to poor old Berger’s verdict.’
    ‘C’mon,’ says Paul, placing
     a protective arm around her shoulders. ‘Let’s get you out of
     here.’
    The clerk appears, pushing his way through
     the sea of people. He stands in front of her, blocking her path, slightly breathless
     with the effort of his short journey. ‘Here, madam,’ he says, and hands her
     the painting. ‘I believe this is yours.’
    Liv’s fingers close around the gilded
     frame. She glances down at Sophie, her hair vibrant in the dull light of the court, her
     smile as inscrutable as ever. ‘I think it would be best if we took you out the
     back way,’ the clerk adds, and a security guard appears beside him, propelling
     them towards the door, already speaking into his walkie-talkie.
    Paul makes as if to step forward, but she
     puts a hand on his arm, stopping him. ‘No,’ says Liv. She takes a breath and
     straightens her shoulders, so that she seems just a little bit taller. ‘Not this
     time. We’re going out through the front.’

Epilogue
    Between 1917 and 1922 Anton and Marie
     Leville lived in a small house close to the edge of a lake in the Swiss town of
     Montreux. They were a quiet couple, not fond of entertaining, but apparently most
     content in each other’s company. Madame Leville worked as a waitress in a local
     restaurant. She is remembered as efficient and friendly but as someone who did not
     volunteer conversation (‘A rare quality in a woman,’ the proprietor would
     remark, with a sideways look at his wife).
    Every evening at a quarter past nine, Anton
     Leville, a tall, dark-haired man with an oddly shambolic gait, could be seen walking the
     fifteen minutes to the restaurant, where he would tip his hat through the open door to
     the manager, then wait outside until his wife emerged. He would hold out his arm, she
     would take it, and they would walk back together, slowing occasionally to admire the
     sunset on the lake or a particularly decorative shop window. This, according to their
     neighbours, was the routine for their every working day and they rarely deviated from
     it. Occasionally Madame Leville would post parcels, little gifts, to an address in
     northern France, but apart from that they seemed to have little interest in the wider
     world.
    At weekends the couple tended to remain at
     home, emerging occasionally to go to a local café where, if itwere sunny enough, they would spend several hours playing cards or sitting beside each
     other in companionable silence, his large hand over her smaller one.
    ‘My father would joke to Monsieur
     Leville that Madame would not blow away on the breeze if he were to release her just for
     a minute,’ said Anna Baertschi, who had grown up next door. ‘My father used
     to tell my mother that he thought it was a little improper, to be hanging on to your
     wife in public