“It’s true he had beautiful eyes.”
“You think so, too! Deep and blue, intelligent and sad at the same time. Romain knew how to melt you with just one look. Seeing him reassured me through that whole exhausting trip across the European continent in flames.”
“Where did you get off?”
“At Wilno, where the train stopped. I had intended to go all the way to France so Romain could grow up and study and become someone, but it was impossible to go any farther.”
“Are Wilno and Vilnius the same city?”
“Oh yes, just like Vilne and Vilna. The city has four names, which gives you an idea of its complicated history.”
Mina explained that she was so traumatized by this uprooting that she found herself hating History itself. Human relations, love, friendship: these became the only things she cared to think about. Political theory bored her stiff. But it was difficult to ignore what was happening all around her; politics defined the age in which she lived. Nevertheless, she allowed herself to go into some detail with Rebecca.
“Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire until its independence in 1918, before it was invaded by Poland in 1920. With Jews making up almost forty percent of the population, Vilnius was the capital of Yiddish intellectual life. They came from Poland mostly, a few from Belarus and there were Lithuanians, of course. It was one of the busiest cultural centers in the Jewish world. It lived up to its reputation as the Jerusalem of the North. We could have stayed but I was obsessed by France.”
“How long did you live there?”
“Five years,” she answered curtly.
“It must be difficult to talk about your life there,” Rebecca acknowledged. “I’m sorry if my curiosity has seemed indiscreet.”
“Not at all. It’s just that I’ve almost forgotten our life in Wilno and Warsaw, wherever we were before we arrived in France: I was so determined to get there. Even back then, I could pass for being French and I was raising my Romouchka to be both a diplomat and a French writer. I taught him Russian, Polish and German, Jewish stories and Lithuanian folktales, but above all I taught him French history. There was a book that I read to him again and again: Lives of Famous French People: Louis Pasteur, Joan of Arc, Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux. I wanted Romain to be in that book, too. I was full of hope and affection for the man he would become. I would tell him over and over that he had the soul of a hero. I believed in him.”
Rebecca looked at Mina’s souvenir box: It was full of photographs of Romain. For her part, she didn’t like taking pictures; the innumerable questions of light, perspective and distance got in the way of seeing, and then the instant was gone. She wondered now, though, if photos didn’t in fact help you remember. Without them, would the faces of loved ones fade? Would the details of life dissolve? No, Nathan’s features would remain forever engraved on her memory: the chubby-cheeked baby who had become a skinny little boy before transforming into a handsome young man. She could remember clearly every moment of his life. But what would Nathan remember of her? Would her expressions gradually vanish from his memory, until only a halo remained? Do we ever truly see anyone, even the people we love? Her gaze paused on a picture of a young Mina: a green-eyed, pale-skinned, high-cheeked brunette. She was wearing a white dress, a string of pearls and her hair was caught back by a headband. She was stretched out in a field, smiling and relaxed, holding a cigarette.
“I smoked to beat the band,” Mina remembered. “Even after I got old. I thought that having a cigarette in my hand made me look young and healthy but the truth is I was overworked and diabetic.”
Rebecca was fascinated. Where did this little Russian woman find such willpower? Alone and penniless, how did she manage to get herself to France when all of Europe was heading for war? Why did she have such faith in her son’s future?
“That’s just how it was. I always knew. And so did Romain. France was where he would make a name for himself. And that’s what happened. Didn’t he say himself that there were only two people who had the best interests of the country in mind: me and General de Gaulle? When De Gaulle rallied his countrymen to join the French Free Forces in 1940, Romain didn’t hesitate, but it was my own urging he responded to as much as the General’s.”
Louise Cohen burst in, looking like a Greek shepherdess in a long skirt of rough cloth and carrying a tray of fruit juice.
“You’re talking so much, Mina, I thought you must be thirsty.”
“Do I detect a note of irony?” Mina asked.
“No, but you’re telling Rebecca a lot of nonsense, whereas I think she ought to have a clear idea of what things were really like at the time.”
Rebecca steadied herself for Mina’s inevitable outburst, but, unexpectedly, she only sighed.
“I suppose you know everything that happened to me even better than I do,” she said to Louise. “It’s one thing to live through important events; knowing how to tell a story about them is another.”
While Mina poured herself a glass of juice, Louise took Rebecca aside.
“What Mina has forgotten to mention is that Wilno was a living hell for her. She was boasting of the intellectual life there, but the Jewish quarter was filthy and its narrow streets were canals of stagnant sewer water. She lived in a building called ‘Le Petit Versailles’ but she barely earned enough to pay the rent. Eventually, she had to leave, like so many others, but Warsaw was no nicer. What with the famine and Pilsudski’s dictatorship, it became impossible to live in Poland.”
Mina, who had heard everything, suddenly piped up:
“What did we care? We were headed for France in any case.”
“If Warsaw had been welcoming and comfortable, you never would have left and Romain wouldn’t have become Romain Gary, World War II Hero. He would have stayed Roman Kacew. Your son’s destiny was to collide with history: you had no choice but to leave.”
“Think whatever you want,” replied Mina. “It’s all the same to me.”
“Don’t get so angry,” Louise retorted. “Go ahead and fool yourself that it had always been your decision to emigrate to France, that you had always planned to stop over in Vilnius and Warsaw. You can embellish the past all you want.”
“But it’s the truth, Miss Know-It-All!”
“Do you really think you can just rewrite history like that?” Louise insisted.
Trying to create a diversion, Rebecca interjected: “How did you get a visa to enter France?”
“You could always get a fake visa,” Louise answered before Mina could say a word. “But in that case it was best to enter through Italy.”
“So, you did have a fake?” Rebecca asked Mina.
“That’s none of your business. All I’ll say is that the police captain who processed our papers was adorable. I told him that I had been forced to come to the Mediterranean climate for my health and he told me where the best places were to go. He had fallen under Romain’s spell.”
She stood up with the air of an actress delivering the last lines of a tragedy.
Never able to let anyone else have the last word, Louise Cohen also got to her feet and turned to face Mina.
“The France you entered in 1928 was not as wonderful as you’d have us believe. How could you live in Marseille, or in Nice for that matter, with no money and no relations? You might have had two years of French at school and been a passionate francophile, but it’s impossible that you could have felt at home.”
Mina turned as pale as if Louise had slapped her across the face. Rebecca didn’t like the way the conversation was going. She took Mina by the arm and sat her back down, inquiring politely how they found things in Nice when they arrived.
“You have to understand that this pretty little southern city was like paradise to us. We had come from the gates of Hell,” Mina explained. “We had already been uprooted when we arrived in Poland, even though we were staying with my brother and his family. You can’t imagine how they treated my beautiful Romouchka. Like some common child! They
had no idea what greatness was in store for him and I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You sold jewelry and silver door-to-door, even daring to knock at the finest homes in Nice, pretending that your goods came from the Russian Imperial family, but you never would have made ends meet without your brother’s help,” Louise reminded her.
“He was horrible to us. However, we had a neighbor in our building who believed in Romain. He was only eight at the time but this neighbor was impressed by my predictions about his future. He would insist that Romain describe for him the immortal glory that awaited him and he would feed him Turkish delight. Mr. Piekielny was his name. He looked like some forgotten clerk out of Kafka. He used to ask Romain to say his name to the important people he would meet when he becomes famous. He was preparing him for his future. He believed in him while my own family made fun of my dreams of glory. I just refused to be a poor immigrant. My son was going to be an ambassador and a writer, and that would change everything for us.”
“I would never have dared to dictate Albert’s future like you did to Romain.”
Mina seemed not to hear Louise, continuing her story unperturbed.
“We slept for a time in the waiting room of a dentist friend of ours. We had to be out every morning, but anything was better than my family’s mockery. The dentist was a marvelous man who treated Romain like a prince.”
“And you like a princess.”
Mina blushed slightly at the mention of this trivial flirtation.
“Oh, I have to admit, he was charming and he seemed attracted to me. It lasted three months, until his nurse put a stop to it. She either had enough of us encroaching on her waiting room or she was jealous. She clearly had a thing for Gabriel. His name was Gabriel,” she said with a far off look that betrayed some affection for his memory.
“She forced you out?”
“The dentist’s wife complained to the nurse that her husband was coming home later and later and asked her to stop making evening appointments for him. She thought there was something going on between the two of them. So, to prove her innocence, the nurse told her about us, implying it was our fault he was so busy. He threw us out the next day.”
“But your life must have been easier in Nice than in Warsaw?” Rebecca prodded.
“We were happy because we were together. I was content just knowing that everything I did was for Romain’s good and that he had a proper childhood. I held every job imaginable: cleaning lady, dog groomer, saleslady at the Negresco Hotel. Finally, I became the manager of the Mermonts Hotel. That was luck! It was a Ukrainian whom I’d helped to buy a building who hired me.”
“Is that so?” Louise scoffed.
“That’s quite enough!” Mina burst out, truly angry this time, and with that, she was gone.
Louise Cohen now turned to Rebecca and pulled out a photo taken at the time of her arrival in Marseille: she was young and a little plump and was wearing a summer dress and a straw hat with a bunch of cherries on the brim. She and her son were walking and he was holding her skirt. It was hard to know who was protecting whom. Was it Louise, the Jewish mother, or was it little Albert, who, at five years old, was already careful to hide his fears from his mother so as not to worry her?
“It was difficult for Albert to adjust to Marseille, and for me as well,” she began. “We felt quite alone in this France we hardly knew. Albert was my brave little man, wide-eyed, trying hard not to cry. But the big city was overwhelming for him, the noise of passersby, the speed of the cars. Marseille gave us a fright after our little island.”
Jeanne Proust had come in solemnly, looking like a grand noblewoman, sat down next to Louise, and Mina followed. Had she gone to find an ally?
Jeanne interrupted, addressing Louise Cohen:
“You were an Italian in Corfu, you were used to being a foreigner by the time you came to France. I spent my whole life in Paris but I can imagine how hard it must be to feel at home in a strange country.”
“There’s no comparison! We were Italians in Corfu, it’s true, but four centuries of Venetian rule left their mark. We felt at home there. In France, however, we were utterly lost.”
“Now you’ve hit the nail on the head!” Mina joined in. “I was already French in my soul before I arrived there. You on the other hand, didn’t even know who you were or where you came from. I don’t know why, Louise, you insist on believing we endured the same hardships. Our experiences weren’t alike in the least.”
Rebecca looked from one to the other. Mina was heavily made-up and her short hair was carefully combed around her face. More discreet and natural, Louise emanated a certain grandmotherliness. Physically, they were opposites, but their personalities were strikingly similar: determined, domineering, inflexible and hypocritical. Two peas in a pod!
Louise Cohen was unstoppable now on the subject of her exile.
“I wanted Albert to be French but it was just as important to me that he understood where he came from. So I did what I could: I put him in Catholic school in the hope he’d rub elbows with the French elite and at home, I told him stories of the Jewish royal houses and all their customs and ancestral traditions. I would never have allowed him to become one hundred percent French; it would have created a gulf between us. On the other hand, nothing delighted me more than to read about the adventures of the Valiant family. They were eager, imaginative and sincere, as all of us are who call Corfu home.”
“I suppose the Valiants’ grand arrival in Geneva took place with a bit more pomp and circumstance than yours in Marseille?” Rebecca wondered.
The allusion made Louise laugh; how could anyone compare her to Albert’s daring and resourceful characters? She was not too shy to admit, however, that she admired his novels’ portrayal of the immigrant’s fear of rejection. He had written from experience.
“No matter how much Albert thought of himself as stateless, each move was an uprooting for him,” Louise continued. “He grew to like every city: Marseille, Paris, Geneva, London, Jerusalem, and he wanted to become a French citizen, but wherever he went, he always said the same thing: ‘My home is somewhere else.’”
“Perhaps he felt he was Jewish above all?”
“He could hardly have forgotten that fact. We left Corfu as so many Jews did, just as a tide of anti-Semitism started to grow. This was in 1900. A young Jewish girl, Rubina Sarda, had been found murdered just before Passover. Suspicion immediately fell on the Jewish community, including the girl’s father. People thought it had been a ritual sacrifice and some arrests were made. But this gave rise to more generalized violence, insults and attacks against Jewish businesses. The family was acquitted but the damage had been done and the atmosphere was suffocating, even though Corfu had been admirably tolerant to Jews up until then. Jews had even obtained equal rights from the French in 1791. If we were persecuted, we remained united, and resigned. In Marseille, however, things were far worse.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, we arrived just after the Dreyfus Affair.”
Jeanne Proust interrupted curtly. She had no interest in hearing tell of the unfortunate captain; it brought up so many unhappy memories for her. Her Adrien had been stubbornly pro-military and anti-Dreyfusard and their differing opinions on the scandal had provoked disintegration of their marriage. In fact, they had had a bonafide argument about it that only cemented their lack of understanding. After that, she had always felt that she was living with a stranger.
“That may be,” Louise Cohen replied dryly. “But you had the good fortune to live in Paris, such a cosmopolitan city, not like us in Marseille. We had hardly gotten settled in our hotel room when we were robbed of everything.”
Tears welled in her eyes at the memory.
“I got over it, but Albert became more and more withdrawn. He avoided boys his age and seemed different from them. He had such a fine imagination, I thought he would adjust, but the humiliation he endured on his tenth birthday was the final straw. We were out, and he was dress
ed in his sailor suit: such an innocent soul! He stopped to watch a street peddler selling a sort of stain remover. The peddler was a smooth operator, and Albert was fascinated. I remember him smiling, looking at the crowd that had gathered. He had found a good spot in the audience from which to observe the man’s performance and for a moment he felt as if he belonged among these French people, whom we had idealized so much. Emboldened by that thought, probably, he decided to buy three sticks of the stain remover and held the birthday money I had given him out to the man. But the peddler yelled right in his face: ‘You? You’re nothing but a kike, a dirty Jew; I can see it on your face. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you one of Dreyfus’ pals, come to steal the food out of the mouths of the French.’ Well, I won’t repeat any more of his anti-Semitic slurs. They were common coin back then. That was the end of Albert’s childhood, though. He lost all his joy from one day to the next. That happened on August 16, 1905, and he wrote many years later that that was the day his life became his destiny. The episode comes up many times in his work. I knew nothing of his feelings at the time, however. Albert didn’t share anything with me; he was too sensitive to burden me with his sufferings.”
Jeanne Proust was deep in The Guermantes Way. She was looking for the passage where Bloch wonders if Norpois, the ever prudent diplomat, was a Dreyfusard or not. She knew the page by heart. Her expression brightened when she found it, and then she began to chuckle indulgently as she read the Duc de Guermantes’ reply: ‘When one goes by the name of “Marquis de Saint-Loup,” one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?’ She never tired of rereading the literature of the great Marcel Proust, her son! She was still bristling from Louise Cohen’s snub and, holding a book in her hand, allowed her to follow the conversation without having to say a word.
Jewish Mothers Never Die Page 6
