Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  “As long as you’ve left so much room against the wall, I might as well sleep there,” Janine said, as if moving toward a vacant subway seat. “But don’t worry. I’m not expecting anything but your company.”

  Roland lowered the book and gazed in unspoken disbelief at her youthful breasts, her narrow waist, and the promise of her hips and thighs visible through the black transparent veil that flowed around her and reached her ankles. Her feet were bare and her toenails were painted a happy cherry red.

  “Come on, move it, buster, I’m climbing in here,” she said lightly, sounding far more confident than she really felt, drawing back the covers and settling beside him. “Okay, now you can continue reading,” she added. “I guarantee I’ll be very quiet here against the wall.” And so she was.

  Roland tried to read but soon confessed he could not focus on the pages. “Maybe if you’d given me Playboy instead of the Jesuits I might have expected this.” He laughed.

  “That’s okay,” she answered. “It’s so late anyway—why don’t you just put the book away, and turn out the light, and we can go to sleep. You know, I didn’t wait so many years not to enjoy the pleasure of resting my head on your chest as I drift off.”

  Later on, each would claim it was the other who acted first. But of course I must believe my mother. She reported that he placed an arm across her waist and slid the other behind her neck and slowly started kissing her. Soon there was nothing left between them—not time, or distance, or meddling family, or political upheaval, or duty, or even the fabric of their nightclothes. Aloud, with words and wordless sounds, he marveled at the soft and scented beauty of each part of her. He was generous and worshipful, and she felt tenderly loved as she never had before.

  How easy to imagine: it was past the midnight hour of March 13, 1942, and they could hear the halyards clanking, foghorns groaning, hungry cats complaining, and drunken sailors and their women singing on the twisted streets beyond the windows of their hotel room in Marseille. Still they saw each other—young and perfect and trusting but untested—in the moonlight that danced indifferent to the war across the waters of the Mediterranean, filtering through the shutters to paint their bodies silver.

  Now they would again too soon be separated, but they had this single moment and, with the greater understanding of life’s vagaries that comes with hard experience, this time they would not squander it. They reveled in each other and kissed each other’s tears away, and then she suddenly leaped up from the bed, pulled him by the hand, and ran completely free and laughing past the swinging golden pendulum of the French clock in the hallway, and drew him to her own bedroom. Hand in hand this time, they escaped the family and crossed the border. There, in her marriage bed with an antique cupid, that most clever archer, perched atop the headboard, at long last Janine held Roland against her pounding heart, and with a vast and soul-deep sigh of coming home, they joined together.

  “Whatever happens now, I will have had the two happiest days of all my life,” she called me to confide after he’d returned to Montreal. “And they were thanks to you.”

  The following Monday morning I flew to New York and sat in the waiting room of the hospital, my eyes anxiously riveted on the doorway, watching for Mom’s surgeon.

  “I was able to preserve her breast,” Dr. Peter Pressman said. “The tumor was very small, and I did a lumpectomy.” A sampling of the lymph nodes in a second operation the following week thankfully showed the cancer had not spread. There would be weeks of daily radiation, the only side effect fatigue but nothing worse. The only sign of surgery would prove to be a delicate line of stitches on her left breast. It seemed to mark the spot where a broken heart had been repaired.

  That spring, Gary, Dan, and I met Roland and Mom for lunch in Manhattan at the Symphony Café near Carnegie Hall. He was visiting her again, and to say we were eager to get to know him would be an incalculable understatement. Alone at the bar when I came in, they failed to notice me. Their heads, silver and blond, were bent and touching, and Roland was kissing the palm of Janine’s hand. She looked girlish, her blue eyes full of joy in a way that I had never seen them. I stood there undetected, watching, and it seemed that I was peeking surreptitiously at my daughter on her first date. Roland threw back his head, robustly laughing in response to something that she told him, and he was everything I had imagined: elegant and handsome and obviously in love with Mom. I felt full of gratitude to view this spectacle of myth become reality.

  When Gary arrived, he surprised Roland—particularly dignified and formal in demeanor—by clasping him in a jovial embrace. “So you’re the man who was almost my father!” he exclaimed to Mom’s chagrin. “I’ve been hearing about you all my life. It’s amazing to get to meet you!”

  For my husband, however, it would turn out to be more difficult to regard Mom’s involvement with a married man as positive, no matter how charming and intelligent he found Roland to be.

  “Aside from the issue of his marriage,” Dan objected, not unreasonably, “this will keep her from exploring other relationships with men who are available. I’d hoped someday she might remarry.”

  “There could be no other man for her,” I countered, and Gary agreed with me.

  “Honestly, there never has been,” my brother added. “He’s the only man she’s ever fully loved. No one else would interest her. To whatever degree that she can be with him, he’s the only one she’s ever wanted.”

  After lunch that day, I accompanied Mom and Roland as they walked along Fifth Avenue arm in arm, very slowly, a royal couple in procession, glowing. Their feet barely moved along the pavement, and as I found myself outpacing them, I stopped to turn and wait, replete with something that resembled the contentment of creation. I would not have been surprised to see New Yorkers, however jaded, line the street to cheer in honor of a love reborn, now transcending every obstacle.

  During Roland’s next trip to New Jersey six weeks later, the happy couple invited me to spend some time with them. Dan was back in Maryland with our children, and I was at my mother’s house, staying in the upstairs guest room. Over dinner at a local restaurant—the scene of many memorable meals I’d shared with both my parents—Roland indulged me by recounting the story of his life and origins, beginning with his grandfather, the shoemaker from Genoa. It was fascinating to come to know the man who had always been a mystery, a picture in my mother’s wallet.

  “I feel robbed,” Mom told me later, when we got home. “It’s sometimes hard to keep in mind how lucky I am to have him back, when I consider how very much time I missed.”

  Before they retired to bed that night, Mom suggested that given my own curiosity for all things past, she’d be pleased to offer for my late-night entertainment her so-called Old Maid Box. She’d recently come upon it while cleaning out a closet, she explained, but hadn’t troubled to peruse its contents. Indeed, she seemed completely satisfied to be living in the present now. I found the box on a shelf in the closet and sat with it on the bed, facing the display of Mom’s Ahnengalerie, including many pictures of my father. There was a New York Daily News article that recounted his novel 1955 court fight against the use of radar in speeding cases, which he’d proudly printed on aluminum and mounted on a wooden plaque; a snapshot that showed him seated with one hand on his hip and a tiny white kitten I had adopted creeping down his arm; a stiffly stylized portrait of the four of us at Gary’s bar mitzvah; and even a large, matted chiaroscuro photograph of Dad as a dimpled child, in velvet shorts and kneesocks, like little Lord Fauntleroy with bangs across his forehead.

  Mom’s memory box was full of kitschy greeting cards from the 1950s and ’60s and many yellowed letters written by my father—full of boyish swagger, ambition, and young love, written in their courtship and early marriage. It was difficult in that moment, knowing Roland was in my father’s bed and that I was at least partially responsible, not to feel remorse toward him. Dad would not have expected his widow to remain forever chaste, yet the fact that Roland was
in his place, as he had always been in Mother’s heart, made me question whether I’d betrayed him—not just in bringing Roland back, but always, through my fascination with the story of my mother’s first romance.

  It was then, digging deeper in the box, that I first found the letter on thin blue airmail paper that Norbert sent Janine in 1945, after spending a dissipated night in Lyon with Roland. I was shocked to find it full of threats and coldly worded warnings. “In the event you return to Europe and marry Roland,” her brother had written, “YOU WILL SAIL OUT OF MY LIFE FOREVER.” How baffling that Mom had never mentioned it, a letter that would have helped explain the pressure that prevented her from returning to the man she loved! Had she truly managed to erase this letter from memory? Or had she just concealed it from me in order to preserve my feelings for my uncle?

  Norbert’s letter was burning in my hand, and I only wished that I could wake Mom up immediately to ask about it. I felt disturbed by Norbert’s criticism of Roland, while unable to assess its truthfulness. And yet, I wasn’t sure: come the morning, should I tell them what I’d found, or should I rather keep this ugly letter to myself? How would it affect them now, almost fifty years after it was written and with Norbert gone, to confront this buried evidence, which helped elucidate so much? I felt confused and hot and tired and engulfed by more of the past than I could handle, so I opened the window to get fresh air. The burden of too much knowledge was suffocating.

  “YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED AREA! THE POLICE HAVE BEEN CALLED! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!” Instantly, a man’s voice reverberated throughout the house, intensely loud and menacing. I jumped in terror, and he bellowed deeply once again: “YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED AREA! THE POLICE HAVE BEEN CALLED! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!”

  Oddly, despite my midnight probing, I felt the voice was not addressing me. Rather, it almost seemed that by delving in the box I had summoned up my father’s ghost, like Agamemnon’s, with Norbert’s there to serve as ally, to condemn and to expel the usurper lying even now beside my mother in my parents’ bed. Mom’s door burst open, and she came running out in her nightgown, frightened, as the booming voice repeated, “LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!”

  “Are you okay?” she gasped, blinking in the light.

  “Yes,” I stammered, Elektra after all. “Who is that? What the hell is going on?”

  But Mother didn’t answer me. She was already flying down the staircase to silence the commanding voice of her new security alarm, which had failed to guard against spirits of the past entering the house unbidden.

  In May 1999—a decade after traveling to Germany and France with my parents and Gary—I went back again, this time with Mother and Roland. I had become an aficionada of this sort of pilgrimage, it seemed, a reporter whose favorite beat meant inching in rediscovered pathways through the geography of the years. I needed to see the stories fleshed out in front of me: the house, the river, the railway station, the theater, the café table, and the pier. I wanted to enter every scene myself and smell the air and feel the ground beneath my feet and count the steps at every door and evaluate the neighbors’ smiles.

  Roland had long since informed his wife that he was doing consulting work for a company in the United States, which enabled him to travel freely and get away discreetly for regular extended visits. And while he and Mom were neither emotionally nor morally content with the compromises they were making, both recognized that their options were very limited. Roland hated being responsible for Janine’s living by herself, yet she insisted she preferred to have whatever time she could with him, rather than make her life with anyone else on earth. Given that assurance, he refused to consider losing her again. It was not their fault that destiny had driven them apart, he said, and they owed it to themselves to seize this unpredicted happiness. Still, both agreed it would not be fair for Roland to abandon his blameless wife after more than thirty years of marriage. Janine insisted she would not want that on her conscience. So every six weeks since 1994, he had come to spend two weeks with her, and from time to time they traveled in the United States or France.

  “Two days only have passed since my return and it already feels like months,” he wrote her after one such visit. “I miss you terribly. You see, you always talk about getting cured of our romance, and I did my best to help! But now you have me definitely and hopelessly ‘contaminated’ to the extent that I am sick at heart. Strangely, I do not want to be cured! I love you completely.”

  To me, Roland explained, “No matter how long I stay, when I have to leave, it’s definitely very painful for us both. All the same, we have to try to be grateful for what we have.”

  For the rest, they spoke by telephone every day, twice a day—as evening fell and then again past one a.m. for a whispered good night kiss. And so Roland, the man whose name had always been familiar to everyone who knew Janine, became real and dear to all her friends and family.

  The year before our trip, in 1998, Roland had come to Washington for Zach’s bar mitzvah. I invited him and Mom to stay with us for a few days in advance, and I dodged the children’s questions about their relationship until the point when the phone rang with only Zach at home, and he found himself uncomfortably talking to a woman who gave her name as Mrs. Arcieri. What she may have thought about her husband’s absences—how much she guessed or tolerated—we would never know. She asked Zach to take a message for Roland, and my soulful son, on the brink of ritual manhood, confronted me as soon as I got home. Urgently, he drew me to his bedroom, peered into the hallway to make sure no one was approaching, and quietly closed his door.

  “You won’t believe this,” he whispered. “I think Roland is married!” He imparted this intelligence with all the grave intensity of a spy reporting back on the opposing camp’s position. “A woman who said she was his wife called here while you were out. Whoa, I didn’t know what to say! Don’t you think we should tell Nana?”

  We sat down on his bed, and I outlined his grandmother’s cruel dilemma. She could give up Roland entirely, or make do to reclaim in little interludes, now that she was in her seventies, the love stolen from her in her youth. In respect to Roland’s wife, yes, the situation was deplorable. But a divorce at this point in life might be even worse for her, and Roland was trying to shield her feelings by keeping his relationship with Nana secret. It was a complex ethical conundrum to present to a thirteen-year-old boy, and so it was and would remain for all of us, especially for Janine, with her own experience of infidelity.

  From my place on the bimah at Zach’s bar mitzvah that Saturday, I wept silently for Dad when the moment came to recite the Kaddish, remembering how he’d always said it was his goal, despite his lack of religious faith, to live to celebrate this milestone in his grandson’s life. But I had only to look down at the congregation and see Mom seated with Roland, her hand entwined with his, to know that while I missed Dad terribly, there was reason here for thankfulness. And so I hoped there was a God who would understand and tolerate that living in a ruthless world could sometimes lead us to unholy bargains.

  Our trip to Europe in 1999 began for Mom, Roland, and me in Freiburg, as had our family adventure in 1989. But if the previous journey was a sort of pilgrimage for Mom and an opportunity for us to understand our roots, this one enabled her to share her German past with Roland, who had never traveled there before. For the sake of history, I had arranged for us to stay on the Poststrasse in the Hotel Minerva, long boarded up and empty but recently refurbished and reopened next door to Mother’s childhood home. At Michael Stock’s suggestion, we even parked our rental car in the driveway of Poststrasse 6, and from her corner window Mom could see the site of Sigmar’s former business, still an Eisen Glatt showroom, on the Rosastrasse. Once again, we went to services on Friday night in the modern Freiburg synagogue. This time Roland was seated with the other men across the aisle from us. Seemingly at ease among the Jewish worshippers, many of them recent Russian immigrants, he wore a yarmulke floating on his head of thick white hair. My sixteenth wedding anni
versary fell that week, and when Dan arranged to have a bright bouquet sent to my hotel room, I presented the flowers to Rosemarie Stock before we said good-bye to her. Posing for a picture in the very room where Mom was born, she and Mother stood together, side by side. And in a gracious nod to the background that connected us, Michael surreptitiously covered our hotel bill, subsequently insisting over our objections that no one from our family should ever have to pay to sleep on the Poststrasse.

  In front of the 1987 Freiburg Synagogue, the waters of a Bächle (dark line at bottom right) run across the sidewalk and up to the center of a large steel Star of David. (photo credit 27.1)

  In Ihringen, we found the chestnut trees inside the desecrated Jewish graveyard blooming pink and white, with crimson poppies winking through the nearby vineyards. The cemetery’s walls were clean again, the vileness painted over, and patches of cement, smooth and slightly raised, filled jagged cracks on all the broken tombstones like keloid scars. Notwithstanding the offer of a large reward for information leading to the vandals, Walter Preker told us, no arrests were made, and in 2007 the little graveyard would be attacked again.

  Mulhouse proved far more painful. My cousin Michel Cahen, Lisette and Edy’s eldest son, had only recently at the age of sixty died of a brain tumor. Roland’s sister Emilienne was also gone, the victim of a violent mugging in 1993 at an ATM not far from her apartment. As it was, we had dinner with Michel’s family, and his widow, Huguette, surprised us with two other guests: Martine, the daughter of Roland’s first cousin André, and her little son, who hid behind his mother as he studied his previously unknown relative from Canada.

  “It’s funny,” Mom observed to Roland, meeting these new members of the extended Arcieri family. “Here we come to see my cousins, and we meet yours! Whoever would have guessed our families would finally sit together at a dinner table in Mulhouse?”