The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  The certainty that we’d arrived safe and sound was reinforced further still whenever we visited my father’s aunt, who lived in a small building on rue Daguerre two steps from the Lion de Belfort.

  She had once been a knitting worker in the 11th arrondissement fur workshops, and after retiring, she’d reinvented herself as an amateur painter. Her exuberantly colored paintings depicted overabundant families captured inside crimson interiors: the women, with almond eyes and long black hair, wore turquoise dresses, the men had beards and multicolored caftans, and children with dark skin looked at the adults with trusting eyes. The aunt piled up her canvases in every corner of her apartment, cramming them against one another, in the kitchen, on the landing.

  What was most fascinating was the way that Anna—who still wore her hair, now gray, the way she had when she was young, in two coils separated from one another by a part on top of her head—had painted the tiles in her apartment the same tawny colors she used for her paintings. Transformed into stained glass, the windows filtered a soft blue, yellow, and red-colored light into the rooms which, especially in summer, enveloped the furniture and the books piled on the library shelves in a surreal halo.

  In one corner of the living room was a portrait of Anna at twenty years old. It was easy to see from her melancholy dark-haired gypsy gaze, her half-smile, her parted hair up in a chignon, and her long and shiny earrings, that the women with large eyes in her paintings were only an uninterrupted series of self-portraits.

  The creator of the painting was a certain Schoenberg, Anna’s great love before the war.

  He had painted her face from memory, at the camp in Pithiviers where he’d been interned in 1941. Schoenberg, a tall and frail young man—judging by the only remaining photo of him, which was set on the speckled marble above the fireplace—had prefaced the drawing with a dedication: “To my beloved Chanouchi.” He’d also drawn a staff, on which were reproduced the first notes of a Chopin nocturne that I tried in vain to decipher each time I visited.

  There was also another “œuvre” by Schoenberg, a letter opener made of light wood on which he’d carved drawings of the barracks in Pithiviers with, once again, a music staff, but this time with the first notes of a Beethoven symphony. On the handle of the letter opener were written the following words, the irony or sadness of which I didn’t consider at the time: “Fond memories of Pithiviers.”

  Anna would whistle me the nocturne, the beginning of the symphony, and then she would talk about Schoenberg, that boy who was so fragile, so artistic, so in love. For me, though, Schoenberg and his thin face in metal-rimmed glasses was just one more silhouette like the ones in the photos that populated my grandmothers’ shelves. Faces of men, of women, of children, brothers, fathers, sisters, mothers, nephews, or nieces who had most likely existed at one time, somewhere, in places of which I’d glimpsed a few details: the thin bank of a river, the finely crafted walls of a wooden house, the gate of a railway station in the countryside.

  This crowd of black and white—or rather white and gray, in which I sometimes saw a face strangely resembling one of my grandmothers or Parisian cousins, like a plant from the same species—was the crowd of the disappeared. These disappearances did not surprise me. “They died during the war.” I’d gotten used to hearing that without asking questions long ago.

  It seemed completely natural to me that Schoenberg, too, had disappeared, and that there were no traces left of him but those musical staffs, the portrait, and the letter opener.

  Anna had also inherited one other thing from Schoenberg: his best friend, who came from the same village in Poland, who “didn’t die in the war,” and whom she’d married in the early fifties.

  This was Morgenstern, the diabolical figure of rue Daguerre! Morgenstern—not much more than five feet tall, a few sparse teeth—who insisted, whenever he emerged from his library where books were piled from the parquet floor to the ceiling, on speaking to me in English (he’d learned it on his own by reading Shakespeare) because, he said, there was nothing more important than knowing other languages. He had a good grasp of ten or so, which completely baffled me, because if my English was rudimentary, then his—like his French, in fact—was scarcely comprehensible due to the combined effect of his accent and the absence of teeth.

  But Morgenstern hardly worried about material details as trivial as teeth and accents. He would plant me in his old chair, brown leather with curved armrests, and give me, in English, the detailed inventory of his library:

  “French Literature, Russian Literature, American Literature, English Literature.” He’d point out each consecutive section with the hand gestures of a magician, haphazardly accentuating the syllables in each word. “LittéraTUre française, LIittérature rrrrusse, LittéraToure aMMéricaine, Littérature anglaise and then Polish Literature, Yiddish Literature, Spanish Literature, Italian, North European and now and now see, listen! BAUdelaire, Tsvetaïeva, Louise Labbé, Dostoïevski, KAfKA, Sade, John Donne, Knut KNUt Hamsun, WITKACY.” He turned around. “Philosophie, Political SCIENCE, Économie politique, Trotski, Marx, Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Hegel, Platon. Nothing, nothing that is human is alien to me.”

  He’d pirouette from the window to the door, run his hand over the shelves, caress the bookbindings, blow on the dust-covered pages, and adjust the heaps.

  “This book”—he took down from the shelves the theoretical texts of Rosa Luxembourg—“I bought on boulevard Saint-Michel, it was 1932, I had just arrived in Paris, East Railway Station, gare de l’Est, such an awful racket, I ran straight to the Latin Quarter, that’s where I had been told to go, back there in Ostrow, Mazovie, Poland. In 1933, I also bought the first translation of Kafka, I could read in German of course but thought it could be interesting in French too. Just to compare, what do you think, little girl? Dites-moi, jeune fille, et vous que lisez-vous, WHAT DO YOU READ? What do Parisian little girl read?”

  I didn’t answer; I hadn’t understood a thing! He found me a bit simple-minded, Morgenstern, but he’d put on a show for me because as far as spectators went, he didn’t have very many. He lived cloistered on rue Daguerre, reading and rereading in his worn-out armchair. At his feet he had several wobbly stacks of books onto which he’d unthinkingly toss each volume that he’d finished. Certain ones had collapsed but he paid no attention, and the nation of books, creeping plank by plank, invaded each corner of the room like an unmanageable grass a little more every day.

  Sometimes he’d bring me with him for a tour of the cemetery at Montparnasse. He’d shout at the dead, climb over the graves, and laughingly comment on the epitaphs. I walked ten steps behind him, certain that these sacrileges would not go unpunished. He found all of it beautiful and outrageous, these cemeteries surrounded by walls, with neatly traced paths where the dead lay quietly awaiting visits from the living. “Can you appreciate this: walls, paths, graves, how beautiful this is? Parisian girl!”

  Once in a while, worried, Anna would suddenly open the door to the library, her hands blue with paint, and interrupt Morgenstern’s tirades; she forbade him from bringing me to the cemetery.

  She mixed French and Yiddish. He’d answer with dignity in English. “I try to give this Parisian little girl a sense of what aaaart and more specifically literatoure is. I don’t know what she should be effrayeeed of.”

  She’d yell in Yiddish, her long gypsy earrings swinging in every direction, then take me out of the library and repatriate me to the “Schoenberg area” in the living room, force-feed me her cinnamon apple tart, white and brown, and let me play with the letter opener from Pithiviers. Then on her easel she’d continue her psychedelic explorations of squandered family happiness.

  I interpreted this whole strange atmosphere as a collection of relics, the exoticism of which—from atop my pedestal as a schoolgirl fed with the peremptory slogans of the Republic—I could appreciate. They were the stages, emigration, deaths, accents, and follies that had been necessary in the end to lead to this perfection that was my Frenc
h childhood in a world at peace. And rue Daguerre was, in essence, no more than a small lost island, an isolated embassy from “the world before” whose customs were not unpleasant to observe, and whose magic lights did perhaps capture the imagination, but then vanished immediately once across the Seine, where one’s feet were replanted in the present.

  On the other side of the Seine, in “the world of today”—impermeable to old troubles, the world of my blissful childhood—a new president of the Republic was elected, a socialist, and people danced in place de la Bastille to celebrate the coming of a new era. My parents did not share this surge of enthusiasm; they would have been too afraid of being noticed. It also would have required too much hope (the betterment of humankind!). They had lowered their ambitions immediately: it was enough just to carry on. It was in fact on this pessimistic conviction that their alliance rested, but I for my part enjoyed the scenes of rejoicing I saw on television.

  Girls in tee-shirts brandished tricolor flags, perched on shoulders in the crowd. It was an updated revival of our history lessons: the French Revolution, 1936, etc. It was the triumph of la bonne France–France the generous, the model, the enlightened. And François Mitterrand, with his thin smile and discerning gaze, had the gentleness and experience of a benevolent father. I was keenly aware of this subtle mixture of eternal France and modernity, of small valleys and anti-racism, of Elysian dignity and Touche pas à mon pote. France éternelle had landed right in the middle of the country of TGV trains, US bags, and sentimental songs by Jean-Jacques Goldman.

  This was, we were told, the Mitterrand generation. It was one more fortress keeping me inexorably shielded from the ghosts.

  4

  ONE DAY, MY MOTHER found a piece of paper in her sister’s files. That piece of paper, which bore the heading of the Ministry of Prisoners of War, was addressed to my grandmother. It was dated May 1945.

  My grandmother probably hadn’t read it until she herself had returned from Germany with her two daughters.

  The family had been arrested a few months earlier in June 1944. In the convoy that left from Toulouse in July 1944—and in which Jews and resisters were mixed together—the women and children had been sent to Ravensbrück and then to Bergen-Belsen. My mother’s father had never returned from Germany; it was presumed that he had died there.

  My mother and her sister had learned that—though neither they nor their mother knew it then, and they were just little girls, anyway—their father (the father with blue eyes of whom only three or four photos remained, the father whose even-featured face resembled the American actor Paul Newman’s, the father they pictured next to his own brother in the mountains of Galicia, where he’d been born, the two brothers who were like two versions of the same face, one harmonious, the other a mess), their terribly handsome father had spent his last weeks just a few steps away from them in the barracks, at the door to the barracks, on the walkways through the camp that had been built in the heart of the Bergen-Belsen forest in Northern Germany.

  It was war, they had come back; he’d died one hundred feet or so from them without their knowing. They had grown up without a father, far from Northern Germany, returned to life.

  It was war, there were the disappeared and the others, and now it was necessary to live, here, in France.

  My aunt Pesia, my mother’s sister, was the spitting image of her father! She was, as he must have been, magnificent. Even back then, in the camp, her beauty had saved her. With her curls, she looked just like Shirley Temple. For the little Shirley Temple of Bergen-Belsen, my grandmother received vegetable peelings and a little soup, too. She was so adorable with her curls full of lice. For the little Shirley Temple of Bergen-Belsen with hair full of lice, the world was, nevertheless, the camp, the barracks, the roll-calls, the shots, the dogs, the dead bodies, the thin tree trunks covered in snow. It was lingering at the doors to the kitchens, an imitation Shirley Temple, begging for the vegetable peelings and soup that kept a person going for a few days, a few more weeks.

  And Pesia’s beauty had survived the war. She’d turned into a terrific young girl, a motor scooter and all the rest, a well-formed figure, knee-length skirts, beehive hair, gingham dresses, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve. It was miraculous, that face and body, smooth with no scars, no tattoo, nothing. That beautiful, tall young girl, so uncomplicated, who could have been an actress on the black and white streets of Paris Nouvelle Vague. Nothing stirred in her peaceful face, a Madonna, until her eyes eventually fell upon a law student in glasses, a student who became a lawyer, a lawyer who gave her three children with blue eyes like Paul Newman, and with those three children and the lawyer she moved into a big house-yard-Formica kitchen in the Paris suburbs, and to those three children, lawyer, house, and yard she devoted herself as was proper and good and normal to do.

  But something was wrong.

  Inside the house she tidied, she took care of the children. She took care of the far end of the yard, the tall pine tree that grew in the middle of the clipped grass; she trimmed the dark green hedges that camouflaged the outline of metal fencing. She no longer had Shirley Temple’s ringlets; au naturel she would have, but she straightened her hair mercilessly every morning, strand by strand, and even the smallest curl could not escape.

  She cooked, she invited people over, and sometimes we would go. She organized grand luncheons, interminable afternoons. In the dining room with glass doors that looked out onto the pine tree, the grandmother would sit at the end of the table, watching her youngest daughter without speaking. The grandmother, served first, who conscientiously emptied her plate, cleaned it, emptied it, nothing left on the plate, white, gleaming, the plate extraordinarily empty whenever she had been there. We, the grandchildren, were in turtlenecks and corduroy pants. That was the style in those days. Pesia’s children had blue eyes like Paul Newman, and my sister and I had brown eyes like just about anybody.

  Pesia served, cleared, straight hair and her remarkable face on which I recognized the same strange smile my mother had. She hurried around this way, dish towel, dishes, sauerkraut, kisses for the children, conversations, but when I looked at her I felt as if there were two Pesias. One for dish towel-dishes-sauerkraut-kisses-children-conversations and the other who peered with distress at the active Pesia while she, the other one, remained standing, motionless, silent, as if behind a glass bell, capable only of perhaps walking her hands over the transparent wall and banging on it.

  In spite of the movement, the shouts, the noises of covers on the plates, and the lawyer’s loud voice, the house was inhabited by this invisible duplication, and the atmosphere, the carrying out of actions, seemed to be in subtle slow motion, dilated. My cousins’ blue eyes were not as bright as they could have been, their movements less defined. I found the shadow of the pine tree through the glass door gloomy. I liked my younger blue-eyed cousin; she was the one who resembled Paul Newman the most, the one who hid under the stairs, at the top of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs, in the wine cellar, the one who stayed stubbornly silent when we spoke to her, and who, when she did end up talking, had a strange voice, rasping, the voice of another world.

  “At school they say I’m weird.”

  “You’re not weird, Judith. You don’t like talking, that’s all.”

  “Actually, it’s the not talking that they think is weird.”

  “And what do you say to them?”

  “I don’t say anything to them. I never say anything to them.”

  “Give me your hand, Judith.”

  “For what?”

  “So I can keep it nice and warm for you. So I can give you powers.”

  “I watch them but I don’t care. They can think I’m weird. They can laugh, jump, run … I watch them but I swear I really don’t care … Hold my hand a little longer.”

  And I held her hand in mine, in the warmth, in the darkness, under the stairs. We looked at each other, the two blue-eyed/brown-eyed cousins. And eventually Pesia became afraid; she called thr
oughout the whole house and came to force us out from under the stairs, but Judith said nothing, didn’t speak. We were put in two chairs, our feet not touching the ground, under the grandmother’s supervision.

  “I don’t understand anything she’s telling me with her Yiddish.”

  I spoke softly to Judith; the grandmother didn’t hear anything, she was deaf.

  “Do you understand any of it?”

  “No, Father and Mother speak Yiddish when they don’t want me to understand.”

  “I know for sure I won’t speak Yiddish in front of my kids, I’m not going to speak a language they don’t understand.”

  “You don’t know that, you can’t know. You don’t know if kids understand or if they don’t. Sometimes they even understand a language that they don’t understand.”

  My mother and Pesia returned from the kitchen. They each sat down next to their mother, facing us. They stayed like that, a strange trinity, the mother, the silent daughter, and my mother, who in spite of everything was smiling.

  “Pechiou,” the mother said, “go and get me the tea in the kitchen. Perla”—my mother!—“take out the papers, I’m going to make you the list.”