The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  The two women obeyed their mother’s orders; tea, shopping list. She had only to wave her two wrinkled hands. On her left ring finger, she wore two wedding bands of white gold. The rings were too tight, making her veiny skin swell up. Perla and Pesia moved like Siamese twins, and this ancillary twinship was a continuation of their childhood and adolescence, when the two had slept in the same narrow bed, head to toe, feet and hands tangled, a single body.

  I observed the reconstruction of this archaic alliance between the mother and her two daughters; it was an ancient scene—a zone forbidden to us—in which were reborn, intact, in their freshness and their violence, the invisible impulses of the soul and memory. There wasn’t even a need for words, just the grasped hands, the laughter, the eagerness, the glances exchanged in secret, the mute disapproval; they had an entire well-oiled choreography in which we had no place. Besides, when it came to children—to us—the grandmother really couldn’t care less. She had saved two other children at a different time with her own hard work, like two puppies brought to the surface with their skin between her teeth. The litters that came later did not interest her; she was—who would’ve guessed from looking at her, that wrinkled old lady?—a goddess of fertility who reigned without tenderness.

  Sitting on the chair just across from her, I watched for the moment when my mother would become my mother again. When she would escape the zone and return to me as herself, full of warmth. And, finally, she shook herself free, crossed the boundaries of the magic circle, took two steps, and placed her hands on my cheeks.

  Pesia remained on the other side of the border, next to the goddess, absent. Judith was quiet, absorbed by this spectacle. The lawyer continued to pontificate.

  We left for Paris.

  On the banks of the Seine, in the neighborhoods at the edge of the city, was a bric-a-brac of wastelands, old workers’ hostels with their outdated cafés, buhrstone houses, and housing projects with façades that were already gray. Everything had sprung up, been destroyed, and reconstructed without order. From time to time, between a house and a low-income building, even a stretch of wild riverbank would appear; unruly trees and below them the wide coursing of the Seine.

  The faces of girls with shining lips on the flyers for erotic telephone services posted crookedly on the walls, the calm fishermen straight out of a Renoir film, the bar-restaurants with striped awnings, white letters painted in a semi-circle on their windows, blacks wearing boubous walking under the sun, a man smoking a cigarette alone in the window of a stone building, enormous among the small homes, the empty workshops and broken tiles of a factory in ruins. There was never the possibility of settling one’s gaze on something, of getting used to it. This was the banlieue, a landscape that was incongruous, unfinished, stratified; holes left by buildings, holes left by time from which returned, breath by breath, the imagined memory of before the war, the fervor of rue Lénine, the idleness of Arab cafés on rue des Fusillés.

  At each new crossing, my mother would show me the disappeared houses that had been destroyed or already replaced. She was the attentive recorder of these transformations, ones that moved her as deeply as if she herself were the landscape being changed.

  And the Seine, massive and slow, would accompany us on our voyage. It moved forward, bordered by warehouses, then sandy riverbanks; its substance, its movement, and its uniform color amid disparate urban plains were—before it tamed itself at pont d’Ivry and entered Paris in majesty—a reminder of the elementary structure of lands and water.

  It was a few years later that Pesia first attempted suicide at the Pantin cemetery. She had chosen a funeral at random, let the procession move farther away, and then she had arranged the bottles around her, swallowed all of the medications, and lain down with her arms crossed on top of the tombstone. It was there that the funeral parlor employees found her a few hours later, stretched out, lifeless. They saved her, of course, and nothing was left of her gesture except the ridiculous nature of her setup: a suicide in a cemetery. She was cared for in the same hospital where, a few months before, the grandmother had deteriorated in a room invaded by the shouts of children rising from a nearby school playground.

  We waited for news about Pesia in the same hallway where we’d learned about the grandmother’s death. The lawyer, for once, was silent. My cousin with blue eyes held my hand.

  We remembered the grandmother’s death throes: the way she no longer spoke or ate or drank for several days and then, out of the blue, how she’d sat straight up in the bed, settled herself comfortably into it, refusing the drip, and then had started screaming without stopping. Nothing could stop her anymore!

  She screamed while together the two sisters rushed around the bed to try and take her hand, she screamed whenever the nurses would come in, holding their ears, and rough up her old body from which there was nothing left to draw, neither healing nor silence.

  She screamed when I entered the room, dead with fear, almost pushed from behind by my mother who was standing in the doorway, and while I stood for a long time far away from the bed, concentrating on the games the children were playing in the schoolyard. She screamed at night, she screamed during the day; the other patients complained, it felt like being in a madhouse. The staff was completely disorganized, and the doctors didn’t understand how this could be happening when she was lying helpless in her bed, her legs barely covered by the yellow hospital gown.

  Perla, my mother, and Pesia, my aunt, would conspire together in the hallway, in the room, their heads leaning against one another; they’d each come to one side of the bed to caress the face resting on the pillow, but the grandmother kept her eyes and mouth wide open, straight up to the ceiling. She continued her monotone cry, wordless. She kept on like that for two whole days.

  We watched mechanically as the nurses’ aides passed in front of us, we heard the squeaking of their plastic sandals on the linoleum.

  It was then we realized that the silence had returned.

  When my mother and aunt came out of the room holding hands, their faces were white, their eyes dead. The hallways, fluorescent lights, and the hospital linoleum had disappeared, replaced by a barren plain enveloped in wind. They walked out of habit, but when they put one foot in front of the other it was as if they were weightless, in thin air; they had lost their certainty of place, their sense of time. They were each like a child who has just been born, incapable of fixing his gaze. The world was no longer standing up, it was once again a succession of incoherent injunctions, shapes, and sounds in the midst of which they were navigating by sight, indifferent. They had lost their translator forever. It was strange because the others fell for it: the doctors, the funeral home employees, the rabbi. They saw the beautiful faces twisted with sorrow, but that was normal, a testament to reverent filial compassion, and they accepted the faces as representatives of the people they were speaking to; they spoke with contrition and empathy, diagnoses, the size of the coffin. Deception! They had become tiny again, they no longer knew anything.

  They were still holding hands the day of the funeral, their two silhouettes in the middle of a path where dust was swirling, covering with a thin white layer the shoes of everyone in the small group gathered around the coffin.

  The sky was imposing: gray clouds raced across it and eventually blended into one another before each one left again on its own course. The trees, too, were moving under the gusts of wind. There was no doubt about it; this was truly weather for a funeral and the end of the world. I heard the rabbi talking about Warsaw, but he may as well have been talking about Mars, or Neptune, far-off planets, he may as well have been talking about Pompeii, cities swallowed up. I daydreamed about bodies frozen in lava; I closed my eyes, letting myself be soothed by the rabbi’s lumbering voice. When I opened them again, he was holding his hat firmly in his hands to fight against the gusts of wind, and he was already at “the tragic tumults of history.”

  Pesia and Perla weren’t listening to a thing. They were staring, left of t
he path, at the little hole in the ground below the highway in which they’d have to let go of their all-powerful and stern goddess. It started to rain, and the rabbi had to cut his speech short. Everyone hurried into single file between the rows of graves to get to the hole where two groundskeepers were patiently waiting, leaning on their shovels. The rain whipped everyone’s faces, people jostled each other on the path, umbrellas banged against one another in the air. The sand transformed into mud in which no one was able to move; a few tried holding their arms out like tightrope walkers on the back edges of the gravestones to try and escape the swamp, but they stumbled on the muddy ground. Even the bucket filled with dirt for everyone to throw on the coffin, once it had been lowered down, was drenched. The sand had turned back into clay and, in spite of the small pail they used, as people took their turn they stained their hands or faces with large black smears which they tried, despite the solemnity of the moment, to clean discreetly.

  At the head of this procession, Pesia and Perla had thrown their handfuls of dirt almost distractedly, one after the other, without pausing beside the grave. They looked ready to flee, but they still had to form a condolence line at the other end of the path. The funeral director, wearing a sopping black suit, led them by the arm like a Chief of Protocol and placed them under two trees that were dripping. The line re-formed, we shook hands energetically, murmuring, hurrying to be done with it. My mother and my aunt, both soaking wet, shook hands, smiling like two robots, and in an instant the cortège went by and people started running, car doors slammed, and we repatriated Pesia and Perla into a car, the wipers flying over the windshield.

  And it was over.

  Later, as we climbed a deserted boulevard Voltaire, Pesia, huddled in the backseat against the cousin with blue eyes, began softly repeating:

  “We abandoned her in her hole. She saved us and we abandoned her in her hole. She’s all alone, freezing. We left her.”

  “We didn’t abandon her, Maman. She’s dead, she’s buried.”

  “We abandoned her in her hole.”

  My mother said nothing. She looked out the window. I knew that in the unchangeable façades of the buildings, in their persistence, she was looking for the vanished comfort of her mother’s arms.

  After Pesia’s suicide attempt, the people at the hospital had watched us return with worry. The screamers!

  But she remained quite calm, shut up in her room. She would watch us enter, following each movement without releasing her gaze. She played along with the attention, the covers under her chin, water in the glass, the radio on the table during the night. She smiled, she said thank you. She probably wanted more than the covers or the radio: what she really wanted was for us to save her. She left, fragile-looking between the lawyer and the cousin with blue eyes, and returned to the house with the pine tree.

  During one of her convalescences, while she was sorting through her papers and some of my grandmother’s that she had salvaged, my mother stumbled upon the letter from the Ministry of Prisoners of War.

  April 1945

  Ministry of Prisoners of War

  Department of Missing Persons

  Monsieur,

  [With names that were so bizarre—the grandmother’s was Mendla, one could never make heads or tails of it, was it a woman or a man?—they had opted for the most generic term, Monsieur.]

  The Ministry of Prisoners of War, Deportees, and Refugees is pleased to inform you of the liberation from BERGEN-BELSEN of Monsieur STERN OVADIA currently awaiting repatriation.

  Certain liberated individuals were able to leave ahead of our correspondence and will have returned to their homes when the present notice arrives. Please accept, Monsieur, the assurance of our sincere regards.

  On behalf of the Minister

  Director of Missing Persons

  Paul Newman!

  He’d been liberated, he’d been alive.

  “Alive,” my mother murmured to herself when she’d finished reading the letter, and that single word transfigured Aunt Pesia’s living room; even the pine tree outside the window was less sad. “Alive,” my aunt repeated, and once again—though by now our feet touched the ground—Judith and I were sitting in chairs across from them, watching the show.

  The lawyer interrupted them, imperious. “He may have been liberated and then died right after the letter was sent. He may have died right away, from typhus, from who knows what. The British soldiers who liberated the camp were afraid of those living cadavers when they first saw them. They stuffed them with food, and the living cadavers couldn’t handle it. They ate and ate but they couldn’t handle it, so they died. That’s exactly what could’ve happened. They liberate him, they put his name on the list of survivors, they write the letter and bam, he dies, but now there’s no letter to fix the mistake. He’s dead, typhus, something else, he’s dead. At any rate, he never came back.”

  He spoke to them as if they hadn’t actually seen the piles of dead bodies, had never seen the lost bodies on the beds, delirious with typhus, as if they’d never offered their heads to their mother so she could remove from them, for hours on end, the swarming lice, the lice of typhus.

  Regardless, they paid no attention to him. Pesia remained in her armchair, elsewhere, and my mother had already gotten up to dig through the papers. She found three photos of Ovadia and spread them out on the coffee table. A portrait of Ovadia, Ovadia at the office with his colleagues in a suit and tie, the elegance of a Brummell design, and a candid shot of Ovadia arm in arm with people we didn’t know on a street in Prague.

  “He could just as easily not have died. Maybe he didn’t want to come back, who knows why. He may have come back and not said anything. To start another life, without us.”

  And my mother grasped the photos in her hand, studying them, as if it really had been possible to find an answer in his frozen eyes, as if it had been possible for photos to suddenly come to life, leave their black and white trap, and come resurrect themselves in the middle of the living room. She looked at them like a child waiting for a miracle.

  “He may even still be alive. Old, but alive.”

  “We should do what they do for missing children. Using the computer, they can make the faces look older. They recreate the child’s face at ten years old, at fifteen years old … We could make his face older and give it to the people looking for Nazis, Wiesenthal and those people. They find Nazis, so they should be able to find Jews, right?”

  We all looked at Judith, who had never talked so much. My mother turned the photos around between her fingers.

  The man who until now had been a dead shadow had been alive; the letter told us that, and maybe he still was. This certainty transfigured the house in the suburbs. The living room was invaded by a presence that occupied its empty spaces. Behind our chairs, next to our bodies and our faces, close to Pesia’s pained face, my mother’s worried hands, near our feet, Judith’s and mine, stuck to the floor, Ovadia had leapt from his place of exile. He’d traveled across spaces and years, he’d crossed borders, half-phantom, half-man, he had disrupted the normal successions of time and memory to appear before us (and this apparition was a whirlwind, new blood) on the brink of repatriation.

  5

  WHEN YOU LOOK AT a street, at buildings, at façades; twenty-six years, thirty years—is that a little or a lot? When you move around a city, when, as if inside an untouched forest, you trace in it trails only you can decipher, when you go over and over the same pathways, when I walk and walk again in Paris, the stones, what are they saying to me? Walker, that’s a distinctive piece of clothing you’re putting on, the way it dilutes the lines of your body, the way it forgets your gender and what you’re made of. That passing through me, who has become invisible, absent, are the particles of time, that they are giving me life, that they are exoticizing me, that they are imprinting themselves in me, surviving because of me, my body and pristine head, miracle child, carrier, just like there are water carriers, bread carriers, I am a carrier of stories, o
f names and telephone numbers. The senseless utopia that everything revives and inscribes in me for the simple reason that, armed with my post-war vaccine, I am me, immortal, and I will always remember everything.

  The streets of Paris are fine streets, ones that do not tumble into ruin, ones that traverse the centuries indifferent to the wars, the disappearances, the collapses. The buildings of Paris are fine fortress walls, more or less whitened, and without too much risk the sentries of time can easily examine the stones to make ghosts appear in the middle of the city in motion.

  So you walk. This walk was an apprenticeship. The streets, to begin with, had been full of signs, colors, and movements: this was rue du Louvre near the Seine in 1978. The red diamond outside the tabac, the fluted wicker chairs placed neatly on the sidewalk, the huge metal façade of Établissements Cain et Rheims—Silk Fabrics, the half-erased face of a pink and chubby baby drawn on a blue background against a section of brick wall: these were the solid, tangible signs which, in their sequence along the street, seemed like the materialization of a necessary order, the one belonging to the real life of adults. An order you needed only to look at, look at a second time, and look at again to rightfully be part of.

  Then, gradually, the signs grew rich with knowledge, with disappearances, and in the same way that the depth of field can suddenly appear with greater and greater clarity in a cinematic image, on the streets of Paris and on the façades of buildings, the crowd of invisible details had congregated around well-known landmarks.

  There were only a few of us to keep an account of these details that were inaccessible to the naked eye: hunters, tamers of phantoms, the sentries! Like sorcerers on a quest for underground water, propelled by their never-ending walks. They intermingle with the city they wander through until they become components of it as natural as the buildings, the domes, and the carriage entrances. They appear in the middle of a street, or at summer’s peak in the sun-bleached courtyard of a certain old hotel, where the old stables still remain and have been transformed into storage rooms, and the wrought-iron lanterns swing from the ceiling of the stone vestibule.