The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  I returned to the free air and crossed the camp’s borders.

  It felt good to move forward under the sun, to let my eyes rest on what was nothing more than a large clearing, to move forward in the grass step by step, to follow the stony paths, scanning the explanatory signs letter by letter without putting the words back together, to put one foot in front of the other a little more, to feel the sky above me and to feel nothing except its blue liquid, the shakings of the wind. So I went forward. Finally, after a while, I lay down without knowing where I was.

  My head hurt, my head was spinning. The clouds, the magnificent clouds, were moving majestically above me and I felt every inch of my body’s contour: the long line of my legs, my roller coaster fingers, the weight of my head against the earth. I fell asleep. When I woke up, I lifted myself up halfway and saw my mother’s shadow coming toward me from the other end of the clearing.

  She took a few steps and stopped, turning her head slightly left and right. She set off again. I saw her completely, then she disappeared, hidden by a mound of grass, and I could only make out her torso or her head until, finally, she emerged fully once more. She strode on. She was walking in her own footsteps again. She didn’t see me, though there was nothing unusual about that because I didn’t exist. Not yet. She came close to the edge of the camp, the trees, she touched the trunks, she looked at her hands, and she turned and walked in my direction. I now saw her face clearly: closed, inaccessible.

  A few yards away from me, without so much as glancing at me, she squatted down. Her coat was dragging on the ground in the grass and her legs were spread far apart. She was crouched like an animal, like a monkey, like a wolf, like a dog. She was as small as a child. She looked around her and I realized she was searching for her sister’s presence, her mother’s. She was looking for her pack. In that moment, she could have pulled out a rusty bowl, lapped from it without a spoon. She could have devoured invisible scraps of bread. She could have stood up, stepped over the cadavers, she could have pushed away the ones who came begging for her soup, she could have been a threatening and monstrous child. Why she was crouching, she didn’t know. But seeing her in that empty clearing, I realized—and the force of that image was such that my head spun, I had to close my eyes and stretch out completely against the ground—that she had been a monkey, a wolf, a dog. That she had devoured, stepped over, pushed away. She had been a threatening and monstrous child. Here was the root, the red-hot iron against which none of us—not me, her miracle, the houses of Paris, the repetitions of rue Caulaincourt, or the rescue attempts—stood the slightest chance. Swept away. The possibility of return was a mirage.

  Under the autumn sun, in the middle of the vast clearing, I felt penetrated by a sadness that was so brutal, so desperate, I couldn’t move. There was no longer anything to do but stay there, stretched out, to measure the regular path of my blood, the beating of my heart, the accelerations of my pulse, and to feel myself contained by the limits of my skin. To no longer move an inch lest I encourage suffering, lest I pave a way for it into each fold, each ventricle, each cavity that it would progressively contaminate over the course of its journey inside my swarming and open body.

  In the silence we heard shouting. It was Inge, running clumsily toward us because of her heels, which were getting stuck in the grass. She brushed aside the leaves with her arms. She reached us out of breath, disheveled. Long strands of hair had escaped her chignon and were hiding her face. She suddenly seemed younger, almost a young girl, her cheeks reddened by the sprint.

  “I found this for you, I found this for you,” she repeated. Then she stopped talking, stunned by our statue-like immobility; we looked at her in silence. She started again more timidly, “I found this for you,” and her hands were still twitching but only a little, and the leaves were trembling in her fingers, probably because of the cold. My mother looked at her without seeing her, almost squinting; she was seeing beyond her.

  “Documents from Buchenwald about your father, before he arrived here.”

  “Yes, yes,” my mother answered mechanically, still crouching.

  “Just have a look, look at this,” and she was almost pleading with my mother to take her papers, to hold them in her own hands. To come back.

  “Yes,” my mother said again, and she stood up heavily.

  The wind picked up all of a sudden, and around us the branches and leaves were writhing, tight together.

  Again, all three of us found ourselves gathered around leaves that the wind was threatening to tear out of Inge’s hands at any second.

  The texts were in German. Some were typed, others handwritten in tall, round letters. He had even filled out a few forms himself. Inge translated out loud in English. He had arrived at the camp on August 4, 1944. He had been registered on August 6, 1944 under the ID number (häftlingnr) 69646, between David Wajeman, 69645, and Paul David, 69647. He had with him the following objects and sum of money: 2 goldene Herrenuhren eine mit Kette, 1 gold. Ring mit Stein, 42,000 francs. He had said he weighed 70 kg and that he had the following medical history: 1916, Rippenfellenentzündung, 1936, Geisteskrank, 1940, Ischias. He answered to the following description: Grösse: 174; Gestalt: stark; Gesicht: lang; Augen: blau; Nase: gerade; Mund: grind; Ohren: absteb; Zähne: vollst; Haare: braun. He spoke Polish, French, German, Czech, and English. He had been assigned to Block 51. He had then left Buchenwald for the Hecht Kommando, between Salomon Roth (häftl. nr 69644) and Charcoun Eleazar (häftl. nr 69655).

  The last sheet was not a sheet, it was a small card in French.

  STERNE Owadies

  Born 10/24/01 Poland

  Residence in France: Toulouse

  Bergen-Belsen Camp

  Trace lost since April 19, 1945

  Source of Information: Search Bureau

  “Trace lost,” my mother murmured thoughtfully. “Time lost,” I added. It beat along my finger, my heart, the blood, the pulse … The lines on her face were even, dug into the soft and warm material of her skin … I felt the freezing weight of the wind on my back as strongly as if it had been bare. In the midst of her light brown eyes, dark and opaque spots had emerged, drawing a complicated image over the iris. She grazed my shoulder; she wanted to hold onto me but her hand fell gently down. I didn’t move; Inge had taken back her papers, hesitant. At last, she took a deep breath. She wanted to leave; we were suffocating despite the fresh air. “I need to put this back in the files, stay as long as you like. I’ll send you copies of these documents.” She shook my mother’s hand, returned her errant strands to the chignon, made a military about-face, and I saw her move away as awkwardly as she had appeared, her heels sinking halfway into the ground.

  I wanted a flying carpet to get me out of there. No returning to the woods. No going back to the hotel. No taxi, and no airport, either. I wanted to fly away from the middle of the clearing, to flutter without feeling a thing, to turn over in the air, to see the tops of the trees from above, to no longer weigh anything. I didn’t want my feet to touch the ground anymore and I wanted any trace of me to be lost, too.

  In reality, though, there were still the forest and the hotel. The gastronomic menu, the muted head waiter. There was the taxi, the Hanover countryside, and the airplane.

  The small child at the house, my child, needed to be washed; she needed to be fed, kissed. She needed to be held far away from the blaze. I brought her to Parc Monceau.

  I watched her as she ran along the straight paths, between the statues, around the fountain and ancient columns. She couldn’t yet manage to coordinate all of her limbs: she would go with her arms in front of her, head leaning back. She leapt and fell down onto her feet. She screamed in her immaculate outfit. She pulled off the buttons and fought as she rolled in the grass. It was barely four in the afternoon and yet night was already starting to fall. The orange light illuminated the façades around the park. Under the fire, they had the appearance of a theater backdrop. Colored bands of pink and red sprawled far across the sky. The sil
houettes of parents and children gradually became dark, and as they went back and forth between the violently lit merry-go-round and the candy kiosk, they didn’t appear to be real. The women were carrying their teenage daughters’ sneakers and the men grew bored, watching them from a distance. As if in a dream, they walked in silence to the rhythm of the darkness that was settling in.

  Sitting on my bench, I wondered whether I was really there, a silhouette, one mother among others, or if all of this—the spectacular sunset, the bouncing shadows racing one another—was only a reflection of a life that had been dreamt, one that was intangible. My child was coming toward me. I saw her two dark eyes advancing. I felt the heat of her face in my hands. I saw the speckled, greenish skins of the statues behind us. Behind the gates, Paris had faded into the night. Parents and children left the park in small bunches; the guards whistled for the closing; on boulevard Courcelles, the cars’ red and yellow headlights formed a crackling thread.

  Paris had faded into the night and we were alive; unbelievably, unjustly alive.

  PART II

  To the East

  1

  I am afraid to go and meet You

  But more afraid not to

  Now I am amazed by everything,

  And now in everything I sense destiny.

  Alexander Blok

  (Translated by G. McQuillan)

  LEAVING THE PRISON IN Warsaw, I realized I had lost my identity card. It was February, and at four p.m., it was already dark. We had filmed a few scenes of a former political prisoner’s return to the halls of “his” prison. Pressed against the bars, he puffed on his cigarette and searched for an answer to my question about his “most significant memory” from his imprisonment. It was a pathetic question, a pathetic plan for someone returning after twenty years, but he had kindly thought it over for a few minutes because, after all, I had brought together a whole team for the filming, and considering that the cameraman, the sound engineer, the assistant, the translator, and the prison guard—whose palm we had greased to get authorization to film for a few minutes—were all waiting patiently for him to speak before they either started the camera, gave him an opening, or began translating, he really needed to answer.

  I was tired after spending the whole day asking him about his life, and I was looking forward to finishing. So I asked, the translator translated, he answered, the translator translated, and bing, that’s a wrap. With his red silk scarf knotted around his neck, and his emaciated head, he had the look of a Polish aristocrat past his prime. He smiled and said, “I read, I read constantly. Pasternak, Dickens, Tolstoy, even Balzac, I think.” I didn’t even need to wait for the translator to finish. I had understood and was instantly awake. In the midst of dead dates and timelines, here was the “Open Sesame.” I forgot about the piece I was filming on the Polish democratic opposition under communism, I forgot about the work schedule, the days beginning at dawn in a sinister hotel and ending at nightfall as we shot eerie views of the city. Time as something locked down and mapped out was forgotten, too, for I was in the very flow of life: “the cry repeated by a thousand sentinels,” “the call of hunters lost in the big woods.” It was Balzac and Pasternak thrown like a bridge from him to me. And I thought of the books I’d pile up around me before I closed my eyes at night—I was a little girl with sure instincts—like an invincible building protecting my sleep. I also thought about the story of Varlam Chalamov, a faceless zek saved from certain death under the ice in Kolyma thanks to a position as a nurse’s assistant, who found Swann’s Way on a hospital bench. Proust in the Gulag, the miraculous journey of books building a parallel world next to real life, a world unconcerned with death and time and history, unconcerned with limits. The materiality of the pages, volumes transformed into images, thoughts, getaways, and rescues spinning a refuge-thread as protective as a mother’s watchful eye that men clung onto from one generation to the next; an invisible thread by which they still could recognize each other.

  And it was this tenuous thread that had suddenly appeared, altering the routine, the piles of questions and the weariness at the heart of this prison where those condemned by tsarism, then by the German Occupation, and finally, by the communist regime of the Polish People’s Republic—and sometimes they were the same people—had been imprisoned. Okhrana, Gestapo, UB.

  So Roman Baljewski smiled again, and rather than telling me in detail how in this very prison he and his fellow Solidarity members had refused the agreement handed to them by Jaruzelski’s regime—their freedom and the freedom of other political prisoners in exchange for leaving political life and no longer harassing them with their petitions, their union, their amusing desire to be free—instead of mentioning his heroic gesture, which I knew about already, having read about it in books, used it to prepare my note cards, and ruminated on it as I thought of all the questions I intended to ask him, instead of all of that, he began, as if he were simply following the thread of the interview, reciting a poem in Polish. I did not understand the poem. But I heard the music, and it was like a primeval language, a language before speech, before words, where only modulation existed. He kept his eyes fixed on mine, his head moving gently to the rhythm of what I supposed was the end of each verse, and even the operator with the huge camera on his shoulder was nodding, hypnotized by what was a babbling, a prayer, a formless nursery rhyme of reassurance and hope.

  Now and then I recognized syllables of the song rising up among my cells, whistled ones I’d once heard exhaled by my grandmothers, the Polish of lullabies, the one murmured in secret behind the walls of Haussmann buildings. I almost would have taken Roman Baljewski’s hand; I would have clutched it, caressed it, stroking his fingers, but one of the guards jangled his keys. The half hour we’d bought was ending and we needed to get going, fast. Ultimately, the prison was no place for poems. We packed up our things like entertainers being asked to leave; Roman Baljewski had not moved. He watched us idly; there was no sound except the noise of our crates and the shouts of prisoners in the corridor next to us who were pressed against the doors of their cells, drawn by our presence.

  We gathered again in the courtyard. Baljewski followed us in silence, surrounded by the guards. He was smoking in huge puffs, his mouth tight around the cigarette. He listened to the jokes told by the guards, the sons of his own guards. A little lost, he looked at the silhouettes of the trees encircling the walls whose branches cut through the dark blue of the sky. A large automatic door opened. Outside were the streets of Warsaw, the tramways shining in the night, and people running from one sidewalk to the other, bound together by the invisible wave of their movements. There were straight lines, right angles, spots of color, and we were standing, almost squinting, the way you do after coming up from underground, at the edge of the world. Bravely, Baljewski moved away and we saw him release himself, anonymous, back into the stream of living people. We wandered around, filming shots here and there of lit-up storefronts, old men with lowered heads, geometrical perspectives, the tramways flying by. In the sky we could no longer make out anything except the birds coming and going as they traced wide, murky curves.

  Unbeknownst to me, on one of those sidewalks lay my identity card with my photo, my address, and my date and place of birth trampled underfoot by the Warsaw pedestrians. My photo, my address, and my date and place of birth, 30 April, 1971, Paris 10th arrondissement, had been abandoned thousands of miles from the Sacré-Cœur, thousands of miles from my mother’s eyes. That card was the condensed and unexpected representation of a return made in silence, almost in spite of myself, traveling backward through the invisible tunnels of time. The brutal return to a land I had never known and had never left.

  I came back to the hotel, rising up in all of its ugliness—at one time the avant-garde of socialist luxury—along the banks of the river. Behind the automatic door in the hallway lit by neon lights, the bellhop, the doorman, and two idle receptionists watched me enter with suspicion, afraid I would try to speak to them. I went straight
into the restaurant area, which was watched over by a melancholic blonde who dragged her worn kickboxing shoes over the floor as she drifted between three tables occupied by an illegitimate couple, an old man in a suit curved over his bowl of soup, and three quiet Spanish tourists. The waitress took my order absentmindedly while she glanced at the couple who were pushing their adulterous explorations further and further: the bright-eyed woman was stroking her companion’s bare forearm, and he was getting closer, inch by inch, helped by the alcohol, to the pair of weary breasts coming halfway out of her dress. The Spaniards didn’t miss a moment of what was happening and they laughed softly, nudging each other. Only the old man lapped at his soup with a dignified air, and I noticed his right eye fixed on an imaginary line at the edge of the synthetic fabric tablecloth.

  The food at the hotel suited me perfectly, more in its matter—the gelatinous texture of meat and potato fritters—than in its taste. Its blandness was a strange cousin of the dishes that invaded my parents’ table three or four times a year on holidays, and whose one-dimensional white flavor—far removed from gastronomic subtleties—was, and rightfully so in France, like a discreet reminder of an incomplete assimilation. In fact, the vodka I was swallowing from pairs of tiny glasses glistening with ice crystals had the same propensity for “non-subtlety”: an abrupt alcoholized current that invaded all at once, penetrating the body with drunkenness without any natural progression.

  After several tiny glasses, I struggled to collect my arms, then my legs, and went back across the room. The Spaniards had run off. The couple couldn’t hold on any longer: the woman was squirming with anticipated pleasure as she closed her eyes. I brushed against the mumbling old man’s chair. I distinctly heard the word kurwa, “whore” in Polish, then I heard it repeated, without pausing for breath, kurwakurwakurwakurwakurwakurwa … The blonde was sitting down again in a corner next to the door, waiting for the time to pass.