The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  He laughed openly. He let go of my hands and continued walking quickly. I had to run to climb up to where he was. He turned right onto a path leading to a perfectly demarcated rectangular wood where birch trees rose up every twenty inches. I was running behind him when he stopped short. At his feet I noticed a half-buried object. Under the melted snow, a child’s slipper gradually appeared, brown with dirt. The laces were still knotted. It was an old-fashioned slipper, made of leather stamped with rosette motifs. The eyelets reinforced with metal rings, which once must have been a beautiful shiny black, were now covered in rust. The slipper was resting on top of the snow, abandoned at the foot of the birch trees. Bielinski had stopped laughing and walking. He was standing still and watching me as I looked at the little shoe, unable to move.

  I kept standing straight, attentive to the movements of my back and shoulders—careful not to stoop, don’t break, don’t give in—as I resisted the waves of anxiety coming one by one to infiltrate, invisibly and rapidly, the porous border of my skin. I started crying without realizing it, the tears flowed obligingly, effusively, my nose dripped, and I didn’t have a handkerchief. The shoe, naked in its abandonment, had been fused onto the muddy earth like a seashell onto a rock, like a mineral fossil, a useless and lasting trace I didn’t know how else to respond to except by crying with fear.

  Bielinski took the shoe, cleaned it with his handkerchief, put it in the pocket of his coat that was too big, and took me by the hand, the way you guide a child frozen in the dark. He brought me back over by the riverbank and approached a thicket of reeds. He released my hand and pulled out a boat that had been hidden from under the green mass. I let him do this without moving. I heard, though, the sound of his breathing, and the difficulty he was having dragging the boat over to the water.

  “Get in.”

  I almost slipped in the mud. He sat me down on one of two wooden benches. Holding the boat with one hand, he turned around toward the undergrowth to pull from it—he had suddenly become agile—a pair of oars. He sat down across from me and energetically began moving the oars in one perfectly mastered motion. Barely a few yards from the shore, the ice kept us from continuing and we started to stall between two blocks of frozen snow that stretched pale as far as we could see. It made no difference; we were already between two riverbanks, and the groups of trees running upstream and downstream into the distance wrapped themselves around us. We could let our faces be warmed by the winter sun. The birds, hardly visible behind the reeds, were spreading their wings.

  “You see, madame mademoiselle, we are in the middle of time.”

  I had noticed, in fact, on the map in the assistant’s car, that we were less than nine miles from the small town of my father’s father, his mother, and his aunt. The town in the multicolored canvases. And in the barely stirring rowboat, I remembered well the gray photo placed just next to one of Schoenberg’s paper cutters in the library. Light gray for the water, dark gray for the riverbanks, and almost black for the two triumphant silhouettes surrounded by white foam who were moving about amid the calm waves.

  “Heniek’s mother died years ago. She was born around here, a small town near Bug. Little Jewish girl, a child during the war. Locked up inside the ghetto of the small town with her parents and her brother. The two children had been raised by a Polish maid, a nanny. She had remained faithful to them. She’d bring them a little something to eat. There was no wall, not like in Warsaw. Simpler. One night, the mother begs her, ‘Antonina, take the two children. You’ve fed them, you’ve raised them. Save them. Take them with you.’ The Polish woman takes them. Two little children. She leaves with them for her parents’ house in another village. She hides them, she feeds them. Now that’s courage. If the Germans found out, she would be risking her own life and her parents’ lives. A few months pass. In the village, it starts to be known about, talked about. Antonina’s house. Two hidden Jewish children. The village is at risk, too. Death. Farmers come to see her, they know she’s hiding little Jews. She must kill them. If she doesn’t, they’ll come and kill them themselves, the children along with her and her parents. In their hiding place, a nook in the attic, the children hear and understand everything. They hear Antonina speaking with her parents. She comes up to the attic and tells them they have to leave. Heniek’s mother, the oldest, maybe seven, pleads with her. ‘Don’t kill us, Nina, don’t kill us, please, we’ll hide better, we’ll be nice. Don’t kill us.’ Antonina doesn’t answer and takes the two children. They leave in the night. In the distance they see the shadow of the farmers, watching. The children cry, they yell. She leads them toward the woods. She digs a hole and puts the children in it. They have to wait for her, she’s going to come back, she says. The children are crying. ‘Stay here, I will come back.’ She leaves them a little bread, a little milk. She leaves. The children stay there, terrorized, with the bread and milk. They wait. One day, one night. Two days, two nights. Three days, four nights. On the fourth night, Antonina is there. She brings them back to the same house but to another hiding place: a hole inside the pigsty. Impossible to find. The others believed she had killed them. The kids stayed there for two years, until the end of the war. After the war, the three of them left the village. The farmers wanted gold, the Jews’ gold. They were convinced that Antonina had been given some gold by Jewish parents but there was no gold, nothing. So the three of them left. The farmers killed Antonina’s parents. The children’s parents had been dead for a long time … The woods, the rivers … So there you go, our fairy tales.”

  Night had fallen and I was shivering, my feet covered by the stagnant water in the bottom of the rowboat. When we landed near the house, the assistant had put out chairs that were lying scattered on the grass. He was fussing over a pile of wood.

  Excited, Heniek followed him, wielding branches which he balanced on top of the assistant’s cleverly constructed pyramid. It stank of silt and cloves. Behind the house, nothing more of the forest could be seen except the harsh architecture of the trees. The assistant lit a match and all of our faces were suddenly illuminated by the orange flames climbing tall toward the sky. Sitting on the chairs next to each other, we were warmed and protected by them. We watched the insects that came to play in the sparks’ shifting waves: they were lit up and then fell down to the ground, blackened and inert. Bielinski had moved Heniek’s chair closer to his, and his son’s head rested against him in his arms. Absorbed by the heat, freed from words, he stroked his hair, and even from a distance I could feel the unique fluid of this caress, this contact as intense as if they had been skin against skin, soul against soul. All the pain and the joy, the defeated valor, the impulses denied, and the secret fevers mingled together under the pads of Bielinski’s fingers, giving life to the back-and-forth movement that was taking the necessary measurements of his son’s soft-prickly hair and the heat of the skull beating under his hand.

  Encouraged by the silence, the assistant comfortably began to hum, but our immobility intimidated him. He hummed softer and softer, then finally gave up and the silence returned. The sky had become black on top of the water and I could still see, above this dark bottom, the uncertain and transparent shape of sailing clouds.

  So yes, I told myself, it was possible to find oneself, for a moment, in the middle of time, in the middle of the riverbanks, between the water and the fire, to be in the middle of a time that was filled, inhabited, and populated by faces and objects, and to be carried into their presence by water, fire, by love.

  When we recrossed the woods that night, the assistant turned on the headlights, casting yellow patches onto the birch trunks like trail markers left by our fleeting presence. On the road from Warsaw, we passed through towns where nothing shone except the illuminated façade of a bistro.

  Days later, after the filming was done, I went to the hotel reception desk and picked up the wrapped package of old journals Bielinski wanted to give to his friend Jan from Paris.

  You will deliver this package, madame mademoiselle
, to boulevard Voltaire, No. 102. Please. Bielinski.

  2

  I BROUGHT JAN THE package of books wrapped in newspaper. I took boulevard Voltaire. I was unsuspicious of that gloomy boulevard running straight from République to Nation, its relics of political mythologies, its cafés filled with horse racing enthusiasts and Chinese wholesalers. At the end of it was the faded building containing Jan’s impersonal office.

  I saw Jan coming down the hall toward me. He was massive, so massive that when we returned to his office to sit down, his chair resembled a child’s toy. The smell of the cigarettes Jan smoked was still on him; his two arms were propped on his desk as he smiled. I saw Jan’s ugliness. I heard Jan saying “madame mademoiselle” to me. I learned that Bielinski and Jan had once been constant companions, and that they’d enjoyed walking together toward Barbès, where Jan was working at the time. I didn’t want to let myself be taken in but, needless to say, Jan’s presence wrapped around me like a terrifying and desirable wave.

  Jan opened the package from Bielinski, examining the books one by one. He handled them slowly, opening the covers, brushing over the pages. He raised his head.

  He held out one of the books to me. I was only able to read the name Alexander Blok on the cover; the title was in Polish. I stood up, wanting to get out of there and to leave him his book. But Jan continued holding it out to me and I had no other choice but to seize it with two hands. Already I was compelled to turn greedy. I was wearing a black sweatshirt, black pants, and black shoes: queen of the crows. I crept toward the exit. As I closed the door, I took another quick glance inside the office. He was still looking at me, smiling.

  He could smile as much as he wanted to; I was under high protection.

  Or so I thought.

  It was only when he called me on the telephone a few weeks later, after hanging up, that I realized how much, from a place inside me—a walled-in crypt whose exact location I couldn’t pinpoint—I had been waiting for that call.

  I was still holding the mute receiver against my ear. There was a mirror in front of me. I blinked at the reflection. “Surprised?” But even though I stuck out my tongue and made faces, I was unable to resurrect myself as someone asexual, innocent, and free.

  I was a prisoner.

  We met one night in front of the Cirque d’Hiver. We walked, at a distance from each other, under the rain and then under the snow. Leaving the wide boulevards behind, we split apart the cold air. I looked like a Soviet child with my hood pulled up over my head. In a great blast of wind we climbed the steps to the summit of Montmartre. The streets were empty, the street lamps diffusing white lights.

  At the top of the stairs, we walked past a sparkling Paris. I looked at Jan’s profile, lit up by those distant fires. He could have been the brother-in-arms of my little tragic figures, the ones I searched for in Paris, in Prague, in Warsaw: insubmersible. In my head I toyed with the idea of flight, pursuit, hardship, and, at last, rescue.

  Jan’s hand had become hot in mine.

  We passed black buildings that seemed to have come back, lifeless, from the depths of time. Perhaps, despite the darkened windows and the silent façades, the town really was inhabited? Perhaps all that was needed for its past lives to enter into me was to stop on a corner of the sidewalk, indifferent to the wind, and become stone, slate, inanimate material.

  I saw Jan stretch backward like a gymnast. His body, from his extended fingers to the ends of his legs (and there were also his veins, his arteries, and his skin), was the bridge aligned between the riverbanks of time.

  Jan alone was my landscape, the sentinels I’d met, the names and faces I’d imagined.

  Under the snow our bodies were lukewarm against one another, resisting the cold.

  My eyes were vast and we kissed.

  Next we found ourselves in one, then two, then three, then ten cafés along boulevard Voltaire, all the way from place Léon Blum to boulevard Richard Lenoir. There were horse racing fan cafés, the empty cafés, the Chinese cafés, the back rooms, the terrasses. The waitresses who smiled at Jan, the ones who flirted with him as they leaned over too closely to serve him, a waiter with a stutter, the ones who flattered me by half-smiling, knowingly. We drank a lot; we had to drink. Entire bottles. We hid ourselves in the cafés and we drank. Inside my mouth I felt my breath turning sour, the makeup running under my eyes accentuating my dark circles because I was either laughing or crying. This boulevard Voltaire was a revelation, a dead, gray part of the city that had suddenly become its resounding heart. The front windows of the Chinese wholesalers jammed with packages badly wrapped in bubble wrap and kraft paper, their crude neon lights that were turned on even in the middle of the day, and the streets blocked by delivery trucks where the noise of horns and shouted insults climbed up from the sidewalk to envelop us like a vapor of sound: this was the backdrop for our love.

  And like the waitresses who brushed against him, the shy waiters who smiled at him without knowing him, and like those other invisible and insistent people on the other end of the line who made his cell phone vibrate inside his jacket, though he never dreamed of answering it, just like them I wanted to stay close to Jan’s body, to his heat, to his hands slicing through the air and grabbing the glasses on the table in front of him, his body always appearing ready to attack and to console.

  I wanted to understand the details of his life, which was attached to mine as if it had been its prelude or invisible double. His parents’ addresses before the war, the first name of his brother who died in 1943, what his father had done for a living. I asked, I filed, and I memorized, substituting an organized inventory for my selective memory loss.

  “My brother’s first name? I don’t know anymore. Madame mademoiselle, please stop asking me questions and peering at me like that, analyzing me with your witch’s gaze. Stop staring at me and then turning your head to snuggle up with your thoughts in your comfortable what do you think and your thorny impenetrable edges. ‘I’m thinking, I’m evaluating.’ Stick your head out a little bit over the guardrails, the machicolations, and look around you, just look. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You say, ‘I evaluate this, I note that, I compare, I lambast,’ but life isn’t like that. Madame mademoiselle, I know it all. Oh yes, it keeps you quite comfortable, you must be quite comfortable behind your barricades. But you know what? Your barricades aren’t so fun. Air! Wind! And stop looking at me like that, like a witch, and then stop with your accumulations, the bricks in the barricades, stacking, stacking, all those old things. Wind!”

  I laughed at him. I made fun of him. I was offended. It was a battle. And at night, in secret, on a map of Paris I marked down all of the cafés we’d been to so that I could superimpose this new map on top of the ones I had already put together.

  After the cafés were the public gardens. Parks that were set back from the city, known only to nearby residents, with openings lost among the backyards and hidden from sight. We took refuge there as if in a kind of Eden, where adultery metamorphosed into a primitive idyll. He stretched out on a bench and placed his head within reach of my hands.

  I stroked his head, not saying it but thinking, “Jan my love”—and “my love” came so easily to me, as easily as a reflex, as automatically as inhalation and exhalation of breath followed one another—“Jan my love, a long time ago, before we met on boulevard Voltaire and walked from café to café, before you made the plane trees on each side of the sidewalk shine whenever you came to meet me, both of us were—we were not born, but we were there—in the terrifying undergrowth, on the run, defeated. But you dug holes for me so I could hide in them, you pulled up roots so I could eat, and you collected water in the hollows of your hands so I could drink, for I was your brother, your sister, your daughter, your mistress. And lying next to each other we looked at the terrifying tops of the trees, the terrifying pieces of sky between the branches, the terrifying breath of leaves above us. And in those woods, day after day you saved me, and our bodies bear the trace of that r
escue, Jan my love.”

  In the bedrooms—never the same ones, we were past shame—I would go searching over Jan’s body, unearthing, seizing for myself the evidence of its heat, its root offshoots that plunged into lands of imagination. Held between his arms, contained by his thick thighs, my body—damp with secretions, examined inch by inch—entered into an unknown presence that took my breath away. This body contorted itself, shaken by dark and mysterious movements in which visions of silent incest flashed before me. Jan, my father, Jan, my brother. At the same time as he was thrusting into me, he was also dragging the shadows and dead silhouettes out of me.

  The curtains were pulled shut in the middle of the day. It was artificial night and the double glazed windows muffled the sounds of the street. The silence was matte and round, like in an airtight chamber. Naked, skin trembling, I’d have to laugh more and drink more so I wouldn’t feel what I recognized perfectly to be the injection of a poison into my veins. Then I’d also have to set foot in the city again, alone, and climb back up the boulevards pockmarked with blurry colored spots of green, red, and yellow.

  And I, in turn, felt like a giant with heightened contours and a phosphorescent face. I had landed in the middle of the streets like a cadaver preserved in ice brittle as glass that had suddenly been unfrozen. A phenomenon of cryopreservation resurrected in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  Perhaps I needed all of this cryopreservation gibberish to hide the reality of my betrayal as I climbed the boulevards and streets toward the window with the shining railing, toward the library and Daniel. To hide the pain that was contaminating our Robinson Crusoe life with the cruel and sexual wind of the world.