Dora Bruder

by Patrick Modiano

  I have heard that the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy of the Rue de Picpus had established a holiday camp at Béthisy. Was it at Béthisy-Saint-Martin? Or Béthisy-Saint-Pierre? Both villages are near Senlis, in the Valois. Perhaps Dora Bruder and her classmates spent a few days there, in the summer of 1941.

  The buildings of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie no longer exist. Modern apartment blocks have taken their place, giving an idea of the vastness of the grounds. I don’t possess a single photograph of the vanished school. On an old map of Paris, its site is marked “House of religious education.” Four little squares and a cross symbolize the school buildings and chapel. And a long, narrow rectangle, extending from the Rue de Picpus to the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly, outlines the perimeter.

  Opposite the school, on the other side of the Rue de Picpus, the map shows, successively, the houses of the Mère de Dieu congregation, then the Dames de l’Adoration, the Oratory of Picpus and the Picpus cemetery where, in the last months of the Terror, over one thousand victims of the guillotine were buried in a common grave. And on the same side of the street as the boarding school, almost an extension of it, the large property belonging to the Dames de Sainte-Clothilde. Then that of the Dames Diaconesses, where, one day, aged eighteen, I went for treatment. I remember the garden of the Diaconesses. I didn’t know then that this establishment had served as a rehabilitation center for delinquent girls. Not unlike the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. Not unlike the Bon-Pasteur. These institutions, where you were shut up, not knowing when or if you would be released, certainly rejoiced in some curious names: the Bon-Pasteur d’Angers. The Refuge de Darnetal. The sanctuary of Sainte-Madeleine de Limoges. The Solitude-de-Nazareth.

  Solitude.

  The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, 60–62 Rue de Picpus, stood at the corner of the Rue de Picpus and the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. In Dora’s time, this street still had a countrified air. A high wall ran the length of its lefthand side, shaded by the school’s trees.

  The few details that I have managed to glean about these places, such as Dora Bruder would have seen them, day in, day out, for a year and a half, are as follows: the large garden ran the length of the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly, and the school buildings must have stood between it and the courtyard. Within this courtyard, hollowed out beneath rocks in the form of an imitation grotto, lay the burial vault of the Madre family, the school’s benefactors.

  I don’t know if Dora Bruder made friends at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. Or if she kept to herself. Until such time as I have the testimony of one of her former classmates, I am reduced to conjecture. Today, in Paris, or somewhere in the suburbs, there must be a seventy-year-old woman who remembers her erstwhile neighbor in classroom or dormitory—a girl named Dora, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes.

  In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.

  In those days, the Mother Superior of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie was Mother Marie-Jean-Baptiste. She was born—so her biographical note tells us—in 1903. After her novitiate, she was sent to Paris, to the house of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, where she stayed for seventeen years, from 1929 to 1946. She was barely forty years old when Dora Bruder was a boarder there.

  She was “independent and warm-hearted”—according to the biographical note—and “endowed with a strong personality.” She died in 1985, three years before I knew of Dora Bruder’s existence. She would certainly have remembered Dora—if only because the girl had run away. But, after all, what could she have told me? A few humdrum facts of daily existence? Warm-hearted or not, she certainly failed to divine what was going through Dora Bruder’s head, neither how the girl was coping with boarding-school life nor how she reacted to chapel morning and evening, the fake grotto in the courtyard, the garden wall, the dormitory with its rows of beds.

  I traced a woman who had entered the boarding school in 1942, a few months after Dora Bruder ran away. She was about ten years old at the time, younger than Dora. And her memories of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie are merely those of a child. She had been living alone with her mother, a Jew of Polish origin, in a street in the Goutte-d’Or district, the Rue de Chartres, no distance from the Rue Polonceau where Cécile, Ernest, and Dora Bruder had lived. To avoid dying of starvation, the mother worked night shifts in a workshop that made mittens for the Wehrmacht. The daughter went to school in the Rue Jean-François-Lépine. At the end of 1942, because of the roundups, the headmistress had advised the mother to send her child into hiding, and it was doubtless she who had given her the address of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie.

  To disguise her origins, she was enrolled at the boarding school under the name of “Suzanne Albert.” Shortly afterward, she fell ill. She was sent to the infirmary. There, she saw a doctor. After a while, since she refused to eat, it was decided to send her home.

  She remembers everything in that boarding school as being black—walls, classrooms, infirmary—except for the white coifs of the nuns. It seemed more like an orphanage. Iron discipline. No heating. Nothing to eat but root vegetables. Boarders’ prayers took place at “six o’clock,” and I forgot to ask her whether she meant six in the morning or six at night.

  1. The Écoles chrétiennes de la Miséricorde ran the boarding school (the Holy Heart of Mary).

  .................

  DORA SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1940 AT THE BOARDING school. On Sundays, she would certainly have gone to visit her parents, who were still living in the hotel room at 41 Boulevard Ornano. I look at the plan of the métro and try to retrace her route in my mind. The simplest, avoiding too many changes, is to take a train from Nation, a station fairly near the boarding school. Pont-de-Sèvres line. Change at Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. Porte de Clignancourt line. She would have got out at Simplon, just opposite the cinema and the hotel.

  Twenty years later, I often took the métro at Simplon. It was always about ten o’clock at night. At that hour, the station was deserted, and there were long intervals between trains.

  Late on Sunday afternoons, she too would have returned by the same route. Did her parents go with her? Once at Nation, she had to walk, and the quickest way to the Rue de Picpus was via the Rue Fabre-d’Églantine.

  It was like going back to prison. The days were drawing in. It was already dark when she crossed the courtyard, passing the funerary monument with its imitation grotto. Above the steps, a single lamp was lit over the door. She followed the corridors. Chapel, for Sunday evening Benediction. Then, into line, in silence as far as the dormitory.

  .................

  AUTUMN HAD COME. ON 2 OCTOBER, THE PARIS NEWSPAPERS published the decree obliging all Jews to register at police stations for a census. A declaration by the head of the family sufficed for all. To avoid long lines, those affected were asked to attend in alphabetical order, on the dates indicated in the table below . . .

  The letter B fell on 4 October. On that day, Ernest Bruder went to Clignancourt police station to fill in the census form. But he failed to register his daughter. Everybody reporting for the census was allotted a number, later attached to the “family file.” This was known as the “Jewish dossier” number.

  Ernest and Cécile Bruder had the Jewish dossier number 49091. But Dora had no number of any sort.

  Perhaps Ernest Bruder felt that she was out of harm’s way, in a free zone, at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, and that it was best not to draw attention to her. Then again, the classification “Jew” meant nothing to the fourteen-year-old Dora. When it came down to it, what exactly did the Bruders understand by the term “Jew”? For himself, he never gave it a thought. He was used to being put into this or that category by the authorities and accepted it without question. Unskilled laborer. Ex-Austrian. French legionnaire. Non-suspect. Ex-serviceman 100% disabled. Foreign statute laborer. Jew. And the same went for his wife, Cécile. Ex
-Austrian. Non-suspect. Furrier’s seamstress. Jewess. As yet, the only person who had escaped all classification, including the number 49091, was Dora.

  Who knows, she might have escaped to the end. She had only to remain within the boarding school’s dark walls and merge into their shadows; and, by scrupulously observing its daily and nightly routine, avoid drawing attention to herself. Dormitory. Chapel. Refectory. Playground. Classroom. Chapel. Dormitory.

  It chanced—but was it really chance—that, at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, she was back within sight of her birthplace on the opposite side of the street. 15 Rue Santerre. The Rothschild Hospital maternity ward. Rue Santerre was a continuation of the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly and thus ran alongside the school wall.

  A quiet, tree-shaded neighborhood. When, twenty-five years ago, in June 1971, I spent an entire day walking around there, I found it unchanged. Occasionally, a summer shower obliged me to take shelter in an archway. That afternoon, without knowing why, I had the impression of walking in another’s footsteps.

  After the summer of ’42, the area around the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie became particularly dangerous. For two years there had been a succession of roundups, at the Rothschild Hospital, at its orphanage of the same name, Rue Lamblardie, and at the hospice, 76 Rue de Picpus, where the Gaspard Meyer who had signed Dora’s birth certificate lived and worked. The Rothschild Hospital was a trap for the sick from Drancy camp, sent there only to be returned to the camp whenever it suited the Germans, who were keeping watch on 15 Rue Santerre with the help of a private police agency, the Agence Faralicq. A great many children and adolescents of Dora’s age were arrested, taken from their hiding place in the Rothschild Orphanage, Rue Lamblardie, the first street on the right after the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly. And, on the Rue de la Gare-de-Reuilly itself, at number 48bis, exactly opposite the boarding school wall, nine boys and girls of Dora’s age or, in some cases, younger, were arrested with their families. Indeed, the garden and courtyard of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school were the sole enclave in this entire block of houses to remain inviolate. But only on condition that you never went out, that you stayed forgotten within the shadow of those dark walls, themselves engulfed by the darkness of the curfew.

  I’m writing these pages in November 1996. It seldom stops raining. Tomorrow we shall be in December, and fifty-five years will have passed since Dora ran away. It gets dark early, and it’s just as well: night obliterates the grayness and monotony of these rainy days when you wonder if it really is daytime, or if we are going through some intermediary stage, a sort of gloomy eclipse lasting till dusk. Then the street lamps and shop windows and cafés light up, the evening air freshens, contours sharpen, there are traffic jams at the crossroads and hurrying crowds in the streets. And in the midst of all these lights, all this hubbub, I can hardly believe that this is the city where Dora lived with her parents, where my father lived when he was twenty years younger than I am now. I feel as though I am alone in making the link between Paris then and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There are moments when the link is strained and in danger of snapping, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears to me in fleeting gleams behind that of today.

  I’ve been rereading the fifth and sixth volumes of Les Misérables. Victor Hugo describes Cosette and Jean Valjean, tracked by Javert, making their way across Paris, by night, from the Barrière Saint-Jacques to the Petit Picpus. You can follow part of their itinerary on a map. They are near the Seine. Cosette begins to tire. Jean Valjean carries her in his arms. Taking the back streets, they skirt the Jardin des Plantes and come to the riverbank. They cross the Pont d’Austerlitz. Scarcely has Jean Valjean set foot on the right bank than he thinks he sees shadowy figures on the bridge. Their only means of escape—he tells himself—is to take the little Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine.

  And suddenly, you have a sensation of vertigo, as if Cosette and Jean Valjean, to escape Javert and his police, have taken a leap into space: thus far, they have been following real Paris streets, and now, abruptly, Victor Hugo thrusts them into the imaginary district of Paris that he calls the Petit Picpus. It is the same sense of strangeness that overcomes you when you find yourself walking through an unfamiliar district in a dream. On waking, you realize, little by little, that the pattern of its streets had overlaid the one with which, in daytime, you are familiar.

  And here is what disturbs me: at the end of their flight across a district whose topography and street names had been invented by Victor Hugo, Cosette and Jean Valjean just manage to escape a police patrol by slipping behind a wall. They find themselves in “a sort of garden, very large and of singular appearance; one of those gloomy gardens which seem to be made to be seen in the winter and at night.” This garden where the pair hide is that of a convent, which Victor Hugo situates precisely at number 62 Rue du Petit-Picpus, the same address as that of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie school where Dora was a boarder.

  “At the period to which this history relates,” Victor Hugo writes, “a boarding-school was attached to the convent. . . .These young girls . . . were dressed in blue with a white cap. . . .There were in the inclosure of the Petit Picpus three perfectly distinct buildings, the Great Convent, in which the nuns lived, the school building, in which the pupils lodged, and finally what was called the Little Convent.”

  And, having given a minute description of the place, he continues: “We could not pass by this extraordinary, unknown, obscure house without entering and leading in those who accompany us, and who listen as we relate, for the benefit of some, perhaps, the melancholy history of Jean Valjean.”

  Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist’s gift for clairvoyance—the word “gift” not being the exact term, for it implies a kind of superiority. No, it simply comes with the profession: the imaginative leaps this requires, the need to fix your mind on points of detail—to the point of obsession, in fact—so as not to lose the thread and give in to natural laziness—all this tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to “flashes of intuition concerning events past and future,” as the Larousse dictionary puts it, under the heading “clairvoyance.”

  In December 1988, after reading the notice about the search for Dora in the Paris-Soir of December 1941, I thought about it incessantly for months. The precision of certain details haunted me: “41 Boulevard Ornano, 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes.” And all enveloped in night, ignorance, forgetfulness, oblivion. It seemed to me that I should never succeed in finding the faintest trace of Dora Bruder. At the time, the emptiness I felt prompted me to write a novel, Voyage de noces, it being as good a way as any of continuing to fix my attention on Dora Bruder, and perhaps, I told myself, of elucidating or divining something about her, a place where she had been, a detail of her life. When it came to her parents, and the circumstances of her escape, I was completely ignorant. All I had to go on was this: I had seen her name, BRUDER DORA—nothing else, no date or place of birth—above that of her father—BRUDER ERNEST, 21.5.99, Vienna. Stateless.—on the list of those dispatched on the transport that had left on 18 September 1942 for Auschwitz.

  I was thinking, when writing Voyage de noces, of certain women whom I knew in the sixties, women like Anne B., Bella D.—the same age as Dora, one of them almost to the month—who, during the Occupation, were in the same situation and might have shared her fate, and whom she probably resembled. Today, it occurs to me that I had had to write two hundred pages before I captured, unconsciously, a vague gleam of the truth.

  It was a matter of a few words: “The terminus was Nation. Rigaud and Ingrid had allowed Bastille, the stop where they should have changed for Porte Dorée, to go by. Emerging from the exit, they were confronted by a vast expanse of snow. . . .The sleigh cut through the back streets to reach the Boulevard Soult.”

  These back streets lay behind the Rue de Picp
us and the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school from which Dora Bruder made her escape, one December evening when it was probably snowing in Paris.

  That was the only moment in the book when, without knowing it, I came close to her in space and time.

  .................

  THUS WE FIND NEXT TO DORA BRUDER’S NAME IN THE school register, under the heading “Date and reason for departure”: “14 December 1941. Pupil has run away.”

  It was a Sunday. I imagine that she would have taken advantage of the free day to visit her parents. That evening, she failed to return to the school.

  Those dying weeks of the year were the blackest, most claustrophobic period that Paris had experienced since the beginning of the Occupation. Between 8 and 14 December, in reprisal for two assassination attempts, the Germans ordered a curfew from six o’clock in the evening. Next came the roundup of seven hundred French Jews on 12 December; and the fine of one billion francs levied on the Jewish community as a whole. And then, on the morning of the same day, the shooting of seventy hostages at the Mont-Valérien fortress. On 10 December, by order of the Prefect of Police, French and foreign Jews living in the department of the Seine had to submit to “periodic checks,” producing special identity cards stamped “Jew” or “Jewess.” Henceforth they were forbidden to travel outside the department, and any change of address had to be registered at a police station.

  In the 18th arrondissement, a curfew imposed by the Germans had been in force since 1 December. Nobody could enter the area after six o’clock at night. Local métro stations were closed, including Simplon, the one nearest to where Ernest and Cécile Bruder lived. A hand grenade had been thrown in the Rue Championnet, very close to their hotel.