by Alba Arikha
“Be careful,” says my father. Then this: “You shouldn’t go.”
“But Sarah’s ill…”
“Don’t go, Clara.”
“It’ll be fine. We’ll take the back streets.”
She kisses us goodbye and leaves with Sarah. I am twenty years old. The French police stop her on the Boulevard de Beaumarchais. My mother is wearing her yellow star, but my cousin is not. Any child over six years old has to wear the star, and Sarah isn’t. My mother was distracted. I know this because our neighbour saw it all. The soldiers stopped my mother and took her and Sarah away.
I never saw either of them again.
My father knows they will come for us next. But he does nothing. I tell him that we have to leave our apartment. There is a look on his face which I’ve never seen before, as if blood had momentarily stopped flowing through his veins. As if he had already given up on life. A man he knows offers to hide us in his basement. M. Bonnet and his wife Jacqueline. They own a restaurant and live on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, near the toyshop. Their daughter always stops by the shop after school. She especially loves the porcelain dolls. She also loves my parents. My father tells me to go there, says he will meet me the next day. Why? Why the next day? Why not now? Maybe he wants to take a last look at his beloved shop. Maurice Baum: Jouets. “Go, go,” he says.
So I walk to the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois alone. I’ve removed my star. I am terrified I will get caught. I cannot get caught. I want to live in London one day. I cannot get caught. I want to become something. Someone.
I cannot get caught.
They come for my father that night. They cannot find him at home. So they go to his shop and there he is, sleeping among the toys, clasping those puppets against his chest. The police smash them up, together with everything else. Then they take my father away.
M. Bonnet inspects the shop the next day. Amongst the wreckage he finds five precious dolls inside a trunk the police hadn’t bothered to open.
*
My father is released after six months. M. Bonnet knows someone important at the Commissariat de Police. My father looks the same physically, but something has changed inside him. Whatever it is I had suspected about his state of mind has now been confirmed. “I’ve lost my balance,” he tells me, sounding like a child.
He returns home. He doesn’t want to stay at the Bonnets’. He wants to play with his toys, he says. His eyes are darting around, like those of a madman. I leave him alone; it frightens me to see him this way.
The police show up at the Bonnet home. They look around, but don’t find me. “You have to leave, Flore,” they tell me.
I can no longer stay in the basement room. I leave that evening. I do not dare say goodbye to my father. I fear getting caught. I cry for him. For what has become of him. For my mother. I say goodbye to the Bonnets. A friend of mine has found me a new place to stay. An older couple, communist farmers in the Vaucluse. It takes me a month to get there. A fixer leads me, and a Jewish family travelling with us, through fields and woods under the cover of darkness. We sleep in barns and abandoned houses along the way. Whenever we hear someone approach, we fear for our lives. It is hard to distinguish between the Nazi patrols and the villagers. When I finally arrive in Vaison-la-Romaine, Marie and Antoine Thibault greet me warmly. They are very poor, but they are kind. I’m not sure I’d still be alive if it weren’t for them. I stay with the Thibaults until the war is over. When I return to Paris, I am told that my father was arrested again, not long after I fled. No one is sure of his whereabouts.
4
It is 1945. The temperature has dropped to -14 Celsius. There is snow everywhere, no heat, no food. Electricity is only on for an hour at noon. Families have placed advertisements in Le Monde looking for their loved ones. I do the same.
Someone comes forward. An old friend of my parents, Roger. He tells me that my mother, father and Sarah died in a concentration camp. Bergen-Belsen. Roger knows, because a friend of his, who has survived, was there with them. He said that my father had stopped speaking. That he didn’t care whether he lived or died. That he had gone mad.
That night I dream of the toyshop. Its musty smell. The way my father greets the children. Stooped, twinkle-eyed. The way he displays the marbles: mica, devil’s eye, opaque, cat’s eye. Can we play? M. Baum, can we play? The miniature circus where the clown turns round on a wheel. The wind-up soldiers. The rosewood music box with the dancing ballerina. Oh, comme c’est beau! The porcelain dolls. Les Parisiennes, they are called. Valuable, nineteenth-century dolls clothed in silk, velvet, cashmere, patent-leather shoes. Some like Marie wear jewellery. Rose has a wig made of human hair. M. Bonnet tells me he’ll give me the dolls when I’m ready to have them. When will that be?
My mother can hear me. Feel me. So can my father. I speak to them at nightfall. Their breath has vanished into a place with no name. But I can feel particles of their spirit float around me.
*
We are about to enter France’s Fourth Republic. I am twenty-five years old and a painter’s model at the École des Beaux-Arts. I like sitting in the nude. I make money that way, but not enough to sate my hunger. So I take on another job as well, translating poetry from English to French. One night I go to the Comédie-Française to see Jean-Louis Barrault perform in a play. On the way to my seat I bump into Jean. He looks different. Richer. He introduces me to his wife, who is pregnant. Her eyelashes are pale. A small diamond sparkles around her neck. Jean tells me that he is working for his father now. “So you never wrote your novel?” I ask him. “No,” he answers, looking as ill at ease as does his wife. Does she know about us or has she spotted the Jew in me?
We say goodbye quickly. The meeting leaves me feeling unsettled. I wonder what I ever saw in Jean. Then I think of that evening in the jazz club, of the way we used to ride our bicycles along the Seine, of Paris before the war.
But I must not think about those days.
The theatre is very crowded: we’re all squeezed next to each other, and there is an unpleasant smell of unwashed bodies. But the play is so gripping, albeit tragic, that I eventually forget about the smells, although my empty stomach grumbles. Theatres and music halls may be full in Paris, but grocery shops are bare, and we’re going hungry. Thank goodness for Charles-Henri, my lover. His parents have a house in the country, and he goes hunting for food there, and when he’s lucky he returns to Paris with large sacks of meat and potatoes. I’m never sure what the meat is, but I eat it anyway. We’ve long given up being fussy. People eat their own guinea pigs and pigeons from public parks. The government has had to warn the public that cats are unsafe in stews. Charles-Henri assures me that his meat is perfectly edible, and I believe him. He cooks dinners in his apartment and invites his friends over. Not mine, because I don’t have many friends. His are raucous and pretentious, and I don’t like them much, but I don’t want to be picky, because at least I have a lover. Charles-Henri is very good-looking and writes bad poetry. He’s also jealous, especially of the painters I meet at the Beaux-Arts school or in Montparnasse cafés. Picasso tries to seduce me. But I don’t find him attractive. He says he will draw me, but it never happens. He has a thick Spanish accent. He buys me a drink one day at the Café de la Rotonde. His new lover, Françoise Gilot, is with him. It doesn’t stop him from flirting with me.
I live on the Rue Saint-Jacques. I am trying to rebuild my life.
When I am alone, away from the Beaux-Arts or Charles-Henri, I am overcome by grief and despair. The familiar space I once inhabited has lost its meaning. Everything has lost its meaning. Sometimes, at night, my breathing feels constricted, as if I were choking on splinters. I wake in a sweat and sit upright. It takes a while for my breathing to slow down. I close my eyes and I can hear the first sounds of morning. The cry of a child. The distant roar of a car. Someone walking quickly down the street. A bird chirping on my balcony. Isolated sounds which will onl
y later gather into the tumult of an ordinary day.
When I open my window and look outside, the sky is a smokeless blue, the air is thin, like glass. I lean forward, and the breeze blows smoothly against my skin, still pale, not freckled, like my mother once was.
My mother. Now dust, now gone. And my father? I can understand him now. He lost himself in an imaginary world because the reality was too painful to accept. When he finally did accept it, after my mother was arrested, it was too late: madness had taken over. Did he feel responsible for her arrest? Would she have been spared had we stayed at home and not left the house?
I will never know the answers. Every day I ask myself, but I will never know.
There are many who say it wouldn’t have made a difference. Nothing would have, except for luck. It stood by my side, not theirs. I loved them and lost them. Why? Because of a religion I barely believe in. Judaism is the bane of my existence. Yet it is an indelible stamp on my skin. I cannot make it disappear. No matter how hard I rub it off, it will always remain.
There are good men and women in my life. The Bonnets and the Thibaults. “Never forget the good people,” I can hear my mother say. Never forget them, even though they will never replace the dead.
My English is nearly fluent now. I could leave France and my memories behind. Throw them into the Seine and watch them drown. But memories never drown. They always rise again to the surface.
5
In the fall of 1945, my father’s shop is sold to someone else. A man who paints it white and changes its name. I split the money from the sale between the Bonnets and the Thibaults. Both these families saved my life. I keep only a small amount for myself. With this money, I will buy myself a ticket for Palestine. Not London as I had dreamt of. London is too close. I need to go farther, away from my memories, away from the ghosts of my parents. Not for ever, just for a while. Roger and Catherine, his wife, inform me they are looking for French teachers in Palestine. Catherine’s brother Samuel settled there a few years back. He’s become an architect and is happy. I could be too. I could change my life and reinvent myself in the land of milk and honey. Catherine knows a man who could help me get on a ship. “But it’s not necessarily going to be the most comfortable of voyages,” she adds. “They’re not taking in refugees any more.”
“What do you mean by that? Who aren’t taking in refugees? The Jews?”
She shakes her head. “No. The British. They have quotas. It’s outrageous, really, given what’s happened,” she mutters, under her breath.
“So immigration to Palestine is illegal?”
She hesitated. “We call it clandestine rather than illegal. You might be stopped by a British patrol, or you might not. But it’s worth it. It’s worth the risk.” She pauses and looks at me. “The boat leaves from Italy on 17th September . If I were you, I would go. There’s nothing left for you here. And you’re young. You have your whole life in front of you.”
Yes, but would I be willing to risk it once again? I hadn’t given Palestine much thought before, because I wasn’t a Zionist. I loved my country and had never seen a reason to leave it. If any movement tempted me, it had to do with literature, not the Promised Land: Dada and Surrealism, Symbolism and Existentialism. That’s what I was interested in, and I didn’t want to give it up. “Why should you?” Catherine says. “Take what you know with you! Write the novel you always wanted to write!”
“I don’t know if I can,” I tell her. “And I don’t know if I still want to.”
“You might change your mind when you get there,” she says. “And at least you’ll be far from those degenerate art schools.”
Catherine strongly disapproves of my being an artist’s model. Doesn’t understand how I can strip naked for strangers. Doesn’t understand art in general. I don’t mind what she thinks, because I know what I like. Although, in truth, I don’t see myself being a model in Palestine: I’ll be exposing myself enough by going to a foreign country; I do not wish to expose myself further.
What awaits me there? I know hardly anything about Palestine, aside from the fact that the Mediterranean divides us. And I know no one who can enlighten me about the country’s mores. What do people read there? Can one buy foreign books? What food do they eat? Do they have good coffee? How many languages do they speak? Will I be understood?
Too many questions, yet I know that I must go. I must sail as far away from Paris as possible. There is nothing left for me here, whereas in Palestine I will have a purpose. And I am bound to find others who have shared my plight. In Paris there is no one. I no longer see my old friends from the Sorbonne. I had close friends there. But many have moved away, or seem awkward in my presence, as if I had been the perpetrator of this war, rather than its victim. Or perhaps I’m over-interpreting. Perhaps their awkwardness stems from an unease, a difficulty in commiserating with me, because what I have lived through is bigger than anything they can grapple with. None of my friends have lost their parents. All they seem to have lost is their ability to speak with me. The war is a taboo subject, like a curse. So we avoid each other, like cats in the night.
*
Catherine is cooking me dinner, my last one before my departure tomorrow. We eat potato-and-carrot soup. Bread has been rationed again, as there is a wheat shortage, but she has managed to find us a small loaf on the black market. “I also saw a grapefruit in the shop today,” she announces, excitedly. “The first grapefruit I’ve seen since ’39.”
There is a pitcher of watered white wine. It tastes like medicine, but we drink it anyway. Roger arrives late. He has had a meeting with someone from a publishing company who might have a new job for him. Roger used to be an editor before the war. He spent some time in the Resistance and managed to escape before the Germans uncovered his cell. But he became ill with tuberculosis while in hiding and hasn’t been well since. He coughs a lot and looks pale. They have no money for a doctor, although Roger doesn’t like doctors anyway, so it wouldn’t make a difference. He coughs throughout dinner and he wheezes when he laughs. For dessert, we all smoke Gauloises. “You’re doing the right thing by leaving this damn country,” Roger declares, before heading off to bed. “And you should change your name to Flora. It’s more international.”
6
My first impression of Palestine is one I will never forget. The blinding white light. The dusty heat. The resinous scent of pine. The cyan blue of the sea. I haven’t seen anything like it before. Paris is thin and hungry, but at least I know her. Here I know nothing and no one. There are nurses and soldiers on standby when we disembark from the ship. They take our temperature and whisk away the frailer ones. The streets of Haifa echo with the cries of vendors and the laughing of Arab children running around barefoot. A chicken squawks desperately before it is slaughtered in broad daylight by a man wearing a keffiyeh. There are Jewish women dressed in sandals and shorts, soldiers in khaki uniform with Mauser pistols hanging from their holsters, carts being pulled by tired donkeys. The air is filled with salt and the sound of foreign languages. Everything is loud and carefree. A seventeen-year-old girl who has sailed with me asks if we can stick together. She’s French and quiet. She’s been to Buchenwald and seen horrible things. This is what she tells me, without elaborating. We share a room in a hostel our first night in Haifa. It is dirty, and the bed has a few springs missing, so we decide to head for Jerusalem. It’s where I want to be anyway. We take a bus there and find another hostel near Damascus Gate. It’s much nicer, and we stay there for a while. The French girl cries a lot. I’ve tried to remember her name several times, but cannot. All I know is that she cries a great deal and reveals very little. Then a teacher at the Hebrew school I enrol in tells me about a Polish family. They’re looking for someone to teach their son English. In exchange, they will give me a room with a small basin. I would rather it had been French lessons, but I say yes anyway. I have to do something, and it seems too good an opportunity to pass up. So
I move in. The French girl announces that she is going to a kibbutz in the north, and I never see her again.
*
I find it difficult to learn Hebrew, and I am not the only one. There are many people like me in the classroom who struggle: orphans and refugees, but also Zionists and activists who claim that they want to change the world. I am not in Palestine to change the world, just my life. I want to leave my past behind and forget the traumas of the war. I am a twenty-five-year-old woman who has never been outside France. But Paris without my parents has been stripped of its meaning. Everything has been stripped of its meaning.
In the evenings, I usually have dinner with the Polish family. The mother is called Sonia. She has two boys: David, my seven-year-old pupil, and a small baby who hardly sleeps. I can hear him wailing every night in the room above me. He often keeps me awake, but I don’t complain. I feel sorry for Sonia, because she looks so tired and fraught. She speaks no English, so it is difficult to communicate with her. Her husband is called Mordechai. He wears short-sleeved shirts and smokes a lot, and his skin is always sunburnt. He used to be a mathematician in Warsaw, before he was deported. Now he’s making up for lost time. “I have many things to do aside from mathematics,” he once tells me. “I want to live everything again.”
“I do too,” I say; there is no need to ask him what he means by that. Mordechai and I understand each other. To a large extent, we all understand each other in this strange land. There is an urgency here, as hard and hot as the stones that dominate the landscape. Many of us have suffered, but it is time to heal. “We have to reduce the six war years into six minutes,” says Mordechai, puffing on his cigarette. “In mathematics it is called the beta reduction: you substitute one function for the other. I am doing it in my every day. Substituting life for loss. It doesn’t mean you suppress, but compress. That is the way forward.”
