Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  Marie stares into the cup, where cocoa has congealed at the bottom. She tells Sylvie she had never set foot inside that grand hotel before, but in the old days, every time she got off the metro at Sèvres-Babylone, she would see elegant women whisked inside by the revolving doors. She imagined them settling down to dainty tea sandwiches for le four-o’clock, or newlyweds gazing at each other over the rims of champagne glasses before retiring discreetly upstairs. To think that this hotel—where de Gaulle had spent his honeymoon before the war, and the German Abwehr had spent the Occupation—was now sheltering survivors from the concentration camps! The idea of their sleeping on the same expensive sheets, eating the same tempting delicacies, struck her as a macabre irony.

  When Marie finally entered the lobby with its sparkling chandelier, instead of the whiff of expensive perfumes, there was the overpowering smell of DDT as the survivors were fumigated for lice and disease. Along the walls, invalids too weak to stand lay motionless on stretchers; others sat patiently in chairs, their gaze turned inward. Everyone was waiting for something. For a doctor, for an identity card, a government allowance. They clutched anything that was given to them—a piece of paper, a roll of bread—close to their chests as if afraid it would be snatched away. Despite the swirl of activity, the doctors and volunteers spoke in low voices, while the perfectly trained hotel staff went about their tasks in silence. Suddenly there was a crash from the dining room as a tray was knocked over, and everyone turned to stare. But the returnees instinctively raised their arms to protect themselves, revealing the tattooed numbers they had tried to conceal.

  Everywhere one looked, there were photographs of les absents pinned to the walls. So many of them, photographed in happier circumstances, in family portraits taken at the beach, at a wedding, smiling into the camera, unaware of what was to come. Now their happy countenances seemed unbearably poignant, three generations wiped out at once.

  “My photographs of Clara and the girls were there as well, and that’s how I met Julien. He was only a couple of years younger than I was at the time, and somehow I had imagined Clara’s brother looking quite different, I don’t know why, but there was no mistaking the resemblance, the same blue eyes, the same way of carrying himself. When I introduced myself, all I could think was that Julien had left Paris when peace still seemed possible. To return to this!”

  Julien and she went to the Lutetia every day, except Saturdays, of course, when the registry closed for the Jewish Sabbath. At first they still had hope. It was spring, the chestnut trees were in bloom, and the dark years were finally behind them. But as May turned to June, and the stream of survivors slowed to a trickle, the people crowded behind the barricades became weary, discouraged. Something about Julien drew others to him, among them a woman who looked like she could have been a habitué of the hotel in happier days, but who was now there for the same sad reason as everyone else. She pestered people to look at the picture of her daughter, a beautiful young woman posing with her hand on her hip, defiantly flaunting the star of David on her coat. “Belle, comme elle était belle,” Mrs. Stein sobbed, “what have they done with her, who will make them pay?”

  Julien replied that he wanted something more terrible than vengeance. Marie wondered what could be more terrible, but just then a woman broke away from the line of people filing into the hotel and staggered toward them. Mrs. Stein thrust the photograph at her and cried, “Have you seen her, have you seen my daughter?” She shook her head and gazed at the photograph with sorrowful eyes. Mrs. Stein stared at this specter robbed of all defiance, all youth, all beauty, then she embraced her, weeping, “Ma belle, oh, ma belle,” and Marie thought that this is one thing at least that we’ve been spared.

  “Julien and I continued to wait all through the summer, until finally the Ministry sent out an official memo that repatriation was terminated.” It was September, and the chestnut trees were starting to turn color. They turned away from the Lutetia, knowing they would never willingly walk past its grand façade again.

  But Julien refused to give up. He pursued every lead, however slight, and yet all he could discover was that Clara had entered the Vel d’Hiv with her twin daughters and had left from there alone. At the police headquarters, a couple of gendarmes recalled the little girl who had berated a German officer; at the Red Cross, a nurse remembered the twins, one had died of a raging fever, she wasn’t sure about the other. Marie told him the twins were inseparable, if Gigi was dead, Lilou must be presumed dead. But presumed dead is not the same as dead, and Julien kept hoping for a miracle. Marie no longer believed in miracles, but still she had held on to Clara’s letter inscribed to my daughters.

  Immersed in scenes of the past, Marie is unaware of time in the present, paying scant heed to the hour, to the street outside the tea shop crowded with people walking home with loaves of bread, others hurrying toward the boulangerie before it closes for lunch. She says in a low voice, “I never told Julien about Mathilde’s role in all this, I was afraid he wouldn’t forgive her. There was a lot I didn’t tell him.”

  “You loved Julien?”

  “Yes.” She bites her lip, and then the bottled-up words come out in a rush of bitterness. “Yes, I was in love with him. But by then he had met Isabelle. So beautiful, so comme il faut. What man in his right mind would choose me?”

  The image of Isabelle glides between them, and they both fall silent. From the first, Marie had taken a dislike to Isabelle. It was partly jealousy, of course, but something about her just rubbed her the wrong way. Isabelle had no inkling that her efforts to “correct” Mathilde might be unwelcome, or that her tips on how to keep tulips fresh in a vase might be useless; in her world, everyone could afford cut flowers. And Isabelle simply couldn’t fathom that someone who was poor should be as proud as she was herself. But in the end, it was Julien who had severed the connection.

  “When he told us about his new position at the hospital, Mathilde couldn’t resist showing off, she had an important job, too, and then it all came tumbling out, what she did that day. Julien’s face went white as chalk. He didn’t blame her, but it was too painful to be around us after that. I never saw him again, but he continued to send me money to make life a bit easier, to make up for all the years of privation when I had to say no to Mathilde for everything. The payments stopped after his death, and then last month, they started up again. I suppose it takes time, all the formalities. But I can’t tell you how thankful I am, not just for the money, but that Julien…” Her voice trails off.

  Seeing the expression on her face, Sylvie holds her tongue. She has no desire to take credit for the restarted payments, it means more to Marie this way.

  Marie sighs. “He was a fine man. But I suppose you lived with him long enough to know that. I wrote to him when he left Isabelle. He could take it however he chose, a token of friendship, a declaration of love…but he never replied.”

  “He kept your card, all the same,” says Sylvie.

  “All these years!” Marie cannot hide her emotion, and Sylvie tactfully looks away.

  A couple of women enter the tea room, pick out a cake, wait for change. One of them greets Sylvie, and she struggles to place her before recognizing a former pupil. When she turns back, Marie has tucked the pastry into her string bag and is picking imaginary crumbs off the cloth. “Anyway,” she says, “when Julien died, Isabelle came around to rue Elzévir for Clara’s paintings. But when I offered her these canvases, she was no longer interested. Later I wondered if it was the other painting she wanted, the one Mrs. Grzybyk had left with Clara.”

  During the Occupation, Marie had sold everything she could, including the unclaimed books in the bindery. The secondhand dealer grumbled he was only buying them out of charity and paid her a pittance for a costly set of Balzac. But when she took him another set, the complete Proust, he shook his head and said, “No Jewish writers.” She hated the grasping old man, everyone knew he did a
brisk business with the Germans, they were the only ones with enough money to buy books and paintings, once necessities for Parisians, now luxuries like butter and eggs for which the Boche could pay fivefold, tenfold, while she and Mathilde were always hungry. One day she had thought of Mrs. Grzybyk, and wished she had left the samovar behind instead of the painting, at least that would be worth something. In any case, she took the painting around to the old brocante, who looked at the signature and said, “It’s a Jewish artist,” and her heart sank, because she knew he would buy it cheap. He made an offer so insulting that she wrapped the painting back up. But in the end she took the money for it after all.

  Marie sighs, “I was always ashamed of that. I didn’t tell Julien I had sold it, and many years later I read that one of Soutine’s paintings was auctioned for an extraordinary sum at the Hôtel Drouot.” The newspaper article said he had gone into hiding during the Occupation, and it made Marie feel peculiar to think of him concealed somewhere, in someone else’s attic, maybe, while his painting was secreted in her ceiling. In her dreams, she would see Mrs. Grzybyk holding her samovar and gazing sorrowfully at her till she would wake up in a cold sweat.

  Marie clutches the tablecloth, creasing the immaculate linen. At the sight of Sylvie’s face, she recollects herself and smooths out the creases. Sylvie glances at the pastry in the string bag, and tells the waitress to add a box of chocolates to the order.

  Guessing her intention, Marie recoils. “I don’t need anything,” she says, bristling.

  “They’re for Mathilde.”

  Marie hesitates, then says gruffly, “In that case…”

  Sylvie sees that she is eager to leave, has said all she has to say, more than she intended, perhaps. As they part on the street, Sylvie thanks her again and wishes her au revoir. Marie responds with the much more final adieu.

  They part to go their separate ways, but I stay where I am, turning over in my mind Marie’s unanswered question: What is more terrible than vengeance? More terrible than the violent reprisals after liberation, when people were paraded naked through the streets, women with shaved heads and mutilated breasts, men with broken arms and crushed testicles. The last-minute résistants who switched sides when they saw which way the wind was blowing were loudest in their demands for “purification,” denouncing neighbors, cudgeling black-marketers, shooting collaborators without a trial.

  But is even a trial enough? I think of Pétain in the dock, flaunting the seven stars of his rank. He refused to submit to the court’s jurisdiction, claiming he was answerable only to God and posterity. Impassive throughout the testimony, Pétain’s blue eyes flickered only when he was charged with sending Jews to their death, as if he was looking beyond the packed courtroom to a host of phantom accusers.

  Remembering these mute witnesses, I realize why the perpetrators tried to destroy all records of their crimes: More terrible than vengeance, more enduring than the verdicts of men, is the final judgment of history.

  A couple of shopgirls hurry past me to their hostel on rue Poulletier. At the sight of their bright faces I shake off thoughts too morbid for this summer’s day. The cobblestones radiate warmth from the afternoon sun, and down by the river a welcome breeze silvers the green leaves of the poplars. When I pass the hostel, its gates are open and its young inhabitants spill out on the pavement, craning their necks to stare at an ambulance blocking the street. I feel a familiar clutch of dread and look instinctively toward the river.

  Two men from the fluvial police sprint toward us, carrying a girl on a stretcher which they place on the ground, right at my feet. One of the men kneels and breathes into her mouth, presses down on her chest. Her pale eyelids do not flutter, her pale lips do not part. But I feel the world spin around me at the sight of that face.

  Delphine!

  “So lovely,” one of the girls whispers. “So lifelike.”

  An ironic stroke of fate has transformed the death mask of the laundress into the countenance of the CPR dummy; L’Inconnue de la Seine smiles her mysterious smile as the young man continues to demonstrate the kiss of life, the science of resuscitation seeking to duplicate the greatest miracle of all, the raising of the dead.

  Seated at Julien’s desk, Sylvie opens Clara’s jewel case, releasing the dormant aroma of cedar into the air. She takes out the contents—three smooth pebbles, an Alsatian bonnet of black lace, a folded sheet of onionskin paper sealed with a drop of wax and addressed to my daughters—and wonders if Marie had kept the letter from Julien to spare him pain or because she hoped it might yet be claimed by the lost children. The lost children! If they had lived, they would be as old as Sylvie now, but the dead never age.

  She pulls out Clara’s photograph from the desk drawer and studies once more that young countenance. The bright eyes, the parted lips. Again she seems on the verge of speaking. But what Clara has to say is not meant for her eyes, it is addressed to my daughters. It’s not for Sylvie to unseal the secrets of that letter; and as for the secrets of the envelope marked with the letter M, she has done what she can, she can do no more.

  Sylvie hears a knock next door and wonders who can be calling on the Americans. She sticks her head out and finds the judge on the landing. Monsieur de Cheroisey hands her a magazine he has brought for Will. He sounds disappointed that the Taylors aren’t home.

  “I was just clearing out some papers and found this issue from last summer. I think the American will find it interesting.”

  Sylvie is surprised the judge has chosen to bring the magazine up himself instead of leaving it with Ana Carvalho. Perhaps like herself he finds it refreshing to be around the Taylors. And, of course, their impermanence makes such overtures of friendship perfectly safe; by summer’s end they will be gone. “I believe they’ve driven down to the Loire.”

  “Ah, the châteaux,” he says approvingly. “But one needn’t go that far, the most dazzling one is only fifty kilometers from here. For true connoisseurs, Vaux-le-Vicomte outshines them all, even the palace of the Sun King. But then Le Vau was the architect, so no wonder, and we’re fortunate to be surrounded by his masterpieces without even crossing the bridge.”

  Sylvie smiles at being included in the “we” and wonders again whether the arrival of fresh outsiders has led to this acceptance, or merely the passage of time. The judge turns to leave and Sylvie goes back inside. The cover strikes her as vaguely familiar, and she is sure she has seen it before. Flipping through the glossy pages of La Vie Française, she sees the article earmarked for Will, about a billionaire collector who had recently acquired some bottles from Thomas Jefferson’s famed wine collection. She glances at the remaining articles, all lavishly illustrated: Belle Époque interiors in Paris, famous recipes from Relais et Châteaux hotels, an interview with Georges Simenon. About to put the magazine away, her attention is suddenly arrested.

  She looks closely at the black-and-white photograph on the last page, accompanying a regular feature called “I Remember…” The photograph shows a scene at a railway station, nothing remarkable about it, there must be thousands of photographs like it in family albums all over the country, children leaving for a summer holiday at a colonie de vacances up in the mountains, waving as the train pulls out of the station. The only thing that sets it apart from those innocent family photographs is a young boy on the platform, looking up at German soldiers in uniform.

  Sylvie reads the accompanying essay, no misty stroll down memory lane, no lament for the snows of yesteryear, but words written at white heat, burning themselves on the page:

  Yes, I remember. I had just turned thirteen that summer of 1942, an age to prepare for my bar mitzvah in normal times. But these were not normal times, and nothing could prepare me for this hard coming-of-age. My father was rounded up the winter before and since then his employer, a wine merchant named Jacques Laferrière, had shown us extraordinary kindness, above and beyond what one might expect from someone
linked to us neither by blood nor friendship, but simply as one human being to another.

  When rumors of a great roundup reached us, no one believed it would include women and children. But Monsieur Laferrière insisted on hiding us in the wineshop, huddled in the same small room where my father had done his accounts in more “normal” times. Even after the raid was over, we could not go home, the police had sealed off our apartment. In any case, Monsieur Laferrière said it was dangerous for us to remain. He arranged false papers, bought us tickets to the unoccupied zone, and volunteered to accompany us. My little brother and I spoke faultless French, but we were afraid our mother’s strong accent might give us away, so we filled her mouth with gauze and bandaged her face as if she was recovering from dental surgery.

  Monsieur Laferrière instructed us to separate and act as though we did not know each other. I sat at the far end of the carriage across from my mother. Monsieur Laferrière and Benjy were near the front. The carriage was filled with children leaving for their summer holidays, some being dropped off by their parents, some accompanied by schoolteachers, and Benjy and Monsieur Laferrière looked unremarkable among them. Our papers were checked without incident, and as the whistle sounded, I let out a sigh of relief. Too soon. Three German officers boarded the train with their dogs, and all we could do was watch in horror as they took Benjy and Monsieur Laferrière off. My mother moaned and tried to tear the bandage from her mouth, and people all around commiserated with her agony. A pulled tooth, quelle douleur! But Benjy got down holding Monsieur Laferrière’s hand, and did not cast a single glance at us as the train pulled away without him.

  My mother and I made it to Nice, where we took refuge with her cousins. Monsieur Laferrière wrote to us that the Germans roughed him up and took away the boy. The wine merchant was released after six weeks in prison, but he had no further news of Benjamin. We learned my brother’s fate once the war was over, that he had been sent to the death camps with a group of orphans. My mother never got over it. She had fled Russia for France, but now she could not bear to live here any longer and left for Israel, the only place she said where it was no trespass to be a Jew.