David Foenkinos
CHARLOTTE
A NOVEL
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY SAM TAYLOR
International literary phenomenon, multiple award-winner, and massive bestseller with over 500,000 copies in print in France and rights sold in 20 countries, Charlotte tells the story of artist Charlotte Salomon—born in pre-World War II Berlin to a Jewish family traumatized by suicide. Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte attended school in Germany until it was too dangerous to remain, fled to France, and was interned in a bleak work camp from which she narrowly escaped. Newly free, she spent two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of autobiographical art—images, words, even musical scores—that together tell her life story. A pregnant Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 26 but not before she entrusted her life’s work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime. The result, an extraordinary graphic novel avant la lettre, was eventually published as Life? or Theatre? (and now reissued by Overlook), a unique, relentlessly complete artistic expression.
In Charlotte, David Foenkinos—with passion, life, humor, and intelligent observation—has written his own utterly original tribute to Charlotte Salomon’s tragic life and transcendent art. His gorgeous, haunting, and ultimately redemptive novel is the result of a long-cherished desire to honor this young artist. Infused with the emotion of a writer who connects deeply with his subject, and masterfully and sensitively translated by Sam Taylor, Charlotte is a triumph of creative expression, a monument to genius stilled too soon, and an ode to the will to survive.
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],
or write us at the above address
Copyright © 2014 Èditions Gallimard, Paris
English translation copyright © 2016 by Sam Taylor
Quote from On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin,
from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940,
translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others, edited by Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings, published in 2003 by
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1344-4
Contents
Copyright
Epigraph
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Epilogue
About the Author
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate.
—FRANZ KAFKA, Diary
This novel is inspired by the life of Charlotte Salomon.
A German painter murdered at the age of twenty-six,
when she was pregnant.
My principal source is her autobiographical work,
Life? or Theater?
Part One
1
Charlotte learned to read her name on a gravestone.
So she wasn’t the first Charlotte.
Before her, there had been her aunt, her mother’s sister.
The two sisters were very close, until one evening in November 1913.
Franziska and Charlotte sing together, dance and laugh together.
But never to excess.
There is always a reserve to their displays of happiness.
Perhaps this is linked to their father’s personality.
An intellectual, strict and unyielding, with an interest in art and antiques.
For him, nothing could be more fascinating than a handful of Roman dust.
Their mother is gentler.
But it is a gentleness tinged with sorrow.
Her life has been a series of tragedies.
But more on that later.
For now, let’s stick with Charlotte.
The first Charlotte.
She is beautiful, with long dark hair like a promise.
It all begins with the slowness.
Little by little, she does everything more slowly: eating, walking, reading.
Something inside her is slowing down.
Her body, I imagine, being infiltrated by melancholy.
The kind of melancholy that devastates, that never goes away.
Happiness becomes an island in the past, unreachable.
But nobody notices the arrival of this slowness in Charlotte.
It is too insidious.
People compare the two sisters.
One simply smiles more than the other.
At most, someone might remark the occasional daydream that goes on too long.
But night is taking over her.
The night she must wait for, so that it can be her last.
It is such a cold November night.
While everyone else is sleeping, Charlotte gets out of bed.
She gathers a few belongings, as if she’s going on a trip.
The city seems at a standstill, frozen in this early winter.
Charlotte has just turned eighteen.
She walks quickly toward her destination.
A bridge.
A bridge she loves.
The secret locus of her darkness.
She has known for a long time that it will be the last bridge.
In the black night, unseen, she jumps.
Without the slightest hesitation.
She falls into the icy water, her death an ordeal.
Her body is found early the next morning, washed up on a riverbank.
Completely blue in places.
Her parents and her sister are woken by the news.
The father is paralyzed, utterly silent.
The sister weeps.
The mother howls with pain.
The next day’s newspapers run stories about this girl.
Who took her own life without any explanation.
And perhaps that is the ultimate outrage.
Violence added to violence.
Why?
Her sister considers this suicide an affront to their closeness.
Mostly, she feels responsible.
She never saw, never understood that slowness.
Now she moves forward, with guilt in her heart.
2
The parents and the sister do not attend the funeral.
Devastated, they shut themselves away.
They probably feel a little ashamed too.
They flee the eyes of others.
A few months pass like this.
In the impossibility of taking part in the world.
A long period of silence.
To speak is to risk mentioning Charlotte.
She hides in wait behind every word.
Silence is the survivors’ only crutch.
Until the moment when Franziska touches the piano.
She plays something, sings softly.
Her parents move over to her.
Surprised by this manifestation of life.
The country enter
s the war, and perhaps this is for the best.
Chaos is the perfect backdrop to their pain.
For the first time, the conflict is global.
Sarajevo brings the fall of the old empires.
Millions of men rush to their deaths.
The future is fought over in long tunnels dug in the earth.
Franziska decides to become a nurse.
She wants to heal the wounded, cure the sick, bring the dead back to life.
And to feel useful, of course.
This girl who lives each day with the feeling of having been useless.
Her mother is horrified by this decision.
It gives rise to tensions and arguments.
A war within the war.
But it makes no difference: Franziska signs up.
And finds herself near the danger zone.
Some think her brave.
But she is quite simply no longer afraid of death.
In the heat of battle, she meets Albert Salomon.
He is one of the youngest surgeons.
He is very tall and very concentrated.
One of those men who seem in a rush even when they are still.
He manages a makeshift hospital.
On the front, in France.
His parents are dead, so medicine is his only family.
Obsessed with his work, nothing can distract him from his mission.
He shows little attention to women.
Barely even registers the presence of a new nurse.
She smiles at him constantly, all the same.
Thankfully, something happens to change the situation.
In the middle of an operation, Albert sneezes.
His nose runs, he needs to blow it.
But his hands are deep in a soldier’s guts.
So Franziska approaches with a handkerchief.
It is at this very moment that he finally looks at her.
…
One year later, Albert takes his courage in his hands.
His surgeon’s hands.
He goes to see Franziska’s parents.
They are so cold that he loses his nerve.
Why has he come here?
Oh yes … to ask for their daughter’s … hand in … marriage …
To ask for what? the father grumbles.
He doesn’t want this gangly beanpole for a son-in-law.
No way does he deserve to marry a Grunwald.
But Franziska insists.
She says she is deeply in love.
It’s hard to be sure.
But she is not the type for passing whims and fancies.
Since Charlotte’s death, life has been reduced to its essentials.
The parents finally give in.
They force themselves to rejoice a little bit.
To learn to smile again.
They even buy flowers.
It has been so long since colors were seen in their living room.
Somehow they are reborn through the petals.
At the wedding, though, they look like mourners.
3
Right from the beginning, Franziska is left alone.
Is this really married life?
Albert returns to the front.
The war is mired in mud, it seems endless.
One vast slaughter in the trenches.
Just don’t let her husband be killed.
She does not want to be a widow.
She’s already a …
Actually, what is the word for someone who has lost a sister?
There is no word.
Sometimes the dictionary says nothing.
Frightened by pain, just like her.
The young newlywed wanders around her large apartment.
On the second floor of a bourgeois building in Charlottenburg.
Charlotte town.
It is located at 15 Wielandstrasse, near the Savignyplatz.
I have often walked that street.
Even before I knew about Charlotte, I loved her neighborhood.
In 2004, I wanted to entitle a novel “Savignyplatz.”
That name resonated strangely within me.
Something drew me to it, though I didn’t know why.
A long hallway runs through the apartment.
Franziska often sits there to read.
In the hallway, she feels as if she is at the border of her home.
Today, she closes her book quite quickly.
Feeling dizzy, she heads to the bathroom.
And splashes some water on her face.
It takes her only a few seconds to understand.
While caring for a wounded man, Albert receives a letter.
Seeing his face turn pale, a nurse becomes worried.
My wife is pregnant, he finally sighs.
In the months that follow, he tries to return to Berlin as often as possible.
But most of the time, Franziska is alone with her belly.
She walks along the hallway, already speaking to her child.
So desperate to put an end to her solitude.
Deliverance comes on April 16, 1917.
It is the first appearance of a heroine.
But also of a baby that cries constantly.
As if she refused to accept her birth.
Franziska wants to call her Charlotte, in homage to her sister.
Albert does not want his daughter to bear a dead woman’s name.
Still less one who committed suicide.
Franziska weeps, outraged, infuriated.
It is a way of making her live again, she thinks.
Please, Albert begs, be reasonable.
But he knows that she isn’t.
It is part of why he loves her, this gentle madness.
This way she has of never being the same woman.
She is by turns free and submissive, feverish and dazzling.
He senses that conflict is pointless.
Besides, who ever feels like fighting during a war?
So Charlotte it will be.
4
What are Charlotte’s first memories?
Smells or colors?
More likely, they are notes.
The tunes sung by her mother.
Franziska has an angel’s voice and she plays piano too.
From her first days of life, Charlotte is soothed by this.
Later, she will turn the pages of sheet music.
And so her early years pass, enveloped in melody.
Franziska likes going for walks with her daughter.
She takes her to Berlin’s green heart, the Tiergarten.
A small island of peace in a city still sunk in defeat.
Little Charlotte observes the damaged, mutilated bodies.
She is scared by all these hands reaching out toward her.
An army of beggars.
She lowers her eyes to avoid seeing their broken faces.
And does not look up again until she is in the woods.
There, she can run after the squirrels.
Afterward, they must go to the cemetery.
So they never forget.
Charlotte understands early that the dead are part of life.
She touches her mother’s tears.
This mother who mourns her dead sister as she did on the day of her death.
Some sorrows never pass.
On the gravestone, Charlotte reads her name.
She wants to know what happened.
Her aunt drowned.
Didn’t she know how to swim?
It was an accident.
Franziska quickly changes the subject.
And so comes the first arrangement with reality.
The play begins.
Albert disapproves of these trips to the cemetery.
Why do you take Charlotte there so often?
It’s a morbid attraction.
He asks her to visit less frequently, not to take their daughter.
But how can he kn
ow if she obeys?
He is never there.
He thinks of nothing but his work, say his parents-in-law.
Albert wants to become the greatest doctor in Germany.
When he is not in the hospital, he spends his time studying.
Never trust a man who works too much.
What is he seeking to avoid?
Fear, or simply a feeling.
His wife’s behavior is increasingly unstable.
She seems absent at times, he notices.
As if she were taking a vacation from herself.
He tells himself she’s a daydreamer.
Often we try to find pleasant reasons for other people’s strangeness.
In the end, the way she acts becomes worrying.
She lies in bed for days on end.
She doesn’t even pick Charlotte up from school.
And then, suddenly, she becomes herself again.
In the space of a minute, she snaps out of her lethargy.
Without the slightest transition, she starts taking Charlotte everywhere.
Into town, to the park, to the zoo and museums.
They must walk, read, play piano, sing, learn all there is to learn.
In lively moments, she likes organizing parties.
She wants to see people.
Albert loves those soirées.
They are his deliverance.
Franziska sits at the piano.
It’s so beautiful, that way she has of moving her lips.
As if she were conversing with the notes.
For Charlotte, her mother’s voice is a caress.
When you have a mother who sings like that, nothing bad can happen to you.
Like a doll, Charlotte stands up straight in the middle of the living room.
She greets the guests with her brightest smile.
The smile she worked on with her mother, until her jaw ached.
Where is the logic?
Her mother shuts herself up for weeks at a time.
Then, suddenly, the social demon possesses her.
Charlotte enjoys these transformations.
She prefers anything to apathy.
A deluge is better than a drought.
But the drought returns now.
The rain of life ceases as abruptly as it started.
And once again, Franziska lies in bed, exhausted by nothing.
Lost in contemplation of some other world at the far end of her room.
Faced with her mother’s mood swings, Charlotte is docile.
She tames her melancholy.
Is this how one becomes an artist?
By growing accustomed to the madness of others?
Charlotte Page 1
