I took a small room in a pension near the Luxembourg, run by a toothless, wart-covered woman named Madame Charpentier who claimed she could not understand my accent. There was a flush toilet at the end of the hall, a luxury I’d never known, but I was so much colder in the city than I’d been at home in front of the fire. I made friends with one girl, Geneviève, whose room was next to mine—she was blond and delicate, a little like Mathilde, if Mathilde had been shy and awkward—but I ignored the other girls and they ignored me.
Mathilde herself is my only clear memory of Paris. I’d kept an eye out for her, hoping she might have moved to Paris after Marcel’s death. I wanted to run to her and tell her that my mother had died. I thought that would make us equals! I imagined us rekindling our friendship, but I no longer wanted her to teach me to be beautiful. Now I imagined us both pale and plain, dressed in old clothes. If Mathilde and I could walk past a group of German soldiers, arm in arm, wearing our poor Alpine boots, I thought my mother would be vindicated. Everything in me was confused, the way it is in dreams, scraps of one part of life adhering nonsensically to another, as if my mother’s willful poverty had been an act of patriotic resistance.
Mathilde wasn’t in any of the places I looked for her—she wasn’t resting in the Luxembourg or beside the river, where I often went to escape the press of the city. She wasn’t hurrying down a side street, or waiting in a long line for some poor cut of meat. She was, predictably perhaps, in a dance hall, which I, just as predictably, wandered into by accident, looking for a toilet.
I could have waited until I got back to my pension or squatted in the shadow of a building. It was almost curfew and hardly worth getting in trouble for a toilet. But I went in, squinting into the darkness, the smell of alcohol. A few glittering, ropy-looking women were holding their dance partners against their breasts. If they let go, it seemed, the men would simply fall. There were no boches, just the slow, sad couples, the sticky floor, the smoke, and, at the front, on a dais, Mathilde, singing in her deep, lovely voice. I opened my mouth to call out to her, but I couldn’t make a sound.
She held a microphone with one hand and stroked her breasts with the other, not the way a singer runs her hands along the side of her body, offering herself to her audience—none of the customers were looking at Mathilde, anyway—but as if she were soaping herself, lathering her body through the gauzy red fabric of her dress.
She was more beautiful than ever, with her hair cut into a bob, and her lips painted red. She looked ten years younger than she had in our village, dressed in those high-necked dresses with the little white collars, and her hair in a chignon. The other people in the bar may have been dissolute, but she was radiant, singing her song about the consolations of a kiss: Le chagrin est vite appaisi, et se console d’un baiser.
I wasn’t shocked by her plunging neckline, the long slit up the side of her dress, or by the odd way she was touching herself—it cost me nothing, after all, to give up my fantasy of her innocence—I was shocked that she was still so beautiful, so much in life. I thought a mother who had lost her son should be a kind of phantom, biding her time until her own death. Mathilde swayed to her voice and a smile played around her lips, as if she knew that when she was done a man would come and claim her. I imagined that her smile would open as warmly as it once had when she saw me, and for a moment, thinking of those distant Sundays, I wanted to run up onto the dais and pull her out onto the street, take her to my pension and beg her forgiveness. I should have been with her when she received her telegram.
Le chagrin est vite appaisi, she repeated, her hand on her heart: Sorrow is quickly soothed. I slipped back out into the evening, as sickened as I’d been after we lost the war. How could she sing those words as if she meant them, as if she’d written the lyrics herself? She was no kind of mother at all.
But I wanted to talk to her, to tell her everything that had happened since she’d left. Maybe, I thought, if I told her how sorry I was that Marcel had died, she’d remember her grief and be a mother again. I stood on the pavement, equivocating in the mild, spring air, and it wasn’t until I heard the sound of German at the end of the street that I remembered the time and jumped on my bicycle.
There’s always a reason—a thousand reasons, if you want them, and afterward, a thousand regrets.
* * *
By the time the armistice was signed, I’d come down with tuberculosis and had been sent back to the mountains, to a sanatorium. That was where I met Pierre Mason again, when I had nearly recovered and he’d just been released from prison. He hadn’t helped plan the fire, but they had found a Communist tract in his room.
He was bone thin, his head shaved and his lungs racked. The men were allowed to wander the grounds as they pleased—the female patients could only go out as a group, with a nun to chaperone—and he used to sit on a bench and watch us take the air. One day, he lifted his hand. “Marie-Claire,” he said. “Marie-Claire Sauvier!” I almost started coughing again, I was so startled that anyone had noticed me. They released me a few days later, but I stayed in a hotel nearby and visited him every day until he was well enough to go home, and then we went straight to the town hall for a marriage license.
Seven months later, when I gave birth to our first child, I thought I understood Mathilde at last: It wasn’t radiance I’d seen in her at the dance hall, it was the sheen of someone who had been scrubbed raw. Mathilde had gone back to the person she was before Marcel, as if Marcel had never been. If he never was, she hadn’t lost anything: in the gloom, she was a girl again, the world around her whole and smooth and featureless.
Now, I don’t know. We never know how other people suffer, what sacrifices they make, what accommodations.
Perhaps my mother, far from being heartbroken when the villagers turned away from us, felt the dross of her life falling away, imagined herself becoming lighter and lighter until, at some longed-for point in the future, she would be as light and invisible as God. Maybe Mathilde just liked singing, liked touching her own breasts.
I only know that motherhood, like war, is all failed plans and improvising. Every generation builds its own Maginot Line and hopes for the best; the worst, until it comes, is unimaginable.
Someone Else
I wrote to Docteur Naquet when Marcel was killed. He’d sent me money every month, his notes brief and formal, as were my replies. Chère Mademoiselle. Cher Docteur. I looked for a hint in his letters, some indication that he still thought fondly of me, and though I never found any, I was glad he called me Mademoiselle and did not pretend—as we all had—that I was a widow.
I’d been happy working for the Naquets. Every night, a hot bath; every morning, a bowl of hot chocolate. At home, there had been the orchard and eight siblings to tend to. A cold bath once a week if I was lucky, and no time for breakfast. My hands were rough, my clothes stiff with sweat and dirt, my face sunburned—but even so, my father said, I was prettier than my mother, who was unwell and mostly lay in bed. He said it angrily, as if my looks required him to do things he didn’t want to do: reach under my skirt and down my blouse, pull me onto his lap, hide his face in my neck.
At the Naquets’, I dusted, polished, helped Madame in the kitchen. Quiet work in a quiet house. The Naquets never argued or shouted; as far as I could tell, they never disagreed at all. I often eavesdropped: they sometimes discussed politics, but mostly they laughed, communicating in a kind of shorthand that was impossible to make sense of. In public, Madame Naquet was so reserved she seemed cold, but around her husband, her laughter went on and on; she had trouble catching her breath. She reminded me of Cleopatra—so dark and elegant—but he could have been a baker, round and simple with his round, popping eyes. She gave me books to read and she gave me days off for no reason at all except that the house was clean enough, she said, and I should enjoy the day. She believed everyone should have the chance to develop. Why, she asked me, as if I’d contradicted her, should a housekeeper not read, listen to music, visit museums?
> * * *
When I had been with the Naquets for four months, she was called away to care for her father. The house seemed suddenly empty. The doctor retreated to his piano room in the evenings and I sat up in my room and read. After the first week, Madame Naquet wrote that her father’s health was worse than she’d realized and she didn’t know when she’d be back, so the doctor invited me to join him for dinner. We sat at opposite ends of the long table and I worried that I might be holding my fork wrong, but he didn’t seem to notice. He praised every dish I set out—the fish with oyster sauce, the soufflés, the sole meunière, the soups, all things Madame had taught me to cook—and asked about my day. What could I say? The silver had needed polishing, the fishmonger had closed early? To fill the void he told me about his patients and when, after a few nights, I began asking questions, he always said, “A very good question,” before answering me.
Within a month, I had taken on most of Madame’s responsibilities: I greeted patients at the front door, organized the doctor’s schedule, kept track of the medical supplies. When he was called out at night, I tried to wait up for him so I could make him a tisane if he came back before dawn, a coffee if it was time to get to work, but he often found me half-dozing on the divan in the front hall. I would jump up, embarrassed, but he just smiled and told me to rest. Once, when I didn’t hear him come in, he carried me upstairs to my bed.
He began to tease me, but the way he did it was like a compliment, as if he was teasing some part of me that didn’t know my own worth. I can’t remember any of the things he said, only the feeling of my own happiness, up in my cheekbones.
Summer came, the long days and the warm wind, everything green and ripening. He found me fast asleep in the front hall again. “You can sleep with me if you like.” He said it lightly, as if he was offering his coat, but later, when he touched me, his eyes welled up with tears. “You are so beautiful and perfect.” He kissed my eyes, my mouth, my neck, my whole body.
We lived like man and wife until September—he brought me my breakfast in bed, and at night, he hummed to me until I fell asleep—and then his father-in-law died, and he left for three days to attend the funeral. I went back to my little room above the kitchen. My narrow bed with the white lace coverlet and the white lace curtains, the child-sized bookcase Madame Naquet had filled with books for me.
The day they returned, Madame saw me first. I was in the backyard, beating the rugs, and I wasn’t well. I knew what the problem was—I wasn’t stupid—but I hadn’t faced up to it. Just as Madame opened the back door and called out to me, I leaned over and vomited in the grass. She stopped, and when I looked back up at her, standing in the doorway in her traveling suit, her face drained of all expression. She stared at me for a few minutes and then she turned and went inside.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and followed her. They were in the parlor, but the door to the front hall was open; I could hear them as well as if I stood between them. She hissed: “What’s the matter with you? Raphaël! For God’s sake, what is it you—”
“Claudine,” he said.
“What? What, Raphaël?”
He didn’t answer.
“I liked her, Raphaël. I liked her a great deal.”
“Claudine.”
I waited, holding my breath, but they seemed to have nothing else to say. What did I hope? That I could replace Madame Naquet forever?
“I’m sorry, Claudine,” he said, finally. “I’m very sorry. It was stupid of me . . .” And then he said he would take care of things.
“I liked her,” she said again, and I ran upstairs, not caring if they heard me.
He found me in my room. “Mathilde,” he said, and he sat next to me on the bed and tried to hold my hands, but I pulled them away and looked past him toward the door. “I can make arrangements for you,” he said, softly.
I studied the brass doorknob, the way the light from the window pooled on the carpet in front of the door. I thought if I stayed still, if I didn’t speak, I could prevent whatever was going to happen next.
But I wouldn’t give up the baby. I didn’t want someone else holding my child. Feeding him, singing to him, teaching him his numbers.
For days, the Naquets murmured behind closed doors. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but in the end, Madame Naquet bought me a mourning dress and a train ticket. When I arrived in Lyon, where a friend of the doctor’s met me at the station, he greeted me with all the consideration due to a young widow. I could tell the doctor’s friend wasn’t fooled—no one was fooled—but I didn’t care. If the doctor wouldn’t have me, what did it matter what anyone else thought? I knew how to look after a baby, I would manage.
Marcel was an easy baby, a copy of my youngest brother, so long and skinny and pink, with a tuft of red-blond hair on his crown. He made swimming motions in his sleep, like sea grass, his dreams full of vague smiles; when he began to talk, I laughed and clapped, and he laughed with me. But when he grew into a rawboned boy and went to school, he discovered that he didn’t know how to fight like the other boys, and saw that I was useless to him.
My father had been right: my looks gave off a kind of poison. Men were too attentive, women suspicious, and in the school yard, Marcel bore the brunt of it all. We moved several times; each time, I thought I could convince people of my purity. I wanted them to think well of Marcel, to believe his mother was good, his father tragically dead. I made sure I never missed mass, I spoke little, but everywhere I went, people looked at me and saw disaster.
When the war came, I was scared, but I thought it would be quick. I thought we’d cripple the boches forever. It was quick, I was right about that. The boches killed our boys and in return we gave them everything they wanted. We were told to make ourselves stronger, more disciplined, more like them. Posters showed up everywhere upholding the family, that paragon of virtue: Happy father, happy mother, happy son and daughter. Germany’s victory is France’s victory! We’ll throw out all the Jews and build a new and flawless state.
The Jews? Madame Naquet, offering me books, the doctor, snoring lightly on his back?
* * *
I don’t know if Docteur Naquet wrote back after Marcel died. I’d moved to Paris and hadn’t sent him a forwarding address. I didn’t want anything after Marcel died. Not food or friends or comfort. I stayed in an empty shed in the Bois de Boulogne for a while and the only difference between day and night was that by day I sat up and by night I lay down. One afternoon, I watched a spider crawl down my thigh and drop by a thread from my knee before I thought to brush her off. I made so little noise that not even the boches noticed me. But in the end, I wanted to eat.
I work in a dance hall now and at night I let the owner do what he wants with me. He’s mostly a dead weight, crushing my ribs. Sometimes I wish there were three of him, pushing down on my heart.
I’d like to tell the doctor about Marcel, not the way I told him in letters—Marcel is fine, thank you for the check—but the real story: how rarely he smiled, and how, when he did, his upper lip caught on one tooth so that he kept smiling longer than he meant to. The way he would pull his knees up to his chin when he read, lost in a book. Detective stories, mostly. I want the doctor to laugh, ask me a dozen questions. No, I’d say, he wasn’t interested in medicine, but he drew beautifully. He looked like my people, my brother. He slept with me until he was four.
* * *
I saw the doctor last week. I’d gone down to the river to smell the water, and there he was, walking toward me along the bank. His old, bright, sturdy self. I was so startled to see him here, in Paris, that for a moment I didn’t notice he wasn’t wearing a star. I thought he didn’t recognize me. Twenty years, I thought, bitterly. He can’t see the girl in me anymore. But then I understood: he was pretending to be someone else, a gentile. My whole body contracted, a fist in my stomach, but I managed to walk past him without making eye contact, without any recognition at all.
The Jew and the German
Let’s pretend you’re the Jew and I’m the German. There has to be one of each: my great-uncle and the SS officer who arrested him. I’ve written this story dozens of ways, hundreds, always trying to imagine myself as my great-uncle. In photographs, he’s on the verge of laughter, a moon-faced man with bright blue eyes. The kindest of men, everyone agreed.
* * *
After I’ve written the story, I picture my aunts setting fire to it. My aunt Françoise and my mother’s aunt, Chouchotte. You understand nothing, they say. Nothing! You weren’t there, Polly, you can’t imagine—and your Nazi! A cartoon! He insults us all. As if we would have been afraid of such a man.
The war had been over for fifteen years when I was born, but, still, the sound of German unsettles me—in the metro, in a café. Tall, blond Germans my own age, laughing. I imagine them turning around, midlaugh, and shooting me, though I know it’s wrong to suppose they’re all bad. To imagine that I am wholly good. We are all everything.
I’ll be the German this time, and you’ll have to be the Jew.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 7
