One Hundred Twenty-One Days

by Michèle Audin

  3.An elegant house with white frilled curtains and green shutters, along with rhododendron bushes and a pergola in the garden.

  4.The little stone girl on the fountain, smiling, with her motionless spinning wheel.

  POUCH 12

  LIBRARY OF THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS, N. (6-27-06)

  The Kolloquium register with all the names. Among others, M. on July 6, 1943, Smith on June 8, 1950. Completed in 1961. The tradition continues (in modern registers).

  Back to the university archives. Still the same day. A wealth of papers. The little town wasn’t bombed. The paper didn’t burn. The letters are still here. The eagle and the lark as well.

  POUCH 13

  MESSAGE FROM THE ARCHIVES CONSERVATOR (7-19-06), TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN

  Dear Professor-Doctor,

  In response to your request of June 27, you have our authorization, provided that you obtain the authorization of the beneficiaries, to publish the letters of Professors Heinrich Kürz and Christian Mofraust.

  Best regards,

  Doktor H. Raffke

  Following is a list of Kürz’s beneficiaries. Bernhardt Hermann, the son of Charlotte Kürz and Wilhelm Hermann (both deceased). Met at N. He gave his permission.

  POUCH 14

  LIST OF M.’S BENEFICIARIES

  THÉRÈSE, deceased, married Guy Langlois (deceased), six sons (Mathieu, Marc, Luc, Jean, Pierre, Paul), no response from any of them (planned? Of course).

  MARTHE, deceased, single with no children.

  ANNE, deceased, wife to Patrick Dubois (living?), one son (Pierre-Marie): no.

  BERNADETTE, deceased, wife of Pierre Meyer, two daughters, Andrée (now Andrée Daniel) and Nathalie Meyer-Lemaire: yes for both (thanks to Nathalie, contact with Pierre Meyer).

  MARIE, deceased, wife to Jean Besson, deceased, three daughters (Marie-Claude Besson, Berthe Besson, Christiane Mallet): all three, no (exactly the same wording for all three, the same as Pierre-Marie Dubois—planned).

  IGNACE, husband of Françoise Durenberger, two sons (Antoine and Georges): yes for both.

  One no is enough for it to be no, so it’s no.

  POUCH 15

  M.: UNORGANIZED NOTES FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE BIOGRAPHY (RELEASE AROUND OCTOBER 2006)

  Allegiance to Nazi Germany; Berlin talks (and others here or there, like in N.) in 1943; Croix de Guerre with one mention from the army; daughters, five daughters and finally one son; embarrassment felt by the purge committee, before whom he didn’t even need to take off his mask; freight cars of deportees that were filled, but without his help; geriatrics among whom his life came to an end after the death of his daughter Marthe; hospitalizations on a regular basis; injury of a terrible, glorious, obvious, unforgettable nature; Jesuis partout and other newspapers in which he participated, in sickness and in health; kudos, speeches, and homages given by the army, Catholics, politicians, scientists; longevity beyond belief, which was also full of suffering; mask of black leather, which may also have been uncomfortable; neuralgia and neuritis; operation after operation; prizes (academic) obtained for his brilliant work in mathematics; quarantine (metaphorical) after the war by certain mathematicians at foreign conventions; rages into which he flew when he feared he wasn’t being treated like the best; salons with the Catholic bourgeoisie and the evenings of poetry in which he participated; treatments of all kinds that were tried on him; university professors who gave him the cold shoulder; victim of daily and seasonal suffering; widowerhood too soon; xenografts; yperite, or mustard gas, of which he was fortunately not a victim; zone of ambiguity, the gray zone.

  POUCH 16

  PUBLICATION OF KÜRZ’S JOURNAL

  •Transcription of an interview with Catherine Billotte-Yersin, December 5, 2008.

  Summary: her father and grandfather, after the Great War, the occupation, relationship with M.

  •Letter of acceptance from the University of Fribourg Press for Kürz’s journal, translated and annotated. Dated March 5, 2009. Publication scheduled for January 2010.

  POUCH 17

  HANDWRITTEN NOTES

  (Page torn from a notebook)

  6-18-10. Meeting with Louis Klein, the author of Testimony of a Deportee (he’s the one who reported Silberberg’s death at Mariahilf). Born in 1918. Meeting arranged by Pierre Meyer.

  157034

  Separate from the pouches, scribbled on the binder’s cardboard cover:

  Pierre, April 25, 2pm, Cimetière Montmartre.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Form of a City…

  (PARIS, APRIL 25, 2013)

  CIMETIÈRE MONTMARTRE – AVENUE HECTOR-BERLIOZ. All the names. Massé, Pernissin, Masson, Meyer, Rolland, Ruben, Chaiche, Maccini, Fridman. On the monuments, the plaques, the tombs. Tabet (star of David and cross), Greuze, Meyer, Lew, Chaïa, Léger, Berlioz. Pierre, who has just been buried, is another Meyer. Words were spoken, rose petals were thrown on the coffin. I walk a little back from the group. The conversations have started up again. The two women in black are probably his daughters, Andrée and Nathalie. I talked to Nathalie on the phone a few years ago, but I never met her. She was the one who suggested I go see her father. There aren’t that many people. The others walking in front with the two sisters must be Ignace’s children; the youngest adults are probably the children, and the two boys, both around age ten, the grandchildren. They seem so solemn… Maybe it’s their first time attending a burial. Pierre had told me he had four great-grandchildren, but the other two must be too young. There are certainly some friends here (from the daughters’ generation) and perhaps some of his former students from the high school as well. I walk behind them—I don’t know anyone. It also happens to be a beautiful spring day here. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai… Although it’s still April and we’re on Avenue Berlioz, Heine’s tomb is definitely here. Stendhal’s is on the other side, on Avenue de la Croix. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there, and I can’t help thinking about it, no more than I can help recalling his: “On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor.”

  AVENUE DUBUISSON. Underneath the bridge of Rue Caulaincourt are the iron columns supporting it, forged in 1888 in the blast furnaces of Montluçon. A joyful flowerbed of red and yellow tulips has been planted on the roundabout.

  AVENUE PRINCIPALE. Armies of watering cans await the visitors who have come to look after the graves of their loved ones. I discreetly head for the cemetery gate. I will write a letter to Nathalie Meyer: “I was very fond of your father and I want to thank you for allowing me to get to know him.” Pierre taught me a lot. I exit the cemetery.

  AVENUE RACHEL. Incredibly calm. Funerary dignity (monumental masonry), bistro, funeral parlor, florist. On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry…

  BOULEVARD DE CLICHY. In contrast, sound and fury. The Moulin Rouge, red, not dark gray like the last time I saw it in a black and white archival photo showing two German soldiers joking with two blonde women. How did you say “sex toys, 2 euros” in German in 1942? Definitely two soldiers: officers like Kürz probably didn’t visit this type of neighborhood. Pierre lived right behind it at that time, in an attic room on Rue Véron, he said. He would’ve done what he’d had to do, transporting leaflets or other things, in a peaceful manner, because I already imagine him at peace.

  RUE BLANCHE. I could take bus 68 home. But I’m going to walk for a little while, I’ll take it further along. I walk down Rue Blanche. Blanche, Dante, and then I think of Rue Dante and Rue Lagrange, for their assonance. On the sidewalk, an elderly woman walking in the opposite direction up the slope has stopped to catch her breath. I am again reminded of Pierre, who would always make the trip down and back up his three floors to buy the macaroons he used to offer me with the coffee he’d prepare whenever I arrived. I saw him for the last time in February, I believe. He had just celebrated
his ninety-eighth birthday. He was invaluable and precise as an eyewitness. And he was funny. He used to challenge me: “Being the historian that you are…,” he would give me tests: for example, I managed to find the source for each of the twenty-two articles he had given me, higgledy-piggledy in a big brown envelope—articles that had been saved, over the years, by Marguerite M., Mireille Duvivier, and Pierre himself… He lived a full life and observed his entire century. I pass the Blanche-Calais bus stop—Rue Blanche is blocked, I’ll go just as fast on foot.

  SQUARE D’ESTIENNE-D’ORVES. The Resistance member with his fine aristocratic name. He was “the one who believed in heaven” in one of Aragon’s poems. That may be why they named this square after him. The Church of the Trinity is certainly ugly, but I still think “Trinité–d’Estienne d’Orves” sounds rather nice. He was a polytechnician, too. There are all sorts of polytechnicians. Like the two boys from the same year, Gorenstein and M. The fact that both fell in love with the same girl is quite a common occurrence. That both were wounded in the war is just as common. What’s more original is the fact that both were treated in the same hospital, by the same nurse.

  RUE DE CHATEAUDUN. A family visiting from the county asks me how to get to the Galeries Lafayette.

  I point them towards RUE DE LA CHAUSSÉE-D’ANTIN. Which I take slowly, in order to stay behind them. There are lots of people and lots of the usual stores, the ones that make all cities look like each other. In any case, this is true on the street level, because above that, it’s definitely Paris, with its history and its fractures.

  I cross BOULEVARD HAUSSMANN. Fittingly. More and more pedestrians, customers, tourists.

  Behind the Opera Garnier, I cross RUE MEYERBEER. Meyerbeer, as in the composer of the opera Robert le Diable, not Meyerbeer as in Robert Gorenstein’s psychiatrist. Meyerbeer, Doctor Meyerbeer, thrown off a train. On the other side, the Garnier’s majestic steps. Pierre told me about a memory that his wife, Bernadette, had shared with him (she hadn’t been there herself but she knew about it): Kürz, during one of his trips to Paris, had taken Mortfaus to the opera. During his trip in June 1942, he had said he wanted to do it. Apparently, he fulfilled his wish. Pierre had described for me the look of this “broken face” from the First World War, both proud and embarrassed to be climbing the steps of the Paris Opera arm in arm with a German officer in full uniform—which Pierre hadn’t even been there to see. No date, not even a direct testimony. I remember that Pierre said that Bernadette had told him that someone had told her that her father… Not very reliable. Pierre told me that Bernadette had told him that Marguerite had told her that she had had nausea on April 8, 1921, while watching a solar eclipse—that still passes the test, but not the other story…

  AVENUE DE L’OPÉRA. I turn the corner and turn back around to look at those famous steps. I know lots of stories like that. Certainly true. Or almost. In America, this is called “common knowledge.” Actually, in the United States, and concerning Kürz, a story has long been told about the biologist with blue eyes, Emil Schreiber, the one who played in a trio with the Tiedemanns. Supposedly, Kürz offered to “Aryanize” Schreiber’s children (who had just one Jewish grandparent—André Silberberg would have called them “quarter-Jews”) so that Schreiber could stay in Germany. I’m no longer thinking about taking the bus and then a 68 (another one) slips right by. There isn’t much to see on Avenue de l’Opéra: luxury shoes, banks, jewelry, travel agencies, yes, but not one bookstore left. Only the street signs remain for reading.

  RUE DANIELLE-CASANOVA. A member of the Resistance, a communist, killed at Auschwitz in 1943, has her street in this neighborhood where there’s probably no one left who knows what she did.

  And I stop at RUE DES PYRAMIDES. On the 2nd of July, 1798, General Bonaparte entered Alexandria…

  RUE DE ROHAN. The tourist population becomes denser.

  I pass the arches of the Louvre and walk along the side of the Museum of Decorative Arts in the JARDIN DES TUILERIES. The city is loaded with history, without speaking of the Paris Commune and the war waged on it by the government in Versailles (and the beautiful, chateau-less Tuileries garden that resulted from it). I inevitably find myself in the grandiose perspective between the two Arcs de Triomphe: the Carrousel arch here and, there, down the Champs-Élysées, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I finally understand why it’s here, in this same garden, that in May 1939 M. declared his love of Germany and his vision of France and Germany dominating Europe together to his German guest. Today, there’s a lot of noise, the happy shouts of a bunch of kids on top of a statue. It’s spring break somewhere, but not in Paris, since my daughter is at school today. The two boys in the cemetery must have had to miss class, or else they live out in the country. There’s a lot of dust on the garden paths.

  AVENUE DU GÉNÉRAL-LEMONNIER. I read the plaque. This general was one of the heroes from the Indochina War. Still thinking of M., I wonder what he did, said, thought, about decolonization and the colonial wars. He was directly concerned, he whose family owned and operated a plantation in Senegal. Too late to ask Pierre.

  I’ve crossed the quay and now take the PONT ROYAL, on which I stop for a moment to contemplate the sparkling ripples of the Seine. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai… Not too far from here is the gilded cupola of the French Institute where, probably, the Academy of Sciences is unshakably carrying on with its work. This city may be steeped in history, but I must confess I don’t know whether they threw the Algerian protestors into the Seine from this bridge. There was no more night watchman of the Pont-au-Change on the 17th of October, 1961…

  I take the RUE DU BAC in front of me. Where I start off by crossing a 68, going the wrong direction. The stores here are very elegant; I pass galleries, monasteries, pastry shops in a style different from that of Korb & Schlag, but very chic as well.

  Here, VALMY has its IMPASSE. I cross it and stop to read the plaque, on 46 Rue de Bac: “Roger Connan, shot by the Germans on August 20, 1944, at the age of 28.”

  At the intersection, I take BOULEVARD RASPAIL. And I choose to walk on the left side, in the shade, which means I’ve really given up catching a bus. On the median, the chestnut trees are not yet in bloom. But that can be sung—“April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom…” After the German Romantic poet, Americans in Paris. Which evokes the Liberation, Mireille, her endless wait. I didn’t know Mireille, she had been dead for several years when Pierre told me about her, told me her story. She worked as a librarian her whole life, with specializations in German and Italian poetry, as well as the literature about the camps, the concentration camps, the extermination camps. And she always lived alone. With lots of generosity, Pierre passed all of her stories on to me. Reading letters that weren’t addressed to me, intimate diaries hidden at the bottom of linen dressers, agendas, drafts—that’s my job. Opening boxes of archives, my heart pounding in my chest, that, too. And did my heart pound less for Pierre’s stories than for those old dusty trophies? I cross the boulevard and, in front of the Bank of France, I read another plaque. At this location, an unknown member of the FFI (French Forces of the Interior) died for France on August 21, 1944. Across the street, the Hotel Lutetia—after housing the headquarters of the Abwehr, a German intelligence service, then after taking in the scant survivors returning from the camps—has long been restored to its original purpose. I cross the street again to read the plaque, which I’ve already come to read several times and which always mentions joy, anguish, and pain. It’s impossible here not to think, once again, of Mireille Duvivier. I keep on walking. I can’t imagine Mireille in 1945. The private events, like the one hundred twenty-one days of Mireille and André’s story, do they not form a sort of chain that holds the threads together—the very fabric of history? The barking of a dog, to which my mind probably wasn’t headed, brutally brings me back to today, April 25, 2013, the day of Pierre Meyer’s burial. I’m now in front of the “modern” building of the EHESS, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, which
replaced the Cherche-Midi prison. I know that Dreyfus was incarcerated there in 1894, and that during the occupation, it was used for all sorts of prisoners and members of the Resistance, with forty per cell. I’m walking in the very city Kürz visited in 1942. The beautiful building now hidden by scaffolding once served as a recruitment center for the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), which subjected French workers to forced labor in Nazi Germany. In passing, I see the window of the historic bookstore, but I don’t stop. I don’t really have the heart to go look at tables of books. I remember the intense nausea that came over me when I unexpectedly discovered a “scientific biography” of Georges C. Collaborators are in vogue at the moment. I saw all kinds of books, books by sons and grandsons, some courageous, others scandalous. And piles of books on Céline, who was also a World War I veteran.

  RUE NOTRE-DAME-DES-CHAMPS. The metro. Notre-Dame des Champs, our lady of the fields, pray for us. And Saint Marguerite as well. Marguerite M. was a saint. I’ve realized that I probably can’t comprehend the true nature of the relationship between the Catholic nurse and the broken face, the exchange of pain and sacrifice… and why not love, pure and simple?

  CARREFOUR VAVIN. Rodin’s statue of Balzac is found here. After Stendhal… I’m getting a literature lesson as well this morning. This is a novel, from end to end. Fiction. But “all is true,” like Balzac said, rightly, at the beginning of Père Goriot.

  On BOULEVARD MONTPARNASSE. The café terraces that, as in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, were once fashionable, are now full of tourists. The words that can be “as murderous as a gas chamber,” as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, maybe in one of these cafés, murderous words, answering terrifying numbers. Multiplying 8 Reichsmarks by 40 years then by 365 days to get 116,800 Reichsmarks has nothing particularly terrifying about it; it’s the addition of the words “mentally ill patient” and “cost” that makes the calculation murderous.