Silent Letter

So I am writing, at last, but I have no idea where this will all end up. You are in the North; the South. You are in a basement; in the city; in a tent in a camp; in a prison cell. In France; in Germany; in Poland. You are everywhere and nowhere all at once; off in a forest, running away. I know you are far from a post office. You would write me if you only could, you would send me some sign of life. But you are alive, it can’t be any other way. And you’ll be back, I know you will. Somehow, you’ll suddenly show up, show up wherever it is that I’ll be when you finally return, in a place of whose existence I am not aware. Even if the very heavens themselves never recover from the madness and no longer know how to fulfil what their God commanded concerning you and me and the children and everything - in the end, even if there isn’t a single soul left in the world who knows whether or not you’ve returned, no witnesses who might testify as to whether you could even possibly return - you will return. I want you to, so badly. And then, once you return… you’ll read what I’ve written.

I’m not going to write about every day that went by without you. That is simply impossible. I wouldn’t even know how to write such facts. What goes on every day without you is beyond my powers of description. I want you to read about the every-now-and-then that keeps life moving from place to place, and then moving on once more to some new, unknown destination. But just the facts, without my presence altogether, the facts that you need to be aware of now - and if that’s too much for now, then at least at some point in the future, you will need to be aware of them. I will leave you every page that I write - I do not know where, but when you return, you’ll find them, and read them, and then you’ll know everything, and, at the same time, you’ll know absolutely nothing.

We boarded the train on a Sunday night. We didn’t take anything with us, just our winter clothes. I had the big block of laundry soap that you had prepared in my bag. You had sliced it lengthwise with a string, dug a little well out of the two halves and hid the few diamonds that we had left and then put the halves back together, moistening them carefully so that no one would have the slightest idea what lay hidden inside. You had prepared it for me, ‘just in case’, as you put it, and I needed it. I took along a box of bleach as well, so that if they asked, as you said, I would just tell them I was on my way to do a load of laundry for myself and the boys. There was nothing else, just our clothing and the winter coats with some Swiss francs hidden in the folds. How much? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all anymore. I never asked you how you managed to get a hold of Swiss francs, you just did, the same way you did everything. That’s just the way you were.

For a few months, we lived in an apartment on Rue Aix-les-Bains, but we knew none of our neighbors and none of the neighbors knew us. We lived on the top floor and we certainly ran into a few of them, but not one of them ever greeted me with a Bonjour Madame Mayer and I never offered a single Bonjour Monsieur Boulanger or Madame Charpentier. As it was, other than ‘bonour’ I didn’t know a single word of French, and no resident started anything resembling a conversation during the course of which I would have stumbled miserably before we even had a chance to get off the ground.

But what is certain is that someone somewhere turned us in.

Was it the people coming up the stairs as we descended or coming down as we made our way upstairs? Not a single one of them, or so it seems. Perhaps it was the concierge, who never once said hello to me and only ever spoke to the boys, telling them to be quiet as they flew down the stairs in their hobnailed shoes. There wasn’t a single nail in them, but she said ‘hobnailed’ all the same and demanded, in strict, angry tones, that they never laugh even as they competed to see who would descend the curving stairwell first. She would rebuke them for merely breathing. She was wicked. They became accustomed to going up and down the stairs in absolute silence, but she would still tell them ‘no audible laughter.’ And then they would apologize. They apologized every single time. They didn’t laugh once, neither audibly nor otherwise, and they were constantly apologizing. I didn’t make them do it. They just picked that up on their own - life itself had taught them. I like to refer collectively to these life lessons and all the other life lessons that followed as ‘the concierge.’

You were very respectful towards her, addressing her as though she were some sort of aristocrat of noble descent. I thought you were overdoing it a bit. You were a ragman posing as a scion of the upper class who had fallen on hard times and was living, as the result of some accident or other, in a hovel, when, by right, you should have really been living in a mansion. Was that just some sort of a justification, a mere excuse? You said it suited a researcher, a man of science, someone who worked in a laboratory somewhere. You wanted to camouflage the truth with the closest possible thing to the truth itself. You altered your identity by showing off just a little part of it. You didn’t even change the name you brought with you from Romania, that country of origin that left no mark on you whatsoever. You were Romanian by a simple twist of fate and posed as a gentile as a matter of taste, or simply because you had no other choice. It’s all the same in the end. And so we too became what you at once both were and were not. You thought it was a rather clever solution - lying by telling a bit of the truth, if not the whole truth. You were always in the habit of innocently dreaming your many dreams at the same time that you employed every bit of cunning at your disposal to interpret them.

Not a single Sunday went by that you didn’t give her a flower. And you always accompanied the flower with a quotation from some poem, with an accent befitting any native poet born and raised in France. You liked all that, incurable romantic that you always were. You were generous. You seized every opportunity, real or imagined, to slip her a few francs.

And still someone turned us in.

If I had told you it was she you would have said that you couldn’t stand unfounded accusations. So I won’t tell you it was her, or anyone else for that matter. I’ll just say that someone did it. You know that someone turned you in. I know that the true identity of that someone doesn’t concern you anymore. If you could, you would tell me that this sort of information would not undo what was done, would not bring you back to me, to us.

But they turned you in.

You knew it right away. When the scoundrels in the black raincoats stood before you in our narrow room, and the kids emerged in shock from their own tiny bed room and stared at you without saying a word - because that was what their life had taught them, which consisted then of one fear after another in an end-less concatenation, and which forced even a child who had not yet turned six, seven, or eight, to be wise beyond his years. They stared at the men, these men who ad-dressed you with their exaggeratedly benevolent tones, Monsieur Mayer, would you be so kind as to come with us? Please, Mrs. Mayer, there’s no reason to worry, he’ll only be an hour or two, just a minor matter that needs to be cleared up with the police, a mere trifle, go to sleep and when you wake up he will be by your side once more. What language, what breeding! And the kids heard what was said and stared at the men and I could see in their eyes that they would never forgive these men in their black raincoats for as long as they lived. You knew this then and you know it now, and the same goes for that anonymous somebody who was to play the most pro-found role in the story of your life, and mine, and that of the boys, that somebody who turned you in - we do not know who that person was and we do not know their name and we have no real proof, we have nothing at all, we just know that it was somebody, no more than somebody! And the concierge said, they were giggling again.

You did not say a word. You were about to leave with them in nothing more than your house clothes. One of the men then said, A coat, Monsieur Mayer, it’s January, the nights are cold even in Marseille. And you smiled. You wrapped yourself in your worn overcoat and stood still for a moment. It was a farewell stance. You said nothing, hugged no one, kissed no one. You deceived your self and us too into believing that you would only be away for an hour or two. I stood there rooted to the ground, as did the children. The front door, which had remained open the entire time, was shut behind the last scoundrel who walked you out. And then there was silence, a silence so profound that it tore through my very eardrums. Afterwards we just sat there, the children and I, sat on the faded couch until dawn and said not a word, not a word, not a single, solitary word.

They took you away on a Tuesday. Wednesday morning - in a city that came to life as though men in black raincoats had not disturbed its rest during the night - we began to look for you. First we went to the police station right near Rue Aix. But you weren’t there. They told us that we should perhaps have a look somewhere else, so I went with the children close to my side so that we wouldn’t be separated from each other for even a moment. And so we roamed into the night and the entire next day as well, until an officer whispered to us, in a barely audible voice, that the prisoners from the 26th of January had been taken to the Gestapo building to be interrogated. He said when we go there, that we should never tell them who revealed this secret to us. When the war is over I am going to go look for him, that frightened officer who gathered the courage to whisper to a woman all alone with her children who were swallowed up behind the counter… I will find him and I will greet him with a kiss on the cheek.

We walked over to the Gestapo building utterly exhausted and with our nerves well-frayed. I was convinced that in the entire city no one but me knew the secret address that the officer had whispered to me in a moment of kindness. But there in the doorway stood literally hundreds of people - some men, but mostly women and children standing around with their mothers. They all knew the address. Perhaps the entire city knew it. Well-armed German soldiers in their helmets stood there and maintained order.

A few hours later it was our turn to enter. A man in uniform with his hair carefully combed and his outfit rather well-pressed received us. suit sat at a nearby desk and her long fingers, with their manicured nails, tapped away at a big, black typewriter. Next to the typewriter there was a tray filled with documents that seemed to have been arranged by the hand of some exacting artiste. From time to time she raised her head and listened for a moment to the many things that the uniformed man was saying. Her hair was pulled back and a golden braid rolled off her shoulders, fastened there with a long, black pin just above her neck. She gave off the scent of a perfume that filled the room with a sweet smell that was completely out of place. There were quite a few such well-ordered desks scattered around the room, and at each desk there was a soldier in a well-pressed uniform and a woman typing away with her hair pulled back and her perfume ever-present, and before each one of the soldiers sat people just like me and my children, wearing rumpled clothing and smelling like they hadn’t slept all night, people who came alone or two by two, in groups of three, to ask where their loved ones had disappeared to after they were taken from their homes in the night.

All the people posed their questions in near silence. The answers were delivered almost soundlessly. Even those who wept were careful not to weep beyond what their shoulders could bear, or revealed the many of tears they held back. Everything unfolded as though in some temple where those who entered were all warned to worship in shock and sorrow, but with the restraint appropriate to an assembly of the faithful. I was convinced at the time that you were in the bowels of the building with who knows how many other people, in the infamous cells that hid behind this large, long, silent, perfumed room. You could not possibly have imagined what this hell looked like as it prepared to receive those who came along to inquire as to the whereabouts of their lost loved ones.

Erwin spoke up. But even he spoke softly, in his exaggerated politeness. He projected tremendous pain across his small, pale features. His words were well-chosen, his sentences measured, restrained. There was not a stitch of supplication. He said that the men in the raincoats had only mentioned a minor investigation. They had said that our father would be back in no time, and now, two, three days had passed already and he hadn’t returned - where was he? The soldier listened patiently and replied that, indeed, it was no more than a simple investigation. Our father would certainly return in no time at all, and our concerns - the concerns of a wife and mother, and beloved sons - were only natural and certainly understandable, but it was also unnecessary and as such, without a doubt, excessive. It would be best for us to go home and wait there. That would be a much wiser approach. The woman next to him raised her head above the typewriter. Her weightless fingers kept tapping away as the hint of a benevolent smile formed across her painted lips. She went back to her typewriter once again. The tapping sound her fingers made joined the tapping sounds of the typewriters going simultaneously. The sounds filled the room like tiny drums that seemed to tirelessly announce and repeatedly proclaim that, in this place, one would do well to give up all hope.

We got up and left. Outside there were many more people standing around, some of them in well-ordered lines as we did before entering, while others were scattered around the square. Somebody told us that we had come in vain because just the day before a number of buses and trucks had departed filled with the prisoners who had been seized in the night between Tuesday and Wednesday,. The entire city already knew of the transit and there was nothing to be gained by waiting around or searching anymore. As soon as we heard the news a number of other people gathered around us and repeated the same thing we had already heard from the first group.

One woman told us that with her own eyes she had seen her husband in the window of one of the buses and that he had waved to her from behind the glass. Another woman refused to believe this even though she swore she had really seen him. There was another man who listened to everything the woman said and nodded his head. He said that someone had thrown a note from the window of one of the buses in which they had been taken away. Immediately the entire crowd tried to seize the note, but it was trampled underfoot after it torn to pieces and covered in mud. It was lost beyond all recognition. Every member of the crowd was certain in their heart that the note had been sent to them alone and they clambered and climbed over one another, but little by little in absolute silence they all gave up finding what it was they were looking for and retreated, one by one making way for all the others. The man who was describing the scene said that somebody came back after a little while and tried to look once more for the note that was gone forever. Maybe he was still there, or he might be back tomorrow or he may well never stop looking for it as long as he lives. Some notes are just like that.

We listened to everything that was said and we stared at all the speakers and believed each and every one of them. Erwin asked the people standing in line if they knew that they were standing there in vain. They’ve been told to, the people all replied, each one of them pronouncing the words with their own particular emphasis. An old woman dressed elegantly in black, as though she had been to some ball the previous evening, stared off into the city above the heads of all the people around her and said, as though speaking to herself, They’re standing there because waiting around with no purpose is a sort of prayer that has no answer, and even so the people keep offering up that same prayer since time immemorial. I never heard such useless talk, some man or woman said, and added They’re standing there because they wouldn’t be able to forgive themselves if they didn’t stand there, and some of them are standing in line because it is the only thing that they can do for someone whose destiny has already taken them away to that place of no return.

One man, who I guess never quite managed to understand what was going on, said, It’s all very clever. They’re standing there because the Germans want them to. It gives hope to all the others to come and ask where their relatives have disappeared to. Then they write their names down and the next day they’re going to come round and give them the answers in their homes. So why are you standing around? somebody challenged him. Because I have no home, he replied. And besides, the Germans are getting one over on me too and they play with me, the same way you knead and roll out a lump of dough. In the end, there’s no escape, I’m doing exactly what they want me to do. And so are all of you. So is the entire sorry country of France, just like the rest of the world and all its inhabitants, and even our very Father in heaven, along with His son and the Holy Ghost, and even if they won’t admit to it in any church anywhere in the world, they’re all just doing what the Germans tell them to do, openly, secretly, or in silence. Either way, the earth below and the heavens above only ever hear the hum of hearts humbled by the occupation. He said his piece and disappeared and went wherever it was he went and was gone.

I hurried home to prepare for our departure with no intention of returning ever again.

The next day, when the sun came up, I sent the boys out by themselves as though they were heading off to school so that we would not be seen emerging together from the building and arouse any suspicions. About an hour later I walked out myself, locked it behind me as usual and headed down the stairs so that if anyone ran into me they would have no idea that I would be never coming back again. I didn’t take a suitcase with me, just a handbag. The block of soap was stuffed deep down inside. The hand bag, covered by all sorts of needles and thread. The children had their clothing in their own bags. As I left the concierge spotted me. I didn’t see her but I could feel her eyes upon me, as she considered whether I intended to return, or was heading out without any intention of ever coming back. Even a concierge who knows nothing at all knows everything there is to know, all the more so in the case of our concierge who we always treated with such respect and decency. I was extremely cautious, like a person who had been bitten by a snake behaves when they spot a coil of rope. I wanted to avoid someone who could report me to someone else, which would result in the authorities waiting for me when I reached the train station where they would then stop me and ask, ‘Where are you headed, Madame Mayer?

The French passport that you had prepared for us in the rooftop apartment was among all the various passports and official documents that you had prepared for the Resistance. It sat inside my handbag along with the boys’ French passports, as well. I had already burned the Romanian passports with the names of Madame Mayer and the Mayer children which you had also prepared and then flushed the ashes down the toilet in the communal bathroom on our floor in the building. You were Romanian in every sense of the word, but where are you? I saw no sense in pretending to be Romanian as it clearly had not helped you at all. So I became a Frenchwoman. With my own name. And the children became French too, with their own names. At first you had recommended alternate names, something like DuChenne, or LaChenne, or maybe Chendelle. For some reason I just couldn’t get used to being a complete fake. What was wrong with Mayer, I asked you? So you said you’d prepare one with Mayer, too. DuChenne or LaChenne or Chendelle had all gone up in smoke along with that Romanian Mayer. And with that, we were on our way.

We gradually made our way to the station on foot on the last day of the month of January, on a Sunday. Along the way I stopped at a store and bought myself a little suitcase. Then we headed over to another store where I bought another little suitcase for the boys, as well. There was no way that we could leave our building with suitcases in hand but it would also have seemed strange to board a train with absolutely no bags at all. We spent the rest of the daylight hours walking around. The children didn’t ask any questions whatsoever. They understood everything. How do children know all that they do? We were lucky, at any rate, and it did not rain. It was cold, but we were wearing everything that a single person could possibly wear. I was sweating. I was alright and my body weighed me down, like any woman about to enter her seventh month of pregnancy. In the evening the streets were almost completely empty. The three of us, the boys and I, looked like any other little family hurrying to get home before the rain started. I told myself that we were in fact a little family hurrying to get as far away from home as possible. I imagined that instead of a few drops, we had already been drenched by the very flood itself. But I realized that the image wasn’t mine. I had never been blessed with an intense imagination. Yet three days after you failed to return I started thinking the very way you thought. Dear God, how strong your presence felt, even in your absence.

We boarded the train headed for Saint-Claude, a little town in the mountains not far from the Swiss border. You and I had discussed this in the event that something happened to you and we weren’t able to survive the war in Marseille. You yourself had said that in wartime even the most clever invention can suddenly seem colossally stupid, and so we had to prepare our escape route by relying on our own cleverness. Your friends had recommended Saint-Claude. They had contacts there. The place was literally crawling with smugglers and poor souls who might either die or be saved and who had paid for their courage and cunning in cold, hard cash. Your friends, who died for nothing other than liberty and country - or so you believed - recommended them. The poor souls paid and the smugglers collected. It wasn’t some elementary school operation rife with youthful innocence that ripened into this mercenary exchange, nor an academy of ethics set in stone either. It was an open-air survival market teeming with the amateurish cunning, riddled with money-hungry rogues and traitors. Still and all, if someone were to ask me whether these smugglers should be cast into the fiery furnaces of hell or welcomed through the pearly gates of heaven - if such things still exist or ever existed at all for that matter - I would recommend that they be allowed into heaven, even though common sense might dictate that I really ought to decide otherwise. But common sense had no place in Saint-Claude in January 1943.

You had sent my sister there, a few months earlier, after the Gestapo - or their Vichy minions, it was one and the same - arrested her husband Jacques. She was to await the first possible opportunity to steal across the border into neighboring Switzerland. She was in the first months of her own pregnancy at the time. You had no idea. She got held up in Saint-Claude of her own free will because she was afraid to cross the border before giving birth. She was sure that Jacques was dead, or as good as dead. I am carrying an orphan inside me, she wrote me, I owe it to him to be as careful as possible. And now I was headed there as well, carrying your third child inside me, along with our two boys, in order to await our first possible opportunity to steal across the final border. As far as I could see I only had one chance, there would be no second chance, not for me, not for the boys, and not for your unborn child.

The train platform was almost completely empty. Here and there a few German soldiers stood around with their rifles on their shoulders and satchels strapped to their backs, wearing helmets, of course, along with French policeman wearing mere dark hats and raincoats cinched tight at the waist. There was no mistaking them. All the passengers were already sitting in their respective cars. I planned to arrive at the last possible moment. I was afraid of everything that might happen before the train left the station, even though I knew there was no way to get around going up to the counter to purchase the tickets and getting asked, ‘Where to? and One-way or round-trip? Erwin was the only one who could handle the task, our son who in just three days had matured beyond anything you could have imagined and had become an independent adult, a man-child. I also knew that there was no way other to display our documents as we boarded the train. I had stopped by the station the day before to check out all the possibilities. I saw that a French policeman accompanied by a German soldier stood there asking people for the documents, one by one, but without paying any particular attention to them or demonstrating any persistent suspicions. I had no choice but to rely on what I had seen. It was time itself that I feared most. It was a fear I had never known before I had become a single mother caring for her children - the two holding my hands and the one still stirring inside me. My sole desire was that they should all survive - the two living and the one yet on its way. Suddenly there was no greater threat or enemy than time itself, because all the horrible things that might God forbid occur would certainly come to pass if there was enough time.

Erwin bought the tickets and nothing extraordinary happened. The German and the Frenchman glanced a moment or two at our documents and then handed them right back to us the same way that they handed back the documents to everyone else who had come before us. I did not dare breathe until we had boarded the train. The papers you had forged for us had passed the test. You had done a masterful job.

I had hoped to find three seats together for the boys and me but there were none. Somebody noticed my swollen belly and asked the others to move over and make room for me. The boys stood out in the corridor of the narrow car, rocking back and forth as the train rattled along, staring through the glass of the windows into the night without any illumination. At the first few stations a number of the people got off the train and I was able to sit a bit more comfortably. Even the boys found seats, and while they weren’t next to each other, people made room and were kind enough to change places so that a mother and her sons could sit together. War, which wrecks everything, had somehow not managed to ruin this minor bit of humanity, which suddenly seemed rather major, once all sense of proportion had been lost.

Jackie fell asleep but not Erwin. He kept his eye on me. I wanted to tell him, Go to sleep and I will too, but I held my tongue. We did not make a sound. That was what we had decided, the boys and I, even before we left Marseille. It was not part of the preparations that you had gone through with me. To this day, I cannot under-stand how a man who had thought of everything had failed to think of what might happen to a supposed Frenchwoman, whose passport attested to her being a full-fledged citizen, if she were asked a question in a language she completely failed to understand. It is not all that unusual to think of everything and yet fail to consider this minor point. And you were so very intelligent. I did not for a moment consider blaming you. On the contrary, I was certain that there would be so much more yet to come which had been impossible to foresee. It was actually imperative that there be this oversight on your part, because it prepared me and the boys to face whatever trials we might have to overcome in order to survive, even without you.

I was afraid to fall asleep. I waited for the authorities to come around and check our documents. I had no way of knowing how they checked these things once you were on the train. I gradually became anxious as I considered what might happen if the papers that you had forged for us would suddenly fail to make the grade. I had no doubt that they would appear quite valid even to some. But I lacked the strength to be absolutely certain. That is what fear does, it confounds logic to the point that everything that could possibly happen seems to be happening retroactively and drives one insane. My eyes came to rest from time to time on the boys. Erwin could read the fear in my face, I am convinced of that. He would stare at me, and when the fear had invaded every single inch of my lungs, he would suddenly look away, as though he had seen my very blood run cold in my veins. What a fool. You are a foolish woman, I said to myself. The child does not see a thing. He can not possibly see it. Who ever said that I was afraid? Who said that the thing that I feel is actually fear? Jackie’s head rested in his hands where they were joined on the back of his seat. His eyelids fluttered from time to time. What was he dreaming? I stared at him through my own fears. When we ran for our lives from Antwerp, the very first day after the war broke out, he was only four years old.

The war had erupted on a Friday, and within just a few short hours you already knew that we would be travelling by train, and you knew the hour of our departure, and that we would arrive first in Spain and then Portugal and would then get on a boat headed for America. You did not ask anyone for advice - not you - not from me, at any rate. The things that you decided in consultation with yourself in the mad moment when we were being uprooted from our home and being asked ‘Where to?’ and forced to offer very specific, detailed responses, tripped off your tongue almost by chance, in carefully measured doses, in clipped sentences that added up in my ears to nothing more than what was minimally necessary to ensure that I went along with you without raising any objections. You were only at home for a few moments at a time. I do not know where you ran to, other than over to see your brother Zollie, who, on his own, was never able to decide even the most basic things, like where to shop for food and such. Gizzy, his wife, was the wily absolute ruler in their home - a woman who, if she had been so evilly inclined, could have gone to war with the entire world around her - but she was a good woman, and stood naked, of necessity, before the innocence of her beloved Zollie. It seems that the two of you had apparently arranged and planned the entire trip by train, including how to handle the children, the what, where, and why, and, at any rate. The next morning as we stood jostling on the train platform with all the other thousands of people who were trying to board and could not, her little kids were right there alongside our children, and she was there with Zollie. We were all ready and weighed down beneath more suitcases than we could possibly carry, and all in vain, as you now know, completely in vain, each with our train ticket in our hands.

You had hung little cardboard squares around the children’s necks to which you had taped strips of paper and on which you listed their names and the names of their father and mother - our names, that is. Erwin, your pride and joy, because you had managed to teach him what no other child of five or six had yet learned and he already was able to read. He turned the sign hanging from his chest around to look at it and asked you, What is this? The bombs had started to fall that Friday, but somehow you found a little pocket of patience in the midst of the chaos. You got down on your knees and explained to him that if the train were to suffer a direct hit and the passengers panicked and started to run every which way so that nobody knew who belonged to whom and who was headed where, they would at least know the name of every child and the names of that child’s father and mother, and find some authority who could then return the child to his parents. But you did not write an address, Erwin said to you. We do not have an address anymore, my son, you responded, and you got up and kissed Jackie on the cheek, you kissed him but you did not kiss Erwin, because Erwin only needed an explanation, whereas Jackie needed your affection. For all I know, to this very day you never really understood Jackie. You may never have asked yourself what dreams he dreamt during those three awful years that passed between that train ride we all took together, and this trip I was now taking on my own with the boys, as we ran once more for our lives. Most of the time during those three years you were not at home, and you failed to see how your kids were growing up. When you did stop by from time to time you would take a moment to talk to Erwin and embrace Jackie with a love that looked no further for any signs of an intellect which you seemed to think you had bequeathed to Erwin alone. How wrong you were.

My thoughts were all confused. They shifted from that first day, May 12th when we boarded the train with Antwerp, and hurtled forward to the beginning of September. But what was so special about the first day? The train dropped us off in some place called Bondigoux, a godforsaken village in the south of France. We had spent the summer months there, June, July and August, and then suddenly the Vichy ‘folks’ showed up and led us to the little Municipal Building in Bondigoux. And we did not know why. You carried Jackie in your arms and Erwin walked on his own by your side as I trailed along behind. Erwin was not yet six years old but in your eyes he was already independent and could stand on his own two feet while you still considered Jackie a baby who needed support. Erwin could bear it, but Jackie needed support.

Bondigoux consisted of no more than a few dozen farmers but the Municipal Building, which also doubled as a day school, was filled with a few hundred people, most of whom I am sure were Jews. I was suddenly unable to figure out where they had all been living during the many weeks that they had been waiting for someone to come along and help them make their way across the border into Spain. Where had they found a home? I was completely confused by the fact that I did not recognize most of them even though we had all been cast off in this unlikely place to wait for someone who did not seem to be able to make it.

Zollie and Gizzy were pressed together with us in a single space-the two of them, the two of us, along with all our children. It seemed that we had not developed any connection with the rest of the people who shared our same destiny. In those days since we were only living in order to survive and we had no strength left over to bother trying to experience anything that did not concern us alone. The boys were joined by Marion, Gizzy’s oldest, a girl about the same age as Erwin, and they never stopped running around during those awful weeks in Bondigoux, from the barns and the pig pens to the fields, and all sorts of other places between that I can not imagine. When they were not busy running around the little urchins cuddled and dandled Gizzy’s little girls and infants. The war had uprooted us from our homes and forced us to find shelter in abandoned granaries, without bathrooms or running water or almost any change of clothing or towels and the like. All those things that we had heaped into our suitcases and which got lost along the way from Antwerp during a trip that lasted eight days and nights aboard a train that was bombed and lost numerous cars, and we moved from our own cars into whatever other cars were left over. This cursed war was the furthest thing from the children’s minds, as though it was nothing more than a mere word. They passed their time as though they had fallen into some wonderful summer camp in which the missing home where they had all grown up was just one more unexpected benefit.

War runs wild in one place in the form of bombs and blood and flames, but at the same time it wreaks havoc all over the rest of the world in false silence, making our daily routines seem no more than an illusion laid bare by reality. That was how it seemed when I later spotted the coffee houses down by the old port in Marseille, filled with men and women sipping lemonade and sampling chilled ice cream while they read papers that portrayed military fronts and victories and whatnot. That was the effect on me of those French beauties promenading arm in arm with the Germans along the Canebière on New Year’s Eve as they celebrated the arrival of 1943. It was the same thing with the people all lined up outside the movie theaters where the Americans Laurel and Hardy made the French roll with laughter in the aisles, or The Rebel Son with Harry Baur playing Taras Bulba, which we saw together before the war broke out at the movie theater in Antwerp, and you thought that he was the greatest actor in the world. But that was exactly what Bondigoux was for our children, and it all came to an end one Sunday in September, all of a sudden, inside the Municipal Building. We were all exiled from Bondigoux - our two families along with all the others who were with us in the camp at Brens.

At night Erwin slept like any child should, but Jackie would wake up in a panic and then fall back asleep, then begin mumbling something and wake up once again. He sensed something - I know that now and I am now telling you that his life is filled with something very, very deep, much more than just a wonderful summer camp. He is a child of unfathomed understanding and feeling. He was not to be misled by his dreams. Perhaps Erwin also glimpsed the truth during the nights, but Erwin talked, whereas Jackie simply absorbed it all in silence. I looked at him now on the train as he slept and I thought of all the things that had happened just a few days ago and it already seemed so distant. I thought of you - you who had been with us but who was now gone - and I asked myself if you really knew Jackie the way that I do, if you had ever really recognized him the way that he truly is, or if you had just let the image that you already had of him determine your perception and prevent you from ever seeing him the way that you actually should have. I never talked to you about all this. I had somehow wanted to protect the little boy. I sanctified the privacy of his world to the point that I held myself back from delving deeply with the things that I just said, or even merely allowed myself to think. I even refrained from even raising the possibility with you. What a mistake that was… perhaps.

I suddenly stiffened and switched to high alert. Jackie stirred for no obvious reason whatsoever, curled up against me, wrapped his two little arms around my neck and gazed on two men who stood there facing us like phantoms who had suddenly risen out of thin air, one in a raincoat and the other dressed in the uniform of a German soldier. Erwin stared at them without moving a muscle. He was silent and focused, his features fixed immovably. Papers! said the one in the rain-coat. Erwin got up, went over to my bag, pulled out our documents and showed them to the inspectors. The one in the raincoat read through the documents languidly, handed them over for a moment to the German who clearly did not know how to read French, then took them back and returned them to me, not to Erwin, saying, "Merci, Madame", in the polite tones of a bureaucratic functionary. He then turned to the person sitting next to me. I did not dare breathe until the two of them had moved on up the train. Jackie kissed me on the cheek and lay his head on my shoulder and did not return to his previous spot. Erwin checked my bag to make sure that the documents were put back properly in their place. I can not recall if he said anything before settling down once more in his seat. I imagined you, drawn up to your full height with the fine features of your face in profile, present before my eyes. I imagined a faint smile stretched thin across your lips, just the hint of a smile, a vague gesture that, as ever, was impossible to properly decipher. Sage irony, satisfaction, inspired confidence. The documents had once more passed the test. Who knows where they might have taken us if you had not done such a perfect job on the documents.

At that point I thought that I might finally allow myself to fall asleep for a bit. I closed my eyes in order to try and hint to