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smiling. She tries to keep her spirits up. Vicente has gone away often since they first met. But he has always come back.
A few hours later, he disembarks at the Gare de Lyon. Paris is as bustling as ever, as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
Franco-Belgian resistance group. This new network is called Ali-France. It has links to the Zéro network, formed in Roubaix in 1940.
He’d first visited the opium den when he was fifteen years old. It was with Francis, father and son discovering a mutual pleasure at last.
After four children with Gabriële, Francis had concluded that, sometimes, great minds cancel each other out. Their relationship might have produced transcendent paintings, but their offspring had turned out disappointingly mediocre.
It was the first time his father had ever laughed with him, rather than at him.
But, Vicente knows, what people come here for does not lie. He puts the money Gabriële has just given him on the counter. The old Chinese woman signals for one of the boys to take care of him.
he is seized by the desire to weep for his brother. The false twin. The bastard Francis sired with another woman at the very same time he was conceiving Vicente. Where is he, the detested brother? Gone, sailed away, across the sea. I should have gone with him, instead of hating him, Vicente thinks.
When he wakes again, he has no idea what day it is. He has no more money. And no more will to act. The opium has stripped him of any motivation to do anything at all.
the uppermost cloth is covered with what the people
of Provence call “the Thirteen Desserts of Christmas Eve.” The table is heaped with olive and holly branches, representing happiness. The three candles of the Holy Trinity are burning next to le blé de Sainte-Barbe—a
The four beggars are arranged on four plates, symbolizing the four religious orders having taken a vow of poverty.
Ephraïm, Emma, Jacques, Noémie. Where are you? she wonders on the way home, as if an answer might rise up in the silent stillness of the night.
And yet, if he’d stayed hopeful, he would have been all right.
Céreste were quite familiar with the old handkerchief trick themselves. The sight of it had set their weary hearts fluttering again. They’d been slim and supple young women, too, once, drawing water from the well. They knew the words hidden in the handkerchief, the handkerchief hidden in the hand, the hand hidden in the pocket.
Marcelle would be immortalized as the vixen in Feuillets d’Hypnos, René Char’s poetic journal of the war, published in 1946.
Throughout the region, there were men and women ready to fight. Sometimes whole families; sometimes isolated individuals who didn’t even know they were on the same side as their
He knew how to bring men together, to galvanize them into action, and—most importantly—to organize them, and to spot the most promising among their numbers. It was René who drew up the list of those he felt could be relied on, and René who assigned the missions.
Myriam says nothing. Her husband has never called her “sweetheart” before. And he won’t meet her gaze. His skin is waxy, and his eyes have a glassy quality.
It’s a thirty-minute walk in inky darkness, the cold burning her skin. But she feels useful, so it’s all right.
You never tried to find out exactly what happened on the Plateau des Claparèdes that year, the year before you were born. And I can guess why. Of course. I’m your daughter, Maman. You’re the one who taught me how to do research, to gather information, to make even the smallest scrap of paper speak.
The still, icy veil of winter settles over the endless bare trees of the plateau. The landscape of Haute-Provence is nothing like the plains of Latvia or the deserts of Palestine; rather, it’s like something Myriam has known for a long time. Since her birth, since her first journey by wagon through the forests of Russia. Exile.
She’s angry with herself for obeying Ephraïm when he ordered her to hide in the orchard that night. Why do girls always do what their fathers tell them? She should have stayed with her parents. She goes over those
but the truth was that she’d felt the need to distance herself from Noémie, to fling open the windows of a room grown too small. They weren’t little girls anymore. Their bodies had grown; they were two women now. Myriam had needed her space.
The older sister had begun frequently treating the younger with disdain. She was tired of Noémie’s moodiness, her embarrassing outbursts in front of everyone, even at the dinner table. Myriam felt as if Noémie lived her whole life as an open book, even the most private moments, and sometimes it drove her crazy. How she regrets that now.
She doesn’t know what day it is anymore, or even what time. Sometimes she doesn’t even know if she’s asleep or awake, if the whole world is after her, or if it’s forgotten her altogether. How can you tell you’re alive, when there’s no one to witness your existence?
“Galen says that nature is always giving us signals. For example, peonies are red because they heal the blood. Celandine sap is yellow because it can treat biliary illnesses. Stachys byzantina, called hare’s ear because of its shape, can be used for problems with the auditory canal.”
Uncle Boris skipped through nature as lightly as a sprite. Aged fifty, he looked at least fifteen years younger. He attributed this to his habit of taking cold baths, following the example of Sebastian Kneipp,
Pausing next to a white willow, he would say, “This tree is aspirin, you know. The laboratories want to convince us that only the chemicals they manufacture can cure human disease. Eventually people will end up believing it.”
“Nature isn’t just scenery,” he would say. “It’s not around you, but within you. It is inside you, just as you are inside it.”
Contrary to what she imagined during her weeks of hibernation, seeing Vicente again isn’t a relief. She would even say it’s the opposite. At least he was safe in prison. Safe from the Germans, and the French police, and most importantly, safe from the obscure dangers Myriam senses but is unable to name.
In that kitchen that evening, Vicente realizes just how naïve and innocent both Myriam and Yves are. The country boy and the young foreigner. Vicente, accustomed to the jaded children of his parents’ circle, finds this both vexing and provocative.
Their books hadn’t helped her to understand her husband any more than they’d taught her about life. It was only through living that, much later, she gained a true understanding of the books she’d read in her youth. Vicente
He got used to the smut and obscenity of adults the same way he got used to opium. Eventually there was no more mystique to be found in the bedroom of a woman or a man. His brain has come to require ever-greater doses of excitement, ever more exotic pleasures, spiced with the tang of heat and blood.
Reaching her parents’ house, the first thing she sees are all the postcards she has sent them over the past year, telling them she’s all right. No one has picked them up. No one has read them.
Vicente has gotten his hands on some of the amphetamines used by the military to keep soldiers awake for as long as possible. The drug strips him of any sense of danger, but miraculously his recklessness hasn’t gotten him killed yet.
By August 25, 1944, the storms have passed. Paris stands free beneath a mackerel sky.
Four months later, on December 21, 1944, the winter solstice, my mother Lélia, the daughter of Myriam Rabinovitch and Vicente Picabia, is born at number 6 rue de Vaugirard.
Lucienne Cloarec and Jeanine Picabia were the first two women to be awarded medals by General de Gaulle for their work in the Resistance, by a decree dated May 12, 1943.
They can see the eyes of the Parisians widen as they pass, the pedestrians and drivers pausing for a few seconds, wondering where these hairless beings in striped pajamas flooding into their city have come from. Like creatures from another world.
He’s never seen anyone in such bad condition. “Follow me, please, Monsieur. I’ll take you someplace where they can give you some medical attention. You don’t have a returnee ID card?” The man thinks to himself that it’s been a long time since he had any kind of ID. Or any money. Or a wife, or a child, or hair, or teeth. He’s afraid of all these people, crowding around, staring at him.
guilty for being here, guilty for being alive when his wife, and his parents, and his two-year-old son are not. When so many others are not. Millions of others. He feels as if he’s done something wrong, and he’s afraid that all these people are going to start throwing rocks at him, and that the police officer will take him to prison and haul him up before a tribunal, with the SS on one side and his dead wife and dead parents and dead son on the other. And the millions of other dead.
it’s too heavy for someone hanging on to life by a single thread after being evacuated from Auschwitz by the SS in January, three whole months ago, after having somehow survived the final massacres and death-marches and forced walks through the snow beneath the blows of the soldiers’ truncheons, the constant humiliations, the chaos of the fall of the Reich, and the journeys in the same stock cars, on the same trains, and hunger, and thirst, and the fight to stay alive long enough to get home, a fight that has been almost impossible for his exhausted body, and so his heart finally stops beating
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But, Myriam sees, the people getting off the buses don’t speak. They can’t answer. They hardly have the strength to think their own silent thoughts. How can they possibly tell the story? No one would believe them. Your child was put in an oven, Madame.
Your father was stripped naked and put on a leash, like a dog. For entertainment. He died from the cold, insane. Your daughter was made a camp prostitute, and when she became pregnant they cut open her belly to do medical experiments. When they knew the war was lost, the SS stripped all the women naked and threw them out a window. Then they made us stack the bodies like firewood. No chance they’ve survived. You’ll never see any of them again.
But hope is the only thing that kept them alive in the camps.
This means that each returning person must be questioned to make sure that he or she is a “real” deportee. Some of them see this new ordeal as a humiliation.
The deportees are served their meals at tables in this dining room. They haven’t eaten from plates in so long. Not since they lived in a world which now feels like it never existed. Their shining goblets contain clean water. They’ve forgotten what that’s like, too.
Seeing the woman in the armchair, Myriam realizes that she isn’t asleep. She isn’t the only one who will die here. There are dozens every day, their fragile, exhausted bodies unable to withstand the emotion of returning, of reuniting.
She was two years old when they took her for safekeeping; now she’s five and speaks perfect French with a Parisian accent. They’ve come to the Lutetia because they heard her mother’s name read out on the daily radio broadcast. But the little girl doesn’t recognize her maman in the thin, bald figure reaching out for her. Seized with sudden panic, she begins to cry, and then scream at the nightmarish sight of this woman she wants nothing to do with, clinging tightly to the legs of the lady who is not her mother.
