The Postcard

by Anne Berest

“Among members of the Resistance, sending a letter with the stamp upside-down meant, ‘read the opposite meaning.’ For example, if a letter said ‘everything is fine,’ the reader was to understand that really, things were going badly.”

“So, who is Monsieur Bouveris? Can you tell me more about him?” “Not very much. He was my grandmother’s second husband, and he died in the early ’90s. I think he was quite a moody person. He worked for the tax office for a while, I believe, but I’m not even completely sure about that.”

I think it was suicide. Like my grandfather before him.” “Your grandmother had two husbands, and they both killed themselves?” “That’s right.” “Good lord. Your family members don’t tend to die peacefully in their beds, do they?”

“Was your grandmother’s name—Bouveris—on the mailbox at your parents’ house?” I shook my head. “Then why did the postman deliver it there, if there was no ‘M. Bouveris’ on the mailbox?” “I never thought about it. That is strange, actually.”

Just as I was about to walk out the door, he handed me a battered business card. “Here. This is a friend; you can say I told you to call him. He’s a handwriting analyst. Specializes in anonymous letters.”

“We’ve known each other slightly for a long time,” Déborah would say about Georges. “We used to know each other quite well,” Georges would say about Déborah. Until, thirty years after their school days together, Déborah had looked at Georges with new eyes and become interested in him at last. She’d thought that Georges would be thrilled to have another shot with his teenage crush. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. “I’d really like for us to be friends,” Georges had said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Jewish joke.” “But Anne’s Jewish, too,” said Georges. “Really? I thought your last name was Breton,” she said warily. “My mother’s Jewish,” I replied, blushing.

“Your fantasies. You think that once the National Front gets into power, you’ll finally be able to go off and fight, like your parents in ’68 and your grandparents in World War Two. Part of you even wants the extreme right to take over, just so you can feel alive. And that goes for the left-wing political leaders, too. You’re all just waiting for the worst to come, so something will finally happen in your lives.”

children dying of hunger on filthy mattresses. Doesn’t that remind you of anything? What if you had to be the generous ones? Would you take someone into your house and let them sleep on your sofa? How much would you risk? What if you weren’t the victims, for once, but the people who could actually help?” “The Jews had enemies in France, before the war. Immigrants today don’t have those kinds of enemies here.” “Oh, so your indifference isn’t a kind of collaboration?”

He got up so fast that his chair tipped over backwards. It was as if the two cousins were acting out a scene in a play.

My grandmother, the sole survivor of her family by war’s end, never set foot in a synagogue again. For her, God had died in the death camps. My parents didn’t raise us, my sisters and me, in the Jewish faith, either.

One of these words is never pronounced quite like the others; it has a particular sound to it, a particular tone. A word that scares and excites me at the same time. My natural repulsion at hearing it is contradicted by the shivery thrill it gives me—because I know that this word has something to do with me; I feel . . . designated by it.

“Wash that off right now,” Lélia orders me. “But I like it, Maman.” “Mamie will be very angry if she sees it on you.” “Why?” “Because Jews don’t get tattoos.” Another mystery. Unexplained.

Did my mother misspeak that day, when she used the word “button”? Or was it me? Did I somehow confuse the French word bouton with savon, the word for soap? Experiments were carried out on the remains of Jews, but with the aim of using human fat to make soap, not buttons.

Pale presences sit around me on my bed, forms wearing striped pajamas. This is when the nightmares start.

This is when I realize that adults are preoccupied by two things, both of which they hide from kids: sexuality and concentration camps.

Back at home that day, I feel sad. I feel like the only thing I truly belong to is my mother’s pain. That’s my community. A community made up of two living people and several million dead ones.

In a way, the secret Jewish part of me was glad to be hidden by the goy part. Made invisible. No one would ever suspect me. I’m my great-grandfather Ephraïm’s dream come true. I’ve got a perfectly French face.” “And you’re an anti-Semite’s worst nightmare,” Gérard said. “Why?” “Because even you are Jewish!” he said, with his booming laugh.

“The first record Myriam was able to file concerning her family is dated December 15, 1947. It was signed by her and countersigned by the mayor of Les Forges on December 16, 1947.” “The same mayor who signed the letters ordering her parents’ deportation? Brians?” “The very same. She dealt with him directly.”

“Yes, in 2000. It was case number 3816. I’d been summoned to give oral testimony, which was supposed to take place—get this—in early January 2003.” “When the postcard arrived.” “Yes. That was why it made me so uncomfortable, with everything that was going on.”

statistically speaking, neighbors are often involved in various criminal acts. In the Paris metropolitan area, for example, more than one in three murders is due to conflicts between neighbors.

I drew three columns on a page of my notebook and labeled them: Neighbors, Friends, Family.

Its the cousin

what Jodorowsky would have called an act of ‘psychomagic.’” “I’m not familiar with . . .” “Jodorowsky says, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘There are, in the genealogical tree, traumatized, unprocessed places that are eternally seeking relief. From these places, arrows are launched toward future generations. Anything that has not been resolved must be repeated and will affect someone else, a target located one or more generations in the future.’ You’re the target in a future generation.

There is some question of whether it’s the same writer on the left and right sides of the card. I think it is, but I can’t be certain.

A person’s handwriting changes every five years on average.

Jésus and my mother were in agreement on this point. Colette was not the author of the anonymous postcard.

“When the police came to arrest them, my mother saw the children come out of the house. When they got into the car, they were singing ‘La Marseillaise.’ She never forgot that. She used to mention it often: ‘Those little ones were taken away singing “La Marseillaise.”’” Who would have told them to stop? Not the Germans, and not the French. No one would dare demean the national anthem that way. The young Rabinovitches had found a way to defy their killers. Suddenly it was as if we could hear them singing, faintly, outside in the street.

“Monsieur and Madame François.” “Oh—of course, yes. Them.” “Madame François’s mother was the Rabinovitches’ housekeeper,” the woman explained.

“Hey ho, what’s going on, Myriam?” he asked the woman. Lélia’s gaze flew to meet mine. My face went slack with shock. I knew the woman could see our thunderstruck expressions. “Your . . . your first name is Myriam?” my mother asked, haltingly. But instead of replying, the woman spoke to her husband. “They’re descendants of the Rabinovitch family. They have a few questions.” “We’re eating. It’s not a good time.” “We can speak later, on the phone,” the woman said. She seemed terrified of her husband, who clearly wanted to get back to his lunch.

The woman spoke to us very quickly, all in one breath. All we could see of her through the crack in the barely opened gate was her mouth and one eye.

The two remaining pigs are currently in the custody of Monsieur Jean Fauchère, along with the grain located on the premises.

He seemed very pleased with his find, grinning widely, those bright white teeth on full display. He handed us a box containing about twenty photographs. They were photos of the Rabinovitches’ house, photos of the Rabinovitches’ garden, the Rabinovitches’ flowers, the Rabinovitches’ animals. My mother, I saw, was reeling. I felt sick. The presence of the piano behind us was almost unbearable. “I have a framed one, as well. I’ll get it.” At the bottom of the box, my mother saw a photo of Jacques, taken in front of the well during the summer when Nachman had come to help plant the garden. Jacques was gripping the handles of his wheelbarrow proudly, standing there in his too-short trousers, smiling at his father behind the camera.

“That would mean that even back in the ’50s, someone wanted their four names to be back together again,” murmured my mother, thinking aloud.

Claire,

Ope

“Like a lot of atheists, I compensate by being superstitious, and I believe in the power of first names.”

I’ve realized that, when we were born, our parents gave us both Hebrew first names as middle names. Hidden first names. I’m Myriam, and you’re Noémie.

I thought using a family name was not customary but is that only if theyre living?

Yours was Myriam. And mine was Noémie. Maman told me once that she originally wanted Noémie to be my first name, but Papa suggested that it would be better as my middle name. “But Noémie is so pretty as a first name too,” she said to me. And it is. Then she said, “But ‘Claire’ was a good choice. It means ‘light.’ And I think that’s really lovely too.”

Love

Sometimes, in a crowd, she spots them. For a moment she can’t move. Then she runs and seizes a young woman by the arm. But when she turns, the young woman is never Noémie. Myriam apologizes, dejected. The night that follows is invariably a bad one, but hope always returns by morning.

She doesn’t wash, doesn’t change her clothes. She’s still wearing the same five pairs of underwear. Not taking care of herself is her way of stopping time.

The only thing he can recall is that he was supposed to go to his mother’s family home in the Jura, to get a saucepan and some bedsheets.

She takes care of him the way she hopes that someone, somewhere, is taking care of Jacques.

“In the camp where you were, do you remember meeting a boy your own age? Jacques? And a girl called Noémie?” “No. Doesn’t sound familiar. Who are they?” “My brother and sister. They were arrested in July.” “July? You’ll never see them again. Gotta face facts. That ‘work’ in Germany . . . it doesn’t exist.” “All right,” Myriam says, taking the bottle of wine from him. “Time to rest.”

She stays curled up in bed, newspapers and clothing piled on top of the blankets to keep in the warmth. She lets herself drift into a kind of half-sleep, a state of indifference, where nothing matters anymore. She opens her eyes from time to time, as slowly as possible. She moves as little as she can, only getting out of bed to fetch a new oven-warmed brick to shove beneath the covers or eat a slice of the bread left by Madame Chabaud, then returning to her room. 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?

Vicente is being escorted by the two Sidoine cousins, Yves and Jean, each grasping one of his arms as if they were hospital orderlies, or police officers.

She knows her husband is capable of strange things sometimes. Vicente comes back with a piece of charcoal. He takes Yves’s wrist and ceremoniously draws a thin black line around it, like the bracelet described in Loti’s novel. It tickles, and Yves laughs. The laugh irritates Myriam. Then Vicente says he wants to draw an anchor on Yves’s left pectoral. He’s taking the game too far, Myriam thinks uncomfortably. But Yves unbuttons his shirt willingly. His body is lean and well-formed. His skin gives off a strong odor of sweat that surprises Myriam—and arouses Vicente.

Four months later, on December 21, 1944, the winter solstice, my mother Lélia, the daughter of Myriam Rabinovitch and Vicente Picabia, is born

And the Vélodrome d’Hiver. (The Vél d’Hiv no longer exists. It was torn down in 1959, a year after it had been used as a detention center for Algerian French Muslims on the orders of then-Prefect of Police Maurice Papon.)

By April 26, everything is ready. Jeanine arrives at the Hotel Lutetia to lend a hand to the already-overstretched staff. But things don’t go the way the MPDR expected them to. The condition of the returning prisoners is indescribable. The arrangements that have been made are totally unsuited to the reality of the situation. No one imagined anything like this.

everyone stops as they catch their first sight of the strange passengers on board, with their jutting brow-bones, hollow-eyed gazes, and bumpy, shaven heads.

“Have they let all the inmates out of the asylum?” “No, it’s just some old men coming back from Germany.” But they aren’t old. Most of them are between the ages of sixteen and thirty. “Is it only men they’re bringing back?” There are women on the bus, too. But their ravaged bodies and bald heads make it impossible to recognize them as such. Some of them will never again be able to bear children.