The Postcard

by Anne Berest

Listen carefully, son—the instant you feel the touch of honey on your lips, ask yourself: of what, of whom, am I a slave?”

“Oh yes, I’m a Zionist now!” Nachman announced proudly to his son one evening. Fetching a dog-eared book filled with scribbled notes, he held it out to Ephraïm. “This is the true revolution.” The book was called The Jewish State. In it, the author, Theodor Herzl, laid the groundwork for the foundation of an independent nation. Ephraïm didn’t read the book. He divided his time between his parents’ orangery, where there was serious need of help, and his work as an engineer at the PEC.

“Does it make you sad that your son doesn’t believe in God?” Jacques asked his grandfather. “It used to, yes. But now I tell myself, the important thing is that God believes in your father.”

This was where it all began, with the first German ordinance of September 27, 1940, and the law enacted October 3. Myriam, summing up the situation, wrote later, “One day, everything was turned upside down.” The uniqueness of this catastrophe lay in the paradox of its insidious slowness and its viciousness.

In times of peace, it is the Ephraïms who are the backbone of a people—because they have children and raise them with love, patience, and intelligence, day by day. They are the guarantors of a functioning country. But in times of chaos, it’s the Emmanuels who save their people—because they refuse to submit to any rule and because they sow their oats in other countries, creating children they will never acknowledge . . . but who will survive them.”

“Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now? Ask yourself that. Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your ‘invisible ones’? The Vichy regime set out to remove the Jews from French society. And they succeeded.”

If you want to get some idea, just look at the subtitle of her book: Medicine and Crimes Against Humanity: The Refusal of a Doctor, Deported to Auschwitz, to Participate in Medical Experiments. Take it, if you want”—Lélia offered me the book—“but, if I were you, I’d keep a wastebasket handy nearby because I promise you, it’ll make you want to throw up . . . literally.” “I don’t understand why Dr. Hautval was sent to Auschwitz. She wasn’t Jewish, or a political prisoner.” “She was too outspoken. She stood up for the defenseless too often. She was deported in early 1943.”

Can a man who survives a plane crash ever know where his luck came from? If it had happened a few minutes earlier, or later, would he have been the one in the wrong place? He’s not a hero. He was fortunate; that’s all. It was luck, enormous strokes of luck, that saved my life.

An image flashed suddenly into my mind. Crystal clear. A photograph of the Opéra Garnier, taken at twilight. From that moment onward, I was on the case. I wanted to find the author of the anonymous postcard my mother had received sixteen years earlier, whatever it took. The idea of finding the culprit became an obsession. I had to understand why that card had been sent. Why did the postcard come back to haunt me at that exact moment in my life? The thing that started it all was the incident at my daughter’s school. But looking back, I think there was something else, too. A more subtle reason. I was about to turn forty years old.

I’d reached the age where something, some force, pushes you to look back, because the horizon of your past is now more vast, more mysterious, than the one that lies ahead.

‘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.’

“If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, you must recreate it.”

“A true friend isn’t the one who dries your tears. It’s the one who never causes them to be shed.”

How can you tell you’re alive, when there’s no one to witness your existence?

One morning she opens her eyes, and there’s a small fox sitting there in front of her, looking at her. It’s Uncle Boris, Myriam says to herself. He’s come from Czechoslovakia to watch over me. The thought gives her courage. She allows her spirit to roam free. She sees the sunlight filtering through the boulders and aspen trees of a forest a long way away, the bright sun of Czech holidays warm on her skin. “Man can’t live without nature,” Boris whispers to her, through the fox. “He needs air to breathe, water to drink, fruit to eat. But nature is quite able to live without man. Which proves just how superior it is to us.”

Something had to be learned from all these lives. But what? Reflection. Examination. A deeper questioning of that word whose definition remained ever elusive. What does it mean to be Jewish? Maybe the answer was contained within another question: What does it mean to wonder what it means to be Jewish? The book Georges gave me, Nathalie Zajde’s Children of Survivors, told me everything I should have said to Déborah during that Pesach dinner, just a few weeks too late. Déborah, I don’t know what it means to be “truly Jewish” or “not truly Jewish.” All I can tell you is that I’m the child of a survivor. That is, someone who may not be familiar with the Seder rituals, but whose family died in the gas chambers. Someone who has the same nightmares as her mother, and is trying to find her place among the living.

You said I’m only Jewish when it suits me. But, Déborah, when my daughter was born, when I held her for the first time, do you know what I thought of? The first image that went through my mind? It was the mothers who were breastfeeding when they were sent to the gas chambers. So yes, it would suit me not to think about Auschwitz every day. It would suit me for things to be different. It would suit me not to be afraid of the government, afraid of gas, afraid of losing my identity papers, afraid of enclosed spaces, afraid of dog bites, afraid of crossing borders, afraid of traveling by airplane, afraid of crowds and the glorification of virility, afraid of men in groups, afraid of my children being taken from me, afraid of people who obey orders, afraid of uniforms, afraid of being late, afraid of being stopped by the police, afraid whenever I have to renew my passport. Afraid of saying that I’m Jewish.

I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day. To me, death always feels near. I have a sense of being hunted. I often feel subjected to a kind of self-obliteration. I search in the history books for the things I was never told. I can’t read enough; I always want to read. My hunger for knowledge is never sated. Sometimes I feel like a stranger here. A foreigner. I see obstacles where others do not. I struggle endlessly to make a connection between the thought of my family and the mythologized occurrence that is geno...

I can see, in the constellation of fragments scattered over the page, a silhouette in which I recognize myself at last: I am the daughter...

I unsealed the envelope. Something went through the room then, a kind of silent, electric exhalation. A letting-out of breath. Both of us felt it. I gently extracted two notebooks, completely blackened with Noémie’s handwriting. Every page was full; not a single line was left empty. I opened the first notebook, which began with an underlined date. I began to read aloud to my mother.

We must hold on, and we will hold on. For us, there is even something attractive about so much change. Cynical, maybe, but it’s true. Our physical bodies haven’t changed yet; our actions are still the same. But everything around us is different. Our life itself has come off its axis, and adjusting to that, changing ourselves to fit, will take some time. The most important thing is to emerge from this metamorphosis strong and brave. London was bombed for two hours today. A passenger ship was sunk. These are dark times for civilization.

We’re getting used to the fact that it’s wartime now. Nightmares when I sleep. My first thought when I wake is to remember that we’re fighting. That men are dying in the fields, and women and children are being killed by bombs falling on city streets.

Maybe we can go to Russia soon and finally meet all our relatives. We sure do make things easier for our descendants, don’t we? 150 years after the revolution, a war to liberate the people is taking place. Let’s just hope it doesn’t last too long. Something I’m beginning to realize is that, as long as the battle isn’t over, we don’t have the right to think about the consequences of the war on our own lives and those of others (Myriam and pessimism).

But the day would be bright; the air was pure, the sky cloudless. Anne passed the time wandering the streets of town, waiting for the girls to get out of school so they could gossip. Of course, to get to the school you had to pass the barracks and the Hôtel de Normandie, where the English officers lodged. Anne put down her music book and gazed at the tomatoes, the cabbages and pears. Across the street was a row of cottages and five pairs of black socks drying on a line. “It appears,” said Anne, listening to the town, “that the first English convoys will arrive tomorrow. There’s already a small staff at the Grand Cerf. They’re very chic, you know.” The heroine of Noémie’s book was named Anne.

I stared out the window, scrutinizing each house, each shopfront, the way you gaze at an old man’s face, trying to see the features of the young man he used to be. It was all so strange. I took out my phone and pulled up a map of the area.

“We’re only thirty kilometers from Céreste. My grandmother’s village.” The village where Myriam had sent Lélia to stay as a toddler, and where she’d moved after the war, to marry Yves Bouveris. Céreste, the village of my childhood vacations. “I haven’t been back there since my grandmother died. Twenty-five years ago now.”

I thought Myriam had been born in France, in this little village straddling the Via Domitia, because it was where we always went for the summer holidays. I also thought Yves was my grandfather.” “You didn’t know about Vicente?” “No. How can I explain it . . . everything was sort of . . . blurred.

She had been able to put down roots at last, on this vaguely inhospitable hillside that might have reminded her of the heat and rocky soil of Migdal, of that brief period in her childhood when, on her grandparents’ property in Palestine, for once she hadn’t been hunted.

For me, it was difficult to bridge the gap between Mirotchka, the daughter of Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch, and Myriam Bouveris, the grandmother I spent summers with between the peaks of the Vaucluse and the mountains of the Luberon. It was no simple matter to put everything together. I had trouble keeping track of all the different periods of history. This family was like an overlarge bouquet of flowers that I couldn’t quite keep a grip on.

Myriam would take us to feed the fox that lived on the hillside. “Foxes are gentle,” she told us. She always said the fox was her friend, and the bees were, too. And we really believed that she had secret conversations with them all.

My grandmother? What kind of woman was she?” “Oh, she was very reserved. She didn’t talk much. No one in the village ever gossiped about her. She wasn’t at all flirtatious, I remember that.” We stayed for a long time, talking about Yves and Vicente, about the love triangle they and Myriam had formed and its consequences. We talked about René Char, too, and how he’d spent the war in Céreste. Mireille spoke frankly, without going off on tangents.

She was a cheerful, chatty woman, and we talked for a long time about everything: Myriam, her Alzheimer’s disease, her funeral. Back when Juliette was a nurse, she had moved in with Myriam to take care of her in her final illness. She’d been thirty years old at the time, and she remembered it all vividly. “She used to tell me about all of you! Her grandchildren, and especially Lélia, your mother. She always said she was going to go and live with you.”

Anyway, she asked me to help her write those four names. I remember that she absolutely insisted on using a ballpoint pen. She wanted to be sure the ink wouldn’t fade or run. And then she said to me, ‘When I go to live with my daughter, I want you to send me this postcard. Promise?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I promise.’ I took the postcard home with me and put it away with my personal papers.” “And then?” “She never went to live with your mother as she’d hoped to. She passed away here in Céreste. I’d forgotten all about the postcard, to be honest. It just stayed there, filed away with my papers.

“Yes. January 2003.” “That’s right. I’d brought a manila envelope with me, with all the documents for the trip: our ID cards, the hotel reservations, etc. And while we were in Paris, I found the postcard in that envelope. It was on the last day of our holiday, just before we went back to Céreste.” “A Saturday morning.” “Must’ve been. I said to my husband, ‘I absolutely have to mail this postcard.

“But why did Myriam want to send this postcard to herself?” “Because she knew her memory was failing, and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’”