The safe house, p.2
The Safe House, page 2
8
This time we were all on a mission. Sunday morning, an appropriate time for both profane and religious rituals, began with delivering L’Humanité. She was the card-carrying Communist. An affiliation which had more to do with her loyalty to her publisher than with an ideology that had always been a little fuzzy in her mind. Despite her handicap, she went at least once a month to pick up the weekly paper in the 7th arrondissement at the rue Amélie branch before distributing it to the few subscribers in her area. She did the driving; Jean-Élie and Anne made the deliveries. In line with the sociology of the neighborhood, the cell she belonged to included a number of executives and highly trained professionals, even CEOs with ten or more employees, as the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Research would say. The Nomenklatura of the Eastern Bloc might have been a better comparison for this strange sample of the French Communist Party. The lawyer defended the General Labor Commission, the banker managed Soviet investments in France, the poet sat on the Central Committee, the editor published her writer comrades. As residents of enemy territory, they avoided all proselytizing through flyers, leaflets, or canvassing. Securely bourgeois, but secretly militant, they carried out their political activities with great discretion. When Anne delivered the paper, they hurried to let her in and shut the door behind her, afraid a neighbor would catch them with such seditious literature. They were unsure how to treat this young woman—not quite a comrade or a fellow traveler, or even a delivery girl you offer to tip. One of them asked her if she’d like to earn a little money bringing him croissants.
After L’Huma, there was mass. At Saint-Sulpice. In front of it, actually, on the plaza. Neither grandparent entered the church. The roles were always the same: Jean-Élie and Anne scouting ahead, swallowed by the monumental entryway. The rest of us stayed in the car, waiting for the end of the service, seated, gathered together, prostrate at the foot of the steps, beneath the huge colonnade. The Fiat was conducive to genuflections. Did they get out a missal? Murmur the Hail Mary and the Our Father? Or did they pray by proxy, through their emissary children? I remember nothing but a long silence, an empty square, a fountain where no water flowed. A closed newspaper kiosk. Motionless beggars with their backs against the columns. Chairs piled behind the glass at the Café de la Mairie. Deserted parking. And I was lost in contemplation of a movie poster spread across the facade of Bonaparte Cinema, trying to decipher the film’s name through rows of chestnut trees, anxiously watching for my aunt and uncle to reappear from that asymmetrical, almost lopsided edifice, eager for the bells, the signal for their deliverance and our departure.
The mornings ended in the Marais, on the rue des Rosiers, which wasn’t yet that pedestrian alley invaded by boutiques and falafel shops but still a lively, working-class thoroughfare. Another ritual. We bought bread with cumin, poppy-seed cakes, and cream-cheese tart from Finkelsztajn’s bakery, charcuterie and relishes from Goldenberg, Blum, or Klapisch—endlessly debating which of the three had the best pastrami, corned beef, and liverwurst—and, in a grocery with a name I’ve forgotten tiled in little blue squares on the rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, we bought matzo, which I gobbled down covered with butter and ham, a double violation of kosher law that made grand-papa smile. I can’t remember noticing any contradictions in this long Sunday sequence. At least not until I was much older. And what did he make of it all?
9
In one of life’s coincidences, his own father also had a close relationship with cars. He should have ridden in a carriage, standing with his brows arched, dressed as Mephistopheles in a red cape, making his entrance to a shower of applause. Instead, he built the carriages. He grew up in Odessa, that musically inclined town on the Black Sea. A child of the ghetto, born to a pious family of modest means, he had an incredible voice. A gay, rich merchant (or a charitable lady, depending on the version) paid for his singing lessons and told him over and over that he was the next Feodor Chaliapin. The boards of the imperial stage awaited him. He would play Boris Godunov. He would collapse in front of the czar. He would spit out the “Ah! Ah! Ah! Blacha!” in the King of England’s face (a fantasy that was apparently pretty common in Russia—years later, the writer Romain Gary revealed that his mother had promised him the same future). Tuberculosis of the vocal cords put an end to his lyrical ambitions and dreams of glory. Under the combined pressure of sickness and pogroms, he immigrated to France around 1895 in hopes of a better life despite the formal degradation, that same year, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the grand courtyard of the École Militaire. He arrived in Paris on a Sunday. Everything was closed except a carriage shop, most likely located near the Gare de l’Est. The owner asked him what his trade was. He didn’t know how to do anything except sing, and he didn’t speak French. He held out his hands. And so he became an upholsterer, a maker of seats, cushions, trimmings for cars. Then he was hired as a laborer for Citroën. Was it on the quai de Javel or the place de Clichy? A tough job, with long periods of boredom and intervals of overwork. He ended up a shop foreman. As he was dying of cancer, he begged his friends to take him to one last opera. Apparently they brought him to the Palais Garnier on a stretcher. Christian was always skeptical of this story—too melodramatic to be true. According to him, his forefather’s tragic career as a great bass never surpassed the role of cantor in a synagogue.
10
They covered thousands of miles on vacation, not in the Fiat 500 but in a Volvo 144, better designed for highways—hardy, square, cut from Swedish steel. They got out as little as possible, spending their days and nights in the car. To avoid lobbies, endless corridors, narrow staircases, the cramped attic rooms of hotels, mère-grand liked to sleep sitting up, in random towns, squeezed in the front seat with her people piled around her. That way she could watch over them without having to talk a suspicious receptionist into a single room for five people (including three adults). Jean-Élie sat next to her. I have no idea how he managed to sleep with the steering wheel jabbing his ribs, his head squashed against the window. A teenaged Anne lay down in the backseat. Grand-papa slept above her on a plank balanced between the headrest and the rear window ledge. When I was with them, I was sandwiched between suitcases in the trunk, which was left open so I could breathe. At the port of Brindisi, in Italy, I was once awakened by a soldier’s flashlight. I still have a terrified memory of a beam passing over my face, of whispering in a language I didn’t know. The officers probably suspected a theft when they noticed the gaping trunk—until they saw the outlines of our sleeping forms.
In previous years, in other cars, Christian was always in with the bags. His brother, Luc, was in Anne’s spot. Their father stretched across the axle, abutting a Dutch poet with long hair, a family friend wrapped in a green cape. The combinations and actors could change—it was always the same tableau vivant, the same architecture—a mass of flesh and steel like the aftermath of a car wreck. We woke to ghostly parking lots and the sound of horns. In lieu of a bathroom, mère-grand hid behind the car door, perching on the running board above a commode. We rarely changed clothes. We washed ourselves like cats, with an Évian mister or a water bottle. We sneered at museums, at castles, at ruins, at beaches, at bits of greenery, at picturesque villages, at famous restaurants, at sites worth a detour. They traveled like this, without me, all the way to Iran, to the Arctic Circle, to Moscow, beyond the Tropic of Cancer. They crossed the United States from east to west, Australia from north to south. In their travels they “sacrificed depth for breadth,” as Paul Morand would say. Their goal was not to explore faraway and exotic countries but to cover the longest distances possible, to stick new pins in the surface of the globe.
11
Were the drivers already out of gas, or had they also gone on strike? We rolled through a sun-drenched Paris, empty as the first day of summer vacation. Up the avenue General Leclerc. It was morning. Through the little portholes of the Fiat, the lion on the place Denfert looked like a circus animal, dabbed with bright paint. Mère-grand and Jean-Élie wore conspiratorial smiles. We passed through a city covered in graffiti and shredded posters with an overflowing bucket of paste between our feet, a broom, and our own ream of flyers. The message we were going to plaster on walls had little to do with the first tremors of May 1968. I was six then. In the alley where my parents lived I played riot police and protesters with the neighboring kids. I chose the side of law and order I think because I liked their uniforms. There was nothing about police violence on the little rectangular brown posters we were about to put up—instead they read “The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski.” I didn’t understand why my uncle judged his short existence so severely or why he wanted to advertise it to the Parisian population (with the help of his family, no less). It was his first show. Henri Ginet, a friend of the surrealists, had offered his theater and cinema, the Ranelagh, named after the garden in the 16th arrondissement. Christian installed his paint-splattered chiffon mannequins at the bottom of a huge staircase in the faux-Renaissance-style lobby with its walls upholstered in red felt. I have a vivid memory of the opening—the evening of May 3, 1968. Jean-Élie arrived, full of emotion, and announced there were barricades in the Latin Quarter.
12
We backed into the courtyard, careful to avoid bumping the two little hoops of wrought iron that framed the archway. The neighbor, who’d inherited an old publishing house specializing in travel books, wanted to get rid of our old clunker. She dreamed of a French garden—elegant, rectangular, in the style of Le Nôtre at Versailles. To that end, she’d built a perpetually dry fountain on her side and planted some hawthorn bushes around it in lines that were more or less geometrical. Topiaries in spheres or cones, saplings that all ended up stunted and scrawny for lack of sunshine. She would have liked to identify her property with a particular century (preferably the seventeenth) to classify this very particular mansion—damp in winter, cool in summer, always in the shade, melancholy, full of dusty, grainy air—and better yet, to designate its style, endow it with a prestigious name. But she was rejected without appeal by the board of historic preservation. The building was a bric-a-brac of architectural styles, a heap of geological strata, a patchwork of different eras that had lumped a seventeenth-century rotunda in with an ivy-smothered Louis-the-fifteenth facade and many more recent additions.
It might seem strange to begin the description of a house with its car. But just like her Swedish older sister, the Fiat 500 was the first room of the Rue-de-Grenelle, an extension, an airlock, a removable part, a space beyond its walls, a pair of eyes or at least an eyeball. Like the foyer, it formed a finite universe, round, smooth, as warm and reassuring as a hearth. It wasn’t just a mode of transportation—it was a habitat. At once empty, transparent, and full as an egg; open glass surfaces and closed, locked doors, watertight rubber seals and nickel plating. The interior was defined by its opposite, that urban backdrop, ever-present and yet faraway, unreal. It satisfied our need for evasion, for confinement, for going out into the world yet retreating into our unborn state. It stood for the female body, protector and midwife. A symbol that was as phallic as it was maternal—as much domus as domina, domicile and dominator. Mère-grand furnished it with useful objects: hairbrush, Bic pens, makeup-remover towelettes called Quickies, tissues, sunglasses, gold-foil packets of 555 cigarettes in the style of Blaise Cendrars, another maimed artist who transformed his Alfa Romeo into a moving bedroom, filling his glove compartment with chapters from books he wanted to read.
13
I can imagine the look of rage on her face when she found, on her windshield, the wide-ruled sheet of paper covered in block letters that read: “PROFFESSOR BOLTANSKI JEW.” Right away she recognized the childish handwriting not just because of the spelling mistake and the awkward pettiness of the expression. She had no trouble confronting the culprit. One day, in a honeyed tone, she asked him, “Sweetie, how do you spell professor?” The boy was barely older than I was—neat, well behaved, in short trousers, his hair parted on the side, and he hurried to answer her. Did she ask afterward for an explanation from his parents, who were also perfect—in navy-blue ensembles, with blazer, pleated skirt, and headband to match—and lived on the second floor? She kept repeating that this label, which crawled out of the night, hadn’t just “occurred to him.” He would have heard hints and rumors around his family’s dinner table about “those people next door,” about that man who put the title “professor” on his mailbox, hints and rumors he might have shared at Saint-Something-or-Other school with his many classmates in the neighborhood. Did one of them suggest the act? To unmask the intruder? While she railed, not against the child but against the hate-molded society that he’d come from, the message’s intended recipient said nothing. A sheet of paper, three words, brought it all back.
14
How do they get to the police station? Not in Hotchkiss, that car with the tapered front he was so proud of despite its many breakdowns. The German army had already seized it. Not on foot, despite the short distance. Probably in the Vélocar, which at that point hadn’t yet been confiscated. This four-wheel bike, with its lightweight body, had already caused him some trouble. After buying it from a stranger, he was accused of theft by a youngster in the neighborhood who pretended to be the owner. Of course he paid him what he asked. He was in no position to argue.
Arriving at 10 rue Perronet, he helps his wife, with him as always, to navigate the dusty staircase. His mother, who has also been summoned, brings up the rear. The police station occupies two floors of a masonry building on the corner. They are one of the first groups to get their patches. Those whose names began with A or B were called on Tuesday, June 2, 1942. A man wearing a threadbare suit admits them to a murky, smoke-filled room. He politely offers a chair to the handicapped wife but not to the mother. The two outcasts stand, facing the police officer as he sits behind his desk. Was he the same one who listed them in a special registry in October 1940? The one who said, as though it were obvious, “Monsieur Boltanski, there’s another Jew who lives near you, a Mr. Levy. I’m sure you know him?” He gives each of them the yellow square, with three stars to cut out with scissors, and asks them to sign the column that serves as a roster. In exchange, he demands a textile coupon from their ration books. His mother emerges first, her eyes wide, the cloth in her hand, which she’ll cut once she gets home, following the black line, and apply with care to the lapels of her coats. On the sidewalk, she breaks down. Seeing the scrap of fabric and the tears on her face, a passing woman embraces her and says, “From now on, we’ll know who our real friends are!”
15
He wears his yellow mark. She huddles at his side. He pedals as fast as he can through the partially deserted city. They almost never go out anymore, but they’ve been notified of a shipment. Oranges. Impossible to find. A whole crate. Where do they go to get it? Jean-Élie can’t remember. “Maybe a train station.” And who’s the sender? A relative? A friend? Someone who owed him? Whoever it is, they worry. They hesitate to take such a risk. Surveillance has increased since the start of the summer. The police force assigned to the “Jewish question” sets traps in the tunnels of the metro, at the exits of cinemas and theaters, in public parks. With the bright fabric on his chest, he could be picked up anywhere. Coming home, a line appears, people gather, and suddenly there’s a roadblock in the distance, a checkpoint, men in uniforms inspecting papers, orders flying through the air. If he turns around, he’ll be picked up immediately. So he edges away, very slowly, imperceptibly. There’s no reverse gear on a quadricycle. The only way to go backward is to put your feet on the ground and push the machine toward you. His handicapped passenger watches him sweat, tense his muscles, grip the handlebars. The soles of his shoes skid; the wheels scrape the asphalt. The bike chain turns without the pedals. Up ahead, the crowd that was concealing them begins to break up. If they leave too much space between themselves and the cars in front, they risk attracting the attention of the police or the soldiers. As the last pedestrians and vehicles are about to reach the barricade, he sees an escape. He inches back another meter or two, readies his Vélocar, and disappears down a side street.
16
This time, he walks alone. In the middle of the night, he goes down the kitchen stairs and heads to the street with his overcoat, his hat, and a little suitcase. Defying the German ordinance that forbids him to leave his place of residence between the hours of eight at night and six in the morning. Was it the end of summer or already the fall of 1942? He’d stopped seeing his patients. The Public Welfare Supervisory Board of the City of Paris is about to declare his post vacant. He is officially divorced from his spouse. His bank account is frozen. There’s nothing left to keep him in Paris. With a determined step, he crosses the courtyard, reaches the entryway, lifts the latch, and pulls the door toward him, slamming it hard, as if he wanted the whole world—family, concierge, neighbors, local residents, police informants, and passing strangers—to hear it.
Kitchen
1
There was a time when a property was distinguished by the number and quality of its locks. Inside a bourgeois house, everything was kept carefully shut: doors, wardrobes, desks, cubbies, drawers, cellars, attics. It was actually considered the sign of a good household. The wealth and the respectability of a place were measured by the rattle of its key ring. Nothing was owned that couldn’t be latched, padlocked, stuffed away. Everyone eventually has the experience of cleaning out an apartment after a death, collecting keys with unknown uses. Keys of all sizes—big, gilded, coppery, rust colored, gray, stunted, thick, tubular, with circular pins or notches. Keys cloaked in mystery, which often lead nowhere, orphan keys kept out of doubt or nostalgia, protecting things you can only guess at, concealing wealth, treasure chests, gardens, vegetable patches, garages, entire fortunes made manifest yet invisible.
