The safe house, p.6
The Safe House, page 6
9
At school, Étienne was proud to be Russian. Russian like Nicholas II, crossing Paris in a carriage beside President Félix Faure, whom the press sarcastically called Felixkoff. Russian like the czarist fleet showing off in Toulon’s harbor or the Saint Petersburg balls in honor of Republican dignitaries. Russian like the bear crowned with caricatures, Kaiser Wilhelm’s nightmare. Russian like the little girl in white who decorated the Exquis Guillout cookie boxes or the “bonbonof ruskof” sweets sold on the boulevards. Like the stock everyone wants to sell, these securities in faded colors, in rubles, would soon be no more than bits of paper. To his awestruck classmates, he belonged to the powerful empire that allowed France to come out of isolation, to the empire that would terrorize Germany as everyone hoped and make another war impossible. His head was filled with clichés, with picture postcards and stamps celebrating the Franco-Russian alliance, displaying serene bearded men with fringed epaulettes and two-headed eagles on a gold background. He lived in an imaginary world peopled with cossacks at full gallop, messengers for the czar, and Michel Strogoff holding off the tartar hordes.
Until one hot, sunny afternoon in spring. His second birth. He was nine years old. Unlike most days, his mother met him after school. She called him her little king and stroked his hair as they went down the avenue de Villiers. How do I know these details? The scene is carefully reported in Saturday’s Cake and Resucideception. I’ve also heard it told many times as a joke. Étienne was laughing, letting go of her hand to run around plucking green leaves that poked through the grates. When he handed his mother this tousled bouquet, she took him in her arms and squeezed him hard against her embroidered white blouse. Belle époque Paris surrounded them. Horses passed, whips cracked. Hats strolled down the street. She forced a smile, her voice strange. The first time, he didn’t understand the question. “You don’t hate Jews, do you?” she repeated. She was hurting him a little, practically suffocating him. To get out of her grip, and also because he was a good boy, kind to everyone, he replied “No” in his good-student voice, anxious to give the right answer. He saw his mother’s face immediately relax. She kissed him on the forehead, saying, “Ah! I’m so glad. Because your Papa and I, we’re Jewish. You’re a Jew, my darling boy.”
Other images poured into his mind. Cartoons glimpsed in the same newspapers that celebrated big brother Russia. Bogeymen with thick lips and sagging necks along with countless stories that were funny, or supposed to be, in almanacs or calendars. Posters, intended to frighten, plastering the streets the night before an election, warning of an invisible enemy. He remembered insults shouted at cheaters, epithets spat during recess by his classmates with such conviction, as if they were based on evidence. Maybe even from his own mouth. He felt sick. She was shocked at his paleness and decided to offer him a little treat for his snack. Maybe she wanted to mark the event. He wasn’t hungry. She had to drag him to the pastry shop on the place Pereire and scold him so he didn’t drop his cherry tart on the tiled floor of the shop.
10
He had a twin, a double, but turned inside out. Same origins, same age down to the month, same studies, but two personalities, fates that differed like fire and water. Théodore Fraenkel was his shadow, his opposite, his good little devil. The one he could have been. In Odessa, their fathers had known each other. They were basically neighbors. Théodore’s father was the first to immigrate to Paris. David or Eliahou—whatever his first name was—had he followed this example? Their two boys found themselves on the same benches at Chaptal, a modern school, meaning they didn’t teach Latin and Greek, on the boulevard des Batignolles. They both wanted to become writers. Étienne read Alphonse Daudet, Jules Renard, Pierre Loti. Scholarly writers, very French, destined for the Académie française, reputable enough to be given out at the end of the year. Books that were school prizes. No doubt the ones he had received. His companion displayed tastes that were riskier: Mallarmé, Huysmans, Baudelaire. Alfred Jarry, above all. He pretended to be Ubu. He spouted bizarre words, mangled other sounds, created homonyms, composed pastiches and acrostics, busied himself with anagrams. He could also be a prankster, telling incredible tall tales that got him in heaps of trouble. Fédia, as Étienne called him, was kind, funny, cruel. He was his best friend and also his worst bully, endlessly mocking his seriousness and his helpless side. Théodore quickly found another supporter: a young oracle with a high forehead and slow gestures. In his autobiography, André Breton says he noticed Fraenkel when he was a student because of the way he recited verses. Breton was apparently seduced by his disenchanted grimaces, his shrugs, his fierce spirit and cold irony. The two high schoolers shared a passion for poetry, the bizarre, dark humor, provocation, anarchy, the illegal. They worshipped Jules Bonnot and his band of thieves in cars, whose slightest misdeeds were reported in Le Petit Journal. After classes, they strolled around the Gustave Moreau museum and fantasized about the glimmering naiads of long ago. They stuck together until they were forced to part ways.
While he was never a Dadaist or surrealist, Étienne was a part of what could be considered the core of the original Bretonesque avant-garde: The Sophists’ Club. A group of brats that already had the characteristics of groups to come—closed meetings, chosen disciples, and a mastermind. André Breton was of course the leader; Théodore Fraenkel was his right-hand man. I don’t know what role my grandfather played. I have a lot of trouble imagining him as a devotee, cultivating eloquence, and even more difficulty associating him with hilarious evenings soaked in absinthe. I don’t believe he contributed to their poetry magazine run by René Hilsum, the future editor of Sans Pareil. In 1913, all three of them enrolled in premed courses and began medical school the next year. By default, since none of them really had a calling, and with perfect togetherness, as if they were inseparable. I don’t know whose idea it was. Of the three, quiet Étienne stands out. Unless he was once a completely different person? A burning spirit, inventive, sure of himself, and—why not—audacious?
11
When and how had he been broken? The first time was the same for millions of men: feet in the mud, facing a soft mound of earth piled with different kinds of waste, with wooden barriers and gnarled bushes of barbed wire; in a narrow ditch, subjected to violent trembling, giving off a smell of piss, shit, sweat, and butchered meat. You could write a whole book about his two years in the trenches if he had passed on his memories, kept a journal, saved his letters, even if they were redacted by the censor. But he left nothing. During his lifetime he was equally reserved. As soon as we questioned him about his war, he invariably sent us to read Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire. As if Barbusse, who was sent home for health reasons in 1916, just as my grandfather was being mobilized, had already said everything: the bodies covered in dirt, dazed, bent over, their noses between their knees, boots sticking in the clay, intense cold, waiting, the wail of missiles, the whistling of shrapnel, the thundering of heavy artillery, the slow sigh of the no. 75 shells, all this auditory skill that allowed them to guess whether they would live or die, the panicked fear when they stepped over the fortifications, the lunar desert between the two enemy lines, huge, full of water, crossed with ruts and pierced with beams, plywood boards and tangles of iron, holes piled with corpses that they stumbled over or found hanging, crucified on the barbed wire, turned into scarecrows with arms stretched out, the constant screaming of the wounded in the night, the friend you almost recognize in the unmoving monster planted in the soil, his eyes cooked, a wreck.
He could’ve had an exemption because of his studies. “If you don’t go off to fight and come back decorated, then you’re no son of mine,” his mother warned him. And he made it happen, as they say. Did he allow himself to be swayed by patriotic folly? Or, after two years of carnage, did he already sense that this insane firestorm was destroying Europe? He was careful to obey his mother’s order without having to give his life. Instead of volunteering, he ignored the call, knowing that he would be drafted. One morning, the police came to get him. The army dumped him in the medical corps and attached him to the 54th Infantry, commanding a unit of stretcher-bearers. He was sent to the front on November 21, 1916.
He was in charge of a first aid station, a hole covered with boards and two feet of rocky earth, with the red cross flag on top. A privileged place to observe modern mass killing, industrial, violent, and anonymous. In that chain of extermination, he was only a powerless link. Without penicillin, which wasn’t discovered until 1928, he could only apply cursory bandages or strips of plaster. Then he quickly filled out a form and pinned it to the dying man’s clothes. Name, regiment, nature of wound, whether or not a tetanus shot had been administered. He followed the methods that were taught at Val-de-Grâce Hospital in those days, based on the experience of previous battles. Since the bullets had been disinfected by fire, war wounds were said to be antiseptic. To avoid contamination, they weren’t supposed to touch them. Medical units had to content themselves with staunching hemorrhages, stopping the flow of blood, splinting fractures, and moving the patient as far from the front lines as possible. Before understanding this error, the military academy did not advise surgical intervention. The poilu, they assured, would heal himself. They realized belatedly that three quarters of injuries were caused by exploding shells, which mixed with mud, stagnant water, and the dirty cloth of uniform jackets, causing immediate infections. After traveling for several days in jostling ambulances, and then on crowded trains, most of the severely wounded arrived at the hospitals with tetanus or suppurating gangrene.
The Record of Marches and Operations kept by his unit and now available on the Internet does not describe the horrors flowing into the infirmary with their faces covered in dirt, their intestines hanging out, their bloody stumps and half buttocks, their larynxes torn as if someone had slit their throats, still able to make sounds despite their open skulls revealing curves of scarlet brain. It also doesn’t mention the conditions inside the shelter: the wounded grabbing your shirt and demanding to be taken care of first, the spouts of vomit, ether, and hot gunk, the acetylene lamp going out every time a “Big Bertha” falls nearby, the ground cut through with water and blood, the muddy fingers digging in dimness for the wound and dousing it with iodine tincture, the dead piled up outside, swollen and covered with flies, the dull hammering every half second, which throws you to the floor and threatens to turn the ward into a tomb. Nothing about the whistle blasts, the shouts of “forward march!” from the officers, the despairing race after the first wave of the assault, the clacking of machine guns, the cries, the explosions, the bodies that are too heavy to lift, the stretcher dragged through the muck, the stretcher-bearers dying one after another, with nothing to send home, just red slush, like my grandfather’s best friend, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper from Roubaix whom everyone called “Fileuzeuf,” not because of his capacity to make up theories but because of his sangfroid in all situations. Not a word, either, about the worst winter of the war. Oh wait! A few understatements as days go by. November 26, 1916: “Sanitary conditions are poor (many relieved of duty for frostbitten feet).” December 10, 1916: “Change of guard in the night, without incident, but very painful because of rain and mud.” January 15, 1917: “18-mile march, cold weather.” Even war is described with the tone of a weather report, as though they were experiencing a series of storms. From March 10 to 19 of the same year: “Enemy artillery quiet at first, becoming more and more active. . . . The thaw makes the trenches and passageways almost impassable.”
On the other hand, this logbook allows me to follow Étienne’s footsteps with the precision of a GPS, to go with him on each of his transfers, to know the destinations, his swings back and forth, his encampments, his movements up the line with the rhythm of offensives, his marches and retreats, most often undertaken at night, crushing, impossible for this man who wasn’t a walker. Giant cemeteries. The Somme, first of all, at the end of 1916. A million victims. Bois-l’Abbé farm, Malassies ridge, Bouchavesnes ravine, Riez wood, Fargny mill. Farm, ravine, wood, mill, which are already nothing more than points on the military staff maps, nothing but the chaos of ruins and decapitated trunks. Then the Chemin des Dames, from January to mid-May 1917. Five hundred thousand dead, on both sides. Soupir, Moussy, Braisne, Hauzy wood, Saint-Mard, Montagne farm, Ostel, Château Ruiné, the Gargousse, Chevregny ridge, the caves of Coblentz. Behind these names, a tormented plateau, slopes of jagged grottos, and, at the top, the impregnable Hindenburg line. And as many mass graves as charges. Attacks whose obvious absurdity strikes the men in charge like so many shells. Ranges too short, objectives too far away, makeshift tactics spoiled before they were even put into action. Did he witness the first acts of mutiny? Did he also imagine deserting, fleeing this pointless killing?
Such a traumatic experience couldn’t be communicated. Walter Benjamin traces the disappearance of the storyteller to the First World War. Because, he explains, it’s death that transforms life into a tale. Death alone curates a life of assorted images and gives them an order resembling fate. No epics, no heroic couplets without an exemplary death. But as soon as it becomes anonymous, reduced to a mechanical operation, death can no longer perform its sanctioning role nor create the material from which stories are made. The soldiers of 1914, glorified as unknowns because they had been reduced to abundant and interchangeable human parts, came back silent from the battlefield. He was like the rest. His service records, filed at the Paris City Hall archive, indicate a Croix de Guerre dated August 1, 1917. That particular decoration was never displayed on the office mantel.
12
It rested inside a huge Louis-Phillipe writing desk built of walnut and placed almost in the center of the room. Well hidden—behind the flap, in the back of a compartment. Maybe forgotten to this day, in a nook of that desk that was full of surprises, where young ladies from previous centuries hid their gallant correspondence. All you had to do was push a button or pull a lever—I don’t remember which anymore—to open a secret compartment concealed behind a decorative panel. My grandfather arranged minute objects in these little drawers, things without monetary or aesthetic value that carried a heavy sentimental weight. By their juxtaposition, they took on meaning and allowed a glimpse into his internal universe, or else, his interior chaos. With the great discoveries of the Renaissance, both learned men and princes used curio cabinets to create representations of the world. As the precursors of modern museums, they housed incredible bric-a-brac—from the turban of the grand eunuch of Constantinople to the head of a Cyclops, Egyptian mummies, Mexican codices, or bezoars, those stones found in the gizzards of animals that supposedly have all kinds of magical qualities. And also medals, ancient coins, parchment papers, money resting in compartments that opened with artfully concealed inner mechanisms. My grandfather’s interior display held only one form of oddity: war.
Besides the Croix de Guerre, the writing desk was a jumble that contained his yellow star (which also provoked the maid to say, in ignorance or cruelty, “I saw a gentleman in the street with a cockade like monsieur’s, but it looks much better on you”), papers forged by one of his friends, a surgeon who under the circumstances became expert at it, a newspaper folded in quarters he showed me one afternoon, exhuming it from the drawer after his last patient had gone. He must have thought I was old enough to grasp what it meant, that word in all caps, printed in fat black type, that repeated in every line, before or after slurs: “lice-ridden,” “profiteer,” “parasite,” “negroid,” “undesirable,” “invader,” or “crook.” Unlike today’s weeklies, Au Pilori’s job wasn’t to inform. As the name suggests, it denounced. For those who were vindictive, or worse, violent, it targeted a specific population. The issue was dated August 16, 1940. Under the headline “Let’s Purify France!,” a cartoon showed a man with a hooked nose, a cigar in his mouth, and a pocket watch hanging over his fat stomach admiring, with a well-fed air, a battlefield covered in French corpses. Lists of individuals followed, organized by profession and always introduced with the same word in all caps. Two months after the fall of France, Au Pilori began its smear campaign with the most sensitive professions, those most likely to influence bodies and minds. On page two, they published a list of Jewish doctors and professors who were prominent members of the Paris public hospital system. For Saint-Antoine Hospital, eight names were cited. His was one of them.
13
Did someone give it to him or did he rush out to buy it at the kiosk on the boulevard Raspail? I imagine him inspecting the paper, running his finger down the column with the same feverishness he felt when he searched through test results in the halls of the medical school on the boulevard Saint-Germain. After the shock passed, he probably tried to reassure himself. This list is not unfamiliar to him. How many times has he found his last name erased from the rounds schedule, replaced by the words dirty jew scribbled in chalk? Good marks given year after year on his evaluations—“excellent student, worthy of promotion to intern,” “very good resident in all aspects,” “very thoughtful intern, conscientious”—make no difference. From the very beginning of medical school, he prepared for an exam he couldn’t pass. When he came in second on the written exams for medical certification, his supervisor convinced him not to take the oral: “It’s no good,” he told him, “You won’t be chosen. They already selected a Jew last year.” The Deposits and Consignments Fund rejected his application for a position as their in-house doctor. They didn’t even consider his candidacy. “We’re in a very difficult spot,” the director wrote to him, “We would have been happy to employ you, but we hear that you’re an Israelite.”
