Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  Suddenly she stood and strode across the room to a contemporary shelving unit of glass and chrome, where an image of the Holy Family, displayed within a modest frame, was one of several pictures in the room that seemed to have been salvaged from the pages of an illustrated Catholic calendar. On a higher shelf, from the middle of a row of books, she withdrew a little volume that she wordlessly placed into my hands. It was covered in red paper with a design of four-leaf clovers and bore a printed sticker glued onto the front:

  Hanna Günzburger

  Freiburg Br.

  Poststraße 6

  Tel. 2833

  Inside the book, barely legible to me in that complicated German script called Sütterlin, Mom had also inked that same address, and beneath it, in more familiar penmanship, her address in Mulhouse. From cover to cover, the pages were filled with poems and messages dated from 1935 to 1938, most of them written by her friends in German as perplexing to decipher as her Sütterlin address. Still, I was astounded by the charming colored drawings that accompanied the entries. With exceptional artistry and whimsy, my mother’s girlhood friends had drawn or painted elves with beards and pointed caps, children in folkloric dress, animals and insects, flowers and gardens, illustrations of nursery rhymes, and early Disney cartoon characters. Silhouettes of dogs and cats and little girls and flowers were detailed cutouts from black paper that meticulously decorated several other pages.

  The autograph book that Janine left behind with Roland in 1942 is a creative jewel, filled with delightful pictures and poems from her girlhood friends, including this entry by Lore Brose.

  My eyes welled up with grateful tears, and I couldn’t trust myself to speak. I was holding in my hands the treasure I remembered Mother saying she had given to Roland in pledge before she left Lyon as tangible proof that someday she would return to him. It was not a thing she would abandon. For me, as once for Mom and for Roland, this cherished book of friendly messages provided lasting testimony of the truth of their relationship. How astounding that this devout and austere woman, seemingly starved of love herself, had kept it at her fingertips after all these years. In the archaeology of love, this discovery was priceless, a tantalizing shard that impelled me to keep digging.

  “This is fabulous!” I cried, once I had composed myself. “How can I ever thank you? It was wonderful of you to keep this for so long. How did you come to have it?” I felt like jumping up and hugging her, but she turned her face and blushed, apparently unaccustomed to such outbursts of emotion.

  “I found this among the things my brother left behind in his bedroom in our parents’ house when he went to Canada in 1949,” she said. “As I told you on the phone, I never knew your mother—Roland was much younger than I, and we had separate friends. When Roland lived in Lyon after France was occupied, I was here in Mulhouse with my parents and my sister. But I always thought this little book so special and creative that while, as you can see, I didn’t take much with me when I moved here, I could never just get rid of it.” She glanced around the bare apartment and then shrugged her shoulders as if to add that sometimes human action moves beyond the scope of logic. “When you called last night and spoke about your mother, it struck me that the family name you mentioned might match the label on the book, and I went to check. So I guess that I was meant to save it. I hope you’ll take it to her. I imagine she’ll be pleased to get it back after all these years.”

  That would prove Emilienne Arcieri’s longest speech of our encounter, as well as our warmest interchange. Getting her to talk about Roland was far more tricky, and there was nothing paranoid about my sense that she was eyeing me suspiciously when I inquired into his life and whereabouts. She asked me why I was so curious and whether I had come because my mother sent me.

  “Non, elle n’avait aucune idée que j’essaierais de vous voir,” I assured her. My mother had no idea I would try to contact anyone in the Arcieri family, I said. But in view of Mom’s close friendship with Roland in those dangerous war years before she fled the country, she had always worried how he’d fared throughout the Occupation and whether he’d gone on to live a life of happiness. As I chanced to be briefly visiting my cousins in Mulhouse, it had simply occurred to me to try to ease her old concerns. Emilienne said nothing, and, squirming in the heavy silence, I began to prattle, telling her far more than I had planned. I related how her brother had written to my mother following the war, and how my grandfather had so unfairly intercepted all of Roland’s letters: Mom had come upon a telegram from him only by accident long after it arrived, so that her failure to reply had never been intentional. “Au contraire, ma mère en était vraiment désolée.” Mom still despaired to think Roland could possibly believe she had refrained from writing back to him on purpose. I ventured that I hoped she might be able to relay that message to her brother.

  When Emilienne ignored my little recitation and asked directly about my father, I took it as a signal that I had crossed the bounds of decorous behavior. When she asked me whether I was married, I sprang to get my purse and showed her pictures of my children, as if their open smiles and twinkling innocence at three and five years old could purify my image or my motives. We spoke in French and, helplessly but shamelessly, I prodded her for details in a way that even I could recognize would seem invasive to a European. Deliberately I employed all the reporters’ tactics that I had ever used to wheedle information from cops and crooks and politicians—subjects rarely disinclined to vaunt their knowledge and importance in response to wide-eyed fascination or flattery. But Emilienne, not caring to impress me, proved tight-lipped.

  She answered every question with skimpy facts, volunteering nothing, but what I learned was this: as my cousin had related, Roland returned to Mulhouse in the exhilarating period following the war, and in 1947, the same year that his father died, he married a local girl, Colette, whose family’s thriving flower business exported cyclamens throughout the Continent. The couple promptly had a daughter, but barely two years later, they separated and divorced, and Roland set off for Canada. (That was when—I knew but did not say—he had tried to contact Mom.) Although he returned to France to visit in 1955 and often after that, he was fixed in his decision never to move home again. Starting life afresh in Montreal, he had risen in the ranks of a copper-mining firm with properties in Panama, eventually becoming president. His second marriage, in 1960, this time to an English-speaking Canadian, was childless. His daughter from his first marriage lived in Paris, where she worked in pharmaceuticals and had just recently been widowed in her early forties. Roland himself, his sister said, was seventy.

  I asked if she had pictures she would show me, half expecting a refusal. But she had already chosen several and placed them in an envelope hidden underneath a book on her coffee table, as if postponing the decision whether she would bring them out. Now she withdrew them one by one and tenderly examined each before she passed it over to me.

  “He’s as handsome now as he always was,” she noted fondly. Then, in a tone of wry acceptance, she added a painful observation: “Lucky for him, he doesn’t resemble me at all. Because I am so frightfully ugly, I have never had any real pleasure in my life.” She leaned across the table where we sat facing one another and, becoming businesslike, began identifying when and where each photograph was taken. I knew it was no accident that the first one she showed me was a picture from her brother’s second wedding, the beautiful new couple emerging from the ceremony through a great stone arch of some public doorway to face a storm of rice as white and dense as a February blizzard.

  Tall and lean in an elegant black suit, white tie and shirt, with a white boutonniere in his lapel, Roland steps into the camera’s frame with the grace of a male model posing in a photo shoot for a bridal magazine. His hair is thick and prematurely graying, which makes him look distinguished at thirty-nine years old, and his unlined face, solemn here, has only grown more striking, maturing into manliness, from the one that I remembered from the picture in my mother’s wallet. Be
side him, laughing, a pertly pretty, brown-haired bride squints against the hail of rice. She is carrying a white bouquet and a wears a lacy hat, long white gloves, and a dawn mink stole atop a blue silk dress floating over crinolines, short enough to show a pair of slender, shapely legs that end in matching blue silk high-heeled pumps.

  I looked into the photograph and felt sore and hollowed out inside, as if the picture were a bomb that had left my dreams in tatters, while my excitement in having found the means to reach Roland withered in frustration. My thoughts raced backward to the year Roland remarried, and I realized it was right around the time that Dad had fallen for Ayn Rand and saw his egocentric muse embodied in Miss Chase. My parents’ marriage had never been the same. If Roland had only tried again to reach Mom then! I mourned that window between 1949, when Roland arrived in Canada and Mom could not permit herself to see him, and 1960, when he’d wed this other woman. If not for Gary and for me, our mother might have found a happier life with him.

  I studied the picture in my hand of the newly married couple and tried to reassure myself that it couldn’t tell me everything, any more than my parents’ wedding album could reliably predict the betrayals and the heartaches that would undermine their marriage. This photograph, however joyful, had captured just one moment more than thirty years before: it really told me nothing about this couple now. But Emilienne was passing me more pictures. Roland in liberated France, April 2, 1945, smiling broadly in suit and tie, as proud as if he’d chased the German Army back across the border by himself. He was sitting on a bench with his parents and two sisters, his arms spread wide, encircling his mother and Emilienne, then a moonfaced woman of thirty-two with a pouf of hair like a great profiterole balanced above her forehead. At the far end of the bench, Arcieri père, the textile manager, was the epitome of a Frenchman of his generation, in a three-piece suit, with a goatee and a beret and a pipe between his teeth.

  Another gray-toned snapshot offered more than I anticipated seeing of the lanky form my mother still regretted: Roland in his early thirties was standing in a shallow, foamy surf in bathing trunks, his V-shaped torso lean and hairless as he smiled into the sun. Trailing up his groin toward his hip, a scar on his abdomen scrawled the story Mom had told me of nursing him back to health when his appendix ruptured.

  The next picture showed Roland comfortably at home in Montreal, sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug in a sports shirt, slacks, and leather sandals, his graying mane of hair still streaked with black and swept straight back. A caramel-colored shaggy dog was cuddled adoringly beside him, and a bottle of champagne sat chilling in a silver cooler beside a red poinsettia on a marble table. The next shot was of Roland outdoors, cigarette in hand, sitting on a boulder. Another showed him stylish in khakis and a jacket, seated on a wall overlooking Lake Geneva. Roland at forty-three appeared a thoughtful man of business at a reception in Hannover. Slightly later, at a formal dinner dance in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the dashing mining executive was magnificent in bow tie and tuxedo, laughing with companions. All pictures of a life he had lived without my mother, who had never ceased to yearn for him.

  Disheartened, I forced gaiety into my voice, profusely thanked his sister, and stood to take my leave. Yet before I slipped into my jacket, I wrote out Mom’s address and phone number for Emilienne to give Roland, though nothing in her attitude suggested willingness to do so. When I asked if she would be so kind as to provide his contact information, she took a little printed note card, crossed out her first name to replace it with her brother’s, and above her own address wrote out his in Canada. But she added no phone number, an omission that I took to be intentional. I shook her hand, and as we headed for the door, I hesitated, then dared to ask her for a picture of Roland to bring back to my mother. Even as I told her Janine would be delighted to see a current picture of Roland, I actually felt unsure of how Mom would react. Being reminded of him now, under the present circumstances, might only grieve her more.

  Emilienne kept silent for a moment, then moved back to the table, shuffled through her envelope of pictures, and to my surprise selected two, both fairly recent. In one, Roland stands at a lookout on a mountaintop with metropolitan Montreal sprawling far beneath him. In the other, he is seated at his dining table, his wife standing right behind him with her hands positioned firmly on his shoulders as if holding him in place.

  Realizing the unlikelihood of my ever meeting her again, I said good-bye to Emilienne with something close to shame in having come into the home of this straightforward, clear-eyed woman with my secret aspirations. It was only through my disappointment, triggered by that second photograph, that I recognized the fantasies that had drawn me there, as well as the romantic folly of my optimism. Confronting what I was up to, I felt shady and embarrassed.

  When I got back to New Jersey on October 24, I waited for a private moment to break the news to Mom about my meeting Emilienne. In my absence of a week my father had grown sicker, my mother more despondent, and I hoped the story of my exploit would help sustain her through this crisis by pointing to a future with unexpected opportunities. If not the one I wished for her, still a world of possibility. But Mom gaped at me, befuddled, and then pronounced herself aghast at the liberties I’d taken.

  “I can’t believe you just picked up the phone and called her, a perfect stranger!” she exclaimed. “How on earth did you explain your purpose? What was your purpose, anyway? What did you think you would accomplish?” She studied me with the same suspicion I’d seen from Emilienne. “Who did you say you were? How did you even know her name? I only hope to God you didn’t say I sent you! And wait—how did you explain to Michel what you were doing? What on earth did he think of all of this?”

  Still, she couldn’t help but delight in the entries in her little autograph book, whose reappearance seemed nothing short of miraculous, and she hung on every word I reported of Roland. That he had actually remained on this side of the Atlantic, so near and yet so far, after coming to the United States to find her in 1949, hit her like a seismic shock. When I handed her the photographs, she was even more stunned to see the changes of the decades. She could scarcely fathom she was seeing her Roland, not yet twenty-three years old when she’d left him on the quai de la Joliette, now a man of seventy with silver hair. Thick, but silver all the same. She noted that his wife appeared to be a pretty woman, and then she gave the photos back to me. It was all too much for her. I felt terrible as well, not only for betraying Dad by searching for Roland, but also for adding to my mother’s painful burden of emotions. She looked spent and almost as gray and gaunt as Dad.

  Emilienne’s picture of a silver-haired Roland—taken atop Mount Royal in Montreal—was Janine’s first view of him after almost fifty years.

  “I even got Roland’s address,” I murmured. Hoping to lift her spirits, I offered her the card with Emilienne’s handwriting, but Mom just shook her head as tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Not me,” she said. “I’d never have the nerve to write to him. I don’t know how you do these things. But even if I could, he’s a married man. Why would I cause trouble for him now? I only know too well how terrible it feels to have your husband chased by some other woman. No, that’s not for me. Definitely not.”

  “What’s on the agenda? What shall we do next?” my father asked repeatedly on his last full day of life, as if he knew that something really big was happening. Despite our efforts to maintain a mood of normalcy and join him in denial, he may in fact have sensed the approaching hand of death, as he suddenly began to press me with that same unnerving question every hour: “What’s on the agenda?” Like a busy top executive committed to appointments whose details were the duty of an underling to organize, he called the question out to me from the room where he was sitting with a dumbbell at his feet, ostensibly watching television, although his mind was fading. Or else, perhaps, there was only one inevitable appointment that he dreaded with such anxiousness he couldn’t bring himself to name it. Whatever we had
planned, he wanted reassurance we were doing it together.

  “When you’re finished with your toilette, tell me what’s on the agenda, what shall we do next?” he called to me as I was getting dressed, his tone so companionably relaxed that it saddened me to realize I had never heard him speak that way before. Oddly out of character, something vague and vulnerable had permeated his personality. It was frightening to find our warrior laying down his armor with the enemy massing. If this supremely strong and vital man could die, I understood at last that none of us was safe.

  The date, November 9, was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a day already set aside by many Jews for mourning loss. Since coming back from Germany, I’d gone home to be with Zach and Ariel for Halloween, the quasi–holy day of childhood, before returning to my parents. I had somehow also felt impelled to spend a day reading in the library. Approaching death like cramming for a test, I was seeking expert guidance to explain it to my children—or so I told myself—as if there were an answer that would make it acceptable for anyone we love to disappear forever.

  I passed the days that followed living with my parents in an intimate cocoon. At times, Dad lay in bed, curled upon his side with his head resting in Mom’s lap, and she stroked his hair and rubbed his back, as if he were a schoolboy who had been bested in a fistfight and craved his mother’s solace. It broke my heart to watch them come together in this way, with so much pure affection and so little time remaining. Few people came to visit, but Dad’s secretary Zoanne would make her way upstairs and stand beside Dad’s bed or chair to report to him or seek direction on the business she was still conducting. The moo-like buzzer for the office entrance blasted through the house, and the grumbling garage door rose and fell, and the UPS man entered with deliveries and exited with shipments, and Zoanne dragged on her cigarettes and blithely informed any customers who called and asked for Len that, sorry, he was out and would have to call them back.