by Jan Rehner
THE HOUSE OF IZIEU
Copyright © 2020 Jan Rehner
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We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.
Cover design: Val Fullard
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The house of Izieu : a novel / Jan Rehner.
Names: Rehner, Jan, author.
Series: Inanna poetry & fiction series.
Description: Series statement: Inanna poetry & fiction series
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200208217 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200208225 | ISBN 9781771337250 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771337267 (epub) | ISBN 9781771337274 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781771337281 (pdf)
Classification: LCC PS8585.E4473 H68 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Printed and bound in Canada
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4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
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Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca
THE HOUSE OF IZIEU
a novel
Jan Rehner
INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA
For Jake and Kyle
ALSO BY JAN REHNER
Almost True
Missing Matisse
On Pain of Death
Just Murder
THE CHILDREN
Sami Adelsheimer
Hans Ament
Nina Aronowitz
Jean-Paul Balsam
Max-Marcel Balsam
Elie Benassayag
Esther Benassayag
Jacob Benassayag
Jacques Benguigui
Jean-Claude Benguigui
Richard Benguigui
Barouk-Raoul Bentitou
Albert (Coco) Bulka
Majer Bulka
Lucienne Friedler
Egon-Heinrich Gamiel
Liliane Gerenstein
Maurice Gerenstein
Henri-Chaïm Goldberg
Joseph Goldberg
Claudine Halaunbrenner
Mina Halaunbrenner
Georges Halpern
Arnold Hirsch
Isidore Kargeman
Liane Krochmal
Rénate Krochmal
Max Leiner
Claude Levan-Reifman
Fritz Löbmann
Alice Jacqueline Luzgart
Marcel Mermelstein
Paula Mermelstein
Theodor Reis
Gilles Sadowski
Martha Spiegel
Senta Spiegel
Sigmund Springer
Sarah (Suzanne) Szulklaper
Herman Tetelbaum
Max Tetelbaum
Charles Weltner
Otto Wertheimer
Emile Zuckerberg
PRESENCE AND ABSENCE
THE HOUSE STILL STANDS, a large white house on a long, sloping hill, nestled against the blue-shadowed foothills of the Jura mountains in a tiny corner of France. To the right of the house, sprays of arching, red-berried shrubs border a path that leads to the barn; to the left, a decorative terrace with white balustrades stretches toward lush fields of wild grass that ripple in the wind. A wide circular fountain filled with clear water dominates the front courtyard, while brown cows graze in the lower meadow, just below the old granary.
The view from the house is stunning, uninterrupted, bordered by pine-covered mountains, and centered by wide-open sky and the shine of water, a sweeping slice of the Rhône River. A flock of birds catches the eye, a mass of silver wings swinging in upward drifts across the sun.
All this beauty, and yet no one stumbles upon this place accidentally. The village of Izieu, a mere scattering of houses, is miles away and the narrow road twisting up the mountain is a wilderness of ivy and brambles. Encroaching tree branches meet overhead, turning the road into a green tunnel.
Step into this space and the air is electric, charged with all that once happened here. Time slides in some unfathomable way and suddenly you are there at the moment it began. The clock ticks. The hour strikes.
You want to shout out to the children, “Run! Hide! It’s not too late!”
But the children are playing, drawn back to the place where they were happy, their spirits woven into the woods, sparking off the surface of the river. Their bodies are sketched in shadow, their movements slightly out of rhythm, jumpy, as if you were watching an old black-and-white newsreel.
Three young boys swing from the limbs of a craggy apple tree. Two sisters, hand-in-hand, shyly watch from the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. Another group of children has turned the fountain into a wading pool. You hear the lilt of their voices above the splashing. A toddler bounces up and down as if there is too much energy in him to be contained in one small body. In one corner of the terrace, two teenagers steal a kiss.
The rush of a child’s breath whispering into your ear is like the flutter of a butterfly wing, a soft puff of displaced air that you wish you could capture in a jar and keep forever.
You lay the palm of your hand on the bark of a tree just to check on reality and you imagine that a child once lay their hand on that very spot, or maybe that spot is now further up the tree, further than you can reach, up in the tangle of branches above your head.
But time buckles again and you are back in the present, abandoned amid an aching vacancy.
You squint your eyes and blink and blink again, but the children are gone and it does no good to shout into the wind that they should have been safe. They should have been.
You wander inside now, hoping to find their sharp presence again, touching, naming, and identifying, acknowledging the significance of a child’s crayon drawing, row upon row of empty desks in a makeshift classroom. Upstairs, there is a dormitory, yawning space where once there were beds, pillow fights, faces reflecting the light of candles, warm hands reaching out to comfort.
There are photos of the children, some blurry, some clearly in focus. You feel an urgency to learn every name, memorize each set of eyes, each nose, each smile, every freckle and twist of hair. But you are quickly defeated. Each face is a universe.
The stillness of the photographs is inherently elegiac. Sometimes, the paper evidence of a crime is more reliable than memory or testimony.
Outside again, you stand in the front yard and stare up at the House of Izieu, solid enough to have survived for over a hundred years and yet, in retrospect, as ethereal as a dream. The dream lasted for only a moment, but that moment was brilliant.
Then the light goes out. Nothing prepares you for it. The loss. The darkness. Nothing moves, not a leaf, not a bird, not you. The river stops flowing. The moment has come.
The story is too terrible to speak of in the present tense. You must slide into it from the past, the details trapped in the tangled nets of history.
THE GATHERING
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NANCY, 1927
SHE STUDIED HIM BETWEEN SIPS of espresso in the café in Place Stanislas. He sat two tables away, reading a book, and would occasionally glance up over the rim of his glasses to catch her looking at him.
She turned a page in her sketchbook and began again, tracing the contours of the longish face, the high brow, the strong line of the jaw. He had thick, dark hair combed straight back from his forehead. He had fine grey eyes and smile lines around his mouth. She thought he must be a student at the University of Nancy, and that if he had any curiosity at all, he would introduce himself.
She deliberately caught his eye again and then stared out at the square as if it were the most fascinating place on earth. It was impressive, with its grand baroque buildings, gilded wrought iron gates, and a rococo fountain where mythical figures speared oversized bronze fish. As an architect’s daughter, she could not help but admire the beauty of the place, but she considered it a cold beauty, lacking gaiety and the warmth of a more human scale.
A tall shadow fell across her table. Finally.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle. I couldn’t help but notice your sketching. I’m Miron. Miron Zlatin.”
He spoke to her in French, but she could hear that it wasn’t his first language because it wasn’t hers either.
“Sabine Chwast. Please, sit. Are you a student here?” She noticed that he looked younger when he removed his glasses, and that, up-close, his shirt and pants were clearly expensive and finely tailored.
“I am. I’m studying agronomics at the university.”
“You want to be a farmer?” Sabine tried to keep the surprise from her voice. She had no wish to offend, but this man, with his fine clothes and refined manner, did not look like a farmer. A lawyer, perhaps, or an estate manager, or even a banker. She was relieved when he smiled, ignoring the bluntness of her question.
“I want to be an agronomist. You might think that’s just a fancy word for farmer, but I see it differently. I was born on a large estate in Russia, the heir to fields and farms, badly run and lost now. I want to modernize the business of farming with new efficiencies and even new inventions.”
“You are an inventor? Of what?”
“Nothing but dreams right now. But what of you, Sabine? Are you an artist?” he asked, nodding at her sketchbook.
“I’d like to be. My father worked as an architect in Russia sometimes, even though we lived in Poland. My love of sketching comes from him. Did you leave Russia because your estate was lost?”
“Partly. And partly because it’s not easy to be a Jew in Russia. And you? What brings you to Nancy?”
“It’s not easy to be a Jew in Poland.” Sabine shrugged, but the truth was she couldn’t get away fast enough from holy Polish earth and the rise of nationalism there. She felt too deeply the lack of tolerance in the new national character so widely praised in her homeland. The worry was that as she travelled and worked in Dantzig, Köenigsberg, and Berlin, she’d recognized signs of the same fervour again and again.
“Well, then,” Miron said. “You’ve landed in the most appropriate place. This grand square is named for Stanislas Lesczcynski, deposed king of Poland in the eighteenth century.”
“Perhaps that’s why I prefer the old town,” Sabine laughed. “I don’t like the geometry of kings or their grandiose visions. I prefer crowded and winding streets. I’ve never been comfortable inside straight lines. I’m here to study Art Nouveau, the flowing, organic line.”
“You’re a most interesting young woman, Sabine. Tell me, do you like concerts?”
“I prefer dancing.”
“Ah, perhaps I’ll see you again someday when you come here to sketch. I’m afraid I don’t dance.”
She watched him walk away and felt a little sad. Once again she’d talked too much and been too opinionated. Her mother had always told her it was better to be pretty and shy than plain and intelligent. She was too tall and her dark hair too unruly. She was too disobedient, she was told, and she ought to find her proper place in the world as a modest Jewish woman and abandon her mad dreams of being a painter.
But Sabine, the youngest of twelve children, did not like her proper place and she turned away from her family who did not understand her, all but her father who never liked the name Sabine and called her Yanka instead. Because of him, Sabine was given far more freedom to travel than other girls her age. He understood her restlessness and her thirst for a life different from the old ways of her mother.
“Yanka,” he would say. “The world is big and somewhere there is a place for you and your bright talent. Find that place and the world will smile back at you.”
Was this the right place, she wondered? She was happy enough in France, but she would have been happier if Miron had smiled back at her. She supposed she would never see him again, or at best might catch sight of him in the square, or browsing in a market, or reading in the café. But she was wrong.
A month or so later she was in the home of a fellow student, Collette, who’d invited her to see her small collection of Gallé glass. Sabine was excited. Emile Gallé was her favourite, born near Nancy and a leader of the Art Nouveau movement. His glass vases and boxes were exquisite, every shape and size, with smooth contours and whimsical designs, decorated with dragonflies or lilies or fish or birds or even landscapes. Some of his glass was called clair-de-lune, because it appeared to capture moonlight.
The two young women were in the living room admiring the glass when they heard music coming from down the hall. Jazz music with its strident, driving rhythm. “That’ll be my brother,” Colette said. “Come, let’s peek.”
They slipped along a corridor to a doorway, slightly ajar. Underneath the music, they could hear male voices and laughter. Sabine put her eye to the open space and looked into the room.
For the rest of her life she would never forget that precious moment when she spied Miron Zlatin, elbows cocked and knees splayed, trying to learn how to dance the Charleston with Collette’s brother. Perhaps the only thing that surprised her more was that three months later, she agreed to become a farmer’s wife.
It was a decision Sabine would never regret, even though her mother disapproved of Russians and insisted she was too busy with a brood of grandchildren to attend the wedding. Her father and Colette acted as witnesses to the simple civil ceremony at the mairie, and Miron’s parents, too old and uncertain of the world to travel so far from Paris, sent a fat cheque and an antique ruby necklace that Sabine would never wear, a family heirloom intended for Miron’s wife. Sabine wore her best blue dress since she didn’t own a white one, and Miron was elegant in a grey suit. He held her hand tightly and whispered that she was beautiful, and Sabine smiled back because she knew, for the first time in her life, that she was beautiful in his eyes.
After the ceremony, her father pulled her aside. “Yanka, you have found a good and loyal man who will not break your heart. Be a wise wife, kind and solicitous, but do not forget who you are. This is my gift to you and I only wish it could be more.”
He placed a box in her arms, a polished box of cherry wood with her old and her new initials carved on the top, YZ. Inside was a set of sketching pencils and paintbrushes and little pots of oil paint in every shade, but especially tones of pink and ruby, which he knew were her favourites. Sabine ran her hand over the smooth wood, her fingertips tracing the initials.
“Y and Z,” she said. “The last two letters of the alphabet. That must be lucky. Thank you, Papa. I promise I’ll remember.”
He pulled her close and kissed her cheek. “That big box that I gave to your husband? It’s from your mother. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s an iron.”
Amidst a flurry of good wishes and goodbyes, names called out and kisses blown into the wind, Sabine and Miron ran down the steps of the mairie into their new life together and somehow the heavy box was left behind, unopened and unmissed.
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The first years of their marriage were pure happiness, pure exuberance. Except for their studies, which they both continued diligently, they were carefree vagabonds. On weekends, they rode bicycles into the countryside and shared picnics beneath leafy trees and the lazy buzz of bees. They talked about everything from the best kind of tractors, to the worst kind of government. They read aloud to each other in the evenings and made love in the mornings when dawn was blooming and the world belonged only to them.
Sabine felt intensely alive, curious about everything, able to be fully herself. She drew so many portraits of Miron she could have used them to paper the walls of their small kitchen in their apartment on Rue Sainte-Anne. He was a man who never doubted that he was born to be happy with a simple life that balanced physical labour with the refinement of the mind. When he was deep in thought, there was a soulful cast to his features that seemed to reveal his innermost self. Sabine learned to read his moods by looking deep into his eyes, which she claimed changed colour depending on his frame of mind: bluish when he was content, grey when his brow was furrowed with a problem, green when he reached out his arms for her in the pale light of dawn.
Within two years, they both had graduated from their respective colleges, and the future was filled with possibilities and forking paths like a book they’d just begun to read together. But sometimes Sabine felt guilty about being so happy when so much of the world was going wrong. She’d told Miron about the terrible poverty she’d seen in Berlin where hundreds of homeless people lived under the bridges and searched in garbage bins for food. Once, she saw a woman trade a sable coat for a loaf of bread. People slept on the ground with nothing to protect them from the damp, unhealthy air, and the sound of children crying from hunger echoed eerily in the underpasses of the highways.
Miron tried to reassure her. This was not the time to tell his compassionate wife about Russian unrest and the misery that had caused his own family to flee their homeland. “We must try to help when we can,” he said, “but we can’t save the world.”