The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  Copyright © 2015 by Ruth Zylberman

  English-language translation copyright © 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First English-language edition

  First published in France in 2015 under the title La direction de l’absent by Christian Bourgois Editeur

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-803-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-806-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  PART I

  The State of Things

  1

  And the city stood in its brightness.

  And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.

  Czesław Miłosz

  (Translated by the poet and Robert Hass, 1963)

  WHEN MY MOTHER REALIZED I wanted to die, at the time I was a woman between two ages, she became frightened. Until then I had been a good little bijou who was very much alive, but I was almost forty years old and I wanted to die.

  I had to look under the green liquid mass; I had to look under the sludge and sink down, body outstretched, and absorb the water. Let my tangled hair hang over my shoulders, let my tangled hair hang over my eyes and face. Get used to the mass of hair, get used to the mass of water. Let myself soak, envelop, and leave on tiptoe for the water’s end, toward its down-below. Travel through the water without flapping my arms or legs. Accept the coughing and spitting and the cold everywhere along my body. I looked around me at the surface of the water, the bits of floating wood, and the lacy shrubs and bushes on the surrounding banks. On the other side, all the way up the hill and at regular intervals, the trees soared upward with every inch of their trunks. Their black branches, immaculate, stretched toward the sky. They were a woeful army of comrades.

  They were cold, cold, cold. I was cold, and I felt my feet going numb in the water. The world was deserted. All my faces had disappeared behind the tracery of trunks and branches. They were sunken, swallowed up, and my body was no longer inside my body. It had become a naked tree, a branch. The hills and trails were swallowed up with everything else around my living body, the one that walked in step, at a trot, or at a gallop to the beat of my heart and the blood pounding in my head. From my side of the water, I saw it in front of me: the sweep of naked trees, the sorrowful army of comrades. It, that, I shiver against the branches raised to the sky and the earth all around and the fragile expanse of water. I, that, it moves to the middle of the water.

  The sound of silence: my long breath mixed with the wind.

  I remembered hills and trails, the hardness of the sun, dreamed faces that floated superimposed on the dazzling green of meadows, brown ridges of cut lavender on the hillside, the lone horse that had turned its head to watch me pass. I remembered the gray building façades in Paris and my eyes glued to the rows of balustrades. Everything had to be numbed, and the suffering reduced to silence, in the cold water and the naked trees. I just had to let myself drift to the middle of the water, between the two banks. It was time for my own death. It was time, unavoidable at last, for my own death.

  I dragged the traces of crossed centuries with me to the bottom of the water, the traces of the werewolf century I’d tried so hard to keep alive, as my mother had done before me. I had been her eternal life, her miracle, unaffected by fog and gray lands. Unharmed. An escaped bird she sent out to conquer the wide world.

  And the world began with Paris. Maman knew all the streets and shortcuts; she held me by the hand. It was 1978. In the 18th arrondissement, she was in her own kingdom; black curls, high cheekbones, and shining eyes, paying no attention to the men turning their heads in her direction. The Algerians of Barbès-Rochechouart mistook her for one of their own, and would murmur in Arabic when she passed. They had no idea that, for her, the desert dated back thousands of years, and between the desert and Barbès there had been a detour through the austere plains of Poland.

  We’d get off at la Goutte-d’Or: condemned buildings with windows sealed off by wooden beams set in the shape of a cross, people sitting on sidewalks, the muffled cries of a brawl, the soft steps of African women. It was like the city border, the continental border, even. I crossed over the edge and descended the hills, my hand in my mother’s. She’d have long conversations in a low voice with a butcher who had known her father during the war, and whose shop on rue Myrha was surrounded by the gaping holes of demolition: no man’s lands, pits, and sand. I noticed everything and sensed the mystery of the city in decay, the almost invisible movement of time attacking the fronts of the buildings …

  Maman would emerge from between the ruins and I’d take the lead, running several feet ahead just so I could turn around and rush back to her. Hand in hand, we took rue Doudeauville and made our way to the top of the neighborhood in no time at all. We circled around la Butte following the curve of rue Caulaincourt, sheltered by the leaves of trees planted evenly on both sides of the street. Reunited in the center, their branches looked like a botanical dais.

  Here, and for me it was the heart of Paris, the houses were built straight up and down and made of brick and plaster, eternal. All the movements of the street—the comings and goings of passersby, the noise of cars, the alternating darkness and light at nightfall, when the apartment windows behind the façades would light up and then go out—were accidents. Their anecdotal and uncertain matter dissolved in that landscape of stone where Maman paved the way for me. When she walked, as I observed looking up at her, she often wore a slight smile that seemed intended for invisible presences only she could detect. She led me down a narrow street bordering the gardens of the Sacré-Cœur. When I ventured there alone, I was always frightened by the little caves dug into the rock, vestiges of the Montmartre gypsum mines. A barely legible plaque announced that Cuvier had discovered fossilized bones here in 1798. Nothing, however, announced that at the same location, less than a century later, Communards had been executed and the hollowed-out pits used to bury their bodies.

  I knew nothing about the Paris Commune, but—did I have some kind of intuition about the massacre?—I was certain that those stony, dark, and stinking pits harbored troubling spirits that my mother put to flight with only the force of her absentminded smile.

  She dressed me, she made me read, and she contemplated me. From my bedroom door I’d feel her eyes resting on me, checking under the colorful dresses she bought me incessantly for the uninterrupted flow of aliveness. Without touching me, she listened to the regular beating of my heart and measured the path of blood in my body, the filling of my veins. She also saw the words in books and images as they inscribed themselves inside my head. To be wise, studious, a
nd polite; I knew very well that wasn’t what was most important. The command my mother silently threw to me from the doorway, the marvelous project in which she obliged me to take part, that was most important: to grow … my skin nice and warm, my eyes bright.

  In truth, it wasn’t a difficult task: let my blood circulate, breathe, let my heart beat, and at last grow up. There was nothing I had to do except let myself go, and let her hopeful gaze take root in me like a plant irrigated by water.

  That was my entire childhood: my mother’s beauty and the city she transformed. On the bus, she lifted me onto her lap and I watched Paris pass by. The solid city, made of evenly measured cut stone, was the mineral and welcoming double of my mother’s abundant body, a body-shelter I had occasionally seen naked. Stripped of its erotic fluctuations, it was like a veiny block, granular but unassailable. Sitting on my mother’s lap, her arms around my body, I felt her chest against my back. The bus rushed over the Seine and I fell into a deep sleep against her, a sleep like that of an animal or an infant. I heard the distant sound of passengers, the muffled noise of tires and brakes on the pavement. I didn’t worry about missing part of the trip, though, because that trip, in that city handed to me like a gift, was one I believed I would be led to take many more times, an incalculable number of times, maybe even forever: the infinite length of time that my infinite childhood beside Maman would last.

  And so we went, pressed together, over the white sand paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the life both of us wished for was possible: one that was self-sustaining and established on the unsinkable foundations of peace and joy.

  And when she pushed me on the green swings to go as high as the tops of the trees, in my own delight I carried the breath of her joy. All the way to the jagged sky between the branches, I brought her prayers for immortality.

  My mother’s face. To be studied closely, even when she’s sleeping. I came close to the bed. It was dawn. A halo of white light unveiled her cheeks, the path of wrinkles, the still new corruption of her skin. I scrutinized each part. I try to determine where the power comes from, the radiance, and I leaned over her the way one leans over a reflection. I recognized the tip of the vein that beats under the skin at the top of her neck. The line of her eyebrows and the triangle of her face. Skin that vibrates. My mother’s face, an abrupt shield on which I searched for the geological traces of the child she was, the child who escaped the snow and cold—a long time ago, in the snow, the stuff of legends—pulled by her mother’s arm. I knew it, I always knew it, without even needing to be told. I looked at her again. My mother, whose face in its childhood proportions touched the deadly snow and bodies piled on top of each other. It was during the war, and the face that should have never grown old but remained always that of a dead child, buried under snow with her head turned beneath the pile of corpses, that face was saved by her mother out, out, out—tremendous strength was required—from under the snow. The face becomes distorted under the imprint of an image that chills me, and I recoiled in fear because through her forehead, far behind the roots of her hair, inside my mother’s head, among the cells, in the midst of the living magma, I saw a tree growing with branches encircling a vast white expanse. And from that landscape, I knew this too, one cannot run away. But Maman opened her eyes and the face recomposed itself; invincible, back from the dead.

  For me and for herself, she sought out the landscapes of her rebirth. She brought me to a hidden area east of the Rhône in the south of France. We passed through villages. The road, at first flat and straight, rose up after a bend uncovering a jumble of open, gently sloping pastures. Another village; a temple, a church in the center, houses with tiled roofs grouped above the coursing of a river. We kept going.

  Then, as if to escape the world, a small road on the left. First we couldn’t see anything, just a few trees along the path. Then came the dark and evenly cut rectangles of the lavender fields. Finally, one by one, and each of these appearances was like a greeting, came the round hills that looked like a group of sisters, calm and laughing.

  We took to the trails, rocks mixed with earth, our souls on alert: the blue and mauve patches of flowers, the harshness of the wind, the rustling of the grasses, the empty river bed, and the trees that turned green in uneven tufts of wet and shiny leaves. It was the necessary thread of growth and decline and growth again, renewed indefinitely. Below the hills it finally seemed possible to settle on the ground, to really stay, with our skin and coats like mended scraps on the fields of cut wheat, and to take shelter from the world’s brutality.

  In a drawer in my room, I kept the photo strips she took me to get in the booth at the Blanche métro station. For the background, you could choose the Sacré-Cœur or the Moulin Rouge. She chose the Sacré-Cœur. I climbed onto her lap, we set the shutter, and we waited for the flash. We spent the three minutes while the film developed in silence, dancing from one foot to another in the cold air of the métro. The photos came out of the machine, always identical: softened by the same orange filter, my face out of the frame and my head turned, looking at Maman who smiled without moving, looking right at the flash.

  Year after year, the composition never changed. The Sacré-Cœur behind us was an extension of ourselves, our symbolic home, and an assurance that we inhabited this place the same way it inhabited us.

  Year after year, photo after photo, my childhood went by: a mass of hours and actions governed by routine and repetition, indistinct hours stuck to one another with the saliva of kisses, the friction of caresses, and the white secretions of tears. And, like a precious flower under the artificial sun of a greenhouse, while I went to school and out to the yard and to piano lessons, while I read in my bedroom and ate dinner at night in the kitchen with my parents, while I went to the Grand Palais every Sunday morning with Father where we admired its sparkling glass shell and the clouds reflected in it, while I resisted the cruelty of children at school and was cruel to them in turn, while I looked at adults and city streets like movie extras on a sleeping set, like a precious flower under the artificial sun of a greenhouse, my soul and heart were polished in anticipation of life and love.

  Night was coming, and the silent languages were coming to power.

  First, there was only a map: no buildings or sidewalks, just a drawing of the streets and their familiar names I flew over without thinking, like a luminous and naive soul returning serenely to her birthplace. I flew above the little ghetto, rue Sienna, rue Pańska, then I took off to the north, rue Miła, right onto Zamenhof, Gęsia on the right, Nalewki and Place Muranowski on the left. Familiar too was the passenger bridge on rue Chłodna with the wobbly tramway underneath. My list of addresses: 13 rue Leszno, 17 rue Krochmalna, 27 rue Nowolipki, 26 rue Grzybowska, 16 rue Leszno, 19 rue Zamenhof, 18 rue Miła, 22 rue Franciszkańska, 32 rue Elektoralna.

  It’s the enclave of my dreams, hemmed in by high walls. I see only the map, the names of streets I fly over without thinking. The faces and silhouettes are invisible, or rather I only glimpse them, recognizing a few: the pianist, the little smugglers, the singer, the beggar children, the distraught mothers, the cannibalistic mothers. I don’t look closely, though; I’m too afraid. Their eyes, the lice, and their terror fill me with terror, so I fly and fly. I see only the map, the names of streets I fly over without thinking. To avoid Karmelicka, I learn the secret passages between rue Nowolipki and rue Leszno.

  I am the soul of life returned from pacified times.

  And in reality, I am the ghost among the panic-stricken Jews who walk and die between rue Niska and Muranowska. A ghost from the future, bullet-proof, fear-proof, untouchable. Except that I lose my way, I linger over the sidewalks, next to the walls, near the bunkers that no longer exist, and under the paving stones. Alone and horrified, in the nights of my post-war, I hear noises under the earth’s crust, those of molten bodies that keep exploding. And I don’t remember these sounds; I am the only one who hears them.

  “Maman.” I’d yell loud enough for her to hea
r me at the other end of the hallway. She came.

  2

  I WAS BORN IN the 10th arrondissement in Paris on April 30, 1971. In other words, twenty-six years after the end of the War, the only one that counts, the second one. For a long time I thought twenty-six years was a lot. More precisely, I believed for a long time that I’d been born in another space-time—after a sort of new Big Bang, in a new universe, the fabulous world of “post-war”—and that as the chosen child, I was out of harm’s way.

  So let me rephrase. I was born on April 30 in the Year of Grace 26: splendidly alive, marvelously uncontaminated.

  Twenty-six years; is that a little or a lot?

  3

  FROM THE END OF the dark hallway, my mother would come. What did I have to be afraid of? The great sorrows were behind us. This was France in the eighties. Every morning I’d leave for school on rue de Clignancourt and regain my peace of mind. The ground was stable under my feet.

  France was not an abstraction. It had the firmness of the engraved stone on the school building’s pediment, the austere solemnity of the motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” toward which I complicitly lifted my head before going through the doors each day. It had the radiance of the tricolor flag and the unbending gentleness of Marianne’s blind eyes, seen from her perch on a pedestal among children’s drawings hanging on the wall. France had the clear sonority of the old songs we copied into our notebooks; it was the tidy parks of Île-de-France, the joyful abundance of Prisunic grocery stores, the unchanging loftiness of Racine’s plays.

  I used to rejoice on election days when the school was transformed into a polling station: in this blending of functions was the implicit affirmation of a continuity between the schoolchild and the voter, the certainty of an inescapably delineated way of life that would unfold within the schoolyard’s four walls. The ballots lined up in piles on the table, the way everyone picked them up one by one to conceal whichever slip would eventually be slid into the envelope, the voting booths surrounded by a gray curtain where both my parents—with a conspiratorial air—would go in turn, the seriousness of the assessor who called out the names and addresses in a loud voice, the wonderful cry, “A voté!” underscoring the dropping of ballots into the box. These things were props on the set of “Democracy, Liberty, Frenchness” that filled me with joy. The tie my father put on for those occasions further strengthened my feeling that a true mystical communion was taking place: this was the public demonstration of our assimilation, the poignant advent of our identity as citizens. In that magnificent ritual I saw, vaguely, the necessary outcome of centuries in exile.