The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  I remember Sentinel No. 1, posted on rue Jouffroy d’Abbans. More rarely, rue des Morillons or rue Blanche. Sometimes place Saint-Sulpice. The sentry was a tall man, almost six feet, once brown-haired, now going gray. Distinguishing mark: a stutter. Familiar with the shadows of the Occupation, the uncertain silhouettes of the sixties. I met Sentry No. 1 when I was fourteen, on boulevard Malesherbes. He had feverish eyes, and he walked without looking around him.

  Whenever we ran into each other over the years, always by accident, he would smuggle me secrets under the café table about a seedy cabaret hidden in the recesses of a staircase in Montmartre, the mysteries of empty streets in the 15th arrondissement around the Lost and Found Center, the long waits of his childhood near place Pigalle.

  Sentinel No. 1 methodically paced around the city, hoping to make the vanished shadows reappear with the power of his panicked eyes. The shadows already existed in his silences and hesitations when, sitting across from me, he’d try to speak. “It was a bizarre place … it was a strange place,” he smiled. He would have liked to say more; he couldn’t, so he smiled to show his good will, but he never went further than “it was bizarre.” And in order to say “it was bizarre,” he’d take a deep breath, he’d speed up his delivery, so much that I believed it was only a prologue, but then he’d stop short, smile, and repeat more and more softly, “it was bizarre,” as an excuse, an explanation. And as he sank back into silence, I saw a transparent cohort appear at his sides: traffickers and second-class actresses, runaway teenagers, dead-ends where abandoned children hung around. He’d shielded them, even in his silences, from the forced march of time, and the shadows accompanied him, intangible until, periodically (and I imagine this was also a way of getting rid of them, of sharing with other people the weight of their presence), he gave them a body of words and letters in the books he wrote.

  On pages resembling photosensitive paper, the silhouettes extracted from silences and walks would appear, little by little, as if in a chemical exposure. They carried with them the sweltering days of the month of August, the province towns one escapes by car, and uncertain destinies, all of which—tenuous and paltry framework of history, sensation, minute, movement—would never have been able to be brought to life without his stubbornness.

  I’d seen Sentinel No. 2, Jaro, hanging around the metal gate outside a building, looking at the garden and the lawn, and in front of the white buildings striped with shutters—from a moment of early nineteenth-century folly—in the middle of the rue des Martyrs. In those structures that were only several stories high, giving one the illusion of being in the provinces, Jaro had lived as a child during the Occupation. He’d fled in July 1942 with his parents on the day of the big roundup, the same day my father and his own mother, who were living at the end of a street a few hundred yards up, had taken refuge there. He had told me the story of his flight, and I’d told him the story of my father’s. He’d taken a paper from the inside pocket of his overcoat, and on the back of a leaflet he’d drawn for me that day’s journey, from rue des Martyrs to rue des Écoles. The crossing of the Seine had been an immediate relief, which he represented with a drawing of a smiling cat on a stone bridge. Decades earlier, the old man across from me had been a child-cat who wove in and out of the back alleys of Île Saint-Louis, eventually ending up in hiding with Father-Cat, Mother-Cat, and Sister-Cat in a maid’s room perched high above rue des Écoles. And from those years, when the greatest danger came from a creaking floorboard, he had kept the habit of walking on the tips of his toes. He’d mimic this gentle gait along the closed train lines on boulevard Pereire, but he limped a little and from the back, with his disheveled white hair, he resembled an old elf.

  He had enlisted a few students from Beaux-Arts to paint the walls with big brown-eyed yellow cats who would continue watching over him from the rooftops. He took me by the arm and pointed at them with a sweeping gesture: “my lucky star.” One day in 1943 when the parquet floor had creaked a little loudly, a few hours later there was banging on the door of the maid’s room. Father-Cat, Mother-Cat, Sister-Cat, and Little-Cat recoiled, terrified. In the end, Father-Cat had opened the emergency window and Jaro had fled over the roofs, leaving the others behind him, huddled together.

  He’d say to me, “I know what the quiet façades are hiding.” Crouching on the roof that day, from high above Jaro-Cat had seen the minuscule silhouettes of his parents and sister put into a car; he had also seen, pressed against the gutter, the car pull away in the wide perspective of rue des Écoles and then disappear to the left on rue Saint-Jacques.

  And on that sidewalk, where the presence of the black car and the small silhouettes had already been buried, people walked by, stores were being opened. This was the Paris he saw from an overhang, the streets carved in neat lines; the walls like stone cliffs absorbed the disappearances, enduring without a second thought.

  High up, around rue des Écoles, he knew the incline of every roof, the cornices, the orange chimney blocks, the zinc and the slate, flowing with rain, spots whitened by the sun. Later, during the Liberation, he hadn’t let himself be taken in by the city’s return to normalcy. For him, it had never stopped being the place of flight, of rescue, and of swallowing up. Since then, he had been resisting—solo, an orphan—against the disappearances. To get his revenge he needed to see everything, to understand everything, to know everything about the simultaneous movements on the streets he observed—even when he was walking at the level of the sidewalk—in plunging panoramic view as if he were still perched on his roof. The invisible threads of motorcades, trajectories, the continuous stream of urban movement, limitless cellular river; people passing, buses, girls, horns, boys, métros, hair in the wind, old men, rustling, idleness, children, desperate people, bare legs, trees, conversations, monuments, burning sidewalks, clinking of machines, frantic hands, the dead and the living. He strove to control or even reroute this flow, a traffic controller of accidents and coincidences.

  He told me the story of the blonde girl he’d followed one day in the mid-fifties as she was coming out of the Vélodrome d’Hiver. She had taken the métro to the Bir-Hakeim station and disappeared before he could approach her. At the time, Jaro, who had never gone to school and had never worked, was a professional chess champion. To find this girl again, he decided—the way one introduces a wonderful strategy but also one without any clear rational basis—to station himself every day between six and seven p.m. at the bus stop by 91 place de la Bastille. Naturally, after a few weeks, the girl stepped off of the bus. He approached her, told her the whole story, she agreed to walk with him, and off the two of them went around place de la Bastille, then to the left on rue Saint-Antoine. No money for the restaurant, they walked and kept walking, and they walked so much that they were stopped by the vice squad working undercover in the neighborhood, which at the time was a hot spot for soliciting prostitutes. Explanations were given, they laughed, they set out again. An egg at the counter to calm the nerves and it went on like this for part of the night, walking. They were very respectable. Then, before leaving, the girl swore to Jaro that she had never been to Vél d’Hiv’, and had never taken the métro to Bir-Hakeim, but overall she enjoyed the story.

  He brought me in front of buildings with two entrances, rue de la Bienfaisance, rue de Rome, rue de Cronstadt, and told me stories about dramatic getaways. He mimed the fugitive’s dizziness, showing how, by getting in over there, and coming out over here, he’d thwarted the city’s staid protocols.

  And I, who felt that this was a power—the power of life and survival, resisting against the apparent order of the city, making things disappear and reappear at will without seeming to, pretending, as Jaro did, to be just an anonymous passerby in a gray overcoat while all the while, in reality, he was casting the nets of his knowledge over the mute façades—I learned, I watched, my heart and memory wide open, I wrote down the addresses, I retraced the paths.

  And I defied—peaceful young girl, lungs filled, body exult
ant—I defied the course of time.

  In the small streets behind avenue des Ternes, I walked alongside Sentinel No. 3.

  He moved slowly; the slightest effort wore him out. He was going deaf, and only heard me if I shouted in his ear. We remained silent most of the time, or I’d listen to him speak without even trying to respond. We’d pass in front of Le Franc-Tireur café, the red brick Saint-Ferdinand’s church. We’d climb up toward a quiet little village square, a stone’s throw away from the turbulence of place de l’Étoile. On the terrasse of an almost provincial cafe, Sentinel Gérard—once a timid student at a boarding school in Normandy (fifties), once the respected leader of a small revolutionary group (sixties), once a clandestine emissary for that same group in the farthest countries (seventies)—Gérard, emaciated by sickness, would warm himself, eyes closed, in the sun. He’d stop speaking, appearing to be asleep, and then in a soft voice he would start again, and when his eyes opened after a few minutes, they held a twinkle of irony and tenderness that made me blush.

  On the fourth floor of a building on rue Saint-Ferdinand, he showed me the windows behind which the former director of a group of foreign resisters, Adam, still hid himself away. He hadn’t come to live there until recently, not knowing that on the street perpendicular to his there had once been a brothel, later transformed into a swinger’s club, that was managed by a young woman who had denounced some members of his organization during the war. Gérard told me that one of his friends in the sixties, Pierre, vibrant Pierre as he called him, had decided one night to go straight to place des Ternes and bump her off, the manager, the ginger, in her brothel named after an opera singer. In the end Pierre had gotten himself drunk out of his mind in a bar, he had given up on killing the manager, and he’d come back to the Latin Quarter looking slightly pitiful. Pierre had since died, Pierre whose hero was one of the young people under the orders of Adam, the old man of rue Saint-Ferdinand. Pierre who had been outlived by the ginger manager, Pierre whose tall silhouette and dark eyes Gérard saw once more. Pierre’s useless violence, the way he wanted to make others settle debts that could never be paid. “Born too late to fulfill his dreams of great fighting, and condemned to farcical repetitions, he suffered,” said Gérard, who claimed to suffer from the same disease: nostalgia for History.

  “Oh beautiful, grand, tragic history,” he intoned in the sun on place Saint-Ferdinand, “beautiful history, beautiful scarf, I wrap myself, you wrap yourself, blood-adornment that you watch from far away … no splatters, no, just harmless shivers, indifferent to the breeze and tepid climates, you yearn for storms, a bovarism of catastrophes. Calm amplitude of the retrospective, you evaluate the choices, you hoard the dilemmas for yourself; horrified, so nobly horrified (so much you can no longer sleep at night!), you measure murders and battles; you enroll yourself, panting, in the race of marionettes, heroic, soldierly, martyred marionettes whose first names, habits, and addresses you know: cop, novelist, historian, empathetic spectator from the future.

  “You live every life, you jump from one marionette to the other (the choices are endless). You’re almost there, you’re almost there, and you obviously never really get there. From the peak of your time, from the imposed end of your linear time, it will remain unknown to you, sealed forever: the insane minute swollen by the biting wind, the moment of dislocation that is no longer inhabited by words or by memories … only the awareness of the body as a string hanging over nothing, the painful, terrifying awareness of the frozen body. And your heart hammers, thrusting fear along your legs, open sphincters, your back is heavy with sweat, hunger, cold, thirst, blood, cries. When all the world gives way, when, in this desert, there is nothing left but this body and its foreseeable death. Tell me, what can we feel about that minute? It’s as if it was behind a transparent pane of glass and we are knocking, we’re knocking, eyes wide open, bulging, in vain.

  “My little girl”—and he would stroke my cheek, in the shelter of the sidewalk on place Saint-Ferdinand—“we all, all of us, hold onto our beautiful histories, our tragic histories, the ones that suit us, the ones that occupy the daydreams of peaceful times, and we gently pull the strings, we coincide, we get agitated, we occupy ourselves—noble occupation.” And he laughed.

  I knew, though, that despite his speeches, despite most of all his weakness and his deafness, Gérard still dragged himself to the four corners of Paris to visit those he called his “old revolutionaries.” They came from every country: Romania, Poland, Spain, Czechoslovakia. For Gérard, that geography of ancient fights was superimposed on the city’s topography, even covering it up: he would go to Hungary, rue Amelot, to Poland, porte de Bagnolet, to Spain, rue Sorbier. He climbed into minuscule apartments, taking care of papers, retirements, pension requests that even the fiercest of the old revolutionaries had to submit in order to survive. Then he’d turn the volume on his hearing aids all the way up, and in the half-light, in armchairs with old covers that were often the sole survivors of exiles and emigrations, he would scratch down a few details, a few dates.

  He enjoyed listening to the broken, homespun French of his old friends. He knew quite well that the accents that had become so familiar to him, that could single-handedly evoke a multitude of distant landscapes, would soon die out like the transitional dialects of a tribe that has disappeared, and that one day he’d wake up with not one person left on the surface of the earth who would speak this way, and the idea of this loss left him more unhappy than even the prospect of his friends’ “real” deaths.

  For that wobbly language—as much as the faces, the photos, the autobiographical accounts taken down on copy paper—bore witness: it spoke of lost countries, of exiles, and each misplaced tonic accent, each error, was like a scrap snatched from life, a scrap of flesh, a scrap of straw, the accumulation of which had eventually formed those fragile nests just outside of Paris.

  Janina, the Polish woman, was Gérard’s favorite. She lived on place de la Porte de Bagnolet in a brick low-income building. She was Pierre’s mother. After spending the war in France, she had returned to Poland. She had not returned to Paris until after her son’s death. She spent her days between her bed and the single chair near the yellow plastic table on which she had her meals. The small room was always dark, the curtains drawn, a lamp turned on in the corner. In the dimness, Gérard could still make out her radiant violet eyes, the only trace of what she had been. Gérard would sit on the chair, his knee almost touching Janina’s as she sat hunched on the edge of the bed. She could stay sitting like that for hours, her face in her hands, in silence. Gérard would wait.

  Janina started speaking for herself. She compiled an inventory of certain episodes in her life, organizing them in a different order depending on the day, without regard for the chronology. The damp walls of the prison in Warsaw where she’d been locked away between the two wars for illegal activities and communist propaganda, the alignment of the twenty-five birch trees along the path in front of her father’s house, the sparkling of their green silver leaves, the sweat that ran down her legs one August day in Lyon as she carried weapons hidden in Pierre’s baby carriage, weapons intended for an attack on German soldiers. The lost look of the young boy to whom she had given one of the grenades, the stealthy way he hid it in his pocket, the feeling of conspiracy like an unending road that unfurled in front of you, the congested train platform at Gare de l’Est when she’d fled from Poland in secret and disembarked in Paris for the first time, the return to the Polish People’s Republic, without her child, without Pierre, the fervor of the marches, the slogans, the building of socialism, Pierre raised by his father coming for the first time to see her in Warsaw, their loneliness, the ruins of Warsaw, understanding and letting it truly sink into your head that there was nothing, of all the side streets, avenues, gardens, of that entire city, nothing that remained except sand and stones. Warsaw 1945, a swamp of ruins, and at dusk, jumping from the burned-out façades, rowdy groups of orphaned children who threw stones and thought they saw
fork-footed devils snaking in and out between the pieces of wall. They would surround the devils and she-devils, saying, “Jew, Jew, devil, Jewess, she-devil, where are your forked feet?” They would spit, cross themselves, and disappear again behind the collapsed walls. It was a landscape of apocalypse bordered by the coursing of the Vistula.

  Janina stretched out on the bed and turned her head toward Gérard. “You’re not so deaf when you make an effort.” And Gérard, the little man from Normandy whom the promise of revolution had once dragged like a hurricane out of the cloistered universe of the woodlands, Gérard, who was ever after bound by the implacable boundaries that illness had drawn inside him, Gérard found in those hours with Janina, in that pitiful shoebox apartment, beside that old woman who had seen everything, the certainty that a movement between souls was possible, one outside the limits of bodies, places, and time.

  He told me everything, leaving nothing out, in the bright sunlight on the terrasse of the café at place Saint-Ferdinand because, though he didn’t say so, he hoped that later, when Janina had died and he too had disappeared, whenever I passed la Porte de Bagnolet, among the cars, next to the signs for the périphérique, looking up at the top floor of the pale brick low-income building, I would be able to bring to life inside me the sparkling of the leaves of the twenty-five birch trees that ran the length of Janina’s father’s house.

  6

  SO, IT WAS THE end of the twentieth century and my mother had started searching for her father.

  That old president was still here, his face petrified like a mummy’s. As death grew near, he didn’t conceal as much, and he no longer tried claiming nothing was wrong, though perhaps that was just for show. He even seemed to be giggling at what an evil trick he’d played: Generation Mitterrand, what a joke! In the era of computers and the first portable phones, that old president was more Fourth Republic than ever. I had only to see him—prim and impenetrable against a background of Elysian gilding, reserving his enthusiasm for prejudiced writers’ most rancid pages, their sentences about the great France of old, scheduled and straight-lined, standing at attention—and I understood, little by little, just how naive I had been. This “former” naiveté exasperated me, but it was also a moving example of extreme youth’s messy hopes, those same hopes that make you jump and run without fear of being split apart, as if your body and spirit were overtaken by an uninterrupted movement impossible to contain. I had been very naive: the post-war had never really happened.