Dora Bruder

by Patrick Modiano

  Some day, I shall go back to Vienna, a city I haven’t seen for over thirty years. Perhaps I shall find Ernest Bruder’s birth certificate in the Register Office of Vienna’s Jewish community. I shall learn his father’s first name, occupation, and birthplace, his mother’s first name and maiden name. And whereabouts they had lived in that zone of the 2d district, somewhere between the Northern Station, the Prater, and the Danube.

  Child and adolescent, he would have known the Prater, with its cafés, and its theater, the home of the Budapester. And the Sweden Bridge. And the courtyard of the Commodities Exchange, near the Taborstrasse. And the market square of the Carmelites.

  In 1919, his life as a twenty-year-old in Vienna had been harder than mine. Following the first defeats of the Austrian army, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from Galicia, Bukovina, and the Ukraine had arrived in successive waves to crowd into the slums around the Northern Station. A city adrift, cut off from an empire that had ceased to exist. Ernest Bruder must have been indistinguishable from those bands of unemployed roaming the streets of shuttered shops.

  Or did he come from a less poverty-stricken background than the refugees from the east? The son of a Taborstrasse shopkeeper, perhaps? How are we to know?

  On a file card, one of thousands in an index created some twenty years later to facilitate the roundup of Jews during the Occupation, and which still lies around to this day at the Veterans’ Administration, Ernest Bruder is described as “French legionnaire, 2d class.” So he must have enlisted in the Foreign Legion, though I have no means of knowing precisely when. 1919? 1920?

  A man enlisted for five years. He didn’t even need to go to France, it was enough to visit a French consulate. Was that what Ernest Bruder did, in Austria? Or was he already in France by then? Either way, along with other Germans and Austrians in his situation, he was probably sent to the barracks at Belfort and Nancy, where they were not exactly received with open arms. Then it was Marseille and the Fort Saint-Jean, where the reception was cooler still. After that, the troopship: in Morocco, it seemed, Lyautey was short of thirty thousand troops.

  I’m trying to reconstitute Ernest Bruder’s tour of duty. The bounty, handed out at Sidi Bel Abbès. The condition of most enlisted men—Germans, Austrians, Russians, Rumanians, Bulgarians—is so miserable that they are dazed by the idea of receiving a bounty. They can’t believe their luck. Hastily, they stuff the money into their pockets, as if it might be taken back from them. Then comes the training, long runs over the dunes, interminable marches under a leaden African sun. For volunteers from Central Europe, like Ernest Bruder, it is hard going: they have been undernourished throughout adolescence, owing to four years of wartime rationing.

  Next, the barracks at Meknès, Fez, or Marrakesh. They are sent on operations intended to pacify the still rebellious territories of Morocco.

  April 1920. Fighting at Bekrit and the Ras-Tarcha. June 1921. Legion battalion under Major Lambert engaged in the Djebel Hayane. March 1922. Fighting at Chouf-ech-Cherg. Captain Roth. May 1922. Fighting at Tizi Adni. Nicolas battalion. April 1923. Fighting at Arbala, and in the Taza corridor. May 1923. Heavy fighting for the Talrant Bab-Brida, taken under intense fire by Naegelin’s legionnaires. On the night of the 26th, in a surprise attack, the Naegelin battalion occupies the Ichendirt massif. June 1923. Fighting at Tadout. Naegelin battalion takes the ridge. Legionnaires raise the tricolor over an important casbah to the sound of bugles. Fighting at Oued Athia, where the Barrière battalion has to make two bayonet charges. Buchsenschutz battalion takes entrenched positions on the pinnacle south of Bou-Khamouj. Fighting in the El-Mers basin. July 1923. Fighting on the Immouzer plateau. Cattin battalion. Buchsenschutz battalion. Susini and Jenoudet battalions. August 1923. Fighting at Oued Tamghilt.

  At night, in this landscape of stone-strewn sand, did he dream of Vienna, the city of his birth, and the chestnut trees of the Hauptallee? The file of Ernest Bruder, “French legionnaire, 2d class” also indicates: “100% disabled.” In which of these battles was he wounded?

  At the age of twenty-five, he was back on the streets of Paris. The Legion must have released him from his engagement because of his war wound. I don’t suppose he talked about it to anybody. Not that anybody would have been interested. I’m almost sure he didn’t receive a disability pension. He was never given French nationality. In fact, I’ve seen his disability mentioned only once, and that was in one of the police files designed to facilitate the roundups during the Occupation.

  .................

  IN 1924, ERNEST BRUDER MARRIED A YOUNG WOMAN OF seventeen, Cécile Burdej, born 17 April 1907 in Budapest. I don’t know where this marriage took place, nor do I know the names of their witnesses. How did they happen to meet? Cécile Burdej had arrived in Paris the year before, with her parents, her brother, and her four sisters. A Jewish family of Russian origin, they had probably settled in Budapest at the beginning of the century.

  Life in Budapest and Vienna being equally hard after the First World War, they had had to flee west yet again. They ended up in Paris, at the Jewish refuge in the Rue Lamarck. Within a month of their arrival, three of the girls, aged fourteen, twelve, and ten, were dead of typhoid fever.

  Were Cécile and Ernest Bruder already living in the Avenue Liégeard, Sevran, at the time of their marriage? Or in a hotel in Paris? For the first years of their marriage, after Dora’s birth, they always lived in hotel rooms.

  They are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous. Inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered that they had lived. Often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown.

  I tracked down Ernest and Cécile Bruder’s niece. I talked to her on the telephone. The memories that she retains of them are those of childhood, at once fuzzy and sharp. She remembers her uncle’s gentleness, his kindness. It was she who gave me the few details that I have noted down about their family. She had heard it said that before they lived in the hotel on the Boulevard Ornano, Ernest, Cécile, and their daughter, Dora, had lived in another hotel. In a street off the Rue des Poissonniers. Looking at the street map, I read her out a succession of names. Yes, that was it, the Rue Polonceau. But she had never heard any mention of Sevran, nor Freinville, nor the Westinghouse factory.

  It is said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of their previous inhabitants. Stamp: an imprint, hollow or in relief. Hollow, I should say, in the case of Ernest and Cécile Bruder, of Dora. I have a sense of absence, of emptiness, whenever I find myself in a place where they have lived.

  Two hotels, for that date, in the Rue Polonceau: the tenant of one, at number 49, was called Roquette. In the telephone directory he appears under Hôtel Vin. The other, at number 32, was owned by a Charles Campazzi. As hotels, they had a bad reputation. Today, they no longer exist.

  Often, around 1968, I would follow the boulevards as far as the arches of the overhead métro. My starting point was the Place Blanche. In December, a traveling fair occupied the open ground. Its lights grew dimmer the nearer you got to the Boulevard de la Chapelle. At the time, I knew nothing of Dora Bruder and her parents. I remember that I had a peculiar sensation as I hugged the wall of Lariboisière Hospital, and again on crossing the railway tracks, as though I had penetrated the darkest part of Paris. But it was merely the contrast, after the dazzling lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, with the black, interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the métro arches . . .

  Nowadays, on account of the railway lines, the proximity of the Gare du Nord and the rattle of the high-speed trains overhead, I still think of this part of the Boulevard de la Chapelle as a network of escape routes . . . A place where nobody would stay for long. A crossroads, where everybody went their separate ways to the four points of the compass.

  All the same, I made a note of local school
s where, if they still exist, I might find Dora Bruder’s name in the register:

  Nursery school: 3 Rue Saint-Luc

  Primary schools for girls: 11 Rue Cavé, 43 Rue des Poissonniers, Impasse d’Oran

  .................

  AND, AT THE PORTE DE CLIGNANCOURT, THE YEARS slipped by till the outbreak of war. I know nothing about the Bruders during this time. Was Cécile already working as a “furrier’s seamstress,” or rather, as it says in the files, “salaried garment worker”? Her niece thinks that she was employed in a workshop near the Rue de Ruisseau, but she can’t be sure. Was Ernest Bruder still working as an unskilled laborer, if not at the Westinghouse factory in Freinville, then elsewhere, in some other suburb? Or had he too found work in a garment workshop in Paris? Next to the words trade or profession on the file that they had drawn up on him during the Occupation, and on which I had read “French legionnaire, 2d class, 100% disabled,” it says “None.”

  A few photographs from this period. The earliest, their wedding day. They are seated, their elbows resting on a sort of pedestal. She is enveloped in a long white veil that trails to the floor and seems to be knotted at her left ear. He wears tails with a white bow tie. A photograph with their daughter, Dora. They are seated, Dora standing between them: she can’t be more than two years old. A photograph of Dora, surely taken after a special school assembly. She is aged twelve or thereabouts and wears a white dress and ankle socks. She holds a book in her right hand. Her hair is crowned by a circlet of what appear to be white flowers. Her left hand rests on the edge of an enormous white cube patterned with rows of black geometric motifs, clearly a studio prop. Another photograph, taken in the same place at the same period, perhaps on the same day: the floor tiles are recognizable, as is the big white cube with black geometric motifs on which Cécile Bruder is perched. Dora stands on her left, in a high-necked dress, her left arm bent across her body so as to place her hand on her mother’s shoulder. In another photograph with her mother, Dora is about twelve years old, her hair shorter than in the previous picture. They are standing in front of what appears to be an old wall, though it must be one of the photographer’s screens. Both wear black dresses with a white collar. Dora stands slightly in front and to the right of her mother. An oval-shaped photograph in which Dora is slightly older—thirteen or fourteen, longer hair—and all three are in single file, their faces turned toward the camera: first Dora and her mother, both in white blouses, then Ernest Bruder, in jacket and tie. A photograph of Cécile Bruder in front of what appears to be a suburban house. The lefthand wall in the foreground is covered in a mass of ivy. She is sitting on the edge of three concrete steps. She wears a light summer dress. In the background, the silhouette of a child with her back to the camera, her arms and legs bare, wearing either a black cardigan or a bathing suit. Dora? And behind a wooden fence, the facade of another house, with a porch and a single upstairs window. Where could this be?

  An earlier photograph of Dora alone, aged nine or ten. Caught in a ray of sunshine, entirely surrounded by shadow, she might be on a rooftop. Dressed in a white blouse and ankle socks, she stands, hand on hip, her right foot placed on the concrete rim of what appears to be a large cage or aviary, although, owing to the shadow, you can’t make out the animals or birds confined there. These shadows and patches of sunlight are those of a summer’s day.

  Dora Bruder with her mother

  Dora Bruder with her mother and grandmother

  .................

  OTHER SUMMER DAYS WERE SPENT IN CLIGNANCOURT. Her parents would take Dora to the Cinéma Ornano 43. It was just across the street. Or did she go on her own? From a very young age, according to her cousin, she had been rebellious, independent, with an eye for the boys. The hotel room was far too cramped for three people.

  As a child, she would have played in the Square Clignancourt. At times, this part of town seemed like a village. In the evenings, the neighbors would place their chairs outside and sit on the sidewalk for a chat. Or take a lemonade together on the café terrace. Sometimes men who could have been either real goatherds or else peddlers from the fairs would come by with a few goats and sell you tall glasses of milk for almost nothing. The froth gave you a white mustache.

  At the Porte de Clignancourt, the toll house and gate.1 To its left, between the flea market and the tall apartment blocks of the Boulevard Ney, an entire district of shacks, warehouses, acacias, and low-built houses, since pulled down. This wasteland had impressed me, aged fourteen. I thought I recognized it in two or three photographs, taken in winter: a kind of esplanade, a passing bus in sight. A truck at a standstill, seemingly forever. Waiting beside an expanse of snow, a trailer and a black horse. And in the far background, the dim masses of high buildings.

  I remember experiencing for the first time that sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground. As yet, I was ignorant of the existence of Dora Bruder. Perhaps—in fact, I’m sure of it—she explored this zone that, for me, evokes secret lovers’ trysts, pitiful moments of lost happiness. Here, reminders of the countryside still surfaced in the street names: Allée du Puits, Allée du Métro, Allée des Peupliers, Impasse des Chiens.

  1. One of the 18th-c. gates (barrières) in the fortifications of Paris; originally control points for game, later also used for goods subject to excise tax, they were abolished in the late 1920s.

  .................

  ON 9 MAY 1940, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, DORA BRUDER was enrolled in the boarding school of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, run by the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy1 at 60–62 Rue de Picpus in the 12th arrondissement.

  The school register contains the following entry:

  Name, last and first: Bruder, Dora

  Date and place of birth: 26 February 1926, Paris 12

  Parents: Ernest and Cécile Bruder née Brudej

  Family status: legitimate

  Date and conditions of admission: 9 May 1940. Full boarder

  Date and reason for departure: 14 December 1941. Pupil has run away

  What were her parents’ reasons for sending her to this religious school? No doubt it was difficult living three to a room in the Boulevard Ornano hotel. I wonder if Ernest and Cécile Bruder, as ex-Austrians and “nationals of the Reich,” were not threatened with a form of internment, Austria having ceased to exist in 1938 and become part of the “Reich.”

  In the autumn of 1939, men who were ex-Austrian or otherwise nationals of the “Reich” were interned in “assembly camps.” They were divided into two categories: suspect and non-suspect. Non-suspects were taken to Yves-du-Manoir stadium, in Colombes. Then, in December, they were included with the group known as “foreign statute laborers.” Was Ernest Bruder among those laborers?

  On 13 May 1940, four days after Dora Bruder’s arrival at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, ex-Austrian women and nationals of the Reich were called up in their turn and taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they were interned for thirteen days. Then, with the approach of the German army, they were transferred to the camp at Gurs, in the Basses-Pyrénées. Was Cécile Bruder among those called up?

  You were placed in bizarre categories you had never heard of and with no relation to who you really were. You were called up. You were interned. If only you could understand why.

  I also wonder how Cécile and Ernest Bruder came to hear of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school. Who had advised them to send Dora there?

  I imagine that, by the age of fourteen, she must have given proof of independence, and that the rebellious spirit her cousin mentioned to me had already manifested itself. Her parents felt that she was in need of discipline. For this, these Jews chose a Christian institution. But were they themselves practicing Jews? And what choice did they have? According to the biographical note on the institution’s Mother Superior when Dora was a boarder there, the pupils at the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie came from poor backgrounds: “Often they are orphans, or children depende
nt on social welfare, those to whom Our Lord has always shown His special love.” And, in a brochure about the Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy, “The Saint-Coeur-de-Marie was called upon to render signal service to young children and adolescents from the capital’s least fortunate families.”

  The teaching certainly went beyond the arts of housekeeping and sewing. The Sisters of the Christian Schools of Divine Mercy, whose mother house was the ancient abbey of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy, had founded the charitable institution of the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, Rue de Picpus, in 1852. In those days, it was a vocational boarding school for five hundred girls, the daughters of working men’s families, with a staff of seventy-five nuns.

  At the time of the fall of France in June 1940, nuns and pupils were evacuated to the department of Maine-et-Loire. Dora would have left with them, on one of the last packed trains still running from the Gare d’Orsay and the Gare d’Austerlitz. They formed part of the endless procession of refugees on routes leading southward to the Loire.

  July, and the return to Paris. Boarding-school life. I don’t know what the school uniform consisted of. Was it, quite simply, the clothes listed in the notice about the search for Dora: maroon pullover, navy blue skirt, brown gym shoes? And, over this, a smock? I can more or less guess the daily timetable. Rise about six. Chapel. Classroom. Refectory. Classroom. Playground. Refectory. Classroom. Chapel. Dormitory. Day of rest, Sunday. I imagine that life behind those walls was hard for these girls for whom Our Lord had always shown His special love.