by Alba Arikha
“Listen, I don’t understand,” he said, speaking quickly. “Why did you get in touch with me now, after so many years? Why not before? Something must have made you do it. I’m a writer. I know these things,” he added.
“I read about you and your book in the paper,” I blurted out. “I saw the name, the title, and I knew it was you. I wanted to get in touch. I was curious.”
“Did you buy my book?”
“Yes I did,” I said. “But I haven’t read it yet.”
“OK. Fine. But listen,” Ezra was saying. “How did you know it was me, since my name isn’t the same?”
I breathed in deeply. How indeed? “Because Flora told me about you. She knew. Your mother wrote to her. And I never forgot your name when I heard it,” I added, pre-empting further prodding.
“What?” Ezra exclaimed. “My mother wrote to her? She never told me!” He paused, and I heard him light a cigarette. “What else do you know?” he asked. I could hear him blowing the smoke into the receiver.
“Not much,” I answered simply. “Just that your father and Flora had loved each other and she was devastated when she boarded that boat back to France.”
“Yes, I can imagine. What happened was terrible.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch with Flora,” I continued. “She was fascinating.”
“Yes,” Ezra said softly. “My mother said that she was great. But she also said their relationship was a complicated one. It would have been, of course.”
I froze. “Why?”
“My mother and Ezra had been together before Flora came on the scene. She never told you that?”
“No…”
“That’s interesting. Well, my father left Lotta for Flora. My mother was broken-hearted. It was terrible for her.”
“I don’t remember Flora mentioning that,” I said, dumbfounded by the news.
Was this true? Something told me it wasn’t. Lotta’s letter had stipulated that it had only happened once. So she had to have made this up in order to protect her son. To make him feel wanted by mother and father alike. No one likes to know they’re the result of a one-night stand. She had concocted the story that she and Ezra had been a couple. That they had loved each other. And then Flora had come along, breaking up their affair. But that couldn’t have happened. Relationships such as those are never kept secret. Flora would have been bound to find out one way or another, and she would have written about it. Therefore I didn’t believe what Lotta had told her son. What she had shared with Flora was the truth. A cruel truth, but then again Lotta had always been jealous of Flora; that much was clear. She wanted to ensure she could dig that knife in one more time before closing the Ezra-and-Flora chapter.
And it was certainly not my place to interfere with her son’s version.
My head was spinning. I needed to find out more. I needed to speak to Lotta. She was the only one who could lift the lid on Flora’s younger years. No matter how jealous she had been, surely enough time had now elapsed since those events of 1946. But how could I ask Ezra without appearing suspicious? There was no reason for me to speak to Lotta, unless I knew something he didn’t.
Then I stopped myself. Did it matter? Why was I becoming so embroiled in this dead woman’s life? Shouldn’t I be concentrating on Maurice exclusively?
The answer came to me immediately. Everything about Flora Baum mattered. Her past, her present, her future.
Everything.
I took my courage in both hands and asked Ezra if he might give me his mother’s email address. I explained that I wanted to find out more about Flora and her time in Palestine.
“OK. But you’re not related to Flora, so why are you so interested in this woman?”
“I’ve always been interested in her,” I declared.
“But why do you want to speak to my mother?” he insisted. “What can she tell you that I can’t?
“She knew Flora. You didn’t.”
Ezra paused. “Yes, that is correct. But listen, I don’t know you. I know nothing about you. And there’s something about this story that doesn’t add up. I think you’re keeping information from me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.”
“You’re wrong,” I replied firmly. “Like I said, I’m just very interested in the whole story, in Palestine and in Flora.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ezra declared. “I repeat, I think you’re keeping information from me.”
“I’m not,” I repeated, less firmly than before. “But if you’d rather we left it, then let’s do that. Thank you for your time.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s leave it.” He paused. “And you should read my book. I believe you’ll find it interesting.”
He hung up before I could say anything more.
*
A lanky woman from the adoption agency was the one who interviewed me. She had highlighted hair and thin lips. She wasn’t sympathetic, but neither was she antagonistic. It was hard to determine her age – late thirties, early forties – but it was easy to see that she was efficient. Despite her dulcet tones, the nature of her questions and her requests for me to elaborate on some of my answers demonstrated an ability to read between the lines which made me feel uncomfortable.
“So why now?” was one of the first questions Pauline asked. “What made you decide to come and look for your cousin now?”
I hesitated and she saw it. “I inherited a box of books from Flora. In one of the books there was her son’s birth certificate. I had heard a lot about him from my father, but never did much about it. This made me want to do more.”
“I see. So you weren’t interested in finding out about him before?”
“Yes, of course I was! But I didn’t know enough about him. There’s much more urgency now that Flora’s dead. And I didn’t really know how to go about it,” I added. “I didn’t know who to contact, until I saw that birth certificate…”
Pauline’s eyes rested on mine. “Tell me a bit more about what you know of the adoption. What circumstances was Flora in when she gave the baby up for adoption? Do you know any of her family members?”
I told her everything I knew and she listened carefully. “Everyone on my father’s side is dead,” I concluded. “Flora’s son is the only one left. So here I am, searching for answers.”
Pauline nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see that. But you see, Hannah, a moment ago you mentioned that your father used to tell you a lot about Flora and her son. Then you said that you didn’t really know about him. I’m confused. Help me out here.” She twiddled her pencil between her fingers as she awaited my answer. I felt hot, and my mouth was dry. I had meant to bring some water with me. But I couldn’t ask for it now. It would betray the sense of anxiety that was now permeating my very bones.
“OK,” I said, looking at her and trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m going to give you the answer.”
I opened my bag and pulled out the notebook. I placed it in front of her and explained. “Flora left me her books, but she also left me her handwritten memoir. It recounts her terrible years in the war, how she lost her family in a concentration camp and how she was forced to give Maurice – or whatever his name is now – up for adoption.” I paused. “What I read was so harrowing I felt that I had to do something and do it now. I thought Flora’s son might want to know where his birth mother comes from and might want to meet his cousins.”
“Yes,” Pauline said, “yes, that makes sense. But why didn’t you mention the memoir before?”
“It’s a very private document,” I replied. “And a private story.”
“But this is our job,” Pauline said, leaning towards me. “Private stories are our job,” she added. “What can be more private than an adoption? You should have mentioned it before.”
“Yes, yes, I can see that.” I was getting nervous again. But then I quickly realized that
there was no reason to. Pauline thumbed quickly through the memoir, then produced the declaration, which I duly signed, managing to steady my shaking hand. “Good luck with your cousin,” she said, smiling. “We don’t get many war stories like yours around here.”
*
I cooked Az and Stéphanie supper that night. Beef stew with roast potatoes, my mother’s signature dish. I added chopped minted courgettes and made a tarte Tatin for Stéphanie. We drank a lot of wine, possibly too much wine, and played a raucous game of Scrabble with Stéphanie. Az took pictures of the two of us – of me drinking a glass of wine, Stéphanie lying on the sofa, the two of us laughing.
Az was happy whenever Stéphanie stayed with us. And he was thrilled we got along so well. She was slowly opening up to me, and a few times I had gone to pick her up at school. I had never had such an immediate rapport with any child before, and I could feel the newness of it, the excitement of it, like spice on the tip of my tongue.
“You’re nice,” Stéphanie told me one day, as we were walking towards the Tube from the Lycée.
I nearly cried when she said it. I nearly told her I loved her, but that would have been premature. So we walked into a French bakery on Harrington Road, and I bought us both two large chocolate éclairs instead, and we sat around a little wrought-iron table outside and ate them with sticky fingers.
I was ready for a child, for marriage, for everything, and I told Az as much, after Stéphanie had gone to bed.
At first we spoke about us: our plans for the future. A baby, a wedding. We had discussed it before, but now we made more concrete plans. A summer or autumn wedding. Somewhere by the sea? Or here in London? Perhaps I might be pregnant then? We had been trying; a week more and I would find out. If I wasn’t pregnant, we would start again. And if that didn’t work, said Az, we would adopt a baby. “Algerian,” we added in unison, then laughed.
The conversation turned to Flora and Maurice. I told him about Pauline, about the administrative red tape I had managed to circumvent. And this is where Az caught me off guard. “You could have easily avoided that red tape completely, by not going on this crazy search for Flora’s son. You chose to do it, but you didn’t have to.”
“But of course I did!” I exclaimed. “Come on, Az, don’t you remember? You were just as shocked as I was! You found Flora’s story just as harrowing as Ben and I did!”
“I suppose I did, yes,” he admitted. “But I didn’t think you’d actually go to the trouble of finding him. And Ezra’s son? Why would you get in touch with him? Flora’s past with Ezra has nothing to do with her story with Maurice.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I replied. “One led to the other.”
He held my hand. “OK, maybe. But she’s dead, mon amour. You don’t owe her anything. You don’t need to investigate this connection. Pas besoin de donner un coup de pied dans la fourmillière, as we would say. No need to kick the hornet’s nest. You could just leave it be.”
“I certainly couldn’t. I owe it to her and her memory.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “But it’s not the approach she chose.”
“What do you mean?” I released myself from his grasp.
“I mean that Flora didn’t come looking for you. She could have said something after she moved away, sent you a note of explanation about her behaviour. But she chose to keep it to herself for nineteen years and do nothing about it during all that time, even though her conscience urged her to.”
“OK, but in the end she did, right? She left me her memoir. It may have taken nineteen years, but at least she did it. Are you saying that I should hold a grudge against her? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” he answered calmly. “But you were young, vulnerable. It reveals something about her. I know that she felt very bad about leaving without saying anything to you. And I know that it was done with the best of intentions. But she didn’t do anything to rectify the situation.”
“OK but we’re not dealing with an ordinary woman here,” I answered, slightly shaken. “You read what she went through. It’s a miracle she came out sane at all. Her whole life was one of loss. And she was trying to protect me, because she knew loss was coming my way. She even admitted that she had made a mistake. You read what she said about things not mattering enough. So I forgive her everything. I love her. She was a good woman, an extraordinary woman.”
“Yes,” Az agreed. “But she should have known better.”
“I totally disagree and I don’t think that anything in this case is about knowing better. It’s about survival.”
“OK, OK. You’re upset.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m upset.”
He pulled me back towards him. “I’m going to tell you a story. Are you ready for it?”
I was still upset. “No.”
“Well I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“If you must,” I mumbled.
“I don’t. But I think you’re going to like it,” he said. “I promise.”
“OK. But what does it have to do with Flora?”
“You’ll see. It’s about my mother and Oran and a poster.”
“All right, go ahead,” I sighed. It was hard to resist Az. Whenever I sulked, he knew how to make me snap out of it. Except for this time. This was more than a sulk. I felt that he completely misunderstood the situation. And it bothered me; but he didn’t seem to care.
“As you know,” he began, “after my father was killed, we fled to France and moved to a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Aubervilliers. Horrible, dismal place. My mother, who had been a teacher in Oran, took a job as a cleaner. She could find nothing else. Every night I would come home and I could smell the detergent on her fingers. It was shit, really, and the only thing we wanted to do was go back to Algeria. But there was a civil war going on. So my mother found an alternative. She got us a poster she had found somewhere, not sure where. It was a large poster of Oran, and she hung it in our small kitchen. It took up the entire wall, but we didn’t mind. We looked at it every morning before I set off for school. The turquoise sea, the white rooftops, the orange trees. ‘This is what we will return to as soon as the war is over,’ she used to promise me, and it gave me hope. The squalor we lived in now couldn’t last. It was only temporary, right?”
“Right.”
“But then the years went by, and my mother continued to clean houses, and a rich family decided to employ her full-time. Eventually, we moved to Paris. We found a furnished and very ugly small flat in the 12th Arrondissement, but I loved it. To me it was magical. Beautiful. A new beginning. But my mother didn’t think so. She still kept talking about how we would return home. She would point at the Oran poster which hung once again in our new kitchen. ‘This is where we belong, not here,’ she would repeat.
“But things had changed for me. By then, that image of Oran had stopped being a symbol of hope, and became one of resentment. I didn’t want to return anywhere. I was happy in Paris, at my school, with my new friends. I had also begun to take pictures with a second-hand camera my mother had bought me. I had found my vocation. I wanted to photograph the present, not the past. Now I ignored the poster of Oran glaring at me from the kitchen wall. I had become French and felt French. Oran was a vestige of a land we had passed through on the way to somewhere else. When I told my mother, she went crazy. She threw a plate against the wall and screamed. Then she tore the poster off the wall and began to rip it to pieces. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me away and screamed again and again until I was so distraught that I began to cry, and then my mother broke down too and cried with me and we clutched each other, the two of us, standing in the middle of our small, ugly kitchen, strewn with bits of paper, and gazed at the wall: it was nearly empty except for a tiny slice of turquoise, where the sea had once sparkled.”
We were both quiet for a while. “It’s a very touching stor
y, Az,” I finally said. “But what does it have to do with Flora?”
He turned his face towards me. I could distinguish his features in the dark. “It has to do with the fact that my mother knew I was right. We couldn’t go back, and chances were we never would. There’s an Arab saying: ‘What is coming is better than what is gone’. If we returned, it wouldn’t be what we expected. We had changed. We had become aliens in both countries. We knew it was best to move forward. To focus on what was coming and not look back.”
“So you’re saying that I shouldn’t go looking for Flora’s son…”
“Yes. I think it’s best you keep the story as it is. A wonderful one, written by someone you vaguely knew. No more, no less. Don’t go looking for answers.”
“But why?”
“Because this shouldn’t become your story. If it does, it may carry you into a place you might regret visiting.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” Az said, after a brief pause. “I just feel it.”
“Well, I still want to find him,” I answered softly. “I don’t expect anything. I’m ready for any eventuality. And you’re too late: the story became mine as soon as I started reading it.”
I had become so intrinsically linked to Flora that I had to remind myself that I wasn’t, in fact, related to her. I didn’t tell Az, but it was the truth. I had read her memoir so many times, I felt as if I really knew her. I could see her as a young girl, walking the streets of Paris. I could picture her mother, standing that day in the sunshine, before she disappeared. I could smell the musty odour in her father’s shop. I could feel the hot stones of Jerusalem and imagine Ezra and Flora mingling among the refined crowd of the King David Hotel. I could see her as a young woman working behind that perfume counter at Selfridges. I even bought Shalimar perfume in order to feel closer, still, to her as well as to her mother. I could feel her despair, after her baby was handed over. Her utter, gut-wrenching despair, the opening of a black void. And I had pictures of her in that psychiatric ward, shackled to a bed as a doctor pressed a button that sent shock waves through her. It was a miracle she hadn’t suffered more long-term problems. Then again, how was I to know that she hadn’t?