I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  Josée was proud of the space. She showed us the electric metal blinds that descended like storefront grates, the same kind Paul had had in his bachelor pad years ago. She demonstrated the modern light switches she’d had installed, panels of touch-sensitive concentric circles that proved impossible to control. She showed us the luxurious tiled shower, with its sliding mirrored door.

  “The shower is mirrored on the inside as well,” she said mischievously.

  I stepped out onto the balcony. In the distance, a toy-sized Eiffel Tower marked the skyline, the way it seemed to from nearly every vantage point in Paris. Close by and yet out of sight, I could hear a playground. How strange that the sound of children playing was so universal, I thought, uninflected by language or culture.

  Josée joined me. “I used to attend the school next door,” she told me.

  “When you were how old?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Until I was six? And then of course there was the war.”

  I nodded, realizing how little I knew of her life. “Do you keep good memories of it?”

  “Oh, only,” she said. “I only keep good memories of everything.”

  She went back inside, but I stood there a moment longer. A little girl’s high-pitched shriek sliced through the still air.

  —

  ON THE PLANE back to New York, my mother repeated a negative comment Josée had made about one of her sisters. “Poor thing,” my mother said, but I could hear the guilty delight that danced under her words.

  “Well, but,” I said, “Josée was a bit rude to you as well.”

  “What do you mean?” There was the hint of a challenge, the beginnings of a defiant smile.

  “When she said daughters were good for something after all, though it may as well be a secretary or a housekeeper. Don’t you think she meant that to hurt you? I mean, after everything you’ve done?”

  “Oh, Nadja!” my mother said. “You’re still stuck in your black-and-white phase of good and evil. The world is more complicated than that.”

  I became defensive. “It’s not that I care whether Josée is good or evil in any objective sense,” I said. “It’s just about whether or not I can love her, or even whether I have to. She’s only ever been cold to me, and so cruel to you.”

  “Well, what about Josée’s own mother?” my mother said. “Mina was cruel to Josée, you know. Can you forgive her?”

  I blew air through my lips, pfff, the French equivalent of I don’t know, whatever. We’d only been in France for a few days, but I always picked up the mannerisms quickly.

  “I haven’t even thought about Mina yet,” I said.

  “Josée had a difficult life,” my mother said.

  “So did many people,” I replied. “It’s not a perfect excuse. You had a difficult life, too.”

  My mother rustled her newspaper, shifted in her seat.

  “I suppose that in learning about your life,” I continued, “I’ve learned to forgive certain things. I understand how problematic your relationship with your own mother was, and how that’s influenced ours. I see now that no matter how it felt at the time, you were always at least trying to do what you thought was best. But you . . . you? How did you forgive Josée?”

  “It’s not about forgiveness,” my mother said. “I just stopped needing her to love me. And I don’t need you to forgive me, either.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I do, as I get older.”

  “For what?” my mother asked, her tone undeniably tense.

  I mentioned how she’d favored my brother. Though in a way, I said, it was a good thing. “In the end, I think, it made me stronger.”

  I felt proud of myself for speaking so clearly. I was cool and rational and mature.

  “I hope you don’t see that as a justification,” my mother said. “You can’t hang things in a balance like that—this hurt, but in the end good came out of it.” It wasn’t an apology, but it wasn’t a denial, either. It was as close as we’d ever come. I should have let the matter lie, but I pressed on.

  “You were tough on me, and it made me tough,” I said. “In the end, I think there is a balance. I like who I am, more or less. I feel strong, capable, and confident. And that came from you, one way or another. As a kid, I was jealous of the attention you gave my brother—but honestly, I don’t think you did him any favors.”

  My mother pulled away from the armrest we shared.

  “Did I ever tell you about the moment when I decided to have a second child?” she asked. She looked at me sharply. I saw the hard metal glint in her eyes and knew that I did not want to hear what she had to say next. But I kept my voice light and said no, she had not told me. It had been so long now since we had fought.

  “You were three and a half years old and it was your bath time. I loved your bath. It was the only moment I had to myself. And you loved your bath, too; you’ve always loved water. I left you to play while I had a cigarette, read a book, I don’t know what. But this day, when I got up to leave, you said, ‘Maman, stay with me in the bathroom!’ I felt so trapped. I stayed for a minute, and then I tried to leave again. And you said, ‘No, Maman! Stay with me longer!’ You were on the verge of tears. I sat back down. But the violence of my emotions—being made prisoner by you, my hatred for you—it scared me. So I left. I slammed the door behind me and let you cry. That’s when I decided to have a second child. It was to break something between you and me.”

  “Oh,” I said. The back of my throat burned hot with shame. She picked up her newspaper and began to read. I turned toward the window. Tears pricked at my eyes. I sniffed loudly but she did not turn. We barely spoke for the rest of the flight.

  —

  THE TRIP LINGERED with me. Back in New York, I felt that I contained something new. For weeks it sat inside me and then it emerged, like sea glass shifting upward through sand. It was the first time I had entertained this thought, and yet somehow, also, I had always known it would come to this: I needed to know Josée’s story.

  I knew so much of my mother that I felt I could inhabit all the years before my birth almost as if I had lived them myself—every strand of emotion that vibrated along the five-pointed cat’s cradle that tied the Mouly family together. And yet at the very center of my mother, a mystery remained. Perhaps I understood my mother’s adolescence only because I had lived those years of my own life. My mother and I had never been closer. Yet I worried that I did not understand how she had forgiven her mother because I hadn’t fully forgiven my own. Or maybe I had not yet understood how to not need her to love me. Either way, I wanted to know what my mother had done. And I wanted to be able to forgive Josée myself, for my mother’s sake and my own.

  But first, I had to make Josée forgive me. That path was very clear. Josée had laid out explicit demands: I must remove the sentences about her mother from subsequent printings of the French edition of my father’s book. I emailed my father a new version of the text. In it, I made no mention of my great-grandmother. Instead I said simply that my French ancestry complicated my Jewish one because only 3 percent of the French had actually taken part in the Resistance, while all the others, whether tacitly or actively, had collaborated with the German occupation.

  I disagree with/disapprove of/am ashamed by your whitewashing of history, my father wrote back to me.

  I called him on the phone, tried to explain. “Josée was as clear as she could be without saying it outright: I remove this line about Mina, and she’ll tell me about her life,” I told him. “It’s worth it to me.”

  “I’ll do it,” my father said. “I told you you could speak in your own words, and if this is what you want, then I’ll do it. But I’m disappointed.”

  “I thought you’d understand,” I said.

  “Where do you think I would be,” he asked, “if I’d left out of my books the parts that made people uncomf
ortable?”

  My father and I rarely disagreed. His words stung.

  “It’s a small omission,” I said, more to convince myself than to convince him. He almost never changed his mind. “It’s in the service of more truth.”

  “It’s cowardly,” he said. But he sent along my text, and the future editions of the French printing were changed. He was cold to me for a few weeks and then thawed. When my father and I fought, which was rarely, it was not as wrenching as my fights with my mother. I never worried that he had stopped loving me. But he almost never gave me his opinion unbidden, and I valued it more than anyone else’s. I couldn’t bear to admit that he might be wrong any more than I could bear to admit that I was.

  “It’s not fair,” I whined to my mother. “Papa didn’t have to face Josée’s anger. He doesn’t understand.”

  “Oh, but he did!” my mother said. She told me that the December before, in Paris, Josée had tried to engage my father over those very lines. He’d shrugged it off and bought her a crêpe. She’d thrown the crêpe on the ground. My father had shrugged again, laughed about it later.

  “Then the subject came up once more, when just she and I were in her car,” my mother continued. “I opened my mouth to say that it was a good thing. The shame stops with this generation. My children are proud of Mina. She turned to me and—with all the hatred and venom I’ve always imagined she felt for me—she said, ‘Tais-toi!’”

  I jumped back, rattled. My mother had often told me to shut up in that exact tone, though it had been years since she’d done so.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice, my apology automatic.

  “Oh, but it was wonderful!” my mother said. “It was such a relief.” She smiled with glistening eyes, her gaze forceful and direct. She was willing me to understand, trying to beam her emotions to me telepathically.

  “A relief?” I asked.

  “It means I didn’t invent her, that version of my mother,” my mother said. “It means she’s still there. And for a moment I could be a child again, her horrible unwanted child!” She reached toward me but did not touch me, as if inviting me to jump into her arms or join her in a waltz.

  “I see,” I said, though all I saw was one more thing I couldn’t yet understand.

  —

  I MADE ARRANGEMENTS to move to France for a year. I found a job in a gallery, a subletter for my room in Brooklyn.

  That August, I sat by myself on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum and watched the fountain dance to no music. Groups of teenagers rearranged themselves on the steps, like seashells in a tide, Hasidic women jogged by in long skirts and sneakers, a young mother laden with bags from the farmer’s market watched her daughter toddle dangerously close to the water. I had thought Brooklyn would be enough for me, a city across the river whose geography mystified my parents.

  My flight loomed a few weeks away like the steep drop off a cliff. I’d been to Paris often, and yet I knew the city only the way a little girl would. I’d followed my parents from museum to bookstore to café to restaurant and understood the landscape only as a bare mental map of our personal landmarks. I had no friends there. Paris was a city in which my independence evaporated so fast I barely felt it leave. It was not a city in which I had good memories. When Americans gushed about the Seine, the macarons, the women, the wine, I wanted to tell them that that was not Paris. Paris was long anxious dinners with your grandparents, shopkeepers who slapped your hands for touching key chains, a concierge who scolded you for laughing too loudly in your living room on a Saturday afternoon. I knew these were things I couldn’t complain about—who would take me seriously?—and yet I was scared.

  —

  MY PARENTS DROVE ME to Newark Airport, the pulsing strobe lights of the Holland Tunnel heightening my anxiety. We said our tearful good-byes. My mother joked that she wouldn’t let my plane take off. I turned around three times to wave as I moved slowly toward security. But when I arrived at my gate, the waiting area was empty. The man behind the counter told me that my flight had been canceled. The next flight was tomorrow. “Why?” I asked. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. All around me, screens flashed ON TIME and NOW BOARDING. The man shrugged.

  I called my father. My mother turned around abruptly on the New Jersey Turnpike, barreling back toward the airport.

  One last night in my childhood bedroom, suitcase still packed. I was drained, empty—all my emotion had flown off into the air where my plane wasn’t. My father joked that my mother had used her powers to cancel my flight. I joked, too, but I knew it was true.

  One more time at the corner of Canal Street and Broadway, where the fancy stores of SoHo bled into the knockoff designer bags of Chinatown. New York was my city. I knew its rules and how to break them. I knew how to weave in and out of the tourists, when it was okay to speak to strangers, how to jaywalk. This was a busy intersection, crowds shoving, but I knew it well. I knew it desolate at four a.m., taxicabs burning red lights and rats rustling through the trash. I knew it under two feet of snow, and in startling summer downpours. I rarely felt more a New Yorker than while I waited for that light to change, pushed left and right by the tourists who crowded the sidewalk. The pedestrian crossing light had a significant lag, but I knew to turn my head to catch the traffic light turning red, and I always stepped out into the empty oasis of the street thirty seconds before it signaled WALK.

  Today, though, I looked down at my feet. I felt the noises of the street fade. Carved into the cement of the sidewalk, in simple handwriting that could have been either someone else’s or my own, was the word NADJA. No matter how much I searched, no memory of writing it surfaced. It seemed to me a secret message, risen up out of the city itself. I shifted my stance so that my name was directly below me and stood looking down at it through the changing of two lights. The crowds surged around me, huffing, complaining, elbowing me in the sides. I did not give. I did not want their feet to wear my name away. And then, eventually, reluctantly, I moved again.

  That evening, I took a cab back to the airport. I called my mother.

  “Will you let my plane take off this time?” I said.

  “Oui, mon chaton,” she agreed, wistful sadness in her tone. More and more these days, she seemed burdened by the powers that I continued to ascribe to her.

  And then the plane barreled down the runway and I felt the surge of weightlessness in my stomach as the wheels let go of the ground. I flipped the pages of my book, unseeing. New York shrank to pinpoints, was swallowed by the ocean.

  I put away my book and pulled out a long list of questions. “What sorts of fights did you have with your own mother?” and “When did you lose your virginity?” I couldn’t imagine asking Josée any of these things. I imagined her drawing my plane forward through the sky by a silky spider string. I thought about how my mother had come to New York to escape her mother, and about how now I had set out to find her. I had the feeling I’d formed a loop, spun time around on its tail, and suddenly I was traveling backward.

  My mother was eighteen when she came to New York; I was twenty-five when I left it. Perhaps a ghost of her plane crossed mine. Perhaps, for just an instant, we overlapped in the silence over the black water. Inside the cabin, in the white-noise hum of recycled air, we were both sitting perfectly still.

  chapter seven

  The plane hit the tarmac so smoothly that the cabin applauded. My stomach was a tight fist. From inside the taxi cab, I saw the Seine and then the Louvre, and my heart leapt despite myself. It usually made me feel French, to not love Paris, but right then I felt more American than I ever had. I leaned my phone against the window to take pictures, all blurry, all accidentally containing tourists taking pictures of their own.

  In my parents’ studio apartment, in the perfect geographic center of the city, I was alone. I had never lived alone before. I struggled to find the quiet reassuring rather than unsettling. I unpacked my belo
ngings. My mother’s collection of broken telephones, chargers that had long ago lost their appliances, mismatched sheet sets filled the closets. I moved them to the highest shelves.

  I discovered that the apartment was filled with objects that had belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s share of what had been taken from his apartment after his death. There were Egyptian artifacts, hieroglyphs carved into pieces of stone, brown leather desk accessories. There was a box filled with the artifacts he’d kept of our lives: letters my mother had sent him, magazine articles with glossy photos of her, photos of my birth, two copies of the Teen People in which I’d modeled real jeans for real bodies. A stack of translucent pages proved to be the faxes I had sent him as a child. I could read the strain of forced cheeriness even in my childish scrawl. Sending you lots of kisses! I remembered writing these, how my mother stood over me at the kitchen table, dictating, correcting my French. Every word had felt like something ripped from me. I closed the box quickly and put it away.

  In New York I had a solid gold compact mirror that had belonged to my father’s mother during her youth in Poland. His father had buried it, along with a gold cigarette case, at the start of the war and after miraculously surviving the concentration camps had risked his life to dig it up again. It was all that remained. Everything else, everyone else, was gone. My father had bestowed these objects upon my brother and me with gravitas. It terrified me, the power this mirror held. What if I broke it? What if I lost it? I’d opened it once and looked at my face inside. Then I buried it deep in my childhood bedroom.

  The objects in the Paris apartment terrified me in a different way. I began shoving them into the boxes of stray electrical cords high in the closets. I all but threw an African fertility goddess into one of them, and at the sickening brittle crack of clay on clay felt a rush of petty vindication, as if perhaps I had broken these objects of some black enchantment. Then remorse set in. They were centuries old, these artifacts. They had seen far more than I had.