I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

“I can see you knocking on the door and Mina—oooOOoo.” My mother feigns girlish modesty, her hands at her mouth and across her chest.

  “I just want to get all four generations on tape,” my father says, annoyance creeping into his voice.

  The camera cuts out and back on again. My mother is balancing me on her knee, her hands under my arms so that I am drawn to my full length.

  “She’s a big girl now, aren’t you? You’re a big girl,” she tells me.

  “She’s a big chieuse,” Josée says—the word translates roughly to “pain in the ass.” She takes a carved wooden duck off a shelf and flies it gently toward my face. I gape at it and reach with chubby fingers, trying to guide its beak into my mouth.

  Mina appears in the doorway behind my mother. She must be eighty-one or so, a few years younger than Josée is now, but she looks much older than Josée ever has. She is shrunken and vulnerable in her large pink dressing gown. My mother hands me to Mina, who looks surprised and takes me awkwardly.

  “She’s going to drop you!” Josée cries out in the present, right as Josée on the screen says, “Don’t worry, it’s okay if you drop her. Babies are very soft and there’s a carpet.”

  “Josée, could you go stand by Mina?” my father asks from behind the camera. “I’d like to get a shot of all four generations.”

  The women arrange themselves in the doorway. For a single instant, we all look toward the camera.

  “I forgot about the coffee!” Josée exclaims, and she and my mother rush offscreen. Mina watches them go, then turns to my father with a smile and a shrug as if to say, Those girls! Then the smile slips off her face and she stands awkwardly rooted in place, me in her arms, my father still filming her. She shifts her weight self-consciously. She looks warily from the baby to the camera and back again. The other women don’t return. The camera switches off. The scene changes.

  —

  I WAS EIGHT when Mina died. I’d been swinging on the wood and rope trapeze in my bedroom. My mother came in, her eyes red and raw. I dug my feet into the ground to stop the swinging and stood very still to listen. Mina was wrinkled hands, the smell of roses and baby powder, the terrifying medical noises of a nursing home. I know someone who has died, I thought to myself with solemn pride and drew the new weight around my shoulders.

  “What was Mina like?” I asked Josée one evening.

  “Physically?” she said, then changed the subject.

  “Did you fight with your mother when you were growing up?” I asked another time.

  “No, never,” she said.

  “What do you know about your mother’s life?” I asked a few weeks later.

  “She kept her past for herself,” she said. “I would never have dreamed of asking questions like you do.”

  One day, in the front of the houseboat, I found a folded paper bag inside a cabinet that Josée had asked me to help her sort. On the bag, in thick red marker, there was a note in Josée’s hand.

  We only really think about the past when we have no more future. [Mina] knew the bitter sensation of evoking people unknown to those to whom we’re speaking. She had, with her usual valiance, turned the page. But I! I should have interrogated her, given her the feeling that her past was my own. I should have wanted to know, for love of her, but I showed no curiosity out of modesty.

  I held it carefully. I showed it to Josée. She could not remember having written it. “Out of modesty,” she said pointedly, reading it over. “Which you should show more of.”

  When I asked my mother about Mina, she became flustered. “I want to be able to evoke her for you,” she said, “but I just don’t know how.”

  She had been sketching me as we talked, starting over and over. A pile of pictures grew beside her, charcoal pencil on cream-colored paper. I was not recognizable in any of them individually, and yet somewhere in their overlap there was a likeness of me. As I watched my mother draw me, I thought about how crystal clear a metaphor this action was. My mother had told me once that her life felt like literature to her. It was filled with resonances and symbolism. I had always felt similarly, and I wondered now if everyone did. The acts of omission and inclusion we made in our memories were creative acts, through which we authored our lives. Perhaps this, I thought now, was why we were taught in high school to find the meaning of the green light in The Great Gatsby: so that we could find it in ourselves.

  Now she turned the pad toward me and began to draw a floor plan of Mina’s house: a series of scribbles for the rose garden, question marks filling rooms whose purpose she’d forgotten, the exact position of an armchair sketched into place without explanation. She told me that Mina didn’t like cooking but loved to cook for her. She told me how happy she felt, reading beside her in the sunshine as Mina pruned the roses. She told me how proud she had been, to have a grandmother who worked. Mina was elegant, she said. Mina was quiet, she was kind.

  My mother reached the end of her memories and wracked her mind for more. She couldn’t remember any specific things Mina had said to her. She held her head and sighed heavily in frustration.

  The next morning, she told me she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d found it painful how difficult it was to share her grandmother with me.

  “Somehow, I think the best story to describe Mina would be the story about the doll,” she said.

  “What story about the doll?” I asked.

  “I must have told you this,” she said, but she hadn’t.

  One day when Françoise was two or three years old, Josée took her to play in the park with Sylvie. She had her favorite doll with her and was playing at throwing her up in the air and catching her. She was standing under a gazebo and, on one magnificently high toss, the doll got stuck. She asked Josée to get it down. Josée reached up but could not grab it. The doll was not far away—even my mother could see her clearly. She expected Josée to remove her shoe and throw it, to fetch a chair, to call the park guard, to phone the police. But Josée simply declared the task impossible. She scolded Françoise and told her she should not have thrown the doll in the first place. She dragged her home by the arm. Françoise sobbed the whole way.

  “But Mina,” my mother told me now. “Mina would have gotten the doll down. Even if it had taken all night.”

  And so for a while, this was all I had of Mina: the story she was not in, the doll left behind in the rafters.

  —

  ONE NOVEMBER DAY, in Paris, Josée took me to see Mina’s grave. Yellow and pink flowers from All Saints’ Day dotted the cemetery so that it looked strangely colorful in the silver light of the overcast sky.

  “When the girls were young, I used to bring them to cemeteries to play,” my grandmother said. “People said I was crazy but I’ve always liked cemeteries.”

  She and Sylvie had planted daisies at the grave site just the weekend before, but they were slightly wilted now from a heavy rain. Josée had me dig them out of the planter so that we could replace them with the hyacinths we’d bought en route. As she stood by and watched me work, I felt the muscles ripple in my arms. The dirt pushed up under my nails. Mina was buried here, and Mélanie and Beppo. But etched into the stone were names I’d never seen before, their real names, different from the names everyone I knew had always used. Moss had rendered the letters blurry and soft.

  Josée talked to me as I worked, pointing at things I had to stand up or crane to see. It was very difficult to get a spot in this cemetery, she said, but here in this tomb there were three more places. She would take one, her estranged half brother another. She’d invited Andrée to take the final spot. I wondered if my mother would have wanted to be buried here, had she been invited.

  Only a few years before, I had become tormented by the thought of my mother’s eventual, inevitable death. I had, of course, worried about it as a child, every time she’d left me overnight with a babysitter. But now the thought was unavo
idably realistic, and it crossed my mind often. On a business trip to Versailles with my mother, I’d burst into tears about it, in her presence. We’d been put up in a palatial hotel room overlooking Marie Antoinette’s gardens. Maybe it was something about how beautiful everything looked, and how futile and petty and selfish that beauty had been. As my mother kissed me good night, I’d tried to memorize the sensation of her body in soft pajamas, the smell of her hair and perfume. I was trying to build a memory vivid enough to revisit forty years in the future. Then I started crying, so hard I couldn’t breathe. My mother was confused but gentle when I tried to explain. She stroked my back and promised me that she would never die.

  Over the course of that year, the fear of my mother’s death was replaced by a fear of my own death. The terror I felt at these thoughts was so intense, and so divorced from any actual danger, that I began to wonder if perhaps these were not really the things I was afraid of at all. Perhaps I wasn’t afraid of my own death but of the loss of my youth. Perhaps I wasn’t afraid of my mother’s death but that I would be able to keep living without her.

  Here in the cemetery, my hands in the cold, wet earth, I felt in full bloom. A few years ago, Josée was telling me, the cemetery management had put up signs on the neglected plots. If no one claimed them within a year, the tombs would be repurposed. No one did. The bodies were dug up and reburied in a mass grave. The plots were sold to new people.

  “Will you come visit me here sometimes so that they don’t dig me up?” she said.

  “Of course!” I said. “And not just for that reason.” Josée beamed, a large, broad smile that I’d never seen before. Her smiles were usually a tight turning up of the corners of her mouth that highlighted her cheekbones. But this smile touched every part of her face.

  A few plots away was a man with a power hose. Josée asked if he could clean off Mina’s grave, then efficiently negotiated the price down by twenty euros. She had me cover the planter with a tarp to protect it. The man sprayed bleach over the stone, then turned on the hose. The pressure ripped the moss from the stone and sent huge jets of water up against the sky. The stinging smell of bleach electrified the air. The water fell down around us. And then it began to actually rain, water spreading through the whole sky. I felt the rush of being wildly, defiantly alive.

  The man finished, packed up his hose, and drove away. The tomb sparkled white and the letters were crisp and clear. I knelt down and planted the hyacinths.

  “Voilà,” Josée said when I’d finished. “Do you like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It looks very nice.”

  She laughed and hit me playfully on the back. “I was talking to my mother.”

  chapter nine

  Josée’s earliest memory was from inside her mother’s stomach. There was a violent rattling. The warm body in which she lived was rejecting her. She could feel her mother urging her to let go, to leave, to die. Even then she was stubborn. Even then she held on. Only much later, she told me, did her mother tell her about driving in circles over the cobblestones of La Défense, trying to shake her loose.

  “What I didn’t do to make you let go,” Mina told her. “And oh, how you held on!”

  Josée was born in 1930. I often wondered if the roundness of that year contributed to the precision of her memories. Her age had always been easy to calculate. Nine years old in 1939 when war was declared, fourteen in 1944 when the Americans marched through Paris. Her name, at the time, was Josette—a little girl’s name, the “ette” permanently diminutive. It was the name of a baker or a shopkeeper, not a name that was destined for greatness. When she married, she became the bourgeois-sounding Marie-Josée, and then simply Josée.

  When she’d asked her mother about her name, Mina told her, “It’s not Josette.” Josée, in telling this story, turned her head to the right and looked coldly down the bridge of her nose as she quoted her mother. “It’s j’ose être.”

  I dare to be.

  —

  ANOTHER TIME JOSÉE told me that her earliest memory was of watching her mother through a window of her grandparents’ house in Nanterre, the commune in the western suburbs of Paris where Mina’s parents lived. Josée was not tall enough to see through the window from the garden, so she stood on the dog. She watched her mother dip a cotton wick in alcohol and light it with a match. Mina held the burning wick in an overturned glass cup that looked like an empty yogurt pot. Alfred, Mina’s father, lay on his stomach on the bed. Mina placed the heated glass on his back and the vacuum sucked his skin up into it, bulging and purple. After a few moments, Mina popped the glass off with her thumb. A welt remained, the capillary vessels flowering at the surface. With a small scalpel, Mina made a quick x in the raised flesh. Blood spurted. Alfred lay gasping and bald. His hair, Josée noted with a jolt, was sitting on the nightstand. She got down from the window and flung herself against the dog. Who were these people, she sobbed into its fur, who bloodied each other’s backs and cut off each other’s heads? She never wanted to see them again.

  But it was a very good treatment, she told me in the same breath, very good for clearing out the pulmonary tract. It dated from the time of Louis XIV, and we would perform it still if only it weren’t so complicated.

  It had been difficult to get Josée to talk about the past, especially her earliest past, but gradually she had begun to venture there with me. Still, her stories took strange, insistent turns. She recoiled abruptly from any condemnation of her mother.

  There was only one event that Josée resented openly, and she mentioned it several times. On those same visits to Nanterre, when Josée was two or three, Mina pressed the blood from raw steaks into a glass. She took Josée on her lap, pinched her nose, and poured the blood down her throat. “That is why I never eat red meat,” she told me, though she was eating prosciutto while she spoke. What she meant was that she never ate meat that appeared bloody.

  It was the men in Mina’s life who marked her, Josée said—Mina’s little brother, who died when he was nine; Mina’s father, Alfred, who died when Josée was three; and Mina’s son. Josée didn’t include her own father in this list. She herself, she said, had always been much more attracted to women—for confidences, to talk and to laugh. Perhaps, she told me, that’s because in the beginning she wasn’t desired by men. In fact, she wasn’t desired at all.

  “But that was before you were born,” I said. “Afterward, when she held you in her arms, Mina must have felt differently.” I had a firm belief that biological love manifested itself in women the instant they’d given birth.

  Josée told me that it seemed to her she could remember the warm, sweet smell of her mother’s milk, the gentle bobbing as her mother switched breasts. “You have to love a baby for that,” she said. “It’s not like she had nothing else to do.”

  —

  TOGETHER, we often drove near the street where she’d spent the early years of her life, on Rue du Marché. It was between the houseboat and her apartment, in the same small neighborhood where she still lived. Once, she told me, she’d seen a For Sale sign in the window of their old building. But by the time she came back the next morning, the sign had disappeared. “I would have loved to buy it,” she said.

  “You have happy memories there?” I asked.

  “Oh no! Horrible!” she said.

  When she was four or five years old, Mina would send her out to buy cigarettes. At the café-tabac on the corner, little Josette would ask for “des chameaux.” That was a happy memory, she told me. She’d felt like she existed then. She was grateful to be considered useful. The café was still there, the street was still there, the building, the floor. It’s all still there, she told me. I’ll show you, she said, but she never did.

  Josée lived alone with Mina. Her father, Eugène, paid for the apartment. He visited occasionally, during his lunch hour, to “tirer un coup,” fire a shot, in Josée’s mischievous slang. Sometimes he took
the time to balance Josée on his knee. “Have you brushed your teeth? Have you been to the bathroom today?” he would ask her, always and only those two questions.

  One evening, at a friend’s house, Josée made an incredible discovery.

  “Did you know that there are papas who are home at night?” she told Mina. “How come my papa isn’t here at night?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Mina replied. “You’re too young to understand.” Eugène spent his evenings in his own home, with his wife and his sons.

  Josée’s most vivid memories of Mina were of her leaving. Once, she hid in Mina’s steamer trunk, packed for Greece, in hopes of being smuggled along. Mina traveled often, unaccompanied, on vacations paid for by Eugène. In a photograph of her on a ski slope in the 1930s she looks debonair in trousers and a sweater vest. Her stance is wide and confident, one hand in her pocket, her black beret tilted jauntily to the right. That, my mother assured me, was not what most women were doing back then. When she wasn’t traveling, Mina went out. She was don’t-touch beautiful, Josée told me, she was so glamorous. During those trips, those nights, Josée stayed home with her own grandmother, Mélanie. The two of them watched from an upper-story window as Mina stepped out onto the street below, a shimmering vision in a sheer orange organza dress, turned a corner, disappeared.

  When Josée was three, Mina sent her away to live with Mélanie in Nanterre. I could not understand this. I returned to it continuously. How could a mother send her young daughter away? Why? Mina was thirty, Josée told me with a shrug. She was busy. She had her own life to lead.

  We came across a photograph, Josée at five years old in her school uniform, holding Mina’s hand.

  “Ah so,” she said. “This is when I attended that school next door. So I did not go to Nanterre until I was six, perhaps.”

  Still, I did not understand. Still, six is young. One day, Josée said in passing, “When I was hidden away . . .” and then the pieces fell into place for me. Even though a man who was not Mina’s husband paid her rent, her bills, her vacations, the illegitimate child was a mark of shame too great for Mina to bear.