In Orléans, the Milice marched my mother and her lover, the poet Monny de Boully, to the Gestapo headquarters where they were grilled for a whole day. At the time of their arrest, Monny’s papers identified him as Claude Pascal (Amédée Sylvestre, his most recent identity, was only a few days old, which is why he kept repeating the name, to remember it, to convince himself). My mother, whose thoughtlessness was equalled only by her comprehensive ignorance of Jewish surnames, gave her name as Aïcha Bensoussan. While Aïcha might sound Arabic, anyone named Bensoussan was certainly Jewish. She had, however, a perfectly good excuse for not knowing: the Bensoussans, numerous though they were, were all still on the far side of the Mediterranean, the Algerian War not yet having taken place, and in Paris the name simply sounded exotic, which was what she wanted, believing that its very outlandishness would protect her. Confronted by her German interrogators, Monny told me, my mother was obdurate, she faced them down, never even for a moment flustered, haughtily denying that she belonged to the Chosen People, pointing to a photograph of Göring on the desk in the interrogation room and declaring, ‘Look, your own Field Marshal looks more Jewish than I do!’ The previous autumn she had dragged Monny to the Paris Opéra where almost all the seats, from the stalls to the gods, were occupied by Nazi officers in full uniform. Since Monny was fluent in German he overheard the incredulous remarks as, row after row, people turned to stare at my mother: ‘Guck mal, es gibt eine Jüdin dort!’ ‘Ach! Quatsch, das ist ganz unmöglich. Dummheit! Sie ist wahrscheinlich eine Tscherkessin.’ [‘Look, over there, there’s a Jewess!’ ‘Rubbish, that’s completely impossible. Don’t be ridiculous, she’s definitely a Circassian.’] The way she doggedly fought her corner with the Gestapo in Orléans rattled some of her interrogators. Monny, who was waiting his turn, could tell as much from their remarks. Because he too staunchly denied being Jewish, they called for the ultimate test. When he said he was uncircumcised, the Obersturmführer leading the interrogation ordered, ‘Rufen sie die Ärtze an!’ [‘Call in the doctors!’] Out of the corner of his eye, Monny noticed two henchmen slipping on white coats and heard them say to each other, ‘Kennst du etwas in Schwänzen?’ ‘Ein bisschen.’ [‘Do you know much about cocks?’ ‘A little bit.’] All this Monny told us on his first evening in Brioude. His gift for storytelling came from another world, the surrealistic genie that lived inside him and popped out when he began to tell a story, his mastery of ten languages, the impressive richness of his French – something that only foreigners manage – had us veering from panic to laughter, from joy to agony. Years later, when peace had returned, he regaled my friends so often with his story of the medical examination that I have to repeat it here. It goes without saying that, being a Jew from Belgrade – the son of rich bankers, by now stripped of everything they possessed and murdered, although he did not know this yet, that dark day in Orléans – he was of course circumcised. ‘But I was so scared,’ he used to say, ‘that there was pretty much nothing to see, nothing to show them,’ and, slipping his left little finger between the index and middle finger of his right hand, he mimicked the examination, one of the doctors sneaking a quick look and pronouncing the sententious conclusion, the life or death verdict: ‘Alles ist in Ordnung. Der Herr ist nicht beschnitten.’ [‘Everything is fine. The gentleman isn’t circumcised.’]
This triumphant proof was not, however, deemed conclusive, there remained serious doubts, and Monny and my mother were placed under guard and would undoubtedly have been reinterrogated later that night or the following morning if a wondrous fairy, a deus ex machina in the person of Jean Rousselot, the Orléans commissioner of police, had not intervened. He himself was a poet and not only knew Max Jacob, but also Monny and Paulette. He personally vouched for them with the head of the Gestapo, negotiating their release with fearlessness and authority. He personally escorted them to the station and put them on a train to Paris, saying, ‘You can’t stay here a moment longer. Half an hour from now they’ll work it out and they’ll hunt you down and this time they won’t let you go. Get out of Orléans and when you arrive in Paris, don’t go to the address on your papers.’ Though their papers were false, the home address on them was real. That night, Monny and Paulette, who had lived in Paris with no ration cards under assumed names all through the Occupation, endlessly forced to move house, returned to their peripatetic Parisian life. It truly was a brotherhood of poets. Rousselot, a talented, handsome ladies’ man, eventually left the police to devote himself entirely to poetry, which I reproached him for when I first met him. I didn’t mean to imply he was a bad poet, simply that the police needed men of his calibre in the ranks. Because he truly was, as Ashkenazi Jews say when they want to distil the greatest virtues of a man into a single word, a mensh.
For my mother, Orléans had been a qualitative leap: her courage and her vitality were undiminished, as were her ability to face the worst without ever contemplating surrender, her confidence that she could argue her case, put forward her reasons, uncompromising about reason itself, but she no longer had her carefree spirit. She realized that optimism or an ill-judged decision would be met with the immediate sanction of death. Monny’s sudden appearance in Brioude, the risks he had run, attested to this newfound awareness. She had consulted a clairvoyant, a misfortune-teller, who had told her she would not see her three children again, and my mother could not rest until Monny – about whom we knew nothing – came to see us: he was her eyes, her hands, her ears, her heart, her flesh, her spirit; he was she. Never had such a union existed. If Monny succeeded, then the clairvoyant was a blind, money-grubbing pedlar of lies: it would have been easy, meeting my mother in 1942 in some gypsy caravan, to get her to talk, intuit her deep-seated anxieties and, with sinister predictions, drive her into a paroxysm of fear. Is it permissible to have a complicated private life when the great course of history has itself become complicated and crazy? It was this meeting between History and her history, our history, that had sent my mother into a spin and Monny to us as her cathartic messenger.
I was nine years old when, coming home from school with my brother and sister, I found our house in Vaucresson deserted, and a brief note from my mother on the kitchen table in which she assured her ‘darling children’ that she had no choice but to leave, but that she loved us and would see us soon. My first reaction was one of relief rather than sadness: my parents’ arguments had grown so frequent and so violent over the years that I lived in fear that the worst would happen, murder perhaps or suicide, I didn’t know. That was in 1934. At the time, those women who, appalled by the conditions imposed on them by marriage, dared to throw caution and security to the wind, to leave their husbands and their children were extremely rare; one had to be made of steel to brave the stigmatism and the daily heroism to which they were condemning themselves. My mother left without a penny and, for a year, worked in a factory where she crimped sardine tins. She lived, until she met Monny, in a furnished room in the 18th arrondissement on the rue Myrha, facing the Goutte d’Or district.
By the time Monny tapped on the back door of our house in Brioude, we had been living without our mother for eight years; we had not seen her for more than three – what few scant letters had been exchanged since contained nothing of any significance. She had faded from my memory, had become distant, I no longer missed her and if, from time to time, I did think about her it was not her caresses or her gentle words that I remembered but, on the contrary, everything in her temperament that belied the ordinary representations of maternal love, everything in her or about her that had embarrassed or shamed the conformist little boy I was: the terrible stammer she could never master, the big nose it would take me some considerable time to think of as that of ‘one of the ancient daughters of Israel’, seeing it first and foremost as characteristically, spectacularly Jewish, the fits of rage when her beautiful eyes rolled, and which alone made it possible for her to control her stammering – anger released her tongue – her utter lack of mercy: how she would pinch me until she almost d
rew blood to force me to open my mouth so she could feed me huge spoonfuls of cod liver oil, a very ‘fashionable’ elixir, which I immediately threw up, or panade – a disgusting bread soup that was also very popular at the time, and which I also immediately threw up.
Suddenly, in the middle of the war, when danger was at its height, this mother of shame and fear presented herself to me in a new light, by way of the love this extraordinary magician bore her. She seemed like a mysterious stranger beside me, and in the nine years during which she had struggled with maternity, I had utterly failed to notice or to perceive her richness, had failed to understand who she truly was. Unlike me, my father and Monny shared the same knowledge: one loved Paulette, one had loved her, still loved her perhaps, had never truly stopped loving her. Monny dazzled us in the week he spent in Brioude lodging in Monsieur Legendre’s room. My father was as charmed by him as I was. He realized that Monny opened up to my mother an entire universe, one that fulfilled a vital need and which he had not had the means to offer her. A remarkable brotherly relationship, born perhaps out of circumstance (my brother Jacques had recently gone to work as a labourer on a local farm), developed between the three of us: Monny not only told us about the Gestapo, but of the days and nights my mother spent hiding in a wardrobe, the forced departures, the escapes, the mutual support, the heroes, the betrayals. In this sleepy yet unsettled sub-prefecture, Monny was Paris personified: the big city, culture, poetry and thought.
Monny wrote to Paulette every night, becoming increasingly worried as the moment approached for his departure, as he would have to face the same dangers as on his journey to get here. Sitting at my father’s desk, in his beautiful handwriting, that of a poet and a foreigner, he wrote cards and letters that he invariably concluded with this pledge of love: ‘Yours, Paulette, yours alone for all eternity’. And after each of them he would ask me, ‘Do you want to add a few words for your mother?’ The only thing I could add were platitudes or professions of a filial attachment that would prove genuine only in time. For a whole week, my timid, adolescent pen hesitated to inscribe these feeble or untruthful thoughts beneath his ‘Yours, Paulette, yours alone for all eternity’. But I had no hesitation in having his immortal challenge carved on the headstone that stands over my mother’s grave in Montparnasse cemetery. They are buried side by side, next to my sister who committed suicide at the age of thirty-six on 18 November 1966. Two years later, Monny was struck down by a heart attack while crossing the Champs-Élysées on my mother’s arm. On the same stone, one can also read four lines from one of his poems, a heartrending poem of inconceivable death and nothingness, of the inconceivable thought:
Past, present, future, where have you gone
Here is nowhere
Throw the harpoon on high,
On high among the monotonous stars.
Chapter 5
This journey will have marked my whole life. The fear, the shame and the remorse were so intense that its central event is graven in me with the clarity, the violence of a primal scene, sweeping everything away – what came before and what came after – blurring or erasing the circumstances of my departure. However much, now I come to recount it, I furiously spin the spinning top of memory, I still do not know who decided, how it was decided, that I should go to Paris under a false identity: despite everything Monny had told her, my mother’s superstitious fears had flared up rather than died away. The pressure put on my father to consent to such a risk must have been very great. At Vierzon, I passed the demarcation line. My name now was Claude Bassier, my papers were perfect and I knew what I was to say if interrogated: I was going to visit my paternal grandparents (the school holidays had begun) in Normandy. I remember the long wait through the night at the station in Vierzon, the glare of spotlights on the platforms and the trains, I remember the dogs, the thud of boots, the brutal way the compartment doors were flung open, the meticulous inspection of my papers by uniformed Germans and French policemen, the interrogation conducted by the former. My reply to the question that indeed they asked satisfied them.
I arrived in Paris in the early morning, expecting Monny to be waiting for me at the station. There was no one; I waited for a long time. But this eventuality, as was routine in the clandestine life we lived back then, had been anticipated: I had been given an address to which I could go if no one came to meet me. Despite my hazy memory of the journey, so much of which I only half remember, I still clearly remember the address: 97 rue Compans, in the 19th arrondissement, a long, broad, quiet, rather steep street. I also remember the name of the Swedish man who owned the refuge. He had graciously lent it to Monny and my mother, though he was fully aware that they were Jewish, that they were perpetual fugitives: Hans Eckegaard. I rang the bell at number 97 and was immediately kidnapped: the concierge of the building had been warned I would be coming and, without even stopping to check that I was indeed the person he was waiting for, he clapped his hand over my mouth and dragged me to the top floor, to a large bright room whose huge picture-windows overlooked three cardinal points in Paris, since the rue Compans ends at the Buttes-Chaumont. Allowing me no time to admire the beauty of Paris, the concierge breathlessly explained that, relying on a tip-off, plain-clothes Germans had arrived the night before to arrest Paulette, who had been alone in the apartment at the time, but they had offered to let her buy her freedom: in return for a considerable sum of money – money she did not have – they agreed to defer her arrest. This odious sport was increasingly popular at the time, the ‘sportsmen’ being either corrupt Gestapo officers working with the Commissariat aux questions juives or scum from the French Gestapo, the famous ‘rue Lauriston torturers’. I wouldn’t swear that ordinary Parisian policemen did not also participate in this vile game. The concierge was very friendly with Monny and my mother who had told him about the incident. She had kept her cool with the two Germans, had grimly bargained for a lower sum – although she did not have a penny to her name – which she promised to raise if they gave her three days’ grace. They agreed but insisted the meeting take place in two days’ time, not at the rue Compans but in a café, and she had sworn she would come. Throughout the conversation, my mother had been desperately afraid that Monny would reappear prematurely, which would have called a halt to the bargaining. What little money they had, he earned working as a dealer in old books. Leading booksellers, impressed by his great cultivation, his knowledge of books and his talents as a salesman, entrusted him with precious – sometimes priceless – books, which he sold on to other booksellers, claiming to have discovered them in a private collection. But the privileged stops on his rounds selling incunabula were always the same: Thomas Scheler, rue de Tournon, who sheltered them more than once; Eugène Rossignol, rue Bonaparte; Blaizot; Bérès; and I’ve forgotten some. Monny, the son of a banker from Belgrade, is considered these days to be the Serbian Rimbaud. He had been summoned to Paris by André Breton and Louis Aragon who, having read the poems he had written as a young man, were keen that he should join the French surrealist movement. He had been praised to the skies, been excommunicated, come back into favour, he had been a member of every faction, every group. He cared little: every month a cheque arrived promptly from his father’s bank. This extraordinary freedom came to an abrupt end with the war, a few short months after he and my mother first met on one of the red banquettes in La Coupole in Montparnasse and fell head over heels in love. This mad passion had given him the courage and the imagination to launch himself on a new career, making it possible for them to survive clandestinely in Paris for the five years of the Occupation. It was the first time he had ever had to work for a living.
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