One Hundred Twenty-One Days

by Michèle Audin

  “Now,” he said upon returning, “we have time to talk.”

  He told Mireille that he had seen André every day for a year and a half, that they had spoken a lot, that André, as always, wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  “Did you know that before the war, I had to give him stitches after a brawl?”

  Mireille remembered the discretion and pain with which André had told her about his life in Strasbourg and his rebellions before the war.

  “He told me he’d had to have stitches, but I didn’t know that was you.”

  Sonntag told her about how he and André had been assigned to the Revier, the camp’s infirmary, until January, when all three Auschwitz camps were suddenly and violently evacuated. He didn’t say anything about the conditions in which they had lived for the eighteen months before, but he did talk about how he and André had walked side by side, in the snow, for forty-eight hours, after which they had arrived alongside a railroad and had been made to climb into uncovered freight cars. There had been a lot of pushing and shoving, during which he and André became separated. He had ended up in Buchenwald. He didn’t know where André had been sent.

  “One of my colleagues was in the same group as André,” he said to Mireille, “Doctor Meyerbeer, a psychiatrist. He got to know André well at the camp. Maybe he’ll be able to give you some news. I’m not sure what became of him. But I know he practiced at the Saint-Maurice Hospital. It should be easy to find out if he’s come back, or when he will come back. I wrote to the hospital and no one has answered, not yet anyway, but I should hear something soon. When they have news about him, I’ll let you know.”

  Mireille still had questions. She asked Sonntag if he knew Daniel Roth, the historian André had told her about, who had signed the book by Dante.

  “He was my cousin,” Sonntag said. “A historian, a great mind, and a member of the Resistance. One of his colleagues, Marcel Schmitt (Mireille recognized the name of the Renaissance specialist whose class she had taken at the Sorbonne), tried to get some German historians to intervene in his favor. With no success. Daniel was beheaded.”

  There was silence for a moment. He could see her hesitating once more.

  “Please don’t ask me about that,” he stopped her gently. “We did our best to never talk about anything too personal. Adding that kind of pain would have killed us. André and I spoke about mathematics and medicine. He was still thinking about his dissertation; he would give arithmetic and geometry problems to the deportees to help them keep their minds occupied. Have you visited his family?”

  “It wasn’t a very warm welcome,” Mireille answered, and she smiled. “You could even call it icy. To tell the truth, they really didn’t want to speak to me,” she finally added.

  They treated me like a dog, she thought to herself, but didn’t say so.

  “I know them,” the doctor said, “I’ve been their doctor for years. That’s how they deal with suffering. Their anguish is all they have left of their son, and they don’t even want to share that.”

  The Sonntags put her up for the night, then she took a train back. Like in a Romantic poem, it was a radiant summer morning. In the train compartment, people were commenting on the reports from Pétain’s trial. She closed her eyes so that she didn’t have to join the discussion.

  “Meyerbeer, yes,” said her mother, “I know him, he’s the one who was treating Robert. He was deported. They might have news about him now.”

  And Nicole returned to Saint-Maurice, where her brother sadly welcomed her. “He’s not coming back,” he said. Doctor Busoni confirmed it. They had just found out that Doctor Meyerbeer died in January after the Auschwitz camp was evacuated. And they gave her the name and address of the survivor who had brought the news.

  His name was Louis Klein and he lived in Paris, near the Raspail metro station. It was through him that Mireille finally found out about André’s death. He didn’t know André’s last name, only his first name: André, his name was André. That was why he hadn’t been able to let anyone know. He recognized him in a photograph, taken at Clermont-Ferrand during a picnic, that Mireille showed him.

  “That doesn’t really look like him,” he said, but then he started over.

  It wasn’t that the photograph didn’t look like him, but rather that the deportee he had known in January 1945 didn’t look like him.

  “That’s him, those are his eyes, and he was from Strasbourg, a mathematician, his name was André, no doubt about it. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” he said, “but he died. Right before my eyes.”

  And he started to cry.

  Not Mireille. She wanted to know, she waited. They had met after the march, on the train; they’d ended up in a corner of a freight car. A corner was a relative shelter—Klein explained how Meyerbeer had fallen, been trampled on, and died, from that or from everything that had come before, and how his body had been thrown off the train.

  “Thrown,” he repeated, shaking his head. “But André and I,” he continued, “after having survived the march, we survived the uncovered freight cars and the snow, and we knew that we were saved, that the war had already ended, that we were going to go home. We were laughing with happiness,” he added through tears. “But André died. Two days later, the camp was liberated. It was a makeshift camp, called Mariahilf.”

  It was over. He hadn’t disappeared. Someone had seen him die. Someone knew where he had died. Someone knew what day and what time he had died. It was no longer possible to imagine that he had gotten lost or detained somewhere, in a Saxon forest or a Polish hospital. He wouldn’t be coming back. He was dead.

  Mireille let the family know, by way of a short letter to Clara. The Silberbergs kept ownership of their grief, which they wouldn’t share any more than they had shared their anguish.

  She also wrote to Doctor Sonntag and Professor Pariset.

  To Daniel Roth, beheaded in a Bavarian prison (whether or not any of those German historians who had been asked to help had actually cared about his fate); to Pariset’s brother, shot as a member of the Resistance with his philosopher cousin; to Robert Desnos, the poet who died of typhus one month after the war ended; to the anonymous millions especially, who weren’t done being counted and who wouldn’t be coming back; to Doctor Meyerbeer, who was thrown off a freight car in who even knows what country, André Silberberg must be added.

  Mireille was remembering, counting the days, calculating. We knew each other, but what does that mean, to know someone? We saw each other for the first time, even before we had really spoken, Clara introduced us, that was February 23rd, he had come to wait for me after Schmitt’s class. He was so tall! Then there was the day he played piano in a room at the university, every once in a while a whole group would come to hear him, and he had asked Clara to invite me, “ask your friend with the blue eyes if she wants to come,” that was a Sunday, March 7th, he had played Bach, and then Mozart’s Fantasia. And then the picnic, a long trip, almost all the way to Saint-Nectaire, mainly to get some cheese from a farmer, on bikes, our landlord’s wife had let me borrow hers, it was still cold but it was the first day of spring. How carefree we were! We still hadn’t really spoken, and then, one of the girls, Madeleine Feinstein, who was slightly scatterbrained, said she’d never understood anything in math. Another one of them, Simone Bamberger, said it was stupid, but no one knew why she thought it was stupid. And of course Clara said something, that her brother was a genius. I don’t know why, maybe because he was watching me, but I wanted to add my two cents, that I had an uncle who was a mathematician, but I didn’t know him, I had never even met him. He reacted immediately, I had to say his name. Ah! Robert Gorenstein, of course he knew him—well, he knew his work, he had even written to him once, before the war. Gorenstein had sent him a letter and one of his articles in return, thanks to which he had found the answer to his question. That day was March 21st, he rode his bike back with me right to my house, that is, where Mama and I were staying at the time, leaving Clara an
d the others to go back without him. And two days later, on March 23rd, since the class was on Tuesdays, he was there, outside the lecture hall when I came out, he was waiting for me. Clara had caught a cold during the picnic, she had stayed home, which he knew, of course, that was why he had come. We walked side by side down the street. Then we saw each other more, we took walks together, usually without saying anything. And then there was the time Clara invited me over to their house, that was the day he gave me his article, “On a Few Theorems from Class Field Theory,” by André Danglars, that’s me, he had said while laughing, that way I no longer risk having my articles rejected.

  And April 28th, the day he said it to me.

  Mireille always thought “he said it to me,” without anything more, because what he had said was unheard of, in the proper sense, and also too intimate for her to express with words, even with the words he had in fact uttered, and which, of course, she kept hearing.

  A few weeks of meetings, of confessions, of happiness, of being carefree, until the last day they had agreed to meet, June 25th, when he didn’t come. And that was it.

  Mireille was counting the days, but how? From February 23rd to June 24th, one hundred twenty-one days, from when, say, our eyes met for the first time. Or from April 28th to June 24th, not even two months. Mireille was counting the days, and the words André had said to her.

  Hard words, for life in Strasbourg.

  Sad words, for the war, when she had told him that her father had been killed. Before France signed the Armistice with Germany in 1940, André had fought as an aviator, and he had made a friend from Paris, also a mathematician and an aviator, who was killed in flight—that blitzkrieg had been so bloody—he’d had a young wife, they’d been expecting a baby, and then André had added that his friend’s father had also been killed, in August 1914, before his son was even born—Mireille had heard the sob in André’s voice.

  Serious words, to talk about Mozart’s Fantasia.

  Rebellious words, to tell her about the last class he taught, at the high school in Digne, in December 1940, when his teaching position was revoked in accordance with the Statute on Jews, and about one student, just one, but one student all the same, who had come to shake his hand at the end of the class period.

  Joyful words, when he had finished proving his “fundamental” lemma, which had given him so much trouble, this will be in my dissertation, and it’ll rile up—Mireille remembered he had said rile up—an arrogant German I know. That’s when he had talked about Daniel Roth and Dante’s Inferno.

  Playful words, to explain how he chose his pseudonym. For Silberberg, he could have chosen something related to the French words for “silver” and “mount,” like Largent, or Mondargent, but that was too transparent, too risky. He had also thought about Winckler, which was the maiden name of one of his grandmothers who wasn’t Jewish, but, alas, it was still a Jewish name, no luck, how he had laughed! So he had translated: Winkel = angle, Winckler = Dangle, Danglars, a real name, a well-known name, and even the name of the traitor in a famous French novel.

  Confident words, to say I’m totally safe because I’m publishing under the name of Danglars.

  Beautiful words, to describe the numbers he was studying, she had loved the irrational, the complex, the transcendental…

  And impassioned words, sweet words, words of happiness.

  She had so few of his words left. The words in the letter—a makeshift note, thrown at random to the will of the wind that would carry it far away from the tracks, away from the rain that would not destroy it, to the discretion or indiscretion of the person, a more or less considerate passerby, who would find it—friendly words, of course, but cautious words, so cautious that sometimes in rereading them, she doubted whether there had really been more passionate ones.

  She had so few of his words left. She also had a couple of photographs, the note thrown from the train, a mathematics article, and the book he had let her borrow, which she hadn’t been able to return to the family. Almost all of the young, carefree people in the photograph from the picnic were dead: that scatterbrain Madeleine, Simone, and André, André who had said, “I’m totally safe because I’m publishing under the name of Danglars.” So few saved, so many drowned. A verse from André’s Dante came back to her as she looked at this photograph:

  And thus the Yawning Deep forever o’er us closed.

  in dodecasyllabic verse—even though the original Italian verses of the Divine Comedy all have eleven syllables. She had looked in the Sorbonne library for other translations of the end of Canto xxvi,

  Until the sea above us closed again.

  Hell and the sea, the meter of the poetry, the words and the numbers…

  CHAPTER IX

  The Numbers

  The numbers, in order, starting with the negatives:

  -25,the temperature (in degrees Celsius) in Upper Silesia in January 1945 during the evacuation of Auschwitz

  0.577215…,Euler’s constant

  0.625or 5/8 Jewish would have been each of Mireille’s and André’s children

  1single bullet managed to remove one of M.’s eyes, his nose, and half of his jaw

  1.414213…,the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a square with a side of 1

  2grenadiers returning to France in a poem by Heine

  3croissants for a breakfast at the Hotel Raphael

  3.14159…,π, the constant allowing one to calculate the length and surface area of all circles

  5daughters (and one son) had Christian and Marguerite M.

  6THArtillery Regiment, the one in which Gorenstein was serving when he had the sense knocked out of him

  7kilometers, the distance between Monowitz and the main camp of Auschwitz

  8minutes, the length of time it took for Sacco to die on the electric chair

  9Rue de Médicis, the home of the Duvivier family

  11,answered the nurse when the numeromaniac polytechnician asked her for a number

  12,the number of syllables in a translation of one of Dante’s hendecasyllabic verses

  12.3569111418…,Gorenstein’s constant

  13THof August, the date the uprising started in Paris in 1944

  14years old, Claude Yersin’s age when he was looking for his uncle’s remains on the battlefield

  14.134725…,the imaginary part of one of the zeros in the zeta function

  15years old was the boy when they decided to send him to Paris

  16meters, the height of the cylinder Beckett describes in The Lost Ones

  17years old, Kürz’s age when he enlisted in the navy

  18THof January, the day the Auschwitz camps were evacuated

  19years old, the age of the future great poet when he jumped out of a trench

  20years that Meyerbeer studied Gorenstein

  22years old, Gorenstein’s age when he committed a triple murder

  23RDof June, the date Christian and Marguerite were married

  24THof June, the last day Andre and Mireille saw each other

  25the only square that becomes a cube when you add 2 to it

  26,the canto number in the Inferno in which the sea closes over Ulysses and his companions

  27German physicists were winners of the Nobel Prize of Physics

  28is a perfect number

  29days had the month of February in 1916

  31years old, André’s age when he died in Mariahilf

  39,the number of survivors from the convoy in which Silberberg was taken

  40prisoners were held in each cell of the Cherche-Midi prison

  41,the largest dimension for which Kürz managed to demonstrate Silberberg’s lemma

  42.8meters cubed of rubble per person after the bombing of Dresden

  48hours that André and Sonntag marched side by side

  50meters, the circumference of the cylinder Beckett describes in The Lost Ones

  60,the number of the convoy that took André to Upper Silesia

  65,the small
est integer whose square can be written in two ways as the sum of two squares

  67kilometers, the length of what became known as the Auschwitz death march

  70kilos, the weight of the bags of phenyl-beta that Klein had to carry while he was at the camp

  80victories (at least) had been achieved by Guynemer

  103years old, M.’s age when he died

  120pages of M.’s dissertation were recopied by Marguerite

  121days of happiness for André and Mireille

  131cities were attacked by the Royal Air Force

  209,the number of the hospital where Gorenstein’s aunt worked as a nurse

  250years old was the University of N. in 1937

  340men in Convoy 60 were sent to Monowitz

  400individual detached houses could have been constructed for the cost of one insane asylum

  475,the number of Mozart’s Fantasia in the Köchel catalog

  479is a prime number and one quarter of 1916

  491men and women from Convoy 60 were taken by SS officers and dogs and immediately gassed

  600barricades were erected during the Parisian uprising

  800meters, the track event in which André was university champion

  1000,the number of Jews in the convoys

  1796,the year Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of his young army

  1800meters, the total length of the cylinders in which the V-2 rockets were constructed at Dora

  1801,the year Beethoven composed his fourteenth sonata Quasi una fantasia

  1821,the date Heinrich Heine evoked the books burned during the Reconquista

  1858,the opening of the Kaffeehaus & Konditorei Korb & Schlag in N.

  1926,the year Vito Volterra invented a model for predator-prey systems

  1933,the date the books of Heinrich Heine were joyously burned in public squares

  1949,Gorenstein’s death

  1950,the lovely summer evenings were started again in N.

  2066,the year M.’s writings will enter the public domain

  8000meters high, they say, was the height the smoke reached after the bombing of Hamburg