Rue des Rosiers

by Rhea Tregebov

  Before he finishes the sentence she knows what he’s going to say…

  “Let’s go visit the Pletzl tomorrow.” He’s finishing off the last of the potatoes. “Otherwise we’re going to run out of time. I’ve got an appointment nearby. Why don’t you meet me in there about 12:30, 12:45? There’s this deli called Rosenberg’s, we could get knishes. Or we could just get a quick falafel if I’m held up and there isn’t time. There are a bunch of falafel joints right nearby.”

  She can’t help thinking about the salade niçoise she had for lunch, perfect fresh skinny green beans and tiny new potatoes, black niçoise olives, hard boiled eggs and tuna, all artfully arranged on the serving plate.

  “Sarah?”

  Even though she didn’t come to Paris to eat bad Jewish food, she does have plenty of reasons to visit the Pletzl, the little place where so many foreignnational Jews were rounded up and then sent to extermination. The place where Jewish life intrudes on civil society, where a different Paris can surface. She gets up, carries her plate to the sink. She doesn’t need to flip the penny. Yes. She’ll visit, figure the place out. “Sure. Sounds good.”

  Laila

  This is what I remember. What my mother, my father, wanted for me. My mother’s hands busy with the needle, the embroidery cotton, flash of that needle. Her hands reaching for mine to take me into the yard, let me hand her the sheets, the shirts and the handkerchiefs, clean and wet, and then hand her each wooden peg as she pinned them all to the line, clean against the sky where the sun would scour them white. Or we would be in the kitchen and she would tell me to go and wash my hands, I had to wash my hands first before I helped her, because in our kitchen we keep everything clean. Then she would lift me onto a chair, let me put my hands in the bowl to help make the dough, we would carry it in a pail covered with a red striped cloth to my aunt’s house, to the oven she had there, to bake. My mother taught me how to eat properly with it, to tear each piece off correctly, just the right amount, I had to know where to dip my piece of bread in the serving bowl, how much it was right to take, how to cup the bread in my hand so that nothing would spill, nothing would be lost. I was learning to read and write in school, she told me, and that was good, but I had to understand that there were also things I could only learn with my hands, know with my hands.

  My father would be sitting on a chair in front of our house, the blue of his cigarette smoke curling like the letters of his script, like handwriting, against the smooth white-washed walls. I’d come to him, and he’d take me on his lap, his shirt a blue like the sky. I’d ask him to tell me a story, and he’d touch the tips of his moustache, smile. What about my brother, he’d ask me, didn’t he want a story too? I’d beg him to tell me, just me. I wanted a story just for me. And he’d smile again, and the story would begin, a story just for me. About Antar and Ablah, a slave and a queen. About a fool and his son and his donkey. A poor man and his seven hungry daughters, his lemon tree and his dream. About a fox and a dragon and a frog. A sparrow and a locust. About how burning can turn you back into yourself. How some day justice might come even to the poorest woman, the poorest man, if the dreams they dreamed were proper dreams, if they listened to them and waited.

  And they would tell me, my mother and father, about the place I’ve never seen, the hills and the valleys where our fig trees grew, the taste of the ripe figs from our yard a taste you couldn’t find anywhere else. Never look for flowers on the branches of a fig tree, my mother would tell me, because on a fig tree, the flowers grow inside-out, they grow like a miracle inside the fruit. Thousands of tiny flowers that give us the seeds inside the ripe fruit, it’s the seeds that give taste to figs, texture. My father would tell me about waiting, about the patience needed to grow fig trees, five or six or seven years of waiting till the trees truly bore fruit, but that waiting was worthwhile because the trees can live so long. They live and bear fruit up to a hundred years, feeding us for a hundred years, if there isn’t a frost, if they aren’t torn down, if they aren’t bulldozed or taken. On our land we had fig trees, we had trees everywhere, figs and also apricots, almond and apple trees, carob and olive trees. Fields of wheat we had, and barley, lentils, peas and beans and chickpeas. In my grandmother’s garden tomatoes and cucumber, onions, garlic, zucchini, eggplant and cauliflower, beets. Everything we needed. Everything we needed we had, there. The place I’ve never seen. A place they wanted me to see in stories, that they wanted me to know like a miracle inside-out, to know with my hands.

  ~

  lunch

  the next morning michael’s dressed before Sarah is up, busy packing his briefcase at the table. “See you 12:30, 12:45, then? In fact, if you can, could you go a bit early, get us a table at Rosenberg’s? Laura says it can be busy.”

  “Is Laura coming?”

  “Don’t think so, she has to be at the office. So, the Pletzl is not even five minutes from here.” He pulls out his Plan. “Just go up rue Pavée, where the synagogue Laura told us about is, and turn left on rue des Rosiers. It’s on the corner of rue des Rosiers and rue Ferdinand Duval.”

  “Ferdinand Duval?”

  “Yes. Get this: Laura was telling me that up until the Dreyfus affair, Ferdinand Duval was called rue des Juifs. And rue des Rosiers – I guess you know that means rosebush street – the name goes all the way back to the 1200s, when the street followed the walls of the city, and roses grew along the ramparts.”

  Roses on the ramparts. A different Paris.

  “Gotta run.” He gives her a long kiss and then is out the door.

  She starts making her coffee, gets out her notes on the Tuileries Garden, the next on Charles’ list. Clears the breakfast table, gets down to work. She’s using the pretty orange Clairefontaine notebook she just bought herself here, eking out her francs. It doesn’t feel like a notebook or a scribbler: somehow it’s a cahier. Funny how in Canada she was surrounded by French words she didn’t think she was paying any attention to, but that clearly seeped into her brain – those old Hilroy notebooks with the map of Canada on the cover and the words cahier d’exercices below exercise book. Some of the French she has now absorbed subliminally that way. What would Marie-Claire say about that as a method of learning French?

  She doesn’t care what Marie-Claire would say. She’s not interested in Marie-Claire’s French, Marie-Claire’s France, Marie-Claire’s Paris.

  When she looks up, it’s already 11:50, so she hustles to get changed, fusses a bit over what to wear, then pulls on the dress Laura helped her pick out, the one that gives her curves. It’s summery, fancy and simple at the same time. She reaches for Michael’s necklace, then sets it down. It doesn’t really go with the dress. She slips the penny into her pocket, her thumb following the thin edge for a moment before she releases it. She’s already decided to go – she doesn’t need the penny to make up her mind for her.

  But when she gets out the door with the directions in her head – up rue Pavée then left on rue des Rosiers – she feels a funny pull to the east, towards Place des Vosges, or south, to the river. She likes taking her crooked path across Ȋle Saint-Louis and surprising Notre Dame by coming up behind its towers, seeing the flying buttresses spread their spindly spider legs towards the little neglected park at the back. She knows the city in such a disorganized way, through familiar nodes she connects by familiar paths, this corner tabac and that little café floating along the routes she’s worked out in her head. So then she can be surprised to turn a corner and find a familiar building or café where she doesn’t think it could possibly be. She has to remember to go back to the map, locate things where they really are, not in the personal map in her head. And right now for some reason, she’s drawn to rue de Rivoli, to the Centre Pompidou, not the narrow streets just to the north that will take her to the Pletzl.

  But she’s decided. And she has a date with Michael. So at rue de Rivoli she takes the first small street north, checking her watch. She should be okay for time even if she does get a bit lost. She’s a few bu
ildings up the street when she notices, peripherally, a shop window that feels familiar. She turns back a few steps. Bazar Miriam. A little store whose shop windows are crammed with an odd-ball display of kippahs and menorahs and mezuzahs, inexpensive Seder plates, yahrzeit memorial candles. A window full of tchotchkes, her dad would say. There are Star of David and chai necklaces too, though none identical to hers. She touches her neck, startles for a moment because the chain isn’t there. Feels in her pocket for the penny, gives it a few turns. What a jumble of merchandise in that window. If everything were written in English instead of French, the shop would be right at home in North End Winnipeg. She’d be right at home. She must be near the Pletzl. She hadn’t noticed any Jewish shops before. She's tempted to go in, smell the musty smell of sanctity, community. She checks her watch: no time to dawdle. Maybe she’ll stop by after lunch if she’s still in the mood for nostalgia. Maybe there’s something Rose would like, or Pat. Something for Gail, maybe.

  And suddenly she’s there, at the Pletzl, which isn’t a square at all but a nondescript triangle. She checks the street signs and finds she’s been wandering up rue Ferdinand Duval and now has found herself at the point where it meets up with rue des Rosiers. Here she is in this anonymous space, a place she’s taken herself to without knowing it’s where she’s supposed to be. This arbitrary meeting of irregular streets, the famous Pletzl, is more an intersection than a square.

  Though she wanted to come, to see this Paris, she can’t help wondering why Michael made such a big deal about the place. Some crummy little falafel joints, a peculiar mosaic of yellow tiles making up the façades of Rosenberg’s, as if to establish a Disneyland link with the mysterious East. An appliqué of one culture on another, but the applied culture is thin. This ‘little place’ doesn’t feel like a place at all, it’s more a non-place. It doesn’t really feel like any kind of Paris, doesn’t feel like anywhere.

  But of course it’s also the place where so many were rounded up in July, 1942, taken to the Vél’ d’Hiv. Almost exactly 40 years ago.

  She checks her watch, 12:45. Michael should be here any minute, unless his meeting has gone late. No time to explore, to try to find out more about the deportations. She should go in, get them a table, since it’s pretty crowded, but instead she studies the façade of Rosenberg’s. It has the feel of a child’s drawing: above the arched doorway are crude little schematic flowers picked out in tile, the borders circling them black against the bright, impossibly cheerful yellow of the mosaic tile – no colouring outside the lines!

  The windows are cluttered with notices and placards: specialists in all kinds of smoked fish, caviar, salmon, sturgeon; blinis with sour cream. Once she’s inside, she finds the interior both familiar and strange. In some ways she really could be in a deli on Main Street. The black-and-white tiled floor, glass display cases, they’re as much Winnipeg as Paris. The bustle and clutter of any deli she’s ever been to, but behind the long counter are upside-down bottles of hard liquor you wouldn’t find in any deli on Main Street.

  The room is packed, there must be fifty people eating lunch, standard Winnipeg fare: gefilte fish, chopped liver, chicken soup, schmaltz herring, perogies, boiled beef with horseradish. A waiter glances at her, there are no tables free, so he gestures with his head, his hands full, towards the counter. She sits down on a red stool, puts her notebook on the stool beside her to save it for Michael. Chicken soup with matzo balls would probably be tasty or at least safe but it’s too hot a day, too hot for borscht either. She could try a potato latke but nobody makes them the way Pat does, thin and light and not greasy at all.

  There’s an older woman seated at the table beside her, painfully thin but fashionably dressed in a white blouse and narrow navy skirt, who looks somehow familiar. She’s deep in discussion with two young men, pointing an animated crooked finger at them, her sons perhaps, and both men crumple into laughter, the woman smiling in mild triumph at them. It suddenly clicks into place where Sarah saw her before – she’s the bird-like woman who was walking her dog, though there’s no dog in sight, the same woman she noticed the other night at the traiteur chinois, the woman she thought of as a Parisian ‘type.’ The woman is wearing a different stylish outfit, the blouse looks like silk, the skirt is beautifully tailored, and the little dog is nowhere to be seen. She is intensely gaunt, but she seems so at ease at her table, so much a part of the place. That’s it. Sarah can see just the edge of the faded blue of the tattoo on her wrist, it’s peeking out of the cuff of the woman’s white blouse. The woman is a survivor. Half-starved, Sarah thought at the traiteur. More than half-starved at one point, if the tattoo that Sarah’s glimpsed is what she believes it is. That look of deprivation that Sarah had pictured as self-inflicted, thinking her a victim of style, not of the Nazis. And now the two images collide. But look at the woman here. In her element. The waiter is standing at their table and all three josh with him in rapid French as they hand him back their menus. Sarah can imagine the woman swapping the same jokes in Yiddish at Oscar’s Delicatessen in Winnipeg. She probably speaks Yiddish.

  Sarah feels someone standing beside her. Michael.

  “Hello there,” he says, giving a somewhat lop-sided kiss to the cheek. “No luck getting us a table?”

  “Nope. I got here twenty minutes ago, but it was already packed.”

  “Have you seen the menu, Sarah? What do you recommend?”

  Oh dear, what can she recommend? She can’t help thinking of French food: steak-frîtes. Bouillabaisse. Vichyssoise. Something with a lot of s’s and vowels in its name. “I think they have knishes. I like the cheese ones, not the potato ones. You might like those. Or blintzes.”

  Michael’s leaning towards her, smiling, trying to decide.

  The light changes behind her.

  She turns her head, looks back.

  Michael is standing right beside her and then he’s not.

  Everything stops. There’s some sort of shift in time, a hiccup. Something splashes into the room, glass is breaking, something has broken the window of the restaurant and there’s a noise, mechanical, sharp and then there are human noises, cries, screaming, and light, a sharp light.

  She has to do something. Michael isn’t there, but the older woman is on the floor and Sarah knows that this is something she can do. In the shock of the moment, she twists herself so that her body is covering the woman, whose white silk blouse is a banner now, blowing in some wind Sarah doesn’t understand. Sarah crouches over the woman, whose eyes are open, looking at her. This is a person. The woman’s eyes are open and she is herself.

  Two shadows, two people, they’re wearing something on their heads, hoods maybe, two shadows at the doorway holding metal in their hands, something silver, shining and there’s more noise, it’s like a movie soundtrack or a cartoon, but loud and close, dit-dit-dat, dit-dit-dat-dat, rat-a-tat-tat.

  And then she’s not crouched any more, she’s fallen, and she makes herself fall so that her body covers the woman’s body. And in the sound and light and terrible brightness, in the sudden light and pain, the worst thing is that Michael, who was beside her, isn’t there and the worst thought, before the merciful darkness, is that he’s gone.

  Michael’s gone.

  Her eyes must have closed because when they open, the sound is different, sirens, wee-woo-wee-woo-wee-woo, the special sound of a French police siren all around her. She touches her neck but the necklace is gone, it was never there. Michael’s gone.

  Her eyes close and she’s gone too.

  Her eyes open. Somebody’s standing over her, a slim man in green pyjamas, no, that’s not right, green scrubs, he must be a doctor, or a medic, and the bottom of the pants that are loose on his slim body are soaked, dark. He looks down at his pants, holds out his hands as if he’s asking a question, then wipes his face with the back of his wrists because his hands are wet and dark too and he looks very tired and he looks down at her, tired and sad, saying something. She can’t understand the words. French. S
he’s still in Paris, some sort of Paris. She looks down at the slim man’s feet and the floor is wet and dark too. Where is the woman she was hiding with her body? Where is Michael? Somebody’s kneeling beside her, saying something in French, she can’t understand, but she feels open, she feels as if her body isn’t itself anymore, she’s open and, worse, she’s meat. Everything’s red, over her, over the medic, and she can’t look, her eyes close.

  With her eyes closed, nothing hurts. Nothing hurts because she’s not in her body. The pain has taken her outside her body and she knows something terrible has happened, is happening. Her eyes close and she’s gone and they open and close, they can’t stay open, she’s back in her body and she knows the terrible thing is the pain, which she can’t escape without leaving her body. The terrible thing is the pain, it’s not at the door, it’s come into the room. She can’t move.

  Her eyes open.

  The light is silver. There’s something shining silver above her. There’s another man standing above her, not the slim green man. This man has a shiny silver helmet – Halloween, a comic-book hero. Or a Greek god, the messenger god with the helmet, wings at his heels, the one who travels to the underworld. The light of the day caught in his helmet. That’s where it went, that terrible light. He has a dark coat, his face is sad. He’s saying words to her in French, but she can’t answer. Because she looked back. Kneeling in front of her, he’s all she sees. His hands lift to reach over her head, she feels the arc as they move behind her neck, a gift, something small, light against her face. A gift with no debt attached, nothing to repay. And now some of what was tight in her loosens, she feels her chest lift. And she’s being carried into the air under a blanket, tan blanket with a band of dark brown. Her mother cuddled up under it on the sofa in the house on Rupertsland. And there’s a sound, herself. She’s screaming. She’s screaming – it must be her – because it hurts, where her body is open. Where are they taking her, these shiny men, into the air, the underworld?