In search of the father: the fates of disappearance

To write on the basis of disappearance would signify the very essence of the gesture of writing. The German author W. G. Sebald suggests as much, at any rate, when he closes the last narrative of his collection Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) with the evocation of a photograph: that of three young Jewish women from the Łódź ghetto, recruited into the weaving workshops imposed by the German authorities and photographed, no doubt, shortly before their deportation. The narrator wonders: “I wonder what their names might have been — Roza, Lusia and Lea, unless it was Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of Night and their attributes, the spindle, the thread and the shears.”¹ There is at the very least a form of grating irony in likening the victims of the extermination to the three Fates, those figures of destiny who preside over the lot of humans and assign them the letters of the alphabet; but there is also a profound sense in this attribution to the disappeared of the burden of the memorial effort, a kind of reinvention (of weaving) of what once was and is no more.

The programmed disappearance of entire human groups deeply impinges on our relation to death and calls into question the rituals of reparation that are supposed to form a barrier against our feeling of ambivalence before disappearance. Mourning thus assumes a form inflected by the bonds that connect us to those close to us and that we experience in conjunction with the parental figures that shape our psyche. The figure of the father, in Judaism, if it does not confer first identity, constitutes one of the keys to the transmission of a symbolic inheritance, whether on the plane of the Law or on the plane of study, the two, as we know, bound by the same Hebrew signifier of torah. The father guarantees access to language, to the signifying function, to the apprenticeship symbolized by the Book and respect for the text, the commentary, perhaps even to writing. What happens when this paternal figure, in the context of a Jewish memory, intersects with the statement of disappearance — whether concretely, through death, or symbolically, through its own failing? How is this memory of disappearance organized within writing? How can the continuity of life recreate itself, the quest for meaning metamorphose, before the disappearance of that very thing which guarantees individual existence? How can the memory of collective disappearance combine with the one that every individual experiences through the bond with the father? These questions recur frequently among authors connected to Jewishness and for whom the bond with the paternal figure is a problematic subject, in large part the source of literary fiction…

Paul Auster and Patrick Modiano both associate the writing of loss with the investigation of the paternal enigma, but arrive at distinct strategies of textual reelaboration. These two authors, born two years apart at the close of the war, Modiano in 1945 and Paul Auster in 1947, differ, of course, as regards their cultural environment and its reinscription in the work. The one, Modiano, issues, in his own words, from the “dung heap” of the Occupation, from Vichy France: born of a Jewish father linked to collaborationist circles, who no doubt thereby escaped deportation. The other, Paul Auster, comes from a Jewish family that emigrated to America at the beginning of the century and that found itself at the center of a crime of passion: the murder of the grandfather by the grandmother during the early years of emigration, inscribing violent death at the heart of a repressed memory. What seems to unite the two writers is, above all, the keystone constituted by the paternal figure, source of ambivalence and secret cipher of the work, from Paul Auster’s Moon Palace to Modiano’s La Place de l’étoile (Place de l’Étoile). In The Invention of Solitude as in Dora Bruder, this quest is elaborated around traces gathered through specific forms, not essentially fictional, but not solely documentary or autobiographical either: mixed narratives, brief, lacunary, in which the figure of the father crystallizes certain deep motivations of the account.

The two texts are devoted to the recreation of vanished figures, that of Auster’s father on the one hand, that of Dora Bruder, a young Jewish woman deported to Auschwitz, on the other. At the same time, and even as they seem dedicated to reconstituting foreign lives, they are rooted in autobiography, indeed in autofiction, as in the second part of The Invention of Solitude, where the first-person narrative gives way to a narrative whose principal character, evoked in the third person, is called A. — at once alter ego and character, organizing the aleatory itineraries of a memory in act. If the first part of the book, the “portrait of an invisible man,” is motivated by the father’s death, the second part, the “book of memory,” is its autofictional development, the extension of individual memory to collective memory through the use of intertextuality and the citation of the texts that haunt the writer. In Dora Bruder, the quest is organized starting from a 1941 newspaper clipping evoking the running-away of a young Jewish girl, Dora, of whom a few traces survive in the archives of the period, allowing the narrator to attempt to reconstitute a fragmentary, hypothetical portrait, largely fictive as well. Just as Anne Frank, in Auster, makes the link between the father’s death and the memory of the children who were victims of the Shoah, Dora Bruder, in Modiano, is linked to the joint evocation of the narrator’s father and to a few childhood memories of which the latter is the center, like the famous episode where he has his son loaded into a police van for disturbing the peace at night.

The immigrant context likewise links the two narratives: Jewish emigrants from Galicia and Russia in Paul Auster, whose text ends with the memory of his grandmother’s arrival in the United States, then aged five; Austro-Hungarian Jews in Modiano, himself the son of a Jew of Italo-Egyptian origin. To the evocation of the father there are adjoined, in both works, family figures linked to the pain or the nostalgia of childhood: Paul’s schizophrenic sister or Modiano’s brother who died at the age of ten, but also the maternal figure (“I was my mother’s son,”² says Auster), while Modiano evokes the expeditions toward the Porte de Clignancourt, or the waitings in the café, when his mother, an actress, was performing at the theater, at the “corner of the rue des Mathurins and the rue Greffulhe.”³

In spite of everything, it is the father who “occupies” the narrative, in a central way, quickly deflected by the analogies and cultural reminiscences in Auster, in a peripheral but recurrent and almost obsessive way in Modiano. These fathers possess as their own a kind of fundamental absence, a quality of self-effacement that operates during their lifetime and that their death multiplies to the point of haunting: “If I searched for him during his lifetime, if I always tried to discover this absent father, I feel, now that he is dead, the same need to go in search of him,”⁴ Auster declares at the outset, adding that time is lacking, as if the evanescence of the traces were at the origin of the necessity of fixing them through writing: “if I do not do something, quickly, his entire life is going to disappear with him.”⁵ This race against the clock inspires, among other things, as is known, the plot of Leviathan, where the narrator must outrun the FBI agents in order to tell the life of his friend and mentor Benjamin Sachs, who preferred terrorism to literature and blew himself up on a bomb.

As for Modiano, one sometimes has the impression that his search for Dora explores the empty space hollowed out in him by the paternal absence, as when bonds are tied between the search for the young girl and the erratic itineraries of the son confronted with the paternal inconsistency: “it takes a long time for what has been erased to resurface into the light. Traces survive in registers, and one does not know where they are hidden, nor what guardians watch over them, nor whether these guardians will consent to show them to you.”⁶ The narrator’s researches resemble a veritable transgression, of which he becomes conscious when he is confronted with his absence of kinship ties to Dora, which obstructs the disclosure of the civil-status data. The official appears to him as “one of those sentinels of oblivion charged with guarding a shameful secret and with forbidding those who wished it to recover the slightest trace of someone’s existence.”⁷ Inhibited, the narrator loses his way in the corridors of the Palais de Justice, an experience of disorientation typical of dreams and steeped in uncanny strangeness. An association of ideas then leads him to evoke a “similar adventure,” when his father, whom he had not seen again since the end of his adolescence, is hospitalized at the Pitié-Salpêtrière and he decides to pay him a visit. Wandering through the maze of the hospital, he will never manage to find him, and the father will die without his son having seen him again, at the end of years of estrangement. This impression of spatial bewilderment in fact translates the impossibility of acceding concretely to the figure of the father: “I ended up doubting my father’s existence as I passed and repassed before that majestic church and those unreal blocks of buildings, intact since the eighteenth century, which evoked for me Manon Lescaut and the era when this place served as a prison for the girls, under the sinister name of Hôpital Général, before they were deported to Louisiana.”⁸ The course of his thoughts draws the narrator toward other figures of absence and desire, here that of Manon Lescaut, as later that of Dora. Likewise, in Auster, the narrator is drawn to Amsterdam by Rembrandt and the paintings he made of his son Titus, but he ends by finding there Anne Frank and the women of Vermeer’s paintings.

Linked to a feminine image, the expression of desire goes back to its fundamental source, the father and his absence, the life of the son in the face of the father’s failing. Dora’s running-away thus serves to recall the memory of Modiano’s own running-away, evoked as a cry for help but also as a liberation. The Viennese origin of Ernest Bruder, Dora’s father, also recalls to him, in an echo, the memory of a youthful stay in Vienna and sets in a mirror the personal memories and the attempt to reconstitute the biography of the other: “Ernest Bruder. Born in Vienna, Austria, on 21 May 1899. He must have spent his childhood in Leopoldstadt, the Jewish quarter of that city. […] In 1965, I turned twenty in Vienna, the same year I was frequenting the Clignancourt quarter.”⁹

The inquiry into the disappearance of an unknown woman speaks, in a displaced way, the quest for the father. The course of the traces, the recording of the imprints make up for the unfigurable prehistory that inaugurates filiation: “in the midst of all these lights and this agitation, I can scarcely believe that I am in the same city as the one where Dora Bruder and her parents were, and my father too when he was twenty years younger than me.”¹⁰ Attempting to reconstitute Dora’s itinerary, which from her identification through her running-away (her father had not declared her as Jewish to the Vichy administration) leads her to detention at Les Tourelles, to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz, Modiano (or his narrator) underlines the analogies with certain elements of his father’s life, even fantasizing a possible encounter in the police van supposed to take them to the police: Dora definitively, the father for his part managing to escape, without his account to his son ever really specifying in what manner, and with what dubious backing. Before being belied by reality, the son takes pleasure in imagining an encounter between his father and Dora, whom the same status of pariahs would unite: “Perhaps I wanted them to cross paths, my father and she, in that winter of 1942. However different they may both have been, that winter they had been classed in the same category of outcasts.”¹¹

In Auster, it is from the father’s death that the attempts at fictional displacement unfold. The quest for the father collides with a void that proves too abyssal to be overcome. The facts are recounted in their flat, impoverished accumulation: the formalities linked to the death, the observation of how few traces a human existence leaves, the attempt to explain the paternal “invisibility” by the concealment of the family secret — that deadly inheritance bequeathed to the father by the murder of his own father carried out by his mother, and the organized disappearance of the paternal figure, all of whose photographic traces are systematically erased. From this hushed disappearance would come, no doubt, Auster suggests, the borrowed life that characterizes his father, that way of having himself “represented” by a “second personality,” which the writer, in a certain way, links to a capacity to fictionalize existence, to tell stories, to make everyone believe them: his own inheritance, in a sense.

Writing about his father’s life triggers in Auster the same impression of taboo as the inquiry into Dora Bruder in Modiano. Writing appears as a labyrinth in which the subject loses himself, casting doubt on the very possibility of intervening consciously in a history that seems to “write itself” but also runs the risk of its own drying-up: “it seems to me that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that it resists language.”¹² Likewise, the revelation through newspaper clippings of the truth about his grandfather’s death triggers in Auster a “repugnance to write,” an impression of unreality analogous to nightmare, together with a feeling of “déjà vu,” of something already unconsciously “known”: “like cave paintings discovered on the inner walls of my skull.”¹³

This disorientation mingled with a feeling of fatality, of the ineluctable, pertains to an “uncanny” experience, like that return of the repressed to which the persistence of the paternal figure bears witness through its very disappearance: “as if, even gone, he were still alive. Or if not alive, at least not dead. In suspense, rather…”¹⁴ The figure of the father traces a zone of shadow, “a block of impenetrable space in human form,”¹⁵ Auster says. Metonymy of the father, the abandoned house he “haunted” throughout the end of his existence gathers the traces of a spectral presence, likened by the son to a myth of origin: “once the disappearance has occurred, objects, even if they remain, are different. They are there without being there, tangible ghosts,” “like the utensils of some vanished civilization.”¹⁶ His father’s death returns Auster to the long duration of human history, woven by the paternal myth. It is likened to a universal, cosmic catastrophe, tinging the experience with unreality, enlarging it to the dimensions of the history of civilizations, nourishing in the son “the sudden feeling that the world has always been unreal, since its prehistory.”¹⁷

In Modiano, it is rather the apprehension of the void that corresponds to the feeling of quest, accentuated by the same impression of spectral fatality: “one tells oneself that at least places keep a slight imprint of the persons who inhabited them. Imprint: a mark in hollow or in relief. For Ernest and Cécile Bruder, for Dora, I would say: in hollow. I felt an impression of absence and of emptiness, every time I found myself in a place where they had lived.”¹⁸ These silhouettes captured by chance on the screen of an unfigurable past appear as scarcely arresting hooks for the gaze, for knowledge: “what one knows of them often comes down to a simple address. And this topographical precision contrasts with what one will forever be ignorant of regarding their life — that blank, that block of the unknown and of silence.”¹⁹ From the outset, the image of the father and daughter reunited emerges from the void of oblivion: “the only thing I knew was this: I had read her name, BRUDER DORA — with no other mention, neither date nor place of birth — above that of her father BRUDER ERNEST, 21.5.99. Vienna. Stateless, in the list of those who were part of the convoy of 18 September 1942 for Auschwitz.”²⁰ Among the multiple stories of that era, the decisive element that holds the attention of the “seeker of traces” is perhaps that specific configuration which binds father and daughter and precipitates their destiny: “parents lose track of their child, and one of them disappears in turn, on a 19 March, as if the winter of that year separated people from one another, blurred and erased their itineraries, to the point of casting doubt on their existence. And there is no recourse. Those very people charged with searching for you and finding you draw up index cards the better to make you disappear afterward — definitively.”²¹

Henceforth, the story of Dora Bruder is inseparable from that of her father, Ernest Bruder, just as for Modiano the quest for Dora is also a quest for his own father, united to the young girl by the fragile tracing of the weather: “The only way not to lose Dora Bruder altogether during this period would be to report the changes in the weather. Snow had fallen for the first time on 4 November 1941. […] On 12 February, there was a little sun, like a timid announcement of spring. A layer of snow, turned blackish under the trampling of passersby and turning to mud, covered the sidewalks. It was on the evening of that 12 February that my father was taken away by the police of the Jewish Affairs section.”²² The historical anomaly is noted by Modiano, in connection with the inversion of family relations: “it happens that children make greater demands than their parents and that they adopt, in the face of adversity, a more violent attitude than theirs. They leave their parents far, very far, behind them. And the latter, henceforth, can no longer protect them.”²³ Is this a way for Modiano to underline the absence of protection he feels on the part of his own father, particularly flagrant when the latter had him loaded into a police van not very different, he tells us, from those of the war years? “I nearly evoked the night of February 1942 when he too had been loaded into a police van, and asked him whether he had thought of it just then. But perhaps it mattered less to him than to me.”²⁴ Like the running-away, the book is a call, at the same time as it manifests “the intoxication of severing all ties at a single stroke […] a feeling of revolt and solitude carried to its incandescence, which takes your breath away and puts you in a state of weightlessness.”²⁵

In Paul Auster as well, the ambivalence with respect to the paternal figure issues in the writing of a fable of redemptive filiation. Taking support from the current of associations and references, the narrator transfers loss to the rank of myth — not of birth, he specifies, but of becoming. Starting from a quotation by Kierkegaard, writing is likened to the phenomenon of the engendering of the father by the son: “but whoever is willing to work gives birth to his own father.”²⁶ The reference to the book of Jeremiah specifies the writer’s mission, that of the one who confronts language, the “infans” into whose “mouth” Yahweh puts his “words.”²⁷ The allusion to Jonah indicates the mortal risk to which the one who does not speak exposes himself (“whoever does not speak is alone; alone even unto death”), and to whom only the fear of death has “opened the mouth.”²⁸ “In the darkness of that solitude which is death, the tongue finally loosens, and from the moment it begins to speak, the answer comes.”²⁹

Finally, in the citation of Collodi’s tale Pinocchio there is produced the alchemy of the dreamed-of encounter with the father, that “episode of reunion”³⁰ of father and son in fiction (the “darkness of the belly of the shark”) and in real life (after the divorce that separates the writer from his son, like an echo of his father’s death), a symbolic episode that Paul Auster qualifies as “profoundly satisfying.” The moment most appreciated by Daniel, Auster’s son, to whom he tells the story of Pinocchio when they are reunited following the separation, is indeed that of the rescue of Geppetto by Pinocchio, that moment of inversion of the father-son relations which comes to put an end to the puppet’s apprenticeship — he who, in order to become a “real boy,”³¹ must first set off in search of his vanished father: “the son saves the father,”³² carrying him on his shoulders in the darkness of the “great raging sea,” a darkness that Collodi himself has already compared to “an inkwell filled with ink.”³³ The quest for the father and its culmination, the symbolic acquisition of maturity, dictate here again the realization of the writer’s vocation, pursued through writing: “the puppet had become the image of himself as a child [Collodi]. To plunge it into the inkwell was thus to make use of his creature in order to write his own story. For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.”³⁴

Thus the “minuscule images,” “lodged in the mud of memory, neither buried nor wholly recoverable,” constitute “an ephemeral resurrection, an instant that escapes disappearance.”³⁵ In the face of the darkness of oblivion, writing is likened to the fixing of an eternalized moment, like the photograph. We find this idea again in Modiano: “photographs such as exist in every family. For the time of the photo, they were protected a few seconds, and those seconds have become an eternity.”³⁶ Writing engenders the myth of art’s redemptive function. The form of discontinuity adopted by the narration makes room for those derisory “epiphanies” illustrated by the “aura” of images mechanically recording the past, as in that film from the years of the Occupation whose “particular luminosity” and “the very grain of the film” Modiano underlines, conferring on the images a kind of “effacement,” a “boreal whiteness” sharply in contrast with the very dark tones: “I understood abruptly that this film was impregnated with the gazes of the spectators of the time of the Occupation — spectators of every kind, a great number of whom had not survived the war. They had been taken off into the unknown, after having seen this film, on a Saturday evening that had been a respite for them. For the time of a screening, one forgot the war and the threats outside. In the darkness of a cinema, we were pressed against one another, following the flow of the images on the screen, and nothing more could happen.”³⁷ Of course, this feeling of escaping time is an illusion, tragically illustrated by the ineluctable outcome of what is not a fiction but historical reality, however absurd it may appear against the “normality” of the cinema screening: the mention of the convoy toward deportation that condemns Dora and her father, taken off together toward death (“The two of them, father and daughter, left Drancy on 18 September, with a thousand other men and women, in a convoy for Auschwitz”³⁸). The cinema is but another sort of “flight” with respect to the “vise” of reality, like Dora’s running-away on 14 December: “Perhaps one of those mild and sunny Sundays of winter when you feel a sense of vacancy and eternity — the illusory feeling that the course of time is suspended, and that it suffices to let oneself slip through this breach in order to escape the vise that is going to close on you.”³⁹

Paul Auster too mentions this will to affirm the sacralized value of art, while at once calling it into question through a kind of self-irony, as when he confesses his fascination before the family photographs: “Back home, I became absorbed in the contemplation of these snapshots with a fascination bordering on mania. I found them irresistible, precious, the equivalent of sacred relics.”⁴⁰ Alas, the family album with its “title in fine gold — this is our life: the Austers” is “totally empty,” and the family photographs have been expurgated of their hidden truth. As for writing, set in motion at the start in order to save the father from disappearance, it quickly collides with the consciousness of its paradoxical impotence: “I had a wound, and I now discover that it is very deep. Instead of healing it, as I imagined, the act of writing has kept it open.”⁴¹ Like the photograph that is “portrait of an invisible man” and “representation of death,” writing is haunting, deepening mourning instead of putting an end to it: “instead of helping me to bury my father, these words keep him alive, more alive perhaps than ever.” At the limit of his capacity to “penetrate the absolute darkness of the earth”⁴² there finally appears the image of the common death, the “big orange root that grew in the grave,”⁴³ the “words and gestures of the ceremony” that “no longer masked the simple reality of death,” the dream of one’s own death on which the filial journey of A. finally comes to grief. Likewise, Modiano’s narrative is powerless to “save” Dora, even if it serves in passing to justify the father or at least to leave of him an acceptable image.

At most the book is the occasion of an encounter, of a “coincidence” according to the definition Auster gives of it: “that which occupies the same point in time or space.”⁴⁴ Like Auster, Modiano believes in coincidences: “like many others before me, I believe in coincidences and sometimes in a gift of clairvoyance among novelists.”⁴⁵ Writing his novel Voyage de noces (Honeymoon), inspired in part by the newspaper clipping on Dora’s running-away, Modiano, without knowing it, captures a reflection of reality by describing in advance, concerning his invented characters, one of the itineraries actually taken by Dora at the moment of her fugitive’s wandering: “there is the only moment of the book [Voyage de noces] where, without knowing it, I came close to her in space and time.”⁴⁶ For Auster, the play with language, those “rhymes” between events brought together by memory, the coincidence, chance, do not for all that constitute a truth of an absolute order: “language is not the truth. It is our way of existing in the universe.”⁴⁷ For Modiano, the relation to literary language is of the order of testimony, including within the fictional universe that creates approximate connections, not always very distant from the events of reality: “the police of the Jewish Affairs section destroyed their files, all the records of interrogation during the roundups or during the individual arrests in the streets. If I were not here to write it, there would no longer be any trace of the presence of this unknown woman and that of my father in a police van in February 1942, on the Champs-Élysées.”⁴⁸ To invent, even if the story told is fictive, is always in a certain way to identify, to give a face to unknowns, those “persons — dead or living — who are filed under the category of ‘unidentified individuals.’” No matter that the unknown woman of the police van could not have been Dora Bruder; for the space of an instant, that of the writing, the possibility of it existed, and through this “coincidence,” the son in a sense insinuated himself into the shadowy life of the father, outside space and time.

If Auster summons a collective memory by way of literary citation,⁴⁹ Modiano multiplies the crossings between fiction and reality, as if to give to his somewhat kitsch fascination of a writer obsessed with the Occupation its ethical dimension, recalled precisely on the occasion of the encounter with Dora. The importance of Modiano’s discovery of Klarsfeld’s Mémorial, thanks to which he completes his inquiry into the circumstances that followed Dora’s running-away up to her deportation to Auschwitz, has been underlined in interviews granted by the writer. For the children of those who miraculously escaped death, all the indices of reality found by chance serve to attest the unfigurable, the unimaginable, the gap between the “abstract” history of history books and the “mythological” (and thus, in a sense, fictional) history of their own parents. For Auster too, and all the more strongly in that the temporal distance is doubled by the spatial distance between America and Europe, the “beginning” is unfigurable, associated with the suffering of children, with Anne Frank’s diary read alongside the stupefaction felt during the visit to the very places where this young life was accomplished, full of hope despite the approach of the end: “here is the beginning. He is alone, planted in the middle of an empty room, and he begins to weep. […] And yet, because forever it surpasses understanding, he wants it to remain for him that which always comes before the beginning. As in these sentences: ‘Here is the beginning. He is alone, planted in the middle of an empty room, and he begins to weep.’”⁵⁰ Thus history (memory, fiction) “establishes the principle of the existence of others and allows the one who listens to it to come into contact with them, were it only in imagination.”⁵¹ For history, although true, is what “surpasses imagination,” the interval between the life of the son and that of the father, accessible only to imaginary reconstruction and to projection through other analogous existences. Thus Paul Auster writes the “book of memory” with the help of the words of others, cited textually and nonetheless translating, in A.’s eyes, his intimate relation to history: “Memory, then, not so much as the resurrection of a personal past as an immersion in that of others, that is to say history — of which we are at once actors and witnesses, of which we are a part without being so.”⁵² As for Modiano, he attempts to reconstitute Dora’s itinerary on the basis of numerous testimonies of other existences traversed by the same deadly absurdity, no doubt for want of having been able to hear the paternal version of this story, and also for fear of not being able to receive it from his own father, whom he considers to be at once victim and culprit.

Thus it is also to a form of collective memory, fairly close to that of the Jewish memorial books of remembrance, the yizker bikher, that Modiano’s “objectivized” writing at times arrives, citing for example the extract of a letter from a Drancy internee, Robert Tartakovsky, “who left in the convoy of 22 June, with Claudette Bloch, Josette Delimal, Tamara Isserlis, Hena, Annette, the friend of Jean Jausion…”⁵³ A passage whose poignant force comes from what we know and what the author of the letter does not yet know — an unfigurable “interval” of time and of pure negativity, to which this passage from The Invention of Solitude could precisely apply: “To speak of the future is to use a language in advance of itself, concerning events that have not yet occurred, in order to assign them to the past, to a ‘already’ eternally belated; and in this space between the discourse and the act there opens a rift, and whoever contemplates such a void, were it only for an instant, is seized with vertigo and feels himself toppling into the abyss.”⁵⁴ In this letter where a son in a sense bids farewell to his mother, there opens for the reader that abyss of History which no word can fill, but which no silence either can save. One must henceforth read in a mirror the endings of these two books, which in their distinction say at bottom the same necessity of writing, and no doubt also of fiction, at the same time as the absolute resistance of the real — dimensions that finally meet, through the injunction of the word and of memory, the biblical zakhor (“remember”): “I shall forever be ignorant of how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she found herself during the winter months of her first running-away and over the few weeks of spring when she escaped again. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that the executioners, the directives, the so-called occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time — all that soils you and destroys you — will not have been able to steal from her.”⁵⁵

“He takes a fresh sheet of paper, places it on the table before him, and traces these words with his pen. It was. It will be no more. To remember. (1980–1981).”⁵⁶

Notes