Maurice Morgenstern. The name of a dead man in the newspaper’s Deaths column. An ordinary name. Like John Smith. The death notice, rather sober, informs us of the death of Maurice Morgenstern in his fifty-fourth year, of his funeral at Bagneux, “all are to gather at two o’clock before the main entrance to the cemetery.”
Maurice Morgenstern, I crossed paths with him only once. I was eight, he must have been thirteen. The silhouette of a heavy adolescent. I do not remember his face, but the ears, the eyes, the pointed muzzle of his dog. A great German shepherd held on a leash, sniffing at everything with its nose and its pupils. Terrifying.
My mother had brought me to the Pioch, an old quarter of the town where we lived together. For only a few days. After months of separation. We had been placed there under house arrest. In the house at the Pioch, I was to meet the lady who, through her efforts, had made it possible for Maman to find me again. I can still see the big brown-framed glasses of Madame Morgenstern, Maurice’s mother. I hear her telling me in her deep voice of the letters, all the letters written by her, “all across the country to find you and give you back to your mother.”
When Maurice came into the house, he unleashed the dog, which rushed toward me. I was afraid; I left the chair where I was sitting, I drew back, I stumbled, I fell. The dog laid its nose on my nose. It was cold and wet, like in the train. It sniffed me and began to lick my cheeks. Maurice seized it by the collar. The boy dragged the animal into another room to shield it from my presence.
Madame Morgenstern crouched down toward me. She was very tall, and yet at that moment her face was right up against mine. She lifted me into her arms. She pressed me against her big bosom and, to distract my mother’s panic, she asked me questions about Lise, about Madame Bernard. I did not answer her. My dull air and my silence must have annoyed her. She grew impatient, she badgered me:
“But tell me about Madame Bernard, she is my friend. How did it go with Lise?”
Then my mother murmured against my stubborn silence:
“Hélène, she never talked much. And since we found each other again, she talks to me even less than before. She won’t tell anything. She says she remembers nothing.”
Madame Morgenstern smiled at me:
“To me you’re going to tell everything.”
So I found the way out. I cried. I had not cried in a long time. As if I had forbidden myself any sorrow outside my mother’s gaze. And weeks and months of despair driven down into my throat began to sob out of my belly and my head. And my arms and my knees that were trembling. And my tears, I felt them erasing my eyes, my cheeks, my nose. My whole face was streaming with water that soaked me, soaked Madame Morgenstern. She pressed me against her, harder and harder, I was going to suffocate. She pushed my mother away:
“Leave her. Let her cry. She was so frightened of the dog.”
I looked at Maman, I hiccupped:
“Yes, it’s the dog.”
To soothe me, the fat lady told about the dog, “so young and so gentle, playful as a child.” It had been given to them as a tiny puppy, a toy for Maurice. Her husband and she had not wanted it. Madness, to take in an animal when one is under house arrest, far from one’s real home. When life is so precarious. They had given in when Maurice, the puppy in his hands, had promised: “He’ll grow big and strong and he’ll defend me. No one will be able to hurt me.”
I listened to the story of the dog. It was not the true one. Madame Morgenstern was lying. The dog — I had recognized it well, it was the train dog.
Then it grew calm in my body. But I did not want to talk to them. I went on sniffling, helping the sobs along a little. They would not have believed me if I had told them that the dog, I had already seen it in the train when Lise, Madame Bernard’s daughter, had brought me back to Maman. But in the train, I had not cried. Nor at Lise’s. Nor at the others’ before.
I had nothing to tell about Madame Bernard. I had barely seen her. I had passed through her house in transit. A parcel in dispatch. How had all my mysterious haulings-about brought me to this lady’s house? I still do not know. One evening. One evening, I think. It was night. Of the winter I am sure. A lady welcomed me into a room where a boy was tapping with two fingers on a piano. She said:
“I am Madame Bernard. David, come and say hello to Hélène.”
David looked at me:
“Are you the one leaving with Lise?”
The lady smiled:
“Lise is my eldest daughter, she has gone to take two children to their parents. When she comes back, she’ll take you to join your mother.”
The next day, Lise was there. And the whole house began to sing. Lise was beautiful. Her white skin and her green eyes. Big russet curls flowed down over her head, her forehead, her shoulders. She wore plus-fours, like David, and a sweater knitted with green Jacquard patterns. She was not very tall. She sang all the time, everywhere, addressed her mother and her brother in song. She never stopped moving, switched on the wireless in the downstairs room, plugged in the gramophone in the piano room, went up, came down the stairs dancing. David, who could not bear the agitation of the young girl’s homecomings, had taken to slipping off to the neighbors’ until his sister’s next absence. Once Lise arrived, he vanished. I saw him again two and a half years later. In July 1945.
At breakfast, Lise announced our departure to me:
“In two days I’ll take you. We’ll cross the line and before the end of the week you’ll be with your mother.”
Of course I understood nothing. I did not know what line was meant, and I asked nothing. Two days later, I was once again on a train with an adult who promised me my mother. I did not believe Lise. But I did not think she was lying. No doubt I thought nothing at all. Not to think, not to cry, not to believe anything, not to ask questions, not to expect anything. Was the journey long?… I no longer know. But I have not forgotten the arrival of the dog. A man in uniform held it on a leash. Lise and I were alone in the compartment. I was lying on a seat, wrapped in a big mauve shawl up to my nose. Lise must have been elegant in her straight coat, her hair hidden under a turban that took up her whole head from the nape to the forehead. Black the turban, black the coat. Maman, who saw her thus, often described her to me later:
“She was all in fashion. Entirely in fashion.”
Lise held out some papers to the man. I saw his eyes beneath the visor of his flat cap. Like the dog’s, they did not blink. The animal sniffed the young girl’s shoes. Smelled me out in the shawl. In jerks. All over. It laid its nose on my nose. It was wet and cold. Lise had said nothing to me, but I knew it — grave things were passing between the young girl and the man. I did not move. I shut my eyes. I was afraid.
When I saw Maman on the platform of a station, it was evening. There were lights, people. And Lise had disappeared.
Maman and I stayed in the town more than two years. Our meetings with Madame Morgenstern were rare. Sometimes on Mondays. The only time when those under house arrest were allowed to form a gathering in the streets of the town. So we formed one. Along the walls of the gendarmerie. The general policing of those under house arrest obliged us, on that day, to report our presence to the local authorities — the Monday check at the gendarmerie is compulsory, it was declared on the municipal notice boards. So I waited, with my mother who would no longer let go of me, and with all the others, for the moment to sign the great register of those under house arrest. On Mondays, they were all equal. The rest of the time, we had no reason to mix with Madame Morgenstern. We were not of her world, and no doubt my mother’s gratitude must have discomfited the fat lady with the brown glasses. One Monday, I glimpsed Monsieur Morgenstern held on a leash by the dog. I never once crossed paths with Maurice. Another Monday, Madame Morgenstern approached Maman: someone had denounced Lise and her mother, they had been taken away. David, luckily, was at the neighbors’, who had written: “David is with us. Lise and Madame Bernard have gone on a journey.”
In the summer of 1944, the gendarmes and those under house arrest were freed from the Monday-afternoon chore that compelled the former to turn into bureaucrats. The others then became simple residents of the town.
The following summer, the neighbors who had sheltered David wrote to Madame Morgenstern: in April, Lise had returned from the journey, “dear Madame Morgenstern, can you take her in for a while with her brother?” Madame Bernard was not even mentioned.
So I saw Lise again.
Lise sitting in front of the house. The white façade, lit up with sun and with Lise. All in white, she too. Her short red hair. But already the curls were sketching themselves on her forehead. She did not seem to have changed. She had been back three months, Madame Morgenstern had said. And the fat lady offered to let us meet the returned one, who quarreled more than ever with David, closed up at the slightest allusion to Madame Bernard, and showed a discreet hostility to Maurice’s dog. The animal, however, made a great fuss over her. Since her return, she had been trying to sate her hunger for cinema and for fashion magazines. She had sewn the white dress in which I admired her. A dress very tight at the waist, that bared her shoulders and her arms.
Madame Morgenstern introduced me:
“Here, Lise, this is Hélène, one of your parcels.”
The young girl looked at me, she smiled at me:
“Forgive me, Hélène, I don’t recognize you. Little girls and little boys, I’ve escorted so many of them. In two years you must have changed a great deal…”
I sat down near her on the stone bench. I looked at the number tattooed in blue on her arm.
Through the open window, above our heads, the wireless could be heard:
Symphony, Symphony of love, Symphony of a day, My symphony…
Lise began to sing in duet with the set. Her voice had not changed, a little forced in the low notes perhaps. The song finished, she said to me:
“Tomorrow is the fourteenth of July. Come with me. We’ll go watch the fireworks on the Place de la Vierge. David and Maurice will be there. Afterward we’ll go to the dance.”
When Monsieur Morgenstern arrived, still pulled along by the dog, Lise suddenly recognized me.
“You’ve changed a lot. You’ve grown, but I remember you now!… You’re the little girl I wrapped in the mauve shawl! It was winter. You were very brave. If you’d shown how frightened you were, it would have been a catastrophe. I didn’t recognize you a moment ago, and yet I hadn’t forgotten you. Neither you, nor the dog. Over there too there were dogs. The same.”
The former house-arrest residents of the town began to leave before the end of summer. The Morgenstern family, with David and Lise, were among the first to go. I knew the day of their departure, I would have liked to take my leave of Lise. My mother had taught me discretion — one had to know how to keep one’s place. Gratitude did not justify my presence on the platform where Lise had brought me a lifetime before. And yet I came to watch her leave. From a distance. I saw the station of weathered red brick. The clock. The clock that went on marking the hours, even when later the little train, then the station, had disappeared.
There were many of them leaving that afternoon. I recognized the five travelers because of the dog. It frisked around the silhouettes rustling in the sun, made a fuss over them, as if it too were impatient to leave. Then the silhouettes disappeared. The dog remained alone. From the platform, it jumped up onto the steps of the little country train. Someone from inside pushed it back. The locomotive whistled. The jet of steam and the haze of the sun blinded me. I heard, without seeing it, the train begin to move, gather speed. I recognized by the sound the moment when it entered the tunnel, at the far end of the platform. A last shrill cry. When the steam had dispersed, the last carriage was sinking into the darkness. And the dog, hurled in pursuit of it, disappeared into the tunnel.