Who, today, can imagine harnessed horses in Paris? Or even, quite simply, horses?… Of course, one still sees parading, sumptuous, the mounted Republican Guard upon their alezans (chestnut horses). Are they even alezans? The elegance of the word suits the arrogance of their splendor. Bronze and crimson. Metal and tawny. Manes like sensual heads of hair. These lavish mounts have nothing to do with horses. Real horses. Proletarian horses. The ones that suffer. The ones I once saw suffer in Paris. Their hesitant steps on the iced-over streets. Their fears. They did not go blind like the grayish ones, colorless, with knotted knees, haulers of wagonets in the depths of the coal mines. In Paris, they collapsed, legs broken, mouth and nostrils full of mucus, winded, without a whinny, beneath the blows and the curses of the carters who voiced in this way their despair at being forced to press their beasts against the curbs to let the automobiles pass. The kicks, the whip-cracks, the invectives to make the whitish ones with broad flanks get up again, the dappled ones from the Bourbonnais in the streets of Paris.
The misery of these horses, their distress, overwhelmed me, just as I was made wretched by the very old bearded men I crossed on the sidewalks of my neighborhood. A clean-shaven old man did not move me. Only the bearded old ones tore at me. Like the one in the photograph, in the frame, on a wall of our dining room. The frame seemed very large to me. The old man’s head was covered with a dark cap. This old man, I knew him to be my mother’s dead father. Dead in Poland. Long before my birth. My first dead person.
Around the photo, suspended by a thin black cord from a golden nail, a strip of dark wood framed a pane of glass. Reflected in it was a mirror, hung on the wall opposite, in which was reflected the old man beneath his cap. Between these two reflections, through long Thursday afternoons, I lost myself infinitely. On the fringe of a vertigo.
My mother always evoked her father as if she had been the cause of his death. I sensed in her a sorrow. As incomprehensible as the sadness that came to me when I crossed paths with a collapsed horse, panicked by the howls of the carter. At the edge of its death.
In those days, it was wartime. When in the street I crossed paths with bearded old gentlemen or draft horses, I gripped my mother’s hand tightly and shut my eyes. I did not want to see them. They made me want to cry. I held it against them that they made me wretched.
After the war, the automobiles occupied more and more of the cobblestones, while the draft carriages disappeared from the streets of the capital. When my mother crossed paths with one, she became nostalgic. In her country, these carriages were called droshkès, and it was by pulling on the reins of a horse harnessed to a droshkè, one Saturday evening, that my father had come to ask for her hand in marriage from the neighboring small town. Just before she emigrated to France.
When all the droshkès of Paris had vanished, the only harnessed horses in the city were those hitched to a kind of advertising stagecoach for the Vins du Postillon. Wine-dregs red the coach and wine-dregs red the coachman’s coat. Then the Vins du Postillon in their turn disappeared.
Much later, nostalgic in my turn for the droshkès, I decided to visit Poland. To tell the truth, my nostalgia is a convenient excuse. In Poland, I did no sightseeing. I went to Oświęcim, a Polish town near which my father died. In the days when, as a child, in the streets of Paris, I saw the horses suffer, their flanks flayed by the shafts of old carriages, their mouths torn by the bits, their hocks broken… Enough of horses!… The German name of the Polish town of Oświęcim. Auschwitz. The place of my father’s death was called Auschwitz. And there, it is said. And said again.
(Chimène, glad of the speech of her confidante, who announces to her that her father has chosen in favor of Rodrigue, has Elvire repeat the exquisite news so as to let herself yield to the happiness of believing it. The one says and says again. The other, to satiety, listens and re-listens and has the happiness repeated to her.)
A need to repeat, in order to believe it, to accept it, the truth of my father’s death. How is one to believe in a dead man without a corpse?… How is one to mourn him?… Who is witness to my father’s death if not the place of his death?
And so I left for Oświęcim. On an organized trip, billed as a pilgrimage.
Departure in the morning. Return that same evening. A Sunday in the month of April. A day in parentheses.
At the dawn of that day, I quarreled like a madwoman with the taxi driver, ordered the night before and arrived three minutes late at the foot of my building to take me to Orly. On the plane, to the very agitated lady seated behind my seat, who was jabbing me in the back with I-don’t-know-what pointed object, I politely signaled my presence. She lectured me:
— “When you think that they traveled in cattle cars and that we travel so comfortably… I didn’t hurt you very much. You can bear it.”
She was right. I bore it.
Accompanying us were two rabbis. One, young-looking, built like a rugby player, clean-shaven. The kippah unsteady on his skull. The other, puny, black coat and hat, gray beard. Ageless. Therefore old. Enough to make you weep.
The boarding at Orly had been quick; the disembarking at Kraków was very long. From the outset, the paranoia of the pilgrims attributed to the malevolent zeal of the Polish police, seated on chairs, behind very rudimentary tables, the wait imposed upon us. In double or triple file. Standing. Without explanation. During this time, I was searching my bag for my visa of entry into Polish territory. In vain. I had left this visa at home, obtained with difficulty at the consulate. Shortly before the day of departure. I could not understand how I had managed not to bring it. A loose leaf the size of the passport, stamped with the Polish eagle. So that the sheet would not slip out of the pages of the passport inadvertently, I had placed it conspicuously on the cover.
In my line, I was panicking. Should I say immediately that I had no entry visa? Or wait my turn to pass before the border policeman? If they did not let me through with the others, what would they do with me until their return? Would they send me back to France immediately? If not, where would I spend the day? Where would they send me?… Ahead of me, pilgrims and their advice. Behind, others with their disapproval. They feared, because of me, a prolongation of our wait.
When I finally appeared before what served as a counter, no torment. Nothing. Save two back-and-forth glances of the policeman’s eyes between my face and the photo of my passport. And my name, that is to say my father’s, pronounced in the Polish way: the c of Swarc said as ts, which made me feel at home. Without my knowing which home.
In the coach awaiting us, which, like the other pilgrims, I boarded once the ordeal was past, I wondered what had made the crossing so easy when I was in violation. Was it my name, neither Frenchified nor Germanized, easy for a Pole to say? My Slavic face, which had always made my parents’ friends call me shiksè (Gentile girl)? Questions without answers. I had passed. And that was that. Once again, I had passed.
We drove. I don’t know for how long. At first I wanted to look at nothing. I had not come to do sightseeing in Poland. I pretended to sleep. The others, I think, were doing as I was. Then I ended up opening my eyes. It was springtime, even in that country. And yet, everything seemed gray. The fields, the houses. The trees were even barer than the trees back home in autumn. Perhaps because it was still early, one saw no one. Or were they all already at mass? Soon a few windows opened and I saw women place on their balconies big red feather eiderdowns, and pillows. I recognized them. I had always seen them, identical, in my mother’s bed. I don’t know at what moment I caught sight of the first droshkè. A horse with a golden coat was harnessed to it. It pulled the carriage in the rays of the sun that had at last dispelled the mists of the morning. Its thick mane and the hairs of its long tail had the blondness of the hair of the man who drove it. Of course, I thought of my mother, of the marriage proposal. There were other golden horses driven by blond carters on the road up to the pilgrimage site.
And then, we arrived. It was still before noon. I no longer know what came to my mind, or even whether anything came to my mind, when I crossed the gate. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. No doubt an impression of familiarity, of the known. Like when I found myself for the first time before the Botticellis of the Uffizi in Florence.
At Birkenau, at Auschwitz, I tried to let the emotions come, to catch them. Even to capture them. To weep, perhaps. And yet, even when the old rabbi spoke before the plaque written in Yiddish, said these words: “… upon this accursed land of Poland…,” (I no longer know in what connection), when he read Psalms, read a chapter of the Guide for the Perplexed (“touting for God,” I thought), never was I moved. However, I was glad that the old man did not practice forgiveness.
Around me, only the men wept or wiped their eyes. A few had placed a kippah on their heads. The women seemed hard. Closed. Among the pilgrims, there were three former deportees. Two men and a woman, Madame Salmon. During the Kaddish, I fixed my eyes on the woman. If she wept, I would weep. At the start of the prayer for the dead, she had covered her pretty blond hair with her scarf, removed at the moment when the rabbi had read the Psalms. A beautiful scarf, blue and richly patterned. Surely a designer one. It was pleasant that morning at Birkenau. The sun was warm and high. The woman lifted her face, her blue eyes toward the sky. She was cute, very coquettishly dressed. With black embroidered stockings, black high-heeled shoes. In patent leather. Like her handbag, to which she seemed to cling. She held it pressed tight against her navy-blue coat. Ample and soft. The heat and the tension had reddened her cheeks. Then her tearless eyes left the sky to fix on a point. Far ahead. Striking, that dry, haughty gaze in this very small woman, pretty, plump and pink. She did not seem to hear the message of repentance read by an activist of the Judeo-Christian friendships who was taking part in the pilgrimage.
After the ceremony, I followed the little blond lady. When she changed her pair of shoes, so as not to tire herself, for another similar pair, just as incongruous on the stony ground of the site, I lent her my arm so she could lean on it. She did me the favor of accepting it, although she had no need of it: her son was there accompanying her. A man of about forty. Black eyes. Very dark. Silent. He must not have been in the habit of wearing the kippah. Constantly, he placed a hand on the top of his skull, to check whether his head remained covered.
While Madame Salmon was putting her shoes back on, she told me how much she had wanted to make herself beautiful for the girlfriends who had stayed there. She had arrived at Auschwitz in January 1944. She was twenty. She was sixty-four now. She was coming back here for the first time.
— “For my son. He’s the one who wanted it. For my son and for the girlfriends.”
I followed her everywhere. She recognized nothing, they had changed everything, she complained.
— “And in the first place, what’s this sun? I was here a year, there was never any sun.”
The chimney-vestiges of Birkenau surprised her. To me, they seemed a succession of gibbets erected by some decadent neo-Romantic.
In the gas chamber, a tourist held her orange Jet Tour pouch, wedged under her arm. I don’t know whether Madame Salmon had seen her. We went together to the toilets. The attendant asked us something involving zlotys. But neither Madame Salmon nor I had any change. I was embarrassed. She not at all:
— “I peed for free here for a year, it’s not today that I’m going to pay.”
Her son was waiting for us. Outside, it was getting hotter and hotter. A luminous day. Unreal. No midday meal had been planned. Perhaps we were even supposed to fast. We were thirsty. An itinerant ice-cream vendor was there, stopped near us. The son offered each of us a cone, with scoops that were melting into cream beneath the sun. We were all tongues out and chins lifted so as not to soil ourselves, when a group from our pilgrimage crossed paths with us. A lady, perhaps the one who had lectured me on the plane, said how shocked she was that one could, at Auschwitz, treat oneself to ice cream like that.
Madame Salmon shrugged her shoulders:
— “And so what?… Life went on. I’m here with my son. Life goes on. Did you see the tourist in the gas chamber with her program under her arm? That’s life too. And in life, me, I love ice cream.”
I no longer know at what moment we left Auschwitz to return to Kraków. We were to spend a few hours there before setting off again for Paris. In the coach, I took up my place from the morning. Madame Salmon and her son, theirs.
It was hot. I was seated near a window. Almost all the structures along the road were of dark brick, like the blocks of the lager. I wondered whether all of Poland was thus built of dirty brick. Whether all of Poland was an Auschwitz. Before the pilgrimage, I had imagined the blocks like the wooden barracks of the camp of Pithiviers, where I had seen my father for the last time. Not these solid edifices, a kind of insolent wager upon eternity.
That Sunday in April, at Auschwitz, everything seemed familiar to me. Blended into the images installed in me over the course of time. Remained unreal. I saw nothing at Auschwitz. Wept for nothing. I could not release my father from his absence. Still not.
Like the other pilgrims, I was dozing when the coach stopped in Kraków. Before the entrance to the city’s old Jewish cemetery. While the rabbis went to negotiate with the dignitaries of the diocese, over the future of the Carmel built at Auschwitz, we were invited to visit the cemetery. An old Jewish cemetery become a historic monument for all Poles. Out of use since the beginning of the eighteenth century. With real graves. Real deaths. Corpses returned to dust by the effect of time. A few local Jews served there as guides. And we, the Jews of France, we looked at these Jews of Poland. In Poland. As though come from another time. Unexistable.
Afterward, I strolled alone through the streets of what had been the city’s Jewish quarter. The bricks and the stones of the streets had kept the memory of the former inhabitants. I heard them in the silence of that late spring afternoon. I saw the trace left by the mezuzah on the threshold of the doors. Then I got back on the coach with the others.
My previous night had been short and the start of that day seemed lost in eternity. Yet I did not feel tired. I would just have wanted to be elsewhere. I did not know it, but I was exhausted. As soon as I was seated in my place, my head against the window, I fell asleep.
It was no doubt an abrupt braking that woke me. The left arm of my neighbor had kept me from being thrown against the seatback in front of me. The coach was stopped. The sun had vanished but it was still daylight. Ahead of us, a heavy truck was stopped at an angle. On the right side of the road, a man was making great gestures. A young man, blond. On his face, something like a rictus. At first I took him for the truck driver. My neighbor said:
— “His horse was killed by the truck. And the peasant is weeping.”
In the middle of the road, the droshkè overturned, the horse lying on its side. Its golden coat like the hair of the man who was weeping with his whole body. And with my whole body, I burst into sobs.
Paris, December 1995