The Sweetness of Forgetting (19 page)

I do as Carole directed and turn left just as I begin passing the enormous Louvre museum on my left. I emerge into a sprawling square surrounded on all four sides by the walls of the museum itself, and for a moment, I stop in my tracks, breathless. I don’t know much of the history of France, but I remember reading that the Louvre used to be a palace, and as I look around me, I can almost imagine a seventeenth-century monarch striding through the square, trailed by his attendants.

Emerging on the other side, I see the pedestrian bridge Carole told me about. She had explained that the rails of the bridge are lined with padlocks, put there by lovers to declare the sealing of their relationships. It’s a romantic thought, but I know that padlock or not, relationships are temporary, even when you believe in them with all your heart.

I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I’ve seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I’m really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home. I miss Annie terribly at that moment.

It’s not until I’m halfway across the wooden bridge that I’m
struck with a sudden sense of déjà vu, as if I’ve been here before. It takes me a moment to realize why, and when I do, I stop in my tracks so abruptly that the woman behind me runs directly into me. She mumbles something in French, shoots me a withering glance, and makes an exaggerated, wide loop around me. I ignore her and turn in a slow circle, my eyes wide. To the right, beyond the glittering Seine, the tip of the Eiffel Tower slices through the blue of the sky in the distance. Behind me, the Louvre museum looms, palatial and enormous, on the river’s bank. To my left, I can see an island connected to two bridges. I quickly count the arches. Seven on the left bridge; five on the right bridge. And ahead, the building Carole had called the Institut de France looks a lot like a second palace, as if it and the Louvre were once halves of the same royal kingdom.

My heart pounds, and I can hear Mamie’s voice in my ears, telling me the fairy tale she repeated so often that I knew it by heart by the time I was Annie’s age.

“Every day, the prince walked across the wooden bridge of love to see his princess. The great palace lay behind him, and ahead of him was the domed castle at the entrance to the princess’s kingdom. He had to cross a great moat to get to his one true love, and to his left, there were two bridges leading to the heart of the city—one with seven arches, and one with five. To his right, a giant sword cut through the sky, warning him of the danger that lay ahead. Still, he came each day and braved that danger because he loved the princess. He said that all the danger in the world could not keep him away from her. Every day, the princess sat at her window and listened for his footsteps, because she knew he would never disappoint her. He loved her, and when he promised he would come for her, he always kept his word.”

I’d always thought that Mamie’s stories were simply fairy tales she’d heard as a little girl, but for the first time, I find myself wondering whether she’d made them up herself and set them in her beloved Paris. I shake my head and begin walking again, but my knees feel wobbly beneath me. I imagine my grandmother
as a teenage girl, walking across this same bridge, taking in the same buildings, the same current beneath her, imagining that a prince was coming for her one day. Had her footsteps fallen where mine fall now, in this very same place, some seventy years earlier? Had she stood on this bridge and looked for the stars to appear to the east, over the island in the middle of the Seine, the way she waits for them to appear now from her window each night? Had she regretted leaving it behind forever?

As I walk on, I think of my favorite of her tales, the one in which the prince tells the princess that as long as there are stars in the sky, he will love her.

“One day,” the prince said to the princess, “I will take you across a great sea to see a queen whose torch illuminates the world, keeping all of her subjects safe and free.”

When I was a girl, I used to cling to those words, to imagine that one day, I too would find a prince who would rescue me from my mother’s coldness. I used to imagine climbing on this prince’s white horse with him—because of course in my imagination, the prince had a white horse—and going away forever to that fairy-tale kingdom with the queen who kept everyone safe.

But now I’m thirty-six, and I know better. There are no dashing, heroic princes waiting to save me. There is no magical queen to protect me. In the end, you can only rely on yourself. I wonder how old Mamie was when she learned those same truths.

Suddenly, although I have the sense I’m being cradled by my grandmother’s past, I feel more alone than ever.

Rue Visconti is dark and narrow, more a long alleyway than a proper street. The sidewalks are slender ribbons on each side, and a lone bicycle propped against a black doorway makes me think of an old-fashioned postcard. I pass a few storefronts and make my way down nearly to the end, where I finally see number 24, a pair of huge black double doors under an arch. I enter the code Carole gave me—48A51—on the keypad to the right, and
when the door buzzes, I push it inward. When I make it from the cool darkness of the arched courtyard up to the second floor of the building, the door is already open. I rap lightly against the doorframe anyhow, and from the depths of the apartment, a deep, froggy voice calls,
“Entrez-vous! Entrez-vous, madame!”

I walk in, close the door lightly behind me, and make my way through a narrow hallway lined by bookcases, all of which are overflowing with old, leather-bound volumes. I emerge into a sunlit room where I see a white-haired, stoop-shouldered man standing near the window, gazing out at the street below. He turns as I enter, and I’m surprised at how lined his face is; it appears as if he’s lived through hundreds of years of history, instead of just the ninety-three years Carole Didot had promised. I approach to shake his hand, and he looks at me oddly.

“Ah, an American,” are the first words he says to me. He smiles then, and I’m struck by how bright his green eyes seem; they’re the eyes of a young man and appear out of place housed in his sunken features. “Madame Didot did not tell me you are American. In Paris, we greet with
deux bisous,
two kisses on the cheek, my dear.” He demonstrates, leaning forward to kiss me lightly on each cheek. I can feel myself blushing.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble.

“There is nothing to be sorry about,” he says. “Your American customs are quite charming.” He gestures to a small table with two wooden chairs, which is situated near the window. “Come, sit,” he says. He waits until I’m seated, offers me a cup of tea, and when I decline, he sits down with me. “I am Olivier Berr.”

“I’m Hope McKenna-Smith. Thank you for having me here on such short notice,” I say slowly. I’m trying to be conscious of both his age and the fact that English isn’t his first language.

“It is no trouble,” he says. “It is always a pleasure to have a visit from a pretty girl.” He smiles and pats my hand. “I understand you search for some information.”

I nod and take a deep breath. “Yes, sir. My grandmother is
from Paris. I just learned recently that her family may have died in the Holocaust. I think they were Jewish.”

He looks at me for a moment. “You learned this only recently?”

Embarrassed, I struggle to explain. “Well, she never spoke of it.”

“You were raised in another religion.” It is a statement, not a question.

I nod. “Catholicism.”

He nods slowly. “This is not entirely unusual. Leaving the past behind in this manner.
Mais,
in her heart, I suspect, your grandmother may still consider herself
juive.
”

I tell him briefly what happened on Rosh Hashanah, with the crusts of the Star Pie.

He smiles. “
Judaïsme
is not just a religion, but a state of the heart and of the soul. I suspect perhaps all religions are this way, for those who truly believe in them.” He pauses. “You have come here today for answers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“About what became of her family.”

“Yes, sir. She’d never spoken of them before.”

Again, he nods knowingly. “You have with you their names?”

“Yes,” I say. I pull out a copy of Mamie’s list and hand it to him. As his clear eyes scan the page, I add quickly, “But Alain, her brother, isn’t in any Holocaust registry.”

He looks up and smiles. “Ah yes. But my registries are different.” He stands, trembling a little on his feet, and then he gestures with a crooked finger. He moves slowly, one foot in front of the other in a shuffle, toward the hallway lined with books. “I was twenty years of age when the Second World War began, twenty-two years of age when they began taking us away, right from the streets of France. More than seventy-six thousand
juifs
were taken from France, most never to return.”

I shake my head, suddenly mute.

“I was at Auschwitz,” he continues, and suddenly, he stops
his slow shuffle to the hall, pausing as if the memory itself holds him back. After a moment, he moves again. “More than sixty thousand were sent there from France. Did you know?” He stops speaking again for a moment, and then he coughs. “After
la libération,
I returned to find everyone gone. All my friends. My neighbors.”

“What about your family?” I ask.

“All of them, dead.” His voice is flat. “My wife. My son. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. Everyone. When I came home to Paris, I came home to nothing. To no one.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. The enormity of it begins to hit me. I’ve never met a concentration camp survivor before, and as the images from the Mémorial de la Shoah play themselves over again in my mind, I blink a few times, feeling numb. The atrocities in the pictures had actually happened to this kind man before me. I can feel tears in my eyes. I blink them away before he notices.

He waves a hand, dismissing my words. “It is the past. Not for you to be sorry about, mademoiselle. The world you live in today is very different, and I am glad.” He shuffles a little farther and regards his wall of books solemnly. He touches a gnarled finger to one book spine, then another. “The only place I knew to go when I returned was to the synagogue I had attended as a boy. But it had been destroyed. It was a shell, no longer a place.”

I’m frozen as I watch him scan the books. He pulls one out, reads something inside, and then returns it to the shelf.

“When I realized that the ones I loved were never coming home, I began to think about the great tragedy, not just of their deaths but of the loss of their legacies,” he continues. “For when you take away an entire family, and they all perish, who will tell their stories?”

“No one,” I murmur.

“
Précisément.
And when that occurs, it is as if their lives have
been lost twice over. That is when I began creating my own records.” He reaches for another book, and this time, his eyes light up and he smiles. He flips through a few pages and stops at one. He’s silent for a moment as he reads.

“Your own records?” I ask.

He nods and shows me the page he’s stopped on. I see a cursive scrawl across neat, lined pages that are yellowed at the edges. “My lists of the lost.” He smiles and adds, “And of the found. And of the stories that go with them.”

I take a step back and look in awe at his bookshelves. “All of these books are your lists?”

“Yes.”

“You compiled them yourself?” I look around in disbelief.

“It filled my time in those early days,” he says. “It was how I stopped living in the sadness. I began visiting synagogues every day, looking at their records, talking to every person I could meet.”

“But how did you put together so much information?”

“To everyone I met, I asked them for the names of anyone they knew who had been lost, and anyone they knew who had survived. Family, friends, neighbors, it did not matter. No piece of information was small or
insignifiant.
Each one represented a life lost or a life saved. Over the years, I have written and rewritten their memories, organized them into volumes, followed the leads they gave me, and sought out the people who survived.”

“My God,” I murmur.

“Each person who survived a camp,” he continues, “has many stories to tell. Those people are often the key to who was lost, and how. For others, the only key we have is that they never returned. But their names are here, and what details we do know.”

“But why aren’t these lists in the Mémorial de la Shoah?” I ask.

“These are not the kind of records they keep,” he says. “They keep official records, the ones made by the governments. These are not official. And for now, I want my lists with me, because I am
always finding new names, and it is important to keep up my life’s work. When I die, these books will go to the memorial. It is my hope that they too will keep them alive and, in doing so, keep the people who live in these pages alive forever.”