I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (20 page)

But first, I had to make Josée forgive me. That path was very clear. Josée had laid out explicit demands: I must remove the sentences about her mother from subsequent printings of the French edition of my father's book. I emailed my father a new version of the text. In it, I made no mention of my great-grandmother. Instead I said simply that my French ancestry complicated my Jewish one because only 3 percent of the French had actually taken part in the Resistance, while all the others, whether tacitly or actively, had collaborated with the German occupation.

I disagree with/disapprove of/am ashamed by your whitewashing of history,
my father wrote back to me.

I called him on the phone, tried to explain. “Josée was as clear as she could be without saying it outright: I remove this line about Mina, and she'll tell me about her life,” I told him. “It's worth it to me.”

“I'll do it,” my father said. “I told you you could speak in your own words, and if this is what you want, then I'll do it. But I'm disappointed.”

“I thought you'd understand,” I said.

“Where do you think I would be,” he asked, “if I'd left out of my books the parts that made people uncomfortable?”

My father and I rarely disagreed. His words stung.

“It's a small omission,” I said, more to convince myself than to convince him. He almost never changed his mind. “It's in the service of more truth.”

“It's cowardly,” he said. But he sent along my text, and the future editions of the French printing were changed. He was cold to me for a few weeks and then thawed. When my father and I fought, which was rarely, it was not as wrenching as my fights with my mother. I never worried that he had stopped loving me. But he almost never gave me his opinion unbidden, and I valued it more than anyone else's. I couldn't bear to admit that he might be wrong any more than I could bear to admit that I was.

“It's not fair,” I whined to my mother. “Papa didn't have to face Josée's anger. He doesn't understand.”

“Oh, but he did!” my mother said. She told me that the December before, in Paris, Josée had tried to engage my father over those very lines. He'd shrugged it off and bought her a crêpe. She'd thrown the crêpe on the ground. My father had shrugged again, laughed about it later.

“Then the subject came up once more, when just she and I were in her car,” my mother continued. “I opened my mouth to say that it was a good thing. The shame stops with this generation. My children are proud of Mina. She turned to me and—with all the
hatred and venom I've always imagined she felt for me—she said, ‘
Tais-toi!
'”

I jumped back, rattled. My mother had often told me to shut up in that exact tone, though it had been years since she'd done so.

“I'm sorry,” I said in a small voice, my apology automatic.

“Oh, but it was wonderful!” my mother said. “It was such a relief.” She smiled with glistening eyes, her gaze forceful and direct. She was willing me to understand, trying to beam her emotions to me telepathically.

“A relief?” I asked.

“It means I didn't invent her, that version of my mother,” my mother said. “It means she's still there. And for a moment I could be a child again, her horrible unwanted child!” She reached toward me but did not touch me, as if inviting me to jump into her arms or join her in a waltz.

“I see,” I said, though all I saw was one more thing I couldn't yet understand.

—

I
MADE ARRANGEMENTS
to move to France for a year. I found a job in a gallery, a subletter for my room in Brooklyn.

That August, I sat by myself on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum and watched the fountain dance to no music. Groups of teenagers rearranged themselves on the steps, like seashells in a tide, Hasidic women jogged by in long skirts and sneakers, a young mother laden with bags from the farmer's market watched her daughter toddle dangerously close to the water. I had thought Brooklyn would be enough for me, a city across the river whose geography mystified my parents.

My flight loomed a few weeks away like the steep drop off a cliff. I'd been to Paris often, and yet I knew the city only the way a little girl would. I'd followed my parents from museum to bookstore to café to restaurant and understood the landscape only as a bare mental map of our personal landmarks. I had no friends there. Paris was a city in which my independence evaporated so fast I barely felt it leave. It was not a city in which I had good memories. When Americans gushed about the Seine, the
macarons,
the women, the wine, I wanted to tell them that that was not Paris. Paris was long anxious dinners with your grandparents, shopkeepers who slapped your hands for touching key chains, a concierge who scolded you for laughing too loudly in your living room on a Saturday afternoon. I knew these were things I couldn't complain about—who would take me seriously?—and yet I was scared.

—

M
Y
PARENTS DROVE
ME
to Newark Airport, the pulsing strobe lights of the Holland Tunnel heightening my anxiety. We said our tearful good-byes. My mother joked that she wouldn't let my plane take off. I turned around three times to wave as I moved slowly toward security. But when I arrived at my gate, the waiting area was empty. The man behind the counter told me that my flight had been canceled. The next flight was tomorrow. “Why?” I asked. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. All around me, screens flashed
O
N TIME
and
NOW BOARDING.
The man shrugged.

I called my father. My mother turned around abruptly on the New Jersey Turnpike, barreling back toward the airport.

One last night in my childhood bedroom, suitcase still packed. I was drained, empty—all my emotion had flown off into the air
where my plane wasn't. My father joked that my mother had used her powers to cancel my flight. I joked, too, but I knew it was true.

One more time at the corner of Canal Street and Broadway, where the fancy stores of SoHo bled into the knockoff designer bags of Chinatown. New York was my city. I knew its rules and how to break them. I knew how to weave in and out of the tourists, when it was okay to speak to strangers, how to jaywalk. This was a busy intersection, crowds shoving, but I knew it well. I knew it desolate at four a.m., taxicabs burning red lights and rats rustling through the trash. I knew it under two feet of snow, and in startling summer downpours. I rarely felt more a New Yorker than while I waited for that light to change, pushed left and right by the tourists who crowded the sidewalk. The pedestrian crossing light had a significant lag, but I knew to turn my head to catch the traffic light turning red, and I always stepped out into the empty oasis of the street thirty seconds before it signaled
WALK.

Today, though, I looked down at my feet. I felt the noises of the street fade. Carved into the cement of the sidewalk, in simple handwriting that could have been either someone else's or my own, was the word
NADJA
. No matter how much I searched, no memory of writing it surfaced. It seemed to me a secret message, risen up out of the city itself. I shifted my stance so that my name was directly below me and stood looking down at it through the changing of two lights. The crowds surged around me, huffing, complaining, elbowing me in the sides. I did not give. I did not want their feet to wear my name away. And then, eventually, reluctantly, I moved again.

That evening, I took a cab back to the airport. I called my mother.

“Will you let my plane take off this time?” I said.

“
Oui, mon chaton,
” she agreed, wistful sadness in her tone. More and more these days, she seemed burdened by the powers that I continued to ascribe to her.

And then the plane barreled down the runway and I felt the surge of weightlessness in my stomach as the wheels let go of the ground. I flipped the pages of my book, unseeing. New York shrank to pinpoints, was swallowed by the ocean.

I put away my book and pulled out a long list of questions. “What sorts of fights did you have with your own mother?” and “When did you lose your virginity?” I couldn't imagine asking Josée any of these things. I imagined her drawing my plane forward through the sky by a silky spider string. I thought about how my mother had come to New York to escape her mother, and about how now I had set out to find her. I had the feeling I'd formed a loop, spun time around on its tail, and suddenly I was traveling backward.

My mother was eighteen when she came to New York; I was twenty-five when I left it. Perhaps a ghost of her plane crossed mine. Perhaps, for just an instant, we overlapped in the silence over the black water. Inside the cabin, in the white-noise hum of recycled air, we were both sitting perfectly still.

T
he plane hit the tarmac so smoothly that the cabin applauded. My stomach was a tight fist. From inside the taxi cab, I saw the Seine and then the Louvre, and my heart leapt despite myself. It usually made me feel French, to not love Paris, but right then I felt more American than I ever had. I leaned my phone against the window to take pictures, all blurry, all accidentally containing tourists taking pictures of their own.

In my parents' studio apartment, in the perfect geographic center of the city, I was alone. I had never lived alone before. I struggled to find the quiet reassuring rather than unsettling. I unpacked my belongings. My mother's collection of broken telephones, chargers that had long ago lost their appliances, mismatched sheet sets filled the closets. I moved them to the highest shelves.

I discovered that the apartment was filled with objects that had belonged to my grandfather, my mother's share of what had been taken from his apartment after his death. There were Egyptian artifacts, hieroglyphs carved into pieces of stone, brown leather desk accessories. There was a box filled with the artifacts he'd kept of our lives: letters my mother had sent him, magazine articles with glossy photos of her, photos of my birth, two copies of the
Teen People
in which I'd modeled real jeans for real bodies. A stack of
translucent pages proved to be the faxes I had sent him as a child. I could read the strain of forced cheeriness even in my childish scrawl.
Sending you lots of kisses!
I remembered writing these, how my mother stood over me at the kitchen table, dictating, correcting my French. Every word had felt like something ripped from me. I closed the box quickly and put it away.

In New York I had a solid gold compact mirror that had belonged to my father's mother during her youth in Poland. His father had buried it, along with a gold cigarette case, at the start of the war and after miraculously surviving the concentration camps had risked his life to dig it up again. It was all that remained. Everything else, everyone else, was gone. My father had bestowed these objects upon my brother and me with gravitas. It terrified me, the power this mirror held. What if I broke it? What if I lost it? I'd opened it once and looked at my face inside. Then I buried it deep in my childhood bedroom.

The objects in the Paris apartment terrified me in a different way. I began shoving them into the boxes of stray electrical cords high in the closets. I all but threw an African fertility goddess into one of them, and at the sickening brittle crack of clay on clay felt a rush of petty vindication, as if perhaps I had broken these objects of some black enchantment. Then remorse set in. They were centuries old, these artifacts. They had seen far more than I had.

When my grandfather passed away, in the summer of 2007, a weight had lifted off me that I hadn't known I was carrying. Each time a whiff of cigar smoke or Hermès cologne sent unbidden memories straight through my central nervous system, I would remember with relief that he was not in Paris waiting for me but nowhere, nowhere, he was gone. But here he was now. His leather briefcase. A carved piece of ivory. He'd been waiting for me after all. I put his
majestic red glass ashtray in the center of the table and told myself that it was not my grandfather. It was a beautiful object and nothing more. I stubbed out a cigarette butt in it to prove it. I had a lot within myself to unpack, I realized, but maybe this was a start.

—

I
WANDERED AIMLESSLY
in an ever-increasing radius from the apartment. I thought I knew the city well enough, but I soon discovered that my childish mental map had always been upside down. The Seine was south of the apartment, not north as I had assumed. I confused east for west for months.

Days passed where I spoke only to shopkeepers and café waiters. I discovered that I could wake up at one in the afternoon and no one would know. America was still sleeping. I became afraid of disappearing. Major construction work was being done on the building, and I lay in bed with my hands over my ears while the walls shook, jackhammers pounding into my skull. Men stood on scaffolding outside my second-story windows and shouted to one another as they ripped the bricks out of the walls. I became afraid of going crazy. I threw myself into a whirlwind of drinks and coffee dates with every tenuous connection I had to a friend of a friend. I had been warned that Parisians ran in tight-knit circles, that it would be very difficult to meet anyone. But when I said I used to live in Brooklyn, people's eyes lit up. “Brooklyn!” they sighed wistfully. The rooftops, the speakeasies, the artisanal hamburgers! Why would I come here? I asked questions constantly—about slang words, the names of streets, why the waiters were so rude—and my new friends answered eagerly, talking over one another. I soon learned that in France it was rare to admit ignorance on any topic. My open naïveté was a novelty. And I, in turn, enjoyed having
my accent and customs gently teased. “
Très
Brooklyn,” my friends would say, impressed, when I served them glasses of water in jam jars I had rinsed. I found myself completely comfortable in my new identity as an outsider, more comfortable than I'd ever been before.

—

F
INALLY
, I
COULDN
'
T
put off calling my grandmother any longer. I paced my apartment as the telephone rang. “I'd like to come over,” I told her, my voice squeaking.

“But of course!” she said. “I'll make you a little lunch.”

“I thought, perhaps, you cook so well, maybe you could teach me a few things?” I said. “Cooking lessons?”

“Cooking lessons?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “and to see you, also. And to talk a bit, maybe, about my mother. About your childhood. I'd like to know.”

“Ah,” she said. “I don't know what I can tell you about Françoise. But we'll see all that when you get here. It will give me great pleasure to see you.”

The day of the visit, I looked at myself in the mirror. I smoothed my dress over my hips. I tried to see myself as my grandmother would see me, but instead I saw only my mother scrutinizing herself, the expression I'd seen on her face so many times.

On the subway, I made a game of the things my grandmother might say to me. Ten points if she told me I'd gained weight. Fifteen if she insulted my sweater. But when I arrived, she hurried to the door to embrace me.

“Look at how beautiful you are!” she exclaimed. “Paris must suit you. You've melted away.”

She took a white-fleshed fish from the fridge and had me place it in a bouillon she had already prepared.

“Your fish is delicious,” she told me as we ate.

“But it's the bouillon that's good,” I said, embarrassed by the wave of pride that flushed my cheeks. I asked her if I might record our conversation.

“Would you like my tape recorder?” she said. “I brought it down from my closet for you; it's right here.”

“Oh!” I said, startled. “Um, thank you. But actually, I can do it on my phone.”

“On your phone?”

“Yes, see? It's recording now.”

“Well don't put it there. It'll catch all the vibrations of the table. On top of this book is better. Doing interviews was my job for quite some time, you know.”

I looked up at her in surprise, eager for her to continue.

“I was a ghostwriter for many years,” she said. The word for this in French is
nègre,
and for a quick moment I wondered if she was being racist. She enjoyed being provocative, her comments sometimes so shocking that it was difficult not to laugh. “Look, black and yellow have made a little bumblebee,” she said once, as we passed an interracial couple and their child.

“Do you have the books you wrote?” I asked her.

“Oh, I've put them well away, under my bed. You have to get down on all fours to reach them. The first was about the legionnaires. It's very difficult to make those men talk. But still, it was exciting. Every experience they described, we had to try ourselves to make sure it was possible. If they said it took so much time, carrying so much weight, to get down to the riverbank, then
we timed ourselves doing it,” she said. “I even got my mother to help.”

I tried to imagine Josée and Mina running down a steep embankment with heavy loads on their backs. It seemed to me an apt metaphor.

“What tricks did you learn to make people talk?” I asked.

“Looking at them,” she said with a charming smile, then pursed her lips and looked at me, batting her eyelashes. I noted that my grandmother understood the power of a small simple answer, and most likely, too, its ability to be accurately transcribed. My mother, by contrast, spoke in paragraphs rather than sentences, and while sometimes her responses wound toward an increasingly precise answer, they more often unfolded in directions that surprised us both. I nodded at Josée, waiting for her to continue.

“And always here!” she said, gesturing to the bar in her kitchen at which we both sat. “So many secrets have been told at this bar. It must be located on a karmic center of energy. Here, this is a good trick. You offer them some wine, some
saucisson,
some tea. They sit like this.” She slumped back in her chair, letting her arms fall wide and lazy on the table. “They come out with all sorts of boring things about their family for hours. And then all of a sudden they tell you the interesting things.”

“It's the things about family that I'm interested in hearing,” I heard myself say, because the opening was there.

“Yes,” she said, “the tables have turned. Would you like some more tea?”

I held out my teacup for her.

“What was my mother like as a girl?” I asked.

“So,” she said evenly. “When you pass something, like a cup, you always pass the plate underneath as well. Like that. You give
it all. It's much easier for the person serving. She aims and you don't move. And it's more refined.”

“Okay,” I said, surprised that she'd rebuked me in a way that didn't sting.

As I was preparing to leave, pleased that our first session had gone so well, I noticed a black-and-white photo propped against the wall by the table. Josée was beaming, her cheek pressed to an odd, soft object in her arms. My mother, aged eight or nine, stood behind her, her face transformed by a radiant smile. I picked it up. This was not the childhood my mother had told me about. I asked Josée what she was holding in her arms.

“It's a pillow with an embroidery of a dog,” she told me—a pillow Françoise had made for her. It was so sweet, so dear to her. But after the divorce, my grandfather had sold it to the auction house, along with most of Josée's other belongings.

“I bid on eight or nine lots of pillows, just to try and get it back,” Josée said, laughing. “But it wasn't in any of them.” She took the photograph from my hand, looked at it, and replaced it carefully against the wall.

From the houseboat, I had a long walk back along the Seine to the subway station. I called my mother immediately, breathless with triumph. Josée had not disdained all of my mother's gifts after all. My mother had forgotten the dog pillow. The dog pillow had been loved. This might fix everything, and so easily.

“Well,” my mother said eventually, with a sigh. “If she'd really loved it, she wouldn't have left it behind.”

I stifled my disappointment, and we talked of other things. It wasn't until later, listening to the recording, that I noticed how few of the questions I'd asked about my mother Josée had actually answered.

—

I
STUBBED OUT
another cigarette in my grandfather's ashtray, which held a great many butts now. I wondered about the fate of the dog pillow, if the person who had bought it had thrown it away. Very few physical traces of my mother's childhood remained. Josée had told me, without a hint of shame, that she had no photographs of my mother between the ages of six and nineteen.

There was, in the apartment, a large oil painting too big to fit in the closet. My mother had taken it from Paul's apartment because she'd remembered it from her childhood home. It was in the French pompier style and it depicted, in fact, a raucous firemen's picnic. Drunken men slumped against trees, gave goblets of alcohol to children, groped women's rears. It was garish, but the frame was nice. I had put it on the floor behind the dining table, but now I worried for its safety. I hung it above the bed. It looked stately, if you didn't examine it too closely.

—

T
HE FIRST TIME
it happened, I was eight years old. I'd gone to Paris by myself, to visit my grandparents. Even then, I'd wanted to prove I was old enough—old enough to travel alone, old enough to have experiences that were mine alone. I was to spend the first half of the week with Josée and the second half with Paul.

On the houseboat, Josée scolded me for washing dishes incorrectly, for stealing the lumpy cane-sugar cubes from the silver sugar bowl at night, for eating too much bread with my meals. “It expands in your stomach,” she said. I slept on a mattress in the room that doubled as her massage room. One day, the masseuse came and my grandmother lay naked on the massage table next to me, moaning.
I had never felt so homesick before. But there was also an afternoon when Josée taught me how to fly a kite, and an evening when she told me, in front of her friends, that my dress made me look “as skinny as a string bean.” There were ducks that made their nests on the houseboat, and Josée showed me how to throw them stale bread out the kitchen porthole. Behind a plant by the Jacuzzi I found a baby duckling that had died the spring before. Josée had had it poorly taxidermied by a friend. I fell in love with the soft still thing, cardboard jutting from its neck, and she told me I could keep it. I took it with me when I left.

One of my aunts drove me from the houseboat to the luxury apartment building on Avenue Foch where my grandfather lived. In honor of my visit, he had made his small office into a room just for me, with a rosebush in the window. He had hung a painting of two terrifying white kittens on the wall.