I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (29 page)

“Oh,” I said.

“That's enough for today, don't you think?” Josée said, pressing her palms against her knees to stand. “You've exhausted me with all this talking.”

—

A
T THE B
OARDING
SCHOOL
in Versailles
,
Josée flexed her powers of rebellion. When a teacher read her roommate's diaries, Josée was outraged. She had a fierce sense of privacy and she never rifled
through other people's affairs. And she was in love with the roommate, who was voluble and Russian—a love she described to me as romantic though undeclared, unrequited, and unconsummated. She never would have protested her own rights, but for this girl she was ready to go to the ends of the earth. She hit her fists against the classroom doors, chanting, “
Formez le monôme!
” and all the girls streamed out to join her in the hall. They went through the school chanting, their numbers growing larger with each classroom they passed. “
Formez le monôme,
” they encouraged each other, a chant with its own melody and rhythm, as they gathered outside the doors of the
directrice
. Which is why, Josée told me, she was never angry with Françoise for her own later rebellions. She had done the same, in her day.

“What's a
monôme
?” I asked her.

“I don't know,” she replied. “It's just what we said.” I looked it up later in the dictionary: a parade of students.

Near the end of the year, in May, there was another incident. On a school outing to a concert in Paris, Josée slipped away from the group to have dinner with a boy. When the time came to return to Versailles, the chaperones were unable to find her. The fourteen other girls missed the last train back to Versailles and were forced to sleep in a hotel. Josée, meanwhile, caught a late bus and made it back to the boarding school that same night. The teachers were furious, but when they threatened to call her mother, Josée threatened to call all the other parents and tell them how lax the school's supervision was. “Do you want the Congolese ambassador to know his daughter spent the night in a hotel in Paris?” she asked. A few days later, Josée was called in from lunch to see the
directrice.
The other girls watched her march off, surely to her doom.

“Do you like the author Claudel?” the
directrice
asked.

“I find him too religious,” Josée answered. It wasn't a religious school, and so she could say such things.

“Turn,” the
directrice
said. “Walk. Stop. Turn. Walk back. Very good.” She looked Josée up and down.

“How would you like to play Joan of Arc in the school play?”

—

J
OSÉE
OFTEN RETURNED
to Paris on the weekends, and it was on one such Saturday a few days later that Mélanie met her with the news.

“Your mother is in prison,” Mélanie told her. Mina had been taken on Thursday, but no one had contacted Josée at school. Presumably there had been some warning: a summons from the police, a trial, lawyers. But this was the first Josée heard of any of it, and Mélanie presented it to her without explanation.

The jail's visiting hours were on Thursday afternoons. Josée was to go see Mina herself, to get instructions on how to run the family's finances and care for her four-year-old brother. Mélanie was seventy-two years old and so fat then that she could barely walk. Josée asked a family friend to write her a note to excuse her from school the following Thursday, saying that she had a doctor's appointment. Of course she could not let it be known that her mother was in jail.

“How was it when you went to see her?” I asked.

“I wasn't terrorized,” Josée said. “When you've been a kid who's known the war, who's seen so many terrible things, nothing impresses you. This was just one more difficulty like all the rest. Life went on.”

She and her mother sat at a table together with their hands in plain view, under the eye of the matron.

“I wonder now,” Josée said, “if perhaps there wasn't a glass barrier between us with a microphone? No, I don't think so. I think we sat just like this.”

As she spoke, I watched the glass barrier rise and fall in my mind. Isn't that something you would remember, whether or not there was glass between you, whether or not you could touch your mother?

“Everything that's painful, thank God, erases itself from your memory,” Josée continued, as if in answer. “Details like that, you see, I . . . I just don't know.”

As Josée understood it, after Beppo's death his two business partners had gallantly offered to name Mina as the managing director of their enterprise, which sold boot-legged liquor to the Germans. Mina was unclear on the nature of the businesses but she was proud of her competence as a secretary. She had readily accepted. And then, within months, the war was over and the new French government began to investigate those who had profited. Mina was not a collaborator. But the government asked for repayment of the money earned, a sum far greater than Mina and the failing business could ever pay. And so, Mina was sent to prison for debts that were not hers but were now in her name.

“What did you talk about, during those Thursday visits?” I asked.

“She told me about her life there,” Josée said. “She had a job in the nurse's ward. She saw abominable things—people who wanted to kill themselves, people starving, people dying of dysentery. Women who suffocated their newborn children beneath them.”

“What?” I asked. “Why would they do that?”

“Because they didn't want to bring kids into that world? I don't know. She saw these things, she told me these things. It made me
feel . . . As much as she had told me nothing at all when I was younger . . . But it did her good to get these things out.”

Later, on one of the many occasions when Josée denied that Mina had ever told her anything personal about her life, I mentioned this.

“Oh, no,” Josée said. “Mina didn't tell me all of that.”

“Then how did you know about it?” I asked.

“Perhaps Mélanie told me, perhaps Mina had confided in her,” Josée said. “But anyway, years later. Not when I was seventeen.”

From that moment on, whenever I asked Josée what she and her mother had talked about in prison, she always gave the same elusive answer.

“I don't remember,” she'd say. “She told me how to run the house. Important things. We didn't have time for chitchat.”

“Did you tell her you'd been cast as Joan of Arc in the school play?”

“No,” Josée said. “We wouldn't have talked about that.”

“And did she tell you about the things she saw in the nurse's ward?”

“No,” Josée said, “I already told you no. And enough questions. I can't talk while I'm eating, I swallow too much air.”

At home, I returned to our first conversation. In my transcript, the ellipses in her speech seemed to me a proof of honesty, her voice staggered by unexamined pain, and this was how I had remembered her tone to be. But when I replayed the recording itself, Josée's voice was captivating and confident—as if, perhaps, she'd wanted to shock. She listed dysentery, suicide, all the horrors in a crescendo, as if she felt that each alone was perhaps not enough.

Why had Josée retracted this? Perhaps she did not want to betray her mother's confidences, however disturbing they had
been. Or perhaps she'd realized, belatedly, that in this anecdote Mina had allowed the roles of mother and daughter to reverse, leaning on her daughter in a way that others might condemn.Everywhere on Josée's houseboat were photos of Mina. I noticed that she spoke more softly and carefully around them, and even occasionally glanced toward them. It was difficult not to feel, during many of our conversations, that Mina was listening.

—

I
LOVED
DISCUSSING
the supernatural with Josée. I felt that these conversations were often our most honest. They had the unintentionally revealing quality of other people's dreams.

She told me in detail about her near-death experience, her NDE as she called it, pronouncing it
en-day-euh
. She said that most people saw their lives play out from birth to death, but she'd seen hers backward, from death to birth. She told me that, in those moments, you saw your life not as you yourself had experienced it, but as other people had. You became the other people in your life and felt, as they had felt it, all the times you'd brought them joy and all the times you'd caused them pain. Much of it was very surprising, she told me, and not at all what you would expect.

I asked who she had hurt and she told me only Paul. In the end, she said, it was only those you'd hurt intentionally that counted.

She told me that after her NDE, she'd become involved in a community of people who'd experienced the same thing. With the help of a spiritual leader, she underwent rebirthing sessions. She relived the primal scream she gave as she entered the world. It was very telling, your primal scream. Hers had been filled with rage.

She told me her NDE had left her with the ability to see auras.
I asked her the color of mine. She told me that the skill had faded over the years, and that only certain people's were strong enough to see.

She told me about her past lives. She'd been a man in many of them, which, she said, explained a lot. In one, she had been stabbed in the back with a pitchfork by her cheating wife. She had bled out over three days in a cow's trough, which was why she'd always hated hay. In one, Mélanie had been her sister, and this explained the affinity they had always had.

She told me that Paul had come to visit her after his death, and that they had settled their scores once and for all. She had awoken to find her pillow soaked with both of their tears and he had never come again.

And she told me that she often felt Mina close by.

“I keep telling her to go up,” Josée said. “Go up, Maman, go up go up go up! Go do something else! Because there are many things you can do after you die, you know, you don't have to stay here. You can be reincarnated. But she won't go. It does make me happy, though, having her near. Every time I hear the squeal of brakes behind me, or I almost trip and catch myself, I say ‘
Merci, Maman
!'”

“So after you die, you can choose whether to be reincarnated or to stay close to earth?” I asked.

“Well, you don't choose,” Josée said, as if this were obvious. “It depends on your karma, and on the life you lived on earth.”

“If you live a good life, you get reincarnated?”

“You reincarnate yourself until you're satisfied. Or until others are satisfied with you. But Mina stays near us.”

“You think Mina watches over
me
?” I asked, my voice betraying how much I cared.

“
Oui!
Of course! But during that time, she doesn't do anything else, either.”

“She can't both watch over us and be happy?”

“No. It's one or the other. She's stuck,” Josée said sadly.

“So why does Mina stay close to us?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said, annoyed at my questions that went in circles. “I didn't judge her while she was alive and I'm certainly not going to judge what she does with her death.”

—

T
HE FINAL TWO
MONTHS
of Josée's spring semester were difficult. She told no one of the burdens she faced back home. She often missed school. She commuted back to Paris twice a week to provide food for her grandmother and brother, which in those postwar years still involved standing on long lines for rations.

But in the small portions of time that remained her own, she devoted herself whole to the play. At the end of the year, she appeared as Joan of Arc, resplendent in her white shift. It was the crowning gesture to her staggered education. I imagine her onstage, her fists raised high in the passion of martyrdom. Neither Mina nor Mélanie nor her father were in the audience, but Josée had long grown used to such things. I see her youthful beauty casting arcs of light that illuminate the whole room. And, even then, I see her hardening.

—

O
N ONE
T
HURSDAY
, she had lunch with her father before going to visit her mother. She told him she had to hurry—it was a long train ride to the prison, involving at least two transfers.

“Take your time,” he told her. “I'll drive you there.”

She ate more slowly. But when the hour approached to drive her, her father told her he no longer had the time. Josée was forced to rush to the subway. There were five minutes remaining in the visitation hour when she arrived. Mina was called. She came to the doorway, but she did not approach the desk. When Josée took a step toward her, Mina held out her hand to say stop. She disappeared back into the depths of the prison. The following week, Josée tried to explain that it had been Eugène's fault. But Mina was still furious and refused to accept her daughter's excuses.

“There, I think,” Josée told me, “my father did that just to hurt my mother. Or perhaps he simply lost his courage at the last minute. It wasn't an easy thing, to go in front of the prison.” She was silent a minute.

“Still,” she said, “it cut me very deeply. You know, little things like that, they hurt you more than all the rest.”

Though they had never lived together, Josée and her father were close. When she was born, Eugène had legally declared his paternity, which other men at the time might not have done. He slipped her small presents, tickets to the circus, whenever he could. Of the papers Josée had kept in well-hidden boxes on her boat, the vast majority belonged to her father.

After Eugène's death, neither his wife nor his three sons were particularly interested in what he had left behind. Josée took upon herself the task of emptying his office and his home. She kept his old date books, the many letters sent to him by his uncle during his service in World War I. She kept his slippers and his robe, all the signs of her father that she had never had at home. I was uninterested in these. I cast them aside, digging and digging for Mina.
But Josée proudly showed me each small scrap: his expired driver's license, a medal he had won.