My mother lit the first cigarette of the day, her favorite, the one that burns your lungs as soon as you wake up. She then left her house to admire the whiteness that covered the entire neighborhood. At least four inches of snow had fallen that night.
He stayed outside for a long time smoking, despite the cold, to enjoy the unreal atmosphere that hung in his garden. She seemed beautiful to him, all that nothingness, those lines and those erased colors.
Suddenly he heard a noise muffled by the snow. The postman had just dropped the mail on the floor at the foot of the mailbox. My mother went to pick it up, being very careful when stepping so as not to slip.
Cigarette between his lips, the smoke thickening in the icy air, he hurried home to warm his numb fingers.
He glanced quickly at the various envelopes. There were the traditional Christmas cards, most of them, from his college students, a gas bill and the occasional advertising brochure. There were also letters for my father; colleagues from the CNRS and his doctoral students wished him a happy new year.
Among that correspondence, the most common given that we were at the beginning of January, there was a surprise. The postcard. There she was, with the other envelopes, as if nothing had happened, as if she had hidden herself to go unnoticed.
What immediately intrigued my mother was the handwriting: strange, clumsy, a calligraphy she had never seen before. She then read the four names written one below the other, in the form of a list.
Ephraim.
Emma.
Noemie.
Jacques.
Those four names were those of his maternal grandparents, his aunt and his uncle. All four had been deported before she was born. They died in Auschwitz in 1942. And they reappeared in our mailbox sixty-one years later. That Monday, January 6, 2003.
“Who could have sent me this horror?” Lelia wondered.
My mother was very afraid, as if someone was threatening her, lurking in the darkness of a distant past. His hands were shaking.
“Look, Pierre, look what I found in the mail!”
My father took the card, brought it close to his face to look at it closely, but it did not have a signature or any explanation.
Any. Just those names.
In my parents’ house, at that time, the mail was picked up from the ground, like ripe fruit fallen from the tree. Our mailbox was so old that I couldn’t keep anything inside it; it looked like a colander, but we liked it that way. No one intended to change it. In our family, problems were not solved that way: objects were lived with as if they were entitled to the same consideration as human beings.
On rainy days, the letters ended up soaked. The ink was diluted and the words became indecipherable forever. The worst were the postcards, barely dressed, like young girls, with their arms in the air and without a coat in the middle of winter.
If the author of that card had used a pen to write to us, his message would have been forgotten. Did he know? The postcard was written in black pen.
The following Sunday, Lélia summoned the whole family, that is, my father, my sisters and me. Around the dining room table, the postcard passed from hand to hand. We were silent for a long time, something unusual between us, especially during Sunday lunch. In our family, there is usually someone who has something to say and who insists on communicating it immediately. That time no one knew what to think of that message that came from nowhere.
The card was the most banal, a tourist postcard with a photograph of the Opera Garnier, like the ones you find in tobacconists, in those metal displays, especially in Paris.
“Why the Opera Garnier?” my mother asked.
No one knew what to answer him.
‘It’s postmarked by the Louvre Post Office.
“Do you think they could inform us there?”
‘It’s the biggest post office in Paris. It is immense. What are they going to tell you…
“Do you think they did it on purpose?”
‘Yes, most anonymous letters are sent from the Louvre office.
“It’s old, this postcard is at least ten years old,” I added.
My father exposed it to the light. He looked at it for a few seconds very carefully to conclude that, indeed, the card dated from the nineties. The chroma of the print, with saturated magentas, as well as the absence of billboards around the Opera building confirmed my intuition.
“I’d even say early nineties,” my father said.
“What leads you to conclude that?” my mother asked.
—That in 1996 the green and white SC10 buses, like the one you see at the bottom of the image, were replaced by the RP312. With a platform. And an engine in the back.
Nobody was surprised that my father knew the history of Parisian buses. He has never driven a car —and even less a bus—, but his profession as a researcher has led him to discover a multitude of details on topics as heterogeneous as they are specific. My father has invented a device that calculates the influence of the Moon on Earth’s tides, and my mother has translated treatises on generative grammar for Chomsky. Between the two of them they know, then, an enormous amount of things, most of them useless for practical life. Except sometimes, like that day.
“Why write a card and wait ten years before sending it?”
My parents kept asking each other questions. But I didn’t give a damn about that postcard. However, the list of names caught my attention. Those people were my ancestors and I didn’t know anything about them. He did not know what countries they had been to, the trades they had held, how old they were when they were killed. Had their portraits been shown to me, I would have been unable to recognize them in the midst of strangers. I felt ashamed.
When we finished eating, my parents put the postcard in a drawer and we never spoke about it again. I was then twenty-four years old and my mind was focused on a life to live and other stories to write. I erased the memory of the postcard from my memory, without abandoning the idea that one day I would have to question my mother about the history of our family. But time went by and I never stopped doing it.
Until ten years later, when she was about to give birth.
My cervix had opened too soon. She had to lie down so as not to precipitate the baby’s arrival. My parents suggested that I go to their house for a few days, where I wouldn’t have to do anything. In that waiting state I thought of my mother, my grandmother, the lineage of women who had given birth before me. And then I felt the need to listen to the story of my ancestors.
Lélia led me into the dark office where she spends most of her time; that office has always reminded me of a womb, lined with books and folders, bathed in the winter light of the Parisian outskirts and the atmosphere charged with cigarette smoke. I settled under the
library and its ageless objects, memories covered by a blanket of ashes and dust. My mother pulled a green box with black flecks out of the twenty file cabinets, all identical. As a teenager, I knew that those boxes contained the remnants of the dark stories of our family’s past. They looked like miniature coffins to me.
My mother took a piece of paper and a pen – like all retired teachers, she is still a teacher in all circumstances, even in her way of being a mother. Her students from the faculty of Saint-Denis adored her Lélia. In those blessed days when he could smoke in class while teaching linguistics, he did something that fascinated his students: he managed, with unusual dexterity, to make the cigarette burn completely without the ash falling, thus forming a gray cylinder between his fingers. She didn’t need an ashtray, she placed the consumed cigarette on her table before lighting the next one. A feat that commanded respect.
“You’ve been warned,” my mother told me, “what you’re going to hear is a hybrid narrative.” Some facts are considered unquestionable; however, I will let you deduce the personal guesswork that ultimately led to this reconstruction. Actually, new documents could complete or substantially modify my hypotheses. Of course.
“Mom,” I said, “I think cigarette smoke is not good for a baby’s brain.”
“Oh, leave me alone.” I smoked a pack a day during my three pregnancies and I don’t feel like I’ve given birth to three retards.
His answer made me laugh. Lélia took the opportunity to light a cigarette and begin the story of the lives of Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques. The four names on the postcard.
