I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (28 page)

On her bike one afternoon, Josée's stomach began to hurt. Blood ran down her leg. She hurried home in terror. She had damaged her internal organs. She was dying. Mina explained in only the vaguest terms. The next day Josée went to school clutching the word “ovaries.” She traded the knowledge with the other children, but even after consulting the dictionary, they only pretended to understand. The mystery was no more clear when Mina explained, a month or two later, that Josée would soon have a sibling—that a baby was growing inside her stomach.

Josée's brother was born in September 1943. Mina and Beppo, thrilled new parents, rented the apartment across the hall for their
son and his nanny. One afternoon, Josée read to me from a notebook. “Secrets of a Big Sister,” it said on the cover.

I cannot accomplish my role as big sister because the nurse doesn't want me to approach him out of fear that I give him microbes. Maman is the recipient of all his smiles, she is very proud of him. I am not jealous and I am very happy about it. I would also like to have a sister but I am not giving up hope.

“I hadn't given up hope!” Josée said, laughing. “Well, I always was very optimistic!” We were sitting on her bed on the houseboat, and I peered over her shoulder at the perfect looping little-girl script.

“I found these notebooks in Mina's house after she died,” Josée told me. “But I haven't had the time to look at them until now.”

I only really suffer at night
, Josée read from another entry.
I cannot sleep despite the Gardenal that Maman gives me. Every night, I obligate her to get up, poor thing. Despite myself, of course, but still I cry or whimper so much that she insists on comforting me, becoming cold and shivering by my side. And I, like the egoist that I am, I let her console me. Truly, she is the pearl of all mothers. There are few like her and I love her. She told me the other day that I do not show it enough. So now, I show it
, Josée read, then huffed, “Oh, this is all boring! Enough.” She closed the notebook and put it aside.

“No, please,” I said. “I'm interested.” She sighed and opened it again, reading silently ahead.

The saccharine sweetness rattled me. Her diary read like a diary in a sentimental film, pitch-perfect to the point of the surreal. For a second, I caught myself wondering whether the notebook was an elaborate forgery. I shook my head quickly to dismiss the thought, dismayed at the depths of my own cynicism. As Josée continued to turn the crumbling yellow pages, reading on with steady interest, I
rested my head carefully on her shoulder. Was it possible that my grandmother was once this little girl, with all of her effusive innocence and sincerity? I tried to feel her presence in the woman beside me. The image flickered in and out of focus, unsteady.

“Oh ho!” she exclaimed. “Watch out! Now I'm really getting started. So!”

I no longer see my flirtation,
Josée read with salacious delight.
Naturally, and I don't regret it. I only saw him in the mornings and coming home from school. I saw him only once on Tuesday. He is not a crush. We don't know each other. Except there is a look between us when we meet each other. But once, the last time we saw each other, he looked at me deeply, as if he wanted to ask me something. But he surely did not dare, as I was accompanied by Marie-Claire and Nicole
[“Those were my friends who walked me to school,” she interjected]
and even if I had been alone, I would not have answered. I would have pretended to not pay any attention to him. Perhaps that would have made him suffer a bit. Good. Maman taught me that we must not be dominated by men, it costs too much agony. That is why I have already begun to avenge Maman. I've already had quite a few conquests. Little ones, but it's better than nothing. I avenge my mother and become war-hardened for later. I think I am on the right path.

The little girl beside me solidified and grew bright. This Josée I recognized: she was the woman over whom many men would later suffer.

Maman is a dear and I love her more and more
, she continued.
It's true that since Christmas I have been very mean with her. She is very annoyed and very tired. She won't be long in falling ill herself. I must get better quickly so that I can relieve her a bit. Maman just went and got me a bonbon. Poor Maman. She doesn't know what to do to make me happy. The candy that Mamina gave me is delicious. When I was
sick this winter, she bought me roller skates and a rubber ball. What an adorable mother I have. I must finally leave you. Who is this “you” destined for? As it's very tiring, to write for so long.

“Did Mina read your diaries?” I asked.

“No,” Josée said. “She wouldn't have bothered.”

The final entry read:
Wednesday I went to have lunch at the office
[“My real father's office,” Josée clarified.]
In thinking about it hard, I like Papa, but I prefer very much Beppo and Maman. Perhaps because they are raising me rather severely and surely because they give me the impression of loving me more. Maman told me not to write Papa too many letters as he could take me back at eighteen with the letters written by me as proof. This bothers me very much. I would like to stay forever with Maman and Beppo
.

There was a blank page and then a single line:

It's been a year since I've written. Beppo died May 31st, 1944.

—

I
N THE NIGHT
, Josée could hear Mina shuffling in the bedroom next door. She heard her walk to the bathroom and back, many times. As soon as morning presented a reasonable hour, Josée went into the master bedroom. It was a room in which she rarely stepped foot. Beppo was in bed, as he had been nearly constantly during the months of his long illness. Mina was in the bathroom.

Josée stood by Beppo's bed. He looked up at her and hiccupped three times. She did not know then about the death rattle—how a dying person might gasp, his head lifted with sudden energy from the pillow, eyes and mouth wide in the astonishment of death.

“Don't worry, he's doing fine, Maman!” Josée called out with the pleasure of all children bearing good news. “He just has the hiccups.”

Beppo looked up at Josée, looked deep into her eyes, and then he died.

Mina rushed back into the room. “He's dead,” she sobbed, “he's dead.”

The doorbell rang. Josée went to answer it. Marie-Claire and Nicole were there, come to walk her to school.

“I cannot go to school today,” she said with perfect composure. “My father just
died.”

L
ess than a week after Beppo's death, on June 6, the American army landed in France. The city exploded in celebration. But Mina, Josée, and Mélanie drifted through the hallucinatory scene in mourning.

When the Americans rolled through the streets in August, Josée remembered, Mina pushed her up onto the tanks, making her take what she could grab. I had at first imagined her as young in that scene, on her mother's shoulders. But as I began to plot the whirlwind of anecdotes against a timeline, I realized that she was fourteen.

“To those soldiers,” I said, “you must not have looked like a child.”

“No!” she said. “I was a young woman. That was what was so uncomfortable to me. They all wanted to grab me and kiss me. And they were dirty. And I had rarely seen black people before.”

“And for Mina, that was okay? For you to be grabbed and kissed by soldiers?”

“Well, she pushed me up onto the tank,” Josée said. “But there were cigarettes and chocolates and chewing gum, which we discovered only then, and cans of corned beef. None of which I liked at the time.”

She told me how the Americans' falling bombs looked like fireworks against the nearby Bois de Boulogne, and how the evenings spent crowded into the building's underground shelter crackled with nervous energy. “You bombed indiscriminately, you Americans,” she said. “You bombed from so high above.” But all of it was only a backdrop for the far more personal and poignant dramas of adolescence. Even witnessing a German sniper shot off a roof, his body landing in the street a few feet away, was marked by the memory that she had had her hair professionally styled that afternoon.

She was in love. A young boy her age named Gerard had moved into her building with his mother and brother. His Jewish father had been deported.

“Had Gerard also been deported during the war?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Josée said. “He appeared at the end of the war.” It was possible, she told me, that his family had lived at that address before the war and been removed during it, but she didn't ask.

They met in secret, on prearranged routes in the park where he walked with his tutor and she with her governess. In the afternoons, when she knew the coast would be clear, she played Beethoven's “Pour Elise”—“Für Elise”—on the piano. It was their signal. That night, he would climb up a ladder to her bedroom window. They would steal out into the service courtyard and kiss. Before each encounter, Josée took long bandages from the medicine cabinet and tightly bound her breasts.
If he feels my breasts against him,
she thought,
who knows what dangerous state he might enter.
She still didn't understand how children appeared in women's stomachs, and she didn't want to take any chances.

For a time their encounters were kept safe under the veil of blackmail. The concierge's husband was having an affair with
Gerard's maid, and though both had glimpsed the young lovers, they had each other's secrets to keep. Josée told no one, not even her friends, sure they would be scandalized. One day, however, the affair was revealed. Mélanie surprised them in the act. Or perhaps it was Mina. Or maybe they were not surprised in the act at all but seen by a neighbor who tattled. Regardless, Josée remembered Mina's fury vividly. Mina slapped her,
un aller-retour
, making a return-trip backhand across Josée's face. Mina slapped her daughter often. Which is not to say that she was an abused child, Josée added quickly. It was a different time, and Josée was much better off for this severity. But the crime of kissing a boy merited far greater punishment than just a slap.

Mina brought her by the scruff of the neck to a run-down boarding school back in the Normandy countryside, in Alençon. She made it clear that the school had been chosen as punishment. The other students all came from small neighboring villages, the daughters of peasants and agricultural workers. Josée's mere arrival was enough to earn her a terrible reputation. What could she have done, the other girls wondered, to have been sent to such a remote place? Was she a murderer? Even on weekends, even over the winter holidays, when the other students went home to their families, Josée stayed on in the dorms. It was so cold that the buckets they had been given for bathing iced over in an hour.

Josée wasn't upset in the slightest with her mother. The punishment was perfectly reasonable, and in any case not a thing that should be questioned. She didn't come from a generation that judged their parents. But she did gain weight at Alençon, a place known for its heavy food, seventeen pounds before the end of the year. And she caused trouble at school.

“I screamed at them that it was unacceptable to have such cold
water,” Josée told me. “But it was after the war, there were restrictions, it wasn't their fault, poor things. I invented a shower, hooking the bucket up to a tube or some other such thing . . . I remember this now only because I found a letter, recently, that I'd written to Mina about it,” Josée said.

“Oh, I'd love to see that letter!” I said.

“I burned it,” Josée said.

“What?” I said. “When?”

“A few months ago. Mina had kept everything, every letter I sent her. I burned lots of things, letters from Beppo's family, all of it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I didn't think it would interest anybody. I wanted to make it simpler, when I die, so that you and the girls wouldn't have so much to sort through.”

“Please don't burn anything else,” I said quickly. “It's just paper, it doesn't take up much room. I'd be happy to go through all of it now, with you.”

“No,” Josée said. “I need to put it all in order.”

Months later, she did let me see her papers. It was then that she showed me the diary, “Secrets of a Big Sister,” and a book in which her friends had written funny quotes at the end of one summer. There were no letters.

—

“O
H
M
AMAN
, tu es la plus belle du monde,”
Josée sang to herself one afternoon as she cleared the table where we'd eaten our lunch. “I used to sing that song to my mother,” she said, looking up at me with a sweet smile.

“My mother told me she used to sing that song to you!” I said.

“No,” Josée said sharply.
“O mama, tu sei per me la più bella del mondo,”
she sang again. “It was in Italian,” she said. “Luis Mariano. It wasn't of your mother's time.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “She remembers—”

“No,” Josée said. “It's impossible.”

“In what moments would you have sung it to Mina?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” Josée said. “Perhaps when she was bringing me to boarding school at Alençon for my punishment. But kindly.”

Again, I looked up the dates when I got home. The song was recorded by an Italian singer in 1958, then in French by Luis Mariano a year later. Josée would have been twenty-eight, married and no longer speaking to her mother. And yet I thought back on the way Josée softly sang the words to me, the way her face glowed with nostalgia. Somehow, in her memories, the song her daughter had sung to her had become the song she used to sing to her own mother. And through the haze of overlapping generations, the unrequited love was real.

—

O
NE EVENING IN
1998
, when Josée was sixty-eight years old, she was having dinner with a woman who was complaining about a man. He had been married and had a child when they became involved, and then she had fallen pregnant as well. He divorced his wife, but not for her—he married a third woman, had a third child. “That's men,” Josée agreed. The vast majority of her friends were divorcées. But as they continued to talk, it became clear that the man in question was her Gerard. She arranged to pass a note to him through the woman's son. She wrote “Pour Elise” on the back of her business card.

“He'll know what it means,” she said.

He came to the houseboat for lunch. From the window, Josée watched him arrive. He was a man now, macho and tan from skiing, with a confident swagger. These were qualities that generally attracted Josée. She made him scallops on a hot plate and they talked until eight p.m. He fell back in love with her quite quickly. Her houseboat was flooding, and eight days later he offered for her to come live with him. But Josée refused. He had three ex-wives, four kids, and too much money. Besides, all of his wives had been much younger. Besides, she would never abandon her boat.

But a year later, her boat again flooding, Josée reached out to him for help. He installed her in his apartment with its view of the Eiffel Tower and gave her the master bedroom while he slept on his son's small bed. He ran her baths, took her to the fanciest Japanese restaurants, bought her a music box that played “Pour Elise.” Josée told him about how she'd bound her breasts, and he admitted to her that he'd worn several pairs of briefs during their encounters, terrified she would feel him pressing against her. They returned to the building in which they'd lived as children and, giggling, convinced the concierge to allow them inside. But the courtyard they had imagined as vast and endless was small and ordinary. The ladder they had remembered was in fact a staircase of three steps. They laughed. The scene was a hollow vessel, far too small to contain their past.

Mina, who had never liked Gerard, must have been watching from the heavens that day. Josée had a nasty bout of sciatica, and Gerard had to all but carry her around their old building.

“Let's have a honeymoon,” he said. He wanted to meet her grown daughters, have her meet his sons. Josée refused. She
wondered why she had gone looking for trouble. She had already known too many men.

“Let's go to Venice,” he said. It was what he'd promised her when they were young. They went for eight days. He rented them a luxurious hotel room on the canal. They went to palaces, ate in fine restaurants. They went to Verona and he climbed Romeo's ladder. A photographer snapped a picture: Josée on the balcony, Gerard's lips lightly meeting hers. They shared a bed, but they never made love. Each time he tried to kiss her, Josée saw Mina's face looming between them and recoiled. Soon after they got back, Josée pulled away until he understood it was through. She didn't want to fall back into all of that.

“Anyway, he's dead now,” she concluded, as if to settle the matter. There was a beat of silence.

“They're all dead,” she continued, much more softly. “Every man I've had a relationship with, friendly or romantic. They're almost all dead.”

—

I
T WAS NOT
UNTIL
her return from Alençon, in the summer of 1947, that Josée first learned of the horrors that had taken place in the concentration camps during the war. She went to the movies with Gerard and his brother to see
Nuit et brouillard,
the documentary that revealed the genocide. The whole theater howled with shock. Gerard and his brother clung to each other. It was then that they first understood that their deported father would never return.

“Is it possible that you saw Gerard again once you were married?” I asked.

“No,” Josée said. “Why?”

“
Night and Fog
came out in 1955,” I said.

“
Ah non!
” Josée said. “It most certainly did not.”

“Is it possible you saw a different documentary?” I asked. “Or a newsreel?”

“No, it was that one, with the scenes from abandoned camps,” Josée said. “I remember it very vividly. No one in France had known what was happening during the war. We were all in shock.”

“Okay, but then . . . perhaps you saw the documentary later? With Paul then and not with Gerard?”

“No,” Josée said, “I saw it with Gerard and his brother. The whole theater was screaming.”

“But that documentary was released in 1955 . . . ,” I repeated.

“No,” Josée said firmly. “It wasn't.”

—

“I
T WAS THE
WAR
,” Josée said often, with a finality she knew I could not challenge.

“I didn't have time to wonder about whether or not I had a good relationship with my mother,” she said. “There were far more important things to worry about. It was the war.”

“Of course I would consider my childhood difficult,” she said. “But not through any fault of my parents. It was the war.”

I pushed Josée hard for details, but all I got were stories about food rations and candles, bomb shelters, the car trip back to Paris when she'd hidden in ditches, the embarrassment of having a chauffeur in 1942. My cynicism took over, despite myself. I began to hear the phrase as shorthand for avoiding the questions she found too difficult to answer. I thought often of my other grandparents and I bristled. But I knew that in the hierarchies of history
and pain, I had no right to judge. I had never seen a dead body. I had never even seen a pig killed.

—

A
FTER
A YEAR
at Alençon, Josée was sent to a much nicer boarding school, one intended for the children of diplomats, at Versailles.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because my punishment was over!” Josée said. “Alençon was a terrible school with a pitiable level of education. I wasn't going to stay there forever.”

“No, I mean why didn't you just go live with Mina?” I asked.

“Oh . . . ,” Josée said, and paused for a minute. When she spoke again she'd slipped into a little-girl voice. “I suppose I could have. Maybe my punishment wasn't quite over.”

“Was your brother ever sent to boarding school?” I asked.

“That would have made Mina sick to her stomach,” Josée said. “She couldn't bear to be parted from him. He was
l'enfant roi,
the little king. He was a boy, first of all. And he reminded her of her one great love. He looked just like Beppo. Mina had a visceral love for him.”