Yann Andrea Steiner (2 page)

Very quickly, that became all I knew about you.

Much later you spoke about this. You told me it was probably true, yes. All the while remaining vague, you added: Just like you, in a different way. You did not say the word. Later I understood that even within yourself, you had to keep silent about that word, the word in your smile: writing.

 

And then evening fell. I said that you could stay here, could sleep in my son's room. That it looked out over the water, and that the bed was made.

That if you wanted to take a bath, that was all right.

That if you'd rather go out, that was all right, too.

And also that you could, for instance, buy some cold chicken, a can of chestnut cream, some whipped cream to put on it, some fruit and cheese and bread. That this was what I ate every day, to keep life simple. I also said that you could buy a bottle of wine, for you. That on certain days I was drinking less. We both laughed.

No sooner had you gone out than you came back. “Money,” you said. “After the bus I don't have any left. I forgot.”

 

You devoured everything with a childlike appetite that I didn't yet know was normal for you.

Much later you told me you'd still been hungry when you
got up from the table. Even after the chestnut cream that you ate in its entirety, with whipped cream on top, without realizing it.

 

It might have been that evening, with you, that I started drinking again. We finished off the two half-bottles of Côtes du Rhône that you had bought on Rue des Bains. The wine was stale, undrinkable. We finished off the two half-bottles of that wine from Rue des Bains.

 

That first night you slept in the room overlooking the sea. No sound came from that room, just as when I was alone. You must have been exhausted for days on end, months, those leaden years, perhaps; those arid, tragic years before deciding your future, and also the torturous years of that same solitude of pubescent desire.

T
HE DAY after your arrival, you discovered the tub in the large bathroom. You said you'd never seen a bathtub so monumental, so “historical.” From then on, every morning, as soon as you got up you spent an hour in that tub. I said you could stay in there as long as you wanted, that I took showers because the bathtub frightened me, probably because there weren't any in the functionaries' cottages in the backwaters I came from.

 

There was your voice. An incredibly gentle, distant, intimidating voice, as if barely uttered, barely perceptible ; always seeming a bit distracted, unrelated to what it was saying, removed. Even now, twelve years later, I hear that voice you had. It has flowed into my body. It has no image. It speaks of unimportant things. It can fall silent as well.

We spoke, you spoke, of the beauty of the Roches Noires residential hotel.

Then you fell silent for a while, as if searching for how to say what it was you had to tell me. You didn't hear the growing calm that came with nightfall, so deep that I went out to the balcony to see. From time to time cars passed in front of Roches Noires, bound for Honfleur or Le Havre. As every night, Le Havre was lit up like a holiday and the sky was above it, naked, and between the sky and the Sainte Adresse lighthouse was the black parade of oil tankers descending as usual toward the ports of France and those of southern Europe.

You stood up. You looked at me through the windows. You were still in a state of profound distraction.

I came back into the room.

You sat down again opposite me and said, “So you'll never write the story of Theodora?”

I said that I was never sure of anything when it came to what I would or wouldn't write.

You didn't answer.

I said, “You're in love with Theodora.”

You didn't smile, but said in a single breath, “Theodora is what I don't know about you, I was very young. All the rest I know. I've been waiting three years for you to write her story.”

I said, “I don't really know why I can't write Theodora's story.”

I added, “Perhaps it's too difficult, it's impossible to know.”

You had tears in your eyes.

You said, “Don't tell me any of what you know about her.”

And then you said, “I know nothing about Theodora except the last pages of
Outside
.”

“So how she made love with her lover, that part you know.”

“Yes. I know this was how the wives of deportees took their
husbands
when they returned exhausted from the camps of Nazi Northern Germany.”

 

I said I would probably never finish Theodora, the book, that it was almost certain. That it was the only time in my life this had happened. That the most I'd been able to do was save that passage from the abandoned manuscript. That it was a book I couldn't write without immediately being drawn toward other books that I had decided never to write.

 

Afterward you went out to the balcony, to the railing facing the sea. I heard no more from you.

 

We went to bed with the moon in the deep blue sky. It was the next day that we made love.

You came to me in my room. Not a word was spoken. We were nourished with the child's body of Theodora Kats, with that disabled body, with her clear gaze, with her cries to her mother before the bullet in the back of the head from the German soldier charged with maintaining order in the camp. Afterward, you said I had an incredibly youthful body. I hesitated to publish that sentence. But I didn't have the strength. I also write things that I don't understand. I leave them in my books and I reread them and then they make sense. I said that people had always told me that, even the North China Lover; I was fourteen at the time. And we laughed. And again desire returned, without a word or a kiss. And then after lovemaking you spoke to me of Theodora Kats. Of those words: Theodora Kats. Even the name, you said, is stunning.

You asked me, “Why so difficult, all of a sudden?”

I said, “I don't know. All I know is that it might come from what they told me, that at the time when she, when Theodora Kats was deported, there weren't yet any crematoriums. That the bodies were left to rot in the dirt of the pits. That the crematoriums came later, after the Final Solution of 1942.

You asked if that's what had led me to abandon Theodora Kats to her fate.

I said, “Perhaps, seeing that she was long dead and forgotten by everyone, even by me, no doubt. That she was so young, twenty-three, twenty-five years old at most.”

And disabled, she must have been, but not seriously – a slight limp in her left ankle, I seemed to recall.

 

You asked, “Did the Germans forget?”

“Yes. If they hadn't, they could have died just from learning that they were German, irremediably German.”

“You hoped so?”

“Yes. It was three years after that war that time began moving again. First for the Germans, as always, and then for the others. For the Jews, never.”

You asked me to tell you more about Theodora Kats, though you knew so little about her.

S
O THAT evening I spoke to you of Theodora Kats, of the person I believed was she, Theodora Kats, still the same person, still alive, but after the war, in the year that followed the end of the war. I told you that her hotel was in Switzerland, that Theodora Kats would have lived in the Hôtel de la Vallée at the end, before dying. And in that Swiss hotel – a square block of a building, with a fountain and statues of bathers – they had also put children repatriated from the Nazi camps who had been found dying in those camps and all day long those children, about whom nobody knew anything, screamed and ate and laughed, it was impossible to live there in that hotel, in that place of children left alive. And despite this it was apparently in the Hôtel de la Vallée that Theodora Kats had been truly happy.

You asked me, with a tenderness I'd never heard from you: “Orphaned children?”

I couldn't answer. You asked: “Jewish?”

I said probably, yes. I also said that we must never generalize, never again. And even so I wept, because I was always with the Jewish children. I said, “Yes, Jewish.”

I told you that in the same hotel, the children stole food, bread, cakes, and they hid them. They hid everything. And they stripped naked and dove into the fountain. They were crazy about the water. And people stared at them. There was nothing else to do in that hotel. And they injured themselves in that cement basin but their happiness was such that they didn't even feel it. Sometimes the water in the basin turned rosy with their blood and had to be changed. They could not be forbidden anything. Anything.

When someone tried to stroke their face, they scratched us, spat at us.

Many of them had forgotten their native tongue, their given name, the name of their family, their parents. They all let out different cries, and then they understood each other. From what was said in that hotel, at the time they were all from Poland, from the vast Vilna ghetto, huge as an entire province.

“Those children were the reason Theodora ran away from the hotel, so she could keep living.”

I said it was possible she had run away from the hotel but that I didn't really believe it.

I said Theodora was dependent on me. From the moment I knew her, even though I had written very little about her, she was dependent on me.

 

I said I believed it also depended on the moment. At night I thought I'd already seen Theodora. On certain days I was sure I'd known her previously, in Paris before the war. By morning I didn't know anything. In the morning I believed I'd never known Theodora Kats. Never, anywhere.

“You invented the name Theodora.”

“Yes. I invented everything about that young woman, the greenish hue of her eyes, the beauty of her body, her voice, since I knew she had been gassed. And I recognized the name when I heard it for the first time. I could only have invented that name. Maybe I invented it as a way of being able to talk about the Jews murdered by the Germans. A body without a name was of no use.”

You said, “We should say, the Nazis.”

I answered that I had never said Nazis to designate the Germans. That I would continue to say it like that: the Germans.
That I believed that certain Germans would never recover from their massacres, their gas chambers, their executions of all the Jewish newborns, their surgical experiments on Jewish adolescents. Never.

 

She lived in a small room on Rue de l'Université or thereabouts ... She was completely alone. Her face was magnificent. Also, it was a friend of Betty Fernandez who had lent her that room as soon as the Germans arrived.

What I especially remember was Theodora Kats's mad desire to learn the French language well enough to write in that language.

 

I cried. And we stopped talking. It was the end of the night. I cried in the bed where we had taken refuge after talking about the children.

You said, “No more tears now.”

I said there was nothing I could do about these tears, that for me they had become a kind of obligation, a necessity of life. That I could cry with all my body, all my life, that this was a fortunate thing for me and I knew it. That for me, writing was like crying. That no book could be joyful without indecency. That mourning should be assumed as if it were a civilization
unto itself, a civilization of all the memories of death decreed by men, whatever its nature, penitentiary or bellicose.

You asked me, “What should be done about the French Nazis?”

“Like you, I don't know. Kill them. Listen, the French would also have become murderers if they'd been left free to kill like the German Nazis. It was a dishonor for France to let them live. And still today we are nostalgic for those murders we didn't commit.”

 

I nestled in your arms and we wept together. Sometimes we laughed, ashamed of our weeping, and then our tears returned and we laughed again at not being able to do anything about it, about weeping.

You said, “You didn't know Theodora.”

“I did know her, but like very beautiful women who pass by in the street, or like stage or screen actresses, like the women of all those people. Well-known women, beautiful or plain, but famous and talked about. Yes, a whole population of her made by her alone, everywhere. For years people saw her everywhere, Theodora Kats.”

“Someone knew about her ...”

“Yes. Betty Fernandez had heard news of her. In 1942 she
was apparently seen in a German train station, every morning, a kind of triage station for the convoys of Jews. They found some beautiful drawings there, of Theodora. She must have been brought there by mistake, to that station from which Jewish deportees were never sent to the camps of Auschwitz. Alone with the stationmaster, they said. They also said that Theodora herself might have been mistaken about the train stop when she got off. Or perhaps a German had told her she should get off there, perhaps to save her from death, because of her gentle, beautiful face, her youth. She had picked up her valise and gotten off the train without asking any questions. She must have been so determined to take that train, so beautiful, so elegant in that immaculate dress, that not one of the conductors had asked to see her ticket. The charcoal drawings all depicted the same woman, always wearing the same white dress. Sometimes sitting beneath a tree, always the same one, in a corner of the garden, in a white armchair that always faced the triage station. The drawings were not stored in a single place in that station. There were drawings scattered on the ground in the station yard. There were drawings everywhere. All over the ground, they said. They supposed that people had lived in the station after the war and ransacked the place. It was always the same drawing of Theodora Kats, with few
variations: she is dressed in white, always, she is very English, pale, coifed, discreetly made up, wearing a straw hat, sitting in a canvas armchair, beneath the same tree, before an ordinary breakfast tray. She apparently stayed there a long time, Theodora. She woke up early, showered, always at the same time, dressed, and went into the garden to have her breakfast, so that she could then board the train that one day would surely carry her away from there, out of Germany. Every day the stationmaster brought her good food. He said that he, too, waited for that train every day, that never had they failed to wait for it. They waited every morning, every day, for the same train, the one with the Jews. After every train that passed, each day, she said that the next one was surely their train, that it was inconceivable to have to wait for it any longer. I've often thought of that train's passage at a set hour. I believe I also thought that for Theodora Kats this train was the train of Theodora Kats's hope, the one of death by decapitation; the one that fed Auschwitz with living flesh.