Crossing the Borders of Time (35 page)

Janine’s safe-conduct pass, dated January 2, 1942, served in place of a passport, valid only for one trip to Cuba via train and ship
.

Unprepared for instant departure, the family had trouble coming by trunks for packing their things and faced the prospect of hurriedly selling Sigmar’s piano and the furniture they had succeeded in moving from Freiburg to Mulhouse, to Gray and Lyon, only to give it all up in the end. With no possibility of transporting anything more than clothing and some lightweight personal items, regret was numbed by the frenzy of action. The barrenness of the French marketplace enhanced the value of everything they were leaving behind, yet for simplicity’s sake, they struck a deal for the lot, only to have the promised buyer, exploiting their weakness, fail to show up with the payment in time. Thus, in the last moment they were obliged to close the door on all that they had left in the world without the money they anticipated. In their last hasty check around the apartment, they even forgot the crates of valuables they had used to support the mattress on which Norbert slept and so unwittingly abandoned a treasured assortment of family heirlooms. At least documents, letters, and photographs were carefully packed.

Shrouded in grief as the rest of the family buzzed in fretful preparation around her, Janine barely had time to absorb the enormity of the loss she was facing. Throughout the months of Sigmar’s fruitless travels to arrange their escape, she had persuaded herself it never would happen. She had rejected the prospect, declined to discuss it, blocked the image even from nightmares, and assured herself that should the day come, she would insist the family travel without her. She was eighteen years old and eager to make her life with the man she loved. But even as she told herself this, a practical voice argued against it. In the confrontation between self and soul, she knew she lacked the resolve to break from her parents at this perilous time. Recalling the morning she feared them arrested, she knew that she might have to protect them. Who knew what conditions awaited in Cuba? They needed her and, she had to admit as her thoughts reached this point, she doubted that she could manage without them in the labile and increasingly menacing climate of a Europe cruelly ruled by the Nazis.

If she stayed in France, where and how would she and Roland be able to live and support themselves? She could not be with him without getting married, but neither could she imagine presenting themselves in a French city hall expecting someone to marry them now—a foreign Jew and a displaced Alsatian ripe to be nabbed for use by the Germans. Would it even be fair to expose Roland to the growing dangers of wedding a Jew? He might well be suspected of being Jewish himself: his boyhood circumcision posed a threat they had already discussed, as stories of fearsome
Hosenproben
conducted at the point of a gun filtered over the line from the Occupied Zone.

As the week rushed by, she agonized over the question whose resolution would taunt her forever—to stay or to leave—as if she had free choice in the matter. She counted the days with the same bitter foretaste of inevitable hunger with which she had learned to squirrel her rations, already knowing there would not be enough. She changed her mind over and over again. She packed her things, gave up her job, and acted, if only for the sake of her parents, as if she fully intended to emigrate with them. Meanwhile, every cell in her body protested against it. Roland himself worried aloud about his power to protect her if the Germans decided to retake Lyon, so in the end, fear had the last word.

Janine went through those final few days with the same strange eyes that drank in the city when she arrived. But this time the distance with which she surveyed the places around her devolved from the effort to fix them in mind. She felt herself an invisible person, her own ghost, seeing it all as if she were gone. Unengaged in the swirl of everyday life that continued unchanged, she imprinted it all in sadness and longing at a frozen and lonely remove from the world. She felt jealous of every girl she passed in the street, seeing the possible face of a rival who would comfort Roland and then steal his love.

That Tuesday, after her last day at work, Roland showed up outside her office on the place Jules Ferry and announced they were going together to buy her a ring, an enduring symbol of their commitment to marry after the war. For one delirious hour, choosing a ring that pledged his future to hers, she freed herself from the specter of leaving that had blackened the days since the cable arrived. Together, they selected a square-cut stone that aspired to resemble an aquamarine and mirrored the crystalline blue of her eyes. The stone was set in a modern wide band of silver—nothing showy or complicated—as simple and clear as their love for each other. While the jeweler inscribed Roland’s name and the date inside the band, another ornament caught his eye: a brooch composed of three little poppies, enameled in blue, white, and red to symbolize the French tricolor. It was the flag of the country where he would be waiting for her, and before she could stop him, Roland emptied his pockets for patriotism’s token, as well.

“
J’attendrai
.” He whispered the words of their song in her hair as he attached the floral pin to her jacket and then slipped the glittering ring on her fourth finger. “
Moumoutte
,” he murmured, his term of endearment. “
Chérie
.” He opened his arms and clasped her against him, pretending that nothing could force them apart. “
Jour et nuit, j’attendrai ton retour
.”

That night, not having the means to reciprocate by buying a present, but wanting to leave something for him to remember her by, Janine searched through her things for the only two items of value she had: a pink-gold heart-shaped charm with her German initials,
HG
, that she had received from an aunt when she was a child, and a garnet ring that Alice had had made, and the same for Trudi, out of a pair of their grandmother’s earrings. Janine knew they were things Roland couldn’t use, but she gave them to him along with her prized autograph book as a deposit—proof that after the war she would return to redeem them with the gift of herself for the rest of her life.

On Thursday, March 12, the family went in a horse-drawn cab to the gare des Brotteaux for the train to Marseille. Edy’s wife, Lisette, planned to board the train farther south in Valence, where she was living in hiding, in order to see the family before they sailed and to spend a parting night with Janine. No one expected Roland to be there, but he and Roger, along with one of Norbert’s girlfriends, were at the station when the family arrived. Janine’s eyes were swollen with weeping, but instead of the wrenching departure she dreaded, Roland strolled casually by while the parents were busy exchanging farewells with Marie, Mimi, Maurice, and Bella. Curiously, he did not stop to greet her, but flashed her a wink, squeezed her arm, and whispered, “
Pas encore
.” You won’t leave me yet. Then he walked down the track and mounted the train a few cars behind the one the family boarded.

An hour after the train pulled out of the station, with Sigmar and Alice lulled to sleep in the rocking compartment, Norbert beckoned his sisters to follow him through the cars to look for their friends. They couldn’t stay long for fear the parents would wake up and worry, but they scribbled the name of their hotel in Marseille and arranged to meet in the city that evening after Alice and Sigmar had gone to bed. Then they returned to their own seats to watch the soft fields of France roll behind them and fall into memory, and the chestnut and plane trees begin to give way to spears of dark Mediterranean cypress.

“
Never in my life do I remember to have passed a day as sad as this Thursday at Marseille, and I still hate that town for that awful day I spent there
,” Janine would later write in a journal. “
It was only on our arrival there that we fully realized that the next day—only twenty-four hours later—we had to leave France for good
.”

Scanning the crowd to catch sight of Roland after debarking the train, she came out of the Saint Charles Station with her family and found herself standing at the top of a terraced mountain of steps that cascaded sharply down to the street, flanked by verdigris art nouveau lampposts and white statuary. From the crest of that hill overlooking Marseille, she stared in awe for the first time at the sweep of the sea endlessly stretching into the distance and understood with fresh despair the vast chasm that would divide her from Roland.

The sprawling city was laid out beneath her, and on an opposite hilltop over the harbor, the gilded Notre-Dame de la Garde, crowned and cradling her infant son, kept watch on the Mediterranean waters. Pink limestone formations patched charcoal hills surrounding the city, and down past the end of the principal artery of the grand Canebière, antique flesh-colored forts, built from the stone chiseled out of those hills, stood in defense of the narrow Vieux Port. There, at the foot of the city, bustling streets embraced the notorious harbor on three of its sides, and the fourth one opened into the sea. The family wandered the streets toward their hotel, twisting through a warren of tiny alleys north of the port, so steep that many were laddered with steps. Come darkness, Janine worried, what if Roland could not find the place where the Jewish rescue agency had booked them rooms for the night? It was in the vice-ridden, decrepit tenement section, the Quartier du Panier behind the seventeenth-century city hall that crouched in faded glory like a worn-out whore at the side of the harbor.

That evening, after an early supper, Janine and Trudi went back to the room they shared with Lisette, hoping their cousin would fall asleep quickly so they might slip out undetected to meet their friends. But they should have known better. Though Edy had since left Switzerland to join her in Valence, Lisette was delighted to be with Janine again and fully intended to talk all night. Out it poured: a dizzying array of observations and theories, feelings and stories, jokes and poems, philosophies regarding the war and the plots of the Germans and the hope of resistance and the fate of the world and the clash of the sexes, Dostoyevsky and Schiller, and the human condition and the cretins in Vichy and the state of the theater and Hindu art and the pretentiousness of her mother-in-law and the treachery of Marshal Pétain, and the folly of faith and the absence of God and anything else on which she had definitive views.

And so, as their reunion unfolded, sensing her friend would never tire and fall asleep, Janine finally had to reveal to Lisette that she had actually planned to sneak out to spend her parting hours with Roland. It amounted to a rejection that neither woman would ever forget, and Janine mourned her choice at the same time she made it without hesitation, berating herself but helpless to do anything but swallow her shame and beg Lisette not to alert the parents once she had left. Then she folded her beautiful custom-made blue silk pajamas from Freiburg in a paper bag and crept out the door with Trudi behind her.

The six young people met on the street near the hotel and walked the Vieux Port until they found a brasserie open for
moules marinières
, a tricky dish for Janine to eat with only one hand, the other one being attached to Roland. With bloodred, fruity but potent concoctions called PGK—Amer Picon, grenadine, and kirsch—they toasted reunions after the war, and three times again with table wine. Breaking away on their own after dinner, Roland and Janine strolled arm in arm around the tight U-shaped harbor, where a flotilla of boats lent the illusion that in the voyage of life, anyone could set a free course and at a self-chosen hour slip back into port and return to land.

The hotel where Roland had rented a room was even more sordid than the one where Lisette was left to stew on her own. On a rickety bed in a seedy flophouse far better known to sailors and hookers, smugglers and addicts—by the light of the moon that danced through the windows—Janine and Roland hoped to seize a single precious night of their own, a time out of time at the outskirts of war. But the room was cold and dank, the radiator silent and dead. Janine’s blue silk pajamas remained in the bag as Roland drew her onto the bed, and they fumbled for buttons, caressing each other, kicking off shoes and throwing off coats. More than anything she had wanted before, she wanted now, needed now, to give herself to him. The imminence of separation haunted the moment, and she was determined to prove there was nothing she would withhold from him now. This was no time for coyness or feminine wiles, for innocence, for fear or hoarding of love she might never again be able to share. No matter what the future might hold, she needed her first experience to be with Roland. She urged him on: her lips traveled the length of his angular torso, and she kissed the glossy, welted abdominal scar that had stitched them together. She teased his desire and could not understand why Roland pulled away at precisely the moment she was most open to him, boldly decided to know him as part of herself.

But he was determined to prove his love through restraint. It was marriage he wanted, not sexual union rushed on the brink of an anguished good-bye. Roland would not let her leave with any suspicion that sex had been his main purpose, when instead his most ardent desire was to make her his wife, to sacralize what they meant to each other. He had set this inviolable rule for himself even before their train left Lyon. He told her this: it seemed morally reprehensible to him—in a squalid room, at a terrible hour—to become her first lover, only to part the very next day. The rupture of leaving would only be harder, not to mention the risk of making her pregnant. Using a condom would be crude and demeaning, he felt; it was a device to use with a prostitute, not a shield to employ with the woman he loved. And so he was chilled to imagine her nauseous and seasick, alone on the ocean, bearing his child, afraid to confess the truth to her parents, beyond the reach of his protection or even adequate medical care. All these worries lent him resolve. And so, instead, he tenderly held her, her head on his chest and the pulse of his heart. He kissed the auburn tendrils fringing her brow and smoothed her hair, he painted dreams of their future together, and he urged her at last to close her eyes and rest for a while.…