Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (11 page)

A pass. Marcel seems a little unsure what to do with his
success, and has still not decided that law is the right route, but Georges will give him advice about how to find a situation. Papa dropped by yesterday afternoon to get word as soon as the results were posted. He was delighted and told him so most heartily. “You are coming along nicely, Marcel, no more silliness, eh?”

Marcel speaks no more of the idea of a novel, thank goodness. These projects are only a waste of time.

W
HAT LOVELY IRONY
there is in these entries from the summer of 1893—indeed, I have selected these passages to underline both the poignancy and the ridiculousness of the situation. No, Marcel would never become a lawyer and his parents’ interventions in his career would prove fruitless in that regard.

You will have gathered that I call Marcel Proust friend. Of course, I never met the man. He died in 1922, forty-four years before I was born. Yet I like to think of him as a friend, a comrade in pursuit of memory, and I have come to the Bibliothèque Nationale to visit him, transported back one hundred years thanks simply to Air Canada.

Certainly, I appreciate his literary achievement. I have read the novel with careful attention, studied the biographies, sought out some critical commentary, yet my affection extends beyond that of an appreciative reader. I feel personal gratitude for what he wrote and sense some human bond. Yes, I know the link is one-sided; I am not delusional. But I don’t think my fondness is merely artistic idolatry, that tedious elevation of a distant genius by the dilettante who would aggrandize herself with this connection to a
greatness she will never achieve. Proust himself struggled with that demon when he was translating Ruskin: he placed the Englishman on a pedestal and devoted years of his life to Ruskinian pilgrimages, following the critic’s footsteps to Venice and Amiens with his art books for guides. In the end, Proust produced some lovely translations of Ruskin’s essays, but they merely delayed his own artistic maturity. Another case of getting distracted from the task at hand. My own translations will be less beautiful, of course, yet I hope they are more than a distant tribute. I offer here a real vote of thanks for the novel and some attempt at understanding the man.

Let me explain. I was about fifteen—indeed it was not long after the school trip to Toronto—when I encountered the great French novelist Marcel Proust, or rather a small reproduction of his portrait by Jacques Emile Blanche, staring out from the pages of my high school reader. He is a fragile figure with unnaturally pale skin punctuated by large dark eyes, like pools of balsamic vinegar sitting in white porcelain saucers. His lips are small but gracefully shaped, promising a gentle sensuality. His black hair is parted emphatically down the middle and slicked into place like the Sunday coiffe of a docile schoolboy. He wears evening dress and a white flower in his lapel. He appears as a gentle dandy, romantic, exotic, more intriguing, more desirable than the heroic masculinity of Balzac, Hugo, and Zola whose portraits I have encountered on the preceding pages.

Proust’s novel,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
or
Remembrance of Things Past
, published in seven books between 1913 and 1927, is more than three thousand pages long—more than a million words devoted to minute description of the narrator’s emotional states, aesthetic observations,
and social relations in Paris during the
belle époque
. The prose is labyrinthine, the sentences huge puzzles of interlocking clauses that often create whole paragraphs each, sometimes whole pages. The inattentive reader can easily lose her way in this maze, thinking herself all cosily tucked into bed with the narrator as he describes his somnolent state halfway to sleep only to foggily realize that they have somehow been transported downstairs and are now in the hallway tapping on the barometer before setting on a pre-lunch walk, their move quite surprising to her, for in some clause or another she has allowed her attention to wander and so has lost the thread of his story.

Some readers try the first volume, in which the narrator recounts his cossetted childhood, his pubescent pining for his aristocratic playmate Gilberte Swann and the story of her father, a family neighbour in the country and Parisian man-about-town who has an obsessive affair with the courtesan Odette. Few proceed into the next six parts to follow the narrator’s rapid rise into the great salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; his witty and trenchant observation of their inhabitants like the agate-eyed Duchesse de Guermantes or the arrogant Baron de Charlus; his bourgeois parents’ despair that this young socialite will ever make anything of his life, and his dissection of his own obsessive love for a girl called Albertine. Fewer still make it to the very end of the novel to experience the narrator’s poignant summation of time recaptured through physical memory, nor to witness the dissipated Baron begging to be whipped by a male prostitute.

Our middle-aged French teacher, her hair wrapped into a tight bun, her owl’s-eyes glasses firmly in place, certainly does not want her teenage charges to read such things, nor expects them to venture into such an intimidating text. Yet, it
is great literature, which she considers it her duty to teach. We have struggled through the full length of Balzac’s
Eugénie Grandet
, we have read Racine and Corneille aloud in class, each of us taking different roles and rendering the classic French alexandrines as nothing more than a monotonous singsong. For Proust, however, we must rely entirely on our reader, which offers a truncated biography, the pale-faced portrait, and a few brief excerpts from the novel.

My best friend Justine and I, girls filled with cultural pretensions despite our inability to grasp much of what we are taught about art and literature, do admit to a certain amused fondness for this man. We giggle over his preciousness, reading in the biographical notes that at age fourteen, in a parlour game, he revealed that his worst fear was to be separated from Maman, and that he spent his later years in bed in a room lined with cork to keep the noise out as he wrote. We know there is something unusual, slightly contemptible about this sick and sensitive creature. On our second day devoted to these excerpts, when Mme Desjardins steps out briefly to confer with the school principal in hushed whispers in the echoing hallways about some piece of mysterious administrative business, Justine snatches my reader from my hands and, tittering, takes her pencil to the Blanche portrait reproduced there. To exaggerate his unhealthy air, she darkens the circles under Proust’s eyes with her lead and erases what little colour there is in his cheeks. Laughing, I pull my property back across the desk to admire her handiwork.

Despite our patronizing delight and giggling vandalism, we have, whether we admit it or not, discovered in our brief taste of his novel a sensitive child in whom we recognize ourselves. A shy waif, he hovers on the staircase while the grown-ups are all at dinner, hoping finally to catch his
mother on her way up to bed and secure from her the goodnight kiss denied him when his less patient father dismissed him abruptly from the salon as the guests were called to the table. We find there too, more easily admitted, a wealth of detail that inspires our awe and a life dedicated to art that we would emulate. But in the first excerpt that we are required to read, I find more than that—I find a friend’s voice speaking to me across time.

This passage is, unbeknownst to our young selves reading drowsily in an overheated Canadian classroom on a grey winter afternoon with the smell of warm, wet wool rising from our clothing, the most famous moment in twentieth-century French literature.

On a cold and dreary day, the adult narrator returns home to his mother who offers him a cup of herbal tea, thinking to warm his body and cheer his spirits. Dipping into his tea that soft, shell-shaped French sponge cake called a madeleine, the narrator is suddenly transported back to his childhood, to the pre-lunch walks, the grey stone church, the eccentric aunts and uncles of his holiday visits to his relatives in Combray. There, he recalls, his bedridden Aunt Léonie would dip a biscuit in her tea before passing it to him, feeding him a mouthful of the soft, sweet crumb thus created. Analyzing his sudden warm and delightful return to childhood, the narrator realizes that the taste of the madeleine contains within it the key to unconscious memory.

Reading this in the classroom, my grey day is equally enlightened. I have encountered in literature, for the first time, an experience I recognize.

That summer, after school is out, exam papers marked and progress to our next grade assured, I go to the public library and select the first volume of
A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu
. Little knowing what she was doing, Mme Desjardins has handed me the key to literature, locked away, so impenetrably it seemed, behind the author’s complex language and the child’s inability to imagine the adult world. The massive gates swing open, and I begin to read.

B
ENEDICT
, B
ENDIX
, B
ENJAMIN,
Bernard, Bernard, Bernard… Bernheim… That’s all.”

“So…”

“So? There’s no record, mademoiselle.”

“No record?”

“No, mademoiselle.” The young man was barely polite.

“Is there nowhere else to look?”

“Well, I can see if we have a file.” He shrugged his shoulders and disappeared around a metal filing cabinet almost as tall as he was. Sarah stood at the counter waiting, her eyes taking in the cabinets that stretched to the back of the high-ceilinged room and the small window above them, set so high it required a great long crank to open it, as it was now. From somewhere outside she could hear the faintest sound of children’s voices, calling while at play, and a little puff of warm air floated down towards her.

She had spent the first days in Paris arranging her few belongings in her small room, visiting museums, buying gifts for the Plots and her Toronto girlfriends, and looking up addresses in the street directories at a nearby post office, the way a writer sharpens pencils to avoid the moment when she must put one to paper. A week passed in that manner before she had the courage to secrete a small piece of paper
bearing the address of the Red Cross into the zipper section of her pocketbook and set out by Métro to come here. At the front door, she asked where she might inquire about displaced persons and was directed to the second floor. The young man, thin, small, and dressed in a black suit, was sitting behind the counter, reading a book when she entered and asked her question. He reappeared now, carrying a pale-blue manila folder.

“There’s a file,” he said. “Inquiries have been made.”

Sarah felt fear and hope churning in her stomach, rising up and forcing the air out of her lungs. He handed her the folder, but she found only her own letters inside.

Cher Monsieur. Je vous écris …

The young man looked over the countertop, turning his head at a steep angle to read the papers that lay facing Sarah.

“There’s a daughter, in Canada…”

“These are my letters…”

The man looked puzzled.

“But then, you already know, mademoiselle. We have written you.” The young man pulled the copy of a reply from the Red Cross towards him and followed the words with his finger as he read them out rapidly, barely bothering to enunciate as he went. “We have noted the registration of both your parents’ births in the records of the Mairie of the Eighth Arrondissement and located a copy of your father’s professional licence from 1923, but we can find no later record of his address or activities. Specifically, we can find no record of his or his wife’s whereabouts after May, 1942, as per your request… etc.… etc.” His voice trailed off as the letter proceeded with its final formalities.

“Can we not look somewhere else?”

He sighed.

“We can look again on the German lists, but if there was any death registered there, we would have transferred it over onto our files,” he said. “Still, if you want, we can take another look. It will take a day or two. Someone has to go and get them out of storage, and that’s over at the Quai Malaquais.”

“I will come back tomorrow,” Sarah said firmly.

She returned the next afternoon to find the young man still reading his book.

“Yes.” He looked up more promptly this time. “Yes, you were looking for information.” He pulled a piece of paper towards him to remind himself of the names. “Philippe and Sophie Bensimon, formerly of 22 Rue de Musset.… Their names do not appear in the German records.”

Sarah paused and swallowed, then spoke.

“What does that mean?”

“The Germans did not have a record of them living in Paris…”

“But they did live here…”

“Mademoiselle, these lists… During the Occupation, the Germans asked all Jews to register, arrondissement by arrondissement. Your parents weren’t registered.”

“They didn’t register…”

“They didn’t, they couldn’t, they were missed somehow, they chose not to… We don’t know.”

They chose not to
. Sarah seized on the words. “They hid?”

“Mademoiselle…” the man paused, stopped, and chose not to speak. Then he repeated, “We have no record.”

Sarah returned every week to the young man in the Tracing Bureau. She knew that to return every day would
be unreasonable, would somehow cross a line that separated her quest, the natural anxiousness of a child to ascertain the whereabouts of her parents, from a mad grief from which there was no recovery. She held herself straight, clasped her pocketbook firmly at her side, and asked her questions with quiet resolution. Every week, the young man told her that there had been no further news, and that the Red Cross would send letters to either her Paris hotel or the Canadian address, whichever she preferred, both if she wanted, as soon as any other information became available.

“You know, mademoiselle…” He tried for a moment to sympathize and managed to phrase the words gently. “The war has been over for six years. Little new information is emerging. Most people who were displaced have now registered with the authorities.”