Yann Andrea Steiner (7 page)

The Child hesitates, then asks if that's still going on, if the Germans are still murdering.

The girl says no. He looks at her. She doesn't know if he believes her.

 

Afterward they headed north, toward the swampy plains of Bay of the Seine, past the docks of the port.

They crossed over the naked sands and headed for the Black Pillars, toward the canal. At that spot the beach was pockmarked and gummy and again the girl carried the child.

They crossed the great expanse of sand at the bay. The pillars grew taller as they approached.

And then the girl put the child down and they walked onto the last sandbank before the Seine, the river she had said; it continued to flow into the sea before disappearing. She had told him to look at the color of the water, green or blue.

The child looked.

 

The girl lay down on the sandy beach and closed her eyes.

Then the child went off to join the people collecting shells nearby. When the child had gone, she cried.

Now and then, he came back toward her.

The girl knew when he was there, looking at her.

She also knew when he ran off again toward the fishermen and when he came back.

He gave her what the fishermen had left behind, small gray crabs, shrimp, empty shells. And the girl threw them in the water-filled hollow at the foot of the tallest black pillar.

 

And then the sea, slowly, pearled up with green.

And then the long line of oil tankers from Antifer grew darker.

And then the waters of the Seine were slowly invaded by the waters of the sea. And the difference between the waters
of the Seine and the waters of the sea could be read with crystal clarity.

 

The child returned to the young girl. He pressed himself against her and for a long time they looked at each other. Especially she. As if a stranger, suddenly.

She said to him, “You are the child with gray eyes. That is you.” The child saw that she had wept during his absence. The child said he didn't like it when she cried. He knew it was because of his little sister but he couldn't help it sometimes, if he talked about Maria. She had asked him the color of Maria's eyes. He didn't know. Green, he thought; his mother said so.

 

Time passed. It was getting onto autumn. But the end of summer had not yet arrived.

It suddenly turned cold.

The girl carried the child. She held him very close against her, kissed his body. Then the child said that sometimes at night he dreamed he was still crying over his little sister, and the dog.

The child looked toward the canal; maybe he was afraid
because they were now the only ones on that entire stretch of sand. The girl told the child that he must no longer be afraid. She put him down and the child was no longer afraid and they walked along the same path they'd taken to get there, the one between the fallow fields that were covered by the sea when the tide was high.

 

Then the girl spoke to the child. She told him she'd rather it remain this way between them.

That she'd rather their story not move from this place, even if the child didn't understand her; that it remain in this desire, even if that meant she put herself to death. Not a real death, mind you, but a dead death, where you don't hurt, where you're never sad, you're never punished, nothing.

She said, “It should be completely impossible.”

She said, “It should be desperate.”

She said that if he had been older their story would have left them behind; that she could not even imagine such a thing, and that it was good that things between them were like this. She added that if he didn't understand everything she was saying, it wasn't important. The child cried. He also cried for no reason, as if the massacre of his little sister had never ended
and was still invading the earth, the whole world, little by little.

She also said she knew he couldn't yet understand what she was telling him, but that she didn't know this well enough to keep silent.

The child listened to all of it. He listened to all of it, that child.

 

Sometimes, while walking, he looked at her, for a long time, as if he were seeing her for the first time.

At first he said nothing to the girl. Not a thing.

And then he said he was tired and for her to carry him in her arms some more; when he was there, in her arms, he looked at her face for a very long time with a kind of gravity that she had never seen in him before and he said to her almost in a whisper, very quickly, as if someone else could hear, he said that if she didn't take him with her he would throw himself in the sea to die, that the other children had told him how to die in the sea, that he knew this now.

It was at that very moment that the young girl promised to take him with her, swore to him that never ever would she leave him. That never ever would she forget him.

T
HE END began.

The groups from the south Paris suburbs have arrived. They wait around the buses, watched over by the drivers.

The director of the South Suburb Camps squints toward the cliffs.

She says, “We have to call the police. The child hasn't come back. Neither has the counselor.”

We have to call.

 

A siren wailed from somewhere around the Touques estuary. Just as at the end of the work shift in the small factories lining the roads.

The girl lay behind a bush. The child came up against her as if trying to lose himself, to disappear in her. The child doesn't know. The child is frightening. He cries, “I'm staying here with you.”

Another siren calls, slower, softer. She says, “Go on. I'll follow you.”

 

Then the child gets up and looks around. He looks at the distant, empty tennis courts, the shuttered villas, and at her, lying there without strength and without a voice and he looks in the distance at the buses and vans from the southern suburbs. Once he'd seen them, the child looked toward the cliffs. All was calm. All was clear. The child must already know what to do to keep from going back there.

 

A third siren wailed, longer and shriller this time, to be lost in the sea. The girl hissed under her breath.

“Go – now! I'm begging you, do it.”

The child looked once again at the vast summer desert and at her, this stranger.

He said, “Come with me.”

She said no, not that. She can't join him right away but she'll come. Tonight, she said, or tomorrow, or maybe the day after but not this afternoon; this afternoon, she says, she couldn't bear it. She says they have to wait a little longer. He did as she asked. Slowly he moved away from the place and began to walk. And then he headed toward the cliffs.

She doesn't watch him leave. Again she sings that at the clearwater fountain she rested.

She rests, stretched out full, with her eyes closed. She sings in a state of insolent happiness.

Once she had sung, the child was no longer afraid.

They had looked at each other and suddenly burst out laughing as if in a flash of joy. And the child had understood: that now she would never forget him, never again, and that the crime against the Jews had vanished from the earth with the knowledge of their story, hers and his.

 

In the dark room, time suddenly subsided. And it was evening.

 

She tells him that wherever she goes she will take him with her. That as of that very night she would find him again, that he has to start walking toward the forest and after the forest he must keep moving forward, on the paths marked in white for foreign tourists.

 

I remember.

It was at the beginning of the story. And yet I began to remember.

She had asked him, “What do you love the most?”

He tried to understand the question and then he had asked what her answer was, what she loved the most, and she had said, “The sea. Just like you.”

He had said it was the same for him: the sea.

 

I know nothing more of the differences between the child outside and the child inside, between what surrounds him and what keeps him alive, and what separates him from this life again and again, this havoc of life.

Then I return to the frailty of his unformed body, to those temporary differences, the light beatings of his heart that speak his life, advancing every day and every night toward something unknown, something to come, destined for him alone.

 

And I know nothing more of the difference between the men of Gdansk and the men of God. Between the thousands of children who starved to death in Vilna and the young priest Jerzy Popieluszko.

Nor anything more of the difference between the graves in the East and the poems buried in the earth of the Ukraine and Silesia, between the deathly silence of the Afghan lands and the unfathomable malfeasance of that same God.

I know nothing more. Nothing more. Anywhere. Than the
truth of truth and the lie of lies. I can no longer distinguish words from tears. I know only that the child walks forward on the forest path.

That he walks forward. Alone. That he walks some more.

And more. And that the young counselor has stood up and looked into the trees, and that she sees his red sweater. And that beneath her breath she called out a word that the child recognized and that he cried out in turn. A word that cannot be written, that has been spoken only among Jews for six thousand years, or a hundred thousand years, no one knows.

 

On Gdansk I posed my lips and I kissed that Jewish child and the dead children of the Vilna ghetto. I also kissed them in my mind and in my body.

 

You say, “What were we talking about in the dark room? What was it?”

I say that, like you, I don't remember what it was.

It was about the events of that summer, no doubt; about the rain, and hunger.

About injustice.

About death.

About the bad weather, about those hot nights that bled into August days, about the cool shadows of the walls,

about those cruel young girls who lavished desire,

about those endless hotels, now demolished,

about those cool, dark hallways, those now-abandoned rooms where so, so many books and so much love had been made,

about that man from Cabourg who was Jewish like the child, like writing, Jewish like the soul,

about those evenings that went by so slowly, you remember, when they danced before him, those two wicked girls, danced for the man tortured by desire who was on the verge of losing his life and who was weeping there, on the sofa in the grand salon with its view of the sea,

in the mad delight of hoping to die of it someday. One time,

about Mozart and the midnight blue over the arctic lakes,

about the midnight blue daylight over the singing voices in the casinos made of snow and black ice; the heart trembles. The voices, yes, singing arias of Mozart and murdered Jews,

and about the way you had of doing nothing, the way I had of waiting for you to go down to the beach. To see. See your laughing eyes, again and again and more each day,

about your way of waiting on sofas facing outside, toward the scattered continents, the oceans, sorrow, joy,

about that child, over and over. About his eternity.

 

We spoke about Poland. About a Poland to come, embraced by hope and the idea of God,

about the postcard the child brought back to the young counselor,

and again about the country of Poland, homeland to us all, home of the living dead of Vilna and of the Jewish children,

and also about Rue de Londres, so strangely beautiful, so smooth, purified of every detail, as naked as a gaze.

 

The child walks. He moves forward. We no longer see him at all.

We remain standing, apart from each other.

We close our eyes. Our closed eyes face the cliffs.

You do the looking for me.

You say that the buses with the first group have pulled out onto the highway. That it's raining, that it's still a light, warm summer rain.

You say, “The child has passed the cliffs.” You cry, “Where is he going?”

You say she isn't turning around. I've understood: she's letting him go his own way. It's he who is forging the path. She follows the path he traces; she's letting him go completely his own way, as she would do with fate.

I ask if you hoped never to find them again, neither the trace of their steps nor of their bodies.

You don't answer.

You say, “The child is still moving forward.”

I say that the child will not die. I swear it. I weep, I cry out, I swear it on life itself.

You say he is disappearing, hiding, and she can no longer see him.

You say that it's done: he has disappeared, but not to die, never again to die, ever. And you cry out in fear.

I call out that I love you. You don't hear. From fear and hope, you're still crying out.

You say that now, even if she wanted to, she couldn't see him. I say: Nor kill herself.

You say that we could have seen the child again, that he climbed back up the cliff, that he was hidden by the trees, that he didn't go down toward the buses. That he must have hesitated, then decided. That he had not gone to take the buses. That it was raining.

You say that never again will he climb on those buses, never again in his life, and we weep for joy.

 

He did as she asked.

You say, She had already explained to him the night before how to head for the cliff that overlooked the parking lot. Openly he skirted the bus parking lot. Some truck drivers had seen the child and blown him kisses without looking at him, his eyes lowered in the direction of the sea. Then fear gripped him again and at first he walked faster; then he smiled at the truck drivers.