Yann Andrea Steiner Page 2

  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.

  SO 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, dr
essed, 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.

  All her life she spoke very little, Theodora. Like certain Englishwomen she found speech to be noisy, mendacious, and she had chosen silence and the written word.

  You asked what part of Germany the station was in. She believed it was south of Krakow, heading south toward the border. In those cursed lands. She was of British origin, but she had grown up in Belgium. She didn’t know European geography very well: like many English, she liked only London-Paris and the Gulf States.

  You asked if the man who guarded the station visited her in her sleep. It was what I believed I’d written, yes, when she slept. I wasn’t certain that the man was not the master of that station where she lived for two years of war. Why wouldn’t he be? Or that they had loved each other – I’d thought of that too, and even that it was from the pain of it that she later died.

  I said that I didn’t try to find out, that I never asked anything of that nature about Theodora, but I believe it wasn’t out of the question that they should become lovers.

  You asked me what I thought. I told you that I had never asked for names, neither of the man nor of the young woman in white, in the drawings. I said that as soon as I heard that story, I spoke the name I’d surely heard before, of Theodora Kats. Then at the end, after several years, around me, people applied that name to the woman in white lost in a Europe of death.

  I remind you that I’m sure I knew Theodora but that my only memories are of Betty Fernandez, whom I knew well and who, for her part, as I told you, was a friend of the young Theodora Kats. That I knew Betty Fernandez loved and admired her.

  I had never forgotten that name, that time, the white of her dresses, that innocent wait for the train of death or of love – they weren’t sure which; no one has ever been sure.

  You say that even if I didn’t know Theodora, even if I never went near her, I must tell you what I think might have become of her.

  Personally, I believe she went back to England before the end of the war. First she landed a job with a well-known literary review in London. And then she married the British writer G. O. She wasn’t happy. I had mainly known her after her marriage to the British writer G. O., who was famous the world over and whom I admired enormously. She had never liked him very much, neither the writer he was nor the man.

  You asked me what Theodora was like in London. I said that she had put on weight. That she no longer made love with her husband, that she didn’t want any more of that, ever. She said, I’d rather die.

  You said, “Was that woman, in London, the one from the German train station?”

  I never tried to find out. It’s the most I can say. But if you ask me, it isn’t out of the question. She had made something of herself even so, even dead she would have become something; she would have been claimed by a family in England or somewhere else. But no. No one claimed the body of Theodora Kats.

  “Still, at some point she left that station.”

  Yes. Unless they found her after the defeat of Nazi Germany and left her there, in that station, just as they had left “political prisoners” in the camps, thousands of them. As for her lover, nothing was ever known. She was there, in that same station. I see her there, still in her white outfit ironed that very morning, and later that day speckled with her blood.

  I believe this is why no one has ever forgotten her, or that whiteness. It was the white of her dresses, the excessive, uncommon care she took of them, which made the people who had heard of her never forget her; those canvas hats, also white, her canvas sandals, all those things, her gloves. Her story spread throughout Europe. There was never any certainty. We still don’t know who she had been or why she had been there, in that station, for two years running.

  Yes, it was the whiteness of the dresses, of the summer suits that made her story spread throughout the world: a very British lady in an immaculate white outfit, waiting for the train to the cremation ovens.

  For the vast majority, the decent image of that white is what remained. And for others, it was her laugh that prevailed.

  “Perhaps she has no story at all.”

  “Perhaps. Maybe she went mad from a latent, lingering madness that took away her will to live, to know, to understand. A kind of madness of normalcy might have taken hold of her, of her mind and body. As for me, I’ve done all I could to see that the phenomenon of that station was disseminated. And it was.”

  You asked me if she was dead. I said yes. And that the ceremonial of the station had been disseminated. She didn’t wish to be seen in an unflattering light, owing to the cancer that had made her lose so much weight, that had triumphed over her pale beauty. So she asked to be brought to a large hotel near the hospital where she had stayed and there she took a room. She asked for her most beautiful dress, and to be made up. It was there that her friends saw her for the last time, in death as in life, in death.

  IT’S raining.

  It’s raining on the sea.

  On the forests, on the empty beach.

  It’s been raining since nighttime. A fine, light rain.

  The summer umbrellas aren’t out yet. The only movement on those acres of sand are the holiday campers. This year they are small, it seems to me, very small. Now and then the counselors let them out onto the beach, so as not to be driven crazy.

  There they are:

  They shout.

  They love the rain.

  The sea.

  They shout louder and louder.

  After an hour they are good for nothing. Then they’re brought in under the tents. They are changed, their backs rubbed against the cold. They love that, they laugh and shout.

  They are made to sing “We’ll to the Woods No More.” They sing, but not in unison. It’s always the same with them: what they really want is to be told a story. Any story, as long as it’s told. Singing they want no part of.

  Except for one. One who watches.

  The child. The one with the gray eyes. He came with the others.

  They ask him, Aren’t you going running?

  He shakes his head no. That child stays silent a lot, for hours he stays silent.

  They ask him, Why are you crying? He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know.

  One wishes everything could be graced by that tearful child. It’s the grace of the sea when the child looks at it.

  Is he unhappy here? He doesn’t answer. He makes a sign meaning who knows what, like a minor problem he must apologize for, it’s not important, you see ... it’s nothing.

  And suddenly they see.

  They see that the splendor of the ocean is there, as well, in the eyes of the child watching it.

  The child watches. He watches everything: the sea, the beaches, the emptiness. His eyes are gray. Gray. Like the storm, the stone, the Northern sky, the sea, the immanent intelligence of matter, of life. Gray like thought. Like time. The past and present centuries blended together. Gray.

  Is the child aware that someone on the beach is looking after him? A dark young girl with eyes at once sad and gay. No one knows. Johanna is her name.

  Once he almost seemed to be turning back toward her. But no, he was looking behind him, back to where the wind came from; because that wind was so strong, a solid block, so strong that it was as if it had changed direction, come from the forests, from a place unknown; as if it had lef
t this ocean sky for the unknown shores of another time.

  Yes, that is what he was looking at: the wind. The wind that had escaped to the sea, an entire shore of wind that flew above the sea.

  THE ONE looking after him is she, that Jeanne, a summer camp counselor, very young and gay. She asks him, What are you thinking about all the time? He says he doesn’t know. She says it’s the same thing for her, she never knows either. Then he looks at her.

  Today beneath the barren sky there is a kite like they make in China, I’m not really sure, but I seem to recognize Chinese lacquer red, a color from North China.

  The child stands there. He too looks at the kite, the red design in the sky. He is a bit apart from the others, but probably not on purpose; he must be that way all the time. Like a slight delay behind the other children, without meaning to.

  When the kite fell down dead the child watched it. Then he sat down on the sand to watch it some more, a kite that was dead.

  The seagulls are there too, turned toward the distance, feathers smoothed down by the wind. They remain that way, posed on the sand, watching for the disorientation of the rain. And suddenly they let out a deafening cry; they are frightening. Then for no reason they fly into the distance, only to return just as suddenly. Those seagulls are crazy, say the children.

  THE CHILDREN have climbed back up the hill to go to the dining hall. The beach emptied, slowly, as every summer day at that hour, lunchtime for the “camp kids.” The counselors called them in. The child got up, waited for his Jeanne. He put his hand in hers and followed.