Crossing the Borders of Time (2 page)

BOOK: Crossing the Borders of Time

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Janine had last seen Roland on Friday, March 13, 1942. On that day, pulled from his arms on the teeming docks of Marseille, she fled France with her family aboard a Portuguese passenger ship furtively heading for Casablanca to meet a freighter steaming for Cuba. Theirs was a dangerously late escape from the Nazis. Her ship from Marseille, my mother had told me, was likely the last to have carried Jews out of France before the Germans seized total control of the country. Two weeks later, the first transports of Jews to camps in the East would begin in occupied France—that part of the conquered country directly ruled by the Germans. By July, mass deportations to Auschwitz would also begin in the so-called Free or Unoccupied Zone, where the puppet French government of Marshal Philippe Pétain complied with German demands.

At eighteen, my mother prized love over survival, but the moment presented no options. Roland, then twenty-one and a Catholic from Mulhouse, would not be granted permission to leave. Janine desperately wanted to stay at his side, but she had to escape with her family. Buoyed by the optimism of youth, the lovers tried to assure one another that in less than a year the war would be over and, with peace restored, they would marry.

That long-ago hour when her family boarded the
Lipari
to flee a crazed Europe was one I so often made my mother describe that I virtually felt I had lived it. I had peered at a black-and-white photo of Roland in a small rented boat—a snapshot taken for her by a fellow passenger on the
Lipari
’s deck—and I had wondered about him. On the back, neatly written, were the words “
seul sur la mer
,” alone on the sea, and in the picture, Roland’s thin face and angular features looked wooden, his expression as dark as the water around him. In a white shirt and tie and long overcoat, he appeared out of place in the nautical setting. Yet he was rowing behind the
Lipari
as it made its way from the pier, bearing 448 Jews past the rosy stone forts at the mouth of the city’s Vieux Port and out past the lighthouse to the glimmering Mediterranean Sea.

It was afternoon when the
Lipari
pushed away from the quai de la Joliette, the sun floating toward the horizon as the ship passed beneath the promontory where the stately nineteenth-century Palais du Pharo, built by Napoleon III, sits overlooking the water. There may have been dogs in the palace’s park running free in the grass and lovers on benches enfolded in fervent embrace—just as you see there today—as boats of all sizes glided below, distant and toylike, sails furled, motors purring, in and out of that pink, twinkling harbor. Its beauty, with the vast open ocean rich with the promise of freedom, was entirely lost to Janine.

In her arms, she clutched Roland’s parting present, a fragrant bouquet of mimosas—tiny, cottony, yellow flowers that he had brought to the pier. In some parts of France, wearing yellow flowers had become a sign of sympathy for Jews forced to attach yellow stars to their clothing to mark them as outcasts. But Roland’s carried another, more personal meaning. “Mimosas signify remembrance,” he had whispered, his face in her hair, wild in the strong sea breezes, when he clasped her to him before she embarked. The sunlit scent of the flowers surrounded the lovers in a space of their own on the fear-laden dock, as refugees swarmed all around them and elbowed each other to cross the gangway toward safety.

When they parted, the bouquet seemed a token brought back from a dream and mocked her with all she had lost. And so, turning to the railing in tears as the ship picked up speed, she dropped the stems one by one to the water, as if marking a luminous trail on the waves to find her way back to the man she adored. The flowers danced on the foam, drifted toward him, and caught on his oars, but the
Lipari
soon left Roland behind, a speck on the water. The golden dots bobbed on the swelling surface around him as he rowed back alone to the land and its war.

“
Janine, I ask you here to preserve your love until the happy day when you can become my companion for life
.” These were the words Roland had written that morning in her pocket-sized blue spiral notebook, filled with farewell messages inscribed by her friends. On deck, the March wind whipped her stiff brown coat like a sail. She had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, but a waist so slim that my father would marvel that its circumference could fit in the span of his hands. She pulled her belt tighter and turned the coat’s beaver collar up to her chin against the gusts that spun off the water. In spite of her grief, the ring that shone on her finger provided a flicker of pleasure and promise. It was silver with a square-cut aquamarine, the same crystalline blue as her eyes, and it served to signal their vows to each other. Roland had bought it for her a few days before in Lyon, along with a brooch of three poppies enameled in blue, white, and red—a symbol of loyalty, in spite of it all, to the humbled French flag and the Frenchman whose love would be waiting.

Alone in her bunk, Janine would open the thick, sealed envelope that Roland had slipped in her pocket at the moment they parted and would read his pledge through her tears:

I consider you from this present day as my fiancée and future partner. You ask only to belong to me. We must wait for that reality. Our sole enemy is time! Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that
whatever the time we must wait
, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt.… You see,
ma chérie
, fate has sent us a test so that our love will achieve its full greatness. You are everything for me, and I do not want to speak here of all my pain in letting you leave, going so far from me, but know that if I had to lose you, nothing good would come of my life. You are my goal.…

They had never seen each other again. And my mother had never forgotten.

Now, recalling the story that kept me transfixed, I froze on the second-floor landing. I had lived all my life caught up in this romance, but why had I simply assumed that Roland’s sister would also remember? Could it be, as years passed, feeling trapped in a difficult marriage, my mother invented this perfect love of her youth as a balm for her suffering heart? How real was the story she’d told me? What if she’d spent a lifetime mourning a man for whom she had been a dalliance only? Then I had her pride to consider. What would it mean to deliver a message that Janine’s passion for Roland had been so enduring that a half century later her daughter would cross the ocean to find him? He might be happily married with his young love forgotten—a proud patriarch now, settled and stable, with a dozen dimpled grandchildren.

I reached the third floor, groping toward an encounter entirely unscripted. A door led from the bright landing to a black vestibule where a faint orange glow guided my hand to the
minuterie
, the timed switch that would light up the hall just long enough for me to discern which apartment I wanted. There could be serious danger here in my meddling. Though my mother had long since abandoned all hope she would see him again, Roland continued to serve as her anchor. He endured for her always—laughingly lifting his drink and kissing her hand at a nameless café of the past. How could I bear to bring her sad news, only compounding her losses at the very same time that my father lay dying, and she stood so helpless beside him?

The light in the hallway switched off. In the darkness, heart racing, I thought back to the sickroom where I pictured my father clutching a dumbbell, ever in training for his unwinnable ultimate battle. Was I also betraying this resolute man I had never stopped loving, despite the conflicts between us? What would he make of what I was doing? Because one thing was clear: in the life she had lived, my mother was trained in noble acceptance, a patient trait that neither my father nor I had developed. Reared in America and schooled by him in reaching for dreams, it was
his
daughter who had traveled alone to this foreign doorstep. And while it did not occur to me then or before, but surely would later, how had my mother’s eternal love for Roland changed and embittered my father?

I pressed the wall switch for more time in the light and found myself back in that cold, dreary hallway. What would I say when Roland’s sister inquired, as she undoubtedly would, whether Janine was still married? That her husband, my father, was dying? Then what in hell was I doing here? I prayed I would find an acceptable answer, if only for me, as I took a deep breath, softly knocked on the door, and heard brisk footsteps approaching. In that uncertain moment, the ghost of the past and the hope of the future converged in the doorway beside me, vying to claim whatever would follow.

TWO
THE BLACK FOREST

I
HAD SPENT THE NIGHT
before my journey to Mulhouse in the medieval German fortress city of Freiburg, sleeping in an attic apartment of the house where my mother was born. The large red sandstone building had belonged to my grandfather in the 1920s and ’30s, but on the night that I stayed there, my host was the grandson of the German hotelier who took it over when my grandparents fled. I could hardly imagine what his grandfather, who hanged himself shortly after taking over the house, or my own, who never returned there to see it or claim it, would have made of the fact that more than fifty years later, their descendants—German and Jew—would both rest there one night, after a fine dinner and good local wine, under that very same roof.

The difference was that my convivial host, Michael Stock—tall and blond with Germanic good looks—knew he belonged there, and although the house had been my grandfather’s, I knew I did not. I lay awake the whole night conferring with spirits, hearing old voices echo from tales of the past. In confused half consciousness, exhausted and troubled, I lingered in darkness on the threshold of sleep. The police sirens, the buzzing motorcycles and screeching car brakes, the meandering laughter of beer-drenched students loudly returning from untamed moonlit revels seemed as much the night cries of 1940 as of 1990. In the same space where my mother, then a teenager, had fretfully worried over her father’s plans for escape from the only home she had known, I felt the present slide into the past, or worse, the past come alive. By daybreak, I was gripped by a near frantic compulsion to get out of the country. Still, I had yet to realize that in crossing the Rhine, I would not only be tracing the route my mother had laid out before me, but also seeking the Frenchman who captured her heart.

It was within forty miles of Mulhouse, where I would look for Roland, that my mother’s story began in Freiburg im Breisgau. On a map of Europe, Freiburg is easy to pinpoint. I am tempted to say that it sits just where Germany’s profile, facing west and lustily sniffing with interest, pokes its nose over France and Switzerland’s borders. But that does not do it justice, for its beauty is haunting.