and series of lights in the windows of trains she and her mother did not succeed in boarding.
In her memory, the journey into exile had all the sweetness of childhood well-being, the way children settle comfortably into the exceptional and give dimensions to things that adults cannot know and that have nothing to do with what is being experienced. When she left France, Camille was still submerged in that mythology; but by ten or eleven, when she and her mother returned, her adult sense of the real was nearly established. She had precise images now, colored with a sadness that was the reverse of the mysterious dream of the first journey.
She was a redheaded woman, stocky, energetic, careless in her dress, with features more central European than Latin and pronounced by age. Iâve seen Jewish women very much like her in the United States and in Buenos Aires: women of a certain age, fleshy, negligently dressed, lips brightly painted. She smoked a lot, unfiltered cigarettes, and conversed brilliantly, leaping between English and French according to her needs or limitations in expression, and she drank beer with a superb Scandinavian panache. She wrote book reviews for a newspaper and a radio program. The editor who had brought me to the luncheon, and who in the heat of conversation and the beer seemed not to remember I was there, had mentioned her influence when he introduced me, indicating that a favorable review from her was important to a book, especially one written by an unknown foreign author. I had the firm and melancholy conviction that the book, my reason for being in Copenhagen, would not attract Danish readers, so I was feeling remorse in advance for the bad deal the editor was getting from me, and I forgave him and was even grateful
that at this luncheon at the Writerâs Club he had abandoned me to my fate. In any case, the event was not that successful; there were unoccupied tables in the large dining room with its mythological paintings. Before serving, the waiters had removed those settings.
I also noted with annoyance as Camille Safra was talking that she hadnât said a word about the Danish edition of my book. She told me that her mother had died several months ago, in Copenhagen, and that in the last conversation sheâd had with her the two of them agreed about details of that journey to France, especially something that had happened one night at a hotel in a small town near Lyon.
They were looking for relatives. Few had survived. Old neighbors and acquaintances looked on them with suspicion, perhaps fearing that theyâd come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camilleâs mother had taken her to that small townâshe didnât give me the nameâbecause someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sisterâs having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might beâand they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her auntâs name was not on any list of deportees, repatriated, or dead. They came by train very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of cold coffee, black bread, and rancid butter in the station canteen. They asked questions of several unsociable early risers, who looked at them sullenly and refused to give the simplest information for fear of compromising themselves, since at that time collaborators were being flushed out.
Hungry, disoriented, strangers in the country that four years before had been theirs, their feet aching after walking all day, they found themselves, when night overtook them, in an open area near the shelter of a streetcar stop. They couldnât return to Paris
until the following morning. The streetcar had left them at a plaza with closed-up shops and with a monument to the fallen of the First World War; nearby was a street lamp lighting the sign of a
In her memory, the journey into exile had all the sweetness of childhood well-being, the way children settle comfortably into the exceptional and give dimensions to things that adults cannot know and that have nothing to do with what is being experienced. When she left France, Camille was still submerged in that mythology; but by ten or eleven, when she and her mother returned, her adult sense of the real was nearly established. She had precise images now, colored with a sadness that was the reverse of the mysterious dream of the first journey.
She was a redheaded woman, stocky, energetic, careless in her dress, with features more central European than Latin and pronounced by age. Iâve seen Jewish women very much like her in the United States and in Buenos Aires: women of a certain age, fleshy, negligently dressed, lips brightly painted. She smoked a lot, unfiltered cigarettes, and conversed brilliantly, leaping between English and French according to her needs or limitations in expression, and she drank beer with a superb Scandinavian panache. She wrote book reviews for a newspaper and a radio program. The editor who had brought me to the luncheon, and who in the heat of conversation and the beer seemed not to remember I was there, had mentioned her influence when he introduced me, indicating that a favorable review from her was important to a book, especially one written by an unknown foreign author. I had the firm and melancholy conviction that the book, my reason for being in Copenhagen, would not attract Danish readers, so I was feeling remorse in advance for the bad deal the editor was getting from me, and I forgave him and was even grateful
that at this luncheon at the Writerâs Club he had abandoned me to my fate. In any case, the event was not that successful; there were unoccupied tables in the large dining room with its mythological paintings. Before serving, the waiters had removed those settings.
I also noted with annoyance as Camille Safra was talking that she hadnât said a word about the Danish edition of my book. She told me that her mother had died several months ago, in Copenhagen, and that in the last conversation sheâd had with her the two of them agreed about details of that journey to France, especially something that had happened one night at a hotel in a small town near Lyon.
They were looking for relatives. Few had survived. Old neighbors and acquaintances looked on them with suspicion, perhaps fearing that theyâd come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camilleâs mother had taken her to that small townâshe didnât give me the nameâbecause someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sisterâs having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might beâand they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her auntâs name was not on any list of deportees, repatriated, or dead. They came by train very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of cold coffee, black bread, and rancid butter in the station canteen. They asked questions of several unsociable early risers, who looked at them sullenly and refused to give the simplest information for fear of compromising themselves, since at that time collaborators were being flushed out.
Hungry, disoriented, strangers in the country that four years before had been theirs, their feet aching after walking all day, they found themselves, when night overtook them, in an open area near the shelter of a streetcar stop. They couldnât return to Paris
until the following morning. The streetcar had left them at a plaza with closed-up shops and with a monument to the fallen of the First World War; nearby was a street lamp lighting the sign of a
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