Corked (14 page)

 

 

I
n the car, I am thinking.

I can yell
.

I CAN YELL. I have license to do it, so I will
.

Okay. I am just about to yell at you, DAD
.

We were driving south, toward Côtes du Rhône, in a silence that was stony on my end, neutral on his. I planned on yelling something to the effect of “
SO SHE DIDN'T TREAT YOU WELL! WHAT ABOUT HELPING ME OUT?
” Not quite sharp enough. “
YOU CAN BE SO SELFISH SOMETIMES
.” Not specific enough to carry any resonance. I'd been mulling this over for a good couple of hours, while making sure my driving was stunningly adroit, so that when I gave him my yell, it would be very jarring for him.

“I should have died here in 1944,” he said, matter-of-factly.

DAMMIT
. I shifted the hot pan of my injury to a back burner.

“Here? Like, where here?” I was gauging how seriously to take the comment.

“Over there.” He pointed out the window, across the stretch of highway we were rolling along, at a cluster of drab taupe-colored downtown buildings.

“Oh.”

“Do you want to hear the story?” he asked.

No, I'm not that interested. But thank you for offering.” I was half kidding, still grasping at the vestiges of my anger.

“You're welcome.”

I turned on the radio and feigned interest by cocking my head to the side and arranging my eyes and mouth into the Face of Intense Contemplation. My father was sneaking glances at me in the rearview mirror. I stuck my neck in and out in time to the music.

“Dad.”

“Yesssss?” he said.

“Jesus, I'm joking around with you.” I bashed my palm into the power button. The car went silent.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I don't like it when you treat the idea of your death lightly.”
There. It isn't quite “I'm fucking scared of losing you before I've found you,” but we're at least on the dartboard
.

“But it's the truth.”

I thought of him outside the car, bouncing off the right side of it. My face flushed. I slowed down the car to the correct speed limit.

“Okay, okay. It's the truth. Tell me the story then. I assume your almost dying has to do with the war, right? And the Jewish organization? And the kids?” I prodded helpfully. I felt ashamed of having made the joke about not wanting to listen.

“Yes. Your grandfather….”

“René…good old René.” I pronounced this “Ree-nee,” an anglicization of his name, which became his nickname during the last 10 years of his life. He'd called me “
ma puce
”—my flea—and we'd always had a soulful bond, so much so that it didn't bug me when I'd receive letters from him that would include copies of the correspondence I'd sent him, the spelling and syntactic mistakes circled in red pen.

“So you remember his story with OSE.”

“Organisation de secours aux enfants.”

“No.
Oeuvre
de secours aux enfants. It was founded at the beginning of World War I, by a big mountain of a man called Lazarus Gurwich. His nickname was
Le Rhinocéros
.”

“Good name.”

“You remember that Albert Einstein was its honorary president.”

“No.”

“Well, he was. René began working in the OSE headquarters in 1934. We were based in Paris. His colleagues were Jewish doctors, intellectuals, social activists, most of whom had, at one point, been chased out of their towns, their villages, sometimes their countries. When the war hit in 1939, René refused to abandon them, even though this was, as one would say, not
exactly
the best time to be connected with an organization like this. Trucks holding hundreds of orphaned Jewish children started arriving in France in 1939 and 1940. OSE's sole mission was to keep them as far away from the hands of the Nazis as possible. The organization set up a network of safe houses. It rented buildings and old châteaux. The kids went to live in the countryside, with families who were against the war. OSE gave them fake names and fake documents. It set up ‘summer camps.' The children were given survival training and kept fit.”

“René was an accountant, yes?”

“Right. His job was to be a
payeur
. This meant he traveled between Switzerland and France. In Switzerland, he would pick up money that had been sent to banks by Jewish-American support groups. Then he'd get on the train back to France and distribute the money to keep the organization running. Every trip was
vahree
dangerous. If the Gestapo had caught him, he would have been dead.”

“And you?”

“By 1944 we'd moved from Paris to Montpelier to Vic-sur-Cère. Then to Chambéry and Chabannes, and eventually here to Lyon. We had to stay mobile. The Gestapo was getting better at knowing where OSE was carrying out its work. In February, officers raided the Chambéry headquarters, arresting the head of the group, Alain Mossé, and all his colleagues. Your grandfather was in the office, too, in the back, quietly going over the books. But before the men had a chance to throw him in the truck, Mossé pleaded with them, explaining that my grandfather was just the French accountant—a paid employee—not a member of OSE. They asked him to prove his gentility.”

“Yes, yes, yes. You've told me bits of this. So he had to drop his pants, right?” I said, slightly ashamed that this was the part that I remembered so clearly.

“He dropped his pants and the officers left him alone. His secretary, Simone Epstein, who was ‘Simone Estienne' on her false identity card, was left alone, too.
Right
before the raid, she had run into a nun selling small hand-painted cards. On them were pictures of saints. She bought a few and put them in her purse. So because of her ID and those little paintings, how could she possibly be Jewish? The Gestapo let her go.”

“Whoa.”

“Mossé was an elegant, intellectual man with soft manners. He always had a piece of chocolate for me when he came to our house for dinner. Two days after that raid, he was tortured by Alois Brunner.”

“Sorry…he was…?”

“The head of the Drancy internment camp. In those two days at the Chambéry prison, Mossé was able to smuggle out notes to three members of OSE. René was one of them. The note said the Gestapo knew of OSE's ‘summer camp' in the region. Officers were going to raid the area, but when they did, the camp was gone. Mossé was sent to Auschwitz. You're following me?”

“Of course I am.” I felt insulted.
Did he mean to do that
?

“By the time we were pushed into Lyon, René was doing his work for OSE out of our tiny apartment. We had very little food. There were air raids. Across the street lived Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo of Lyon. Barbie was known
affectionately
as the Butcher of Lyon. He was the man who tortured Jean Moulin.”

“Big-time French Resistance guy,” I jumped in, trying to prove myself.

“You got it. Barbie was responsible for the deaths of thousands. That April, he ordered that 44 Jewish children be rounded up from an orphanage east of Lyon, at Izieu, and sent to Auschwitz. Not one child survived.”

We drove in silence for a minute.

“And so….”

“On the twenty-eighth of May, your grandmother, Fernande Léa, stood in the staircase of the apartment, trying to make her little boy hurry up.”

“You.”

“Me. I was complaining of a sore throat and fever. I'd done this a thousand times. Half the time, she would give in to me and allow me to skip school. I would then make a miraculous recovery and be allowed to go outside and play with my marbles.”

“All of which you still had.”

“Ha. Funny girl. That day, she couldn't give in to me. She had to shop for groceries, not easy when food is limited. She did not want me there—it would have been a handicap. It was 8 o'clock. We were leaving the house,
point final
. As we walked into the street, we heard air raid sirens. The U.S. Air Force had been dropping bombs on bridges, railroad yards, and factories for the last few weeks, so most of the people in the neighborhood were used to the blasts. I remember the airplanes very well: They were silver flakes against the blue, blue sky. Then a big noise—a
whoosh
—and the smack of an explosion. My mother thought a bomb must have landed somewhere near the avenue—she said this out loud to me.”

“But it hadn't.”

“No. After she dropped me off, and after her shopping, she walked home. When she turned the corner onto our street, Avenue Berthelot, she was stopped by police officers and firefighters. The blast had been a military mistake—the bomb had dropped directly into the residential zone, onto our home.”

“Oh Christ. It was gone.”

“Everything was gone. The building was a stump made of stone. Everyone who had been spending the morning inside was dead. René had left an hour earlier to meet a
passeur
—they were moving another group of Jewish kids out of the region. We had also left the house earlier than usual. By some fluke, we all survived.”

I said nothing.

“Anyway, Tootsie, that's the story. If she had allowed me to stay home from school that day, well….” He paused.

“You and I would not be having this conversation right now,” I responded.

“Exactly,” he said.

I sat there maneuvering the car from lane to lane, passing and being passed, thinking about timing and death. A Dinah Washington song popped into my head, and I thought the lyrics were all right, but also kind of all wrong.
Twenty-four little hours make a difference, sure. But so do 24 little minutes, or seconds
. Because of them, my father was here. Because of them, I was a killer. I thought of those awful seconds it took for me to draw the link between the crunching sound that came from the right side of the car and death. Those minutes I stared at the old man's shoulder rising and falling. Those days that passed as I waited for an update from the police. Those months that flowed afterward that caused me to transform into this person, right now.

As Peter and I pulled a U-turn out of the accident scene, the 2-liter bottles of tonic water, which I had bought to mix with the gin we were to drink that night, rolled off the backseat and lolled jerkily around, thumping against the door. I remember looking back at them accusingly, knowing that if I had stopped at another grocery store, or had paid for them using cash instead of a credit card, or had located the soda aisle more efficiently, or had not spent a minute deciding between Schweppes and Canada Dry, or, or, or, or, or, or, or…that
I
would not be having this conversation with myself on this highway. All decisions, and whether they are made 24 seconds before or after, push us out of death's way or directly into its path.
It's a platitudinous dichotomy, a boring cliché, but its effects are not. My father is freed by it; I am bound and bedraggled
.

“Your face
eez
a sad face, Tootsie.”

“I'm just thinking about the glory of good timing and the non-glory of bad timing, and how they define a person's life. It feels like a prison sometimes.”

“You are talking about your accident.”

“That is indeed what I am talking about.”

“You feel like you did not deserve to have this happen to you.”

“No,” I said haltingly, scared of causing another disconnect between us. I swallowed hard and went on. “No, not really. I don't believe in ‘deserving,' really. Do I deserve everything? Yes. Do I deserve nothing? Yes. What gets me perturbed is this thing that happened, this humongous, life-changing thing, did not happen for a reason. It happened for no reason. It happened because I spent too much time at the grocery store choosing tonic water. And if I hadn't, what? Someone else would have killed him? He would have crossed the street safely? But whether it's his fault or my fault or our combined faults or no one's fault, I am a girl who becomes very sad and depressed. And I think about death a
lot
, you know?” I added nothing more. I could see him withdrawing.

“Not really,” he said. I took in his face, his inscrutable face.
Where does he go?
My urge to yell at him had returned with fury.
Now it is your turn to listen to my story of why I am like this. I wanted to tell you this nicely in Burgundy, but now we are here and you will listen to me
. It was my turn to orate.

“I've thought about it a
lot
. My own.
Yours
. What I would do if our family died, and I was left all alone. Because I get
depressed
, Dad. And I go to crazy, terrible places in my depression. I lose all sense of reality and
time
. Do you know what it's like to no longer believe in
TIME?
That your entire life will now be a cave of agony?
FOREVER?
And I have no resources to pull on that allow me to convince myself that I will ever feel any other way. No
resources
, Dad, even though there's all this evidence to the contrary. I can't even
believe
in time and
empirical
evidence. I reject reality. Do you
get
that? Do you? Like, you've seen the sun rise 7,000 times and you are so fucked up that you cannot access the information that indicates the sun will, based on empirical near certainty, rise tomorrow?”
You must understand why you are obligated to protect me
.