Dora Bruder

 
Dora Bruder with her mother and father

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press
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© 1999 by The Regents of the University of California
Translation © 1999 by Joanna Kilmartin

Originally published as
Dora Bruder
in 1997 by Éditions
Gallimard, Paris. Copyright © Editions Gallimard Paris, 1997

First Paperback printing, 2015

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maps

Dora Bruder

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution to
this book provided by the Literature in Translation Endowment
of the Associates of the University of California Press, which
is supported by a generous gift from Joan Palevsky.

 
 
XII
^e
Arrondissement (detail)

 
 
XVIII
^e
Arrondissement (detail)

.................

E
IGHT YEARS AGO, IN AN OLD COPY OF
PARIS-SOIR
DATED
31 December 1941, a heading on page 3 caught my eye:
“From Day to Day.”
¹
Below this, I read:

PARIS

Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m
55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket,
maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym
shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder,
41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

I had long been familiar with that area of the Boulevard
Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the
Saint-Ouen flea markets. We would get off the bus either at
the Porte de Clignancourt or, occasionally, outside the 18th
arrondissement town hall. It was always a Saturday or Sunday
afternoon.

In winter, on the tree-shaded sidewalk outside
Clignancourt barracks, the fat photographer with round spectacles
and a lumpy nose would set up his tripod camera among the
stream of passers-by, offering “souvenir photos.” In summer,
he stationed himself on the boardwalk at Deauville, outside
the Bar du Soleil. There, he found plenty of customers. But at
the Porte de Clignancourt, the passers-by showed little
inclination to be photographed. His overcoat was shabby and he
had a hole in one shoe.

I remember the Boulevard Ornano and the Boulevard
Barbès, deserted, one sunny afternoon in May 1958. There were
groups of riot police at each crossroads, because of the
situation in Algeria.

I was in this neighborhood in the winter of 1965. I had a
girlfriend who lived in the Rue Championnet. Ornano 49–20.

Already, by that time, the Sunday stream of passers-by-outside
the barracks must have swept away the fat photographer,
but I never went back to check. What had they been used for,
those barracks?
²
I had been told that they housed colonial
troops.

January 1965. Dusk came around six o'clock to the
crossroads of the Boulevard Ornano and the Rue Championnet. I
merged into that twilight, into those streets, I was nonexistent.

The last café at the top of the Boulevard Ornano, on the
right, was called the Verse Toujours.
³
There was another, on
the left, at the corner of the Boulevard Ney, with a jukebox.
The Ornano-Championnet crossroads had a pharmacy and
two cafés, the older of which was on the corner of the Rue
Duhesme.

The time I've spent, waiting in those cafés  .  .  .  First thing
in the morning, when it was still dark. Early in the evening,
as night fell. Later on, at closing time  .  .  .

On Sunday evening, an old black sports car—a Jaguar, I
think—was parked outside the nursery school on the Rue
Championnet. It had a plaque at the rear: Disabled
Ex-Serviceman. The presence of such a car in this
neighborhood surprised me. I tried to imagine what its owner might
look like.

After nine o'clock at night, the boulevard is deserted. I can
still see lights at the mouth of Simplon métro station and,
almost opposite, in the foyer of the Cinéma Ornano 43. I've
never really noticed the building beside the cinema, number
41, even though I've been passing it for months, for years.
From 1965 to 1968. Address all information to M. and Mme
Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

1.
“D'hier à aujord'hui.”

2.
During the Occupation of Paris, Clignancourt barracks housed French
volunteers in the Waffen SS. See David Pryce-Jones,
Parus ub the Third Reich
, Collins,
1981.

3.
“Keep pouring, nonstop.”

.................

F
ROM DAY TO DAY. WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME, I FIND
,
perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into
another. That of 1965 and that of 1942.

In 1965,1 knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But now, thirty
years on, it seems to me that those long waits in the cafés at
the Ornano crossroads, those unvarying itineraries—the Rue
du Mont-Cenis took me back to some hotel on the Butte
Montmartre: the Roma or the Alsina or the Terrass, Rue
Caulaincourt—and the fleeting impressions I have retained:
snatches of conversation heard on a spring evening, beneath
the trees in the Square Clignancourt, and again, in winter, on
the way down to Simplon and the Boulevard Ornano, all that
was not simply due to chance. Perhaps, though not yet fully
aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her
parents. Already, below the surface, they were there.

I'm trying to search for clues, going far, far back in time.
When I was about twelve, on those visits to the Clignancourt
flea markets with my mother, on the right, at the top of one
of those aisles bordered by stalls, the Marché Malik, or the
Vernaison, there was a young Polish Jew who sold
suitcases  .  .  .  Luxury suitcases, in leather or crocodile skin,
cardboard suitcases, traveling bags, cabin trunks labeled with the
names of transatlantic companies—all heaped one on top of
the other. His was an open-air stall. He was never without a
cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips and, one
afternoon, he had offered me one.

 

Occasionally, I would go to one of the cinemas on the
Boulevard Ornano. To the Clignancourt Palace at the top of the
boulevard, next to the Verse Toujours. Or to the Ornano 43.

Later, I discovered that the Ornano 43 was a very old
cinema. It had been rebuilt in the thirties, giving it the air of an
ocean liner. I returned to the area in May 1996. A shop had
replaced the cinema. You cross the Rue Hermel and find
yourself outside 41 Boulevard Ornano, the address given in the
notice about the search for Dora Bruder.

A five-story building, late nineteenth century. Together
with number 39, it forms a single block, enclosed by the
boulevard, the top of the Rue Hermel, and the Rue Simplon, which
runs along the back of both buildings. These are matching. A
plaque on number 39 gives the name of the architect, a man
named Pierrefeu, and the date of construction: 1881. The same
must be true of number 41.

Before the war, and up to the beginning of the fifties,
number 41 had been a hotel, as had number 39, calling itself the
Hôtel Lion d'Or. Number 39 also had a café-restaurant
before the war, owned by a man named Gazal. I haven't found
out the name of the hotel at number 41. Listed under this
address, in the early fifties, is the Société Ornano and Studios
Ornano: Montmartre 12–54. Also, both then and before the war,
a café with a proprietor by the name of Marchal. This café no
longer exists. Would it have been to the right or the left of the
porte cochère?

This opens onto a longish corridor. At the far end, a
staircase leads off to the right.

.................

I
T TAKES TIME FOR WHAT HAS BEEN ERASED TO RESURFACE
.
Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these
registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether
or not these custodians are willing to let you see them. Or
perhaps they have quite simply forgotten that these registers exist.

All it takes is a little patience.

Thus, I came to learn that Dora Bruder and her parents
were already living in the hotel on the Boulevard Ornano in
1937 and 1938. They had a room with kitchenette on the fifth
floor, the level at which an iron balcony encircles both
buildings. The fifth floor has some ten windows. Of these, two or
three give onto the boulevard, and the rest onto the Rue
Hermel or, at the back, the Rue Simplon.

When I revisited the neighborhood on that day in May
1996, rusting shutters were closed over the two end fifth-floor
windows overlooking the Rue Simplon, and outside, on the
balcony, I noticed a collection of miscellaneous objects,
seemingly long abandoned there.

During the last three or four years before the war, Dora
Bruder would have been enrolled at one of the local state
secondary schools. I wrote to ask if her name was to be found on
the school registers, addressing my letter to the head of each:

8 Rue Ferdinand-Flocon

20 Rue Hermel

7 Rue Championnet

61 Rue de Clignancourt

All replied politely. None had found this name on the
list of their prewar pupils. In the end, the head of the former
girls' school at 69 Rue Championnet suggested that I come and
consult the register for myself. One of these days, I shall. But
I'm of two minds. I want to go on hoping that her name is
there. It was the school nearest to where she lived.