RECENTLY I FOUND Mother’s wartime identity card, and it has become an object of contemplation. Issued in January 1943, by le commissaire de police in Marseille, during the German occupation, it describes her hair as châtain, or chestnut, and her eyes as marron, or brown. She is a student of fifteen and living on the rue de Turenne. Her skin is mat, or olive. There is a smudged thumbprint. The carte d’identité describes her face as oval (ovale) and, more strangely, her nose as average (moyen), with a régulier bridge and an ordinaire base. How odd to find details about Mother’s nose as identifying traits. Was this true for Jews and non-Jews alike? Was this only for immigrants like Mother’s parents, who came from Armenia? Mother’s card is signed by a judge. France has issued a national ID card to all its citizens since the beginning of World War II, in 1940. The law says only that, during an ID check performed by police, gendarmerie, or customs, one can prove one’s identity “by any means,” the validity of which is left to the judgment of the law-enforcement official. From 1942, French Jews had the word “Jew” added to their card in red, and this helped authorities identify seventy-six thousand for deportation as part of the Holocaust. Mother looks happy in her polka-dot dress, her hair pinned back with a barrette, but what is she thinking behind her carefree smile? Does she know that in less than a fortnight the Old Port will be locked down by a vast police operation in which the entire city, except for the wealthiest residential neighborhoods, will be searched house by house to rid the area of “certain elements”? Does she know that six thousand individuals will be arrested, forty thousand identities checked, and fifteen hundred buildings destroyed, leaving two thousand Marseillais on the death trains? Does she know that, in two years, she will marry my father?
My grandmother had seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Her first two children were born in the “old country.” The others, including Mother, were born in Marseille and raised as first-generation French children. Among the babies who were lost was Mother’s identical twin, who came first from the well and was said to be more beautiful.
THIS MORNING, at my neighborhood flea market, I tried on sandals that had the look of those worn by Romans on ancient pottery and in sculptures. With a little mallet, a knife, and nails, the sandal-maker gave them a custom fit and asked my métier, or trade. When I replied, “I am still uncertain,” he smiled. His uncut hair made him look feral, like the wild boy from Aveyron in woodcuts. Because of an early frost, he wore his sandals with socks and complained that his head was too sensitive to the cold. He wrapped it in a raffish calfskin as we talked. He didn’t appear to be a modern man, but seemed more natural and authentic, like a classical poem, and I liked this.
Gazing at my feet as he adjusted the sandals, I remembered hiking—long ago, when I was visiting my uncles in the South of France—down into the Eure Valley on a narrow shady lane, between high walls of stone with shards of green bottle glass cemented in the top edges, at the end of which the landscape opened up dramatically, and rocks and sky shone before me like the fulcrum of a poem.
Tucked away in that sleepy place was what looked like a hermit’s farm or a mill, with grazing horses and a river circling around. The burnt-orange ceramic roofs of the buildings sloped whimsically, and small puffs of smoke rose from a chimney. It was the Romans who first camped there, under the tall trees, and discovered the pure and abundant Eure springs, which they transported via an immense aqueduct. Roosters were crowing as I arrived, and I could hear the comforting sound of mineral water cascading from the fountain into the riverbed. As I got down on my knees and drank from the source, it was as though this were the original place of all the earth’s water, which flowed languorously, and after many days and many kilometers, like a long capillary running through a body, reached the muddy Seine.
IS IT UNETHICAL to write about family and friends, presenting only my own side of the story? I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s letter to Robert Lowell after the publication of his controversial collection of poems Dolphin—which is half memoir, half fiction—in which he appropriates his ex-wife’s letters written under the strain of his desertion. “I’m sure my point is only too plain,” Bishop wrote to him.
Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,”. . . . One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them . . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’s marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian,” even, certainly than a poet.
I’ve always believed that poetry exists in part to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance. For some of us, this satisfies a basic human need, like air or water, but a poem must also have music, imagery, and form. Because there is a kind of nakedness or authenticity in poetry that is associated with truth, on many days I haven’t the guts for it, and I fail. But when I succeed, there is nothing in life—except love—that equally verifies my existence.
WALKING PAST THE LOUVRE this evening, I observed a film being shot with the façade of the museum as a backdrop. One of the best-loved French films of all time is Les Enfants du Paradis, released in America as Children of Paradise, and recently I watched the restored version with Octave, who, like many French people, has seen it many times. Though it was made in 1945, during the German occupation, there is no evidence of war. It is set in the nineteenth-century theater world and tells the story of Garance, a beautiful woman who is loved, in quite different ways, by four men: a mime, an actor, an aristocrat, and a criminal.
In French, the paradis is the top gallery of the theater, where the working class responded boisterously to the actors onstage. Watching the hundred-and-ninety-five-minute film, I, too, was in paradis. My favorite line of dialogue is: “If all the people that lived together loved one another, the earth would shine like the sun.” It is spoken by the sensitive mime, a romantic Pierrot figure and a character with whom it is difficult not to identify, since each of us has, at one time, been a sad clown pining for love. The French symbolists saw Pierrot as a fellow sufferer on the difficult road of life, where his only friend is the pale moon and where eventually he dies from too much soulfulness.
Children of Paradise is preoccupied with the struggle between feeling and thought. Since our hearts are always too cold and our heads too hot, it is difficult for us to find the correct balance. “I’m sorry I think too much,” one character in the film admits. Fortunately, the heart can sometimes pick up signals the head misses.
Sometimes, in my friendship with Octave, I feel such an intense, almost dreamlike sweetness, I must take a step back, or away, into reality . . . I must remind myself that, in fact, all the people on the earth do not love one another and the earth does not shine like the sun. In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows—a “place of clear light, like poetry or freedom,” to quote Seamus Heaney’s poem “Oysters,” about an evening spent in the West Region of Ireland, which was for him a place of refreshment and renewal. In the poem, Heaney is eating a meal of oysters with friends as the Atlantic Ocean light is coming up, and he is carried away beyond himself. The poet must dwell in silence, he believed, but also in “clamor and comradeship.” At the poem’s conclusion, Heaney, not wanting to be “too trim a poet” of mere nouns, says,
I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
