Chapter 12
SONG OF THE CHEREMSHA
It is related that one day they came upon Majnún sifting the dust, and his tears flowing down. They said, “What doest thou?” He said, “I seek for Laylí.” They cried, “Alas for thee! Laylí is of pure spirit, and thou seekest her in the dust!” He said, “I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her.”
—BAHÁ’U’LLÁH, THE SEVEN VALLEYS
BACK WHEN HE WAS in Beirut in the mid-1930s, Daniel wrote to his parents that they shouldn’t believe that he was “so much of the extreme left.” Daniel was seeking then, and he would keep seeking. To a young European of the time, the left was attractive at least in part because it took very seriously the problem of how to fix the very broken world. Over the previous century, Karl Marx and then his successors had offered a clarifying answer, with an entire economic theory that rested on what Marx assumed we need, most fundamentally: eating and drinking and the like. From those economic fundamentals, it seemed obvious to Marx that we would end up making a world of perpetual war. Decades passed; empires crumbled; kings were deposed; revolutions exploded.
In the autumn of 1943, the German army was in retreat. But if you lived in Europe then, you wouldn’t have known that to hear it. Pressures of all kinds kept mounting rather than easing—with the questions always swirling of what to eat; how to work; how, in the upside-down world of war, to construct some measure of normalcy. Everywhere, there were food shortages: Bread, meat, cheese, sugar, butter, and rice were all strictly rationed. Nor were the sounds of conflict—from the barking of policemen to the falling of shells—ever far, and canopies of barbed wire still wrapped around the edges of once stately homes and pastoral fields. Young men continued to be called up by a nervous, angry, and increasingly insecure state; not even the velvety golden youth from the world before the war were immune from the general call to the Service du Travail Obligatoire. Those who went to work for the Germans became slaves to that state; those who didn’t became outlaws. Everywhere and—unless a person was able to numb himself completely—every day there were small and large moral decisions that weighed on the mind and heart: Do I share? Do I not share? Do I resist? Do I get along?
As the days and weeks pressed on, thousands were deported to concentration camps and extermination camps. Thousands were gassed to death. Thousands fell to artillery, and thousands more to the plagues of war: typhoid fever, tuberculosis, dysentery. And thousands, when given the choice between buoyancy and bitterness, were choosing bitterness.
On the weakening Eastern Front, Germany had new concerns. With the Red Army poised to take back the city of Kiev in the summer of 1943, one especially pressing challenge was how to quickly erase the traces of the Nazis’ colossal crimes there. The ravine at Babi Yar—still host to a hundred thousand corpses under a thin layer of dirt and rocks—was a particular conundrum. The normal method for getting rid of this kind of evidence, which had been used by Nazis as a matter of practice throughout the war, was to disinter the bodies and burn them. At Babi Yar, however, the site was an almost incalculable enormity; erasure would take some planning. So for a month, beginning in late August 1943, Russian prisoners of war were forced to dig up the corpses and place them—fifteen hundred at a time—on great funeral pyres where they would burn for two nights and a day. The prisoners would then collect the ashes and spread them over the fields beyond. Despite this fantastical effort, Bill Downs, a journalist from Newsweek who passed through the site in December 1943, spoke of coming upon “bits of hair and bones and a crushed skull with bits of flesh and hair still attached”—a pair of glasses here, a dental bridge there. Babi Yar was not for effacing. And as the months and years clicked by, the site periodically asserted its own terrible remembrance. In March 1961, when Kiev was victim of a mudslide after a great rain, chunks of bone could be seen coursing along the streets of the city, following the flow of mud out of the ravine. Residents said, “It’s the Babi Yar curse.”
But now, in this autumn of 1943, even as the Russian prisoners of war dug up those corpses and wondered rightly if the very last funeral pyre they built would be their own, a small group of young men in barracks division A at Frontstalag 122 Compiègne, were feeling the first chills of a new cold season and trying to figure out how they themselves might survive this war. What did they need to do? What did they need to have? Who would be next? And in the meantime, while still here in this relative oasis, what could be done to amass all that they needed, or might end up needing—the things that somewhere, in colder or more distant climes, they couldn’t live without?
Daniel, who had been at Compiègne since August 31, was working on this puzzle, too. If, early on, he’d pinned his hopes on the fact that his heart condition would make him unfit for camps and therefore set him free, it must have been sinking in that this was not such a sure thing. Though the official paper trail surrounding Daniel’s arrest thins out for a while, it is clear that the authorities still didn’t know quite what to do with him. Daniel’s maternal uncle Charles Rist, an economist and public intellectual with connections, got in touch with a certain well-placed lawyer named Mettetal, who had successfully freed even some Jews from camps, including Rist’s own wife. But it was not so easy. Daniel, who had been able to take his own essential freedom for granted for almost his whole life, clearly could no longer do so.
What, then, did Daniel, in these surprising new circumstances, need?
Well, there was food—so perilously limited in prison—for which Daniel continued to write requests to his parents, praising them with lavish gratitude for the packages they had already sent. “Thank you infinitely for the magnificent honey,” he wrote with uncharacteristically florid adjectives, “for the splendid butter, the Nestlé flour, the sugar, the cookies or, rather, the cakes.” Getting down to business, he also included instructions: “The apples and the cookies are equally welcome, but less indispensable at the present time. If you can, try for more pastas or flour or dry vegetables without neglecting fats and sweet things. Some salt, too, please.”
So. Daniel needed food. Of course he did. But what else did he need?
Warmth. His parents had sent him some long underwear; he thanked them for those and said he would save them for later because they had already gotten him a warm blanket and it was really helping. Then there was the pyrethrum powder (or, as he specified, anti-vermin lotion). Toilet paper. Touchingly, he told his parents that he had, at times “nostalgia for a good, small comfort, which I have never known.” These comforts now made a simple trifecta: a warm-enough blanket, protection from the mauling of insects, a way to properly clean himself.
What else? Books. Please, please, books. Always more books. These had to go through censors, of course, but he’d been reading Balzac, Shakespeare, and the French Romantic poet Alfred Vigny (who once wrote, as he was dying, “Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse.” Only silence is great; everything else is weakness); there were bits of Goethe, and Don Quixote, and Madame Bovary, and Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV. Books of poetry, of art, of history. Lesson books. Dante’s Inferno.
What else?
Daniel thanked his parents, “infinitely,” for the cigarettes.
But what else? What more?
If you read Daniel’s letters and you didn’t know any better, you would think that what Daniel needed most of all was news. He asks for “much” news, “precise” news, “precious” news, “rare” news, news about “every Little Cricket,” news about life at home. More news, more, more, more: Words that might conjure a picture of that place where he felt loved and, perhaps most importantly, was himself able to love. Words that could bring back to life, if only for an instant—and then, solidly on paper, over and over again—that place he had come to rescue, that place that may instead have been rescuing him. News! The conjurings of children’s faces, of moments around a fireplace, flames flickering them all in warmth. A moment he had managed to teach something. Or solve a problem. Or make peace.
Only news like that, news with those faces, wasn’t coming much anymore. After the terrifying raid at Roches, the children of Les Grillons had started to disperse, away from the Plateau. Young Peter had left Le Chambon, together with his friends Kurt and Jean, heading west to a town called Figeac. There, Peter went back to school, but also learned how to pour sugar packets into the engines of motorcycles and delight at how the engines would then pop and fail afterward. Fanny, the oldest girl at Les Grillons, who had greeted the raid so mournfully, also left the Plateau, going back into hiding, back into new unknown villages—once, as she told it later, among a herd of goats—back to a place where she would eventually find her parents. Many years later, that mournful Fanny would say, when asked if she had any message for the future, just, “Love each other. Love everyone. Everyone. No difference of color or race or religion. Just to love everybody. That’s my message.”
Now, all of these years later, we know something about Peter and Kurt and Jean and Fanny; and we know that Suzy Heim survived to tell the story of how Daniel would help her with her math homework and watch the children at night. But what about pretty Rosario, whom Peter was in love with? Or the brothers who had given Daniel so many headaches, even while garnering his affection? Or, maybe especially Régine—Régine, of whom I have never found a single further trace, beyond that one photograph, with her fuzzy brown bob and her sweet, plain face, and her three-quarter turn to the right.
Daniel needed news about his beloved children. And that news wasn’t coming.
It’s true that at Compiègne, Daniel appreciated some measure of the companionship of his small group of “outcasts,” as he called the friends and acquaintances from the Plateau and elsewhere. They would talk at meals, go on about old times, debate politics and books. Daniel even wrote home about giving a lecture to his campmates on his travels in Syria. And Daniel was still working to secure some packages for his students who were without their own:
“Beloved parents,” he wrote on October 10. “Life continues calmly, with less reading, but a marked improvement since you sent the package to [Klaus] Simon. Could you please write to W. H. Follander, P. Krugerstr. 45, Hengelo, Holland, that Klaus Simon is in good health and has received his letter. He waits for packages and will write as soon as possible. . . . Thank you for all these things that are so difficult to find but which truly change our existence.”
But all of this was precarious. On Thursday, October 28, at Frontstalag 122 Compiègne, 938 names were called. Among those names were the four young men with whom Daniel had been arrested at Roches, with whom he had shared a floor to sleep on at Moulins, with whom he had shared his food when he was hungry and the news of his own beating, with no time to take off his glasses. And with whom he had become, at some point, friends.
One of these young men lived to describe what happened next. All 938 were loaded onto the cattle cars that made up Convoy 28. They were ordered to take off their clothes, mauled by bloodhounds, and beaten. One man who fell down during the melee was shot and killed because he couldn’t get up. There was nothing to drink on the car, so two days later, when the convoy arrived at its final destination of Buchenwald, twenty of the 938 were already dead. But our young man—still alive—was fingerprinted, given striped clothing to wear and the prisoner number 31017. And he was photographed. Click. His intake papers from October 30, 1943, say that he was 157 centimeters tall—barely five-foot-two; build, slim; face, oval; eyes, brown; nose, straight; ears, slightly protruding; teeth, full; hair, dark brown. And, with the stamp of an upside-down triangle, colored red, the intake papers also say that he is a political prisoner (and not a Jew). And so he lived.
Nevertheless, at Buchenwald, this young man was required to carry gravestones from here to there. Those who didn’t do it properly were beaten. And beaten again. Others were hanged. He learned about medical experiments on fellow prisoners. Heard about how the wife of the camp commandant, Ilse Koch—known to history as the Bitch of Buchenwald—would make lampshades out of the skin of tattooed men.
This young man was Klaus. Klaus, whose intake photo at Buchenwald, click, betrayed a face of soft beauty just on the edge of manhood.
Klaus and the others were gone from Daniel now. Gone, these precious friends Daniel needed. And so, as the autumn days darkened, and the cold whipped its northern wind around the barbed wire at Compiègne, what did Daniel need that he might yet be able to find?
On November 9, 1943, Daniel wrote a short letter: “Dear Parents, Thank you for the package. . . . My students, Schoen, Guyonnaud, Simon, and de Haan, have departed on the last convoy, as well as Corbin and Laventure. So, attention: don’t send any more packages for de Haan or Simon. Let Le Chambon know.”
For Daniel, it was a new sort of catastrophe. A new aloneness in the dark of this new autumn, so different from last year’s, when he’d first arrived on the Plateau, full of hope, looking to reconstruct the world. In the weeks ahead, Daniel began to get sick, on and off. Sent to the infirmary, for shorter and longer stints, he began writing home about “indispositions” that took him out of circulation for a few days—though he never mentions that it was his heart that was causing many of the troubles. He asked for news, and again, more news. And nothing came. And he was ever more alone.
This is my work now: I come to the Plateau. I am invited for meals around tables; I listen to stories; play with children; translate. I take long walks alone through the forests. Then, when I must, I go back home to think.
I’m home now, thinking. Today, I’ve taken another trip back to the Holocaust Museum. I’ve got some archival work I need to do that should help me understand the fate of some of the people who passed through the Plateau during the war. There is much, still, to learn.
I am in an elevator with two women from the museum—Regina and Betsy—going up. This elevator, like all the elevators here at the museum, is industrial dark and gray, with streaks of rust red. Regina is fiddling with the chunky green stones of her necklace. Her face is feathery soft and white; she is very small and rather old.
Regina, who volunteers at the museum, was born in Radom, Poland, in 1926; was smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto there in 1939; worked in a munitions factory at the start of the war—where she met her future husband, Sam—and was eventually deported to Auschwitz and tattooed with a five-digit number. On Regina’s days here at the museum, she sits at a table at the entrance to the permanent exhibit and fields questions about her life in Poland during the Second World War. Betsy, for her part, works at the museum doing research with the International Tracing Service—a massive database that originally helped people find their lost loved ones after the Second World War—but also tends to the volunteers who sometimes, like today, might need help getting onto and off of elevators.
The elevator begins to climb. Looking down toward the smallest person in this closed space, Betsy speaks with warm, clear diction:
“Regina, this is Maggie. She is one of our research fellows.”
Regina smiles up at me with a bit of blur in her eyes.
“And,” Betsy adds, bending closer to Regina’s ear, speaking just a little louder, “Maggie also sings in a band.”
It’s strange, but true. Just as I began going to the Plateau, I joined Doc Scantlin’s Imperial Palms Orchestra—a ’20s-, ’30s-, and ’40s-style big band here in Washington, D.C. Betsy knows this about me, but not everyone in my life does.
Folks here at the museum—researchers, archivists, and librarians—have felt close, quickly. I guess that makes sense. In a university or research institute you might just pass your colleagues in the hall—greeting each other with polite nods, for years on end—all while guarding your real life, your real self, for elsewhere. But here at the museum, you work together—with your big, urgent questions—inside a wall of images of the worst of what we are. The research projects here are very broad; the work hums with inexorable purpose. And inside that purpose, there’s really nowhere to hide—no safe, closed office; no easygoing watercooler. There are nightmares, shared. And tears. And arguments—not the baloney kinds—but real ones, ones that matter.
And so, inside these dark walls, museum folks have very quickly come to feel like a tribe to me, one that welcomed me despite how unformed and ignorant I was at first. They have been with me on some of my most indelible days, like the one when I was watching the video of a long, hard interview with a survivor. That survivor was now an old man with a soft voice, and as he told his story, it began to dawn on me that he had been present at the raid at La Maison des Roches—but due to a simple variation in the spelling of his name, he had been erroneously categorized by historians as “missing without a trace.” But now, as I heard the man recount the details of the raid, the beatings, the cattle cars to camps, I realized that he was, in fact, Klaus Simon. Klaus wasn’t missing. He had a trace. And for my part, upon realizing all this—with my tribe to my right and to my left, in front of me and behind—I cried, finally and fully, into my hands.
The museum people know things about me that other people don’t. And not just the dark things. They know the things that save me from the dark. Like the improbable fact that I periodically put on sparkle costumes and feathers for the Imperial Palms Orchestra, and sing “Skylark” and dance the Mooche. And now today, on this Holocaust Museum elevator going up, Regina—still fiddling with her chunky green necklace—knows this fact, too.
She looks up toward Betsy quizzically, and then up toward me with what appears to be alert, vaudevillian timing.
“A band? Really?” she says, smiling broadly now—her r’s rolling thick in the back of her throat. Rrrreeally?
“Yes, in fact, we do a Yiddish song,” I say. “Bei Mir Bistu Sheyn.”
Rrrreeeally?
“Bei Mir Bistu Sheyn,” which means “To me you are beautiful,” was originally composed for the Yiddish stage in 1932 by Russian-born Sholom Secunda, with lyrics by Jacob Jacobs. The song grew popular in Nazi Germany—that is, until its Jewish origins were discovered—and soon it also made a splash with African American performers in Harlem, still in Yiddish. In 1937, the song was translated into an English version, with phrases from other languages tossed in—“I could say bella, bella, even say, wunderbar!”—and in that form it became the Andrews Sisters’ first big hit. The Imperial Palms Orchestra does an approximation of that Andrews Sisters version, with three of us wearing floaty pink dresses and orange flowers in our hair, and with plenty of reed and brass behind us.
Of course, Regina knows the song. And there in the industrial elevator, with her hand still on her green necklace, she begins to sing:
“Bei mir bistu sheyn . . .”
(In my head, I hear the trumpets that follow, ba-da!)
I ask myself: Is this really happening?
I start with the next line: “Please let me explain . . .”
Then: “No!” Regina stops me. “No, no, no . . . You have to sing the whole thing . . . in Yiddish!”
Regina starts over. “Bei mir bistu sheyn . . .” Her voice wobbles a little with age, but the faintest smile has lit up her eyes.
She sings the song now, syllable by syllable, line by line, turn by turn, in the language of my ancestors. She is looking up at me, coaxing its meaning in my direction. You are this to me, you are that to me. You are beauty, charm, gold.
I can see 1937 in Regina’s face now. I can see the girl who knows this song, singing every word. And—just like Regina, I bet—I hear the swell in the orchestra coming ’round the bend, at the end:
Bei mir bistu eyner oyf der velt!
To me, you are the only one in the world!
With that last word, “velt,” that word, “world,” Regina looks up over our heads there in the dark elevator. And, smiling after a pause, she adds a final curlicue to the song—a final high, sly sigh:
Oooooii!
And then the elevator doors of the Holocaust Museum open. And that’s that.
I have now seen a photograph of Regina as a young woman—with a head full of dark, thick hair and round cheeks and a girlish face, pre-giggle. I think about how, at that infamous ramp at Auschwitz, this young woman was sent to the right, to work, rather than to the left, to the ovens. I think about how, in the chaos and infinite loss after the war, Regina’s future husband, Sam, heard she’d been spotted in Katowice, Poland, boarding a train for Radom, and then—in a grand gesture—sent a horse and buggy for her. And how the two were married in a displaced persons camp, under a makeshift chuppah raised up by hand on four wooden poles, and would go on to have three children, who in turn would give them nine grandchildren.
Regina became the kind of person who lets crowds of children look at her arm with the dusty blue tattoo, and ask her questions—no matter how hard or painful. And she became the kind of person who, in a dark elevator going up, can just start to sing, without inhibition, to a stranger.
Leaving the museum that day, I open the doors to a sunlight that stabs my eyes. And I am left to myself to wonder how any of this is possible.
I HAVE BEEN STRUGGLING so hard to find some bit of light, looking everywhere, in these darkest places, for answers. The light hurts. I think of how the Persian epic hero Majnun (whose very name means “crazy”) loses his beloved Layli (whose very name means “night”), and then searches for her everywhere, even in the mortal dust.
Well. This is what my mortal dust looks like right now:
Humanity—in both its individual and aggregate forms—is capable of scales of depravity and baseness that would seem unimaginable if, time and again, they hadn’t actually been realized. If anyone were to doubt it, they’d need to just take in one single eyeful at the museum, and there it is: evidence of what even the greatest civilizations, with the most pompous assurance of their own moral ascendency, are capable of. There’s no hiding from that.
We need that eyeful. We need that remembrance.
I know depravity isn’t the essence of who we are. I’m just so sad and tired and angry these days—that so much of social science is oriented around our ugliness and our selfishness. How we gobble wealth. How we seize power. How we are inclined toward violence and war. Why?
Why, when there are so many corners of human action that can teach us about other realms?
Don’t tell me that we all act to maximize our self-interest when there is a Regina who shows her tattoos to children.
Don’t tell me villagers in the Plateau risked their lives sheltering strangers—or wayfaring Daniel let himself be hauled off into the desolation of the camps—because it made them feel good about themselves.
Or that the business of eating and drinking, as important as it is, defines the whole of who we are.
I went to school; I can speak logical positivism and Karl Marx; I know about existentialisms categorical, and about the destruction of the master narrative; I can fight in a duel on the side of constructivisms of all kinds, and I can win. I still believe in science. I believe that variables—even in the social sciences—are best served clear and precise, and I know the infernal muck that is created when they are not. I know that when magical thinking pairs with cheap tribalisms—whether of religious or nationalist kinds—we become the worst of who we are.
I know all that.
But the choice isn’t between magic, on the one hand, and science on the other. It can’t be.
I believe in science. But I don’t want to live in a world of science that has no room for bei mir bistu sheyn—a science that can’t reach deep down into its first principles and find the hallowed place of the things that are, to us, beautiful.
Today, it’s one of the very first bright days after an achingly long winter on the Plateau. I’m in the courtyard, with Marzet and her family again. Fuzzy-haired and apple-cheeked, Marzet is from a family who fled the conflagrations of Chechnya, conflagrations that caused her husband, Mairbek, to lose a leg, and caused them to live, for years, in near-constant mortal fear. Mairbek sits under the shade of a tree; their three little girls play nearby. Only the eldest girl, Deshi—eight or so, with slate-gray dots for eyes—seems to talk, and she talks in my direction. Deshi has been following me around from house to house for two days now—even to the houses of families that don’t particularly get along with her own. But of course, she’s too young to know about that. Ding-dong, she’s at the door, with daffodils in her hand and her silent little sisters in tow, one of whom looks remarkably like a tiny Sinéad O’Connor.
Deshi’s voice when she greets me today is whispery and incongruously low. “You said you’d come by. Why didn’t you?”
Well, I’ve come now, and Mairbek is sitting, and the girls are playing, and Marzet waves from a patch of garden where she’s been planting something. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a woman who is more constantly busy doing immediately useful things. On the days when she isn’t indisposed, she invites me in for food and tea and, tossing her mop of curly hair back, laughs generously at my jokes and sneaks a song with me on the ukulele.
But things aren’t so easy with Mairbek. I have, in fact, been a little afraid of him. Well, “afraid” is too strong a word. Yes, he’s very tall—towering, even when he stands up on the tripod of his two crutches and one strong leg. Scruffily bearded and gruff, with a special flair for the sarcastic. At my first big CADA meeting with all the residents, when Monsieur M— asked me to translate, saying, “I’ll let Maggie explain to you why she is here,” Mairbek added under his breath, “za informatsiiu,” for information, as though I were some kind of spy. And there have been aching moments, like when Amélie needed help explaining to Mairbek what the doctor had said about his kidneys—including details about his poor anatomy that no stranger should know. That day, Amélie looked at Mairbek and talked with her hands, and I looked down at the sidewalk, translating only when necessary, so Mairbek wouldn’t have to catch my eye.
I have gathered, without asking, that Mairbek’s life had terrible episodes back in Chechnya, and not just the loss of his once-strong leg. There was the time he had to jump out of a hospital window to save himself from who-knows-which killers. There were the constant bombs overhead, which have caused his children, even here and now, to scream at night whenever they hear a plane. In Mairbek’s family, there was a murdered younger brother, the apple of his mother’s eye; and a cousin who was kidnapped one day when she went into the forest to look for berries, then forced into servitude by the “people of the woods.”
It’s not that I’m afraid of Mairbek, exactly, but I have certainly given him a wide berth. I can see the pain in his eyes. And the anger. But I’ve also seen his tenderness with children, how he kisses his own, holds them, balancing them on his half-empty lap, correcting them gently when they need. In his gruffness and his chain-smoking, there is something that feels grounded to me, and real.
And so today, with little Deshi clutching her daffodils, chattering softly—and now getting scolded in Chechen by her mother—I decide I will try to talk to Mairbek.
“How are you?” I ask, directing my question into his patch of shade. I don’t know if I should call him the informal ty (which I call all the Russian speakers here, except the elderly ones) or the formal vy. I try for a ty and see what happens.
Plokho, he says, now leaning on one of his crutches, looking up at me. “Bad.”
Bad? Why?
Khochu miaso. “I want meat.”
I know they’ve just been to the Resto du Coeur, and that means that the families—including his—each got a pretty big pile of food to take home. So what about meat?
“Can’t eat that meat.”
“Oh! Right,” I say. “It isn’t halel.”
“Halal!” yells a smiling Marzet, listening in from the little garden patch, correcting the pronunciation I’d learned in Kabardino-Balkaria.
I went to the Resto myself last fall. There was plenty of donated food for the families in need—including the CADA families—according to the family’s size and composition: pasta and cheese and yogurt and desserts, and cans of vegetables and sticky sweet things. And some frozen fish. And milk for babies. And yes, there was a lot of meat for these families, too, but come to think of it, it was, in fact, mostly pork: lardons, pâtés, ham in its many forms.
And of course, pork is not halal. For Mairbek, that means it’s not food. Not something you can eat. Not unless you are dying.
Ne mogu kushat’ eto miaso. I can’t eat that meat.
Right. It’s not just that pork is forbidden in the laws of the Quran. Pork isn’t this thing that you can’t have but you really, really want and sometimes just indulge in—like the bacon that my grandpa Sheldon undoubtedly relished when it wasn’t patently disrespectful to do so. In Kabardino-Balkaria, I finally figured out, pig meat, for many Muslims, is simply disgusting. It doesn’t help that pigs, as animals, are seen to be mud-dwelling, dirty, and disgusting, too, even before slaughter. So telling someone from this background to go ahead and eat the pork—eat it if you’re hungry!—is a little like telling someone else that they should go ahead and dine on vulture, say, or long-tailed rat.
No. Real meat—that’s something else. And without real meat—the clean and wholesome kind—you can be hungry from the depths of your stomach, from the bottom of your once long limbs, from your very heart. You can be hungry for a day, a week, months, a year, watching the snows and winds come and go. Watching the sun finally come back.
When you’re hungry like that, all the pigs in the world can’t feed you. Just as all the time here on the Plateau, safe from bombs and bullets, won’t set things right.
There are many fine things, here in Mairbek’s sunny, safe apartment, far from the warring lands of Chechnya—here, where the daffodils have already begun again to explode in the forest and in the fields. Where his daughter can clutch them in her hand without fear. But there is no meat for a tall dark man with one leg who sits in the shade. All hunger; no meat.
NOW I learn from Amélie that Mairbek’s mother, Kheda, needs to go to the doctor. I like being with Kheda; she reminds me of the Russian grandmothers I knew in the village in the north—the ones who would greet you with kisses after you’d been away for a while and pet you like a cat. Kheda has some serious health issues—ones that I know have caused her to cry when faced with the full tally of them on the forms one must fill out. But today, the trip to the doctor is just to check on her knee, which was recently replaced. And I’m here to translate.
Normally, Kheda wears soft, flowing caftans with old-fashioned prints. Today, for her doctor’s appointment, she has dressed up a little, with a soft black sweater and an extra-nice scarf around her hair. She and Amélie and I arrive at the clinic and find three seats in the waiting room. Small talk, such as it is, doesn’t last long.
Kheda says, leaning over, “I am sixty-three. Life is over for me. I’ve seen too much already.
“And some things,” she adds, “you can’t forget.” Like how her younger son—that apple of her eye—was killed years ago. “When Mairbek was wounded, later,” she said, “I thought I’d lose my mind.”
I see her looking out into the past, and her eyes are slowly filling up. Her handkerchief comes out now. It is white with flowers and you can tell it has been washed many times. She dabs at her eyes.
Kheda’s name is called, and in we go to the doctor’s office. I do my best to translate. The doctor puts the X-rays up for all of us to see. How much does it hurt? Are you getting massages? Are you walking with a cane? Kheda is asked to get up onto the examination table. The doctor bends the knee that was operated on, and the one that is still not mended. How is that? The unfixed one hurts more, Kheda says. Both hurt, really, but it’s bearable.
When it’s all done, Kheda thanks the doctor, has me translate that he has wonderful hands. And I tell her that he is impressed with how quickly she has healed so far, that already she no longer walks with a cane. The doctor says she’s strong, I tell her, krepkaia. She remembers that. Repeats it in the car on the way back to the residence. Ia krepkaia. I am strong.
In the car, Kheda tells Amélie that she doesn’t know what she would do if Amélie left CADA for any reason. But Amélie, echoing Daniel Trocmé, says we can all be replaced. All of us.
Hearing this, Kheda looks up at Amélie. Her tears are gone, her eyes clear. No, it’s not true, she says. We’re not all the same. We can’t all be replaced. Look at the fingers on a hand, she says, holding up her own. They’re all different.
I think about hands, and what—given the choice—they have made, or wrecked, or wrought. Here in the Plateau, there are the hands that fix a knee—wonderful hands, says Kheda. There are hands that wash, and hands that cook delicious food and pass it over to a stranger. Hands that catch a window frame as they are about to jump to safety. Or swing a baby over a half-empty lap. There are hands that reach up, to a face, for a kiss on the cheek. Hands that reach up, in pain, in supplication.
There are hands that make shoes for children out of old tires. There are hands that, farther along, write letters begging for news.
And somewhere, a world away, there are hands that clutch a green necklace, about to sing a song—“Bei Mir Bistu Sheyn.”
I have two sets of favorite hands right here in the Plateau. Both belong to women who happen to have long, light brown hair, which they pull away from their faces and fold into buns. Both of the women are in their fifties or so. Both have faces slowly growing soft with age.
The first pair of hands is Esther’s. Esther, as it happens, is the niece of a woman who saved many lives during the war. Mild, wide-eyed, Esther volunteers to teach French at CADA, and her hands point to flash cards with pictures—a man, a woman, a city, a dog, a cat, a car—as her students mouth brand-new words. But once, Esther’s hands—none of us replaceable!—knitted a blue cap for Akhmad and Rovzan’s new baby boy.
Akhmad has repeated the story to me, many times: “She knit a hat for the baby . . . with her own hands!” With her own hands, as if nothing greater could be expected of kindness. “With her own hands,” Akhmad repeats, like a song, and the hardness and pain in his own face melt into a raw openness.
The other pair of hands belongs to Marie-Hélène, who manages the apartment where I stay in the Plateau. Marie-Hélène’s voice is soft, her gaze sure. Over time, little by little, she has invited me into her home for simple, delicious meals; has told me about how she grew up in the village right at the top of the Plateau, where the cold and wind are ferocious, and the farmwork relentless. People who were raised there understood, intimately, what it means to carry on in the brutal times of La Burle.
She has said, looking straight at me, “We are a hard people. But,” she has added, “we know how to work.”
And, she has added further, “we have a heart, too.”
Now, with those same hands, far from the coldest winds of her girlhood, Marie-Hélène types accounts. With those hands, she makes clean and beautiful homes for strangers. With those hands, once in a while, she has also left little packages at my door—soup that I can heat up when the wind howls fierce. With those hands on the steering wheel, she picks up strangers along the road—often, as it happens, the CADA families—and gives them a lift to the grocery store or wherever else.
But of all the things her hands have done, this is what I love most of all: One night, when she invited me to dinner with her and her husband, we sat at a cozy round table in the kitchen. Before the meal began, she took my hand gently in one of hers, and her husband’s hand in the other—the three of us now forming a circle. And thanks were given for what we were about to receive. And requests were made, for our protection. Grace.
We are a hard people, Marie-Hélène tells me. Words that ring now like something gorgeous, and strong.
AMÉLIE DROPS KHEDA off at the CADA residence. Later in the day, I go to check in on her and the others in the family. I am visiting in the front part of house when I hear a gruff male voice calling.
“You!” says the voice from the back room, where the curtains are closed. “How long have you been in France?” It’s Mairbek.
Who, me?
Mairbek has never spoken directly to me before; not without my addressing him first. This man, I’ve thought, has no time for my nervous cheer. Mostly, he still growls and grouses when I see him. Or mutters under his breath.
But now he’s speaking to me?
I tell him I’ve been here for a week or so this time.
“No, I don’t mean this trip. I mean in general. How long have you been coming here? Do you know where to find the cheremsha?”
Cheremsha? What is that?
You don’t know cheremsha? How can you not know the cheremsha?
Ah, there it is. I can feel the air in the room shift. Nearly at once, Mairbek, Kheda, Marzet radar toward me and begin talking. How do you explain the thing that everyone should know already? Something so important, so essential?
The cheremsha! You have to know the cheremsha!
Mairbek hobbles into the bright room toward me—like a great walking tree, limbs splayed, crutches stretched out for balance, taller with every step—and sits on the blue draped couch in front of the window.
The cheremsha. It’s garlic. Wild garlic you find in the forest! You find it at the end of winter! You gather it. You eat it in huge piles!
Cheremsha, cheremsha!
I know this moment. It happens everywhere I’ve ever lived as a stranger when people sputter with words for things that are too large for words. How do you translate the Russian khoziain—roughly “leader” but layered with qualities of the trickster, and the saint, and long-dead relatives, and even iron-fisted Stalin? Or the Kabardian guakach’—meaning that crucial ability, in an intensely hierarchical society, to read people’s needs—from gu, meaning “heart,” and kach’, meaning “grow”? Maybe “heart talent”?
It’s a very good sign when you see the sputtering over words. It means you’re onto something that really matters.
Cheremsha! It’s in the forest! It has these buds, these secret buds! It’s out there. It could be out there! We tried to explain cheremsha to Amélie, but she wasn’t sure of what it is, either!
A kind of song begins.
Ohhhh, Kheda incants: We gather it as the snow melts. Right when there are little green shoots. . . . Every spring, but only for a short time.
Ohhhh, Marzet adds, stomping in from the kitchen now: I know for a fact that you can find it in these forests. I saw them sell it in Paris! And I hear it’s in Austria, too. I know for a fact it’s around here. And the time to gather is now—maybe it’s even passed. You gather it and then you can cook it in butter. . . .
Ohhhh, Kheda says again, her face far away, her tongue clicking, “I would trade meat for it. I would trade meat for it. I would . . .”
Trade meat? Trade the meat they are so hungry for? For something wild and green?
Yes, the room has changed. And it is the cheremsha that’s caused the change, as if the very word cast a spell.
Abracadabra and voilà, a moment of remembering:
Remembered, fragrant forests of bright flopping green leaves, low to the ground. Remembered, the wildness of hills. Remembered, a time in those places when things could be both untamed and essential. Remembered, a sharp, dazzling taste that comes only in spring.
Remembered, also, the land you left—poor, battered Chechnya—that is still, so achingly, the land you love. . . .
But then, abracadabra and voilà: a moment of forgetting, too:
Forgotten, the doctor’s appointment this morning, which—in its way—humbled Kheda again when she saw her own naked, hobbled outlines on the X-ray. Forgotten, Marzet’s trip all the way to Paris a few days ago, when five hundred euros were stolen from her in the market in one swipe.
Forgotten, for a moment, the things that Kheda says can’t be forgotten. Just for a moment in this room, forgotten. That her beloved younger son was killed, and their lives at home shattered.
Forgotten, for a moment, the things that Marzet, in near hysteria, worries about: the fact that she’s bleeding all the time; the fact that there are threats always behind them, or so it seems; the fact that she has to take care of everyone.
Cheremsha, cheremsha. Oh, what to give if only it could be found. And so, forgotten, for a moment: limblessness, bloodlessness, chaos, the death of our best selves.
“Maybe we can get Amélie to go look for it with us,” they say.
“Amélie loves the forest,” I say. “Maybe we can find some together.”
So now I know their forest song. It’s not for the mushroom or the berry, so loved in France and in Russia, too, for that matter. It is not made of the musk of dirt, nor of that bright burst of sweetness. This is that other wild thing, under the trees of acid soils, that takes their breath away. This pungent wild flavor—with no words big enough for how beautiful it is.
Soon, Marzet—who has been somehow cooking all this time—serves me fried fish, the only thing she managed to buy in the market after the depressing loss of her five hundred euros. I hold their littlest boy, their only son. I touch his face. I see Mairbek’s face in all the children now. Slate-gray eyes. I let the boy down.
Still just wobbling upright, the boy walks toward Mairbek, who is sitting on the bright blue couch. And then he tumbles toward his father’s hands. And lands.
Early in his time at Compiègne, Daniel met another prisoner who was also from the big bright old world of his family. This man, Marcel Heuzé, was a Protestant pastor, and the camp chaplain. Like Daniel, Heuzé wrote home. In one missive to his church colleagues on August 18, 1943, he wrote, brightly, directly: “I am in contact with nearly fifty men, most of them young. I have received the communion service. I would need, as quickly as possible, a liter of communion wine, five or six Bibles, thirty new Testaments, and prayer books for the prisoners.”
Camp life was as dangerous for Heuzé as for anyone else. Curiously, though, his letter from August 18 carries a sense of forthright pleasure at certain aspects of life at Frontstalag 122: “All is remarkable at the camp from a religious point of view,” he wrote. “Many men come to mass. There is an important Orthodox community. There is communion every Sunday evening. Prayer meeting every morning at 10 am. Three Bible studies a week.” Then he added, with even more brightness, that he was surrounded by “an ardent group of youth, who are desirous of working for GOD”—he wrote that word in all capital letters, DIEU—“and for their Fatherland”—Patrie with a capital P.
“I’ve been asked to wear the pastoral robe,” he added before closing. “If you could send me a used one, I would be grateful.”
A book, a robe, some wine, some songs, some meetings, some capital letters that spelled GOD. And another capital letter that began Fatherland. Heuzé knew what he needed, the things that made him firm and fine.
And, it turns out, we know from other sources, that at some point Pastor Heuzé sized up young Daniel Trocmé and decided that Daniel—who was, by now, already growing sick—needed the very same things, too. Daniel’s student André Guyonnaud wrote about their encounters, after the war:
Mr. Heuzé, the camp pastor, tried—not without difficulty—to look after [Daniel] because [Daniel] had firm ideas against our religion. Nevertheless, [Daniel] visited our meetings sometimes later. Sick, he stayed in the camp infirmary for long months. I think his heart was not going very well. Nor was his vision. Mr. Heuzé visited him often.
How strange to see that phrase, “firm ideas against our religion,” written down like that, typed neatly in a letter. Our religion? Reflecting on this sentence, Daniel’s older brother Charles was later moved to offer a footnote to that tossed-off phrase: “The expression is, without a doubt, improper. Daniel had, from the very beginning, an extreme scruple of sincerity. Not believing in Christian dogmas, he didn’t want to pretend that he did. Secondly, he felt a friendship with so many others: Jews, unbelievers, Muslims. Adherence to one and only one community would have seemed to him—thinking of those friends—as a kind of betrayal or abandonment.”
Did Daniel need religion? In Beirut, Daniel lived under the brilliant suns of many faiths. It was as though the skies cracked open for him there, with all that light, the world becoming larger than it had ever been for him before. Larger and stranger.
Could you take those suns and put them into a box that comes in a package from home with robes and wine and hymnbooks? Could they ever, ever fit into a box so small?
Or: “Do you suppose,” as Rainer Maria Rilke once asked the young poet, “that someone who really has [God] could lose him like a little stone?”
What, then, did Daniel need? I don’t think he needed little boxes—or faith like little stones. I think he needed suns.
Soon after Daniel arrived in Compiègne, a convoy took away Pastor Heuzé, who would later perish at Ravensbrück. And then another took Klaus and Alexandre, and Jean and André. And Daniel’s eyes were fuzzing up, his heart hurting.
What did Daniel need?
October, November, soon December. As Daniel’s health continued to fade, as his friends left—he fixed his thoughts on the blason, the coat of arms, that he had wished to design for the Little Crickets along with the motto they had come up with, Agir pour tous, Act for all. They could wear it proudly, those little refugees, as if they were at a great boarding school. As if they, too, would live, from then on, among the oak trees.
On November 23, 1943, Daniel wrote to his parents: “If you receive the model of the blason that I hope to send in a package, please have fifty sent to a specialized [manufacturer], and send them all to the Little Crickets.”
It was so hard to get things done from afar. In and out of the infirmary now, Daniel was weaker and weaker. In time, it became clear that the blason would not be made. On December 8, he wrote to his parents again. “Can I ask you to send Pastor Poivre 1,500 francs for the Little Crickets—for them and their Christmas—because I fear that I will not be able to send them the blason that I was intending to. Can you ask Poivre that, if he can’t get them appropriate individual gifts, to please just give them the cash? . . . If I could have some news that was just a little more precise, I would be infinitely happy.”
THIS IS WHAT I THINK:
Beautiful things don’t save us because they give us repose, or peace. Or because they fill us with some lyrical longing. They are not essential because they add lovely flourish—nice as that may be—to the truly meaningful things of life.
They are essential because they change everything.
When I was girl, I memorized some words that had just been loosed into the world in 1943, as it happens. These were the words of the Little Prince, who was telling the pilot he met on the African deserts about his beloved flower, the rose he had left behind on his planet. Oh, she was beautiful. And now she was alone, without him. And he was so afraid for her safety. And, light-years away, he could do nothing to protect her.
“If someone loves a flower,” he said, “of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there. . . .’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened. . . .”
Beauty saves us not because it gives us some kind of aesthetic pause, or pleasure, or because it rescues us from pain. It saves us because when you tilt your head back at night, the beauty that lives, alone on one star, illumines all the stars. Because the beauty of one face illumines all the faces.
Beauty saves us because, after a long day of digging into the depths of sad papers that tell stories of our lowest selves, when the lights are shining in your face on a dark stage, and you hear the violins swell, and you open your mouth to sing the question “Skylark, have you anything to say to me?” . . . you see Regina herself—sheyn, sheyn, sheyn—dancing with Sam. You see both of their hearts looking up into the lights, too. Because they can now. Because they will.
“Somewhere, my flower is there,” makes every sky alive with love. Makes every star—somewhere—a dazzling, crushing sun. It makes of small things an immensity.