Camille Safra had been six at the time of their flight from France. She remembered her displeasure when her mother shook her awake in the middle of the night, and the strange, warm, and vaguely pleasant sensation of traveling wrapped in blankets in a trailer behind a truck, beneath a canvas being beaten by the rain. She also remembered sleeping in kitchens or entryways of houses that weren’t hers, places where there was a strong odor of apples and hay, and she sometimes had flashes of mysterious routes along moonlit country roads, held in her mother’s arms beneath the shelter of a wet woolen shawl, listening to the creaking of a cart and the slow hoofbeats of a horse. She remembered, or dreamed of, lonely lights on street corners and in barn windows, the red lights of locomotives, 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. I’ve 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 Writer’s 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 hadn’t 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 she’d 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 they’d come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camille’s mother had taken her to that small town — she didn’t give me the name — because someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sister’s having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might be — and they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her aunt’s 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 couldn’t 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 hotel that called itself the Commerce.
They rented a room. They went upstairs to go straight to bed because the electricity would be turned off at nine. Sitting on the bed beneath a bulb that faded to pale red then revived to shed an oily yellow light, they shared a package of food they’d been given by the Red Cross. Then, dressed, and with their arms around each other, they lay down, icy feet touching beneath the thin blanket and threadbare bedspread. Her mother, Camille Safra told me, never locked doors; she was terrified of being trapped, of losing the key and not being able to get out. In the shelters, when the air-raid sirens sounded, she had attacks of sweating and panic. If they went to the movies, as soon as the film was over she rushed to the exit, for fear that everyone would leave before her and they would lock the doors, thinking the theater was empty.
Mother and daughter woke at dawn. Through the window, beneath the beating rain, they could see a rustic patio with chicken coops and an area of garden. They took turns washing with the icy cold water in the pitcher beneath the washstand and dressed in the drab, dignified, and inexpensive clothing they always wore, clothes that never kept them warm, just as there was never enough food to satisfy their hunger. When her mother tried to leave the room, the knob wouldn’t turn, the door wouldn’t open.
“I told you last night not to turn the key.”
“But I didn’t, I’m sure.”
The key lay on the dressing table opposite the bed. They inserted it in the lock, turned it this way and that, but nothing happened. The key didn’t click, it seemed not to meet any resistance, merely turned ineffectually in the lock. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit because it was the key to a different room. The mechanism appeared to function, but the door simply didn’t open.
The mother grew nervous. She rattled the doorknob and the key, beat on the lock, bit her lips. She said in a low voice that if they didn’t get out, they would miss the train to Paris and couldn’t go back to Denmark, would have to stay forever in France, where they had no one, where no one had given them so much as a smile of welcome, not even recognition. She took the key from the lock but then couldn’t get it back in, and when she finally did, refusing to let her daughter help her, she turned it so hard that the key broke in half.
“Why don’t we ask for help?” said Camille. “They’d laugh at us, two ridiculous Jews. Who ever would expect to be locked in like this?”
They tried the window: it, too, was impossible to open, although they didn’t see any latch, and of course there was no lock. They had to ask for help. A few minutes later, her mother, now out of control, her jaw hanging loose and her eyes glassy with fear — the fear she’d suffered during the flight that had saved her daughter four years before — beat on the door with desperation, yelling for help.