Читать книгу Dora Bruder - Patrick Modiano - Страница 10

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IT 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.

It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth: 25 February 1926. And a further two years to find out her place of birth: Paris, 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.

One Friday afternoon in February 1996 I went to the 12th arrondissement Register Office. The registrar—a young man—handed me a form:

To be completed by the person applying for the certificate. Fill in your

Surname

First name

Address

I require a full copy of the Birth Certificate for

Surname BRUDER

First Name DORA

Date of birth: 25 February 1926

Check if you are:

□ The person in question

□ Son or daughter

□ Father or mother

□ Husband or wife

□ Grandfather or grandmother

□ Legal representative (You have power of attorney, and an identity card for the person in question)

No persons other than the above may be supplied with a copy of a Birth Certificate.

I signed the form and handed it back to him. After reading it through, he said that he was unable to supply me with a standard birth certificate: I bore no legal relationship whatever to the person in question.

At first, I took him for one of those sentinels of oblivion whose role is to guard a shameful secret and deny access to anybody seeking to uncover the least trace of a person’s existence. But he was a decent fellow. He advised me to go to the Palais de Justice, 2 Boulevard du Palais, and apply for a special exemption from the Superintendent Registrar, Section 3, 5th floor, Staircase 5, Room 501. Monday to Friday, 2 to 4 P.M.

I was about to enter the main courtyard through the big iron gates at 2 Boulevard du Palais when a functionary directed me to another entrance a little farther down: the same as that for the Sainte-Chapelle. Tourists were waiting in a line between the barriers and I wanted to go straight on, through the porch, but another functionary gestured at me impatiently to line up with the rest.

At the back of the foyer, regulations required you to empty your pockets of anything metal. I had nothing on me except a bunch of keys. This I was supposed to place on a sort of conveyor belt for collection on the far side of a glass partition, but for a moment I couldn’t think what to do. My hesitation earned me a rebuke from another functionary. Was he a guard? A policeman? Was I also supposed to hand over my shoelaces, belt, wallet, as at the gates of a prison?

I crossed a courtyard, followed a corridor, and emerged into a vast concourse milling with men and women carrying black briefcases, some dressed in legal robes. I didn’t dare ask them how to get to Staircase 5.

A guard seated at a table directed me to the back of the concourse. And here I entered a deserted hall whose high windows let in a dim, gray light. I searched every corner of this room without finding Staircase 5. I was seized with panic, with that sense of vertigo you have in bad dreams when you can’t get to the station, time is running out and you are going to miss your train.

Twenty years before, I had had a similar experience. I had learned that my father was in hospital, in the Pitié-Salpêtrière. I hadn’t seen him since the end of my adolescent years. I therefore decided to pay him an impromptu visit.

I remember wandering for hours through the vastness of that hospital in search of him. I found my way into ancient buildings, into communal wards lined with beds, I questioned nurses who gave me contradictory directions. I came to doubt my father’s existence, passing and repassing that majestic church, and those spectral buildings, unchanged since the seventeenth century, which, for me, evoke Manon Lescaut and the era when, under the sinister name General Hospital, the place was used as a prison for prostitutes awaiting deportation to Louisiana. I tramped the paved courtyards till dusk. It was impossible to find my father. I never saw him again.

But I found Staircase 5 in the end. I climbed several flights. A row of offices. I was directed to Room 501. A bored-looking woman with short hair asked me what I wanted.

Curtly, she informed me that to obtain particulars of a birth certificate I should write to the Public Prosecutor,¹ Department B, 14 Quai des Orfèvres, Paris 3.

Three weeks later, I had a reply.

At nine ten P.M. on twenty-five February nineteen hundred twenty-six, at 15 Rue Santerre, a female child, Dora, was born to Ernest Bruder, unskilled laborer, born Vienna (Austria) twenty-one May eighteen hundred ninety-nine, and to his wife, Cécile Burdej, housewife, born Budapest (Hungary) seventeen April nineteen hundred seven, both domiciled at 2 Avenue Liégeard, Sevran (Seine-et-Oise). Registered at three thirty P.M. on twenty-seven February nineteen hundred twenty-six on the declaration of Gaspard Meyer, aged seventy-three, employed and domiciled at 76 Rue de Picpus, having been present at the birth, who has read and signed it with Us, Auguste Guillaume Rossi, Deputy Mayor, 12th arrondissement, Paris.

15 Rue Santerre is the address of the Rothschild Hospital. Many children of poor Jewish families, recent immigrants to France, were born in its maternity ward around the same time as Dora. Seemingly, on that Thursday of 25 February 1926, Ernest Bruder had been unable to get time off from work in order to register his daughter himself at the 12th arrondissement town hall. Perhaps there is a register somewhere with more information about the Gaspard Meyer who had signed the birth certificate. 76 Rue de Picpus, where he was “employed and domiciled,” is the address of the Rothschild Hospice, an establishment for the old and indigent.

In that winter of 1926 all trace of Dora Bruder and her parents peters out in Sevran, the suburb to the northeast, bordering the Ourcq canal. One day I shall go to Sevran, but I fear that, as in all suburbs, houses and streets will have changed beyond recognition. Here are the names of a few businesses and inhabitants of the Avenue Liégeard dating from that period: the Trianon de Freinville occupied number 24. Was this a café? A cinema? The Île-de-France wine cellars at number 31. There was a Dr. Jorand at number 9, a pharmacist, Platel, at number 30.

The Avenue Liégeard where Dora’s parents lived was part of a built-up area that sprawled across the communities of Sevran, Livry-Gargan, and Aulnay-sous-Bois and was known as Freinville.² It had grown up around the Westinghouse Brake Factory, established there at the beginning of the century. A working-class area. In the thirties, it had tried to gain its autonomy, without success, and so had remained a dependency of the three adjoining communities. But it had its own railway station nevertheless: Freinville.

In that winter of 1926, Ernest Bruder, Dora’s father, is sure to have been employed at the Westinghouse Brake Factory.

1. An official who has a number of nonjudicial functions in France.

2. The equivalent of Brakesville, from frein, a brake.