Читать книгу Black Man on the Titanic - Serge Bile - Страница 7

I. The New York Express

Cherbourg1, April 19, 1996. An elderly woman is clutching a small black purse in her lap. The purse is black, as is the long coat she is wearing this afternoon. Black is appropriate, because she is still in mourning, eighty-four years after the sinking of the Titanic. Sitting on an iron chair, alone, under the gaze of a sympathetic crowd, she has just unveiled a plaque in memory of the 281 passengers who boarded the famous ocean liner during its stopover in Normandy. The plaque, covered with a blue cloth, is affixed to a headstone made of granite and shaped like a menhir, pointing toward the sky.

Not a word, not a movement. The woman is silent. She seems frozen, both submerged and crushed by emotion. Her face is contorted, but no tears stream down her cheeks. Her lips shape into a scream, but no sound escapes.

Eighty-four years ago, Louise Laroche2 was on this same dock, at Ancien-Arsenal.

This is where passengers boarded the two ferries that took them to the Titanic, a colossal ship anchored off the coast, outside the harbor. Two strong arms had lifted her aboard. It should have been the beginning of an unforgettable voyage, the trip of a lifetime.

Eighty-four years later, her muscles bent by age and hardship, Louise Laroche is looking everywhere, on the dock, on the ocean, among the people, searching for the slightest memory, but to no avail. She cannot remember anything.

How could it be otherwise? She was not even two years old when it all happened. And nothing is the same. The dock itself has been renamed after Lawton-Collins3, an American general. Lawton-Collins, they told her, was in charge of the Seventh Army Corps that landed on June 6, 1944, not far away, on Utah Beach. He and his men freed Cherbourg.