Forgotten on Sunday by Valérie Perrin

Author:Valérie Perrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

49

The drawer of the bedside table is half-open. There’s no water left in the carafe. I fill it. Hélène drinks a lot. I don’t know if it’s the heat of her beach that makes her thirsty, or having been a bistro owner. Usually, we have to force the residents to drink so they don’t become dehydrated. No risk of that with Hélène.

With his girlish hands, Roman removes the hair elastic holding together some torn and stained scraps of paper. They are old pages pulled from newspapers or books. Roman touches them lightly, with his fingertips, and says to me:

“It’s extraordinary.”

I reply to my feet that, throughout his internment at the Dora factory, Lucien hid a sharp little stone inside his mouth, and every time he wanted to write something to Hélène, he would spit it out.

Roman hands me a piece of yellowing newspaper, now almost transparent from being kept so long in a pocket.

“So, what’s written on this one?”

“‘Hélène Hel not-married on November 19, 1934. Milly.’”

“You can read Braille?”

“No, Hélène read them out to me.”

“And on this one?”

“‘We should pray only for the present. To give thanks when it has your face.’”

“That’s beautiful. My grandfather wrote well. But I think people always write well when they’re in love.”

This time, I can’t stop myself from looking at him. As he says it, he pushes his blue eyes into mine, like a child filling two holes with modeling clay.

Without him asking, I unfurl page 7 of a Polish newspaper. On it, there’s the black-and-white photo of a silver-birch forest. Against the light, I show Roman how the page is riddled with tiny holes.

“It’s a kind of letter. A disjointed letter. The last words he ‘wrote’ in Braille. I don’t know what happened next. The train he arrived in, at Gare de l’Est, came from Germany.”

“Could you read it to me?”

I start to recite the words that I know off by heart:

“Why do they shoot at the dead? Why? So no one ever tells? So we all keep silent, even beyond this world? When it was my turn to get a bullet in the head, when I felt the cold of the barrel on my temple, there were some cries from outside. No more barrel on my temple. The men aimed upwards, into the sky.They forgot me, they forgot my life that was there for the taking. She comes from you. The child before our child.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“About Buchenwald, the execution, the seagull.”

“What seagull?”

“Hélène always thought that a seagull was protecting her, since her childhood. And that it protected Lucien while he was deported.”

“Carry on reading, please.”

I continue:

“What’s left of the man who wore flannel suits? Will you recognize me?

“I’m scared.

“First move one finger. Very gently. Then the hand, like on a piano.

“It’s to make noise inside my head.

“I write to remember a memory. The one of us hanging that ‘Closed for vacation’ sign on the café door. But we never left. Our pretend vacation in the room above, with the shutters closed.

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