A Stitch
in Time

Lydia Kann

Her fingers stitch in and out, in and out. First the woolen suits, Vogue quality, herringbone, gray and white squares, collarless, boxy. Like the suits Jackie wore. Remember Jackie with the two little munchkins at the funeral? Then there were the furs. My mother’s fingers have holes, holes oozing blood, then pus, from the mole sized craters formed by the three-sided needles. Fur requires special needles. Her fingers look like the moon on a clear night. Or Swiss cheese. Curdled milk.

She sews my clothes for school. She begins with nothing, a piece of leftover maroon cotton, say, or a swath of paisley jersey. She places it just so, rearranges, changes the angle, slanted on the bias, until the textile is in the shape of a girl, a Jewish girl of nine, then ten, then eleven, a Jewish girl with the requisite long dark hair, the nose angled, not hooked, just a curve of the tip, as was common in a certain strain of Eastern European shtetl dweller.

We live on the West Side, not of the shtetl, but of Manhattan. Many here come from there, and from the War, if they were lucky. My mother was one of the lucky ones. She had made it to Paris before the War, before it was too late, too late for her brothers and father and stepmom — they had remained behind, in Poulavi, or was it Kaziemierz?  

Tell me, I ask. Tell me where you grew up. It wasn’t Poland, and it wasn’t Russia, it was Bessarabia. It is Poland now. If I could know the true town, I could find it on a map.

She won’t tell me what happened. She tells me instead about a friend who drowned swimming in a pond with reeds, got tangled up in a patch and then disappeared. I am afraid of reeds and their tentacles. I steer clear of all foreign matter in ponds — silt, ducks, branches, fish, guppies, frogs. I feel safest in pools, like the little indoor pool at the Hotel Paris on West End. It costs two dollars to swim there.

My mother tells me, Don’t think you are rich just because you have these fancy clothes. Like the models from Vogue. Like Jackie. She doesn’t want me to grow up with ideas. She tells me to know my place in the order of things. I keep secrets — I want to go to the fancy girls’ school across the Park; I want to live in a building with a doorman like Nana, my mother’s best friend whose husband died and left the insurance; I want to dig a hole in the floor of our tiny room and end up in a big apartment on 96th Street like my friend Ruthie.

I ask my mother what happened to her during the War. She is sewing a jacket for a little suit for me, a suit with a straight skirt and two kick pleats in the back. We are sitting in the kitchen where the light is best in the morning, and I am waiting for her to finish so we can go to the park. Roller skating.

Where were you during the War?

She doesn’t raise her head, just keeps her hand moving up and down, the thimble on her middle finger, pushing the needle through the seams made on the old Singer in our bedroom.

I was in Paris and then I was in Pau, in the Basses Pyrénées.

I have already looked this up on the map in my classroom. I found Pau, a tiny town in the south of France.

But who did you live with? What did you do there?

My mother asks me to go get my skates. We will be leaving soon.

My mother has a shoebox with postcards and a few photos. The photos are black and white. There’s one of her sister who died of leukemia before I was born. In Paris.  There’s one of a group of dark haired men and women wearing odd bathing suits and sitting on a rock; maybe they are at the pond with the reeds. There are several of my mother and father. My father is handsome. He is wearing a uniform in one, smiling in front of a barrack. He lives in Brussels now, my mother told me. I have never met him, but I look like him. He has a dimple in his right cheek when he smiles.

When we go to the park we walk down all the streets of people speaking Spanish and Yiddish and other languages I do not understand. The sun is bright as a fireball, and I skip ahead. My mother sings a song I have heard so many times I can’t remember, and I run back and hold her hand, and we swing our arms as we march along. It’s a drinking song from Paris, and we boom it out. I forget about my questions, about her fingers, about the money, about the reeds circling my legs, my arms, my throat. The words that climb through and out of me are Qu’il fait bon. It’s so good. Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.

……….

My mother is dead. It is the anniversary of the day she died, and a yohrzeit candle is burning on the stove. I place it on the stove because I worry about fires, fireballs, bombs, ovens, death. The stove has an oven, but it is turned off; the top of it is made of metal. It will not burst into flame. I have a friend who left Chanukah candles lit in her house while she went to a neighbor’s and returned to an explosion of red. Uncontained loss.

Today I will visit the grave of my mother, stroke the rock that is smooth as lake water from being caressed so many times. I will sing a song of remembrance to my mother, to her bones, a song of hope perhaps. I hope she is resting, and all the mystery has been laid at the vestibule of the past.

There is a photo in a light box at a museum in Paris, in the Marais, near the house of Victor Hugo, not far from the Bastille. I found it when I was visiting recently. It shows a woman hunched over a table — she is sewing. Her hand is extended out with invisible thread, and she is wearing a thimble. She is surrounded by other women and tables, and they are all sewing garments. The label next to the photograph says, Women at work in the Gurs camp. Gurs was a detention camp, labor camp, concentration camp, depending on whom you ask. I looked it up after a cousin — someone who loved Maman, the daughter of my aunt who died of leukemia, the cousin my mother had cared for when she was a young child, in Paris, during the War — on this same visit this cousin told me the answer to my question of all those years earlier. Where were you during the War?  

She told me like it was any old piece of information, like, ‘Oh, did I tell you that Zelda used to sing that song, Auprès de ma Blonde, to me too when I was young?’ How could my mother not have told me? Why would she erase, delete, that part of the story from a tale so coveted by her child?  

My cousin told me the answer after I had imagined, guessed, projected so many images on that screen. Now a change of channel, from a picture of my mother hidden away by a man, safety exchanged for sex, of Maman in an attic like Anne Frank, of my mother on the streets, feeding from garbage cans, from sewage, a rat underground.

Gurs. I looked it up. It was near Pau, in the Basses Pyrénées. It was full of first Spanish and French, and, later, Jewish prisoners. It was a funnel to Drancy and eventually Auschwitz.  

She was lucky, my mother. She knew how to sew, her fingers squeezing the needle through the seam, pushing hard against the fabric, passing through and distilling all that came before, the shape of a life.

It is a kind of language, the thread of a story, in and out, until it is done. Would it have made the difference to have known so many years ago what was true? Would I then have only wanted to know more, and then more again, pressing against the bulwark of silence? Would it never have had an end?

Today I carry dead roses to the grave of my mother. They are long stemmed, brittle, dried blood maroon. I place them vertically from the head to the heart. I lie down alongside and reach my arm across the dirt. I turn my face into the grass and feel my chest next to hers. I whisper Gurs, to tell her I know, and then I pull out my skates and glide away. Qu’il fait bon.

…………

I return to France to find my mother at Gurs. A plane, a train, a car, a map, and I have arrived in the rain at this border town by the Pyrénées mountains. Just as when the ‘laborers,’ no, say it true, the prisoners, spent their agonizing one, two, three years in this quiet country place, it is now wet, the clay earth saturated. Even the three horses in the field beyond the camp pin their ears back and huddle close. It is cold here, cold like rain, cold like the cemetery off in the distance, cold like the barracks must have been, built in rows, each section, each ilot, filled with Jews, with gypsies, with Communists, with homosexuals — les indésirables, the ‘undesirables.’ I race through the memorial, a meager arrangement of videos and actual reproductions of a couple of the original buildings, but in actuality the camp was reforested quickly after it was no longer needed for the collaborators and Germans who filled it at the end. It was closed in 1946.

Reforested, covered over, covered up, hidden — a secret place of shame, or perhaps it was only embarrassment. To feel shame, one must feel that what one did was wrong. The camp had been policed by the French. The conditions were tolerated by the French, all but the very few who sent letters to higher ups in the government requesting medicine, clean water, supplies. So many were dying and not a Nazi on site. No surprise then that when the War was finally over, the locals threw seeds on the red clay earth to return it as quickly as possible to its prior wild state. As if nothing had happened there.

The memorial squeezed between and amid the trees tells the story I need to know about my mother. I look for her among the granite columns listing the groups imprisoned there. Perhaps she is standing next to the two small flat stones hidden in the undergrowth… they are covered in writing, one in German and one in French, markers left to tell the story when all that was left was forest, French graffiti disclosing the Vichy collaboration. The stone tablets declare: In 1940… the government of (Fascist) Vichy began to imprison the politically undesirable in this camp… Yesterday counts as much as today. Don't turn your eyes away! React!

But no, no, it is not the way I imagined, after all. I visit the archives in Pau to locate my mother’s name among the many listed at Gurs, on fiches, index cards, of those sick, those released, those from Poland, those who died. She would not be among this last group. I read name after name after name and rest my eyes. She is not there.

“Can you help me,” I ask of the assistant at the archive. “I was told my mother was at Gurs but I can’t find any evidence on these lists.”  

“What were you told by your mother?” she asks.  

“My cousins were sure that she was at Gurs. But my mother said only that she lived in Pau during the War.”  

“Wait for a moment. I have an idea,” the woman says.

She goes looking for information and returns in ten minutes with a wink in my direction. “I have found everything,” she says with a smile.  

I weep with relief. She has found my mother, but not at Gurs. She has located a fat dossier of documents, all the truth about my mother, my mother, my mother.

The story about my mother remains in Pau. There are forms and permissions, identity cards and letters of reference. Proof of her movement from Paris to Gans to Pau as soon as the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, and then back to Paris after the liberation — listing every apartment she lived in, every job she held. My mother spent the War in Pau, as a Jew, as a foreigner, alone. Every document is stamped Juif and Étranger. 

But how did she survive? Was she perhaps helped by a righteous Frenchman who risked his life to save Jews — a Juste? Or was she protected by a man in return for sexual favors? Or perhaps — I wish it were so – in return for love? Her boss at the sewing shop wrote to the Prefect that she was ‘indispensable’ to the factory and should be given working papers. Was he her savior?

My mother the Jew. She survived the War and went on to a whole other life in the U.S., as though she were newly birthed on that ship from there to here. How could she have told me nothing about all that happened before? How could I still not know? How will I ever know?

  I tell my sons that the story has changed. What hasn’t changed is all that she taught me and I passed on to them — some about danger, some about survival, and something about mystery. As my sons were growing up, we sang the songs of my childhood, we told and retold the stories of the War. I dressed them in store-bought clothes to honor my mother’s wish that I not learn to sew and end up like her. The life we live, my children and I, is different, so much easier than hers, and yet somehow the same. We carry her in our hearts.

Every September I return to the grave of my mother. I place dead roses along her bones, or where I think her bones must still lie. I whisper through the grass, through the leaves filtered down from the maple above, I whisper, Je ne sais rien. I don’t know anything.

I would like to believe that I have all I need, that knowledge is not freedom. I would like to believe that I could love without data, without image, without truth, for the reality remains — I will never know.

My skates are buried in some garbage heap in Manhattan, and I no longer glide. I slowly stand up next to the gravesite and say goodbye. Au revoir, Maman. On peut toujours rêver. I can wonder, I can dream, and I can promise to always remember. No longer is it, Qu’il fait bon — it feels so good, but maybe more like, Cela me semble juste… That just seems right to me.