Crossing the Borders of Time (11 page)

B
ETWEEN THE
R
HINE
R
IVER
and the granite Vosges Mountains, in the heart of Mulhouse, the old city hall or
mairie
is an improbable Renaissance building of bubble gum pink and bright painted gold that presides over the pretty place de la Réunion like an elaborate wedding cake on a dessert buffet of cookies and pies. A work of gleeful imagination, the structure is covered entirely with mischievous trompe l’oeil decorations that appear to be ornate architectural details and statues, but are all just part of a painted façade.

How curious, then, to discover slowly that this confection’s only real, three-dimensional detail, save for a notable double staircase in front, is a stern directive toward peaceful civic behavior. This is delivered by way of a grotesque bald female head carved from a twenty-five-pound stone, which hangs from a wall on a thick metal chain and is known as the
Klapperstein
or Tattler’s Stone. Staring down on the street with bulging eyes, flushed cheeks, an anguished brow, and a swollen tongue that lewdly protrudes from its mouth, the head bears a warning to passersby in old rhyming German: “I am called the
Klapperstein
, well known to those with a nasty mouth,” it says in translation. “Whoever takes pleasure in quarrels and disputes must carry me through the streets of the city.”

According to historical accounts of life in Mulhouse, the town punished gossips, quite often women, by parading them on market days, either on foot or seated backward on a donkey, with the heavy
Klapperstein
hung from a rope around their necks and sometimes also a sign on their backs confessing their slander. A placard dating to 1576, preserved in the building, announces that being condemned to carry the
Klapperstein
for indulging in speech deemed “vulgar, insulting, slanderous, or hurtful” would punish the culprit and serve as a useful example to others. Early on, this was hailed as a valuable goal in a town as provincial as Mulhouse, with little to offer, then or now, in the way of distractions. In a place so inbred, discretion was crucial. Still, in the story of love and loss that my mother shared with Roland Emil Léon Arcieri, wagging tongues in the town of his birth would eventually play a significant role.

The
Klapperstein
or Tattler’s Stone, hanging from the pink and gold
mairie
or city hall in Mulhouse, France
(photo credit 5.1)

Roland’s family background was partly Italian. His mother, Léonie Christophe, came from a French village west of the Vosges. His father, Emil, was the son of a shoemaker from a village near Genoa who had migrated to Lutzelhouse, an Alsatian village in the Valley of the Bruche, sixteen miles southwest of Strasbourg. As a result of the 1870 war that put French Alsace in Prussian hands, Emil was born German. He was drafted to serve as an Imperial Guard for the kaiser and then to fight in the German Army in World War I, even as his French father-in-law was seized by the Germans and died in a detention camp. Such were the not uncommon family tragedies in that contested border region, where generations of Alsatians found their nationality reassigned by history and the vicissitudes of war.

Léonie and Emil Arcieri with their daughter Emilienne and son, Roland
(photo credit 5.2)

Emil and his brother Joseph had moved south to Mulhouse to work in the sales office of a Lutzelhouse-based textile firm before World War I. Joseph sold cloth of plain white or ecru, and Emil traded in the printed cotton fabrics that brought the region world renown. Both brothers would spend their lives working for the same company, sheltered beneath the patriarchal umbrella typical of the Alsatian textile business of that era and linked always to their native village.

The Arcieris—the name means “archer” in Italian—were a close-knit family, Catholics in predominantly Calvinist Mulhouse. And although Roland’s Italian surname would eventually help him hide his Alsatian roots when confronted by Nazis in occupied France, his parents’ decision to have him circumcised when he was five years old would eventually lead to unforeseen dangers. Seared in his mind was the terrifying ordeal of being held tightly on his mother’s lap while the pediatrician in Mulhouse, hoping to cure an infection, snipped off his foreskin in the procedure that is traditionally performed on Jewish infants for religious reasons. But the horror of that memory would later pale beside his ongoing dread as a young man in the war years that a forced inspection inside his pants—called a
Hosenprobe
—by Jew-seeking Nazis would, in consequence of that critical snip, prompt sufficient suspicion for them to arrest him.

Born on May 23, 1920, Roland was the Arcieris’ only son, the middle child between two doting sisters, and he grew up first in an apartment near the center of town and later in a fine house on the rue du Ventron, on the fashionable green hills of the Rebberg section overlooking the city. Owing to his father’s wartime absence, he was seven years younger than Emilienne, the couple’s first daughter, and in every way possible, unaccountably different. While she was a shy, ungainly girl with dark, mournful eyes slanting beneath heavy brows, Roland was a beautiful child with thick curls and fine features.

In contrast, as well, while his sister was devout and conscientious, as a teenager Roland could not be called a hard worker, indulging instead in sports and pastimes with friends who admired his looks and charisma, his humor and pure dedication to creating for all, and not least himself, a very good time. “
Le plus qu’on est fou, le plus qu’on rigole
,” the more one is crazy, the more fun one has, was his only half-joking perspective on life. No grand ambition inspired him to study. Indeed, he willingly considered himself the black sheep of the family and confessed, not without self-satisfaction, “If everyone walks in one direction, I go in the other—that way there’s less traffic.”

This guiding principle involved no grave complications until the spring of 1937, when he set his normally lenient father’s pointed goatee aquiver by failing to pass his examinations at the lycée. For “reasons of vanity,” Roland announced to his parents, he simply could not repeat the same year, and certainly not in ignominy at the same local school. He spent weeks in his father’s office that summer writing to boarding schools, seeking admission to one that would let him move up, even provisionally, to the next grade. When he finally found an all-boys school in Nancy run by Jesuit priests who agreed to his terms, he persuaded his parents to permit him to leave. “I’ll never pass if I stay here,” the young man insisted. “I have too many friends. You must fence me in.”

Except for brief visits home from Nancy at Christmas and Easter, he was thereafter confined to school grounds and would pass his first baccalaureate the following spring near the top of his class. On his return home in the summer of 1938, however, after his uncharacteristically arduous studies, he was eighteen years old and starved for female companionship when he met Yvette, one of the Jewish girls who befriended Janine when she arrived in Mulhouse.

That fall, back in Nancy, Roland wrote to Yvette every week, sneaking his letters into the mail in violation of school rules, undeterred by the fact she never wrote back. It therefore came as a shock, a blow to his manhood, when he came home for Christmas to discover the girl of his frustrated boarding-school dreams ice-skating arm in arm with somebody else. Worse, amid whispers and giggles, he learned that Yvette had been regularly reading his love letters aloud to her friends. Mortified that his expressions of ardor had been so callously mocked, he returned to school feeling profoundly betrayed. No longer in use, the
Klapperstein
offered him no retribution. Nor could he know that he
had
won a heart he would hold for all time with the stream of letters he lovingly penned. Janine had heard them and never recovered.

How it secretly thwarted my sense of romance as a child when my mother added an unwanted prologue to my favorite story, that Roland’s first passions had been inspired by … Yvette! Only years later did I realize the psychological truth that her struggle to win Roland’s attention and trust actually caused her to treasure him more. Because Roland was wounded in love before they met, Janine had to woo him, and the challenge to win him became an obsession.

But I wanted to hear that their love had been perfect, created in heaven right from the start. Roland and Janine were Romeo and Juliet as far as I was concerned, the future of their innocent love subverted by forces and hatreds beyond their control. It therefore came as singularly satisfying to learn in sixth grade that even Shakespeare had conceived of his Romeo as first infatuated by another girl,
Rosalind
, who would “not be hit by cupid’s arrow.” Only then is the young romantic allowed to meet the one true love he would break all rules to wed and for whom, in despair, he would give up his life.

Within a few months of moving to Mulhouse, Janine was enjoying herself as never before. She had new friends, kind teachers, and unusual freedom, especially after her parents decided, now with only two bedrooms, to rent a small maid’s room on the building’s top floor to house their two daughters. As a precaution, Alice and Sigmar kept Norbert with them in the downstairs apartment in order to track his comings and goings and make sure that their girl-crazy son didn’t get into trouble in the hours he wasn’t working with Sigmar. Together they were trying to revive both the faltering pipe-fitting business that had been left to Sigmar’s sister Marie on the death of her husband and the virtually dormant building supply business that Sigmar had launched in Mulhouse before he was married. Now fifty-eight, minus the luxury of his car and driver, Sigmar trudged through the countryside on foot and by train looking for customers and finding it hard to make any money.

Alice, meanwhile, was coping alone for the first time in her marriage with laundry, cooking, and housework, with few friends except for Marie, who thankfully lived around the corner. In frustration, she watched Norbert abandon the business studies he had pursued in Switzerland so as to help his father, while her girls shook off the reins of their strict German upbringing. She worried especially to see Janine fall under the sway of Lisette, Marie’s eccentric, irreverent daughter-in-law.

A vivacious young woman of determined opinion, Lisette displayed a fierce intelligence that brought fire to her beauty. She was nineteen when she married Edy, Marie’s only son, and sparks flew between the two women as Lisette, whose own mother had died at her birth, delighted in shocking her mother-in-law and defying conventions. Lisette’s overtly sexual language, spirited wordplay, and philosophical wit left her listeners gaping, and the more stodgily proper they were, the more she felt it her duty to disturb and provoke them. Speaking in rhyme, she tossed bawdy double entendres over their heads. She also provided Janine, twelve years younger, with a startling new role model of a woman who claimed independence—a right she asserted throughout her life—regardless of how her sudden departures affected her children. There would be six children in all, ranging from thirteen to thirty-three by the time she and Edy divorced. Of the eldest, twin daughters, one was born severely disabled due to the fact that the obstetrician, initially failing to realize the need for a second delivery, waited too long.