Crossing the Borders of Time (31 page)

Full of rekindled desire and anguished self-doubt, she relived each jewellike second of their reunion and vowed to be different—more contained and much more elusive—the next time they met. Joy and despair wrestled all night for control of her mood, and she kicked herself for having neglected to learn his address, which made the next meeting all the more crucial. Having no phones, the only way to guarantee contact was to manage to keep each planned rendezvous. There was no way to reach him to alter arrangements or make excuses if her parents clamped down. She knew that she was facing a challenge. Despite the twenty-eight bridges of Lyon, she would have to start building one of her own in order to span the distance between them.

TWELVE
J’ATTENDRAI

“
S
HH
! J
E T’EN PRIE
! A
RRÊTE DE PARLER ALLEMAND!
” Mimi hissed a warning to Alice as she guided her down the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville toward her Lyon apartment. I beg you! Stop speaking German! She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder, flashed her aunt a look of annoyance, and buried her face in her upturned fox collar. “It won’t help any of us if you go on announcing yourself as a refugee to every stranger who happens to hear you!”

Chastened, Alice fell silent. The memory of Poststrasse 6 shimmered through angry tears that welled in her eyes, and she allowed herself to recall a time when it was right and natural for her to speak German, when being Frau Günzburger meant being somebody, and when she could have opened the door of her own fine home to Sigmar’s niece, with her elegant wardrobe and bleached blond hair, and taught her about hospitable welcomes.

As it was, the sudden sting of rebuke from Marie’s daughter overwhelmed the message her warning contained. Unemployment, war, defeat, and scarcity had helped Vichy malign the hundreds of thousands of Central European refugees who had fled into France in that decade. And as Mimi and other French Jews well understood the need to conform to a homogeneous national image, they feared that an alien hodgepodge of desperate Jews, not speaking the language, chased from their homelands but claiming a kinship, would undermine their social acceptance.

Alice heard only the personal slight. She recoiled on the sidewalk while Mimi stopped to unlock an exceptionally fine wooden door the color of amber, with cascading fruits and flowers in sculpted relief on long center panels. Pairs of decorative white marble columns flanked the entrance to number 99, where a classical sculpture adorned the graceful arch of the doorway. It showed a horned devil lurking beneath a marble bench where two dimpled cherubs innocently sat and played with a bird. He seemed to attest to the hidden presence of evil, like a symbol of inescapable doom.

The doorway of the Lyon apartment building at 99 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville (now rue du Président Edouard Herriot), where Emilie Cahen Goldschmidt and her husband, Maurice, lived with their three children
(photo credit 12.1)

Upstairs in Mimi’s salon, her husband, Maurice Goldschmidt, sat with Marie, Sigmar, Janine, and the eldest of his own three children—a son, Elie-Jean, at the age of fifteen a prodigy in music and mathematics. Every eye was focused on Sigmar, reading aloud a letter from his nephew Herbert in New York. He stopped midsentence as Mimi entered the room, Alice morosely trailing behind her. His niece sniffed the air and wheeled toward her husband.

“You’re serving
real
coffee, Maurice?” Mimi demanded before greeting the others, with a scowl that borrowed resentment from previous grudges and condemned the squandering of precious supplies. Maurice stared at the ivory fringe of the carpet. Where his wife was concerned, he had learned to adopt the virtue of silence. Indeed—squat, balding, and considerably older than she—Maurice appeared perpetually puzzled that the beautiful Mimi had ever accepted his marriage proposal. He had long closed his ears to the gossip about it, that two successive disappointments in love had impelled her to marry not for romance, but in order to put an end to pity, as well as to win an affluent lifestyle. Still, the unfortunate truth that the first of Mimi’s heartbreaks involved her own cousin Herbert meant that her pain was revived every time someone mentioned his name.

Herbert was the handsome and debonair son of Marie’s and Sigmar’s older sister Karoline. Though he and Mimi had fallen in love, full of ambition in his early twenties, he had sailed for New York, pledging to marry his cousin as soon as he earned the means to support her. With loans from Sigmar, he had launched himself in the American steel business, and his letters relayed a tale of success until he crashed with the stock market in 1929. By the time he climbed back, Herbert reported home with remorse that honor impelled him to marry an American woman, his former secretary, who had stood faithfully with him through penurious years when it was largely her salary that kept him afloat. He wrote with the hope that the passage of years had dimmed his cousin’s feelings for him and said he was certain that a lovely young woman of Mimi’s talent and charm would never lack for admirers. But the death of her second fiancé, slain in a violent robbery, completed her heartbreak. Rumor had it that inconsolable sorrow prompted Mimi to marry Maurice, a prosperous silk merchant, and that she opted to seek in wealth and status the elusive satisfaction she yearned for in love but never had found.

Sigmar’s nieces and nephews in the early 1920s (L to R): Herbert Winter, Emilie “Mimi” Cahen, Jacob Winter, Gretl Winter, Edmond “Edy” Cahen
(photo credit 12.2)

Since then, her esteemed position in Lyon social circles had come to define her, and she professed full confidence that her immediate family would remain safe under the protection of the French state. In fact, despite the menace of new anti-Jewish regulation, she refused to acknowledge that Vichy was initiating its own course of persecution beyond what she saw as the collaboration that Hitler imposed.

“
Qu’est ce qui se passe?
” What’s going on here? she said now, scanning the solemn faces around her. “What’s that you’re reading,
Oncle
?”

Sigmar explained that he had heard from his cousin Max Wolf, who had fled from Belgium to Brive-la-Gaillarde near the center of France and who, having applied for Cuban visas to get out of Europe, was urging them all to try the same route. Cuba was a clever backdoor for entry into the United States, Sigmar went on, and it offered the prospect of quicker escape than dealing with quotas for stingily granted American visas. Truly, one had to face reality now. Toward that end—Sigmar’s tone shifted with evident pleasure—Herbert had volunteered to act as their sponsor and even to cover their travel, if needed. He was proposing to pay for their tickets through deposits with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York, which was working with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to secure space for Jews on refugee ships chartered to sail from Marseille or Lisbon. One extra bit of very good luck was that Herbert’s wife had a brother, a businessman with American government contacts in Cuba, who might help procure their U.S. visas from Havana, after they landed.

Sigmar said he was ready to begin the cumbersome process of applying for visas, which he supposed would also involve a trip to Marseille to see about passage across the Atlantic. The shortage of oceangoing ships from neutral countries required booking travel with confirmed reservations in order to get their visas approved, while visas also demanded a perplexing raft of other official documentation. Nonetheless, here was a plan, and he was enthused. He put down his letters and beamed at the circle. But he had failed to consider how the subject of Herbert would upset his niece or even to think how the abrupt prospect of abandoning home and country would explode at the feet of his French relations.

“Absolutely out of the question! I will eat at my table! I will sleep in my bed!” Mimi jumped from her chair, and a black and towering wave of rage, years in the building, spilled over the room. She glared at Maurice as if she had caught him plotting a crime.

“For you Germans, this may be just the right answer,” she snapped at Sigmar. “Cuba!
Allez-y!
Go ahead! But we are pureblooded French.
Pur sang
. Do you understand?” The term was a cold echo of the racialist themes espoused by the Nazis. “We have no intention of leaving our country. This whole discussion is absurd and alarmist.” She cut off the subject with a short, angry laugh. “Herbert!” she scoffed. “
Sans blague!
No kidding! So Herbert’s the hero planning to save us? I’d sooner place my faith in the marshal.”

While shocked to hear her father addressed in that way, Janine was secretly thrilled by her cousin’s pronouncement. The idea of moving again was intolerable now that Roland had reentered her world. And Cuba! Where was that? She couldn’t remember. Besides, the French were not Nazis, and time would prove, as it generally did, that Father had schemed and worried for nothing. Why, they had stewed in Gray for nearly a year before any actual fighting started, a year that cost her incalculably in terms of the time she had lost with Roland.

Sigmar stood, kissed his sister, turned to Maurice, and extended his hand. He was grateful to this openhearted nephew by marriage who had unstintingly lent him money to tide them over since their leaving Mulhouse. “Perhaps it’s best if we discuss this later,” he murmured, “after you’ve had time to think and talk it over with Mimi.” Alice and Janine dutifully followed him to the door, as Mimi moved to collect their coats. She did not try to conceal her impatience to be rid of her uncle and his pessimism, yet when she came to Janine, Mimi paused, still holding her cousin’s coat in her arms.

“I don’t know how you can wear those woolly black stockings,” Mimi observed, as her eyes came to rest on Janine’s dark legs and wooden-soled shoes. Her own, luxuriously encased in silk, were shining pink and ended in high-heeled, open-toe pumps of brown alligator. “I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing those things!”

Janine did not answer. Given the means, she would certainly have opted for silk, but such finery was beyond imagining now. Nevertheless, for the gift of Mimi’s rejecting the notion of running from France in fear for their lives, Janine would gladly forgive her cousin’s insensitive insult. She would even bestow a kiss on each powdered cheek and flash what passed for a genuine smile.

In ensuing weeks, Norbert found work managing the bookstore for a correspondence school across the Rhône, and he persuaded its Jewish owner to hire Janine to handle the business accounts, a job for which her training amounted to zero. (Her government-issued identity card as a foreign worker vaguely and inaccurately described her as a “German corrector.”) The school shipped books, assignments, and tests throughout the country to students pursuing their studies by mail because time or funds or location made attending high school classes unfeasible. But a perk of the job was the plausible pretext it offered Janine to seek out Roland on the rue de la République in the late afternoons, once she hatched the idea of having the school hire him to grade student papers in history and literature.