Read But You Did Not Come Back for Free Online Page B

was born that day. I know that Jacqueline sends the flowers for me but also for her father.
    My return is synonymous with your absence. To such an extent that I wanted to obliterate it, to disappear like you did. I tried to drown myself in the Seine two years later, the year Henri got married. It happened a little farther along from the Quai Saint-Michel: I’d climbed over the parapet and was about to throw myself in when a manstopped me. Then I got tuberculosis; I was sent to a chic sanatorium in Montana, Switzerland. Mama sometimes came to see me. I couldn’t stand her impatience, the way she had of ordering me to get well and to forget. I was such a burden. I tried to kill myself a second time.
    Yet in the camp, I did everything I could to stay alive. Never allowed myself to believe that death would mean peace. Never became that girl I’d seen throw herself against the electric fence. She wasn’t the only one, it had become a common expression “to go to the fence,” to die quickly, electrocuted or riddled with bullets from the machine guns in the watchtower, ending up in the deep pit dug just in front of the barbed wire fences. Never gave up the will to live, never became like the women who let themselves go, choosing to neglect themselves, a gradual detachment from their bodies, a slower death. They began by not saving some of the water from the bottom of their bowl to wash themselves with, they stopped eating, withdrew. They were called Muslims, I don’t know why, another wordthe Polish women used, perhaps because of the blankets they pulled over their heads. Soon they were even more emaciated than us; they couldn’t work anymore and were sent to the gas chamber.
    I held on. I did. I fought off sickness and the temptation to let myself go under. For the first time in my life, I fasted on Yom Kippur, to feel more Jewish, to remain dignified in the face of the SS. I made up all sorts of strategies to survive. I might have even started to do that in the train. Do you remember? We had just arrived somewhere, we were exhausted, silent, it was dawn, the train slowed down, I climbed up on someone’s shoulders, looked out of the small window; I saw a group of women walking in rows of five, they all seemed to be wearing the same dress, they all had red scarves on their heads, so I said: “We’re going to have costumes here.” I used words from civilization to describe what would happen to us; I preferred that to the absolute silence that had overwhelmed you and the others. I was already resisting. And when the doors opened, I heard thedeportees in their striped clothing whisper to me: “Give the children to the old people, say you’re eighteen.” I had just turned sixteen at Drancy and I was smaller than normal. An SS officer made me open my mouth three times in a row to see my teeth, and I lied about my age.
    Why was I incapable of living once I’d returned to the world? It was like a blinding light after months in the darkness, it was too intense, people wanted everything to seem like a fresh start, they wanted to tear my memories from me; they thought they were being rational, in harmony with passing time, the wheel that turns, but they were mad, and not just the Jews—everyone! The war was over, but it was eating all of us up inside.
    I would have liked to give you good news, to say that after having lived through the horrors, waiting in vain for you to come back, we recovered. But I can’t. You should know that our family did not survive. It fell apart. You had so many wonderful dreams for all of us, but we couldn’t live up to them.
    After Henri’s wedding, we stayed on to live in Paris, on the second floor of 52 Rue Condorcet. Little by little, we abandoned that château you’d fallen in love with. It became a vacation home, even somewhere that felt was a punishment. Mama sent me there every time I wasn’t doing well, as if to harden me up in the atmosphere of your authority and your dreams, which