Cover

Title Page

THE ANGEL OF
HISTORY

Carolyn Forché

Dedication

for Harry and Sean Christophe

PART I

The Angel of History

There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world.
When French was the secret music of the street, the café, the train, my own
         receded and became intimacy and sleep.
In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to
         itself, demanding of my life an explanation.
When my son was born I became mortal.

Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April.
At the low tide acres of light, boats abandoned by water.
While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life.

Years later, on the boat from Beirut, or before the boat, an hour before, helicopters lifting
         a white veil of sea.
A woman broken into many women.

These boats, forgotten, have no keels. So it is safe for them, and the emptiness beneath
       them safe.
April was here briefly. The breakwater visible, the lighthouse, but no horizon.
The music resembled April, the gulls, April, but you weren’t walking toward this house.
If the child knew words, if it weren’t necessary for him to question me with his hands—
To have known returning would be like this,
         that the sea light of April had been your vigilance.

In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hôtel-Dieu, a sleepless woman pushes her stretcher
         along the corridors of the past. Bonjour, madame. Je m’appelle Ellie.

There were trains, and beneath them, laddered fields.

Autumns the fields were deliberately burned by a fire so harmless children ran through it
         making up a sort of game.
Women beat the flames with brooms and blankets, so the fires were said to be under
       control.

As for the children, they were forbidden to ask about the years before they were born.
Yet they burned the fields, yet everything was said to be under control
         with the single phrase death traffic.

This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon.
This is a farmhouse in Izieu.
Itself a quiet place of stone houses over the Rhône, where between Aprils, forty-four
       children were
         hidden successfully for a year in view of the mountains.
Until the fields were black and snow fell all night over the little plaque which does not
       mention
       that they were Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu near Bregnier-Cordon.

Comment me vint l’écriture? Comme un duvet d’oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver.
In every window a blank photograph of their internment.

Within the house, the silence of God. Forty-four bedrolls, forty-four metal cups.
And the silence of God is God.

In Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Les Milles, Les Tourelles, Moussac and Aubagne,
         the silence of God is God.