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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.

The children were taken to Poland.
The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland
         singing Vous n’aurez pas L’Alsace et la Lorraine.
In a farmhouse still standing in Izieu, le silence de Dieu est Dieu.

In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hôtel-Dieu it is winter.
If a city, ruin, if an animal, hunger.
If a grave, anonymous.
If a century, this.

Are the present hundred years a long time? But first see whether a hundred years can
       be present.

We lived in Ste. Monique ward over the main corridor, Ellie and myself, in the Hôtel-
         Dieu on the Place du Parvis Notre Dame.
Below us jonquils opened.
Ellie was afflicted with scales again, tiny Ellie, at the edge of her bed, peeling her skin
         from her arm as if it were an opera glove,
and weeping cachée, cachée, cachée all during the war.

Barn to barn in the haylight, field to cellar. Winter took one of her sons, and her own
         attempt to silence him, the other.

Le Dieu? Le Dieu est un feu. A psychopath. Le Dieu est feu.

It isn’t normal for a mother to outlive her children.

It isn’t normal that my sons should be dead.

Paris! Oh, how I loathe this city because of its past.

Then you wish to leave Paris?

Mais oui. I wish to leave life, my dear.
My parents? Deported. My aunts and uncles? Deported. My friends? All of them
   deportees.
I don’t know what became of a single one. How they came to the end.
My papers said I was Polish. When the money ran out, we ran. When the Nazis came,
     we ran. Cachée, cachée, cachée!

The tubercular man offers his cigarette and the snow falls, patiently, across the spring
       flowers.

My life, triste. Do you understand? This place. No good! France. No good! Germany.
       No good! Ni l’Union soviétique. Fascists! It is no good.

Then why not leave Paris?

I am Jewish. Do you understand? Alone in a small room on the third floor, always alone.
To remain sane, I sing librettos to myself, and German lullabies, can you imagine?

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn bleib ich auch lebendige Zeit
ich hätte wenig Glück

My husband was a soldier against the Nazis. Résistance. Agir. He wasn’t killed in
       the war.

He even returned to me. It was after the war he died. He died of cholera.
         And the world is worse now than it was then.

Worse?
Mais oui!

We must wear our slippers and not smoke. We must not go further than the sign No
       ADMITTANCE.

No — a little residue of nothing. And admittance, what does it mean? That they are
     not going to blame themselves for anything.
But the deportees, no, there is nothing between the word and those who are not, who do not
         reviennent.
And if language is an arbitrary system, one must not go further than the sign No
       ADMITTANCE
         in the Hôtel-Dieu on the Place du Parvis Notre Dame.

Then my husband came with our child in his arms and stood outside Ste. Monique.
         They would not permit the child near my bed.
A tuberculosis wing in winter.
You go out then in the hallway, yes. You have the right to see your child. Don’t let
         anyone stop you. They are all fascists.

A rain through raised windows, as in: you must not forget anything: the hours, hope,
sleeplessness,
         and the trains, you must not forgive them.
Smoke rising from the fields, the death of a husband, winter’s
         breath and the moonlight that reached the pallet.
Hunger, and the knife of waking, the cold knife.

In April, the lilacs come, wrapped in Le Monde.
         “A plane went down in Warsaw this afternoon.”
There was time to imagine it: a wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.

But when asked in what sense the world was worse, she answered Pardon, est-ce que je
       vous dérange?
         Je ne sais pas très bien m’éxpliquer en français.

Hôtel-Dieu? Some people say so. I say this God is insane.

We held roses, then the roses rested on the snow as if someone had died there. Winter.
       There were many
         graves. All the same kind.
So it would be a cemetery of war….

They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded.
         So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.

And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?
         The dead aren’t like us.
How can the fields continue as simple fields?

The child has gone to the city with his father. They are en route past remaining weeks
         of boarded summer houses, beach pine, a blue water tower.
The winter residents are packing for spring.
You should return to Ellie. You mustn’t leave her alone.
But we’ve lost days, and many times tried to begin again, while she locks herself in the
       water closet to sing.
         (The words are somewhere. The words belong here.)
Her skin sloughing in the hard towels.
And just then the doves rise and batter the wind.

In my absence, the child took his first step alone,
         moving along the white hallway without help but at night nearly drowning in
       my own breath.
Ellie lifting tissues of herself from herself.
Here, in this book, I have found your illness. It is called St. Anthony’s Fire.

I don’t go out now. It’s a terrible thing to see me walk.
         (The bell of her husband’s ax breaking open the river.)

It is worse than memory, the open country of death.

A tall light entered the room. The windows, hand blown, were those of occupied Paris.
I was waiting for the child’s birth.
There were cut tulips in the glass.

Simone was alive. Twice her hand reached to fold the blue shutters back over the
       windows, and once she
         touched the window as I passed.
Under the plane trees of Montparnasse:
         The cemetery workman’s wheelbarrow, an old woman’s knowledge of graves.

That first week after his birth were wet balconies and voile. White roses.
         And God’s name a boneless string of vowels.

And just now it was as if someone not alive were watching,
         so I asked if he’d suffered very much and he said no.

But when I came back from the border something odd happened.
It had been more than seventy days and I weighed nothing.
My bags were no heavier than usual but I couldn’t lift them.
After a drink and some talk I went for a rest.
When I woke my room was filled with vultures.
They were hopping about the room, belching and vomiting flesh,
     as you saw them at Puerto Diablo and El Playon.

Exactly as you saw them.

As if someone not alive were watching.
On the sill, the bureau, in the bath and on my body

So fat with flesh they weren’t able to fly

And when I turned, there was nothing,
         as someone asks, Is something wrong?

In the window of my earlier life, it is often winter, a glass white with my own breath,     and in rubbing it clear I see only my own reflection.

It was years before my face would become hers, yours, and hers, the other’s, facing
         each other through days, pain, the prisoner’s visiting window.

Adjusting the light so as to see again, so as to commit memory to our features, my eyes,
         hers, our breath, hers, my own—

As if it were possible to go on living for someone else.

When she walked home with me, for me, toward the National Palace, then inside
         with me to prevent my going alone.

Knowing each would give the other her own life, I live yours now, the one you might
       have lived in Paris,
         and your daughters are with me.

We have festivals in memory of you, and nightmares in which you tell us

It is never night when you die.

Eight years later in France I opened your letter as if you had sent it years before we
were parted.
         On blue foolscap in your own hand:

What has become of us? The factory work has aged me, threaded my hair with tin,
         buried my eyes in my face, taken a few of my teeth
         and emptied my body of its fruits.

My children have grown and live separate from me in exile. I haven’t seen them, nor the
         children they’ve had.
The broken mountains have become neutral.

I have in my possession his diary, a sack of the clothing they cut from his body, the
       photograph taken
         before the war, and I call it the war now, I no longer call it the struggle.

Our house has fallen and the debris prevents me from digging up what we buried behind
       it many years ago.

Please, when you write, describe again how I looked in the white dress that improbable
       morning
         when my random life was caught in a net of purpose.

Here you live in an atelier beside Simone’s overlooking the cemetery.
Here you are in exile but can’t afford to buy a clock.
Here at cafe tables you write letters to the disappeared and, worse, mail them.
Here you taste rascasse, a fish you never will have tasted.
Here you open your arms when the man who might have loved you comes.

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an
       experience all the way to the end.

As the last helicopter lifted away from the deck of the Manitowac and the ship turned

Bonsoir, madame. Je m’appelle Ellie.

A colander of starlight, the sky in that part of the world.

A wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.

Bonsoir. Est-ce que je vous dérange?

On the contrary, I’m happy to practice speaking.

Then you aren’t French. How fortunate for me. I couldn’t have shared this room with a
       French woman.

While the white phosphorous bombs plumed into the air like ostrich feathers of light
       and I cursed you for
         remaining there without me, for tricking me into this departure.

Parlez-vous français? Est-ce que vous le parlez bien?

So beautiful, ma’am, from here, the sailor said, if you don’t stop to think.

And it went on like that all night, questions in French, and it went on, radiant white
       feathers along the coast of Lebanon, until Ellie slept.

How can one confuse that much destruction with one woman’s painful life?

Est-ce que je vous dérange? she asked. Et pourquoi des questions?

Because in French there is no auxiliary verb corresponding to our English did

         As in

Did you wait for him to come back? and Did he return from the war alive?

         Or

Did you decide in Beirut to go on without him?

As if someone not alive were watching:
Bonsoir. Est-ce que je vous dérange?

Night terrors. A city with all its windows blank.
A memory through which one hasn’t lived.

You see, I told Madame about my life.
I told her everything.
And what did she say?

PART II

The Notebook of Uprising

“What will be is not; and what would be;
what was, what might have been, they are not.”

—PAUL VALÉRY, Parables

I

The hand moves across the page of its own accord.
The first years are a yellow field, and a child singing through her crib bars.
Yours, the windblown canola between the curtain and hope. Mine, the languor of
       peony in a time unknown to us.
You wanted only to retrieve a few invisible souvenirs:
       words spoken by coals in a tile oven,
       empty iron benches wrapped in snow.

Anna said we were all to be sent: Poles, Romanians, Gypsies.
So she drew her finger across her throat.

II

Anna stands in a ring of thawed snow, stirring a trash fire in an iron drum until her face
       flares, shriveled and intent, and sparks rise in the night along with pages of
   burning
       ash from the week’s papers,
       one peeling away from the rest,
an ashen page framed in brilliance.

For a moment, the words are visible, even though fire has destroyed them, so
       transparent has the page become.
The sparks from this fire hiss out among the stars and in thirty years appear
       as tracer rounds.

They didn’t want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it.

III

Smoke wrote from its fire something brief
       in the city of what could be said.
As if a cemetery were a field of doors. Requia crying against the walls. Little roofs of
   moonlight.
The ecstasy of standing outside oneself—

Anna said “carry this” and “follow behind me.”
The earth is tired and marked, human after human.

IV

So we are going back, to the invisible railyard shed and the poppy-seed cakes.
Anna, coal-eyed in a field of bone chips.

When you were born a steamed pot lid was shaken over your face to provide tears for a
   lifetime.
       This is why you have such happiness no matter what.
Were these the animals of your village? Pigs, goats, geese, a few cows?

Pigs with their throats cut. Goats eating flowers. Crows descending on a child to pull
   hair for their nests.

You loved the shabbiness of the world: countries invaded, cities bombed, houses whose
   roofs have fallen in,
       women who have lost their men, orphans, amputees, the war wounded.
What you did not love any longer was a world that had lost its soul.

V

There are more geese than people in this village and the geese know it. They march
   through the streets
       kicking their feet high like the Germans and, later, the Russians.
On parade, necks craned, beaks open, honking like German jeeps and, later, Russian.

I am not sure what the photograph has to do with what happened.

One went to sweep the schools clean in a mountain town. Another took his life but
   where did he take it?
Don’t believe Western news reports: a carnival of resistance. Rather, think of it this way: you
       are an insomniac who has gone to bed on an ordinary August night.

VI

Alenka: You must not speak anymore. I am going to tell you.

VII

His grave is strewn with slipper flowers in a coppice of loss.
       The girl whose uncle was a violin, Borovská.
Years taken from them: birch light, his breath in her mouth, what do we have to forget?
       In 1941 he knew her, all shawl, her fear.
A basket of bread and klobása wrapped in pain.
       That he had escaped the fate of the others was unknown to her.

VIII

This is close, and passing time brings it no closer: the years, cities moving beside a train.
       What comes back? That Matejka could fold his ears up and stick them inside his head.
       That the women of his village pissed standing up.
       All winter, sandwiches of duck fat.

Then someone calling. It might be from the past. It has that quality.

IX

Folded swans in the mirror, Vltava,
your hand on the bridge rail
in a blackened city under a soot heaven
holding a banner completely fashioned of hope.

X

Beyond the tarred Teplice road, past cut fields, tarpaulin-covered hayricks,
       petrochemical plants spewing black smoke,
Poppies afflicted the hayfields with wounding brilliance.

The people were harvesting cauliflower then from the gardens of Terezin.
Blank-eyed, a boy pedaled a bicycle back and forth with a naked broken doll in its basket.

At the prison gate a woman stood holding a bouquet of leeks wrapped in paper.
Two Czech soldiers strolled through what had once been the women’s compound.
Doors opened and closed, swallows dipped into the prison yard and rose.
We walked the cold, swept-clean barracks, ran our hands down long trestle tables and
   tiered bunks.
We picked forget-me-nots and left them where he died.
Somewhere here, somewhere with his name carved into a wall, are the words
       into your sun-blessed life.

XI

In the café across from Zivnostenská banka we are able to buy
       a sack of bread for the road, and poppies.
In the tin light we walk, our sandwiches in foil
       like the light along Národní, street of the kiosks.

The wind has eaten the faces from the angels of Charles Bridge
       as if the earth were finished with us.

We leave our konvalinka for the saint, white tulips for the mother of God.

XII

Along Leninova, soot pines and state trucks,
       a world emptying of human belief.

Since the war, they begin, or after the invasion:
a little stiff bread to soak up the blood
(meat and boiled potatoes),
a small silence for each of them,
salt in the palm,
a cold stone of bitterness.

“It is playing chess with us.”

XIII

A two-hour queue for pears, a waxen hill of spent tapers where
       Jan Palach immolated himself.
Meat lines, bridge lights in the Vltava.

In a child’s leather prayer book from Terezin: V.K. 1940, hearts, a police doll wearing
   the star.

This is Hana Minka’s field of flowers.
This is Gobi Friová’s imaginary house.

There are flowers growing on the roofs of the cell blocks, the low bricked grass-roofed
   prisons,
       the au revoir of the tunnels.

In starvation rooms along a wall of fading blue figures
       a fresco of hair the blue of bread smoke.

On a wreath’s black ribbon, the word for scaffold: popraviště.

XIV

We cross the Danube into a world in decline:
       nothing has changed here, nothing is as it was.

Darkening lindens, drunks beneath sodium lamps, the bottles belling against the cobbles.

On the back page of a calendar, 1938: “… to the courthouse to be taken away.”
The word on the empty box: Important (all the boxes empty).

In the leather valise, a Dominican habit, altar linens, soap, the clothing of a railway
       conductor wrapped in Rudé Právo
Moth-winged curtains, a blizzard of moths from a trunk’s maw, piano and corpse dust,
       gold attic shafts of spirit.

In the diary “… whoever it was went to prison,”
       a window not opened in twenty-two years.

XV

The past is not where you left it, Svetko.
It is a ruined city, spackled with grief,
       The house, still yellow stucco with pear trees.
Empty swallow nests hang in the eaves
       woven with bits of collar and sleeve.
There is a diary open to the words cannot remain here.

XVI

What has eaten these walls? wind in the mustard fields.
Death maps.
Rat teeth.

Hurrying we find German war maps of the High Tatras where Anna lived, and one of
   Brno
       as if there were a corpse in the armoire.

XVII

A mirror of swans, a gesture of regret, bridge stones rippling in the Vltava,
       your face strewn with childhood:

We were looking for_____ we found_____.

The hourly figures struck each other.
They knew the time was passing in which we are now suspended.

As long as it takes snow to slip from the coal piles,
       a memory barely retrieved from a fire is (the past) in its hiding place.

XVIII

We find her in a block of worker housing flats on a small namástí bordering a ditch
       near one of the places where
Hitler could have been stopped.

Her name appears in a column of names: Borovská.

My voice fills the call box:
“This is the granddaughter of Anna Bassarová and the daughter of Michal.”

There was so much weeping, she said, but never anyone.
A language even paper would refuse,
bell music rolling down the cold roofs,
their footsteps disappearing as they walked.

She stood on the landing of disbelief in Brno as if the war were translucent behind us,
       the little ones in graves the size of pillows.

XIX

This is a map drawn from memory of the specular itinerary of exile.

An erasure of everything destroyed yet left intact:

Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.

Kafka drawn in soft coal.

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