The warm days are de retour.
The other day, not far from where rue Saint Maur runs into the avenue Parmentier, I sat down for coffee with two women acquaintance, Orsola and Corinne.
In the course of friendly chatting in which I was diligently, we could even say, desperately, trying to please, politics came up. My face reddened, strong knot tightened in my stomach; I suddenly needed to bite, to scratch, to maul, to run down and kill.
It may very well be, it certainly is, that my political phobias are true phobias and that I am right but my feeling was all down to my Aunt Helen.
She is why I always want to please people of the woman persuasion, maybe even why I search them out for company. Also, I share a lot of my emotional makeup with her.
Aunt Helen was a beautiful woman, ‘though, for the life of me, I can not recall her hair or eye color or whether she was tall and thin or short and squat. But I can feel her in my bones. I can smell her farm-kitchen scent and hear her breathily ahtaahlkin’…
Aunt Helen’s was a womanly bosom where I was a single and unique. I needed that. I feel her caress yet, the brush of her fingertips, now; I bathe in her warmth still, as I sit here.
With such introduction, I think, did I early learn to love womanly company not my mother.
Aunt Helen, actually one of several great aunts, with three handsome children and a fine, deferential husband, also constable of Somerset, was the youngest sister of her large, late-19th-century American family. As such, it was part of Yahweh’s design that Helen, daughter and sister, take care of her grandparents, parents, sisters and brothers, especially as they became infirm and like to die.
This meet disposition of things, which proves that duty, especially family duty, is a great motivator of human affairs, is why Aunt Helen, otherwise a mere female, was nevertheless a landed magnate and a friendly-society bank. She had the family’s house and farm – parts of which were log and daub and others, stone, clapboard, brick and Queen Anne's lace.
The family’s old and “nervous” – as we then referred to those in existential distress – found a home with Aunt Helen down at the farm.
Also, Aunt Helen was, as the good old gods are my witness, 452nd iteration of her most imperturbable Queen of Misrule and Mistress sans pair of Liberty Hall. Surely more energetic than nervous and, as they then believed, more like to go on forever than die, grandchildren spent splendid summers there, soused with sassafras beer and rolling in homemade ice cream.
Aunt Helen enjoyed a quiet fame.
I once wrote her a little thank-you note from our house up north, scrawling only “Aunt Helen, Somerset” on the envelope. She got it.
Aunt Helen’s bosom was also as full of political poison as of auntliness. The woman was a paragon of righteous and irrational political hatred. When her real or imagined political enemies or their associates or their ideas or what seemed like their ideas or associates were invoked or evoked, and under all circumstances, her face would twist with fury, her soft hands clench to wring a neck, she would cramp up to commit murder.
At such a moment, Aunt Helen would be what she actually was: Helen S., an ineffably eccentric, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, intensely sober, utterly unsentimental farm-lady-wife-mother with an unquestioned and unquestionable habit of command. She had a taste, even late in life, for driving souped-up cars at dangerously high-speeds. There was always a good car on the lawn. She had good taste in food and things. There were always good food and things. She had a sixth sense for the beautiful. You just had to look where she was looking.
All Aunt Helen’s views and judgments applied to all persons in all circumstances and, once applied, applied forever, no exceptions. Not even a smidgen’s bit of Hamlet in her, certainly no fear of untoward dreams.
A good part of the me that is Aunt Helen is the hater part of her: in politics, my emotions turn all too easily to murder. It is a part of me that is finding all too much scope these days; I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam, I DO NOT like green eggs and ham.
I know I get my demonic urge to political murder from Aunt Helen. Self-knowledge is, of course, as much comfort as self-knowledge usually is: it might one day keep me from intemperately using my fists or pulling a trigger.
What puzzles me is where Aunt Helen got it?
So.
There I am, then, Aunt Helen-ing: my red face and clenching fists making me a spectacle before these pleasant women whose real interest in my political feelings is not much more than polite curiosity.
Orsola, well-brought up and obviously versed in emergency treatment of faux pas through apt distraction, immediately started talking about a documentary she had seen on the Arte web channel, called Les enfants du 209 rue Saint Maur Paris Xème, directed by Ruth Zylberman and apt, indeed.
209, Rue Saint Maur dollies a camera and microphone around the fate of the residents of the large 19th-century building at that same address from around the 1920s into the late mid-1940s. The timeline is contextualization of the despoiling and deportation of the apartment building’s Jewish tenants, at that time, first- or second-generation immigrants from north east Europe, like, say, Mexican immigrants in the US today.
The building’s not far from here, Corinne said, pointing vaguely.
But hatred burrows into my breast and coils there like a frustrated viper and is hard to dislodge, so I leave occasions for sin as quickly as I can. I was listening politely, but, still grappling with Helenique emotion and, anyhow, feeling embarrassed, I said I’d try to see it.
I then left, somewhat abruptly.
I hopped on a bus.
Quite by chance, Georges, a neighbor, was on the bus. He had his eyes cast down on a thick book but he saw me, just as I saw him. Chatting wasn’t what either one of us had in mind, but what can you do?
I asked, What’s that fat book, Georges? He said, It’s a psychoanalytic thriller, set in Vienna, you know, when psychoanalysis and fascism and all that stuff were getting their start. Really good. I said, Try the Bernie Gunther series. You should like it, too. It’s about a reasonable human being forced to make a living in Nazi Berlin. Georges replied, See Les enfants du 209 rue Saint Maur Paris Xème. You should like it, too.
While I was making lunch, I found Les enfants du 209 rue Saint Maur Paris Xème, started watching and, chin still in hand more than an hour later, burned my lunch.
Rue Saint Maur was as absorbing as – and seemed to me as inspired by the same humanist flame as – that wonderful Italian cinematic opera di saponi, La meglio gioventù, (The Best of Youth), directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. Both Meglio and rue Saint Maur apply a-slice-of-life optic to historical events, as if Neighbors or General Hospital had hired on a writer with a preternaturally sensitive grasp of the historical sweep of ordinary human action, of feelings and behaviors. In Meglio, politics belongs to the psychically distressed. In rue Saint Maur, they are descriptive, like the shape of eyebrows or the color of skin.
Director Zylberman, Meglio’s Giordana, lets out her story thread delicately: it is a squiggly line, the slops and drips left on the kitchen floor by the cooks and their kids, not an unbreakable chain of retrospective, historical logic. Thus, Zylberman turns an old story of sorrow and pity into a study of human nature – which, in case you’re still in doubt, is at the root of all politics. Zylberman’s approach to her subject just makes it impossible not to ask yourself some interesting, even “important” questions, which is why I got so wrapped up I burned my lunch.
For instance. A man, a neighbor, Dinanceau père, saves the lives of many children, putting himself in great peril. Would he have done it if he hadn’t felt a need to test Dinanceau fils’s loyalty to himself over his son’s loyalty to his political ideals (and by doing that testing his own human loyalty against his own political ideals)? Again. The building concierge is reputed indifferent, cold-hearted, maybe hostile. Yet, when a tenant shoves a baby into her arms, she takes it, saves it. Would she have done it if her spoiled daughter – like the father-son relationship just mentioned, a subject of a fine study – hadn’t been in the squealing ‘O!-I-love-babies’ stage of girlhood and the on the spot witness?
Zylberman’s way of telling the story means that the ironies of life get more thought applied to them. Neither the little boy saved, then adopted then brought to America nor the concierge’s daughter can or want to remember a thing about all those bad things that happened. Is that a coincidence? The police inspector who lives in the building alerts Jewish neighbors to the upcoming raids. All the Jewish neighbors? Or just a few?
When the FFI, the unified internal resistance organization, entered Paris, they grabbed Dinanceau père for Dinanceau fils. They were going to summarily shoot père, but, luckily, a surviving neighbor straightened them out in time. Dinanceau fils, whose own sister says was a “bad ‘un” who took the Nazi salt, never denounced his father’s activities. The sister concludes from that, that, after all, Dinanceau fils, her brother, wasn’t “all bad”.
Again. In this small space on the rue St Maur from 1940 to 1945, as well as sundry ordinary people, including the victims themselves, there are at least two functionaries of the French state who actively resist or undermine the government’s murder goals. Given the scale of the government’s final success, can one conclude that after-the-fact individual resistance, however laudable or well-placed, really hinders a determined policy once the policy gets going? So, in the modern world, once bad things get rolling, they roll on just as well as good things.
My Aunt Helen is a case in point and one of the true sadnesses of my life.
She, like a lot of my family members, was fond of aspirated alliteration. So it was that she finally convinced herself, once my sweet cousin Lolly had died in a high-speed car accident and all the old folks were done dying, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
And once convinced, she took arms against her sea of troubles and by opposing sought to end them. She gave the farm to a man who said he would Save the world, simultaneously running off to be a soldier in her war in his ranks.
Her family got the place back ruined. Aunt Helen never spoke to a soul again and, about 30 years ago, died in exile.