Continued

Belated Letter

Belated Letter Oh Grandpa Cesar, why didn't you wait for me? A single glance would have been enough and today I'd know that I can, that I have the right to recall your face, because I'd really have seen it. Photos are old and dead, and Mother's stories rarer and rarer. A single sentence would have been enough, would have been repeated to me, for sure. You know, Uncle Marcel —when I was there for the first time —drew me the whole family tree (I wanted to draw him one too, but was ashamed: Mama, Grandma — he already had Grandma anyway, since she was your wifeFather , and Chaim and Fajga, his parents, of whom, as about him, I know nothing to this day — and that was everybody), and I looked and looked surprised to find myself on this big piece of paper, just below Mama, and that in one family there could be so many people. You were of course much higher and deeper. Everyone spoke of you with respect and love, and I felt that you had an artistic soul, and I was proud. I think that in a decent French family in those days too, to marry a Jewess wasn't easy, especially in a country 105 of which only the language was left (although a friend says: only the word pan, and front porches). Mama was saying there had been two wedding ceremonies —I suppose civil marriages weren't so popular yet? — ah, these compromises for the sake of the common good and not irritating the relations, eh? And when you came back from the war, supposedly you told Grandma to scramble twenty eggs. That always impressed me an awful lot. I wonder whyyou and not the other one, Father's father, of whom I don't know a thing— I don't know if it's possible to not know so much about someone —except that he lived, had a wife, a first and last name, and that he had to do something. So it would be even easier to write about him, to him, than to you. I could create myself, build myself from scratch. And what emotions those would be! Was Lodz such a grim city back then, too? Of course I'd bring you here, to Otwock, and show you, in detail, this place where there's nothing to show, and would tell you. Maybe this is where everything came from: there was nowhere to go, nothing to see, one had to sit at home, at most look out the window — fifty-, sixty-year-old frame houses, one or two floors of creaky stairs, exposed dumps and dead cats in the yards, and the ball that always gets away from the children into the garbage, some skinned pines, pud106 dies or dark dry stains after puddles, underwear on the line. All this —through the window and inside the tiled stove, the bed, the square of cellar hatch on the floor, and the bronzed strip of sunlight lying under the wardrobe; dust. My friends here know nothing about you, or maybe I did once mention the Legion d'honneur, the mustachioed lieutenant, Verdun and the Somme, but at most once, and probably only to one or two, I forget whom. And even if they remember something of it, they probably think I wasboasting, who knows. And maybe it really is making up one's own genealogy? Later on, I wasmostly ashamed of not having learned your language. Maybe Mama started to teach me too early, when I preferred to grab a heel of bread and go out to the yard (does it have to stay this way? Colette once said I could speak quite well). In the yard the children reminded me too, calling "piot-rhuzh, piot-rhuzh," as if they knew and needed me to share their knowing that you'd come from France. But soon I realized it was a matter of another country, that is, the other grandpa (I don't know how come they knew it so much better than I did). But I don't want to blame Mother, I myself have wasted many opportunities. 107 Oh Grandpa Cesar, why didn't you wait for me? Your great-grandson hasn't even turned three, and yet if I died now, I bet he'd remember something of me. So just a few more...