I know I am bound to repeat myself, but it just won't go away.  The bedside table is full of books: read, unread, and re-read for the umpteenth time.  The Angel of History Just won't go away...

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 cafe, 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 Hotel-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 Rhone, 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'‚criture? 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 Hotel-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 Hotel-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 cachee, cachee, cachee 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. Cachee, cachee, cachee!

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 sovi‚tique. 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 Flugel ist zum Schwung bereit ich kehrte gern zuruck, denn bleib ich auch lebendige Zeit ich hatte wenig Gluck

My husband was a soldier against the Nazis. Resistance. 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 H“tel-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 derange? Je ne sais pas trŠs bien m'‚xpliquer en fran‡ais.

Hotel-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.

The foregoing is excerpted from The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Taken from:
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060925840/The_Angel_of_History/excerpt.aspx