But You Did Not Come Back Read Online Free

say a word. That day, when no one was looking, he showed me his tattoo, saying, “I was at Auschwitz. Don’t tell them anything about it, they couldn’t understand.”
    Michel was with him. He’d gotten bigger—he was eight. I knelt down in front of him and asked: “Do you recognize me?” He said no, but a few seconds later, he added: “I think you’re Marceline.”He looked like a child who’d been abandoned. You were the one he was waiting for.
    We set off in silence. Once we’d crossed the bridge over the river Lez, I saw the Château de Gourdon outlined against the hillside. It made me want to turn back. I’ve never understood that place. I remember the first time you took me there, in a horse-drawn carriage, you were so excited and asked, “What is the thing you wish for most in the world, Marceline?” as if you were about to grant my wish. What did I hope for? The end of the war, that we’d be together, no longer apart, no longer hiding, that was what I wished for and nothing else. But you insisted and spoke in a very mysterious voice: “The place where I’m taking you …”
    You would have liked to hear me cry out that I’d always dreamed of a house like that. I didn’t say it. I wasn’t old enough to ask questions, but I didn’t understand why you were so excited. We were at war, we were living apart, in hiding, Pétain had come to power, he made us singsongs at school that I still know by heart, and you had just bought a château. Did you think that by becoming the owners of a château we would no longer be Jews in their eyes? You did know, though, you read every paper you could. But you wanted to believe in this country where you’d settled, you pretended to forget that the château couldn’t legally be yours, for the simple reason that you were a foreign Jew and didn’t have the right to own property. It was Henri, your eldest son, who’d signed the title deeds; he’d become a French citizen when he turned eighteen and had just been demobilized from a war we’d lost. But you had proclaimed: “Here, we are free,” as if to justify not having seen things through, to distance yourself as much as possible from the Polish pogroms. You’d planned to go to America but you’d stopped here, in France, perhaps because of Zola and his “ J’accuse ,” or Balzac, whom you’d read in Yiddish, you must have told yourself that nothing could happen to us here. How naïve you were. Maybe by buying the château and thevineyards all around it, you were showing some belief in Marshal Pétain, who advocated a return to the land. Or maybe you believed too much in the so-called Free Zone. Or the village’s mayor and police chief, who’d promised you they’d give us some warning. We were Jewish and we lived in the most visible of all the houses.
    That château was not for you, not for us. And we spent one night too many there. On that night, we’d warned many people not to stay at home, who knows why we decided not to run away until the next day. One more night in this château. One night too many. Did you see how fast they took it away from us? They put everyone they’d just arrested inside, we didn’t know them, perhaps they were Resistance fighters or people suspected of helping them; they arrived in groups. You were still groggy from the violent blow to your head from the butt of the rifle and I was clumsily packing our suitcases when a German said, “Take sweaters, it’s cold where you’re going.” They confiscated our house in front of our very eyes, andas Mama and Henriette watched, hidden in the bushes farther away; it was no longer our home, it never had been. Or for barely two years. The Germans set up their headquarters there.
    We made our way home almost in silence, me, Michel, and Uncle Charles. Mama was in the courtyard. She took me in her arms. “I can’t stay here,” I said right away. I added that you wouldn’t be coming back. Your prophecy burned in my throat. “Rest for