But You Did Not Come Back Read Online Free Page A

twenty-four hours and then we’ll see,” she replied. That made no sense. She was playing for time. She didn’t know what to say.
    She was one of those generous but brusque people, the kind completely lacking in insight, who block out their emotions, transforming them into laughter or anger. You know very well how she used to suddenly get all upset and lash out, how she would shout and pinch us hard. She had always been more caring toward her sons than she ever was toward her daughters, for we were nothing more than an extension of herself. She left it to you to teach us affection and authority. She wasn’thard-hearted. I didn’t hold it against her that she hadn’t come to the Lutetia or to meet us at the station. She didn’t understand where I was coming back from, or didn’t want to. She would have had to find words and gestures that were alien to her.
    They’d been free for a whole year when I arrived. Mama was often away; she was trying to get back her shop in Épinal, and everything they’d stolen from us, to earn a bit of money. Henri was in Paris about to get married, still thrilled by the months he’d spent with the FFL, the French Resistance, carried along on the postwar wave of amnesia and anti-Semitism that made everyone believe in a heroic France that clashed brutally with every one of my memories. Jacqueline was at boarding school in Orange, Michel was at Henriette’s house; I saw them on weekends.
    They had the imagination of the very young, saying that one day you would suddenly appear out of the blue, that now you were just sick and lost, far away, very far away, unable to tell anyone your name or address. Michel often wantedto go to the station and look for you on the platform. Strangely enough, sometimes I joined them, embraced their illusions, their fantasies, not for long, just for a few hours, to fall back into childhood again. Sometimes Jacqueline came into my room, she was thirteen and asked me questions about what had happened to me, she was the only one who did; I talked to her but I don’t remember what I said, whether I protected her or not. I’d also started writing, but always tore everything up. No one wanted my memories. We didn’t have any memories in common; we should have been able to add our memories to theirs, but instead, they pushed us apart.
    So I wandered through the château alone during the week. At night, I had horrible nightmares. I didn’t go out during the day, I was afraid to cross the bridge, to run into the locals. I wandered through the house panic-stricken, the house that was too big with its two stories and twenty rooms, its tower, the enormous vineyards all around it. Everything came back to me, even Henri’s badjokes about my frizzy hair—“You have to catch Marceline and stick her at the end of the broom to brush away the spiderwebs!”—because afterwards you told him off and protected me. I wasn’t running away from ghosts, quite the contrary, I was chasing after them, after you. Who else could I share anything with? I told all of them about your letter; they would have liked to hear what it said, but I couldn’t recall a single word, so they finally forgot about it. I was the only one who kept that miraculous feeling I’d had back then, the note I’d held in my hands, My darling little girl . But here, nothing had any meaning, not the château, not my return. Henri and I both seemed destined to the same sense of loss, the same curse, destined to dust.
    I was too young then to instinctively imagine what that château could tell me about you. I only understood much later: You’d found an estate equal in stature to the man you dreamed of becoming. You have to grow old to truly understand your parents’ thoughts. I know that whenyou were a young man in Poland, you loved to wear an English top hat and carry a cane, but in secret, because of your strict, austere, very religious father; you’d shaken off the yoke of arranged marriages, married Mama