But You Did Not Come Back Read Online Free Page B

because you loved her. You wanted to be a modern man. Then you’d fallen madly in love with that château, with its tower that would be the symbol of your freedom, your success. It was your dream, not mine, the one you were pursuing the day you took me there for the first time. “What do you wish for most in the world, Marceline?” No one ever asked me that question again.
    What I would have liked when I came back was to be treated like an orphan. The orphans went to a sanatorium, they were still together and I often used to think about them. As for my friends, the ones who had died as well as the ones who’d come back, we were a close group, united by suffering; never had I felt as loved as I had back there. I know now that they were my family, more than my family was. “Say I’m your sister,”Françoise had whispered to me in the camp when a messenger from the SS had asked for my number. She undoubtedly had wanted to do something to help me, or at least, that’s what Françoise and I thought; when they ask your number, it’s probably a good sign. “Say I’m your sister,” she’d whispered.
    We’d been friends since Drancy. When we’d arrived at the camp, she forced me to walk when I wanted to get into the truck that would have taken me straight to the gas chamber, and later, when I was very sick and didn’t want to go to the infirmary, she’d traded my bread for some aspirin, even though she could have just eaten it herself. But I didn’t say she was my sister. I was alone, I was only responsible for myself, my only family then was you. I’ve always thought it was my fault if they sent her to the gas chamber. Françoise and her beautiful blue eyes haunted me for a long time, like a reprimand, a sister in misfortune.
    So I would have been happy to be on a bed in a sanatorium, with the others, talking to them about Françoise and about my selfishness, listening tothem tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that we were innocent, watching our hair grow back, pouring out memories to women who could bear to hear them and were able to understand. We were coming back to life again, making different choices, the camp hadn’t wiped out all of our backgrounds and personalities, but I would have really liked to be in the same place as them, just for a little while, far away from the château, from my mother, from the world that looks down so haughtily at the fate of young women.
    Almost immediately, Mama very quietly asked me if I’d been raped. Was I still a virgin? Good enough to be married off? That was her question. That time, I did resent her. She’d understood nothing. Back there, we were no longer women, no longer men. We were the dirty Jewish race: Stücke , stinking animals. We stripped naked only when they were deciding when we’d be put to death.
    But after the war, the obsession of the Jews to rebuild everything at all costs was intense, extreme—if you only knew. They wanted life tocontinue normally, as before, they went about it so quickly. They wanted weddings, even though people were missing from their photos because they hadn’t come back—weddings, couples, singing, and, soon, children, to fill the void. I was seventeen, no one even thought about sending me back to school and I didn’t have the strength to ask. I was a young woman, soon they’d marry me off.
    If you had been there, you wouldn’t have been able to bear her questions, you would have told Mama to be quiet. You also would have told her to let me sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to understand that I couldn’t stand the comfort of a bed anymore. “You have to forget,” she’d say. Maybe you would have found it difficult to lie in a bed beside her. You would have wanted to sleep on the floor like me, you would have run away from the nightmares that catch up to us and punish us when the sheets are too soft. I even sometimes tell myself that you would have sent me back to school, I missed it so much afterwards; you wouldhave