excerpt from Yann Andrea Steriner by Marguerite Duras
So that evening I spoke to you of Theodora Kats, of the person I believed was she, Theodora Kats, still the same person, still alive, but after the war, in the year that followed the end of the war. I told you that her hotel was in Switzerland, that Theodora Kats would have lived in the Hôtel de la Vallée at the end, before dying. And in that Swiss hotel – a square block of a building, with a fountain and statues of bathers – they had also put children repatriated from the Nazi camps who had been found dying in those camps and all day long those children, about whom nobody knew anything, screamed and ate and laughed, it was impossible to live there in that hotel, in that place of children left alive. And despite this it was apparently in the Hôtel de la Vallée that Theodora Kats had been truly happy.
You asked me, with a tenderness I’d never heard from you: “Orphaned children?”
I couldn’t answer. You asked: “Jewish?”
I said probably, yes. I also said that we must never generalize, never again. And even so I wept, because I was always with the Jewish children. I said, “Yes, Jewish.”
I told you that in the same hotel, the children stole food, bread, cakes, and they hid them. They hid everything. And they stripped naked and dove into the fountain. They were crazy about the water. And people stared at them. There was nothing else to do in that hotel. And they injured themselves in that cement basin but their happiness was such that they didn’t even feel it. Sometimes the water in the basin turned rosy with their blood and had to be changed. They could not be forbidden anything. Anything.
When someone tried to stroke their face, they scratched us, spat at us.
Many of them had forgotten their native tongue, their given name, the name of their family, their parents. They all let out different cries, and then they understood each other. From what was said in that hotel, at the time they were all from Poland, from the vast Vilna ghetto, huge as an entire province.
“Those children were the reason Theodora ran away from the hotel, so she could keep living.”
I said it was possible she had run away from the hotel but that I didn’t really believe it.
I said Theodora was dependent on me. From the moment I knew her, even though I had written very little about her, she was dependent on me.
I said I believed it also depended on the moment. At night I thought I’d already seen Theodora. On certain days I was sure I’d known her previously, in Paris before the war. By morning I didn’t know anything. In the morning I believed I’d never known Theodora Kats. Never, anywhere.
“You invented the name Theodora.”
“Yes. I invented everything about that young woman, the greenish hue of her eyes, the beauty of her body, her voice, since I knew she had been gassed. And I recognized the name when I heard it for the first time. I could only have invented that name. Maybe I invented it as a way of being able to talk about the Jews murdered by the Germans. A body without a name was of no use.”
You said, “We should say, the Nazis.”
I answered that I had never said Nazis to designate the Germans. That I would continue to say it like that: the Germans.
