Were Cécile and Ernest Bruder already living in the Avenue Liégeard, Sevran, at the time of their marriage? Or in a hotel in Paris? For the first years of their marriage, after Dora’s birth, they always lived in hotel rooms.
They are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous. Inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered that they had lived. Often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown.
I tracked down Ernest and Cécile Bruder’s niece. I talked to her on the telephone. The memories that she retains of them are those of childhood, at once fuzzy and sharp. She remembers her uncle’s gentleness, his kindness. It was she who gave me the few details that I have noted down about their family. She had heard it said that before they lived in the hotel on the Boulevard Ornano, Ernest, Cécile, and their daughter, Dora, had lived in another hotel. In a street off the Rue des Poissonniers. Looking at the street map, I read her out a succession of names. Yes, that was it, the Rue Polonceau. But she had never heard any mention of Sevran, nor Freinville, nor the Westinghouse factory.
It is said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of their previous inhabitants. Stamp: an imprint, hollow or in relief. Hollow, I should say, in the case of Ernest and Cécile Bruder, of Dora. I have a sense of absence, of emptiness, whenever I find myself in a place where they have lived.
Two hotels, for that date, in the Rue Polonceau: the tenant of one, at number 49, was called Roquette. In the telephone directory he appears under Hôtel Vin. The other, at number 32, was owned by a Charles Campazzi. As hotels, they had a bad reputation. Today, they no longer exist.
Often, around 1968, I would follow the boulevards as far as the arches of the overhead métro. My starting point was the Place Blanche. In December, a traveling fair occupied the open ground. Its lights grew dimmer the nearer you got to the Boulevard de la Chapelle. At the time, I knew nothing of Dora Bruder and her parents. I remember that I had a peculiar sensation as I hugged the wall of Lariboisière Hospital, and again on crossing the railway tracks, as though I had penetrated the darkest part of Paris. But it was merely the contrast, after the dazzling lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, with the black, interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the métro arches . . .
Nowadays, on account of the railway lines, the proximity of the Gare du Nord and the rattle of the high-speed trains overhead, I still think of this part of the Boulevard de la Chapelle as a network of escape routes . . . A place where nobody would stay for long. A crossroads, where everybody went their separate ways to the four points of the compass.
All the same, I made a note of local schools where, if they still exist, I might find Dora Bruder’s name in the register:
Nursery school: 3 Rue Saint-Luc
Primary schools for girls: 11 Rue Cavé, 43 Rue des Poissonniers, Impasse d’Oran
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AND, AT THE PORTE DE CLIGNANCOURT, THE YEARS slipped by till the outbreak of war. I know nothing about the Bruders during this time. Was Cécile already working as a “furrier’s seamstress,” or rather, as it says in the files, “salaried garment worker”? Her niece thinks that she was employed in a workshop near the Rue de Ruisseau, but she can’t be sure. Was Ernest Bruder still working as an unskilled laborer, if not at the Westinghouse factory in Freinville, then elsewhere, in some other suburb? Or had he too found work in a garment workshop in Paris? Next to the words trade or profession on the file that they had drawn up on him during the Occupation, and on which I had read “French legionnaire, 2d class, 100% disabled,” it says “None.”
A few photographs from this period. The earliest, their wedding day. They are seated, their elbows resting on a sort of pedestal. She is enveloped in a long white veil that trails to the floor and seems to be knotted at her left ear. He wears tails with a white bow tie. A photograph with their daughter, Dora. They are seated, Dora standing between them: she can’t be more than two years old. A photograph of Dora, surely taken after a special school assembly. She is aged twelve or thereabouts and wears a white dress and ankle socks. She holds a book in her right hand. Her hair is crowned by a circlet of what appear to be white flowers. Her left hand rests on the edge of an enormous white cube patterned with rows of black geometric motifs, clearly a studio prop. Another photograph, taken in the same place at the same period, perhaps on the same day: the floor tiles are recognizable, as is the big white cube with black geometric motifs on which Cécile Bruder is perched. Dora stands on her left, in a high-necked dress, her left arm bent across her body so as to place her hand on her mother’s shoulder. In another photograph with her mother, Dora is about twelve years old, her hair shorter than in the previous picture. They are standing in front of what appears to be an old wall, though it must be one of the photographer’s screens. Both wear black dresses with a white collar. Dora stands slightly in front and to the right of her mother. An oval-shaped photograph in which Dora is slightly older—thirteen or fourteen, longer hair—and all three are in single file, their faces turned toward the camera: first Dora and her mother, both in white blouses, then Ernest Bruder, in jacket and tie. A photograph of Cécile Bruder in front of what appears to be a suburban house. The lefthand wall in the foreground is covered in a mass of ivy. She is sitting on the edge of three concrete steps. She wears a light summer dress. In the background, the silhouette of a child with her back to the camera, her arms and legs bare, wearing either a black cardigan or a bathing suit. Dora? And behind a wooden fence, the facade of another house, with a porch and a single upstairs window. Where could this be?
An earlier photograph of Dora alone, aged nine or ten. Caught in a ray of sunshine, entirely surrounded by shadow, she might be on a rooftop. Dressed in a white blouse and ankle socks, she stands, hand on hip, her right foot placed on the concrete rim of what appears to be a large cage or aviary, although, owing to the shadow, you can’t make out the animals or birds confined there. These shadows and patches of sunlight are those of a summer’s day.
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OTHER SUMMER DAYS WERE SPENT IN CLIGNANCOURT. Her parents would take Dora to the Cinéma Ornano 43. It was just across the street. Or did she go on her own? From a very young age, according to her cousin, she had been rebellious, independent, with an eye for the boys. The hotel room was far too cramped for three people.
As a child, she would have played in the Square Clignancourt. At times, this part of town seemed like a village. In the evenings, the neighbors would place their chairs outside and sit on the sidewalk for a chat. Or take a lemonade together on the café terrace. Sometimes men who could have been either real goatherds or else peddlers from the fairs would come by with a few goats and sell you tall glasses of milk for almost nothing. The froth gave you a white mustache.
At the Porte de Clignancourt, the toll house and gate.1 To its left, between the flea market and the tall apartment blocks of the Boulevard Ney, an entire district of shacks, warehouses, acacias, and low-built houses, since pulled down. This wasteland had impressed me, aged fourteen. I thought I recognized it in two or three photographs, taken in winter: a kind of esplanade, a passing bus in sight. A truck at a standstill, seemingly forever. Waiting beside an expanse of snow, a trailer and a black horse. And in the far background, the dim masses of high buildings.
I remember experiencing for the first time that sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground. As yet, I was ignorant of the existence of Dora Bruder. Perhaps—in fact, I’m sure of it—she explored this zone