Bruno did not understand until much later that his parents were in the Resistance. He had no knowledge of his father’s arrest by the Gestapo in 1943, nor of his death in 1944 at Fresnes Prison, a place where Bruno himself later spent time, though for a silly collection of charges, robbing parked cars—nothing so exalted as resisting tyranny, but he would delve into that perhaps another time, he said.
In those years, 1942 to 1945, he was in a little village in the countryside, in relative idyl. He didn’t know the fate of his mother, his father, his older brother, until after the war. He had not even a sense that he was half-Jewish, no understanding there was any mark of vulnerability by which he should be burdened. Instead, he proceeded within the parameters of how life, for him, had gone so far: you were with your family in Paris, and then you went to the country, while your parents stayed behind. You lived with an old woman who was not your grandmother but hugged you tightly and told you to call her grandmother.
Bruno’s own grandparents the Lacombes rose before dawn, and on Sundays, when the bakery was closed, they visited Bruno and Maxime, bringing with them a sack filled with pastries. This woman in the Corrèze had no pastries, and no grandchildren of her own. She was widowed. Her sons, both grown, had joined the Resistance.
Bruno spent his days roaming with a group of boys, some his age, some older, others mere toddlers—ambulatory, as Bruno put it, but not yet into language. They threw rocks at one another or stole apples from orchards or searched the ground for discarded weaponry and other excitements.
Located in a pocket of the Corrèze known for its red limestone, the village had been erected over seams in the earth of this special red rock. Everything, the churches and farmhouses and barns, the old train depot, had been built of red limestone, its color velvety and appealing, also durable and strong and insulating. Its smooth surface was what Bruno’s little feet touched first thing each morning, bare, as he pattered into the kitchen to greet the old woman, who poured hot milk in his bowl, when there was milk. The old woman was always in the kitchen, waiting, as if the clock of the day would start with Bruno’s appearance in her midst.
Bruno described this little village as a rose-red valentine nestled among golden fields of hay. The village existed still, he said, looked now as it had then, except that tourist buses groaned loudly on the main road that bordered the town, spewing diesel exhaust, and the houses were more tidy and prosperous than they had seemed to Bruno in the wartime years of his childhood.
When German troops rampaged through the area, the old woman and Bruno took refuge in the hayloft of the barn. They spent several nights there. Bruno could still recall the feeling of being clutched against the woman’s bosom, the terrifying sounds of war near and distant, explosions and the report of rifle fire. At one point, they heard German being spoken right outside the barn. They heard boots, people going in and out of the house, someone shouting, a commander, perhaps, and then people driving away.
Quiet descended. The only sound was an old, galvanized water bucket on the ground, sent rolling by the wind. The Germans were gone.
To this day, Bruno said, I can hear that sound, a water bucket rolling on its side. It is the sound of danger’s retreat, and also a signal that is more complex for me, he said, because in the absence of an enemy, an “other,” we become, ourselves, responsible for good and evil. This too, he said, I shall take up later.
After the elders had established that it was safe to come out, Bruno and a band of other boys yelled and tumbled and ran through the woods beyond the village, elated that their forced quiet and cooped-up days were behind them, and curious to see what was changed, for the landscape bore the scars of war. Burned homes. Burned woods.
If they were told to be careful, Bruno said, he had no memory of this. The Nazis left and the boys ran free, ran wild.
When they came upon a soldier in a field just off the road, the sight of this body on the ground had seemed a game to Bruno. An enemy! one of the boys whispered, and they all hid behind a row of trees. The man was facedown, his body twisted wrongly.
One of the boys threw a rock. It bounced off the soldier’s side. His body stayed still and inert. An older boy, proving his mettle to the little band, stepped forward and nudged the soldier with his foot. He declared the man dead, and the others crept forward.
The soldier was German. His eyes were open. He looked as if he had been puzzling over some question at the moment of his death, trying to solve an unsolvable math problem, and he would travel into eternity that way, with a thicket of half-tabulated numbers lodged in his mind.
His weapon and his ammunition were gone. His boots were gone. One boy took the soldier’s canteen, looped it to his own belt. Another claimed his case of medical bandages.
Bruno was afraid to get close. The dead body scared him. He picked up the enemy soldier’s helmet, which lay on its own like a giant walnut shell, empty and discarded.
The boys heard a truck coming down the road and scattered from that scene.
They wandered through the woods, Bruno wearing the scavenged helmet, holding it so it would not fall off. The helmet’s weight, its reduction of his visibility—it rode low—felt to him, he wrote to the Moulinards, like the intrinsic burdens of men and war. He was trying on those burdens, which was the essence of play, to rehearse the dramas and terrors of adulthood.
Etched into the black-painted metal of the helmet over the brow was: “Blutgruppe 0.”
“Blut” is blood, one of the boys declared. This was the soldier’s blood type. He’d scratched it into the helmet.
That boy wanted the helmet. Bruno said no and held tight to it. They all wanted it.
Bruno marched along in the coveted helmet, chanting. Blood type O, blood type O. The other boys took it up. It became a shorthand for bravery, for victory, a celebratory mantra, blood type O. As if they themselves had just vanquished this enemy soldier, had driven out the Germans.
The things you do when you don’t know what reality you’ve come to occupy, Bruno wrote to Pascal and the Moulinards. When you don’t yet know that your fun is over.
His brother was dead. His mother was dead. His father was dead. It was not clear in his memory, Bruno told them, when he learned the news of their deaths. What he remembered, instead, was rampaging over the retreat of the enemy. He saw the forest and heard the whoops and shouts of boys, and he felt the loose fit of a Nazi’s helmet, bobbling against his ears as he ran.
The sensation of movement on his head wasn’t immediate, he wrote to them. But within a matter of hours there was an unpleasant feeling of life behind his ears and along the nape of his neck, his scalp sending him new and unsettling signals in the form of an itch.
He had caught a dead man’s lice.
The lice were in the helmet because their host had died, and they were in search of a new host. Bruno had volunteered his own head, had given these lice a new lease, a reason for being. They roamed happily, exploring their new home, the continuation of their raison d’être. It was wretched to inherit the lice of a dead Nazi soldier, and yet an experience that he later turned to, again and again.
These lice were real, Bruno said, but he had come to understand that they were also a metaphor: they stood for the transmigration of life, from one being to the next, from past to future.
Bruno said that transmigration, what some called metempsychosis, wasn’t magic in the degraded sense of taking place outside physical laws or as conjured by people draped in wizards’ cloaks. Transmigration, he said, was the entire story of people and their long history, archived as chains of information inside the bodies of every living person. No man was not the product of such a chain. Every human was a child of a child of a child of children of mysterious mothers who once lived, and whose secrets we carry. This was our genome, Bruno said. Science and technology are embattled terrain among those who reject capitalism, he acknowledged, but the new discoveries in the study of ancient DNA were stunning and consequential. They have to be dealt with, Bruno said.
I am linked, he said, to ancient people not as a vague and baggy “idea” but as little pieces of string examined under an electron microscope. We have material proof, Bruno said, of transmigration, of the way in which everyone who came before us left a mark on our genome, adding to the story of our ancestry and evolution.
Spirit travels, he said, from the dead for centuries, for millennia, into the living. Each of us inherits code, blueprints, a set of instructions—call it what you want—from those who came before us, all the way back into the deepest sediments of time. These codes, Bruno said, are genetic lice, which crawl from ancestors to descendent; they travel from the many to the one, right on through human history. How do they make their way? They take a transmigrational highway, he said. The lice had helped him understand this.
He had discarded the helmet before returning to the village. Over the days that followed, as the itching on his scalp intensified, he told his “grandmother” he’d caught lice. He did not say where they came from, and neither did she ask. Lice to her were no mystery. She told him to lean over a tree stump where she beheaded chickens (when they had had chickens, which they no longer did, and now ate potatoes with salt, when they had salt).
Bruno put his head on the stump. The old woman treated his scalp with kerosene, which she glugged from a metal can that had lost its nozzle and splashed unevenly. The kerosene was for refilling a lantern that the Germans had smashed.
The vapors from the kerosene made young Bruno ill. Its noxious effects did not kill his lice.
The lice ranged over his head as the Germans had ranged over the Corrèze. They did eventually leave, having explored, as he now put it, the limits of possibility on his scalp. In this way, he tangented, lice have yet a second metaphorical meaning: The bromides marketed to us to fix our problems, like kerosene was once believed a remedy for lice, these posited solutions tend to give us hope more than material benefit. In reality, problems leave when they are ready to go, when they have exhausted their stay, just as these lice did.
Then again, Bruno said, perhaps no one could declare with confidence the reason for the departure of lice. As I have raised three children, he said, I have had plenty of experience with lice and scabies and cradle cap, all manner of bug and bacteria that thrive on the scalps and bodies of the young. (Reading this, I realized it was the single instance I had encountered in these letters of Bruno acknowledging the lost daughter.)
Lice decide on their own when to retreat, Bruno said. The true remedy for them is not poison but patience.
The effects of the kerosene, he said, remained. Thereafter his vision sometimes had a tremble at its edge like a ruffle or pleat that crimped his field of sight. This crimp came and went. It was happening now, he wrote to them, as he was composing this very email, and it was this visual phenomenon that had precipitated his boyhood memory of the soldier and the helmet and the lice, his foolish joy at the death of the enemy, a joy that displaced the memory of learning his family had been murdered.
Because of his exposure to the kerosene, at the outward periphery of each of his two eyes, Bruno’s vision periodically degraded in a vertical line. The line quavered as if a zipper had riven the seen world at this outer periphery, riven it and then sewn it back up, but unevenly, and the living parts of the riven world were vibrating, sutured badly, and leaking something from under the sutures—an unseen, untouched absolute. It was at the quavering edges of his vision, he told them, that the truth of the seen and unseen was attempting to break through, to communicate, to coalesce. A critical point, as a terminology of chemistry, he summarized, was that moment when gasses and solids had the same valence. Perhaps the two trembling seams at the edges of his vision were the destabilized place where two worlds were reaching equilibrium, attempting to find balance where each did not annihilate the other. He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality.
Reading these descriptions of the vertical pleats at the edges of Bruno’s vision, I suspected that he was prone to ocular migraines. He didn’t catch them from kerosene, or lice, or an enemy helmet. I myself happen to suffer from ocular migraines, and so his inspired descriptions of this para-phenomenon, a visual fluttering or disturbance that is both pronounced and diaphanous, were quite familiar to me, although “suffer” is too strong a word.
