Carolyn Porter - Marcels Letters

Copyright 2017 by Carolyn Porter

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2017001221.

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1933-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1934-7

Printed in the United States of America

To Aaron, Mon Chri

Maybe it was on a list somewhere, the name, where I come from and so on.

But in the camp no names were used.

STEPAN SAIKA, SURVIVOR

Chapter One

White Bear Lake, Minnesota

July 2011

As I lifted the nearly weightless pages off my desk, I was surprised to realize I had forgotten so many things. The decades-old paper felt simultaneously soft and brittle. The ink had faded to a brackish gray. Tiny tears and wrinkles created a feather-like ruff along the edges. Translucent blue grid lines filled the background of one yellowed page. A papermakers watermark was embedded into the fibers of another. It seemed impossible I could have forgotten how the handwriting went to the very edge of some pages, and that watery blue and red stripes had been brushed across the background of others.

My eyebrows arched. How could I have forgotten about the postage stamps bearing Hitlers profile?

Yet I intimately knew the alphabet of letters that filled these five pages. The roundness of each curve, the width and angle of each straight letterstroke: every nick and loop of this writing was as familiar as my own.

No. I corrected myself. I knew this handwriting better.

I turned the top letter over and skimmed past paragraphs I could not read, until my eye landed on the flourished signature in the bottom corner: Marcel. The l looped backward to form a proud, angled line underneath his name. I tried to recall how long these letters had been pressed flat inside the sketchbook in my office closet. Had it been two years? Four? More?

I carefully set the letter down and looked at the next piece of paper. The small postcard had been mailed from Berlin to a place called Berchres-la-Maingot. The blotchy cancellation mark read 1944. Sprache Franzsische had been scrawled in tiny cursive along the top edge. Armed with a single year of high school German, I guessed that said written in French.

As I set the postcard down, I focused on the letter that had seized my attention all those years ago. It wasnt even the entire letter, actually. It was one letter: the M . The left stem of the M in the greeting Mes chres petites swept far to the side and ended with a sweet little loop.

The affection infused into that greeting was undeniable, yet I did not know precisely what that meant. My dear? My little darling?

The thought was fleeting, but definitive: I should translate one letter. After all this time, it would be interesting to find out what Mes chres petites actually meant. And even if the letter didnt say anything interesting, I might learn who Marcel was, and why his letters had been mailed from Berlin to France during the depths of World War II.

Aaron and I ate dinner in the living room as we watched the evening news. He sat on the couch; I sat on the chair, as if we had assigned seats. The tsunami in Japan had been four months earlier, but the story still made headlines because of the leaking radiation. Protests in Egypt and Libya were gaining attention as stories about bin Laden, who had been killed two months earlier, had started to fade.

Whats your plan for the evening? I asked.

Aaron looked gray and spent from long shifts at the hospital, so I did not expect he would do anything other than watch television. He nestled deeper into the couch, confirming my guess. You?

I nodded in the direction of my office. I had been freelancing out of a home office for nearly ten years. Tidying up the days loose ends had become a familiar after-dinner activity.

Ill take Hoover out later, I promised, hoping the days blistering temperature would dip low enough to safely take our old black-furred retriever out for a walk.

An hour or so later, after wrapping up client work, I slid Marcels five letters to the center of my desk. Spending time on personal projects was my reward for a long day; a creative respite from routine tasks. And working on personal projects only after paying work was done allowed me to keep the promise I made to Aaron long ago.

That morning, I had decided not to return the letters to their home, pressed flat under the cover of the sketchbook in my office closet. All day, the five handwritten letters lay on my desk, intermittently covered and uncovered as I cycled through project paperwork.

Instead of opening the font file, I decided to pursue that mornings curiosity and find out what Marcels letter said. I moved the letter with the beautiful swash M in front of me, and typed the first sentence into a website that provided free French-to-English translation. Cest aujour clhui, le printemps, et il fait un temps superbe, cet apris midi, Moutardier cloit venir me voir, en lattendant, je reponds a votre gentille petite lettre qui m a fait beaucoup plaiser. The translation read: It is cl today, the spring, and the weather is beautiful, this learned midi, successive dentals end must come to see me, in the meantime, I am responding to your sweet little letter which m has done much plaiser.

My shoulders sank. I had purchased the letters because I knew Marcels cursive handwriting would make a beautiful font, but deciphering his writing as words rather than individual letters was a challenge. Lowercase s s looked similar to i s; e s looked like o s. And since I did not know French, I could not tell whether I was interpreting the words correctly.

The next sentence resulted in an equally garbled, worthless translation. I shook my head, stood up, and returned the letters to the sketchbook in the closet.

I settled back into my chair and rolled to face the two large side-by-side computer monitors. As the font file opened, a familiar grid of tiny black letters appeared. I opened the Preview Panelthe window that allowed me to view and test strings of letters or whole wordsand stared at the blank screen. I positioned my hands over the keyboard and slowly typed the only words that came to mind: Mes chres petites .

As I scrutinized the grave over the and the sweeping lead-in stroke of the p, I decided to have one letter professionally translated. Throwing away hard-earned money on a translation I did not need to read just to satiate a curiosity was folly, an impractical waste of money. I understood the translation might not serve any purpose other than providing a momentary diversion from the seemingly endless rounds of tweaks and revisions. But after being reminded of the letters raw beautyfull of color and texture and historymy curiosity had been piqued.