TE20 Migrant Mosaics

A Girl’s Story

I typed his name into the white pages on the Internet for the department of Doubs. His surname came up, but with another givenname.Afteramoment’suncertainty, followingthedirectory’s advice, I extended my search to a neighboring department. The first and last names appeared, listed at an address in a village or town I didn’t know, probably small. There was a phone number, too. I sat incredulous before the screen, staring at the letters of the name I had not seen written anywhere for fifty years. To hear the voice last heard in September 1958, the real voice, all I had to do was dial the number. The simplicity of the act seemed frightening. To imagine myself actually dialing the number filled mewith the same kind of terror I had felt, sometimes, in the months after my mother died, at the thought that I might hear her voice when I answered the phone. It was as if I would be crossing a forbidden boundary, and at the very moment I heard his voice, the interval of fifty years would dissolve. I would be the girl of ’58 again. The feeling I had was a mixture of dread and desire, as if I were about to see a medium invoke spirits of the dead. Afterwards it crossed my mind that I would probably not recognize the voice of H, just as I had failed to identify that of my ex-husband when I heard it in a video after fifteen years. Or that it might leave me completely indifferent. The power I assigned to this voice to transmute my being of today into the being of ’58 was a sort of mystical illusion, a belief that I could effortlessly, through a miraculous short-circuit in time, make my way back to the girl of ’58. In the end, by calling H, I faced the possibility of disappointment rather than any kind of danger.

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