The Postcard Quotes
"All that blankness, that erasing of colors and blurring of edges."
"Nothing stayed inside—but we liked it that way."
"You simply lived with things, as if they deserved the same respect as human beings."
"Most of you are young married people. Now is the time to pack your bags."
"But in America, in Palestine, you’ll find work easily!"
"It’s all important. These details are what made it possible for me to piece together the fate of the Rabinovitches."
"A guest is like rain; he becomes a nuisance when he lingers too long."
"As long as one limb stirs, one does not think of the grave."
"A whole crowd of people, and not one true human among them."
"The sun sets at the same time for everyone, you know."
"But at the end of the day, the sun sets at the same time for everyone."
"I’ll help you find out who wrote that postcard."
"I want to find the person who sent it to us."
"Take it if you want, but I don’t want to hear about it."
"Sometimes I feel like there’s some invisible force, pushing me."
"You should show your postcard to a private detective."
"Turns out our ancestors were in love a long time ago."
"They must have planned for us to meet."
"Was it supposed to be some sort of reparation for people who’d been denied any kind of proper burial?"
"My gut feeling kept switching between the two, between light and shadow."
"I immediately sent an e-mail with my contact information."
"I spotted a neon-green sign in the distance, all in capital letters."
"The room was empty except for a few knick-knacks in a display case."
"But obtaining complete, reliable, useful information doesn’t happen by accident."
"The original business license filed by Jean Duluc, the agency’s founder, hung framed on the wall."
"The first one was a porcelain miniature of the Chinese vase that Tintin and Snowy jump out of in The Blue Lotus."
"Tintin’s presence among the knick-knacks made perfect sense in this place."
"He sighed. 'Okay—yes, something does actually come to mind here.'"
"The positioning of the stamp on the envelope had a particular meaning."
"Sending a letter with the stamp upside-down meant, 'read the opposite meaning.'"
"My parents taught me the values of equality among humans."
"I felt a sense of wonder, a deep, warm happiness that came from somewhere far away."
"If you were truly Jewish, you wouldn’t take it so lightly."
"The truth, as far as I can tell, is that you’re only Jewish when it suits you."
"My parents were both twenty years old in 1968, and it made them who they were."
"You have to understand that after the war, my grandmother Myriam joined the Communist Party."
"And yet, there was a disruptive element that showed up regularly to contradict their teachings."
"I felt guilty for having wanted to join the church group."
"If we’d been born back then, we’d have been turned into buttons."
"The thought of being ‘turned into buttons’ was so bizarre, so unfathomable."
"I’ve forgotten months, even whole years of my life."
"But despite my shoddy memory, I can pinpoint every single one of the exact moments when I heard the word 'Jew' in my childhood."
"And yet, everything seemed to lead back to the postcard."
"That subconscious drive to write as many books as possible, to fill those places left empty on the library shelves."
"The past was calling out to me more and more urgently all the time."
"I made my way through the streets of Paris, feeling as if I were wandering, tormented."
"If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, you must recreate it."
"I am Myriam in that I always know where the exit is. I run away from danger. I don’t like dodgy situations, and I see problems coming long before they actually happen."
"A true friend isn’t the one who dries your tears. It’s the one who never causes them to be shed."
"The Holocaust was like a treasure hunt in our house. You just followed the clues."
"Myriam spends three months in Marseille, most of that time on her own. Sitting alone on café terraces, tipsy on beer, she imagines scenarios in which she receives news of Noémie and Jacques."
"Myriam envies the rats that can disappear into a crack in the walls. She doesn’t have the taste for risk that she used to."
"Noémie didn’t have the chance to write. You and I became writers."
"We survived. And Myriam couldn’t have saved her family. It wasn’t her fault."
"For reasons I didn’t really understand, I became a passionate volunteer for the Red Cross at the exact age Noémie was when she found herself working in the infirmary at her transit camp before being sent to Auschwitz."
"Jacques Legrand recruits new operatives from among university students and high-school teachers. Most of them are 'boîtes aux lettres'—that is, people who simply agree to have secret documents left in their mailboxes."
"Initially promoted to staff sergeant within the Gloria SMH network, he rises rapidly through the ranks to become a second lieutenant."
"Nature isn’t just scenery. It’s not around you, but within you. It is inside you, just as you are inside it."
"One morning, the fox is gone. Myriam senses that it will not be back."
"How can you tell you’re alive, when there’s no one to witness your existence?"
"She can almost feel the tumult of his emotions."
"The days they spend together don’t add up to anything; their marriage has no foundation."
"You’re one of us now. If we go down, you go down with us."
"The landscape of Haute-Provence is nothing like the plains of Latvia or the deserts of Palestine; rather, it’s like something Myriam has known for a long time. Since her birth, since her first journey by wagon through the forests of Russia."
"Nature is quite able to live without man. Which proves just how superior it is to us."
"She remembers her grandfather breaking a loaf of bread at the beginning of the kiddush."
"Vicente watches Myriam’s belly grow into a grotesque protuberance and wonders what will emerge from it."
"Vicente, accustomed to the jaded children of his parents’ circle, finds this both vexing and provocative."
"Myriam has never seen her husband so happy or healthy as he is now, every day of this life an adventure."
"The first thing she sees are all the postcards she has sent them over the past year, telling them she’s all right."
"The very little Myriam had heard about relationships between men—always writers: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Marcel Proust—had been abstract notions."
"She’s never swum nude. The water feels soft and thick as liquid silk, sliding over her skin like a caress."
"All three of them are caught up in this moment, bound together by it, under its spell."
"The sight of the lavish table reminds Myriam of Yom Kippur dinners in Palestine."
"The truth is that Vicente is living his own version of the period before he was born."
"Everything’ll be all right, just stay calm. No one here’s got anything against us."
"She lets herself drift into a kind of half-sleep, a state of indifference, where nothing matters anymore."
"The most important thing is to emerge from this metamorphosis strong and brave."
"Our physical bodies haven’t changed yet; our actions are still the same. But everything around us is different."
"Sometimes there’s no point in even bothering to write."
"Everyone knows that certain arguments are meaningless, but they make them anyway, to convince themselves."
"Something very strange had happened: Myriam had forgotten how to speak French."
"She always said the fox was her friend, and the bees were, too."
"My hunger for knowledge is never sated. Sometimes I feel like a stranger here."
"I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent."
"I have a sense of being hunted. I often feel subjected to a kind of self-obliteration."
"She knew her memory was failing, and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’"