January 8, 2020, Vanessa Springora has just published Consentan account of the influence exerted over her, then a 14-year-old teenager, by the fifty-year-old writer with the skull of a bonze, Gabriel Matzneff. The show The Great Bookstore invites him on set, when the Nanterre prefecture calls him; his father was found dead – dead for four to six days – at his home in Courbevoie. Please come immediately to identify him. She runs away, short of breath. In front of the apartment, where she has not entered for thirty-five years, she thinks that he committed suicide. Obsessive, paralyzing thought: he read his book, his heart stopped. She knows that he read it, he wrote her a frivolous text message to congratulate her, exonerating himself – with five exclamation points – from the chaos in which she spent her adolescence. From the world of the dead, this father, she thinks, interrupts the promotion of the book where she recounts, between the lines, her parental resignation, he forces her to come and look at his corpse. Which already stinks.
So begins Surnamethe new book by Vanessa Springora, an identity hunt that other ghosts, all male, will lead even further. At the beginning therefore, the father and his name. This Springora with its unclassifiable strangeness, which earned him questions from his teachers at school – Portuguese? Italian? Spanish? –, to which she replied that he was Czech, a convenient country, because about Czechia “the French generally do not know much and generally have nothing to say”, “a nebulous origin, an elsewhere of which I did not know nothing, and in which I refused to be interested for a long time, because it came to me from a father who had deserted my life. When the Internet opened the floodgates of genealogy, she noticed that this surname is not borne by anyone in France, except her, an only child – a hapax, a name appearing only once in the language.
“This name that my father passed on to me, I get it from someone who was eternally absent,” she insists. To explore it is to tell it to him, Patrick Springora. Temperamental, mythomaniac, inventing a career as special NATO envoy to Afghanistan or organizer of Hollande’s presidential candidacy, or even as a spy responsible for freeing French hostages in Mali. Funny male figure who waxes for hours in front of the mirror, wears a well-made blazer then suddenly molds his buttocks into white jeans worn with peroxided hair, a demented, hypermnesic father, and in whose phone there were hidden hundreds of pornographic photos. Sorting through his belongings, wearing a construction mask over his mouth so as not to suffocate in the filth, memories emerge. She’s 12, he invites her to a restaurant, yells at her that he can help her become a famous singer, he knows them all, he screams, she blushes, she’s ashamed. When a customer gets up, approaches her, and says: “Miss, you should stop seeing this gentleman.” A premonitory phrase that, subsequently, no one dared to say to him. Yet she would have saved her.
“Today I recognize some extenuating circumstances”
Behind the father’s name, the father’s father, Josef or Joseph? Springer or Springora? From this grandfather, she finds rare objects. A barometer decorated with the face of Pétain, a portrait of Hitler, and a photo in fencing outfit, a white jersey with a badge on the right shoulder showing the Nazi imperial eagle and the swastika. After the Courbevoie cellar, the archives of Berlin, Prague and the United States. Here she is in Czechia, visiting the village of Zabreh, a commune in Moravia, where he was from. Did he join the Wehrmacht or was he forcibly conscripted? An octogenarian cousin, fragments of memories, total confusion, describes him as a policeman in Berlin, a fugitive in France, a mechanic for the American troops. He was a bigamist for a time, always stateless, because he never applied for French nationality.
At the heart of Surnamethe history of the Sudetenland – his own -, that of the German-speaking Czechs populating the mountain border between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia, who welcomed Hitler “with cries of joy”, then who, the war over, were expelled by the Prague government. “For years, I thought you were just a bastard,” she wrote to her father, “today I recognize some extenuating circumstances.” When she empties Courbevoie’s cellar, she asks her mother to help her. She passes by, takes three trinkets, leaves, abandoning him. Too ugly to put away this bad guy’s things. Vanessa continues. Alone. Power of the unsaid when it acts, and when, finally, it is written.
Surnameby Vanessa Springora. Grasset, 368 p., €22.
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