We Have Our Ghosts

Disaster ruins everything, leaving everything intact.
—Maurice Blanchot

On a clear day in Faulbach, you can hear the discordant bells from the Saint-Nicolas church in Rodemack and the Saint-Sébastien church in Fixem — just the faint echo of them, drifting across the fields of the Moselle, over the furrows of churned-up clay rich with ammonites, faceted pieces of flint, chunks of glazed pottery, and rusted curves of barbed wire. “Every age has its scenography,” hauntology’s founding father, Jacques Derrida, phrased it. “We have our ghosts.”

Alsace-Lorraine’s hauntings run deep. A stone’s throw from France’s easternmost (and most recent) border, the house at 32 rue des jardins seems both an immutable presence and a mirror of history’s little shifts and scars. The curlicued iron of the front door, peeling with rust. The kitchen that was once a pigsty. The laundry room that was once the stables. The barn where a German army deserter once cowered, and was given bread by his sister’s children, and survived. The rusted iron hoops by the front door for tying up your horses, next to the décrottoir for scraping the mud from your boots.

Ghosts flicker through the cold spring wind, cling like firelight to the windows of this house I grew up in. A Napoleonic soldier on leave; a farmer shaking flea powder over a mewling kitten; a schoolgirl named Marie-Thérèse squinting over new textbooks in a language she cannot read; a grandfather named Kaiser or Reiter or Klein, braiding tender shoots of wisteria, fourth finger a polished stump from a run-in with a landmine or a circular saw. And my mother is there too: an American tumbling out of our little red Volkswagen Golf in 1993, clutching diaper bags and pencil sketches, paint swatches and conjugation tables. My mother with her graceful, ambitious vision for this crumbling wreck that was to be our home.

A spark, they say. A cigarette. All it takes to bring down a cathedral.