Long ago, in the last century a young Melbourne girl  walked twice every week day  along the bookish streets  that led to  her school.  Her name was Amirah Gust. She was a bookish young girl who  had heard of and would read  most of the writers whose paths she followed on the solitary walk. She generally began along the back lane, then followed Addison to  Shelley and across Ruskin streets but sometimes, if she had turned in the other direction down the lane,   she met  Byron and Keats until finally, with Tennyson, she arrived at Elwood Central school, sitting square and red brickly in Scott street.

She fashioned stories. In the mornings,  as she walked briskly through the cool empty streets  and on hot afternoons  as she sauntered  home , squashing  bitumen bubbles and inhaling the tantalising smells from the local bakery. Talking aloud she played all the roles herself, her plots pinched from the novels and poems that were her daily food and laced with the schoolgirl and film magazines , the cocktails of her reading.  Sir Lancelot with the coal black curls, rescuer of Queen Guinevere and seeker of the Holy Grail rode along as her hero. Naturally,  she was her own heroine.  

As she passed each modern block of balconied and lead lighted flats, she played herself living in one; an independent woman, sports car parked out the front, ready for anything.  Years later, a university student  dreaming more ambitious dreams, she moved her flat moved from Melbourne to Paris. But life, always more surprising than art, prevailed over her plots and  although she did move – first from literary European Elwood to Aussie Richmond, with its monosyllabic Swan, Church and  Elm streets and then even further afield to Canberra, never as a young woman did she manage to live by herself in that little flat of her dreams.

The girl has long disappeared, but her dreams, though buried under a complicated life,  were never forgotten and when the Literature Board of the Australia Council transported   me to the Keesing Studio of the Cite des Arts and  I settled in to inhabit that dream in the centre of a beautiful old section of  Paris , I gave her a happy wave.

French was my first language . I “made pipi” long after I arrived in Melbourne where other little girls were “doing weewee” and ate poireaux soup, though we pronounced it “poreoh”, which my Aussie friends had never heard of. Paris had long been the city of my heart.  My  Europen Jewish mother passed on to me her love for the place and the love flowered at MacRobertson Girls’ High School  where the formidable and brilliant Jewish Frances Barkman taught senior French .  Although we called her “Fanny” behind her back, to cut her down to size,  we willingly did her bidding as she passionately  prepared her Sixth Form students for their final exams, or coached them for the Alliance Francaise  competitions. Le Mule du Pape and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme became our familiars, the Marseillaise our first favourite among  the war-time national anthems that we sang lustily in school assemblies; Fanny produced Francophiles and Paris lovers as surely as she did her first class honours. 

 At school I was a serious young woman, and Paris is a serious city; where thought is honoured and wisdom admired. A city with an Academy and a Pantheon; a city where Pallas Athene, our school’s symbol, would walked confidently and comfortably.

I early imbibed my parents’ communist politics, and Paris was the oldest heart’s centre for revolutionaries: the Bastille had fallen there and the Commune had briefly arisen. Today socialist and communist deputies sit in  the National Assembly;  the  May Day march is  a large public event and even non-communist Force Ouvriere unionist marchers sing the Internationale.

 I had come to the Cite in search of my uncle Henri.

Chaim, Hermush or Henryk Adler –these were only some of his names he wore before he settled down in our lives as Uncle Henri – had long been part of my dreaming . He knew me  before I knew him. When my father left Europe for Australia  in 1928 my mother and I were taken in by her family, to the joy of  her fourteen year old brother Hermush. Three months of early bonding. No wonder he later  found it hard to believe I was an adult.

I knew him well before I met him, as I knew my mother’s whole family, from the  stories she told about her childhood and youth;  her beloved  youngest brother Hermush had a special place in these stories and he soon became a  hero for me,  marching or riding alongside  Sir Lancelot  and searching with him for a modern Holy Grail.

When I wrote in the 1970’s, about my un-Australian Childhood, I pictured him as he had appeared to a  romantic eleven year old.

“In 1937 my ardent love of heroes and admiration for heroism came gloriously together with my parents’ political beliefs and our European family connections when Uncle Henryk wrote from Spain to tell us that he had joined the International Brigade and was fighting for the Republic in the civil war. “I am proud of you!” my mother telegraphed. And so said all of us….Letters arrived, for Henri like his sister was a formidable correspondent. How formidable I would learn much later.. His letters from Spain included photos showing the fine strong head, the slender form , the rifle slung on the shoulder, the hero. He sent us a book produced by the government about the Brigades, their men and their leaders, and I never tired of looking at it. I fell in love with several brigaders.- most of them Nordic looking fellows. I saved some money and sent it off to my Uncle Henryk with an admiring idealistic letter and received in return a silk handkerchief ,printed with the colours of the Spanish Republic and showing the Cervantes statue in Madrid. With it was a cutting from the  Brigade newspaper in which my letter had been printed. I followed the news of all the battles. Teruel, Guadalajara and Barcelona seemed closer to me than Adelaide or Sydney.”

When I wrote those words, Henri had been settled in Paris for  twenty-five years.

Uncle Henri’s life- story continued to intrigue me , and so did the man himself, especially after the year of my pilgrimage to Europe.  The year was 1968. Uncle Henri  was 55 and I  was 41; the age gap  between schoolgirl and  International Brigader had narrowed  but a great gap remained: I was seven years out of the Australian Communist Party, while he was seven years out of French jails after a five year sentence  for espionage.

In the next twenty seven years, until his death in 1995,  I travelled to Europe many times.  My brother, who also met his uncle first in 1968, did the same and as my children grew , they also made Paris and Uncle Henri their goal.  For each of us 3 Adolphe Cherrioux. Issy les Moulineaux was our European base.   Early in piece, Henri  brought into my life Yvette Raymond, the remarkable woman who had been his wife and a friendship and correspondence between us began , mirroring the one that had sprung up between  Henri’s sister, Manka and Yvette  years before. When my mother first met her brother’s wife  in 1952 ,  each immediately recognised a kindred spirit. Over the years, Yvette’s letters and her conversation had been a  rich source, I believed, of stories about her life with Henri,  and  when her posthumous autobiography Souvenirs in Extremis  appeared  in 1982 I devoured the copy sent to me.  I was a mazed and shocked at how bitterly she wrote of that life.

 In 1980 Henri made the reverse pilgrimage, and was brought out to Australia by his family.  During all these years he grew larger and smaller, darker and lighter, more and less complex  than the ideological hero of my childhood. As always, the real man revealed himself  to be even more extraordinary than the mythical one. Every time we met I learnt more of the life and the man who I already knew as revolutionary, International Brigader, World War II soldier,  mysterious Polish communist functionary  and prisoner of French jails. He was a passionate lover of all things French when I first met him and  most of his energy in his last years were given over to an attempt to gain citizenship and die a Frenchman.  Just how passionate and poetic a man he was,  I had then no idea.  Nor had much of this Uncle Henri  revealed himself by the time I arrived in Paris on a cold, raw morning in early February 1999

***                     *****

How Henri would have loved the Cite  Internationale des Arts!. How he would have approved it. And, in the days before his frail limbs were defeated by the steep  Metro staircases he was forced to use whenever  the Mairie d’Issy escalators were being repaired and he was stranded  on the outskirts of Paris, how he would have enjoyed his visits here. The shortest stroll from the  Metro station nearest the  Cite’s  would have brought  bring him- a former communist and a Jew –  to Pont Marie after a journey on Line 7 which runs between Villejuif (Jews Town) and Louis Aragon ( Communist poet) and stops at Kremlin and Stalingrad.   Saint Paul,  the station only a little further away on the spectacular Line 1 between Grande Arche de la Defense and Chateau de Vincennes would have had him  speeding along under Paris’s old revolutionary history with stops at Bastille, Hotel de Ville, Palais Royale, Tuilieries, Louvre, Concorde and Etoile.

 The Cite embodied the dream of Frederic Brunau a French architect who returned to Paris  after war-time service inspired to create a centre where artists could live frugally, inhale Paris  culture and  visit  all the museums and galleries close by.  Construction was announced early in 1949,  the year that Henri returned again to live in Paris for the second  time in his life and the Cite became a reality in 1962, the year Henri was released from prison  to work and live in Paris and the suburbs for the rest of his life.

The Cite has grown in size and reach and now welcomes writers, musicians and dancers, besides painters, sculptors and other graphic artists.  A true International City of Arts.  At the regular showing of their works, at their concerts and at the monthly  lunches, Armenians and Australians,  Icelanders and Israelis, Austrians, Chinese, Russians and Japanese  meet and mingle. Everyone “bonjours”  fervently on stairs or lift. Communicating in halting French or simply with smiles, Australians greet English speakers with delight and other Australians like brothers and sisters.

For the first mid-winter weeks the Cite daunted me. From the outside its architecturally  pleasant sixties building harmonised  with the pre-revolutionary  Marais; inside it could pass for a superior prison. Daily expeditions down  dark corridors of  green linoleum lit only by  timed lights that suddenly  snapped and left you groping past  a row of identical  heavy dark brown doors , depressed even further  Australian spirits already lowered by  grey skies and flurries of snow , only two days away from blue skies and heat.

If orientation to the Cite and to Paris, somewhat dyslexically finding my way around the city in French seemed like hard work,   the daily and disturbing confrontations with  drunks, beggars, and the deranged reminded me  of the truly hard life of this big city.  After the sun began to appear, the timed switches  seemed rational, the heavy doors perfectly  made for  sound proofing, and each journey for  research or housekeeping, an exciting voyage of discovery. The Metro stations with their poetical , historical or simply  puzzling names were a daily delight: Filles de la Calvaire (Daughters of Calvary) and Argentine; Monge and Jussieu; Gaite, Pernety and Plaisance; Lamark  and Marx Dormoy.

Although he has been dead for five years, Henri  accompanies me now, whenever I plan a route and descend into a metro. A Parisian by adoption and by choice, often the most fanatical, Henri was naturally a metro afficionado. I doubt he had boarded a bus in forty years.  When you stayed with him and set out on an expedition, he would advise the most direct route, usually from memory, sometimes from his little red book, order you to get down at the best correspondence and press a bunch of tickets into your hands. If he travelled with you, he would choose the exact compartment to deliver you at the nearest exit of your destination; if he weren’t going along, he would see you to the mouth of Mairie d’Issy,  hand you the tickets, repeating his instructions in case you made the wrong correspondence, or maybe hopped on the bus behind his back. I mourn his loss in this city. Paris has for so long meant Uncle Henri: without him, the city, though endlessly enthralling, forever beautiful and full of light and life, will never be the same .

 ****                           *******                         ***********

. Settled in,I sat warmly at my desk in the Keesing studio, looking  through the window at the rap dancers across the narrow rue Geoffroy l’Asnier. I assimilated what I already knew and had written about my uncle Henri and planned my further search in the heart of  his great city.

The holes in my knowledge of Henri’s life and activities glared at me from the desk .  What had  he been doing in Paris from 1947 until he left  for Warsaw in 1949? Was his sudden departure part of the French government’s Cold War  expulsion of Polish diplomats, teachers and other workers? What work had he been doing for the Polish government in France and in Europe generally?.  And what about his trial?  On earlier stays in Paris I had spent days reading   newspapers in the old Bibliotheque Nationale, but had found no report there. Who should I ask now for information? Big holes. Big questions.

I  sent off letters to the Archives of those government departments most likely keep files on people like Henri, and to people who had known him and might talk about him and his work.  I  made phone calls to Brussels, Mannheim and Frankfurt, homes of my Adler cousins.  The last call was to the nearest cousin, Uncle Henri’s daughter Helene , who lived now in the fourteenth arrondissement..

While awaiting their replies, I worked on the notes  I had accumulated  since my first meeting with Henri.

         *****                ******

Somewhere here introduce Yvette; we have corresponded since 1956 I asked why she left Poland? Her reply. 

As a glimpse of the flesh and blood Sir Lancelot was too much for the Lady of Shallott after she turned from her mirror, I decided to spend  a week in Italy, after leaving Australia for the first time in July 1968  and before meeting my hero uncle in Paris.

For me this was a European pilgrimage. To my birthplace, home of the relations I had not met since I left Europe as a two year old and most of whom would now never meet, land of my ancestors, source of my ideas and my communist idealism and of most of my reading. Here I was alone for days at a time, a state cherished but seldom as an adult experienced. Ian Turner and I had divorced and in 1965 I had married Ken Inglis.  From 1967 Port Moresby, in the Territory of Papua New Guinea, was home to us and our six children.

I had hardly slept since the Qantas flight touched down in Rome. How sleep when, on the drive from the airport, the Coliseum stands as matter-of-factly  as if it were  a service station or an apartment block? How sleep when on the same day I encountered another of my early heroes?  Luckily I had left my hotel wearing sunglasses, so the small crowd gathered around him in the museum could not see me weeping helplessly at my first sight of the David of Michelangelo in all his 23 feet of marble glory.  As a schoolgirl, I had admired his heroic stand against the giant Goliath  and, perhaps even more, his stocky form, large head of curly hair, worried frown and straight nose . I first met him  in the Mac Robertson Girls’ High School library and he had long remained my model of male beauty. Richly prepared by the admirable sixth form and university teachers who had given life to the Italian Renaissance, we fortunate Melbourne history students lapped up the knockabout realities of Italian cities when we met them. Surely that could not be the Duomo of Florence; its improbable variegated marble stripes as corny as a set from some Hollywood musical?  But it was, and such a tumble of delights produced sleepless nights spent devouring the guide book, planning and anticipating the next day’s sights.

But Italy was only a detour. As the local plane from Milan flew low enough across Mont Blanc to reveal that thrilling view of sunshine on miles of snow and we crossed into France, I toasted the occasion with champagne and peered out for glimpses of the land of dreams, home of  heroes.

 Would I recognise the uncle I had known for over forty years only from photos? Henri in Brussels, the slender young blonde strolling along the street with his older and darker brother Szymeck; Henri in Spain during the civil war, romantic warrior in beret and open necked shirt; Henri in Paris in 1939, meeting my mother and father on their quixotic European journey,  pale and drawn with receding hair; and years later, relaxed and smiling with them on the Italian Riviera. 

What would he look like now?  Would he  recognise me?  Age transforms even those who have had the good luck to live a  peaceful Australian life.

Determined to make a good impression I had dressed carefully and identified myself by wearing the gorgeous Jeanne Lanvin silk scarf in fawns and beiges, which Henri had sent me a few years before, by his sister. my mother, Down the steps, with my scarf and across the tarmac and into the luggage hall, quivering with excitement and surprise to see among the waiting crowd’s two men both waving madly. No trouble about recognising them as my two uncles Henri and Szymeck.  As they cried and hugged me over and over again, I heard my name pronounced in my parents’ loving and richly accented Polish Jewish tones by the middle aged versions of their photographs.

In my heightened state, even the walk to the car park was a wonder. All those 75  number plates  as we followed Henri to his dark green Peugeot 304 and drove off, uncles asking questions, talking, sighing, patting hands and smiling; while I turned away, from time to time, between smiles and pats, staring hungrily out the window for the first glimpses of Paris and curiously at my hero uncle, the driver. Uncle Henri in 1968 was thickly built, with reddish receding hair , blue eyes and a shaggy moustache. A careful dresser, neat and very tidy. A European man.  He was not much taller than me.

During the working week, I learned, he travelled all over his region in this car, calling at hardware and electrical shops to sell TVs and  other equipment  for  his boss, the large firm Thomson –Brandt.. A successful commercial traveller, he earned good money, enjoyed his work and above all the pleasures of Paris.

After dinner that night,  we strolled along the banks of the Seine and into the Latin  quarter;  everywhere people, filling street cafes, walking, talking and everywhere signs of the recent troubles. Wooden palings where there used to be iron fences, formerly cobbled streets  asphalted. The student revolts, the sit ins and occupations of the late sixties had not yet arrived in my part of the world  as in  Port Moresby, the students  hungrily soaked up the freedom and expanded horizons provided by the newly formed university,  preoccupied with the learning offered by teachers both wholly sympathetic and innovative. Revolt? Against what?

Sights and sounds of the serious evenements  which had erupted in Paris universities and overflowed into the streets during May 1968 had reached us before I left for Europe. A mother of adolescent children who all responded to the revolutionary slogans , sometimes in painful ways, I found  the youth revolution and counter culture hard to swallow. Not Uncle Henri.   He was wholeheartedly behind the students and angrily showed us the streets around the University, asphalted to prevent future barricades

Ambiguous about the student revolution, I was ambiguous too in my response to my  uncles;  reacting somewhat coolly to their over-emotion and over-protection, regarding them through sceptical Australian eyes.  I had to remind myself  that while all men may be brothers, brothers can turn out very differently.   Everyday life for  these two European Jewish men had been a tragic drama  which had produced a couple of fellows  who were not at all like the Australian men I had grown up with and was accustomed to. And I didn’t know half of it then.

Entirely unambiguous was my reaction to Paris, which was even more enchanting than I had expected and I was instantly besotted. Even by Issy les Moulineaux, Henri’s home, and even when I discovered it was not “truly” Paris, for his car’s number plates started not with 75, but with 92, showing that he lived in Hauts de Seine. This industrial region on the south east outskirts of the capital, one of the outer ring of suburbs in the 1930’s known as the Red Belt, soon diverted me too.   I loved its every mark of difference from Melbourne or Canberra: its name and the evocative names of its streets: Danton, Hoche, Aristide Briand, Diderot and Pasteur. I loved its shops, their sumptuous contents and amazing service: the butcher, the baker, the fish monger the fruiterer, the charcuterie, and the corner bar-tabac with its food, coffee and smoke.   I even loved the plain, square, public housing block at 3 Adolphe Cherrioux and Henri’s apartment, just a small corner on the second floor.  And the lift, big enough for two people and a bit of luggage, that closed with a metal grille and ground so slowly on its way that agile young people could easily beat it to the second floor. I loved the Guardien (they still existed) who spied on everyone through lace curtains and chatted on fine days through the open window near the front door, gratefully receiving Australian stamps for his collection. I loved the heavy wooden door with its spy hole and two complicated dead locks that opened into a tiny hallway; the tiny bathroom with clothes line over the bath; the compact kitchen, table against a wall, two chairs, roughly made wall cabinets and large, shallow, white porcelain sink, the home made checked curtains; the prints and photos on the wall of the main room and, penetrating everything, the heavy  smell of Gauloises 

During our evening walk on that first visit, as we had crossed Pont St Michel to the Ile de la Cite, Henri had pointed to the Palais de Justice and said ‘There’s where I was tried’. And Uncle Simon, in Polish, which he spoke to Henri whenever he had something intimate to say, recalled  that it was here he had come for permission to visit Henri in prison. My ears opened, but no more was said that night.

These were the only two  who remained of my mother’s four brothers.

 Uncle Szymeck had come from Brussels to meet me and enjoy a French holiday with his mistress, and after I had settled into the apartment , Henri outlined his summer plan. We four would spend the next few days exploring Paris and then part, to meet up again some weeks later, in Brittany. Uncle Henri was still working, but during his  holidays he would take me and, he hoped, his student daughter Helene, on a tour across France ending up in the mountains.  Not, as I would have chosen, to  Scott Fitzgerald’s more appealing  Riviera. But I was in a mood and a place  to enjoy everything so I explored the city of my dreams and accompanied Henri after work to the cafe at Montparnasse, the favourite meeting place for his few close friends. The most regular one is a scholar and novelist I knew as  M.Arega. He and Henri met almost daily to smoke, drink coffee and discuss life literature and politics.

Days pass, Henri’s holidays begin and we wait for a message from Helene. None comes. Dejected and moody , Henri smokes Gauloises endlessly and tries to show some interest in our journey while I speculate about the number of days he is prepared to cut from his holiday waiting for the phone call, which I have already bet myself will not come.  After two more days, he decided that we must  to set off , but his disappointment casts a shadow over our journey.  Although I had not met Yvette, who was away from Paris for the summer, her powerful influence on Uncle Henri became clear in his choice of  the mountains as our destination, the landscapes  of our route  and sights he would show me.

We headed into Burgundy, our first  stop at the dramatic Romanesque cathedral at Vezelay . The shadow moves away  from our journey, as it does at the first of our many overnight stops at an Hotel de la Poste et Lion d’Or.  Cathedral and hotel, both in their separate ways astonish and delight me. In the following days the journey becomes a discovery tour, of France and of my hero uncle Henri. We spend long hours each day driving. I exclaim with wonder and delight at my first sights of a landscape so green, carefully tended and abundant and of architecture so old and so beautiful. We talk and talk – mainly in English with occasional French- but before long, we begin to argue. About what? About everything and nothing.   First about my naïve  responses and my Australian ignorance: “Chateau! but that’s not a chateau, it’s just a house!!”  And then the fiercest and most startling  argument  which was about naming.   Our chatting had revealed that French parents were permitted to name their children only from an official list of names. “What right has the State to tell people what names they can give their own children?” I exploded with Australian indignation,  expecting Henri to agree with me. But he angrily defended the French law and the right of the State to protect children  against parents who would name their children “Lenin” or “Jesus”.

Australians, it seemed, were  individualists even when former communists.   Perplexed and intrigued by his response,  I asked where  I could get hold of the list and nearly had my head bitten off, as though I were putting France on trial..

A letter  was waiting at our destination, a pension in the little mountain town of La Feclaz, near Chambery.  Helene apologised for not ringing  and explained that she and her boyfriend had left Paris to go camping. She would ring from Marseilles.  Neither Henri’s temper nor his spirits were much improved by this letter but they soon brightened when  my brother drove over from Scotland where he was living  with his  girl friend, one of the many good looking young Australian women that Henri would so much appreciate for ever after. He cheered up instantly. And Helene did ring and promised to call again at  our next stop, the pension in Brittany.

Our drive back through the Massif Central  filled with perplexing arguments and long periods of sullen silence bout nothing  and I  escaped for a few solitary days into Lausanne, to look for the house of my uncle David. Solitary because Henri, without the papers enabling him to get back into France, could not cross the border.  Even meals became a source of conflict as we examined the set menus in restaurant windows  of the towns on our way.  Ten days of full pension had left me too full to cope now with four course lunches and as I insisted on choosing a dish from the more expensive a la carte,  meals often proceeded in anger. Only  the glories of travelling along the underground river in the Gouffres de Padirac and the sight of the Black Madonna of Le Puy  sweetened the journey.

Le Primel Tregastel, the beautiful coastal resort in Brittany where Szymeck and Jacqueline waited for us, proved calming and comforting as  we swam and  walked and talked while waiting for Helene. Henri had happily  and confidently announced her approaching visit the moment we arrived but I wrote home from Le Primel a few days later: “ Poor man. I really feel sorry for him. The dreaded Helene has not turned up and Henri’s in a state. He thinks she should have come to see her Australian cousin and I suppose he thinks she should have come to see him too. It’s sad; he looks expectantly at every car and bus that pulls up. She still has tomorrow to come.” On our last morning  Henri hardly said a word. He looked up from the breakfast table hopefully every time a car pulled up in front of the hotel, and became gloomier and gloomier as it became evident, even to him, that she was not coming.  Silently we packed the car, farewelled Szymeck and Jacqueline and left. Our journey home, taking in the Disneyland of Mont St Michel and the most stupendous cathedral of all, at Chartres, continued under the black cloud of Helene’s absence.

A few days  before I was due to leave Paris for Prague and the next stage of my journey, Helene rang.  The tremendous row I listened to, open mouthed, did not surprise me now; but Henri’s curt announcement did. Helene would be coming over next day to meet me.  Given such a build-up, the outcome was probably inevitable.

A ring on the bell next evening , a key turns and  Helene walks in. The instant I set eyes on the  mini-skirted nineteen year old , long hair swaying, long legs swathed in  smart long socks, the latest  student gear, I see I have made a stupidest mistake in the gifts I have chosen for her from a craft shop in Port Moresby and decide instantly not to produce them.  After one cold look thrown at me as she walks into the kitchen where we are eating , Helene and her father fling themselves into another very impressive fight,  he shouting and she shrieking ,while I look on and comprehend  as best I can, grateful to be out of this one. Then as soon as the fight is over, Henri turns to me: “You told me you brought some presents for Helene! Why don’t you give them to her?” Distressed at the accusing tone and flabbergasted because I knew the gifts were so woefully ill-chosen, I said simply

“O.K.” and left to collect the parcel.

 La Belle Helene, as I thought of her then and  ever since, took the carefully wrapped parcel and, interested  at last, tore the paper off. First wonder, then disbelief moved across her face as she revealed the hand made and crafty  sun bonnet  and beach bag of brown and orange  tapa cloth. “What’s this??” she asked in genuine amazement, and after I explained the objects ,  how I had bought them from their makers in Port Moresby , how tapa cloth is made by beating bark  – she threw both  down on the table. “But they’re …”, words fail her, “ How could I wear those?”. I could not argue with that,  but I was very angry with Helene for her childish rudeness and with Henri for making me as ridiculous as the tapa cloth bonnet would have looked on this smart Parisian student. Soon after Helene  left the flat.

Early on the morning  I was due to leave Paris, Henri woke me. “You are going to Prague today? Well, you can’t! The Russians have invaded Czecho Slovakia” From then on he rarely left the radio; sitting and smoking listening to the news all day and saying little; bottling up his disgust at the invasion.  I decided it would be exciting to see what was happening and stuck with my plan; but by the time I arrived at the Qantas office in rue Scribe to confirm my booking, the Czech frontier had been closed and all flights cancelled . The dreadful days dragged on, the voices of the radio commentators grew more and more agitated and it was clear that I would have to skip Prague.  Uncle Henri was almost overpowered with shocked gloom. The prospect of the farewell family dinner party he proposed, with even the faintest possibility that Helene would show up, was too dismal and fraught to be considered. Hastily, and ungratefully, I booked myself on the first out of  Paris..

                  ***    ****    ***   ***   ***   ***   ****    ****    ****

***                                    *****

On our first encounter, my other school girl heroes had come up to scratch. Marble David, holding his sling, standing confidently high and scowling down at me from his pedestal had affected me even more powerfully than his photographs. Sir Lancelot, with his coal black curls would go on singing  Tirra Lirra by the river for ever.  I had never even tried to imagine what words he would have uttered, had he descended from his horse, thrown the reins to a groom and called up to the Lady of Shallot. But my only flesh and blood hero was, as my father would have put it, quite a different cattle of fish.  I don’t know what I imagined the heroic International Brigader uncle of my dreaming would have said and done, or how he would have behaved towards his faraway niece, but my 1968 diary traces my responses to our first meeting:

“I wish he could relax; if he could , then I suppose he’d write about his experiences, or talk about them more and get some of it out of his system. But there he is. A big, tragic, irritating, annoying and wonderful man.”

“What a very complex and very interesting man he is. If only one were a great novelist!”

And though, sadly, one isn’t, from then on I began to observe, take notes, kept diaries and wrote letters all seeking to pin down and understand the man, rather than the hero.  Rather, to understand that heroes are mortal men, made not of marble or the lovely words of romantic poets and novelists.

    ******.

 By August 2000 the book I had begun in 1999, at the Cite des Arts was on its way.  Henri’s life story had expanded and a new personality had emerged, inspired by the cheerfully uniformed man smiling from  a photograph, and by its  dedication, which read: “I had this photograph made for you. It was in Bologna, in Italy, before my last voyage to Villard.  I went into your room and saw that there was no place for it so I took it away with me. I have kept it since then and now, a year later, I feel that it belongs to you. Because I am smiling.  So take it, Yvette, in memory of the time when I was no longer alone. Henri. T. A. March 1, 1947.”  The photo had come to me , along with Henri’s war-time documents, during my time at the Cite.  Who had ripped it angrily in two from his beret and left ear right through his leather –jacketed body?  Who had sticky-taped it together? And how had it ended it up among Henri’s papers?  My first draft sitting securely in the zip drive as I left again for Paris had no answer to these questions. The bundle of Henri’s letters that his stepson Ouri Gorochov had promised me during my stay at the Cite, had not been found before I left for home. This time I was luckier.

The letters had turned up.  The Gorochow family was spending the summer in their Normandy house but the letters had been left in town for me to collect. Madame, their neighbour, had the key. A long heated Metro journey through the inferno of Chatelet, change to the RER for Antony and out to find the bus, on a painfully hot summer’s day for Chilly Mazarin, the former village, now a leafy  suburb out near Orly airport.  Far, far from Henri’s Paris. And mine.

Madame collected me at the bus stop. Pleased to help as she had known M. Adler and liked him well enough to support his application for naturalisation. “It’s awful, when you see the people who are naturalised, that such a fine man was not accepted,”she complained.Did she know about his past, I wondered but did not ask, as she  provided me with cans of iced tea and the front door key and left me to the dining room table and the large plastic box filled with stuff.  Brown envelopes packed with the photographs that Henri had received regularly from his Australian family, closer family photographs  and, buried in all this family history, the precious bundle of letters.  It was much bigger  than I had expected, made up of smaller bundles , each tied up neatly and labelled chronologically. On the top was the envelope marked “Pour Helene” that I recognised as the one which had so tantalised me, years before, when I spotted it, propped up on the little inlaid table at Adolphe Cherrioux. I had longed to open it then, but conscience won over curiosity. Now  both writer and recipient were dead, it was mine to read and with tears in my eyes and an agitated heart, I stumbled through the letter, not a simple task as it was dated August 20 1980 when Henri’s hand- writing was already very shaky.  Written on the eve of his departure for Australia, it was eight pages of explanation to a darling but defeated daughter. ”My dear”, he began, “I know that you know very little about my life.  And what you do know is rather the result of information picked up here and there, not always kind and never objective.

I give you these letters which cover only a little – but how important! – part of my life.  They can – if you like – give you a more truthful, or at least more nuanced picture, of the tormented soul and romantic spirit of your father. I have just re-read the letters and classified them  chronologically. 

I am profoundly moved.

My letters  are permeated with a violent and painful passion, both romantic and revolutionary, which leaves me now, as I write, quite  tender and astounded….Whatever else they are, these letters are evidence of the being I was …. and, perhaps, no doubt, what I still am a little bit, now.”

At the end , a PS that took me back to the day my conscience had overcome my curiosity: “ You can do what you like with these letters; keep them, destroy them or send them to Amirah.”

The Chilly letters, I call them now, were written by Uncle Henri, from 1942 to 1947, to his love Yvette, the woman who became his wife and her letters to him  from  during 1946 and 1947. There are 227 letters and when I read them they  lit up and blew open my draft like a small explosion.

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A few days after collecting the letters, I was lounging under the trees in the glorious garden created by Ouri and his wife Andree out of the bare flat ground behind their Norman farmhouse; inhabiting the place  where Henri spent the last weeks of his life ,a few yards down the road from the churchyard where he is buried, I took notes from more  letters from Yvette to Henri, written in 1947, which her son had found and we drove together  to Evreux, the ancient town that houses one of Henri’s jails, walked around its fortress walls and photographed it.

****                        *****

The Uncle Henri you are about to meet is the one who has been constructed from memories, from government documents, family stories and letters, Yvette’s memoirs, and the unpublished transcript of the tape recordings from which they were made, my notes and the explosive six bundles of letters.

6758 words

add ….”  Describing Henri, in a letter of 1981 Itzhak  wrote “Henry is a “chip” of the old block but educated, modern, up to date but just as stubborn, just as difficult to live with .A pity because he has very good qualities, a very intelligent fellow and a sincere friend when he likes one like Ian. My family was different.” I couldn’t have agreed more.