NONFICTION - Oct. 24, 1993

YANN ANDREA STEINER: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras. (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $16; 128 pp.) When Marguerite Duras, author of “The Lover” and “Summer Rain,” falls in love, people listen. This is the story of her love affair with Yann Andrea, “a sort of tall, thin Breton,” a man 30 years her junior. She is recovering from alcoholism and depression and she is remembering. “For me,” she writes, “writing was like weeping. A happy book was indecent, unseemly. We ought to wear mourning as a sign of civilization, a sign that we remember every man-made death of any kind. . . .” At the center of the book is the shadowy figure of Theodora Kats, a woman dressed in white, a woman who dies in the Nazi gas chambers, a woman seen once in a Swiss hotel, another time in a train station. A woman who symbolizes silence. Some children are brought to summer camp at the hotel, children found dying in Nazi death camps, among them a little boy with gray eyes: “Gray as thought. As time. As the centuries past and to come all rolled into one. Gray. “ The little boy and his counselor fall in love. She helps him to tell the story of the time he saw his little sister shot in the head by a German soldier. “And her head had exploded. The boy wasn’t crying now. He was trying to remember, and he was remembering. He said there was blood everywhere. And the dog too, the German soldier killed the dog too, because it went for him.” “I pressed my lips to Gdansk and kissed that Jewish child and the dead children of the Vilna ghetto,” writes Duras. “And I embraced them in my mind and in my body.”