She finished her soup slowly, conscientiously, dipping some bread into the broth, wiping the china bowl till it was spotless, oblivious to everyone else. All the survivors around her polished their plates with the same application. Underfed for years, they now ate with brutal passion.
Then Rudy helped her stand up by offering her his arm, and he introduced us. Even though she was exhausted, she had the good grace to smile at us.
‘You know,’ she told Father Pons, ‘I only kept myself alive because I clung to the hope of seeing Rudy again.’
Rudy blinked and changed the subject.
‘Come on, Maman, let’s go over to the piano.’
He led her through the hotel’s grand sitting rooms, with their alabaster columns and doorways swathed with heavy silk curtains, sat her carefully on the piano stool, and lifted the lid of the piano.
She gazed at that concert grand with some emotion, then wariness. Could she still play? She dragged her foot towards the pedal and stroked the keys with her fingers. She was shaking. She was frightened.
‘Play, Maman, play!’ murmured Rudy.
She looked at Rudy in panic. She daren’t tell him she was afraid she couldn’t do it, wouldn’t have the strength, didn’t know how to . . .
‘Play, Maman, play. That’s how I got through the war, thinking that one day you’d play for me again.’
She swayed, steadied herself on the frame, then contemplated the keyboard like some obstacle she had to overcome. Her hands moved over, shyly, then came down gently on the ivory keys.
And then came the sweetest, saddest lament I have ever heard. A bit shaky, a bit haphazard at first, then richer, more assured as the music blossomed, intensified, developed, devastating, passionate.
As she played, Rudy’s mother came back to life. Beneath the woman I saw with my eyes, I could make out the one Rudy had described to me.
At the end of the piece she turned to her son.
‘Chopin,’ she whispered. ‘He never experienced what we’ve been through but somehow he felt it all.’
Rudy kissed her neck.
‘Will you take up your studies again, Rudy?’
‘I promise I will.’
Over the next few weeks I saw Rudy’s mother regularly because an old woman in Chemlay had agreed to take her in as a paying guest. She gradually got her colour and shape back, as well as her hair and air of authority. Rudy went to spend the evenings with her and stopped being the determined dunce he had always been, even displaying a remarkable aptitude for maths.
On Sundays the Villa Jaune became a gathering place for all the children who had been hidden. Children aged from three to sixteen who had not yet been claimed by their families were brought in from the surrounding area. They paraded on a makeshift stage set up in the covered yard. Lots of people would come, some to find a son or daughter, others a niece or nephew, still others searching for more distant relations for whom, after the Holocaust, they now felt responsible. Couples wanting to adopt orphans also put their names down.
I longed for these mornings as much as I dreaded them. Every time I walked across the stage after my name had been announced I hoped to hear a cry, my mother’s cry. Every time I headed back in that polite silence, I wanted to mutilate myself.
‘Oh Father, it’s my fault my parents haven’t come back: I didn’t think about them during the war.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Joseph. If your parents don’t come back, then it’s Hitler’s and the Nazis’ fault. But not yours or theirs.’
‘Don’t you want to put me up for adoption?’
‘It’s too soon, Joseph. Without papers certifying that your parents are dead, I wouldn’t be allowed to.’
‘No one would want me, anyway!’
‘Come on, you must keep on hoping.’
‘I hate hoping. I feel useless and pathetic when I hope.’
‘Be more humble and hope just a little bit.’
That Sunday, after the ritual orphan fair, unrewarded and humiliated yet again, I decided to go along with Rudy to see his mother for tea in the village.
We were walking down the path when I saw two figures in the distance climbing the hill.
Without making the decision, I started running. My feet weren’t touching the ground. I could have been flying. I was going so quickly I was afraid my legs might come away at the hip.
I hadn’t recognized the man or the woman: I had recognized my mother’s coat. A green and pink tartan coat with a hood. Maman! My maman! I’d never seen anyone else wear that green and pink tartan coat with a hood.
‘Joseph!’
I threw myself at my parents. Breathless, unable to utter a single word, I touched them and felt them and hugged them to me, I checked them, I held on to them and stopped them leaving. I kept on and on making the same uncoordinated gestures. Yes, I could feel them and touch them, yes, they really were alive.
I was so happy it hurt.
‘Joseph, my Joseph! Mischke, look how handsome he is!’
‘You’ve grown, my son.’
They said silly, meaningless things that made me cry. And I couldn’t say a thing. Three years’ worth of pain − that was how long we had been apart − had come piling on to my shoulders and floored me. With my mouth open forming a long silent cry, all I could manage was sobbing.
When they realized I wasn’t answering any of their questions, my mother turned to Rudy.
‘My Josephshi is just overcome, isn’t he?’
Rudy nodded. Having my mother understand me, read me like that, brought on another wave of tears.
It was more than an hour before I recovered the power of speech. For that whole hour I wouldn’t let them go, one hand clutching my father’s arm, the other buried in my mother’s palm. During that hour I learned, from what they told Father Pons, how they had survived, not far from there, hidden on a huge farm where they worked as farm labourers. They took so long to find me because, once back in Brussels, they discovered that the Comte and Comtesse de Sully had disappeared, and the Resistance sent them on a false trail for me that took them all the way to Holland.
As they told the story of their eventful travels, my mother kept looking round at me, stroking my face and whispering, ‘My little Josephshi . . .’
I was so overcome hearing Yiddish again, a language so gentle you can’t even call a child by his name without adding a caress, a diminutive, a syllable that lilts in your ear, like a sweet wrapped up in the middle of the word . . . On a diet like that, I started feeling better and all I could think of was showing them round my world, the Villa Jaune and its grounds, where I had spent such happy years.
When they had finished their story, they turned to me.
‘We’re going back to Brussels. Can you get your things?’
And that was when I regained the power of speech.
‘What? Can’t I stay here?’
My question was greeted with silent consternation. My mother blinked, not sure she had heard properly, my father stared at the ceiling, clenching his jaw, and Father Pons stretched his neck towards me.
‘What did you say, Joseph?’
I suddenly understood how terrible what I had said sounded to my parents’ ears. I was flooded with shame! Too late! Even so, I said it again, hoping that the second time would have a different effect to the first.
‘Can’t I stay here?’
Uh-oh! It was worse! Their eyes filled with tears; they looked away towards the window; Father Pons’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
‘Do you realize what you’re saying, Joseph?’
‘I’m saying I want to stay here.’
The slap struck me before I could see it coming. Father Pons, his hand smarting, looked at me sadly. I looked at him, astonished: he had never hit me before.
‘I’m sorry, Father,’ I mumbled.
He shook his head sternly to mean that wasn’t the reaction he wanted; he flicked his eyes at my parents. I did as I was told.
‘I’m sorry, Papa. I?
??m sorry, Maman. It was just my way of saying I was happy here, my way of saying thank you.’
My parents opened their arms to me.
‘You’re right, my darling,’ said my mother. ‘We’ll never be able to thank Father Pons enough.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed my father.
‘Have you heard, Mischke, he’s lost his accent, our Josephshi has. You wouldn’t know he was our son.’
‘He’s right, though. We should stop all this wretched Yiddish business.’
I interrupted the conversation by staring straight at Father Pons and explaining, ‘I just meant it’s going to be hard leaving you . . .’
*
Back in Brussels, it was all very well happily exploring the spacious house my father had rented now that he had started up in business with vengeful energy, and it was all very well succumbing to my mother’s caresses, her gentleness and her lilting intonations, but I felt lonely, drifting in a boat without any oars. Brussels was huge, endless, open to the four winds, lacking the boundary wall that I would have found reassuring. I could eat my fill, and wore clothes and shoes that fitted properly, I was amassing quite a collection of toys and books in the beautiful bedroom that was for me alone, but I missed the hours spent with Father Pons thinking about the world’s great mysteries. My new school friends seemed insipid, my teachers robotic, my lessons meaningless, my home boring. You can’t settle back down with your parents just by kissing them. Over three years they had become strangers to me, probably because they had changed, probably because I had changed. They had lost a child and got back an adolescent. The hunger for material success that now drove my father had altered him so much that I had trouble recognizing the humble, plaintive tailor from Schaerbeek beneath the prosperous new import-export entrepreneur.
‘You’ll see, my son, I’m going to make a fortune, and you can just take over the business later,’ he announced, his eyes shining with excitement.
Did I want to be like him?
When he suggested preparing for my bar mitzvah by signing me up for a cheder, a traditional Jewish school, I instantly refused.
‘Don’t you want your bar mitzvah?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you want to learn to read the Torah, and to write and pray in Hebrew?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want to become a Catholic!’
The response wasn’t long in coming: a swift, sharp, violent slap. The second in only a few weeks. After Father Pons, my own father. For me, liberation meant mostly liberating people’s slapping hand.
He called my mother and asked her to listen. I said it again, I confirmed that I wanted to adopt the Catholic faith. She cried and screamed. That same evening I ran away.
By bike, and going the wrong way several times, I retraced the journey to Chemlay, and reached the Villa Jaune at about eleven o’clock.
I didn’t even ring at the gate. Skirting round the outside wall, I pushed open the rusty door in the clearing and went to the disused chapel.
The door was open. So was the trapdoor.
As I thought he would be, Father Pons was down in the crypt.
He opened his arms wide when he saw me. I threw myself at him and unburdened all my emotion.
‘You deserve another slap from me,’ he said, hugging me gently.
‘What’s got into you all?’
He waved me to a chair and lit some candles.
‘Joseph, you’re one of the last survivors of a glorious people that has just been massacred. Six million Jews were assassinated . . . six million! You can’t hide away from all those bodies.’
‘What have I got in common with them, Father?’
‘You were brought to life alongside them, and threatened with death at the same time as them.’
‘And then what? I’m allowed to think differently to them, aren’t I?’
‘Of course you are. But, now that they no longer exist, you have to testify to the fact that they did exist.’
‘Why me and not you?’
‘I do too, just as much as you do. Each in our own way.’
‘I don’t want a bar mitzvah. I want to believe in Jesus Christ, like you.’
‘Listen, Joseph, you’ll have a bar mitzvah because you love your mother and respect your father. As for religion, you can see about that later.’
‘But . . .’
‘It’s really important that you accept that you’re Jewish now. It’s nothing to do with religious faith. Later, if you still want to, you can be a converted Jew.’
‘So still a Jew, a Jew for ever?’
‘Yes. A Jew for ever. Have your bar mitzvah, Joseph. Otherwise you’ll break your parents’ hearts.’
I could tell he was right.
‘You know, Father, I liked being a Jew with you.’
He burst out laughing.
‘Me too, Joseph, I liked being a Jew with you.’
We laughed together for a while. Then he took me by the shoulders.
‘Your father loves you, Joseph. He may not love you very well or it may be in a way you don’t like, but he still loves you as he’ll never love anyone else and as no one else will ever love you.’
‘Not even you?’
‘Joseph, I love you as much as any other child, perhaps a bit more. But it’s not the same love.’
From the sense of relief washing over me, I knew that these were the words I had come to hear.
‘Set yourself free from me, Joseph. I’ve finished my job. We can be friends now.’
He waved his arm around the crypt.
‘Haven’t you noticed anything?’
Despite the poor light, I could see that the candlesticks had gone, so had the Torah, the picture of Jerusalem . . . I went over to the piles of books on the shelves.
‘What! . . . They’re not Hebrew any more . . .’
‘It’s not a synagogue any more.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m starting a collection.’
He fingered a few books with unfamiliar characters on them.
‘Stalin will eventually kill the soul of Russia: I’m collecting works by dissident poets.’
Father Pons was giving up on us! He must have seen the reproachful look in my eye.
‘I’m not abandoning you, Joseph. You are there now for the Jews. You’re Noah from now on.’
Six
I’m finishing writing this on a shady terrace, looking out over a sea of olive trees. Instead of withdrawing inside for a siesta with my friends, I have stayed out in the heat, because the sun injects some of its happiness into my heart.
Fifty years have passed since these events. In the end I did have a bar mitzvah, I did take over my father’s business and I didn’t convert to Christianity. I took up the religion of my forefathers with passion, and passed it on to my children. But God never showed up . . .
Never in all my years as a pious Jew and then an indifferent Jew have I found the God that I felt as a child in that little country church, somewhere between the magical stained-glass windows, the garland-bearing angels and the booming organ. The kindly God hovering above bouquets of lilies, gentle flames and the smell of waxed wood, and watching over hidden children and complicit villagers.
I never stopped seeing Father Pons. I first went back to Chemlay in 1948 when the local council named a street after Mademoiselle Marcelle who never returned from deportation. We were all there, all the children she had gathered up, fed and given false papers. Before unveiling the plaque dedicated to her, the burgomaster gave a speech about the pharmacist, also mentioning her officer father who had been a hero in the previous war. A photograph of each of them had pride of place amongst the flowers. I stared at those portraits of Dammit and the colonel: the same, exactly the same, as appallingly ugly as each other, except that the soldier had a moustache. Three highly qualified rabbis glorified the memory and the courage of this woman who had given her life; then Father Pons took them to see his former col
lection.
When I married Barbara, Father Pons had an opportunity to go to a real synagogue; he delighted in watching the whole ceremony. Later he often joined us at home to celebrate Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah or one of my children’s birthdays. But I actually preferred going to Chemlay so that I could go down into the crypt beneath the chapel, a place which still provided comfort with its harmonious disorder. Over the course of thirty years he quite often announced:
‘I’m starting a collection.’
Granted, nothing can be likened to the Shoah, and no evil can be compared to another evil, but every time a people on this earth was threatened by other men’s madness, Father Pons set about saving things that bore witness to the endangered spirit. Which means he amassed quantities of paraphernalia in his Noah’s Ark: there was the Native American collection, the Vietnamese collection, the Tibetan Monk collection . . .
By reading the papers I got to the stage where I could predict when, on my next visit, Father Pons would say:
‘I’m starting a collection.’
Rudy and I have remained friends. We contributed to the building of Israel. I gave money, he made it his home. Time and again Father Pons said how happy he was to see Hebrew, that sacred language, resuscitated.
The Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem decided to award the title ‘Righteous among the Nations’ to those who, during the Nazi era and the terror it provoked, incarnated the best of humanity by saving Jews whose lives were in danger. Father Pons was named as one of the Righteous in December 1983.
He never knew, he had just died. His modesty would probably not have liked the ceremony Rudy and I were planning to arrange; he would probably have protested that he shouldn’t be thanked, that he had simply listened to his heart and done his duty. In fact, a celebration like that would have brought most pleasure to us, his children.
This morning Rudy and I went to walk a path through the wood in Israel that bears his name. ‘Father Pons Wood’ comprises 271 trees representing the 271 children he saved.
There are now young saplings growing at the feet of the older trees.