“You should have done something.”
“What was I supposed to do, kill them? I don’t have a gun. I was never a soldier. I wouldn’t have done that anyway.”
“Didn’t you feel like it, though?”
“I just wanted to get away. I have a mortally ill child. I can’t solve this problem for France. I don’t think anyone can, but certainly not me. Even if I could, my efforts and attention must be elsewhere.”
JULES HAD ALWAYS been numb to the lighting of candles and the procession of ceremony. In his first years in the attic in Reims it would have been difficult to mark the Sabbath and holidays. They might have done so, as did others, with matchsticks for candles, but they didn’t. Since the mid nineteenth-century, with a temporary reversion during the Dreyfus Affair, the Lacours had been fully assimilated. Even had they not been, in hiding during the war they were stunned enough to exist in many kinds of silence until its end. Their hope was merely to stay alive. Ceremony might begin afterwards, but until then it seemed like something only for those who were not hunted. Throughout his life, Jules had always refused any kind of celebration for himself, and though he tried his best he was present only half-heartedly in celebration of others. As for religious ritual, he was embarrassed by the weakness of rote public prayer, perhaps because when he himself would pray in silence, his simple, improvised prayer was worth a thousand set pieces.
“How do you think it’ll go?” David asked him as they were eating.
Jules knew what he meant, and that he was supposed to know how “it” might go, given that he had lived through the war. “David, I was five when the war ended, a shell-shocked child who couldn’t speak. That warped me for the rest of my life, as I’m sure Cathérine has told you.”
David nodded.
“I’ve never been equipped to live in peace and judge dispassionately. My reality was real then, it may be real in the future, and it’s partially real now. As much as it grants me clairvoyance, it also cripples my judgment. So I can’t tell you how it will go.”
“Of course not,” David told him. “I’m just as uncertain, but unlike you, I don’t have the benefit of experience. I know you can’t know, Jules, but what do you feel?”
“What do I feel? I feel that you should get medical treatment for Luc in the United States or Switzerland, and establish yourselves there. What about Geneva? The lake is cold and blue, the shadows deep, the streets quiet and clean, everything well ordered, peaceful, and rich. The medical care is expert and precise. They speak French, it’s high up, protected from war and conflict. You can have a life there.”
“Really.”
“Really. Yes.”
“It’s expensive,” Cathérine said. “We couldn’t even begin to afford it.”
“First, consider it,” her father asked.
“Jules, you speak as if there could be another Holocaust in Europe,” David said. “Do you actually believe that?”
“I don’t. But the smell of it is in the wind, the taste is in the water. That’s enough. Why should you live your lives in continual anxiety? Why should you or Luc be beaten in the street? Why should he have to hide his identity at school? Why should you fear that he’ll be massacred in his kindergarten, or that you’ll be blown to pieces in a synagogue or restaurant? Except for me, your parents are gone. You have no siblings and neither does Cathérine. You should move. I don’t want to worry that when I’m no longer around you might have to replay the story of my own life.”
“Not that we could go anywhere else,” Cathérine said, the spoon in her hand having been motionless since David’s question, “but if we could, if it could happen, you’d have to come with us.”
“No, Cathérine.”
“Why?”
“Because, for me, France is the world, too synonymous with life. To quote a British politician, J’adore la France, les Français sont charmants, la langue est à mourir. Your mother is buried here, as are my parents, somewhere, in France. Everything I know, have done, and felt is tied to this country and laid down indelibly. Keeping faith to the theme of my life is more important than living itself. There can be changes in tempo, but one must always preserve the tone. You know how you read sometimes in the papers that old people stay behind even as the barbarians approach?”
“Yes, they do that.”
“There’s a reason for it, and it’s not just that they’re tired and have no chance for a new life.” He knew that she could not quite understand such a thing.
“What is it then?” she asked.
“When you’re of that age you’re given a certain kind of bravery that perhaps you had when you were at the peak of your powers. I don’t think it’s just because you don’t have much to lose that the calculation runs in favor of daring. Rather, you get a level-headed courage that allows you to make death run for its money even though you know it must win. I’ll never leave France, but you’re young, so you can.”
“We can’t afford it,” David said.
“I forgot. You’re the accountant.”
“That’s the reality.”
“It can change.”
“How?”
“For one thing, I’m going to give you everything I have,” Jules said. “I have some savings. There’s a bit of jewelry, and I’m going to sell the piano. A Bösendorfer concert grand, beautifully cared for, might bring a hundred thousand Euros.”
“Forgive me, Jules,” David said, “but even that would be hardly enough.”
“I’m working on other things, though nothing is certain.”
“What other things?” Cathérine asked. “And how will you live? You can’t even stay at Shymanski’s. Everything will be gone.”
“I’ll live on my pension.”
“You have something up your sleeve,” Cathérine said, almost as if she were a child. She knew him well enough in that regard.
As he might have done when she was a child, Jules made a show of looking at his forearms, raising first the left and then the right. “No I don’t.”
“If you’re going to stay,” Cathérine said, “whether we go or not, you should be more observant.”
“Religion again.”
“Don’t say it like that, it’s insulting. How are you Jewish? You’re French. How would anyone know what you are? How will the Jews survive in France, or anywhere, if they break the chain of five thousand years?”
“Who’s breaking a chain?”
“You are.”
“No. You’re the next link. You do all the stuff, I’m expendable now, what’s the problem?”
“It’s not enough just to be born Jewish. What have you done to keep the tradition alive?”
“I stayed alive myself. I managed to survive well enough so that I could work, have a family, and love my wife and my child. It was a closely run thing when I was little. I didn’t feel then that I deserved to live. I consider it an achievement that I didn’t die, or kill myself, or become even crazier than I am. What about that? Survival. I look at it as miraculous. I’m proud of you and David for reviving observance in our family, but it’s not for me. God is too immediate, splendid, and difficult for that.”
They looked at him in silence. Then David said to Cathérine, “Maybe your father’s one of the lamed vavnikim.” It was only partly sarcastic.
“What’s that?” Jules asked.
“Never mind,” David told him. “If you are, you don’t have to know. In fact, you can’t know.”
“So why did you say it?”
“I was just trying to tell Cathérine that you’re okay, and that compared to you in regard to being Jewish, we’re amateurs.” David was older than his years, and kind.
EVEN IF HIS INTUITIVE notions sometimes passed as brilliant flashes of theory, Jules had no theory of music or anything else. The potential to love abstraction had been blasted out of him forever in a single shock that had then defined the rest of his life. He thought it just as well, for the things he valued, things great and everlasting, were mysteriously
self-evident yet elusive of explanation. He was loyal to the secret power of that which blessed the homely and unfashionable, the failures and the forgotten. Where theorists saw mathematical relations in music – sometimes clearly and sometimes with foolish complexity – he saw only waves and light. When sound could find and conjoin with these invisible and ever-present waves, it became music. High resolution images through great telescopes showed magical colors and heavenly light that the eye perceived only as a blur of white in the impossible distance. But there was much more to them than a pinpoint sparkle, and in the roseate clouds of effulgent galaxies was music in what was supposed to be silence.
This was, anyway, what he thought, felt, and sometimes saw, although he could neither bring it back, nor, it goes without saying, prove it. Waiting for François in the Gardens of the Palais de Chaillot he saw the same thing in the undulating spray of the fountains as the wind struck their jets. A hundred million droplets shining in the sun moved in synchrony like schools of fish or flights of birds, rising suddenly to a crest and snapping back in explosions of silver and gold against a field of blue. Jules read this and heard it no less than the “Ma di” of Norma, which was like a boat running with the wind, rising and falling gently on the sea. He never tried to explain music more than in its craft. He thought that music was almost like a living thing, that it had a mischievous character, and that, like a spirit or sprite, it would know when the trap of explanation was set for it and craftily disappear. Like electrons, it, too, was allergic to measurement.
François descended the staircase, a plastic bag suspended from his right hand. On what promised to be the last warm day until spring they were going to eat in the Gardens of Chaillot even though the crowds there looked like they were staging to tear down the Bastille. François had suggested that the masses of people would lend them comfortable anonymity, and he knew a place nearby on the Avenue Kléber that made the best sandwiches in Paris. They had had this kind of lunch all their lives, thon or jambon on baguette, with beer, outside on a bench, in a park, on a terrace, or by the river.
They couldn’t sit at the edge of the water, as the masonry was either flush with it or blocked by hedges. The benches were occupied, and the steps had too much traffic, so they had to get up onto the wall behind the benches, where the spray didn’t reach even on the windiest days. The lower part of the wall, nearest the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, was easy of access and occupied. Only as it rose, eventually taller than the tallest man in the world, was it not taken up. Jules and François chose an empty section in the middle, where in their youth they would have been able to jump up, twist in the air, and land firmly planted in a sitting position. Now they were too old, stiff, and heavy to do that, but they managed by making footholds of the iron eye bolts that ran in lines all along the wall.
No one would ever think that François Ehrenshtamm would be sitting here eating a sandwich from a plastic bag. One might conclude only that these were two old guys – maybe retired motormen or very low-level bureaucrats of the kind who thought the whole world could fit into a pencil – who, passing into the restful indolence of retirement and onto the easy ramp down which, forgotten by others, one slides into death, had nothing better to do than drink beer and eat tuna sandwiches. They were invisible to the young, who, assuming that even were they wise they would be useless in new times, were in most cases correct. In the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot, where they began their conversation, they were relaxed and well worn. Who ever thinks of an old shoe? There is no need.
As François laid out the lunch, Jules asked, “Why are the fountains of Paris more exposed to the wind than those of Rome? You know how many times a change in wind direction has soaked me in Paris? In the Tuileries, here, all over the place. But not in Rome. Roman water is disciplined as if by Mussolini. It behaves. It goes up, it goes down. But in Paris the water comes at you like machine gun fire.”
François thought before he spoke, not merely as the habit of a philosopher but because all his life when he didn’t think before he spoke he got into trouble. “You realize,” he said, “that the water in Rome is older, and doesn’t have the energy to attack. The water of Paris has sharp elbows and jumps around, like monkeys or adolescents.”
“Really,” Jules said.
“Do you have a better explanation?”
Jules thought. “Yes.”
“And what is that?”
“What surrounds Rome?”
“What?”
“Hills. Rome is almost in a bowl. Therefore, less wind.”
“Of course I knew that.”
“No, you didn’t, because you’re a philosopher, and philosophers aren’t concerned with wind and waves.”
“Jules, I’m not really a philosopher, I’m a con who talks on television.”
“That’s not going well?”
“It’s going fine – Polish television, Russian television, Brazilian television, African television. It sells books, but it’s like bleeding in the water. Though I don’t want to do it anymore, I have a young family. I wish I could retire to a cottage by the water’s edge in Antibes and put a line in the sea. All day.”
“Five million Euros would do it,” Jules said, “although you wouldn’t have a guestroom.”
“I have to keep on working, but really, television makes me sick.”
“Why not just stop television?”
“My income would decline by seventy or eighty percent. You’re lucky. Believe me. Privacy is royal.”
“I know,” Jules said. He did.
“What are you doing in your privacy, of which, truly, I’m envious.”
“There’s a difficulty.”
“What? The girl again?”
“She’s a student, my student.”
“Nothing wrong with that. I married one. If we were lake dwellers in four hundred B.C. and I was a chieftain in white furs I’d have an even younger wife.”
“François, this is not four hundred B.C., we’re not lake dwellers, and I’m not a chieftain in white furs.”
“How can you fault yourself for being in love?”
“Because obviously I’m crazy. I lose all sense at the first appearance of a lure. I’d be a terrible fish. I fall for images, voices, and, God knows, women I meet sometimes just for a moment. Not because I’m frivolous, but because I see in them their true qualities. I penetrate too fast, right to the core – which is so often angelic. It isn’t that every woman has this, but that so many do.”
“You know that a lot of them would snarl at you and deny the entire proposition. I don’t mean to pun,” François said.
“Perhaps the ones who would, would be moved by rage that they themselves aren’t angelic. When jealousy finally cracks, it releases insatiable anger. And people who aren’t innocent don’t believe that innocence exists. People who aren’t good don’t believe that goodness exists. Alcoholics believe that everyone drinks. Thieves think that everyone steals. Liars think that everyone lies. And those who don’t lie, believe even liars.”
“You see the beauty and goodness in women. So what else is new?”
“I didn’t say I discovered anything, but the fact remains that they’re superior to us – not by action but by existence. They don’t have to work at it, as we do, and as far as I can see, we do so mainly to be worthy of them. Anyway, what am I doing? I’m trying to re-create something that was lost, to make perfect something that was imperfect but still the best thing in my life. Nature has brought me to where I am, and will allow me peace only if I accept it. But leaving them behind is really difficult.”
“I’ll bet that as many hours as you’ve spent imagining it you haven’t even kissed her.”
“No. Nor should I. Even if at this late hour it was not foolish to love anyone else, I still couldn’t be unfaithful to Jacqueline.”
“It’s not as if she was always faithful to you.”
For Jules, it was as if a bomb had exploded nearby and knocked the wind out of him. (This had happened once, i
n Algeria, and he knew what it felt like.) “What?” he asked, as he recovered, observing in François a moment of panic quickly made unobservable by his long practice in debate.
“I mean, she died, Jules. She left you.”
“That’s not what you meant, because you said always, and that doesn’t fit.”
“It is what I meant.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s not as if I haven’t known you forever, François. I know what you meant. Why did you say that? Who told you?”
“Do you really want me to say, Jules? Because it would be better if I ….”
“Yes. You have to.”
“Do I really?”
“If you ever want to see me again.”
“Then I won’t see you again, ever, because no one told me,” François said. “No one had to. Jules, it was a long, long time ago, and we were all so young.”
Even as he dismounted from the wall, Jules reeled. It was as if he were falling off a cliff and nothing was left of the world. After he jumped down, he couldn’t look in François’ direction, much less at him. Instead, he turned and blindly made his way up the hill, the fountains on his right still bursting forth unpredictably.
Jacqueline’s Photograph
THOUGH OFTEN DIVERTED as the streets connected and meandered, Jules went on foot all the way west to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, dreading the moment he would arrive home, except that he knew the many hours of walking would make sleep easy when otherwise it would have been impossible. Were he not continually moving through fresh air and light he would have no escape from fear and despair, as only the walking put off his nausea and helplessness.
Months before, as if the war there were not enough, huge mudslides had made whole villages in Afghanistan disappear in a trice. It was the kind of thing, like ferry sinkings, that appears regularly in the newspapers, eliciting a second or two of abstract sympathy before the reader goes on to news of sports, business, and celebrity. Grief for one person is almost unbearable. Grief for hundreds or thousands is beyond the capacity of the emotions. So such things glance only briefly against them before they migrate to the faculty of reason.