But in May, just after the mudslides, the newspapers published a picture of an Afghan woman – her entire family, her house, her village, as the newspaper said, “lost to the earth.” God knows how many infants and grown sons and daughters had already been taken from this woman, and now she had nothing. She was pictured kneeling on endless bare ground with not a feature left where once had been the village where her life had unfurled. She was dressed in red and purple flowing around her in profusion, hiding everything but her face.
Because her skin was as cured, brown, and creased as old leather boots, it was impossible to tell if she were thirty-five or ninety. Beneath her left arm she cradled what a Westerner might have thought were bath mats. Upon closer inspection, Jules realized that they were enormous flatbreads, all that was left to her. Where would she go? How would she live? You could tell from her expression, particularly from her eyes, that she expected not to live. Jules understood only too well that this was the ever-present foundation upon which rests all that is done to remain above it.
As he neared home he found that, despite the walking, nausea finally overtook him in direct proportion to the fading of his hope. What if François, like Iago, had hated him all along, and Jacqueline was innocent? This proposition, which he excitedly presented to himself, brought no relief. Was François justly punishing him for having fallen in love with Élodi? Or was François projecting upon Jacqueline his own promiscuity and transgressions – of which she would be innocent.
Or was Jacqueline, in what Dante would have called “her second age,” when she had risen from flesh to spirit, reprimanding him for having turned away as if he thought that, her mortal life finished, her good had died with her? That we can merely sense the soul and prove it only by beauty and indirection allows it the possibility of life when all the things that can be proved are gone, and now it seemed that they were.
Had the ghostly Jacqueline observed, disapproved, and set François to lie? That could not be. But how could Jules have betrayed her when, in the beauty of Élodi, he partly found her? That was a poor excuse. What he had done was cruel to Jacqueline, who was betrayed and replaced, and cruel to Élodi, who deserved better than to share her finite existence with the ceaseless calling of the timeless dead.
He dared not admit that Élodi was in love with him, for fear that she was not, but he knew she was. She could not feel, as he could every day, that which was in store for him quite soon. Age, mortality, and the past standing in his way made what might have been simple infatuation all the more compelling. If Jacqueline had betrayed him, he ought now to be free, but he was only bound to her more strongly.
When had it happened, and for how long? Jules had never strayed, taking control of his attraction to students who were at the time not much younger than he, mastering it so that it fused with and dissipated its energy in the music. Was it then, as his infatuations were transforming into art, that Jacqueline was in their bed with François, or others? How could something so tawdry be so painful?
UPON REACHING SHYMANSKI’S gate, Jules found himself in the dusk. Alone on the street in the remnant light of a dark red sunset and in lovely weather that once would have enthralled him, he froze in place. On the wall, drawn as large as a man, was a swastika, although it was not accurately reproduced, as the right-angle extremes pointed down in the nine-o’clock position rather than up. The Nazi swastika was like a waterwheel that would catch water if it turned counterclockwise. But not this one, which despite its inaccuracy was no less powerful.
He told himself not to be overwhelmed by the strengthening cascade of events, because although sometimes things happen all at once, seldom does everything collapse without some part of it springing back. Were he to hold through he might see a break in the line, and something good arise. Still, he was frightened beyond reason of just a symbol some imbecile had drawn on the wall, frightened of crossing his own threshold, of seeing Jacqueline’s photograph, of sitting in the silence of his rooms. Now she was truly gone, and he could no longer take comfort in his wish to join her.
But when he did cross the threshold, and when he did force himself to sit down opposite her photograph, raise his head, and look straight at her, she was the same as she always had been. You could see in her face that her beauty arose from her purity and goodness. It had lasted from infancy to and through her death. Her photograph showed that no matter her faults, she was yet irreproachable, which made it intensely more difficult for Jules, who might never put the contradiction to rest as long as he might live. He still loved her. Even with the hollowness he felt – which was defeat – he loved her.
Just as it had been after her death, returning home to silence was impossible to sustain. He wanted never to speak to anyone again, and yet he desperately wanted a confidant. The Bentley was parked in front of the house rather than in the garage, which meant that Shymanski was home. For years – like a servant who must trade on function as the passport to his betters – Jules had gone to speak to him only about practical matters, and now he had just such a practical matter.
He went the outside way, through the dark. The beige pea gravel on the driveway made a sound beneath his feet like several truncated chords, or the sound of a brushed snare drum disciplined by a felt damper. Though the light in the huge porte cochère was off, it was probably too early for Shymanski, even at his advanced age, to have retired. After Jules rang the bell, a servant whom he didn’t know came to the door. He had to tell her that he lived in the lower part of the house. She was with Shymanski in the South, and knew little of what went on in Paris. “It’s late,” she said.
“It’s seven-thirty.”
“It can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Is he up?”
“Yes.”
“Is he dressed? I know his reluctance to see people, but he knows me.”
“Yes, he’s dressed, but he doesn’t even like to see people he knows, even those closest to him.”
“It’s always been like that, and I imagine it’s worse now. I understand.”
She was beginning to close the door, but Jules said, “Is he busy?”
“No, he’s not busy.”
“Is he well?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Then why shouldn’t I see him?”
“All right, I’ll ask.”
After a while, she came back. “He says okay.”
“Then if he says okay it must be okay,” Jules told her, his tone conveying the message that she might think more for herself.
“I don’t make decisions for him,” she shot back. “I’m not his keeper, and he’s not that far gone.”
He was at least a little gone, sitting in an armchair that could have engulfed a Sumo wrestler, much less a tiny, ancient Jew with so little time left he was afraid to wear a watch. His head seemed as big on his body as the head of an infant, and was shaped like an egg. The large part of the egg was uppermost, narrowing as it descended to the chin, where it met a body that widened as it dropped to the heavy, broad ballast of the buoy of his hips and his behind, from which extended two short legs that seemed as thin as lollipop sticks. Thanks to a magnificent terrace on the Côte d’Azur, he was the browned color of expensive leather. Because of his bald, egg-like head, a nose like a door handle, and huge, careful eyes, he looked not quite human but rather like a creature from Dante or Lewis Carroll. Before he was confined to chairs, wheelchairs, and the back seats of Rolls-Royces and Maybachs, he had walked like a goose, pivoting to left and right before catching himself to return to center, setting each foot down as if on a stepping-stone. The wonder of it had been endearing.
Opening onto the glow of Paris, the salon where he was ensconced was masterfully decorated – in gray, silver, and yellow – to soothe and impress. On one wall was a tapestry, its dominant colors yellow, rose, and gold. On another, a Fragonard portrait of a woman in yellow silks, like the one in the National Gallery in Washington. How beautiful she was in every detail, not least her fine concen
tration. Though gone for centuries, she was fresh and lovely enough so that every time Jules came into this room he fell in love with her. That she was, at most, powder in the grave, made no difference. By the flash of her indestructible soul in the painting, forever still, he knew and loved her. So did Shymanski, who sat across from her, frequently glancing, kept alive.
Only the tapestry and the painting were lit, by tiny spotlights out of sight behind a reveal. When Jules’ eyes adjusted to the darkness, he said, “There’s a swastika on the wall near the gate.”
“I saw it when I came in,” Shymanski said. “It’s not really a swastika. It’s backwards. Must’ve been drawn by an idiot.”
“Who else would draw a swastika?”
“Maybe Hitler, who was no idiot, and he doodled them. In conferences with his generals and when he was talking on the telephone – ‘Hi, it’s the Führer’ – he drew swastikas. Unfortunately, those people were not idiots. They were capable enough to destroy my family and yours. And although you and I are technically alive, they destroyed us too, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but not entirely, and it was different for me. You were old enough to have known and lived in the world. My universe was a dark, one-room attic with three vents and one high window to which I was sometimes lifted at night. That and my mother and father were all I knew. In the first minutes that I left that world it was destroyed. I’ve done my best since. I’ve loved, I’ve tried but failed to protect what I’ve loved. The only way I’ve been able to go back has been in music, and only teasingly. It brings me, as Moses was brought, to a height where I have a glimpse of the Promised Land. But I can’t go in.”
“I understand,” Shymanski said. “For me the war was an aberration, and I knew what it was that I wanted to find again. That kept me alive. For you, they would say it was trauma, but I wouldn’t. I’d say it was simpler, that like everyone else you have a paradise you long to restore, but your paradise is also hell. Although getting back is dark and dangerous, you won’t be deterred. Love draws you back. You can’t escape.”
“Escape is only for my daughter.”
“But maybe not, not in France, not now,” Shymanski told him. “Throughout my life I’ve observed that old men become wonderfully optimistic, and yet I’m not. What is France but a once magnificent house now occupied by ignorant squatters. By no means the majority, but enough to destroy the culture and the law. After all the confused, tragic, costly work through war, plague, famine, revolution, and wrong turns, the house stood beautifully nonetheless and with potential unmatched in history. And now they write on the walls, break the windows, and make fires on the floor. Perhaps I see it that way because I have no strength left. You have a grandson, isn’t that right?”
“I do.”
“I hope he won’t suffer, your daughter, too. I don’t know. Now I’m leaving everything behind. My children ….” He made a dismissive gesture, as if throwing something away. “They’re Brazilians, like their mother, not really French. They think life is cocktails, watches, and cars. It’s my fault: I couldn’t feel for them what I feel for my children who were lost. It was a sin, because, half Brazilian or not, they’re my sons. I made them what they are. I was cold to them. I pushed them away, and the more I did so the more they became what repelled me. I lost them when they were young and now they’re getting their revenge. They’ve stripped me of everything, but that’s all right. I deserve it, and what is everything anyway? Things? I know how to die. I’ve never left the war, not for one second. You too, I think, though I don’t mean to presume. I know the facts but I really don’t know enough about you. As for me, I’m not afraid of the swastika. Let them come. They came before. Most of them are dead now, and I’m alive. I’m just sorry for the youth. For them, no Holocaust, just the mist of it that every day they can read in the eyes of others, which is enough to color a life forever.”
“Unlike you, I didn’t experience the beginnings the last time. If it’s a mist, it’s opaque enough that I can’t see behind it.”
“I think it’s more like Dreyfus,” Shymanski said. “French anti-Semitism is immortal, but not strong enough by itself to make a holocaust. For that dance, the Germans must take the lead, or maybe now the Arabs.”
“In July,” Jules said, “I had to buy a part for my car. It’s an old car, and the part was cheaper in a little store near the Gare du Nord. So I was at the edge of the Quartier de Barbès when the disturbances began. There were just a few police, but the battle lines had begun to form.
“I was in Algeria during the war, but in the mountains. I’ve never seen anything like this. Hundreds, no, thousands of young men, muscled and trim …. They don’t have jobs. What do they do all day, lift weights and look at jihad videos? They had overturned cars and buses to build barricades. They tore up paving stones, made fires, and looted stores. The heat and wavy air from the fires mixed all the colors – green, red, black, metal – and smoke hung over everything. They were covered with sweat, screaming with rage, their eyes like coals. Bitter and unreachable, they wanted to kill and they wanted to die. Half of them were fitted out with iron bars, chains, clubs, knives.
“They had so much energy and were so worked up that when they weren’t charging they would jump up and down. They were an army, and I’ve never seen, even in photographs, so much hatred in so many eyes. Focused on the police, they paid no attention to me. Had I been identifiable as a Jew I’m sure they would have killed me. This happens all over France. It’s not just a mist.”
“It’s not the Wehrmacht, either.”
“No, but France is helpless before it, and when France is helpless, one way or another, it surrenders.”
“It hasn’t yet.”
“What scares me is that, on rare occasions, unable to overcome one another, the right and the left fall in love and make common cause against … guess who? You saw that with Dieudonné. He filled the theaters with Arabs and the FN. Don’t you have powers?” Jules asked, hoping that somehow Shymanski could summon these and set things right.
“Jules, no one has. The higher you go, the more constrained you are. Real power depends on the ebb and flow of events. It comes from riding and floating on them, but it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re just a passenger. Eventually you’re thrown off or you sink in. I was once the third-richest person in France. I succeeded in building this lovely tomb, and I’ll die in comfort. The best doctors will come. The drugs will float me away. The nurses will keep me clean. The room will be quiet and beautiful, with many flowers sent by people whom I never really knew.
“How did my wife die? How did my children? I don’t know. In a cattle car? A gas chamber? Shot? Raped, my little girls? Beaten? I don’t know, but I do know that when I die I’ll be just like them. The lifetime I’ve spent insulating myself will disappear in smoke, as they did. The swastika on the wall is a sign that at last I’m to join them. And when I think of this, I feel peace and joy such as I’ve never felt in all my life, through all my successes.”
“I know exactly,” Jules told him, “but I have a daughter and a grandson. I don’t want to part from them. I can’t leave them yet, because the child is seriously ill.”
“The child. I’m sorry.”
Jules dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Not even a year ago,” he said, “seventeen thousand people marched in Paris and chanted ‘Jews out of France,’ and ‘The gas chambers were fake.’ Children are massacred in Jewish schools; we have to hide on the streets; throughout the country there are ‘Israel-Free Zones’; some authorities instruct shopkeepers that they cannot carry ‘Zionist’ products.”
“You think next is Judenfrei?”
“It feels like that now. I myself am safe when I walk through Paris only because people think I’m a Norman, or a German. My coloring. My face. To pass was always exhilarating, and gave me a feeling of freedom and acceptance. Even now. Then I see Hasidim, I see their expressions, feel their tensions, and I think, why am I hiding? I’m hiding for good reason, but I’m as
hamed even as I continue to do so. After the Holocaust we were free for decades. That freedom felt light and good, and I still experience it, but only because I’m taken for something that I’m not.
“My daughter’s husband is Orthodox. Because he was attacked, he takes off his yarmulke when he’s on the street. My little grandson doesn’t know anything about this of course. He may not even live, but if he does I want to get him out – to Switzerland, America, or New Zealand.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have the money, and neither do they.”
“I’d give it to you, Jules, if I could,” Shymanski said. “I’d give you a million Euros, two million, whatever it would take. But now I don’t have a sou. My sons control everything, and they hate you.”
“I’m not fond of them, either.”
“Jules, your life has been so much better than mine.”
“Really?” Jules asked. “I’ve come to nothing.”
“So have I, but on the way you’ve had music.”
“Music is evanescent, not even like a painting. It flees like smoke in the wind. It’s just gone.”
“Everything is evanescent. Why do you think I offered you the apartment? If there’s a God, and I do believe so even if He’s become inscrutable to me, music is the finest and possibly the last way of reaching Him. I wanted you to teach my boys so they could escape what in fact they’ve become, but they’ve always sought what they should avoid. They’re half Brazilian: maybe they have a different heaven.”
“Monsieur Shymanski, I could never sustain the elevation of music. When it stops I can still hear it, but the elevation vanishes.”
“Still, it teaches you, Jules. You of all people should know that. It shows you that there is something sublime. When I was younger I used to believe that if there’s an afterlife it would be filled with luminous color and gentle light. Now I think that it would be like music. When music, which seems more real than life itself, vanishes, where does it go? Maybe when we vanish we’ll go there, too.”