by Gina nahai
He said nothing.
He looked away from the atrocities his wife applauded, allowed her to teach his children hatred and cruelty and crime. Slowly, the Professor watched his family become a monster that would annihilate him without remorse and without a moments hesitation if the truth was known. They became strangers—he and those blue-eyed women—enemies behind the same line.
It was then—during the years of the occupation when news of the concentration camps spread through Paris and tales of German atrocities became common knowledge—that the Professor realised he must leave. He had given his youth to Europe and invested his time, if not his love, in the wife and daughters who never did become a part of him. But the secret he had taken away from the East had become too big and threatening for his small body to hold. It was spilling out in surprising and unpredictable ways—in arguments he had with his wife over the predicament of the Jews, in his dreams at night when he saw his daughters pointing to him and telling SS guards he was a Jew. He checked and rechecked his passport and employment papers for possible telltale signs of his origins, stayed off the streets as much as he could, for fear of being recognised by someone— anyone—as a Jew. He lived in fear of running into a friend or
family member from the past, in fear of his anger getting the best of him and compelling his tongue to slip and let out his secret.
When the war ended, his wife lost her post at the university and came home to tell him they were going to starve. She said she had to keep a low profile and hope that she would not be targeted by vengeance-seeking Jews and anti-German French, that she could no longer write or teach or use her past work to obtain a job.
The Professor had spent his savings buying sugar and coffee and other necessities on the black market during the occupation. He felt no moral obligation to help his family, felt no pity for the children—fifteen, twelve, nine years old—whom he had feared all through the war. His wife wanted to sell her wedding ring, but the Professor would not allow it: it had been his grandmother’s, he said, meant to stay with him for life. He offered to take a job instead.
He looked for weeks, but in vain. He had no training, no experience, no record of employment outside teaching or research. The city was in chaos and everyone was poor, and they would not entrust their affairs to an Arab man without a name.
That winter, the family had no money to buy heating fuel. The Professor’s wife drank wine instead of coffee all day, and his daughters kept asking for things—food, clothes, books— he could not buy. He finally took a job washing glasses in a sidewalk bistro. He was paid in meals for himself and his family, and he got to keep the tips he received from the American soldiers who frequented the cafe. But his hands quickly became sore from being in water all day, and his back began to ache until he could not sleep, and he quit after only two weeks.
He told his wife he would rather die than do the common man s work.
She put on her best coat, and went on the street selling cigarettes and roses in sidewalk cafes along the Saint-Germain. She worked from dusk until dawn, counted pennies, and negotiated tips. Sometimes, she said, she accepted a glass of wine or Pastis instead of money for the cigarettes. Sometimes she agreed to sit down with a customer long enough to rest her legs, drink her wine, smoke a cigarette. She was fifty-three years old and holding on as hard as she could.
Back at home the Professor assessed his future carefully. Europe had betrayed him. He banked his hopes on America.
He went to the library and looked up the names and addresses of institutions of higher learning in the United States. He wrote letters, citing the university as a return address, and mailed them with money he took from his oldest daughter, who was fifteen and working in a bakery. She left home at three in the morning every day, came back at two in the afternoon, and fell asleep on the couch. The other two daughters stayed home and waited for her to bring day-old bread and stale pastries from her job.
In the spring of 1946, the Professor received a letter from the University of Tennessee offering him a teaching post at their campus in Knoxville. The university would pay for him to relocate to America, and they would extend credit to make it possible to purchase a home.
The Professor got dressed in his black suit and tucked his grandmother's ring into his inside pocket. It was early morning. His wife was still asleep. His oldest daughter was at work. The middle one had a fever.
His youngest daughter asked where he was going.
“For a walk,” he said.
She wanted to go with him, she said. Maybe they could walk by the river, stop somewhere and buy sugar to sprinkle on their bread for breakfast.
He told her she should wait for him at home. He would be back soon, he said, and he would bring her fresh bread and sugar.
In AMERICA the first few years, the Professor kept his eyes on his work and tried to prove himself to his colleagues. He told everyone he was from France, with Arab origins, and they believed him. He said he had never been married. He joined a church.
He didn’t think much about his wife and children back in Paris. He knew they would never find him in America, and he took comfort from this, felt safe from them at last. But the longer he stayed in America, the more he was haunted by the memory of his youngest daughter, and the more he began to wonder about the kind of cosmic justice that exacted retribution for long-ago sins left unpunished.
The Professor believed in cosmic justice, but he also believed in moving along, and so he decided he should marry again—because, in America, a man was expected to have a wife if not a family, and because he wanted to prove to himself that he could do this, find a girl who would respect if not love him, who would be a companion and not a judge, a source of comfort and not a threat. His experience with a Western woman had failed, so he went East to look for a girl.
By the time he found me, the Professor had searched far and wide for a wife and could therefore tell I would fit his purposes. It was true that I was illiterate and wild, but those were faults that he could correct. The fact that I was a half-Jew meant I would not be a threat to him like his Nap wife had been. The fact that I was fair skinned and light eyed meant I could pass among Christians anywhere. The fact that my mother was mad meant I should never have children of my own.
This was crucial, you see—that I should not ask for children, that the Professor should not procreate again. He was not a bad man, so he couldn ’t be bad to his wife. He didn ’t understand my passions, it is true, but he could tolerate them well enough as long as I did not try to extend the bloodline that he so desperately wanted to stop. Every living child he left behind, he had decided after his experience with his first family, would be a witness to his sins.
It would have all worked out, he later told me. He would have died carrying the secret of his Jewish past, would have lived the rest of his life guarding the memory of his nine-year-old’s eyes the morning he left. He could have justified his existence by producing exemplary work in his chosen field, could have left a trace of thought and understanding upon the world that his condescending colleagues would not be able to erase. It would have all worked out except for my daughter.
I had convinced him to produce her though he knew her fate, to bring her to life knowing she would die. It was the last thing he had wanted on his conscience—to have the undoing of yet another child, another girl, on his hands.
He couldn’t sleep anymore.
In the weeks and months after my daughter’s passing, the Professor reviewed his life—carefully and with as much objectivity as he could command—and tried to understand the source of his failings. He was being punished for his refusal to accept his blood and lineage. Never mind logic and science, you see: when all was said and done, the Professor knew there was an order greater than what civil fed man had been able to define in books.
So he gathered his courage, looked behind at what he had so desperately wanted to deny, and for the first time, tried to understand why.
He threw himself into the task
of studying Judaism, visited the old synagogue in Knoxville, and sat in on Friday night and Saturday morning shuls. He learned about the Orthodox Jews of Memphis, went to talk to their rabbis, attended their services. He did not admit to them that he was a Jew, pretended that his interest in them was purely academic. The rabbi in Memphis nodded at him quietly and said he understood. Nevertheless, he insisted on teaching the Professor to say the Sh 'ma for his own peace, the Kaddish for the soul of his departed loved ones. Then he pulled the Professor over and told him that a Jew must be prepared to admit his lineage not only to himself, but also to those who might condemn him for it.
“It’s a haunted man who runs from his own shadow,” the rabbi said.
One morning shortly after another visit to Memphis, the Professor told me he was going to Europe. He was going to find the wife and children he had left behind, he said, to face them one last time and speak the truth he had never before been able to utter.
He was sixty-four years old and at last ready to face his shadow.
At THE a IRPORT terminal in Paris, the Professor watched three plane loads of passengers march past him through customs, and still, he did not have the courage to move. He had come prepared to face his family, to weather their hatred and the many expressions of their scorn. But in his attempt to get ready to stand before his judges, he had forgotten that he was also about to revisit the city of his youth, the place where he had experienced the greatest pain but also, before that, the only bit of happiness he ever knew.
Paris was smaller, more crowded, less civilised than he remembered. The streets were narrow and overpopulated; the air and the river were polluted; the stores and cafes bugged with an urgency that made him want to escape.
On his old block on rue Berger, the tailor shop was gone— replaced by a smoke-filled grocery store tended by an African man. Everything else—the apartment buildings, the bakery, the little booth where an old woman had sold newspapers and gardenias—was still the same.
He spent the night at a hotel two streets away. The next morning he accepted a glass of creme de menthe from the lady who owned the hotel, then went back to his room again.
On his third day in Paris, he gave himself the closest shave he had ever had, and dressed in his best suit. He took an umbrella even though there was no sign of rain, drank another creme de menthe. On rue Berger the old woman with the gardenias gave him a long, hard look before asking if he wanted to buy a paper. When he refused, she shoved the paper under his arm anyway.
“For old times’ sake,” she said, and he was horrified to realise that she remembered him.
His wife’s name was still on the plate next to the button that activated the doorbell. He thought about ringing, then pushed the door to the lobby and went in.
A slim staircase led directly from the front door up toward the apartments. The building was narrow and deep, allowing only one unit on each floor and even then, the rooms within were stacked one in front of the other like hollow chambers of sound and clutter. On the third floor, his breath trapped in his stomach, the Professor stopped and stared at the black-painted door he had closed behind him so long ago.
It opened with swift and unprovoked force, putting the Professor on the defensive, as if he had been caught in midcrime. A woman in a tight skirt and heavy shoes frowned at him, then muttered something in French and pulled the door shut. She was on her way out, the Professor realised. She turned her back to him and struggled with the lock. Overweight and haggard, she had the flat, round hands, the square finger tips, the meaty elbows of women who have done hard, thankless work all their lives.
“Out of my way,” she told the Professor, then nudged him with her body.
She was halfway down the first flight of steps when he found the voice to call her.
“Forgive me, Madame,” he ventured, but she did not stop.
He watched her for a moment.
“Madame,” he called again. “One moment, if you please.”
She grabbed the railing with an angry hand and stopped.
“But hurry up, already,” she yelled from the landing on the second floor. “What is it?”
She was looking up at him now with her light blue eyes, the freckles on her nose having turned with time into large brown blotches. Suddenly he realised he had come to the right place— that this woman he did not know and had not recognised must be one of his three daughters.
At that very moment the Professor grasped the enormity of his sin.
Slowly, one hand gripping the railing, he went down the steps to where his daughter waited. When he reached her level, he took his hat off and stood before her speechless. She must have known that he had something of consequence to say because she had forgotten her pressing business and was looking at him through narrowed eyelids.
“What is it?” she finally asked, but he could read the doubt in her voice this time.
He swallowed the bile in his throat and stood as tall as he could.
“My name is Professor Kerdi,” he said. “I used to live in your apartment with my wife and three daughters.”
Twenty years had passed since the Professor had walked out on his family. His oldest daughter, the one whose salary he had used to buy stamps for his letters to America, was still working at the bakery where she had started at age fifteen. His middle daughter had married a Portuguese singer and moved with him to South America. His youngest had continued to live in the apartment. She cleaned house for rich women on avenue Foch and wrote letters to the Bureau of Missing Persons asking them to keep her father’s file alive, insisting that he had been mur-
dered or kidnapped or simply lost on his walk the day he left, but that he had not abandoned her.
Their mother—the blue-eyed professor ofJungian psychol-ogy with the Nap sympathies—had hung herself from the ceiling fan in her bedroom three years after her husband had vanished.
He CAME BACK and told me he had run out of hope.
He stood in our hallway with his hat in hand and his suitcase by the door—a pilgrim returning from a last-ditch journey to the land of broken promises, sweating into his shirt collar and breathing the slow, scratchy air that surrounds dying men. When he saw me he opened his mouth as if to speak, but his lips were covered with cobwebs from all the years of silence, and it was all he could do to let out a sigh and extend his arm.
I thought then how odd it was that the end of our life—his and mine—had come in the shape of a pathetic-looking man dragging an old suitcase, and not, as I had imagined, in a spectacular inferno of rage and passion and wild, unchecked rebellion. I gave him my hand. He bent down and placed a tearful kiss on the tips of my fingers.
“You are my only link to the world of the living,” he said.
NOW YOU SEE WHY I cannot leave my husband, why 1 will have to go with him no matter how far he takes me from you.
You see me now—the Jew’s daughter from nowhere, my hands painted with the invisible colors of my mother’s sorrow, my eyes filled with the longing for roads that might have led away but that instead took me to a place where I would drink poison and pray for a salvation I know will never come. You see me and wonder at the hollow promise of Hope.
This is what we all look for—the cynic with the restless boots who travels the world seeking justice, the preacher with the snake calling the name of the Lord, my mother braiding her hair with the gold of her father’s betrayal, believing that if she kept the coins he may come back: we are all waiting for the luminous hands that will reach for us in the night, the eyes that will witness our pain, the voice that will whisper the possibility of a different truth.
I owe this to the Professor, you see. I have never loved him, but 1 long ago traded my life for the possibility of the one he offered, and I cannot leave him now that he cannot walk alone.
It’s an even bargain—one in which we both lose.
All NIGHT LONG the wind howled in the mountains, and the temperature continued to drop. Adam dreamed that Blue stood above him in he
r transparent white dress. Reaching toward her, he ran his right index finger across the front of her chest, parting the fabric like water, laying bare the snake wound that was still visible, traveling down to the tip of her navel. Blue lowered herself onto him, seeped like a breath through the pores in his skin and into his muscles and bones. When she exhaled, he felt the weight of a thousand lives lift away.
Isiah Frank was shaking him by the shoulder. Adam opened his eyes and took a moment to remember where he was. Eight in the morning, late September, in a city he had come to conquer but which had entrapped him instead.
“Better get back over there,” Isiah said quietly.
His face was grave, devoid of its usual irony.
He gave Adam a chance to sit up.
“And take your notebook with you.”
MRS. ROSCOE ACROSS the street stood on the sidewalk in her gray-and-red terry bathrobe and her rubber rain boots. She had wrapped a blanket around herself, and she was shivering in the wind as she looked at the police and coroner’s car outside Blue’s house.
“Told you the devil’s in that house,” she said the moment she saw Adam. Behind him a second police car pulled to the curb and stopped.
Adam went up to the house with his knees shaking and his heart in his throat. He had been here less than twenty-four hours earlier and yet he could tell, without needing the police or the coroner to remind him, that disaster had come on his heels. The moment he entered the house, a pair of eyes fixed on him.
“Where is she?” he asked, his voice barely audible for its tremor.
A young woman in a bomber jacket came toward him and stopped half a foot away. He did not want to hear what she had to say, wouldn’t accept the news he thought she would give him.