FOR THE SAKE OF EUROPE, FIGHT
THE GERMANO-AMERICANO-ISRAELO
HEGEMONY!
Germans in Germany!
Americans in America!
Jews in Israel!
For a True Europe, For One Europe,
Death to the Anti-European Hegemony!
Speck stared at this without comprehending it. Was it a Chassepoule statement or an anti-Chassepoule plea? There was no way of knowing. He turned it over, looking for the name of an association, and immediately forgot what he was seeking. Holding the sheet of paper flat on his briefcase, he began to write, as well as the unsteady swaying of the cab would let him.
“It was with instinctive prescience that Hubert Cruche saw the need for a Europe united from the Atlantic to the … That Cruche skirted the murky zone of partisan politics is a tribute to his … even though his innocent zeal may have led him to the brink … early meeting with the young idealist and future statesman A. Bellefeuille, whose penetrating essay … close collaboration with the artist’s wife and most trusted critic … and now, posthumously … from Paris, where the retrospective was planned and brought to fruition by the undersigned … and on to Italy, to the very borders of …”
Because this one I am keeping, Speck decided; this one will be signed: “By Sandor Speck.” He smiled at the bright, wet streets of Paris as he and Cruche, together, triumphantly crossed the Alps.
BAUM, GABRIEL, 1935–( )
UNCLE AUGUST
AT THE start of the 1960s Gabriel Baum’s only surviving relative, his Uncle August, turned up in Paris. There was nothing accidental about this; the International Red Cross, responding to an appeal for search made on Gabriel’s behalf many years before, had finally found Gabriel in Montparnasse and his uncle in the Argentine. Gabriel thought of his uncle as “the other Baum,” because there were just the two of them. Unlike Gabriel’s father and mother, Uncle August had got out of Europe in plenty of time. He owned garages in Rosario and Santa Fe and commercial real estate in Buenos Aires. He was as different from Gabriel as a tree is from the drawing of one; nevertheless Gabriel saw in him something of the old bachelor he too might become.
Gabriel was now twenty-five; he had recently been discharged from the French Army after twenty months in Algeria. Notice of his uncle’s arrival reached him at a theater seating two hundred persons where he had a part in a play about J. K. Huysmans. The play explained Huysmans’s progress from sullen naturalism to mystical Christianity. Gabriel had to say, “But Joris Karl has written words of penetrating psychology,” and four or five other things.
The two Baums dined at the Bristol, where Gabriel’s uncle was staying. His uncle ordered for both, because Gabriel was taking too long to decide. Uncle August spoke German and Spanish and the pale scrupulous French and English that used to be heard at spas and in the public rooms of large, airy hotels. His clothes were old-fashioned British; watch and luggage were Swiss. His manners were German, pre-war—pre-1914, that is. To Gabriel, his uncle seemed to conceal an obsolete social mystery; but a few Central Europeans, still living, would have placed him easily as a tight, unyielding remainder of the European shipwreck.
The old man observed Gabriel closely, watching to see how his orphaned nephew had been brought up, whether he broke his bread or cut it, with what degree of confidence he approached his asparagus. He was certainly pleased to have discovered a younger Baum and may even have seen Gabriel as part of God’s subtle design, bringing a surrogate son to lighten his old age, one to whom he could leave Baum garages; on the other hand it was clear that he did not want just any Baum calling him “Uncle.”
“I have a name,” he said to Gabriel. “I have a respected name to protect. I owe it to my late father.” He meant his own name: August Ernest Baum, b. Potsdam 1899-.
After dinner they sat for a long time drinking brandy in the hushed dining room. His uncle was paying for everything.
He said, “But were your parents ever married, finally? Because we were never told he had actually married her.”
Gabriel at that time seemed to himself enduringly healthy and calm. His hair, which was dark and abundant, fell in locks on a surprisingly serene forehead. He suffered from only two complaints, which he had never mentioned. The first had to do with his breathing, which did not proceed automatically, like other people’s. Sometimes, feeling strange and ill, he would realize that heart and lungs were suspended on a stopped, held breath. Nothing disastrous had come of this. His second complaint was that he seemed to be haunted, or inhabited, by a child—a small, invisible version of himself, a Gabriel whose mauled pride he was called on to salve, whose claims against life he was forced to meet with whatever thin means time provided, whose scores he had rashly promised to settle before realizing that debt and payment never interlock. His uncle’s amazing question and the remark that followed it awoke the wild child, who began to hammer on Gabriel’s heart.
He fixed his attention on a bottle—one of the dark bottles whose labels bear facsimiles of gold medals earned at exhibitions no one has ever heard of, in cities whose names have been swept off the map: Breslau 1884, Dantzig 1897, St. Petersburg 1901.
“The only time I ever saw her, they certainly were not married,” his uncle resumed. “It was during the very hot autumn of 1930. He had left the university announcing that he would earn his living writing satirical poetry. My father sent me to Berlin to see what was going on. She was going on. Her dress had short sleeves. She wore no stockings. She had a clockwork bear she kept winding up and sending round the table. She was hopelessly young. ‘Have you thought about the consequences?’ I asked him. ‘No degree. Low-grade employment all your life. Your father’s door forever closed to you. And what about her? Is she an heiress? Will her father adopt you?’ She was said to be taking singing lessons,” he added, as if there were something wrong with that.
“Shut him up,” ordered the younger Gabriel, but Gabriel was struggling for breath.
“I have lost everything and everyone but I still have a name,” said his uncle. “I have a name to protect and defend. There is always the trace of a marriage certificate somewhere. Even when the registry office was bombed. Even when the papers had to be left behind. How old were you the last time you saw them?”
“Eight,” said Gabriel, now in control.
“Were they together?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Did they have time to say good-bye?”
“They left me with a neighbor. The neighbor said they’d be back.”
“Where was this?”
“Marseilles. We were supposed to be from Alsace, but their French sounded wrong. People noticed I wasn’t going to school. Someone reported them.”
“Sounded wrong!” said his uncle. “Everything must have sounded wrong from the minute he left the university. It is a terrible story,” he said, after a moment. “No worse than most, but terrible all the same. Why, why did he wait until the last minute? And once he had got to Marseilles what prevented him from getting on a boat?”
“He was a man of action,” said Gabriel.
If his uncle wanted another Baum, he did not want a frivolous one. He said, “He was much younger than I was. I never saw him after 1930. He went his own way. After the war I had the family traced. Everybody was dead—camps, suicide, old age. In his case, no one knew what had happened. He disappeared. Of course, it took place in a foreign country. Only the Germans kept accurate records. I wish you knew something about the marriage. I know that my late father would not have wanted a bastard in the family.”
Uncle August visited Nice, Lugano, and Venice, which he found greatly changed, then he returned to South America. He sent long letters to Gabriel several times a year, undeterred by the fact that he seldom received an answer. He urged his nephew to take a strong, positive line with his life and above all to get out of Paris, which had never amounted to more than an émigré way station. Its moral climate invited apathy and rot.
Gabriel read his uncl
e’s letters in La Méduse, a bar-tabac close to the old Montparnasse railway station. Actors and extras for television were often recruited there; no one remembered how or why this arrangement had come about. Gabriel usually sat with his back to the window, at a table to the right of the door facing the bar. He drank draft beer or coffee and looked at magazines other customers had left behind. Glancing up from one of his uncle’s letters, he saw the misted window in the mirror behind the bar. In a polluted winter fog neon glowed warmly—the lights of home.
His uncle wrote that he had liquidated his holdings at a loss and was thinking of settling in South Africa. He must have changed his mind, for a subsequent letter described him retired and living near a golf course, looked after by the housekeeper he had often told Gabriel about—his first mention of any such person. A heart attack made it tiring for him to write. The housekeeper sent news. Gabriel, who did not know Spanish, tried to get the drift. She signed “Anna Meléndes,” then “Anna Baum.”
Gabriel was playing a Brecht season in a suburban cultural center when word came that his uncle had died. The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother Courage alternated for an audience of schoolchildren and factory workers brought in by the busload, apparently against their will. Gabriel thought of Uncle August, his obstinacy and his pride, and truly mourned him. His uncle had left him an envelope he did not bother to open, being fairly certain it did not contain a check.
No Baum memorial existed, and so he invented one. Upon its marble surface he inscribed:
Various Baums: Gone
Father: 1909–1943 (probably)
Mother: 1912–1943 (probably)
Uncle: 1899–1977
Gabriel B.: 1935–( )
Beneath the last name he drew a line, meaning to say this was the end. He saw, however, that the line, far from ending the Baum question, created a new difficulty: It left the onlooker feeling that these dates and names were factors awaiting a solution. He needed to add the dead to the living, or subtract the living from the dead—to come to some conclusion.
He thought of writing a zero, but the various Baums plus four others did not add up to nothing. His uncle by dying had not diminished the total number of Baums but had somehow increased it. Gabriel, with his feet on the finish line and with uncounted Baums behind him, was a variable quantity: For some years he had been the last of the Baums, then there had been two of them. Now he was unique again.
Someone else would have to work it out, he decided—someone unknown to him, perhaps unborn. In the meantime he had the memorial in his head, where it could not be lost or stolen.
GABRIEL’S LISELOTTE
Soon after Gabriel’s uncle’s visit, a generation of extremely pretty German girls suddenly blossomed in Paris. There would be just that one flowering—that one bright growth. They came because their fathers were dead or exiled under unremarkable names. Some of them were attracted to Gabriel—Gabriel as he was, with the dark locks, the serene brow—and he was drawn in turn, as to a blurred reflection, a face half recalled.
Gabriel at that time still imagined that everyone’s life must be about the same, something like a half-worked crossword puzzle. He was always on the lookout for definitions and new solutions. When he moved close to other people, however, he saw that their lives were not puzzles but problems set in code, no two of which ever matched.
The pretty girls went home, finally, whistled back by solemn young men with solemn jobs. They had two children apiece, were probably rinsing the gray out of their hair now. (Gabriel cut his own as short as possible as it grew scarce.) He remembered Freya, who had thrown herself in the Seine over a married man, but who could swim, and Barbara, whose abortion two or three of them had felt bound to pay for, and Marie, who had gone to Alsace and had nearly been crowned Miss Upper Rhine before they found out she was a foreigner. Gabriel’s memory dodging behind one name after the other brought him face-to-face with his Liselotte. Daughter of a dead man and a whore of a mother (which seemed to be a standard biography then), embarked on the au-pair adventure, pursuing spiritual cleanness through culture, she could be seen afternoons in Parc Monceau reading books of verse whose close print and shoddy bindings seemed to assure a cultural warranty. There was something meek about the curve of her neck. She had heard once that if one were arrested and held without trial it was an aid to sanity to have an anthology of poems in one’s head. Poor Liselotte, whose aid to sanity never got beyond “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, Si bleu, si calme!” held the book flat on her knees, following the words with her finger.
“Who would want to arrest you?” Gabriel asked.
“You never know.”
Well, that was true. Thinking there might be a better career for her he gave her lines to try. She practiced, “Is it tonight that you die?” “Is it tonight that you die?” Gabriel counted six, seven, eight shades of green around the place in Parc Monceau, where she sat asking this. He used to take the No. 84 bus to see her—he who never went out of Montparnasse unless he had to, who had never bothered to learn about bus routes or the names of streets. For the sake of Liselotte he crossed the Seine with prim, gloved women, with old men wearing slivers of ribbon to mark this or that war. Liselotte, now seeking improvement by way of love, made him speak French to her. She heard, memorized, and recited back to him without flaw his life’s story. He had promised the child-Gabriel he would never marry a German, but it was not that simple; in an odd way she did not seem German enough.
She had learned her lines for nothing. The director he introduced her to also thought she did not look German. She was one of the brown-eyed Catholic girls from around Speyer. She prayed for Gabriel, but his life after the prayers was the same as before. She had a catch in her voice, almost a stammer; she tried to ask Gabriel if he wanted to marry her, but the word caught. He said to himself that she might not enjoy being Liselotte Baum after having been Liselotte Pfligge. Her stepfather, Wilhelm Pfligge—of Swiss origin, she said—had tried to rape her; still, she had his name. Gabriel thought that if the custom of name-changing had been reversed and he had been required, through marriage, to become Gabriel Pfligge, he might have done so without cringing, or at least with tact. Perhaps he would have been expected to call Wilhelm Pfligge “Papa.” He saw Papa Pfligge with a mustache, strangely mottled ears, sporty shoes, a springy walk, speaking with his lips to Gabriel’s ear: “We both love Liselotte so much, eh?”
While Gabriel continued to develop this, giving Papa Pfligge increasingly preposterous things to say, Liselotte gave up on love and culture and the au-pair adventure and went home. He accompanied her to the Gare de l’Est and lifted her two cases to the overhead rack. Then he got down and stood on the gray platform and watched her being borne away. The train was blurred, as if he were looking at it through Liselotte’s tears.
For a time her letters were like the trail of a child going ever deeper into the woods. He could not decide whether or not to follow; while he was still deciding, and not deciding, the trail stopped and the path became overgrown behind her.
THE INTERVIEW
Until he could no longer write letters, Gabriel’s uncle nagged him with useless advice. Most of it was about money. Owing to Gabriel’s inability to produce his father’s marriage certificate (in fact, he never tried), his uncle could not in all conscience leave him Baum possessions. It was up to Gabriel, therefore, to look after his own future. He begged Gabriel to find a job with some large, benevolent international firm. It would give him the assurance of money coming in, would encourage French social-security bureaucrats to take an interest in him, and would put him in the way of receiving an annuity at the age of sixty-five.
“Sixty-five is your next step,” his uncle warned, for Gabriel’s thirtieth birthday.
He counseled Gabriel to lay claim to those revenues known as “German money,” but Gabriel’s parents had vanished without trace; there was no way of proving they had not taken ship for Tahiti. And it would not have been in Gabriel’s power to equate banknotes to a c
hild’s despair. His uncle fell back on the Algerian War. Surely Gabriel was entitled to a pension? No, he was not. War had never been declared. What Gabriel had engaged in was a long tactical exercise for which there was no compensation except experience.
The Algerian-pension affair rankled with Gabriel. He had to fill out employment forms that demanded assurance that he had “fulfilled his military obligations.” Sometimes it was taken for granted he had been rejected out of hand. There was no rational basis for this; he supposed it must be because of “Profession: Actor.” After his return he continued to take an interest in the war. He was like someone who has played twenty minutes of a match and has to know the outcome. As far as he could make out, it had ended in a draw. The excitement died down, and then no one knew what to put in the magazines and political weeklies anymore. Some journalists tried to interest Gabriel in Brittany, where there was an artichoke glut; others hinted that the new ecumenicity beginning to seep out of Rome was really an attack on French institutions. Gabriel doubted this. Looking for news about his pension, he learned about the Western European consumer society and the moral wounds that were being inflicted on France through full employment. Between jobs, he read articles about people who said they had been made unhappy by paper napkins and washing machines.
Most of the customers in La Méduse were waiting for a television call. The rest were refugees, poets’ widows, and foreign students looking for work to supplement their scholarships. Up at the bar, where drinks were cheaper, were clustered the second-generation émigré actors Gabriel thought of as bachelor orphans. Unlike Gabriel, they had been everywhere—to Brazil, where they could not understand the language, and to New York, where they complained about the climate, and to Israel, where they were disappointed with the food. Now they were in Paris, where they disliked the police.
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