The Travels of Daniel Ascher

by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

  3

  The Giant Atlas

  CLASSES AT THE INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY had started at the beginning of October. At first Hélène felt sure the other students, who were older than her and already had three years’ experience behind them, would be far more knowledgeable than she was. She had done only one training course, the previous summer, on a dig undertaken as a preventive measure under the metro station for the law courts in Toulouse, where a children’s cemetery had been found. She was convinced this was no big deal and she listened in awe when her fellow students cited mysterious names, not even knowing if they were referring to people or places. She thought she’d be a beginner for the rest of her life. Strangely, though, this one experience proved quite a coup from their earliest conversations. She soon realized that a necropolis, particularly a children’s cemetery, was to an apprentice architect what open-heart surgery was to a med student, a sort of initiation, it taught you as much as a whole string of courses.

  Which was why one clique of students, which included Guillaume, soon accepted her as one of them. The first time they ate lunch together it was still warm enough to picnic in the Observatory Gardens opposite the institute building whose redbrick façade, with its diamond- and hexagon-shaped relief design, looked like something knitted by a giant. There were six of them, and they found a nice spot on the lawn, some lying full-length like Romans at a banquet, others sitting cross-legged like Egyptian scribes, all discussing their plans for the future. They had all chosen their specialties already: Egyptology, Latin paleography, Carolingian sculpture, Middle Eastern churches. And Hélène sat listening in silence.

  But once they’d finished the meal and were getting to their feet, they turned into quite different people. Two girls started playing ping-pong with books and a ball of screwed-up paper. Guillaume used his plastic fork to dig a deep hole in the sandbox, pulling ecstatic faces every time he found so much as a blade of grass or the ring-pull from a beer can, and this made the others shriek with laughter. Hélène laughed along with them, but she wasn’t sure it was funny.

  Two days later she went to the institute’s library to work on a presentation, and she was looking through an old large-format atlas which, once opened, was half the size of a bed. There was no way of seeing the top of the page without lying across the book. Someone sitting at a table nearby stood up and came over, and she recognized Guillaume. He leaned closer as he talked to her, you know, at the end of the room, there’s a special counter for books this size, the giants of the book world, they’re called Atlantic format. And before she could reply he’d taken the atlas over, and instead of sitting back down, he stayed there looking at the map she was working on and slowly traced the course of a river with his finger. These giant atlases were adventure books, once inside them you were traveling on paper, you just had to shrink, like Alice. She told him she didn’t feel like it and, anyway, the Atlantic size books were making her seasick. She’d already noticed the way Guillaume tipped his head back when he laughed, making his Adam’s apple stick out. Before he left, he sniffed the paper of the atlas, I love that smell, it smells of saffron, she shook her head, you’re kidding, it stinks of old books. Later, when she knew Guillaume better, she still wondered how he turned everything he touched into a game.

  4

  Uncle Daniel

  AS A CHILD, HÉLÈNE SOON WEARIED of her great-uncle’s stories, of the endless performances he put on for the kids at family meals. His adventures were all the same—there were always storms, savage beasts, unscrupulous crooks, the same plot twists that salvaged hopeless situations just before the catastrophe. He unfailingly made himself the wiliest character, triumphing every time. When she was about eleven or twelve, she asked whether she could move up to the adults’ table. From there she could still see Uncle Daniel, but she couldn’t hear him, it was like someone had cut the sound track, which only made his gesticulations look all the more outlandish. She watched him cavorting about the room, with jerky mimed movements like a character in a silent movie. Her grandfather called him Charlie, and yes, there was something of Chaplin about Daniel.

  Hélène had always felt that her great-uncle was somehow set apart from the family, and not only because of his curly hair and blue eyes. Her grandmother never said “my brother” when she talked about him, but she did say “my sister” for Aunt Paule. The Roches were sedentary types, bound for generations to their mountains in the Auvergne, even though some, like Hélène’s father, had moved some distance away. Daniel, on the other hand, had itchy feet, he never stopped traveling. He was the only one who’d never married, but Hélène had heard her mother say it’s a shame his clothes are such a mess because it’s not like he’s ugly. More significantly, though, the Roches had proper jobs, farming, midwifery, teaching, while Daniel had chosen a strange way to earn a crust: based on his travels abroad, he wrote adventure stories for children. Under the pseudonym H. R. Sanders, he wrote the Black Insignia series, which had been and still was very successful; it had been translated into several languages and adapted for film and television. On the back of each book were the words Heart-stopping adventures where the hero battles his way through countless perils in far-flung lands and every imaginable climate, to ensure justice and truth win out.

  When Hélène moved to Paris, he was onto the twenty-third volume, but as far as the Roche family was concerned, twenty-three books was not enough to make a respectable man of Daniel. He might well live comfortably on the proceeds of his writing, but they saw it as, at best, a hobby, an amateur pursuit, Hélène’s grandfather in particular said it was childish. He might have said the same of archaeology. He’d died in February that year, just before Hélène’s twentieth birthday, and many years later she wondered whether, in her grandfather’s lifetime, she would have dared throw herself into this Indiana Jones–style treasure hunt.

  FOR HER TENTH BIRTHDAY AND HER BROTHER’S EIGHTH, Uncle Daniel had sent them a joint parcel containing the first four volumes of The Black Insignia. He carried on giving them subsequent volumes, one or two a year, as and when they were published, each with the same dedication, For Hélène and Antoine, with all my affection, Daniel H. R. The red-and-gray bindings gradually filled a bookcase in Antoine’s bedroom. The boy devoured them. He was proud to be the author’s great-nephew and felt invested with a form of responsibility, at school and in other situations. He showed the dedications to his friends and then, standing on chairs or hiding behind the sofa in the living room, they would reenact epic scenes in which they took turns playing Peter Ashley-Mill, his enemies and allies, in the ruins of Machu Picchu or the jungles of Borneo.

  About twice a year Daniel visited them in Orléans and brought the children souvenirs from his travels. In the entrance hall, before taking off his beige parka, he would riffle through his myriad pockets, hamming up the search like a clown and deliberately not finding their presents until he came to the last two pockets. For Antoine it was something different every time, the sloughed skin of a cobra, a baobab seed, an Egyptian papyrus; and for Hélène it was always a peculiar gemstone, and she never knew what to do with them. Her father kept her collection in a display case with labels: Brazilian Aventurine, Ethiopian Amazonite, Bombay Scolecite, Madagascan Yellow Jasper. He told her the stones were very valuable, you’ll understand when you’re older, but she thought her brother’s presents were far more interesting.

  At mealtimes Daniel spoke almost exclusively to Antoine, who asked him questions about Ashley-Mill’s latest adventures, going back over such and such a detail. Hélène was convinced he wrote the stories for her brother, and she felt she might as well not have been there. At the first opportunity she would leave the room for fear that he would guess she wasn’t interested in The Black Insignia and didn’t want to know anything about it. She had started the first book in the series, The Ferrymen of the Amazon, and had made quite an effort to follow the wounded hero through the depths of the Amazon rain forest, but she’d given up before the end of the first chapter. S
he tried to persuade herself that they were stories for boys. Perhaps she was afraid she would have to plow through episodes that Daniel had given a test run, so to speak, at family gatherings. Mostly, though, she just felt too old to be taken in by all that eventful adventuring.

  Truth be told, when Daniel came to Orléans he wasn’t exactly the same as at big family parties. The cousins weren’t around, there were just two children, and with this reduced audience he didn’t show off so much. The adventures he talked about weren’t his, anyway, they were his hero’s, Peter Ashley-Mills. Unlike other relations, particularly Grandpa, Hélène’s parents viewed Daniel with a degree of indulgence. Every now and then, without stopping what he was saying, he would touch his breast pocket, running his finger around the edge of the thing inside, the thing about the size of a cigarette case, as if to reassure himself it was still there. There were also strange, opaque words that cropped up in his conversation, like stones in a fast-flowing stream, words he was never heard to say at family gatherings but only when he was with them in Orléans. He never took the trouble to translate them, and Hélène imagined they were snatches of exotic languages brought back from his travels in distant lands.

  5

  The Anger of the Carinaua

  JONAS’S LAST RITUAL ON HIS WALKS WITH HÉLÈNE in the Luxembourg Gardens took place on the way home. Instead of going straight to his apartment on the third floor, he rang the bell on the second floor where Mrs. Peyrelevade greeted him in her singsong voice, and he would run over to a closet where they kept some old toys. He especially liked a tiny camera, Ricordo di Napoli, not only for the views of Naples but also for playing photographer. Mrs. Peyrelevade would sit on the sofa, pull her skirt down over her knees, and adopt a pose for him. One day that October she turned to Hélène, on the subject of photos, there was something she wanted to show her, she kept forgetting. She took her into the bedroom. It was above the Empirestyle bed, in a mahogany frame, a photo of her wedding, with fifteen or twenty people, look, my hair was absolutely black, you could see it where she’d lifted up her veil, and there’s my Jim, standing so tall, such a fine-looking man. They were married in ’41, sixty years in a couple of years’ time, can you believe that. Sitting cross-legged on the ground in the front row were four little boys, three of them with neatly brushed hair, in short-sleeved shirts and white socks, but the fourth didn’t look as if he was dressed for a wedding, with his striped knitted cardigan and that great chestnut brown curl lolling over his forehead. The old lady’s thin hand trembled slightly on the edge of the frame, she seemed to be looking for something, scanning the faces again and again, particularly Jim’s, but just then Jonas hurt himself and they went to console him.

  IT RAINED THE NEXT DAY, and the students didn’t picnic on the lawns of the Observatory Gardens. Hélène lived closer to the institute than any of the others so she suggested they take refuge in her apartment. The moment they were in her room, she regretted inviting them; there were six of them but it felt more like twenty people or that the walls had moved closer together. They sat all over the place, on her bed, on the chair, Guillaume sat on the floor, folding his long legs and wrapping his arms around them, like an Inca mummy.

  It was always the same routine, they talked about archaeology until they’d finished their sandwiches, then they turned into kids again. They spread around the room, some opened books, others fiddled with pencils, or the knickknacks Hélène had brought from her parents’ house, things bought in flea markets when she’d developed a taste for vintage, a stuffed blue tit, an ashtray shaped like a skull, an iridescent ball of glass made to look like a soap bubble. In a way she was flattered they should take an interest in her humble treasures, but she was also worried seeing them manhandling these fragile things.

  Two girls leaned on the windowsill to have a smoke, and they were so enthusiastic about the view that everyone else went over to look. Soon they were all kneeling on the bed, jostling to catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. Only Guillaume carried on exploring the room, he was intrigued by the magazine page taped over the glass in the picture frame. Hélène peeled it off and he almost shouted I know that picture. It was Soutine’s Girl with Menorah, he’d never seen it but had read a description of it in a novel. The people at the window turned around and a boy said yes, I remember, it’s in The Black Insignia, it’s about the war in the Lebanon, he couldn’t remember the title. Guillaume knew, though, it was in Of Milk, Honey, and Powder. Spotting this same picture hanging on the only wall left standing in a bombed house, Peter Ashley-Mill recognizes the painter’s style, having met the man when he was a child. Interestingly, it was the only passage in the whole series that mentioned Peter’s childhood.

  Conversations gradually bubbled up around the room, interconnecting and overlapping. They’d all read several stories in The Black Insignia, some even the whole series, they remembered every book, who’d given it to them, the characters they’d liked, the little beggar girl who climbed up a skyscraper to free her father in Kidnapped in Bombay, the rag-and-bone kid in Cairo who saved his sister in The Scarab of Henouttaneb, or the Chinese peasant woman who found a terra-cotta soldier at the bottom of a well, and especially of course Peter, the lone adventurer they’d all fallen for, blundering and absentminded but managing to foil every trap and never failing to save the downtrodden of this world. The girl who specialized in Latin epigraphs had even drawn her hero’s tattoo onto her arm with a felt pen.

  Hélène didn’t say anything, all these names, Itsme, Ahyam, Mi Yu, reminded her of her brother’s childhood games, and she was amazed to hear students, at their age, talking about these characters as if they’d met them yesterday. They couldn’t agree about The Ferrymen of the Amazon, the first book. Guillaume couldn’t see that the anger of the Carinaua people was justified, they’d saved Peter, the old cacique Umoro even called him my son, and out of nowhere, for no obvious reason, they tied him to a canoe and sent him across the river, threatening to kill him if he ever came back. Hélène’s friends tried to find an explanation, perhaps the Indians wanted to protect their forests, knowing intuitively that a white man might betray them, but Guillaume refused to accept that Peter was a traitor. They were all there in her bedroom talking so loudly that, to quiet them down, Hélène tried to tell them that her great-uncle had written the books, but her voice got lost in the racket and no one heard her.

  THAT EVENING SHE FOUND A POSTCARD OF PATAGONIA in her mailbox. It was sent from Ushuaia, featured low-slung houses against a background of mountains, and had a really beautiful stamp. She recognized her great-uncle’s handwriting, the same writing as those dedications in the Black Insignia books, its sloping letters clinging to each other with tiny connecting hooks as if afraid of losing each other. My dear Hélène, I hope you’ve settled into rue Vavin. It’s magnificent here. I’ll tell you all about it, but only if you insist … Affectionately, Daniel H. R.

  6

  A Shambles

  ON OCTOBER 24, exactly a month after Hélène arrived in Paris, Uncle Daniel returned from his travels, as his neighbors had said he would. She was leaning out her window smoking that evening and spotted him crossing the courtyard, which was already almost completely dark. He was heading to the shed with a particularly heavy-looking garbage bag. From above he looked shorter, a balding patch showed on the top of his head, and his back had become slightly stooped since the last time she’d seen him. Not knowing he was being watched, he didn’t have his usual alert, springing gait, but walked heavily, as if he were tired.

  Hélène had never known Daniel’s true age. She knew he was the youngest of the three Roche children, and she never wondered why, unlike his sisters, there were no pictures of him as a tiny baby in family albums. He first appeared in a photo of the Saint-Ferréol boys’ school, his hair cropped short, wearing a smock and clogs, surrounded by other schoolboys. His life started with that image.

  As she emerged from childhood she had eventually asked her father why Daniel hadn’t been taken to a photog
rapher as a baby, as his sisters had. Her father had run his hand over his face, he wasn’t taken because he wasn’t born into the family, he came to Saint-Ferréol during the war, he was an orphan and the Roches took him in and then later adopted him. To her ears, the words war and orphan formed a quite natural pair, wars kill parents, no need to picture how it actually happens, and she glossed over the missing episode in the same way that, as a child, she used to skip the page where the mother dies in the book about Babar the elephant.

  This revelation explained why she’d always thought of Daniel as a sort of foreign body in the family. Perhaps it was also why he carried on behaving like a child, as if he’d stopped growing up when he came to the Roches, as if he was ten years old forever. And, with all the wisdom of her eleven years, she’d felt older than him. She still found it odd that he’d so completely forgotten his first parents that he never talked about them, and to test the experience for herself she erased her own parents’ faces in her mind, but the harder she tried to do it, the more clearly they appeared to her behind her closed eyelids.

  She’d learned later, from her grandfather, that his name was originally Daniel Ascher, he was Jewish, Grandpa added, drawing out the sibilant end of the word. Apart from these few snatches of information, neither Daniel himself nor any other member of the family had ever mentioned his origins, and she surmised that it wasn’t right to ask questions for fear of twisting goodness knows what sort of knife in goodness knows what sort of wound. She knew nothing and wanted to know nothing about Daniel’s former life, his parents or his brothers and sisters, if he had any. That story doesn’t belong to this family’s memories, as her grandfather used to say, it was none of their business.