Michael put on a pirate voice: “X marks the spot!”
When the boy had finished his ice cream—Noah had already tossed his—they walked over to investigate. The bell tower turned out to belong to the older church beside it, the little Cathedral of Sainte Réparate. “I think Margot may have brought me to Mass here,” Noah murmured as they stepped into the glittering gloom.
The church reduced Michael to silence: an excess of gold, marble, glass, multiple pipe organs, statues of angels and saints flying out of every wall.
“I seem to remember being rather afraid of that bird.” Noah pointed at a gilt eagle holding up the lectern.
Michael telescoped out his selfie stick to take a picture of himself with the eagle. “This is some seriously frilly shit.”
“It’s called Baroque style.”
“I call it fugly.”
He couldn’t disagree. But the crass splendor of this interior offered no explanation of why his mother had taken such a ham-fisted snapshot of the tower. If Margot had been one of the ladies who did the flowers, that would have been here in her local parish church, wouldn’t it? How was the tower connected with the other photos—the dandy and the couple and the little boy, the empty street, the tree?
Noah went up close to a stand of lilies, and breathed in: a sickly tang of death. His eye was caught by a tapestry that showed a man with a little boy on his shoulders, stumbling across a river. What was the name of that saint? All Noah could remember was the twist in the story; when the man griped about how heavy the load had been, the kid—who turned out to be Jesus—told him, “You were only carrying me, but I was carrying the whole world.” Noah had been a disbeliever for almost his entire life, but his head was still cluttered with this nonsense.
He leaned on a column—Corinthian, was it?—and read a leaflet he’d picked up. “In the seventeenth century the nave, this central bit, fell down and crushed the bishop.”
“Like, creamed?” Michael asked. “Game over?”
“Game over.”
Dozens of marble plaques concisely expressed gratitude: Remerciement juillet 63 LB, or Merci à N.D. de Lourdes mars 1953 CMP HB. Mostly from the 1920s and ’30s, but Noah spotted one as recent as 1996. St. Anthony seemed far more popular than Jesus, but less than the Virgin. “These are paid for by people who want to thank a saint for healing them, or doing them favors,” he whispered. “Mille mercis, see—that’s ‘a thousand thank-yous,’ like ‘thanks a million.’”
“You think it’s all bullshit,” Michael said, too loud.
“Well, the placebo effect… If you believe God’s mom is zapping away your tumor, maybe it gives your immune system the power to do it.”
“You’re probably going straight to hell.”
Noah shrugged, eyes on the plaques. “Either way, it can’t hurt to say thanks.”
In one of the tiny chapels he found an undistinguished nineteenth-century painting of the parish’s patron, Sainte Réparate. When Michael came up behind him, Noah murmured, “Roman soldiers arrested this Palestinian girl for being a Christian. It says she was only a teenager—maybe as young as you.”
“Did they throw her to the lions?”
“No, first they, ah…” Noah was having qualms. “It’s a bit gory.”
“I’m not shockable,” Michael told him. “I can see from the painting, soldier boy’s about to whop her head off.”
“All right.” Noah translated the panel. “First they tried burning Réparate in a furnace, but rain put the fire out. Then they made her drink…boiling tar.”
“Shit, man.” Michael stared at the little cauldron in the painting.
“But she wouldn’t stop praying, so in the end they cut her head off.”
A frown. “That’s it?”
“Oh, you were expecting some Hollywood ending? No. Réparate’s body—and head—were put on a raft. The angels blew it all the way across the sea to Nice, and they wouldn’t let the birds peck her, so she did arrive in perfect condition.”
“Still dead, though?”
“Afraid so.” The Mediterranean was full of drowned migrants, these days; Noah was unsettled by an image of that tiny Kurdish boy who’d washed up on the beach in Turkey. “Those are supposed to be Réparate’s bones up there,” he added, pointing at a gold-and-glass case, “but I doubt that very much.”
“The angels couldn’t have pulled their thumbs out of their asses and stopped her from dying in the first place?”
“That’s superheroes you’re thinking of.”
Michael gave Noah a sideways look as they stepped outside into the sparkling afternoon. “If your mom was churchy, how’d she like you ending up a atheist?”
Noah knew he was being baited, so he didn’t say an atheist. “Well, she wasn’t thrilled, but she knew I had the same basic values, that’s what mattered.” (Though what did he know for sure about his mother’s values, anymore?) “When I stopped going to Mass, it was nothing personal.” He reached for an analogy. “You know how salt is formed? Have you covered inorganic compounds yet, at school?”
Blank.
Don’t get technical about anions and cations, Joan advised, or even positive and negative charges.
“For instance, sodium and chlorine are two elements that…long to be together.” Noah was anthropomorphizing, but never mind. “OK?”
“If you say so.”
“Every molecule of chlorine is desperate for an electron to fill up its shell”—he held up one fist—“whereas every molecule of sodium has an extra electron it’s dying to get rid of.” The other fist. “So when they meet”—he brought his index fingertips together—“they click into place like puzzle pieces and make a new thing, salt.”
“Like, their baby?”
“Well put. What I’m trying to say is, I just never had that”—deficit? need? too derogatory—“attraction for religion that let it stick to me like it did to my mom and my sister.”
Michael nodded. “My grandma wouldn’t be asking did you want some salt, she just shook it on.” He bent to pick up discarded paper cones from a glacerie.
“Leave them, they’re dirty.”
Which of course made the kid persist, fitting them over his fingers and collecting more till he had the full complement of ten.
Outside a tiny shop window, tin trays with reproductions of old posters caught Noah’s eye. One bore a girl in not much more than a feathered hat, beckoning to a top-hatted gentleman. The caption said Very Nice; clearly that Anglo-French pun was centuries old. “How does this look on me?” Noah asked, holding up an apron that imposed a bikini-clad woman’s torso on his own.
“Horrible.” Michael shielded his eyes with his spiked talons.
There was a puff-skirted doll in bright Provençal cotton, meant to be hung up in a kitchen to hold plastic grocery bags. A mug featuring Van Gogh’s face, with a tag promising the ear would disappear when you poured in a hot drink.
The boy was spinning the postcard rack, scanning obscene holographic images of huge-breasted sunbathers.
“Take off your paper cones if you’re coming inside,” Noah told him, opening the door. “You can’t touch anything with them.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t touch anything?”
“Won’t go in.”
So Noah stepped into the store, where ceramic crickets chirped as if by magic. Maybe he should get Vivienne a stack of little slabs of handmade soap—rosemary, lemon, olive oil? But he couldn’t settle to browsing through miniature sacks of lavender and herbes de Provence, sets of jars of flavored salts. He wished he could check on Michael through the window, but it was overfilled with oilcloth tablecloths in gaudy blue and yellow patterns. What if when he went out, the kid had wandered off? With only half his attention, Noah considered a bottle of pastis, remembering the sharply aniseed bite of the liquor. According to the label it was made by steeping twenty-four different plants and spices in alcohol for three months. No, if he bought it, he’d need to check in his suitc
ase.
Probably not worth it for a bottle you’ll never finish, Joan pointed out.
Occasionally Noah got the feeling that his wife was waiting for him—briefcase over her arm, hovering by the door—which was patently ridiculous, because neither of them believed in souls, much less anywhere for them to go, so where exactly was she planning to lead him?
The ding of the door; Michael, hands still spike-blossomed with paper cones.
Noah glared. The store owner adjusted her glasses to scrutinize the boy.
“I need a bathroom.”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Noah told him, grabbing a ten-bar collection of soaps for Vivienne.
“Allez, allez!” The owner flapped at Michael as if hurrying a chicken into its coop.
The kid’s eyes flared with panic and he backed up. An entire rack of monogrammed hand towels teetered, then crashed onto a table of pastel salts.
The owner screeched a diatribe Noah could barely follow, but he caught the phrase sale garçon—“filthy boy.”
Noah saw red. In his crispest French he denounced the woman and her overstuffed, overpriced shop, even as he was hustling Michael out the door. In the alley, he slammed it with a clang of the bell.
Michael’s face was ashen. “I’m such a fuckup, I didn’t mean to.”
Imagine being eleven and having to placate some old man you’d only just met, because you had no one else in the world to look after you. “Don’t worry, nothing’s broken.” In case that wasn’t true, Noah hurried the two of them around the corner.
“Fucking fancy stores,” the boy said between his teeth.
Noah eyed him. “True, there was barely room to turn around in there.”
“It’s how they stare. When they come up going, ‘Can I help you?’—it just makes me want to grab something.”
Noah wondered if the boy was half-confessing to a bit of shoplifting in his time. “Let’s find you a bathroom.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
Noah asked in an Indian restaurant, then waved Michael in.
The kid cast an eye at the mirror-decorated hangings, the silver samovar taller than himself.
“It’s fine, the waiter doesn’t mind,” Noah assured him. “Here, give me that thing.” Confiscating the selfie stick.
When Michael came back out with wet hands, Noah was looking up what bus they needed to get to the Musée de la résistance azuréenne. “This is the Blue Coast, remember, so the name means ‘the Museum of the Blue Resistance.’ Sounds cool, doesn’t it?”
“Have they got guns?”
“Ah, very possibly,” Noah said, doubting it.
It was a long ride on two buses, out to near the airport.
Finally, opposite one of several car dealerships, Noah found the right door and they trudged up a spiral staircase.
One room had flour sacks stamped with eagles and swastikas. Noah pointed out ration cards for bread, butter, oil, coffee, even clothes. “See, during the war I’d have been entitled to a J1 ration, for a child aged three to six.”
“Why coffee?” Michael objected. “Nobody needs it, not like actual food.”
“I suppose adults feel they need it, to keep their spirits up.”
There was a hideous substitute drink called Cossac, Noah read, and dextrine from the pharmacy to replace sugar. “Like your grandma’s SNAP card. Rations always ran out early, then you just had to do without.” If there was nothing at all in the stores, one panel explained, you might resort to the brown market (buying directly from farmers), the gray (from Germans), or the black (from profiteers). During the war, the average Frenchwoman spent four hours a day standing in line for food.
Noah wondered with an awful flippancy: if Margot had to rustle up dinner for herself and her father every day, how could she have found the time to betray anybody?
She didn’t, because it’s nonsense, the whole theory. Not even a theory—just morbid speculations.
Noah followed Michael to a display about local sabotage. In one photo a train line had been blown up, lifted high into the air as you might undo the ribbon on a gift. He translated the posters in bold graphics: “Résister pour exister. That means, ‘Resist in order to exist.’ The next one says, ‘Down with collaboration.’” He pushed away the thought of his mother. “‘Our sons and daughters are hungry, we demand five hundred grams of bread a day.’”
“How much is that?” Michael asked.
“Hm, maybe two-thirds of a loaf.”
“That’s a lot of bread.”
“But no hot dogs with it, no burgers, no cheese. Maybe turnip jam.”
“Ew!” Michael drifted ahead, then ran back to report, “There are guns.”
Noah went to examine the tarnished Mauser MG 42s. Then the neat calligraphy on the label affixed to a small suitcase. “A woman from a communist group used this to smuggle weapons.”
“Aren’t communists bad, though?”
Noah sighed. “It’s complicated, but I’d say she was on the right side.”
Some forty percent of Jewish Resistance members in France were female, he read—which seemed a remarkable figure, considering Frenchwomen were so excluded from political life at that point, they couldn’t even vote.
Michael liked the green silk parachutes, and a German helmet that the label said had washed up on the Promenade.
“See how somebody drew a French flag over this swastika?” Noah pointed. “And this cross with two horizontal bars, that was a symbol of the Resistance.”
Michael curled his lip. “We’ve got better graffiti in Brooklyn.”
“Well, these folks were working in a hurry so they wouldn’t get shot.”
“Same with taggers. This one guy, they found him dead a couple blocks from my school.”
Noah had no response at all to that.
A man nearby threw a dirty look—not at Noah, he realized, but at Michael, who was resting his elbow on a case as he studied the toy tanks and other military miniatures inside.
“Don’t lean on the glass,” Noah told him.
Michael went and slumped against a wall, pantomiming fatigue.
Noah shuffled on through the rooms, trying to soak up the information from the crowded boards while he was gathering his nerve to ask for this Monsieur Benoit whom Vivienne had mentioned. He didn’t know enough to know what he was looking for, and he wasn’t going to find it in the exhibits about the Holocaust, but he couldn’t bear to skip them. A tiny clog carved from an olive pit by a detainee; graceful sketches drawn on thin toilet paper. Strange, the human impulse to create, even in a prison camp. Ni haine, ni oubli, said one caption: “Never hate, but never forget.”
“Are these gang tats?” Michael had gotten ahead of Noah.
“Where?” Noah walked over to see what the boy was looking at: a color photo of several elderly people showing five- or six-digit numbers on their outer forearms. “Ah, no, those are their prisoner numbers, from the camps. More like slave brands.” How to make it real? “My friend Vivienne…she has cousins in Florida and Israel with camp numbers on their arms.”
“No way!”
“When she was only three, Vivienne got smuggled out of Czechoslovakia.” A country that didn’t exist anymore, it struck Noah now. “It was called the Kindertransport—the transporting of child refugees,” he added, translating awkwardly. She’d been sent to an uncle in Hampstead, then an aunt in Staten Island. (He thought of Amber’s sister, Grace: when was she going to show up?) Vivienne’s mother had survived the camp somehow and joined the girl in New York a few months afterward, but it took years for confirmation of how her husband had died. She’d held it together for two decades—by Vivienne’s unembittered account, the best of mothers—then she’d swallowed a bottle of pills the year after Vivienne and Frank’s wedding, as if her job was done.
Where had Michael gone?
Noah found him two rooms back, smirking at the mannequins of prisoners standing at ungainly angles in their uniforms striped black and white. They wore tr
iangles—red, pink, black—but also less familiar badges; a bizarrely detailed taxonomy. A purple triangle inverted over a yellow one meant (Noah read) a Jehovah’s Witness of Jewish descent.
He tried to remember whether Amber’s uniform had been exactly like those of the other inmates. He’d heard about a new initiative in some US prisons: color-coding of uniforms according to offenses committed, gang membership, vulnerability. The sheriff quoted claimed it was “for the inmates’ own protection.” Noah stared at an outlined black triangle over yellow now, which meant—he checked the chart—a Jew guilty of métissage, mixing Christian blood with their own.
That’s me, quipped Joan.
Old love, like a kick in his solar plexus.
“Noah?”
He followed the child’s call into the next room.
“Is that your mom’s guy?” Michael asked.
“Where?” Horrified, Noah stared over the boy’s shoulder at a group of Nazi officers giving the Sieg Heil salute in Place Garibaldi. “Shh, I don’t know for sure that she even—”
Michael cut in. “No, down here. With the stick.”
Yes, the suave man leaning on a cane had a familiar air to him. This could very well be the dandy shown in profile in Margot’s photograph.
Maurice Brener (alias “Zazou”) was known for sartorial grace, according to the note below the photo, and never seen without jacket and tie, although in constant pain from childhood polio. An old friend of Abadi’s (who was that, Noah wondered?), Brener supplied false identity papers to the Marcel Network; he also secured funds from French and American Jewry to support its work.
Hang on, who were these people? Noah stared up at the large letters: GROUPES DE LA RÉSISTANCE. He must have walked by this whole section the first time. So his mother had taken a photo of a natty Jewish hero? “It says Zazou was his nom de guerre—his code name in the war,” he murmured as he read.
“Z, like MZ on the back of the hair picture!”
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