by Mok, Judith;
He took me to a show, and once the lights went out quickly found his way under my large silk skirt. At the back of the theatre it was cosy and warm. I’d forgotten to put on my knickers that morning.
We met girls from his past on a lot of grim street corners. They all shook their fingers at me in warning. Not that they wouldn’t meet up with him again themselves, but just the occasional thing, you know. I did know. Could I at least see the shadow of one of his true crimes before leaving, I asked him? He laughed. He was still laughing when I turned around to wave.
The relief I felt was because I was leaving that country, not him. Not him.
But his time was up.
8
S he laughed. She kept laughing up and down the monumental stairs, through the large corridors, inside the warm rooms of his house. It was the first time she’d seen it and he’d already asked her to marry him. They had met in the Métro where she stood playing, rehearsing for a music competition and earning some cash on the side. They had become lovers in her tiny apartment. She was not to know about his place and his people until he knew that she was right. After a few months he knew: she didn’t care for money. The day he bought her a necklace and asked her to marry him was a funny day for her. She had never considered getting married. Men were for love, yes, but only music was for life. She kept her laughter going for half an hour at least until she met his butler.
He had insisted on wearing his white jacket the first time his boss’s fiancée came for lunch. She shook hands with the pale, middle-aged man and asked him if he lived in the house. Yes Mademoiselle, with my panther. She wanted to know all about the panther immediately, very pleased with the man’s eccentricity. It turned out that his panther was just a name for his girlfriend. It made her stroke his arm; having such a weird servant was good indeed.
They met them all. His old seamstress who insisted on telling her that Monsieur always ate with a napkin, even when he was alone. She, too, was dressed in her best black dress and white lace collar. When they reached the kitchen he gave up and went on his way to the library. She could become familiar on her own with the cook and her help, Amelie. There would be much to talk about. Or so he thought.
But she just sat very quietly at the big scrubbed deal table and listened and watched them preparing the food for her lunch with him later on. The cat had settled on her lap; she felt its soft, round head under her hand. Cook talked and handled the knives like a circus artist. Chopping vegetables, shaping them into coloured mosaics, using a fine long blade to cut the bloody red meat. Raw meat, she said, she loved raw meat. Cook smiled and immediately wanted to know what kind of wine she would have with it.
The answer caused her to blanch. Master would crucify her if she served that. Cook laughed again and handed her a wine guide.
There were long shelves of cookery books and wine books at the back of the kitchen. With the wine book in front of her she started to study, while Amelie, the kitchen help, sang wordless songs interrupted by manic chopping sounds in the scullery.
The butler wore gloves during lunch and tiptoed around the huge table to serve them. She kept trying to enter into conversation with him and he kept hinting at her not to. She drank far too much wine. Strands of hair came loose, she wanted to sit on her fiancé’s lap. She told him stories, wildly gesticulating with her hands. She turned into a Jewess from the Dreyfus period, dressed in her white lace dress, bought somewhere in an obscure second-hand shop, no doubt. It suited her classical features and it suited the neo-gothic decorations of his dining room, but it didn’t suit him to have her with him as a romantic heroine. She had to calm down a bit.
His miserly parents were mentioned in unpleasant tales in order to detoxicate her.
Their traditional anti-Semitism was something she had to be aware of; it was the norm amongst the French upper classes. He was telling her this to prepare her for their visit to his parents. Another matter was her clothes. She had taste and grace and he loved her, but she needed grooming.
That afternoon she lost her voice in the carpeted showrooms of prominent designers. Transparent young women moved about elegantly in the casual clothes she was supposed to wear. Their dolls’ eyes never met hers. Her fiancé sat with legs crossed, sipping foam off his cappuccino. Darling, I like you as a gamine, darling stay out of the reds, darling a heel that style is very rive gauche, that’s good. So they were not from the other Bank. She realized the importance of the philosophie behind her looks. It was the Nouveau Philosophie crowd she was supposed to mix with, play for, get paid by. A few hours of fashion and big spending had made her. She was now officially his fiancée.
Now she had to enter the crowd of his normaliens school friends and seduce them. Young men and women who spoke subjunctive French and used the formal vous to address each other. Who knew which knife to use for which cheese and, more importantly, the perfect angle at which to cut it. Their competitive interest lay in who invited the most important savant or politician for dinner. A ground rule was never to discuss a television programme. As they strolled past brightly-lit shops, he explained to her how his friends had all gone to the same Grande Ecole.
She wanted to buy roasted chestnuts in the street. Eat in the street? He watched her eat from a paper cone and wiped the crumbs off her coat, muttering that she ate like a pig. Pigs love chestnuts. She agreed and said she missed her sty and her trough. A bucket would do, a bucket full of chestnuts with butter and salt. She shook more crumbs off her new coat. She felt good about the paper bags full of clothes they were carrying. She liked the clothes and the thought of wearing them, and she liked the crackling sound the bags made against her legs. Bags full of presents. Her own.
That night they had their first dinner party with his friends. He picked her up at eight o’clock, pleased with the gold-lined evening cape she wore; it left room for her eccentricity and fitted his dreams. A dining room had been reserved at the Ritz. All white flowers, all white porcelain, waiters dressed in white.
She was greeted with ceremonial warmth and air-kissed. They sat down to dinner. A series of plates arrived with meat or fish in the shape of flowers, or little towers of peeled and disembowelled potatos. It all looked good and left plenty of space for long intellectual discussion.
There was a lot of laughter behind napkins about the mistress of the President, a formidable lady in charge of one of the most important museums in Paris – all inside jokes, of course. She listened to their voices and pitched them in the middle of a scale. As long as they hovered around A they were pleasantly bearable, but if they were to reach B flat, boredom would strike. More wine, a toast to the mistress of the President, she ventured to say. A communal stare in her direction, a reluctant toast, a slight refroidissement and then the conversation bounced back into Parisian life.
There was some dancing going on in the next room. They all agreed with her that it was much better than dessert, that after such a sumptuous meal a bit of exercise could and should be de rigueur. She felt she had to dance, shake them off in a wild rhythm. The band was good enough, trendy enough for the American hotel guests to dance to, good enough to make a show of herself. He noticed her sweating, her hair swaying, sticking to her excited face.
In the cloakroom she found towels. She stayed long enough to cool down, to give her new friends some time to talk about her, and then reappeared, calm and perfectly made-up, to shake hands for goodbyes and to blow kisses. He took her arm, pinched her gently as if he wanted to get it out of her, her opinion of his friends. He was curious, he wanted to know her. Let’s talk in the taxi, he said.
But she wanted to walk home, show her cape to the people of the night. So they walked through the clear darkness, admiring the architecture, doing a bit of dancing on the way until they reached the Place de la Concorde. She stopped and pointed out a huge oval window, fully lit, on the other side of the Seine. That used to be the writer de Montherlant’s apartment, and that was where she wanted to live. Look, the books are already there. She climbed
on to the edge of the big fountain in the centre of the Place to have a better look and then on to a statue, a satyr. She liked the satyr, she said that was her, that next time she got a new passport she would give that as her profession: satyr. And then she jumped. He hadn’t noticed that they had been followed by merry wanderers who wanted to share in their fun. Soon the fountain was crowded with wet tuxedos and mermaids in evening gowns, all musicians returning from a gig.
She said he was not to be afraid, because he was the only dry one. She had discovered a mad violinist friend in the crowd and they were going to get dry in his hotel nearby. Hotel Crillon, was where he stayed now that he played with a pop band. They all went to his suite. There was a piano.
While the wet crowd stripped, he read through some scores. The violinist joined them, stark naked, his shrivelled prick hopping along to a Kreisler tune. She was dressed in a shawl, stretched out on the bed. When the music was over she clapped her hands and demanded champagne and a madrigal to be sung by the singers that were present. And she got what she wanted. Monteverdi singing in his ears while he watched the naked ones dress themselves in their full voices. While the nymph in the song was sad, his nymph splashed champagne over her feet and had her toes sucked by the violinist. He is allowed to do it, she said. He is a Levi, he is a king, the Levis were all kings.
That was it, the thing about the guy’s prick, it wasn’t shrivelled, it was circumcised. No wonder he was good at Kreisler. Jews were always into show-off tunes. He tapped the naked shoulder of the toe-sucker and suggested that it was his turn.
But she was done and announced it was time to go. They got a ride from a young man who introduced himself as the designer P. She yawned and told him she had just bought some of his stuff. Tonight at the party, had she been wearing his clothes, he wanted to know. Party? Yes, yes, she said, and then afterwards she had taken them off and had partied. And that had been real.
Loth wanted to know more about her family. But they were going to his parents; what about them? It was a long ride to his parents’ country house, so he might as well tell.
Loth’s grandfather had died when his father was five years old, and his father had been an only child, living in a huge empty house. His grandmother was always ailing and had withdrawn to her chambers. There was a library full of stiffly bound books where he read with his governess. There was tasteless food served by the butler in the empty dining room. His mother did not approve of spices; she thought they caused indigestion. The walls in the house were painted in washed-out yellow and hung with a number of awkward portraits. Art costs money and money was not to be wasted. He loved the tall windows and the view of the mountains and lake. When he was able to imagine that the view had taken over the stillness of the living room he felt happy. He grew up going from the house in the city to the country residence. Through his social contacts he developed a taste for the visual arts. When he was old enough to travel on his own he combined his visits to well-connected friends in foreign places, with visits to art galleries and museums. He started to collect paintings. He had never enjoyed sharing them with others. He was a loner who appreciated his background and had no problem in conforming to its ideas and standards. Then there was the young woman he wanted to share his art collection with. She was also an only child. And neither of her parents approved of spicy food. They had a lot in common. There was a wedding with guests, flowers, crystal and porcelain. The dress was Schiaparelli, the lace was hereditary. Of course. They were both short of words, avoided conversation. Even when their only child was born they kept it that way. On the long trips they took together to buy art, approval or disapproval was silent. A slight movement of the head or hand and the new artwork was acquired. Upstairs, the ailing grandmother kept talking to her only grandson. Why waste money on painting when you can listen to music for free? He sat with his grandmother for hours in the old house with the tall windows and the mesmerising view and listened to her radio or gramophone. She made him play the grand piano for her downstairs. She made him leave her bedroom door open so she could hear that he was alive. His parents quietly approved of the music. He could have it. He could have everything. The excellent school, later the Ecole Normale, and entertaining glamorous girls if he so wished. Just bring them home for a short visit. They had enough conversation for a short visit.
He yawned and demanded more details about her family.
Not her brother. Her brother was respectable and living a normal life with reasonable people. Only his cooking was worth mentioning. Her father had already been famous when he was young. A revolutionary who portrayed the suffering of his fellow countrymen on his large canvasses. She knew little about his childhood; he had never told her. From his postwar paintings she knew about the shadow of the lamp on the dining table and the absence of his parents and sister in the darkness behind the lamp.
He had always emphasized the fact that he was not a Jewish artist, just an artist who happened to use war and its consequences for material. Although he had been brought up with Hebrew and the traditional feasts, his was not a religious background. In fact it did not occur to him that being Jewish meant anything until, eight years old, he was walking the narrow streets of his city with his sister and was offered an apple by a woman who was hanging out of her window. He accepted, broke the apple in half and gave one half to his sister. The woman started shouting at him not to give that little Jewess any of his apple. His sister had dark hair and dark eyes; he was blond and blue-eyed. The children had stared at each other in amazement and then ran away giggling.
The children had supported each other a lot in their artistic ambitions. Their mother, the daughter of a rich tailor, was a bitter woman. She was lazy and despised her husband for being a dreamer and not earning a living that could provide her with more then one servant. Her husband, the descendant of a long line of impoverished, red-haired Polish rabbis, liked to withdraw into his books after he had closed his little shop. Selling, whether shoes, soaps, typewriters, thermal underwear or ten other varieties of goods, was not his strong point. Eventually he settled for a deli where he liked chatting from behind the counter to the elegant clientele that came in late at night after a dance or concert. Fresh sandwiches with hot pastrami and chopped liver, pickles and a dash of hot sauerkraut and mustard were his speciality. While his customers ate he loved to show them a medal he had won as a boy. A medal from the state for being the best student of the year. He knew they laughed at him and he didn’t care. He had learned, and still learned, things they knew nothing about, these empty headed partygoers. Blond gentiles, whose illiterate ancestors were crawling around in the mud when his were learning the Books and writing the Commentaries.
He couldn’t pay for his son to go to school, so he got him a sweeping job in a diamond office. The boss of the diamond office gave the fourteen-year-old pen and paper and asked him to write a letter for him. The boy was ready to do this, but the black pen made him draw a diamond cutter at work surrounded by diamond dust. His boss did not get angry; he sent the boy to the atelier of a famous painter. That is how he learned his skills; in the morning he would sweep and in the afternoon he would paint. By the time he was nineteen his paintings made money and he had his own dealer. Together with his sister, who lived with a German actor, they were popular in bohemian circles. His sister played the piano and he seduced young blondes or redheads. His favourites.
He and his sister mixed with the German artists fleeing the Nazi regime, quoting poetry, broadening their skills, feeding on the knowledge of their erudite friends, and sometimes joining their father late at night in the shop to help him out with the sandwiches. They shaped themselves according to the wisdom and humour of a people they had never known, went on to move into bohemia and declared themselves assimilated. Nothing was left of their Judaism.
They were diamond dust.
Her father was sparkling at his peak, a famous twenty-five-year old, when he was told to sew a yellow star over his heart. He never did.
To p
rotect himself from the racial laws, he married a Christian lesbian and lived with her and her girlfriend, who were both morphine addicts. Even when he had to go into hiding in the later war years, they expected him to get them their drugs from somewhere. He did. He went out into a world full of soldiers, a small blond man, to provide for their addiction.
Now, decades later, the sweat pours out of him sometimes, for no apparent reason. It is the fear he had suppressed back then, suddenly surfacing.
Postwar followed in one long period, a massive past that grew painfully into a future with a new family. His fame continued quietly in the shape of financial support from collectors. He picked up a few prizes; there were a few parties in his honour which he liked to endure in the company of attractive women. From the outside world artists would appear on his doorstep and share drinks or a meal with his family. His children got used to men dressed as tramps who enjoyed loud cursing and singing and who made drawings of them. Or portraits they would later discover, staring at their own childhood faces, hanging on the wall of some museum. There were exhibitions abroad and visits to the royal family of their country to admire a work created by their father on a regal wall. The children remembered the stale sandwiches provided at such visits. She still remembered having to play the violin for some princess or other, in shoes that hurt. And her father, his head slightly bent, talking and joking in the world that surrounded him, but that he never really seemed to perceive.
She never saw him cry. Until one afternoon somebody rang the front doorbell. An unusual sound, as people usually came to the back door of their house and knocked.
She was small, followed him to the door, hid behind his legs. When he opened the door the light that fell into the hall surprised her. Bright and beckoning her to go outside and play. Her father sent the man at the door away. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand, she could see names on it in handwriting. Capital punishment, her father said, he was against it, never take another man’s life away, not even an evil life. There was an old Jewish tale he said, a myth it was called, that somewhere out there the souls of the world were being sent out and if you killed a man you took his soul and it might be an evil soul and it might be sent out again. He left the door open and stroked her head, and told her he could not sign to protest against this execution. They had asked him to help save a life, the life of an evil man, a man who had betrayed her father’s sister. She experienced her own silence while listening to him, she heard herself taking in his tears. He stood facing the light and cried, and let go of her, his child, for she wanted to go out and play with the others.