by Lily Tuck
Originally Romanian, Émile Natan is rugged and robust with unruly white hair. His wife, Monique, is the opposite: tiny, perfectly coiffed and dressed. Émile and Monique Natan live in an apartment filled with art—Liliane remembers a lovely Renoir painting of roses—on the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées. She also remembers how Monique took her to Guerlain and bought her a bottle of Eau de Cologne Impériale—the perfume named for Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie—and how, soon after, when Émile dies unexpectedly of a heart attack, Monique jumps to her death from the balcony of the apartment, holding her little dog, a white poodle, in her arms.
In Paris, Rudy’s favorite restaurant is Chez Anna. It is located on Boulevard Delessert and owned and run by a diminutive and combative middle-aged woman named Anna. Anna wears a medical doctor’s white smock and steel-rimmed glasses, her gray hair is pulled back in a tight chignon. She shouts at and insults her waiters, the cook, and, according to her mood—usually angry—or, on a whim, because she does not like the look of them or else, more charitably, because she thinks they can’t afford her prices, turns down customers at the door claiming the restaurant is full when clearly it is nearly empty. Not so for Rudy. She loves Rudy. When Rudy arrives she makes a big fuss—hugging, kissing, and calling him “Mon petit Rudy” (although Rudy is twice as tall as Anna) or “Mon Rudy chéri.” Anna orders for him. She brings a huge plate heaped with langoustines and a bowl filled with yellow homemade mayonnaise, a platter of plump, juicy white asparagus, fresh foie gras with thin slices of toasted bread, giant red radishes, and a dish of fresh butter; then, for the main course, bright pink slices of gigot, a creamy potato gratin, baby lima beans, and finally for dessert—for Liliane especially, if Rudy has brought her—a coupe filled with fraises des bois, topped with a big spoonful of crème fraîche; next to it, wrapped in gold paper, are two paper-thin cigarette cookies, which Liliane, still a child, pretends to smoke before eating them.
Every night at ten o’clock sharp, Anna’s dog, a big brown poodle mix named Marcel, comes down the stairs from Anna’s apartment above the restaurant and, with a single leap, jumps on top of the bar.
“I can set my watch by him,” Rudy says.
“How does Marcel know the time?” Liliane asks.
Anna shrugs. “Marcel is very intelligent,” and going over to the bar, she gives the dog a kiss, saying, “Mon Marcel chéri.”
Rudy has a mistress in Paris. Her name, coincidentally, is Irina and she, too, is blonde and pretty—but not as pretty as Liliane’s mother. She is Russian and married. Her husband is a professor and they have a son about whom Irina complains to Rudy. Alex is intelligent but lazy. He is sixteen years old and he still does not know what he is going to do. Irina is critical. She shows no interest in Liliane or in Liliane’s life and Liliane does not like her. While they are having dinner together, Rudy speaks to Irina in Russian and Liliane is excluded. Afterward, they all three go back to the Hôtel Royal Monceau and, once inside, Rudy checks—Liliane hears him jiggle the doorknobs—to make sure that the double doors between their two rooms are locked. (Years later, Rudy leaves a letter instructing Liliane to give Irina five thousand dollars upon his death. But when Rudy dies, he no longer has five thousand dollars—or, for that matter, any money—and Liliane, feeling obliged to follow her father’s last wishes while at the same time feeling deeply resentful, gives Irina the money out of her own pocket.)
In the fall of 1947, Liliane, who has just turned eight, and her mother leave France on a converted troopship operated by Moore-McCormack Lines. There is still a severe shortage of liners—only thirteen are in transatlantic operation (versus seventy-three before the war) and only two—the Queen Elizabeth and the America—of the thirteen are luxury liners. The rest are substandard and provide low-cost transportation. The fares range from $167 to $190 for the women and a flat fee of $127 for the men. The passengers sleep in open troop quarters that hold more than 100 passengers each. The sleeping berths are arranged in tiers of four; each berth has a mattress, clean linen, a blanket, a towel and a cake of soap. Arriving on board late, Irène and Liliane are unable to get berths on the same tier—the women already occupying the three others refuse to give up their space or to move. Liliane sleeps on an upper berth a few tiers away from Irène, who sleeps on the lowest berth on another tier. In the berth directly below Liliane, a woman has managed to smuggle in her two little dachshunds. The dachshunds whine restlessly during the night and keep Liliane awake. The overhead lights are kept on all day and all night and they, too, keep her awake. Irène, also, can’t sleep and, most nights, she gets up at three or four in the morning to use the communal bathroom and to take a shower—at that hour, she has some privacy.
Most of the passengers on board are displaced persons—thus far, only 36,000 out of the near million Eastern European displaced persons have been allowed entry into the United States. Fourteen-year-old Vera, who was sent to a forced-labor camp and whose parents were gassed, is one of them. She and Liliane play cards together. They play relentlessly all day, sitting cross-legged up on either Liliane’s berth or on Vera’s, also a top berth, without ever exchanging a single word—Liliane speaks only French and Spanish and Vera only Czech, except for when she shouts out, “Va à la pêche!”—Go fish!
“Can you stop playing for a bit and go up on deck and get some fresh air,” Irène has to tell Liliane. “You’ll get sick if you stay in this cabin all day,” she adds. Also, Irène is not sure she likes for Liliane to spend so much time with Vera. Although not the girl’s fault, Irène senses something feral and perverse about her. She imagines that Vera’s experiences of deprivation and of, perhaps, beatings and rape in the labor camp will taint Liliane.
When Liliane goes up on deck, the air is humid; the ocean is relatively calm and a uniform gray. While she sits in a deck chair and reads her book, Les Malheurs de Sophie (Sophie’s Misfortunes) by the Comtesse de Ségur, an account of the trifling misadventures of a little French girl who regularly disobeys her parents and suffers the consequences, a Hungarian boy, his arms flailing, jogs awkwardly around the deck past her. Like Vera, he is an orphan and a camp survivor. He looks to be about fifteen or sixteen and Liliane knows there is something wrong with him. Each time he runs by Liliane, he shouts something at her and Liliane, pretending to be absorbed in her book, does not look up. He frightens her. As Liliane shuts her book and gets ready to leave, the Hungarian boy comes around once again and, as if guessing her intention, he stops and stands directly in front of Liliane’s chair. Then, before Liliane can move or say anything, the Hungarian boy drops his pants.
A heavyset Polish woman sleeps in the berth directly above Irène’s and every night, around midnight, a man tiptoes into the room from the men’s quarters and climbs into her berth. To do so, he first steps onto the edge of Irène’s berth before he hoists himself up into the woman’s berth, then the two have sex. Above Irène’s head the berth shakes so violently she is afraid it will collapse on top of her. After a few minutes, the shaking stops then, almost immediately, the man leaves. Again, he steps down on the edge of Irène’s berth. One night, a second man comes shortly after the first one has left and he, too, steps on the edge of Irène’s berth before hoisting himself up into the Polish woman’s berth.
The voyage takes eight long days.
“The ship was disgusting,” Irène tells Gaby, her future husband, when finally they land in New York harbor. “A floating flophouse,” she says. “Un bordel”—a brothel, she adds in French.
Irène is not anti-Semitic but she does not want to be reminded of some of her ancestors or of her roots. Her mother, born Louise Clara Ida Maria Sonnenburg was the daughter of Eduard Sonnenburg and Anna Marianne Caroline Westphal; Anna was the daughter of Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal, a neurologist and author of the popular yet troubling essay Die Konträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropatholologischen (“The Opposing Sexual Instinct: A Symptom of Neuropatholology”), on
e of the first medical accounts of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, and Clara Rosamunde Dorothea Mendelssohn; Clara Mendelssohn was the daughter of Alexander Mendelssohn who was the son of Joseph Mendelssohn, who, in turn, was the eldest son of Moses Mendelssohn.
Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau, Germany, in 1729. Despite many health problems, which included scoliosis, Moses learned the entire Bible by heart at the age of six. By the time he was fourteen—besides Yiddish, his first language—he spoke German, Latin, Greek, French, and English. Mostly self-taught, Moses never went to university nor did he ever hold an academic position. He supported himself by working in a silk factory. In 1762, he met and fell in love with Fromet Guggenheim, a young girl from Hamburg who was blonde and beautiful. However, when Fromet Guggenheim saw Moses Mendelssohn for the first time—she knew him by reputation only—and saw his stunted misshapen figure, she began to weep.
“Is it because of my hump?” Moses asked her.
“Yes,” Fromet admitted tearfully.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said.
“According to a Talmudic saying, a proclamation of the name of the person I will marry was made in heaven when I was born. Not only was my future wife named but it was also said that she would be hunchbacked. ‘Oh, no,’ I said to myself, ‘she will be deformed, bitter and unhappy. Dear Lord,’ I said again, ‘give me the hump instead and make her fair and beautiful.’”
Fromet was so moved by Moses’s story that she dried her tears and they married. She and Moses lived together happily and had ten children, six of whom survived to adulthood.
Known both as the German Socrates and the Jewish Luther, Moses Mendelssohn is considered to be the founding father of Jewish philosophy and Jewish Enlightenment. He was also an accomplished literary critic and translator—he translated the first five books of the Hebrew Bible known as the Pentateuch and the Psalms into High German. During his lifetime, Moses Mendelssohn was best known for his accounts of the experience of the sublime and for his arguments on the soul’s immortality and God’s existence. Today Moses Mendelssohn is probably best known for his tireless attempts to reform Jewish ideals by stressing religious tolerance, the importance of secular knowledge, and material happiness.
Mendelssohn’s most important works are Phädon or On the Immortality of Souls; Bi’ur (Elucidation); Jerusalem; and Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God. He expressed some of his beliefs thus:
A God is thinkable, therefore a God is also actually present.
State and church have a duty to promote, by means of public measures, human felicity in this life and in the future life.
With regard to man, we believe that he was created in God’s image, yet that he is a human being—that is, that he is liable to sin. We know nothing of original sin. Adam and Eve sinned because they were human beings and died because they sinned. And so it goes with all their descendants. They sin and die.
Formerly, every imaginable effort was made and various measures were taken to turn us not into useful citizens, but into Christians. And since we were so stiff-necked and stubborn as to not allow ourselves to be converted, this was reason enough to regard us as a useless burden to the world and to attribute to such depraved monsters all the horrors that could only subject them to the hatred and contempt of all people. Now the zeal for conversion has subsided, and we are completely neglected. People continue to distance us from all the arts and sciences as well as the other useful professions and occupations of mankind. They bar us from every path to useful improvement and make our lack of culture the reason for oppressing us further. They tie our hands and reproach us for not using them.
Always frail, Moses Mendelssohn died in 1786; of his six children, only his daughter Recha and son Joseph continued to practice Judaism; Joseph’s son, Alexander, was the last Mendelssohn descendant to keep the Jewish faith.
While Liliane is growing up, no one mentions Judaism. No one talks about being Jewish. Irène never does, nor does Rudy. By then, they are both Lutherans, but neither one is religious. (Once married to Gaby, Irène occasionally, in the summer, goes to an Episcopal church on an island in Maine. As for Rudy, except to have some peace and quiet in Marolles or to sightsee in Rome, he never steps foot inside either a church or a synagogue.) Is it a cover-up or a form of anti-Semitism? More likely—and more generously—Liliane thinks her parents were blocking out the horror of the Holocaust by not discussing their past. Also, and she has read this explanation: “The survivors are focused on building a new life in a new country with all the difficulties that come with that, where you don’t have the language and the customs. That process is ‘future oriented,’ unlike mourning.”
Irène’s side of the family converted several generations ago when Clara, Alexander Mendelssohn’s daughter, married Carl Westphal, while it is not clear when the conversion takes place on Rudy’s side. When Emilie marries? And is Felix, her husband, already a Christian? In imperial Germany, Jews rarely became professors unless they were baptized. Again, Emilie never speaks of it. The only evidence Liliane has is a long white lace christening dress that her father, Rudy, wore in 1908 to receive the sacrament of baptism at a church in Bonn. Thirty-or-so years later, in Paris, Liliane, too, wears the same white lace dress to be christened and, according to Lutheran practice, to be cleansed from sin, snatched from the power of Satan and given everlasting life.
On Irène’s father side, the family genealogy is more complex and less direct, but it is the one that Irène likes to lay claim to as it is glamorous and goes all the way back to Mary, Queen of Scots.
Waldemar was the son of Baroness Auguste Wilhelmine von Egloffstein, whose husband was the son of Baroness Marie Karoline von Egloffstein, whose husband, in turn, was the Baron Friedrich August von Egloffstein. He was the son of Lady Elisabeth MacCarthy, who was the daughter of Donough MacCarthy, 3rd Earl of Clancarty, whose mother was Elisabeth Spencer and whose father was Robert, Earl of Sunderland. Robert had a son, Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, who married Lady Anne Churchill. Their grandson, George Spencer, 5th Duke of Marlborough, took on the additional name of Churchill in 1817. It is here that the branches of the Spencer family tree become tangled with those of the Churchill family and suffice it to say that a century earlier Arabella Churchill was the mistress of James II, Stuart king of England. She had four children by him; James II, in a penultimate turn, was the grandson of James I, king of England, and he, of course, was Mary Stuart’s son.
Beheaded on February 8, 1587, on an unusually sunny day, which was thought to be a sign of accord from the heavens, Mary, Queen of Scots was forty-four years old when she died. With the first blow of the axe, the executioner, a Mr. Bull, missed Mary’s neck and instead sliced open the top of her head. Her lips were seen to move. When, finally, the bloody deed was done and the executioner held up Mary’s head for the crowd to see, her long auburn hair fell off in his hand. Mary had been wearing a wig; her own hair was short and gray. Also, curiously, her little dog, a Skye terrier, who, unperceived, had been hiding underneath Mary’s skirts during the entire execution, suddenly emerged from the folds of her petticoats and lay down next to his mistress’s corpse.
Josephine Baker is another important woman in Rudy’s life because, in 1941, she saved it. After being discharged from the Foreign Legion and while he is stuck at the Hôtel de Noailles in Marseille, without a passport or papers and waiting to leave France to rejoin Irène and Liliane in Peru, Rudy happens to run into Daniel Marouani, a well-known agent for review and music hall artists who has retired in Nice. Rudy has had previous dealings with Marouani, and Marouani explains that he is waiting for Josephine Baker, his most important client, who is due to arrive by train with her friend, Jacques Abtey, a captain in the French Army.
“Ah, Josephine Baker,” Rudy tells Marouani with a smile. “I knew her in Paris.”
“Well, you will have a chance to see her again in a few minutes if the tra
in is on time,” Marouani replies.
As it turns out, Josephine and Jacques are staying in the same hotel as Rudy and, that evening, they have a drink together in the bar. From then on, they have drinks and dinner together every night. Soon they are inseparable and when Josephine has to go to Nice for a week to perform La Créole, she insists that Rudy come with her and Jacques. She promises Rudy he will be safe with them. Finally, when the time comes for Josephine and Jacques to leave France for North Africa, Josephine insists that she cannot leave without her friend Rudy and she promises him that she will get him a passport and visas. Josephine also insists that she cannot leave France without her three pet monkeys—this proves easier to arrange than getting Rudy a passport—and someone is sent to Les Milandes, Josephine’s house in the Dordogne, to fetch the monkeys. Rudy is sorry to see Josephine and Jacques leave; he is also apprehensive. Any day, he thinks, the authorities are going to come for him and deport him back to Germany. Fortunately, he is wrong. In his journal Rudy writes:
I returned one night to the hotel and the concierge said to me: There is a man waiting for you. Normally, in my circumstances, I was not keen about visits from a stranger, but I told myself: If they have come to get you, usually they come in the morning and usually they don’t come alone. I therefore went up to the man and said: You are looking for me? Without saying a word, the man put his hand in his pocket and took out a passport. Josephine and Jacques had kept their word; they had managed to open the door for me to life and liberty.