The Double Life of Liliane

by Lily Tuck

  Rudy then joins Josephine, Jacques, and the three pet monkeys in Marrakesh, where Josephine had rented an Arab-style house in the medina. Although the house is charming, Rudy complains about the lack of water and the mosquitoes. He also complains about the pet monkeys. The monkeys crap inside the house and, one day, Rudy has had enough—barefoot, he nearly stepped in the mess—and he is determined to teach the monkeys a lesson. He waits until they again crap in the house, then grabbing each monkey by the neck, he spanks him hard on the bottom and throws him out the window—the Arab-style house is one-story. From then on, the monkeys continue to crap inside the house but when they are done, they spank their own bottoms and jump out the window.

  It was also in Marrakesh that Rudy learns that Josephine and Jacques are working for the Deuxième Bureau, the French intelligence service. Together they had traveled through Spain and Portugal, ostensibly for Josephine’s performances, with Jacques posing as her secretary, while secretly gathering information about the movement of the German military that they wrote down in invisible ink on Josephine’s music scores.

  Josephine Baker claimed that she had learned how to dance by watching animals in the zoo—especially the kangaroos. Uninhibited, she danced bare-breasted wearing only a bunch of feathers and shaking her dérrière at a dizzying speed, declaring, “The rear end exists. I see no reason to be ashamed of it. It’s true there are rear ends so stupid, so pretentious, so insignificant that they’re good only for sitting on.” She clowned her way to success by making faces and crossing her eyes. Moving to Paris in 1925, Josephine joined the Folies Bergère, where she first starred as a native girl, climbing out of a jungle tree wearing a skirt made out of fake bananas. She had many lovers, including the entertainer Jacques Pills, Édith Piaf’s future husband, and the writer Georges Simenon. According to an interview, Baker’s beauty advice was to sweat and dance a lot.

  Years later, in Paris, Rudy takes Liliane to one of Josephine’s farewell performances, of which there are many. By then, Josephine Baker is in her fifties and has her “Rainbow Tribe” of children to support—twelve in all. She is overweight, nearsighted, and running out of money. But the show is a celebration, an extravaganza. Once onstage, a transformation takes place: swathed in furs, plumes, and glitter, Josephine sheds pounds, wrinkles, her glasses, and turns into a dazzling and alluring woman. The process has to do with showmanship, some inner magic, and her own special star quality. During the performance, Josephine dances, talks, improvises, and, finally, she sings:

  I have two loves,

  My country and Paris.

  By them forever

  My heart is ravished.

  Applauding wildly, the audience adores her.

  After the performance, Liliane and her father go backstage and Liliane sees how happy Josephine is to see Rudy.

  “Rudy!” she cries, rushing up to embrace him.

  “Josephine!” Rudy says, wiping tears from his eyes.

  Liliane has never seen her father cry.

  V

  Pictures of horses cover the walls of Liliane’s bedroom in the apartment in New York City. A Currier and Ives print titled A Champion Horse Race hangs across from her bed and depicts two horses, a bay and a black, racing neck and neck, as the drivers whip them on. Lying in bed, Liliane stares up at the print and tries to decide which of the two horses will win—she decides on the black. The other horse pictures in her room are sentimental drawings by the illustrator C. W. Anderson: A Star Is Born shows a newborn foal lying next to its mother while the mare grazes unconcernedly, Good Advice shows a mare nuzzling her foal, Mares Running Their Colts shows two foals gamboling in the foreground while the two mares are trotting behind, and, in Siesta, a foal is lying alone in the grass, apparently asleep, but, to Liliane, the foal looks dead.

  Liliane, like many middle-class teenage white girls in North America, is horse crazy.

  “Why can’t you take up tennis, like your mother?” Gaby, her stepfather, asks, not expecting a reply. He is not familiar with Anna Freud’s theories, popular at the time, that attempt to explain why the rhythmic movement of the horse reveals a young girl’s autoerotic desires or why, again, grooming and saddling the horse reveal the girl’s identification with her mother or why, yet again, her identification with the horse reveals her penis envy or why, still yet again, her phallic sublimations reveal her wish to control and master the horse.

  In an attempt to answer his question, Liliane, after hesitating, says something vague about freedom—the freedom she experiences as she gallops across fields, the exhilaration she feels as she jumps fences.

  “Horseback riding,” she also says, “makes me feel strong.”

  But, by then, her stepfather is no longer listening to her; he is mixing himself another bourbon and water.

  Once a week, Liliane goes to Boots and Saddles, a riding school housed in a defunct brewery—the indoor ring still smells of beer—on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her horse is a powerful, seventeen-hand bay named Mishka—the Russian diminutive for bear. The riding teacher is the handsome son of a Crimean prince, rumored to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. Tall, dark-haired, with high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes—no doubt an adaptive advantage against the Siberian sleet and snow that harks back to his Mongol heritage—and impeccably dressed in his khaki shirt and tie, jodhpurs, and polished black riding boots, the handsome son is, in fact, called Chingis, a homonym for Genghis.

  Stern and imperious, Chingis stands in the center of the ring; whip in hand, he barks out commands to the riders.

  “Tighten up your reins,” he shouts. “This is not a picnic ride.”

  Raising his whip in the air and advancing toward Liliane, he says, “Keep him moving, keep him moving. What are your heels for?”

  Liliane is both attracted to and afraid of Chingis and while she rides—heels and hands down, seat firm, back straight, cantering round and round the ring, making figure eights, changing leads—she conflates him with his cruel and violent ancestor and fantasizes about being his favorite wife.

  Wearing a flowing white tunic and a bright silk turban, she effortlessly keeps up with Genghis as they gallop across the barren Gobi Desert and as he vanquishes one disparate tribe after the other: the Merkits, the Naimans, the Mongols, the Keraits, the Tatars, and the Uighurs. She does not tire or complain. She does not complain when they must subsist only on yak’s milk, or when, on occasion, to fortify himself, Genghis opens up a horse’s vein and drinks the—

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to shift your weight?” Chingis says, startling her. He sounds angry. “Leg pressure is enough.”

  About Chingis’s private life, she knows nothing except for a fact he volunteers one day as he leaves class: “I have to go home and feed my chickens.”

  “Chickens? What kind of chickens?” Liliane asks.

  “Sumatra. A rare breed from the Far East. But not friendly. The rooster, especially. The rooster attacks if anyone approaches the coop.”

  “Do the chickens lay eggs?” Liliane also asks.

  Chingis shakes his head and laughs. “Rarely,” he answers. And rarely, too, has Liliane seen him laugh.

  A few weeks later, after class, he hands Liliane an egg. “Here, I brought you this,” he tells her.

  The egg is small and nasty and has specks of blood in it. Still, Liliane feels compelled to boil and eat it. She would like to believe that the gift of the egg is significant—don’t the Russians, at Easter, exchange elaborately decorated eggs as tokens of love and friendship?

  Wearing gold coins in her hair, she gallops alongside Genghis across the Kyzyl Kum Desert, where, at midday, the temperature soars to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Accompanied by his soldiers and by wagons filled with their plunder—silk, rugs, wine, spices, perfume, ­silver—they are returning victorious from razing the ­cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Gurganj, after massacring all the inhabi
tants—

  “Hey,” Chingis shouts, cracking his whip at Mishka. “Stop daydreaming and keep your horse in line with the others.”

  The whip lands across Mishka’s hindquarters. Mishka bucks, then bolts forward and Liliane falls off. She lands hard on her back. Gasping, she tries to get up and catch her breath. Putting his arms around her shoulders, Chingis helps Liliane to her feet; for a moment, he holds her.

  For a long time afterward, Liliane relives this moment and embellishes on it.

  Poor, proud, handsome Chingis, one of roughly sixteen million men carrying nearly identical Y chromosomes (the result of the rape and slaughter with which Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire); he has no immediate family, he never marries and dies alone in a freak riding accident—electrocuted by a felled wire—thus confirming the old Russian saying (Said by whom? Said by her father’s friend Tolia?) that a bachelor’s life is a good life but he has a dog’s death as no one is there to grieve for him, while a married man leads a dog’s life but his death is pleasant as he is surrounded by his loved ones.

  Genghis Khan’s death was also caused by a riding ­accident —in his case, a fall from his horse. His body was brought back in a cart to his birthplace near Ulan Bator in Mongolia. By then, 1227, his empire extended across Asia, from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea. According to Genghis’s wishes, his death was to be kept secret. Thus, anyone unlucky enough to meet the funeral procession along the way was killed—innocent little children, pregnant women, old people, it made no difference who they were. Once Genghis was buried, a herd of horses galloped back and forth over the grave site to hide any trace of it. A forest of trees was planted and soldiers were stationed there until the trees had grown sufficiently tall to completely conceal the spot. These strategies were so successful that, to this day, no one knows where Genghis Khan is buried.

  Liliane is sixteen when she sees her first dead person. Her grandmother, Louise. Notwithstanding the winters she spent in Nice basking in the Mediterranean sunshine, Louise never fully recovered from the deprivations she endured in Innsbruck during the war, nor from her depression. Her letters to her daughter, Irène, were loving and always about the weather:

  My darling Rehlein, It has rained all day for the past week . . .

  My dearest Rehlein, The sun is struggling to come out but it is still cold and windy . . .

  Rehlein, my darling, The weather has been unusually cold this spring and I can’t seem to get warm . . .

  Fittingly, on an unseasonally chilly and rainy day in July, Louise dies in a nursing home in Königstein, Germany. Alerted too late, Irène flies from New York and Liliane flies from Rome to join her mother. Louise is lying on a cot in a basement room of the nursing home. She is dressed in a skirt and print silk blouse, only her swollen feet are bare and Liliane cannot help but notice her toenails, which are painted pink. The polish is old and chipped and this, a sign of neglect, more than her grandmother’s death, makes her sad. Louise’s eyes are shut and her nostrils are stuffed with cotton; rouge has been applied to her cheeks. Taking one of her mother’s hands—the fingernails, too, are painted with the same chipped pink polish—Irène puts the hand to her lips and covers it with noisy kisses, then she starts to cry. Embarrassed, Liliane looks away.

  Liliane likes her other grandmother, Emilie, better.

  After the war and after Maxie, the incontinent dachshund, is long dead, Emilie moves from the house with the interior tiled courtyard filled with brilliant red geraniums in Lima, to a one-bedroom apartment on Stewart Avenue, across from the noisy Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house, in Ithaca, New York. The reason Emilie moves to Ithaca is that her eldest son, Rudy’s brother and Liliane’s uncle, is a professor at Cornell.

  Uncle Fritz to Liliane, but to scholars he is better known as a philologist, a classicist, and as “one of the last giants of the German tradition of classical humanism.” At Humboldt University in Berlin—home to twenty-nine Nobel Prize winners, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, as well as to some of Germany’s greatest minds, such as G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, the poet Heinrich Heine, and, last but not least, Otto von Bismarck—Fritz studied with Werner Jaeger and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, both famous classical philologists. The latter assembled a group of eminent young scholars—Fritz among them—known as the Graeca, at his home to read and edit Greek texts.

  In 1932, Fritz marries one his students, Lieselotte Salzer, a Lutheran from the city of Karlsruhe. A year later, they leave Germany for England, then, in 1937, they manage to get to the United States. Fritz teaches at Olivet College in Michigan before moving to Cornell, where he will remain for the next twenty-two years, heading the Classics Department, publishing more than a hundred books, monographs, scholarly articles, and reviews on Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Homer, Aeschylus, Hesiod, and other Greek and Roman writers, and, of course, teaching. One of his courses, Foundations of Western Thought, is especially popular and, according to the college catalogue, explores the history of philosophical, scientific, and religious ideas from early Greece through the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

  Fritz smokes a pipe and, like his brother, Rudy, suffers from gout. Liliane has never heard him raise his voice or say an unkind word. He and Lieselotte live in a modest but comfortable brown stucco house on Wait Avenue, near enough to the Cornell campus so that Fritz can walk to work. A good cook and a good academic wife, Lieselotte entertains faculty members and is a respected civic-minded member of the community. Several days a week, she volunteers at the Tompkins County animal shelter. She and Fritz own a much admired Persian cat, called Pamphile—also admired by Vladimir Nabokov, who taught at Cornell for several years and was a neighbor—and named after the woman said to have invented silk weaving on the Greek island of Kos. Few incidents upset Fritz and Lieselotte’s ­routine—a problem does arise with the neighbors over the property line—and, on the whole, life in Ithaca is peaceful, intellectually rewarding, and almost far enough removed from the events in Europe; and they have no children.

  Fritz has his work, his students, and his colleagues, two of whom are his close friends: Jim Hutton and Harry Caplan. Tall, quiet, Jim Hutton, a lifelong bachelor, lives with his mother. His best-known works are his two studies on the influence of the Greek Anthology, The Greek Anthology in Italy and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800; his numerous articles and reviews deal with subjects that range from classical antiquity to the twentieth century as, for example, his elegant and erudite sixty-three-page “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poems on music that traces the historical tradition of the spheres. Harry Caplan is short, exuberant, and social. His field of study is ancient, medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, the history of preaching and the intellectual history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His greatest contribution to scholarship is his English translation of Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium for the Loeb Classical Library Series. Like Jim Hutton, Harry Caplan is a bachelor, only he lives alone. He tells jokes and makes a fuss over Liliane when she comes to Ithaca to visit; Jim Hutton is more reticent.

  “Who do you like best?” Liliane asks her uncle. “Professor Hutton or Professor Caplan?”

  Fritz laughs and shakes his head. “I like them both.”

  Determined to make him choose, Liliane persists, “You must like one better than the other.”

  “I like each in a different way,” Fritz says.

  “You have to have a best friend.” Liliane refuses to give up.

  In answer, Fritz laughs again.

  Professor Hutton, she decides.

  Liliane knows nothing about Lieselotte’s family, nor did Lieselotte ever speak of them—mother, father, sisters, ­brothers—whoever stayed behind in Karlsruhe; a city with a grand palace and magnificent gardens built in the shape of a fan; a city
that was heavily bombed during World War II and whose Jewish population was exterminated. And what could have Lieselotte said—and to whom?—when she received a telegram with the news that her younger brother, Ernst, a gunner in the German Luftwaffe, was killed on July 16, 1942? And how did she mourn him? Behind a closed bedroom door on a hot, airless summer afternoon thousands of miles away in Ithaca, New York? The only sound came from the sprinkler outside on the lawn as, every few seconds, water splashed against the leaves of the peony bushes Lieselotte planted on the sunny side of the house.

  Ernst, as his name implies, was an earnest and studious young boy but what Lieselotte remembers best about him is his voice. A member of the boys’ choir, Ernst sang every Sunday in Karlsruhe’s ancient Lutheran church and Lieselotte could still hear those transcending, treble voices:

  Salvator mundi, salva nos,

  Qui per crucem et sanguinem redemisti nos,

  auxiliare nobis, te deprecamur, Deus noster.

  Savior of the world, save us,

  Who through thy cross and blood didst redeem us:

  Help us, we beseech thee, our God.

  Years later, when Harry Caplan dies, a letter he has kept for sixty-one years, dated March 27, 1919, is found in his desk drawer. The letter offers career advice and was written by his college teacher while he was a student at Cornell and goes in part like this: The opportunities for college positions, never too many, are at present few and likely to be fewer. . . . There is moreover, a very real prejudice against the Jew. . . . I feel it wrong to encourage anyone to devote himself to the higher walks of learning to whom the path is barred by an undeniable racial prejudice.

  Fritz’s best friend, Liliane decides, changing her mind, was Professor Caplan.