by Alba Arikha
So I banished those thoughts from my mind and concentrated on what was important: Arun, my schoolwork, my friends. And now, everything was changing.
School was ending, I would begin Oxford in the autumn; Walter was running a shop again, and my parents were working hard.
Ben though was getting worse. He had turned fifteen and grown a few inches. Soon he would be nearly as tall as my father. But the similarity was purely physical. The two of them barely spoke to each other. The burst of pride Ben had felt during my father’s opening night seemed to have evaporated, and I could understand why: the last term of school was ending, and no sixth form was willing to take him. Ben took this as a valid reason to come and go as he pleased, with predictable consequences. My parents imposed a curfew that involved my mother personally taking him to school every morning, and my father picking him up a few times a week.
But, even then, Ben managed to slip through the net.
At night, he smoked in our bathroom with the window open and played heavy metal at full volume. My parents shouted at him, at each other.
The atmosphere at home was proving increasingly unsustainable. The previous week, Ben had run away from home, and my father called the police. When Ben showed up the next morning, looking haggard and white as a sheet, my father slapped him so hard that Ben teetered under the blow and fell to the floor. A gush of blood came spouting from his nose, though it was unclear whether it resulted from the hit or from something unconnected. My mother clasped her hand to her mouth, and I screamed at my father: “What’s your problem? Are you insane? Can’t you speak to him instead of shouting and hitting him? How is that going to make him a better man?”
My father looked at me with angry eyes. “Don’t you dare, Hannah,” he hissed. “Don’t you dare get involved. And I didn’t hit him: I slapped him.”
Ben stood up slowly, trembling, wiping the blood with the back of his hand. I ran towards him and hugged him. “I’m sorry, Ben, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like crying.
But Ben pushed me away. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you all.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. I decided to go downstairs and check up on Ben. As I reached his bedroom door, I heard him sobbing uncontrollably. I hadn’t heard him cry in many years, and it broke my heart. “Ben,” I whispered. “Let me in, Ben.”
“Leave me alone,” he said, in between his tears.
“No, you’ve got to let me in.”
He paused, and I heard him get up. He opened the door, my tall and gangly brother, his face blotchy with tears. “I want to be alone,” he repeated, pushing me away as I tried to hug him.
“I love you,” I said to him.
“Me too,” he answered, sounding small.
*
The doorbell rang downstairs. I heard my mother open the door to a man’s voice; I hadn’t even realized she had returned home.
I yawned and stretched my arms out. I put my pen down and stood up. I looked across the way at where Flora Dobbs had once lived. I often thought of her house, the things we had spoken about, the porcelain dolls lining her bathroom shelves. Was she still alive? Where had she gone? She had been such a mysterious figure. Had she returned to France after all those years in England? I thought about the way she had announced we could no longer see each other, how I had stood there, holding the lemon cake. I thought of my father’s and Walter’s conspiracy theories about her. Had they been right or plain mad?
Walter. He was the man downstairs. I could hear him speaking to my mother. I wondered why he was visiting in the middle of the afternoon. For some reason, I always associated Walter with night-time. But then I reasoned that perhaps he was there because of the shop; there was always something happening at the shop. I made my way downstairs. As I was about to reach the ground floor, I suddenly stopped in my tracks; I could no longer hear their voices, and the silence was laden with something ominous. Something worse than noise. I heard a shuffling sound and a sigh. What was happening?
I froze, unable to move, my heart pounding loudly.
But I had to find out.
I had barely reached the last step when I saw them.
My mother and Walter were lying in the middle of the sitting-room floor in a wild embrace. Walter’s hand was underneath my mother’s skirt and he was pressing against her, kissing her frantically. They had clearly forgotten I was home.
I shouted. I couldn’t control myself. I shouted so loudly I could hear my own echo, like in a tunnel. I’m not sure how long it lasted. I was glued to the banister, watching the shock on their faces as they sprang up, Walter with his trousers undone, my mother with her unbuttoned shirt, her tousled hair. They rushed towards me and said something I couldn’t understand. Or perhaps they didn’t. My memory of that day is jumbled, out of kilter, as if the ground had been partially pulled from beneath my feet.
Walter disappeared and my mother began to cry.
Later she confessed all. Walter had been in love with her for a very long time. “We waited three years before giving in to each other,” she said, as if that might lessen the blow. “And now that we have, I can no longer hide it.”
“Hide what? What can’t you hide?” I asked, with a trembling voice, although I already knew the answer.
“The fact that I don’t love your father any more,” she said, in a quivering voice. “I’m going to leave him, Hannah,” she added, looking at me as if I were a friend rather than her own daughter.
“I don’t want to know!” I shouted. “I don’t want to know, and you can’t do that to us! You can’t break up the family!”
“We’ve been broken for a long time,” she answered hoarsely. “A very long time. I’m so sorry, my darling.” Her hand reached out for mine, but I pushed it away violently. “I love Walter,” she continued, in a near-whisper. “I want to be with him. I don’t want to lie any more. Especially not to you and Ben.”
I rushed upstairs, grabbed my jacket, schoolbag and keys and rushed back down.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked, her voice now frantic. “Hannah, please, what are you doing?” She got up and attempted to stop me, but I pushed her away, opened the front door and slammed it hard behind me.
Flora
9
It is August 1946, and I’ve returned to an empty Paris. The streets are deserted, the shops shut. A lot has happened since I’ve been away, and I don’t understand much about France any more. The Vichy government has been dissolved, replaced by a provisional one. General Charles de Gaulle has temporarily resigned. There is the guilt of war and what it has done to its people. A new President of the Provisional Government has been elected, but I know little about him. Inflation is spreading throughout Europe; the USSR and USA have emerged as world powers. “As a result of France’s wounds,” says General de Gaulle, “the equilibrium of the world has been compromised.”
The word “equilibrium” resonates with me. We have been knocked down, like skittles.
What the Parisians can’t have in food, they make up for in babies. There are newborns everywhere and prams crowding the streets. Yet bread is still rationed – as is coffee, sugar and rice. The Métro stations have reopened, as have music halls. People talk of the Folies Bergère. But I’m not interested. I visit the Beaux-Arts studios. Many of the men sport beards. I haven’t decided if I like it or not.
I’m modelling for painters again, and I also have a job working twice a week at Galignani, an English bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli. I like working there, meeting some of the writers who stop by, the fact that I can read at my leisure – and that literature affords me solace. I no longer have any desire to write a novel, but I have an increased desire to read. I devour books, especially English ones, and I take notes. I’d like to resume teaching, and am practising my English. My plan is to leave for London as soon as I’ve mastered the language completely. Knowing I have a purpose has made life easier
for me in Paris. At first, on returning from Palestine, I was numb with shock. Every morning I woke up in tears, as if I missed Ezra, which I certainly didn’t: I felt utterly betrayed by him. Then I found myself missing Jerusalem terribly. I thought about my year there, before the darkness. Before the charred debris, the white dust, the people screaming and the corpses strewn on the hot rubble. I closed my eyes and felt the heat and saw the stones and smelled the jasmine and thought of the people I had encountered, and the food and the Café Atara and the parties at Lotta’s, and the way everyone spoke to each other in such an easy manner. I had never been to such a place before, and I had a feeling that I would never visit one like it again.
I wrote to Ava and Mordechai. He told me that Ezra had committed suicide in his cell. He had chosen to die rather than confess. It made me hate him even more. How could he perform such a cowardly act? And then I changed my mind and accepted that the hatred was also tinged with grief. I had loved him, after all. But he was a murderer with blood on his hands, so I went back to hating him, especially as the image of Claire Betts came frequently into my mind. She often appeared unexpectedly, like a mirage, in the same way my parents did, the only difference being that my parents were dead and she wasn’t – at least not that I knew of – so I didn’t understand why the experience was so similar.
I told Catherine about my experience. I had never shared it with anyone beside Mordechai, and I thought she would understand.
I found her living in the same flat. After Roger’s death, she had gone to stay with her sister in the Auvergne, because she wanted to get away from it all. Now she was back; she had aged a lot, and her brown curls had turned grey. Her only daughter never came to visit, she said, even though she now had a grandson. “She was always a complicated daughter,” she said, and we talked about that, and my mother, for a while. It felt so good to speak about my mother that I didn’t want to stop. Suddenly there she was again, speaking, laughing, hugging me the way she used to. It made me want to cry, but I held my tears back, especially as Catherine had now steered the conversation to Palestine and my time there.
We sat down at her kitchen table, the same one we had eaten our soup on the previous year. Roger’s chair was still there, against the table. “It’s shit without him,” she confessed. “But at least I was able to mourn him before he died. I knew he was very ill. I was prepared. But it’s still shit.”
Her words hit me. I hadn’t been prepared for my parents’ death. I had had no time to mourn them. Everything had been so sudden. So fraught. I still didn’t fully understand it.
“It wasn’t the same for you, I know,” Catherine said, looking at me. “I miss your parents. I can only imagine what you must feel. It must have been very hard.”
I nodded. “It’s all shit, whether one is prepared or not.”
Catherine smiled at me. “You were always a wise one, Flore—”
“Flora. Thanks to Roger. I’m Flora now.”
“Yes, of course. Flora. Much nicer.”
Catherine was thinking of visiting her brother in Palestine. “Not much for me left in Paris,” she said, speaking softly.
We spoke about Jerusalem and my time there. I explained why I had returned to France. Strangely, she didn’t seem particularly moved by Claire Betts or by Ezra the Irgun fighter. If anything, she seemed to sympathize with him, which I hadn’t expected.
“You can’t blame him, can you?” she asked me, sounding surprised I would harbour such misgivings. “He was a Holocaust survivor. You should have forgiven him.”
“But he killed people! Innocent civilians!” I exclaimed.
“He was a Holocaust survivor,” she repeated. “He wanted his own country. I don’t blame him.” She paused and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m old; I’m tired of wars, of fighting. I’m tired of everything. I’m sure your Ezra was too.”
I got up and told Catherine I had to be going. I had never heard anyone defend the Irgun before, and I wished I could scrub out her words, because hearing her defend Ezra made me falter for the briefest of moments, love him violently again for the briefest of moments, which I could never do, because I hated him and now he was dead.
I would and could never forgive him.
*
I live in the 4th Arrondissement, in a small flat which belongs to M. Bonnet’s wife’s sister. It is a sunlit room with a small kitchen, a washbasin and a view of the Place des Vosges. I sometimes invite friends over. Not my old ones from the Sorbonne, but people I have met at the Beaux-Arts. The other week I was able to squeeze four of us around my kitchen table and we ate bread with saucisson and cheese and drank too many carafes of red wine. It was very cold outside, and soon it began to snow and we all gazed as the flakes drifted in the wind. There was a man who tried to seduce me, but I’m not interested in meeting anyone new. I flee from love. I avoid men. And I need to leave Paris for London. Everything here is coated in a veneer of treachery and lies. The government didn’t protect us. On the contrary. They shopped us to the enemy. They witnessed and facilitated the deportation of the Jews. They will spend the rest of their lives covering it up. Paris has become a stranger to me. I have become a stranger to me. The world as I knew it has vanished, as have my roots. In nihilo.
I feel denuded. I float in the shallows of the irreparable. I wonder if my emotions are transparent. I wouldn’t want anyone to see through me.
“You don’t smile much, do you?” a Beaux-Arts student remarks one day.
“I don’t when I model, but otherwise I do,” I assure her.
The student, a beautiful young American woman called Paulette, laughs.
“OK, I didn’t mean it to sound, you know, upsetting.”
“It didn’t,” I say.
“Come and have a coffee with me,” she suggests.
I follow her, and we sit down on the terrace of a café, behind the Boulevard Saint-Michel. We order coffee and cake and spend the afternoon talking. She doesn’t ask me many questions, but I don’t mind. I prefer to listen anyway. Paulette studies painting, and she is not very good at it, but doesn’t seem to mind much. “I’m just there for the experience, not to get better. And to have fun,” she says, laughing.
Paulette has white teeth and long blond hair, and is very popular with men. She says that when she’s done with her studies, she’d like to settle down and get married to a rich man. Money is important to her. She grew up rich. When she describes her background, it sounds like a foreign country. Nothing I can relate to. But I listen anyway. And I find her entertaining.
A few weeks later, she takes me to the bar of the Ritz hotel. Many rich men go there, she says. I’ve never sat among such opulence before. Even the whispers sound polished, like silver. The walls are of panelled wood and the seats are made of leather. The lighting is dim, and I feel like I could be on a film set. The women wear cocktail dresses and the men suits and ties. I am underdressed. I am wearing a grey dress and bland loafers. Paulette says it doesn’t matter. We’re sitting in the Ritz, and that’s all that matters. She tells me that Ernest Hemingway liberated the bar as the Nazis were retreating and then ordered champagne for everyone. She wishes she had been there. She wishes she had met Ernest Hemingway. I tell her that he stopped by Galignani one day, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to him. Her eyes widen. “Oh my God, you’re kidding?”
She’d like to find a husband like Ernest, she says. Rich and powerful, but also interesting. Her father is powerful in New York, where she grew up. Powerful and strict, she says, as if the two things were intrinsically linked. I stop listening. I don’t like hearing about fathers. We sit at the bar and order martinis and smoke cigarettes.
I’ve never had martinis before. We laugh, and she orders us another drink. A man comes up to the bar and starts speaking to us. He’s from Spain, he says. I think he’s handsome, but Paulette doesn’t. She asks him to leave us alone. Her tone is condescending. But I don�
�t say anything. Then she starts speaking about her father again, and I tell her that I need to go home.
I see Paulette one more time. She’s going with a group of friends to hear Yves Montand sing in a nightclub. I don’t like groups, and am wary of her friends. But I would like to hear the great man sing, so I accept her invitation. Her friends, a smattering of rich Americans and a few students from the Beaux-Arts, are civil towards me, but not particularly friendly. Except for one, Patrick, a young man with gentle eyes, who recognizes me as the nude model from the Beaux-Arts and mentions something flattering about my body, then immediately retracts and says he hopes he didn’t embarrass me. I find him endearing, and we spend the evening talking to each other and drinking kir royal until Yves Montand comes on stage. The singer is riveting. Patrick places his hand on my knee and attempts to kiss me in a clumsy fashion. I gently push him away, and he seems upset. After the concert, Paulette asks me to go backstage with her and I follow, my heart beating wildly. Montand is very kind and attentive to Paulette, and flirts with her. I try to speak to him, but he rudely brushes me aside. Still under the influence of a few too many kir royals, I snap at him. To this day, I cannot remember what I said to Yves Montand. All I know is that Paulette looked at me aghast and said “Leave us, Flora” – so I did. I found myself standing alone on the street, a woollen beret on my head. I asked a passer-by for a cigarette and smoked it quickly, standing still, shivering in the cold. A strong wind had picked up, and I buttoned my thin coat. I’m not sure how long I stood there. At one point I heard the sound of laughter and turned round. It was Yves Montand leaving the club with Paulette and two of her friends. Paulette’s hair was blowing in the wind, and as they walked past she glanced at me. I’m not sure she recognized me with my beret on – or, if she did, she pretended not to. The click of her heels and the sound of their laughter lingered on in the night air until the street fell silent again.