“Fine,” said Chaim.
“And a monthly sum of five thousand francs.”
Five thousand francs did not guarantee Chaim would be well fed, let alone me. Chaim searched for the fringes of his prayer shawl to twirl around his fingers but did not find them. He had tucked them into his waistband before entering the police station.
Next, the chief wrote out a bank draft for Chaim and laid it on his blotter. He took a wide-handled stamp, pressed it against the ink pad and then to the identification card. When he lifted the stamp and saw that the word Déporté had come out clearly, the chief said, “Ah, good,” and pushed the card toward Chaim, who rose, white-faced. I stood, too. “I will not have this printed on my card,” Chaim said.
“All the other absents have the same stamp. Without it, you cannot have your double rations, your free visits to the doctor, your five thousand francs,” the chief replied.
“Then I shan't have them.”
“What?” I said. I had been thinking about food the whole meeting. Potatoes, chicken, cheese. I had heard that all absents were given three jars of marmalade. I had dreamed of jam. “Chaim, this is a mistake—” I tried to say, pulling on the hem of his sleeve. He snatched his arm away.
“Stay while he completes a new card properly” Chaim ordered me. He got up to leave.
A gust of wind blew the door shut behind him and I heard the officers in the waiting room curse. One hollered at the other again about keeping his pistol atop the stack of papers.
“I don't know where it went,” the policeman moaned.
“The war has unsettled your uncle's mind,” the chief said to me, after Chaim had left.
“He's saner than I am,” I replied.
CHAIM WAS NOT IN THE COURTYARD OF THE COMMIS-sariat or waiting on the benches across the way. With the new papers under my arm, I turned toward home and saw his scarecrow figure stalking down the street, his coat fanning out behind him.
I called out, “Surely you've lost your senses.”
Chaim pressed against the wall as a girl with stocking seams painted on her legs passed us. He would not touch any woman.
“I could not have that word printed on my identification card, Max,” Chaim said. I nearly held out my wrist for him to grab, as I knew he would. “That police chief—”
“Yes?”
“—wearing the Croix de la Reine on his lapel—”
“I noticed it.”
“—the glorious sign of the Resistance?”
“I know what it is.” I struggled to keep up with him.
“In 1942 I was arrested by the same, the exact same, police chief.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
Chaim winced. “How could I forget?”
I blushed with shame. “You could have denounced him right there. He should be hanged. The Resistance should kill him on the street.”
“He's not my concern now. And if I turn him in, he's probably protected. Perhaps his boss also collaborated. I don't want to be pulled up before a judge and relive what happened in ‘forty-two. Besides,” Chaim said, “I got something from him as well.”
When we returned to Chaim's flat, my companion drew from his overcoat a pistol, the bank draft for five thousand francs, and a full box of Gitanes. “We had to learn to steal,” he said.
“You'll never be able to cash the bank draft. The police chief will realize it's missing—”
“—and keep my rations for himself. He's gotten a good deal. Why would he make trouble for us? He and I have a silent pact. He knows that some, though only a very few, of the men he sent away in 1942 have returned. He will know, then, that I may have met him before, back in the days when his office had a picture of Pétain on the wall instead of slogans by de Gaulle. That will be enough to keep him away. And I've had enough of them. ‘Paris liberated by her people?’ On the contrary.”
As I laid out our food for lunch—a baguette, some cheese, a jar of olives, a bruised apple—Chaim asked me, “And where is your family?” I said Le Puy and explained the paintings and the rift with my father.
“The first dilemma is not one I can comment on,” Chaim said. “For me, I would want the paintings in a museum, so my poor kin could go and gawk at them. Yet I have sympathy for your plight. These are not family portraits; those I would want to save. Surely those are destroyed because they are of value only to those who had them painted. Is each painting of your father's a token for a thousand of us that were killed? I don't know. These are questions for a philosopher. But that you have purposefully left your father?” He shook his head in disbelief, but his voice was not unkind. “Tell me, how long is it your plan to stay with me?”
I had never considered when I might leave, so sure was I of Chaim's need for my companionship. This is the hubris of the young, who cannot imagine that the old do not want to be with them. “Ten more days?” I asked him.
Ten days stretched into a month and then two. After we used what Chaim had stolen, there were still ten thousand francs left in my tobacco tin, which we spent on meals and bills for water and electricity and coal. I was glad that my money—my father's money—gave us a respite, that it “came in handy,” as the Americans say. So while Roosevelt lay dying in Warm Springs and we learned of the liberation of the camp Buchenwald (named for Goethe's beech tree—Father, I thought of you), Chaim and I lived, if not in richness then in comfort.
Chapter Thirteen
I HAD ALWAYS PLANNED TO RETURN TO MY FATHER with my catalog of triumph and loss, but as the days extended and my catalog had only blank pages, it grew increasingly impossible for me to contact him. When I thought of him, I mourned. And then, as if Father had sent her to encourage me, I saw Madame Bernheim, immersed in War and Peace, across the Métro tracks at Sèvres-Babylone. So the other Jewish art dealers had begun their return to Paris. I set out to make my rounds of their homes, using my father's address book as a guide.
I began with Monsieur Léon Lethez, a collector of pre-Columbian art. However, when I knocked at his door, the woman who answered said her brother was in too poor health to see visitors. I replied that as I had trained as a doctor, I was understanding of those who were sick, and that I hoped he would allow me to call on him again in a few weeks when he was well. The sister eyed me strangely. I wrote down my address and went next to the home of Frits van Seyveld.
My resemblance to my father was useful to me under certain circumstances and a burden in others. In the pursuit of discovering the fate of my father's compatriots, our likeness was helpful in seeking information from those who had been made suspicious by the war. I was not surprised that many recognized me, for these were men whose business was recognizing a fake.
I rang the buzzer to the van Seyvelds’ apartment on boulevard de Courcelles and waited. Before the war, this man had possessed the world's finest collection of Rembrandt drawings. Standing on the sidewalk for some time, I could not conjure his face, only that he wore a pince-nez. I was about to leave when the wind rattled the front door. It was unlocked. I leaned on the handle and entered the foyer, which opened onto a set of stairs, at the top of which was another door, this one covered with a lace curtain. I knocked and called out the Dutch dealer's name.
I heard voices behind the glass, the squeal of a lock, and before me stood two elderly people very small in size. A white-haired man in striped pajamas leaned against a cane. The woman beside him wore a black dress with a pearl necklace that draped nearly to her waist. She had on a hat and gloves, as if she had been preparing to leave the house.
“Monsieur van Seyveld?” I asked.
“Daniel!” He embraced me. Then he began to speak hurriedly in a language I did not understand. He grabbed my cheeks, looked at his wife plaintively, and barked a command at her.
She said, “My husband wants me to tell you how grateful he is for your visit. He has not seen anyone from the lost world since we returned to France. We were in Switzerland during the war and he suffered a terrible stroke. It's taken years to regain hi
s ability to speak, but finally he can converse in Dutch, his mother tongue. He used to speak such beautiful French! I've discovered that he remembers the tunes to ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Alouette’ and 'sur le Pont d'Avignon,’ yet not the words! Are not our minds miraculous and terrible machines, Monsieur Berenzon?”
Frits van Seyveld clasped my hand and spoke again, his leaking gray eyes intent on mine. I understood that he was inviting me into his home, and so we began the long, slow promenade into their salon, which was a grand one, of the kind I had not seen since before the war. Brocaded curtains hung to the floorboards, and everything wooden was gilt. On the walls were prints of elephants and rajas and women playing stringed instruments.
I explained to Madame van Seyveld that I was in fact Daniel's son, and she conveyed this information to her husband, who nodded as if he understood, though in further untranslated exchanges I heard my father's name repeated.
The wife grew quiet, awaiting the explanation of my visit.
“I'm happy to see your home remained untouched,” I said.
Madame looked down and twisted the emerald ring she wore over her gloves. Her skin hung loosely off her bones and her hair was nearly gone. Hence the hat, indoors. I imagined they had not responded sooner to my knocking because, unaccustomed to visitors, they had had to ready themselves.
“You see,” she said, “the apartment is filled with furniture. Yet, aside from the stove and the bathtubs, none of it is ours. Neither the kitchen cabinets, nor the forks or the linens. Not the bedposts, not the prints of India, not even the doorknobs.”
Her every belonging, Madame van Seyveld said, had been replaced by something that resembled its predecessor but was fundamentally different.
“The Germans emptied our home completely in ‘forty-one. Then it was refurnished to house a Vichy official, who is now in prison. I can't recall his name.” She asked Frits for it, but he turned up his palms and smiled, tapping his temple.
“I've gotten it into my head to find the lady of the house that was looted to stock ours with silver,” she said. “If she is still alive, she must want it back.” With a clink, she lifted a tarnished spoon from the table. “We had the same pattern, only the monogram is changed,” she said. Without warning, her husband began to weep. The wife seemed not to notice as he wiped the tears with the sleeve of his pajamas.
I handed my handkerchief to Monsieur van Seyveld, who blew his nose.
Madame continued for what must have been forty minutes, explaining that she had tried to get the Bon Marché's wedding registries from the same decade in which she herself had been married to see if she could match the initials on the silver to a bride from the last century. The department store's records, however, were incomplete. At a certain point, Monsieur van Seyveld, still clutching my handkerchief, dropped off to sleep. His wife, though she appeared frail, continued. “We find the strangest things in the house—a child's penmanship book in one drawer, dentures in another, this hat I'm wearing, Frits's pajamas, bronzed baby shoes. No two things came from the same house. Rather, the Germans brought a desk from one place, an armoire from another, our bed from a third. I picture some central warehouse of furniture from all the Jews in Paris. I dream of it, in an airplane hangar, with towers of chairs, and tables stacked one atop another.”
At length, I interrupted her. “What happened to your husband's collection of Dutch drawings?” I asked.
The old woman touched her husband on the wrist and pressed her lips to his cheek. I could picture them as young lovers: Frits, blond, speaking French with his rich Dutchman's vowels; she, skittish and stylish.
She recited my question in Dutch. He beamed at me, then spoke one sentence at a time, pausing for her to translate.
“Fortunately, the Rembrandt sketches are not big. We put one or two drawings in envelopes this size.” She repeated his motions, as he held his hands out in a square. “We sent one hundred letters, registered mail, half to our address in Switzerland and the rest to our most trusted friends.
“Four did not arrive. We comforted ourselves: a few out of two hundred is not so bad to have lost. But then, when we came back here as you did, in the late summer, we found those four letters waiting in the postbox. They had been sent all over Switzerland, so it took them nearly twenty months to return home. On two, we had marked the wrong addresses. We learned from the stamps on the other two that a friend had died and we had not been notified.”
“Where are the drawings now?” I asked, incredulous.
The wife straightened her hat and repeated the question to her husband.
He answered her and she translated. “We'll never tell.”
…
I STRAINED AGAINST THE DOOR LEADING INTO CHAIM'S apartment building. At that hour, six o'clock, kitchen windows with grease-darkened panes had been thrown open across the courtyard, and from them fell the smells of onions and boiling cabbage. The branches of a summer magnolia tree draped over the cement wall, and the round loveliness of the blossoms seemed almost obscene. A baby wailed and a cat meowed plaintively, their cries intermingling until I could not tell one from the other.
A telephone rang—an uncommon sound in this neighborhood—as if to say, Stop all this racket! and everyone and everything hushed for a moment, straining to hear the news and how our neighbor would react to it, good or bad, miraculous or tragic. I listened, too, but heard only the wind sucking the curtains in and out of an open window above my head. They reminded me of lungs, inflating and deflating, and I remembered my horror when we operated on live dogs in medical school. We sawed through their sternums and opened the rib cages with the same gesture as one opens a window onto the street, which revealed the dog's lungs undulating beneath. I had given my poor subject too much chloroform, and it died mid-operation. I told Bertrand of the dissections. I hadn't expected to upset him so. For days he would not stop talking about it, lecturing me on the evils of modern science.
As if summoned, Chaim appeared in the window five floors above me. Chaim did not look out but seemed preoccupied with—it must have been—the contents of my valise, which was stored where he stood. His movements were furtive and quick. I entered the building and climbed the stairs. I could not be angry at Chaim for this—I had done my own curious (and ultimately heartbreaking) reconnoitering amid his family's belongings.
Before I reached the landing, Chaim had unhooked the latch and stood shaking in the doorway.
“You eat so much that soon we'll have nothing left. I can't keep a boy who gobbles up all my supplies.” His anguished face reminded me of an El Greco. He seemed ready to howl.
“Please don't worry,” I said.
“Then what will we eat?”
“I have ten thousand francs hidden away,” I said.
“Let's see it,” he snapped. I was lying.
The apartment was stifling. The night was cool, though not unusually so. However, Chaim was burning a broken chair in the fireplace. The blue paint peeled and cracked and glowed in the fire, and one leg stuck out at a strangely human angle. Everywhere I looked were Chaim's family's belongings—his wife's hat with dust on its brim, the box with his son's lock of hair on the mantelpiece, the shelf of children's books. Chaim put his arm on my own to steady himself as we walked to the valise, where I knew I had no money hidden. The fumes from the burning paint made me lightheaded. I felt Chaim's impatience shimmering behind me. I thought, He will know that all I have in here is the fake Manet Ham, a concert program of Mother performing Brahms's Concerto Number 2 in B-Flat Major in 1927, and the pink sweater with the pearlized buttons that belongs to Rose. I made a show of unzipping the case's inner lining, where the forgery sagged in its gaudy frame. I rummaged through a shelf in the pantry.
“I find your lying unsettling,” Chaim said.
He sat at the table. We could hear the radio from the chambre de bonne above us, and the sound of emptying water rushing through a drainpipe.
“You should find your father,” Chaim said.
“I know where to find him,” I said, more harshly than I had intended.
“I'd like some tea,” he said, his eyes darting around the still room. I wondered who and what he saw.
“I'll make tea,” I said, jumping up. He waved me down.
“There isn't any,” he said. “No tea, but I'll tell you a story.” He gestured for me to sit beside him and patted my hand absentmindedly while he spoke.
“I remember visiting the family of a rich dentist when I was very young, in Wilno. They had a magical contraption in their house that kept the water boiling all through Shabbas, so we could drink tea at any time of day. I remember watching my mother envy it, and to see such envy in her eyes made me want to steal it or break it for her.
“I dreamed of that machine for years—until we left Poland, and I was already a grown man. But from the time I was five until, oh, twenty, that machine stayed with me, steaming away, and when my mind drifted or filled with envious thoughts, or when I felt wronged in some way that was small but bitter, there it was. I had loved my mother's samovar and tea set before we visited the dentist's family, but when we returned to our house when Shabbas was over, our samovar seemed common and tarnished to me, with dents in places I had never noticed before. It must have looked that way to my mother, too, because she put it away and stopped using it except when my father asked her to take it out.
“What is amazing, though, is that the dentist and his wife, who was also educated, a doctor—they were the richest Jews in town; they had a cook and two maids—still they only had an outhouse, just like my parents and I did. I remember the dentist's backyard, the kitchen gardens to one side, the chicken coop to the other, then the apple tree with the table beneath it, and at the edge of the property the whitewashed outhouse. Though they were assimilated Jews, my father's fondness for the dentist was greater than his disapproval. The visits, however, made my mother unhappy. She worked so hard. Father would tell her, We're rich in all the things money can't buy, and kiss her and bless her and then the children and the house. But my mother, may she rest in peace, was a more practical woman.” Chaim clapped his hands against the tops of his knees, as if to say, Enough of that.
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