Pictures at an Exhibition

by Sara Houghteling

  “The only goy I call my friend, Gilles Lalieu, is a tailor in the same neighborhood where I worked. His customers were mostly Christians and mine were mostly Jews, though there were some Christians who thought I was better than Gilles and some Jews who thought he was better than me. Yet”—Chaim paused—”I am truthfully the better tailor. When his billy-goat mother torments him, he drinks, and this makes his hands shake. And mine have never failed me. I am as deft as Houdini. I had not wanted to visit Gilles until I filled out. And now I say we should go. Come with me now, won't you? They too, have the tea-making machine.”

  Chaim unchained the door, and I had to jockey on the stairwell to get in front of him. I preferred to walk ahead on the stairs in case he stumbled on the uneven steps. The heavy courtyard door swung shut behind us.

  We descended rue de Sévigné to rue de Rivoli. The sun setting behind the gold-topped pillar at the Bastille filled me with a hope I had not felt in many months. A red convertible car honked its horn at two girls who carried a picnic basket between them. The men and women in the cafés were leaning over one another's tables and laughing, the women's elbows resting on the tables of men they did not know. A crowd had gathered before a hotel on the corner.

  “What's going on?” Chaim asked the waiter at the busy café.

  He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “Maurice Chevalier. He went into the apartment above the hotel two hours ago.” A man in a tweed coat with a camera slung around his neck jostled the waiter. The waiter pushed the cameraman off the sidewalk, into the street. “Watch it,” he said. “The café is still open here.”

  The reporter took a picture of the building, and at the pop of his flashbulb everyone rushed forward. The singer was nowhere to be seen. “Why's Chevalier in the Fourth?” I asked the blond woman standing next to me. She had a doll's face with a black veil drawn over her eyes.

  “I don't know and I don't care,” she declared. “Oh, it's been years since anyone has seen him!”

  A teenage boy at my elbow said, “Chevalier's girl's a Jew—her parents live in this neighborhood.” At that moment, the singing star appeared on the doorstep of the hotel wearing a white linen suit, with his famous boater cocked at its famous angle. The crowd cried out and pushed toward him.

  “Tell us about Mistinguett,” the newsman hollered. Chevalier took off his hat and looked into it. “To me, she is dead,” he said.

  “Tell us about Hollywood,” a second newsman called, as he ran to join the crowd.

  “I love it,” he said in English, and gave a toothy smile.

  “Mr. Chevalier, what about a song?” a woman called out.

  “A song! A song!” The crowd began to chant.

  “Sing ‘Prosper’!”

  “‘Ma Pomme’!”

  “How about ‘Dans la Vie faut pas s'en faire’?”

  “ ‘Valentine’!” Chaim shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  “Chaim?” I said, amused.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “What can I say? My wife used to love it.”

  “No, sing ‘Ça sent si bon la France’,” a voice shouted. The crowd quieted and the blonde to my right clucked. “What a faux pas.” I recalled the song, written during the Occupation and popular with German troops and their sympathizers.

  A young man in a narrow tie and a gray hat pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Collaborator!” he shouted. “Boche lover!” A murmur rose up around me. The young man took a swing at Chevalier, who staggered back. The singer's hat was knocked from his head and onto rue de Sévigné. The wind lifted it and skipped it farther down the street. Two women gave chase, their high heels clattering.

  The crowd parted. No one stopped the young man as he ran up rue de Rivoli, kicking his legs and pumping his arms, the tie dangling over his shoulder. The crowd fell silent and took a step back from Chevalier.

  The waiter from the café handed a dishcloth through the crowd to the singer, who held it to his tanned cheek with one hand and smoothed his hair with the other. “Do you still want a song?” he asked.

  “Yes!” everyone cried. Chaim and I looked at each other.

  “Do you want to stay?” I whispered.

  “Of course,” he said. “It's Chevalier! It's not like we see him every day in shul.”

  “For the monsieur in the impressive black hat,” Chevalier said. “‘Valentine.’” The crowd turned toward Chaim, who nodded to Chevalier above the stares.

  Chevalier took the towel away from his cheek, and two splotches of blood stood out against the white cotton. “Well, I need a girl to sing to, don't I?” he asked and his eyes scanned the crowd, which had grown to fifty or so. Many customers at the café stood at their tables. A few remained seated and continued to talk in loud, deliberate voices.

  “Mademoiselle—yes, you, mignonne, with the lovely black veil. Don't hide your smile. Come here and stand beside me,” Chevalier said. He was pointing to the woman on my right, who did as he said. Chevalier held her hand in his as he sang. Chaim hummed along with the refrain, “Elle avait des tout petits petons, Valentine, Valentine.” The song rhymed the words “little breasts,” “little chin,” and “curly like a sheep.”

  Chevalier kissed the girl's hand and tipped an imaginary hat to Chaim. Chaim lifted the brim of his and then pulled on my sleeve. “Time to go,” he said. We walked away as a few in the crowd shouted, “Encore!”

  “He's not as good in person as he is on the records,” Chaim said, and pulled at his beard. I wanted to know where Chaim had heard the records, because there was no gramophone on rue de Sévigné.

  “He singled you out of the crowd.”

  Chaim shook his head. “He sang for the Germans during the war and went into hiding after, because he was afraid the Resistance might get ahold of him. So when the obvious Yid in the crowd asks for a song, he sings it to him.”

  We stopped in front of a bakery. Its blue awnings had been drawn earlier in the day to protect the precious handful of chocolates in the window from melting in the April sun.

  “This is Gilles's house,” Chaim said. A wind whipped down the street, sending dry leaves scattering along the pavement. Chaim and I shivered. “In the camps, I thought of Gilles only once, at the beginning, and I thought, How terrible I did not get to say good-bye to my friend. He was a good man. And here I am again.” Chaim pressed the doorbell. As an afterthought, he added, “They're modest people. I don't think they would understand the lost paintings or be sympathetic to your cause. Perhaps it's best if you do not come.”

  Since I did not understand, I said, “Do what you wish. I'll wait on the street.” The door buzzer droned and he entered the unlit hall.

  It grew dark, and the lights in the rooms over rue de Rivoli sprang on with the randomness of a child hitting keys across a piano. I walked to the empty market stalls in the place Baudoyer and then back to the building that Chaim had entered. I reviewed what I knew of Chaim's history. In December of 1942, when he was called to the police station to renew his identity card, he was arrested immediately and taken ten kilometers outside of Paris to Drancy. This internment camp had been a public housing project for 700, later a police barracks, and a holding center for, at its peak, 7,000 Jews. When the Resistance killed Germans in Paris, tenfold were executed at Drancy. It was from Drancy that Chaim was shipped east to what he called the lager. I came to know it by the name Auschwitz. It was at Auschwitz that he learned of the German surrender at Stalingrad, thus locating his arrival there in February of 1943.

  That same winter, I was in Le Puy, where the stark, bare tree branches were like Chinese calligraphy against the sky. After a storm, Monsieur Bickart enlisted me to shake the snow from their boughs so they would not be damaged by its weight. We all cursed the cold, except for Mother, who said it allowed her to hear more clearly. From the basement, she could differentiate the strike of a donkey's hooves on the cobblestone path from a horse's, as the donkey's rang more sweetly. A German truck skirted the village via the A-9 highway once
a day, and Mother dutifully reported each evening whether it sounded laden with troops and weaponry or was fleet and quick, carrying only a single officer.

  The winter Chaim was first interned, Mother embroidered handkerchiefs for us all and gave them out on Christmas morning, out of respect for our host. We drank a fierce hot cider, then Father and Mother played belote while Monsieur Bickart stirred the fire, lost in thought, with the flush of the fire and the cider in his cheeks. He said he preferred not to play, though I suspected that he did not want to introduce an element of competition into our cramped quarters, which was wise indeed. He had discerned something of my parents and their natures to which I had long been blind.

  I heard the rat-tat-tat of shoes hurrying downstairs inside the building, and Chaim flung open the door. The meeting had lasted less than thirty minutes.

  “Walk,” he said, and we strode away, our shoulders hunched and coats drawn close to us.

  “I should have known when he was surprised to see me that the visit would go badly,” Chaim said after a while, his breath noisy.

  “They're not sorry about the war,” I said into the collar of my coat, which was moist and foul. Chaim nodded.

  “Madame Lalieu was influenced by Pétain from the very beginning. Too bad I waited to see Gilles until I had fattened up.” He filled his cheeks with air. “I didn't want to give them a fright.”

  We stopped at the corner of rue Pavée, near the synagogue. “I told them only the very surface of it, Max. The cold and the beatings.” He looked up at the streetlamp and spoke to it, as its light poured over him. “Gilles said, ‘It can't be as bad as you say, since you've come back to tell us.’ “

  I did not know how to respond. I raised my arms and dropped them. We stood in the halo of light made by the street lamp. Chaim's cigarette smoke clouded in front of our faces and dissolved. There was still the smell of wood fires. I recalled going riding with Bertrand and Fanny Reinach in the winter before the war started and the sight of the horses’ breath in the cold air.

  “In the lager, I worked in ‘Canada.’ In French, you would call it Peru, as in all the gold of the Incas. But we Poles say Canada. Canada was the collecting point. Diamonds sewn into the hems of clothing stripped from corpses.” Chaim stopped speaking. Two men in identical hats and long coats, with pale faces and black beards and ringlets, passed in front of us. They lifted their heads at Chaim's last word, then turned away and hunched through the low synagogue door. “When the Soviets came, we had already stuffed seven thousand kilos of hair into paper sacks, which we labeled half a mark each. There were women's clothes, men's clothes, a mountain of prosthetic limbs. I stole precious stones, gold pieces, only things easily concealed, and traded them with the Kapo. We were searched very carefully, but I was never caught. And so I survived and did not starve.”

  He shifted the blue velvet pouch that held his phylacteries from under one arm to the other. “We've missed most of the service,” Chaim said, tipping his head toward the temple door. “It's the final prayers. Kaddish. You'll come in with me, won't you?” For once, I agreed.

  The temple was damp and quiet, as it had been when I first met Chaim. He handed me a shawl and skullcap, then offered me a prayer book from a jagged stack. “What good would it do?” I asked. I could not tell top from bottom of the dancing lettering.

  “It gives you something to hold.”

  The men stood scattered among the remaining rows of empty pews. They faced the makeshift ark, their voices crying out at different intervals, as if the same desperate thought was passed along between them by an unpredictable electric current.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WHEN I WROTE NEXT TO MONSIEUR LETHEZ, I received a reply in a feminine hand that he was now well enough to see me. So it was that I climbed a battered staircase in the Ninth arrondissement to visit another man my father had inscribed in his book of addresses. Despair clung to this building and to the modest apartments. Lethez's sister greeted me again, wordlessly with her finger pressed to her lips. Her movements were fluid and soundless, in the way that a nurse is always aware of the sleeping invalid nearby.

  I followed her through a series of rooms without carpets or curtains, the walls of which were streaked with water stains but lined with vitrines of pre-Columbian art: flat golden heads and other works of metallurgy, three-dimensional figures in jade, humans with bird feet or fangs, jaguars, copulating men and women—dozens upon dozens, most no bigger than my thumb, marching in neat rows.

  We passed the kitchen and the drone of the radio and the smell of vegetables boiling. The sister rapped on the door frame of the last room, and we entered it. Inside, a small man creaked back and forth in a rocking chair, his fingers worrying the white bandage on his head. He wore a crimson tie neatly knotted, which suggested the sister's hand in his careful attire. A youthful face ill-matched his widow's peak and, above it, the shock of white hair. He was pale and handsome and frail. He eyed his sister warily and did not look at me.

  “This is Max Berenzon, Léon,” she said. “You remember,” and then closed the door behind her.

  I looked back with alarm—why did she close the door? I did not want to be left alone with him. This thought struck me separately: I, who had nearly been a doctor, was still afraid of the sick. Staring at the door before I could catch myself doing so, I saw a pair of pajamas hanging on a hook. Their sight touched me distinctly, though I could not explain why.

  I turned to Monsieur Lethez and saw him gazing at me, his hand still over the bandage, which was just larger than his palm. There was a plate of cookies on the table.

  “Try these,” Lethez said. “They are delicious.”

  They immediately crumbled all over my pants and the floor and stuck to my fingers. Lethez ate neatly.

  “Wonderful,” I agreed. He gestured for me to take another, which I dutifully ate. “I've made a mess,” I said.

  “Have one more,” he said. I did not want it, but I ate anyway. My crunching and chewing seemed coarse in the quiet room. “Now, tell me, why you are here?”

  My mind flipped through diagnoses—it looked as if a section of his skull had been removed—as I searched for the ailment and the operation.

  I stammered and babbled, the man unnerved me so, thinking of one thing and saying another, and eventually formed the idea that I wanted to learn how he had survived the war and what had been the fate of his collection.

  “What?” Monsieur Lethez asked, in a terrible and quiet voice. “I don't understand your question.”

  I tried it again. Lethez began to answer, but his voice dipped in and out of registers, his accent was very strong, the words slurred or trailed off altogether, and one idea caught the tail of another and dragged it down. I sensed that he had something important to tell me, and yet I could not understand him. All the while, the hand remained on the bandage and his forefinger stroked the cloth.

  I tried to be simpler. “Were you in France during the war?”

  His hand dropped to his knee. “In France the war was terrible,” he said. His chest rose and sank. “In Lithuania, it was hell.” Our eyes met for the first time, and I looked away. “But you haven't come here to ask me about that.”

  I could not form words to agree or disagree but sat mutely. Why must I upset this frail man with my idiotic questions? And what was it about ailments of the skull? Why could I not remember a single shard of information?

  I named the lawyer who had given me Monsieur Lethez's name. I asked about the Bureau des Étrangers. “I served there until my medical problems became too numerous,” he said, in his Lithuanian hush. “I thought we did a fine job. Now I hear many are unhappy with us.” He raised his brows and made a very French noise of dismissal, “Pf.”

  “Can you tell me about your art collection?” I asked. Again, whether it was my own agitated state or Monsieur Lethez's ailment, I could not grasp what he said. I fought the voice in my head, which was louder than Monsieur Lethez's soft one. Finally, I understood him to say, “If
you had come here two months ago, I would have had so much more to tell you, but I had just had the first operation. Now it is all out of reach. Ask Anna these questions, she can tell you. Pernicious disease. Spiteful. Sometimes I am allowed to remember my life and the words I require to describe it, and other times not. To have survived Auschwitz and then to have this. What was it you wanted to ask me?”

  “About your art,” I said, to distract him from my nearness to weeping.

  “It is all from South America,” he said, “from the tribes of the Chavín and the Moche, on the north coast of Peru, intended to accompany their rulers from this life to the next. It was buried with them in their tombs.”

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS AFTER MY VISIT, I WAS UNABLE TO leave the house. Then, I dreamed that my father ordered me to go to the Nurse's Room on rue de La Boétie. I ran there at midnight and found a policeman standing at the gate with his hand on his holster.

  There were wooden boards over the windows. “Move along,” he said. “No loitering.” The dog at his feet growled, or maybe he himself had growled and there was no dog. “Get going,” the policeman said again. “Or are you drunk? I can arrest you for that, too.”

  I felt as if my father were beside me. I missed him in the marrow of my bones, and yet I swore I could not contact him until I had my own new exposition of old lost paintings to offer to him. And if I failed at this, then I was, at the same time, seeking out my father's compatriots in order to provide a blueprint on how to pursue one's shattered dreams. It was an urge both to numb myself and to awaken myself from a long and terrible nightmare.

  I took to visiting the medical faculty's library at night, once it was no longer a polite hour to knock on the doors of elderly art dealers. The security guard at the library was the same as from before the war, and he waved me in without question. I researched ailments of the brain and skull, hoping to find some treatment or diagnosis that might help Monsieur Lethez. Then one day there was a new guard, so I could not go inside the library anymore.