“We must ask you to leave, sir,” my inquisitor said. “This card has expired and you are not Mr. Daniel Berenzon.”
“I'm his son,” I protested loudly, as the men eagerly (now given an excuse) swiveled to stare. “He sent me in his place.”
The inquisitor jerked me out of my seat by the elbow.
“Please,” he said. As I was hustled to the door, I saw Hans Gut-man.
Help, I mouthed to him. He grimaced and raised his hands, as if to say, What can I do?
A FEW MOMENTS LATER, I FOUND MYSELF ON THE street. My knee was scraped where my trousers had torn. I sat on the curb and considered ways to reenter the building. With the eyes of a stranger, I studied my reflection in the darkened glass of the auction house. The war's rations had exaggerated my thinness, so that I seemed taller than ever, with wide shoulders but not enough flesh below them. My curls were in need of a shearing, like a caveman in a diorama I had seen once, long ago, in London, with my mother. Why had we taken that trip? I wondered. A doctor. Micheline.
Mnutes later, the door to Drouot's slammed again and another man was shoved out onto the sidewalk, this one with a childish face and a balding pate. He too had torn the knees of his pants.
He squinted in the darkness in my direction. “Come out, don't lurk,” he said. “I know who you are.”
He took a step toward me, examining my face with a frown.
“You're a friend of Bertrand's!” he exclaimed, after a pause. “That's it. After they threw you out, there was a fair amount of clucking from the hens in the audience, and the rooster had to quiet them down, saying you weren't who the card said you were and it had expired five years ago. Well, anyway, as soon as they got rid of you, I figured I'd be next. I'm Artur Stein.” He thrust his hand toward me. “Picture me with a full head of hair. Then you'll remember.”
I tried to, and conjured up a night of Bertrand, Artur, and me on bicycles, following a taxicab with Fanny Reinach and her companion, en route to the Odéon movie theater.
Artur smiled. “Now you recognize me?”
I said I did. “Have you—” I began.
“Heard from Bertrand?” He shook his head. “Nothing. These days no news is the worst kind of news.” He lit a cigarette. “They were going to leave Paris at the same time we did, but some distant relative named Le Tarnec had connections to the police and promised to keep the Germans off their backs. A protector. You know how connected those Reinachs were. And Léon, too, Fanny's husband, with his father running the Villa Kerylos in the South and practically every Manet, Renoir, you-name-it painting in the Jeu de Paume donated by their uncle.
“At first, Bertrand argued in favor of leaving,” Stein said. “He was always pessimistic. Said they would be punished for indecision. That it wouldn't be so bad to leave the city, since they could always come back. But Léon and Fanny were worried about the Camondo museum.
“Just a month before all this, Bertrand had written a play. He called it The Collector. He mailed the script to some types he knew in the theater but hadn't heard any news. It sent him into one of those terrible depressions. It made him want to flee this cursed city even more. But then a theater troupe wanted to stage it. They idolized him, said he was the next Molière, and if you're a fellow who's been searching and searching and found nothing you like except hashish and Antonin Artaud and then—whoosh!—these twenty unwashed bohemians think you're better than Ibsen, and some of them want to sleep with you, too? So Bertrand convinced Léon to stay. That's all I know.”
We sat in silence on the curb, and the sewers murmured beneath us. In the sky, the stars were bright, sharpened by a dark city in which most people still used their blackout shades at night.
“And Fanny?” I asked. He shook his head.
“There's some central office where you can see if someone was arrested or not,” Artur said. “There's a red book where all this is printed. I've known about it for months,” he said miserably, “and I haven't gone.”
“I've known, too,” I admitted. And yet Chaim went twice a week.
“Where did you hide?” Artur asked.
I told him about Le Puy, Monsieur Bickart, and the root cellar. As I spoke, I pictured my mother's hands playing piano concertos on the bottom rung of the ladder that connected the kitchen to the cellar. She said the ladder had three octaves. Her right foot pumped an invisible pedal.
It was later than I thought. Artur would catch the last train to Vincennes. We walked south along rue Drouot, past the yellow post office and its raised portcullis, toward the Métro. Artur said his family had also hidden in the Massif Central, with a widow who ran a grocery. His grandmother had been rounded up from a hotel in Nice. The family believed she died on the journey to Poland. (I pictured a woman in a white fur coat.) Artur had one brother, younger by ten years.
We descended into the station and waited. Our train arrived, and we changed it for another at Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, then made our way toward the Gare d'Austerlitz.
We approached a flock of pigeons crowded on the pavement beneath the sign posting tracks and times. When we drew too close, the birds took flight and, as if on cue, each slot on the Departures board became a whirl of flying letters and numbers as its information changed. Artur's train did not leave for another thirty minutes. We sat in awkward silence.
“Our business has always been furniture,” Artur began. “That's how we got to know the Camondos. My father sold the kind of furniture Bertrand's grandfather collected. Tout est Louis. Very traditional, Louis Seize, gilt. Can you imagine trying to tuck a chandelier or a harp sichord out of the way? Of course not. When we came back, everything was gone. Mother bought some mattresses for us and we moved back into the house. My parents have started to buy a few pieces, mainly chairs. Father always said that to build a collection one had to start with chairs, since they make the measure of a craftsman's art.”
Artur rubbed his hands against his scraped knees.
“Father can buy furniture again because other pieces have reappeared at our gallery. We'll look out the window during breakfast to discover six fauteuils on the curbstone, as if someone would sit on three-hundred-year-old armchairs on the street. Or a truck will rat-tle our saucers, and the next thing we know a Chinese chest is on our stoop. Or someone will ring the bell late at night, and when we go to the door there's no one there, but instead of some swaddled orphan child there's a set of console tables.
“My parents say, ‘Isn't this nice, a neighbor must have known what happened and they're trying to help.’ But you and I know it's more sinister. These mysterious donors can either burn their loot, or keep it until they die. But then, when the children sell papa's desk, they'll find out that their sweet dead papa was not such a good man after all. We have arrived at the end of the great shuffle.”
“Or the beginning.”
“Six weeks ago, my younger brother and I were at an auction preview. I lost sight of him for a moment. Then I heard him shout, ‘Artur, this is ours!’ so loudly that everyone in the room looked up. The dealer turned seven shades of purple and ran over. There was my brother, on his haunches, staring at the shelves inside a mother-of-pearl-inlaid armoire. My brother recognized the armoire when he bent down to look at it—because that was the height he had been when we went into hiding.
“The dealer rushed us into another room and offered to sell our own armoire back to us. He gave me a fair price, probably what he had paid for it—that is, if he paid for it. He said to me, ‘A bad agreement is better than a good lawsuit,’ and Father bought it that day.”
The same well-turned phrase had made its way around Paris. Was this how the dealers comforted each other when, on a rare occasion, they were forced to correct their collections?
Artur's train appeared at the far end of the station, its front window a glowing band in the gloom.
“Come to the deportees’ office with me, tomorrow?” I asked.
“Where?” he asked. “When?”
I told him the address: the Se
rvice Central des Déportés Israélites, 23, boulevard Haussmann, Ninth arrondissement, where I had left Chaim before.
The train stopped with a screech and a pneumatic sigh. “Till daylight, old man.” Artur hung from the train's open door. “At nine, a few short hours from now.”
I walked across the pont d'Austerlitz, planning to visit Chaim. Yet as I approached his apartment, I feared I might frighten my friend if I were to wake him, and so I changed my course.
Streetwalkers loitered on both sides of the boulevard. They had dead-looking hair like the wigs in the wig shops that flanked the arcades. Three pimps lurked nearby. One in a leather coat talked with the women, while two others leaned in the shadows, sleeping.
The women called out to me.
“You're beautiful,” I said. “But you would tire me out. Plus, I'm as poor as the pavement.”
An ancient whore, her hair pinned by a sequined bow, trotted alongside me. “Sweetheart,” she said. “A special rate for you.” She eyed the pimps.
“Not tonight, young lady,” I said.
“They think you look like a rich man pretending to be poor,” she whispered, her painted cheek against mine. “So run.”
I ran. For what felt like an eternity but could not have been more than three or four minutes, I thought I could outrun the two men who had pretended to doze against the wall. But they were faster than I anticipated. Their breathing sounded like dogs’—easy, animal, enjoying the hunt. In a moment, they were upon me. One wrenched off my overcoat and tore the money pouch from around my neck, and the other knocked me to the ground. The taller of the two loomed over me, raining blows on my cheeks and jaws and kicking my stomach. I heard my keys chime against the metal sewer grate before they landed with a splash. Then the men were still. The taller one sniffed the air. “Enough,” he said, and ran off. The other followed until they were running with their legs in unison.
I lay over the sewer grate until I was certain they were gone. The street was silent again. I dragged myself to the curb, felt my face and stomach, and ran my tongue across my teeth. I thought of all that missing money. Two paintings’ worth, lost, found, and lost again. I vomited in the sewer. Blood slicked my nostrils.
I struggled to my feet and began to walk. My father had been right—the paintings were not to be found—and had turned back as soon as he sensed this, which was almost instantly. I had gone on, blindly. I was a work on paper: weightless, sketchy, all impulse.
I heard no bells that morning as I continued on to the Service Central des Déportés Israélites. I leaned against the door of 23, boulevard Haussmann until a figure appeared, pawing the ground with two crutches, then swinging her body between them. She wore a kerchief over her dark hair.
“Excuse me,” she said. “The office will open in exactly fifteen minutes. You will have to wait outside. I'm sorry. It's the rules.” She peered at my face. “Do you need a doctor?”
I shook my head.
When her back was turned to me, I studied her legs. At first, I thought they looked like the limbs of a starved person. On closer inspection, I realized her calf muscles had been entirely cut away. Only the femur and ulna were wrapped in skin.
The girl on crutches returned to the door. By the puckering and jumping of her mouth, I understood she was asking a question. She stood back, and I gathered I was permitted to enter the building. She pointed to a toilet and held out a towel to me. “I haven't any bandages,” she said.
When I emerged, I told her Bertrand's name, as well his sister's, mother's, and father's. She wrote them down in neat script on a pink slip of paper. Behind her were rows and stacks of books, which resembled photograph albums. She asked me a few questions: Were there alternate spellings to the Reinach name, and did I know the year in which they were deported? No and no, I answered.
“We don't have a precise system yet,” she said. “The Red Book is a list of all the people we know who are alive. The convoys, with the names alphabetized, are on the shelves in order of deportation date. I'll ask you to keep the volumes in order. They're quite heavy. If you put Convoy Forty in the place of Twenty, it's no chore for you to move them, but it's hard for me.” She looked at me fiercely.
I waited another half hour before beginning my work, hoping Artur Stein would still appear. At a quarter to ten I gave up and entered the reading room, which had empty bookshelves but twelve long tables. I began to read through the Red Book.
I did not find Bertrand's name under R-REINACH. Next, I scoured the book looking for anyone named BERTRAND or CAMONDO, his mother's maiden name. I closed my eyes. I could hear the thump and swing of the girl moving about the office and the unintelligible rise and fall of voices on the street. Sometimes the building shook with what surely must have been the Métro running beneath. A shade was raised too quickly and it wound around its roller with a snap. The telephone rang and rang. Single men came and went from the room; there were very few women. When a couple did enter, they were father and son.
I moved to the black books, which were heavier for me than the girl had predicted. The sun traveled across the floor as I lifted book after book and skimmed through the names.
By the twentieth book, my eyes were exhausted from reading. I heard the girl on crutches speak in Yiddish to an old man in the hallway. Eventually, he shuffled into the room and began to work on the black books, too. He was unkempt, with crumbs in his beard. I felt badly that he had no wife to care for him. He grunted with each book he lifted down, and flicked through the pages quickly, licking his finger from time to time. I heard a strangled cry come from the old man.
I found Bertrand in Book 35, Convoy 62, which departed Paris on November 11, 1943. My friend was the 887th person listed on the convoy, with his sister as 888th and father 889th. As if Bertrand had stepped forward first, and announced his profession: carpenter. Schreiner. I continued to read.
Seven volumes later, I found his mother, in a convoy of 1,501 persons, deported on March 7, 1944. How had Madame Reinach née Camondo been separated from them? I could not fathom anything. I thought of what Chaim had said about Drancy and how children there wandered, forcibly separated from their parents, too young to know their own names. If an older child knew a younger one, he wrote the infant's name on a piece of wood and tied it with twine to the baby's neck.
OUTSIDE THE BUILDING, I LAY ON A BENCH AND FELL asleep. Eventually, I heard the crutches of the injured girl. Night fell quickly, and a policeman appeared who knocked at my legs with his baton. “Move along now,” he said, tapping in time to the syllables.
I had the idea that I would like to sleep in the Bois de Boulogne. It took me most of a day to walk there, and as I walked I thought about Rose. The one time I thought I had made her weep with pleasure. The pearls pinned to her ears that she always worried she would lose. I spoke out loud to her as I walked, asking her why she would not love me, telling her that I had not heard all there was to hear about her bravery in the museum. I pictured the fire she had seen burning in the courtyard of the Jeu de Paume. Five thousand or ten thousand pictures, she had said. A fire that burned all day.
I left the Seine, crossing the offices belonging to La Radiodiffusion Française. I could hear its transmissions crackling, and the sound of my mother's piano returned to me. I recalled the strange feeling of sitting at my mother's feet as a child, arranging my toy train set—laying out tracks, placing the stationmaster beside them, putting down a barricade striped like a piece of candy, building a bridge with a miniature pine tree and gaslight beside it—and hearing my mother play on the radio. I had the uneasy feeling that Mother was not really there or wholly near me. That some part of her had been stolen someplace else. I might touch her bare feet just to make sure that she was with me while I tinkered with my train set.
I found a wide bench in the Bois de Boulogne and fell asleep in the sun. I blessed the springtime. I did not know the month or the day.
OVER THE COURSE OF MY WEEKS IN THE BOIS, I SAW many figures from my past—most ofte
n my father, and then Bertrand, Fanny, Mother, the Hungarian trumpeter who had lived across the courtyard on rue de La Boétie, and my grandfather who died on avenue de Breteuil and gave Father his limp.
With my eyes closed, with the sun beating down on my face and the rain misting it, I tried to remember my sister. In the sea of my memory, a few details rose to the surface, memories without any mooring that I began to affix to Micheline. A little girl with garbled speech. A face so close to mine I could not see it, buttoning my coat with the utmost seriousness. Me, waiting patiently through the ritual, knowing its importance, growing stuffy indoors wearing my winter layers. A sticky hand holding mine. Sharing a bag of sweet nuts. Her arms around my head, she kissed my face and nearly strangled me. I put my hands in the corners of her elbows and struggled from her arms. We jumped up and down in a field of mossy green.
I opened my eyes. The Bois was the greenest stretch of Paris. I looked out at its fields. The grass was not the color of the moss in my memory, as green as seaweed waving on the bottom of the ocean floor. I saw myself from behind, a little boy in short pants and a sailor suit, standing next to my sister, Micheline. I could not see her face. Turn around, I begged the two figures. My sister and I don't hear me, though. We stand on the mossy green rug of the gallery, sharing a sweet bag of almonds, underneath my sister's painting with the same name.
A face stared into mine as my mind was breaking. Bertrand held a bottle to my lips. “Les mariages du Bois de Boulogne ne se font pas devant Monsieur le Curé,” he told me. The night fell. The trees bloomed and their blossoms blew against my chapped skin. At night, I shouted, “Turn around, show yourself to me!” How had I been her brother but forgotten her face? Micheline. I had always known it.
It grew warm. Someone stole my blanket. Micheline still did not turn around. Eventually, my mind grew tired of pleading. I thought about Almonds, and how the unshelled nuts clustered together like rats. I wanted to see my father, but first I needed a bath.
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