I slipped into the apartment building on rue de Mézières behind an old man fumbling with his keys. Then I knocked on Rose's door. When she answered, the sight of her with short hair and crescents of darkness beneath her eyes distressed me anew.
Finally, I asked, “What day is it?”
“Tuesday,” she said. I saw the chain was still on the door.
“No, I mean date, month.” My voice creaked. I apologized. “I've barely spoken in weeks.”
Rose said, “July 7, 1945,“ and, “I can see.” She paused. I had been in the Bois nearly three weeks. Rose asked if I needed a doctor, or dinner, or a bath. I said the last.
I stood between the bed and a bookcase with documents on one shelf and tin cans and torn paper ready for the toilet on another. Rose rummaged in the bathroom. I heard the sound of running water and soon the steam from the tub began to cloud the windows.
“Go in there,” Rose ordered. “I'd give your clothes to the Red Cross, but they probably should be burned.”
“I've nothing else to wear,” I said, amazed at the practicality of her speech. It followed the pattern A, B, C, while my senses were darting around the room like gnats. I tasted honeysuckle in the air. Something was clotting at the back of my throat. My eyes smarted. My friend Bertrand had a woolly head like a lamb. The snot had coagulated in my nose. I couldn't hear. I couldn't think. The humming feeling in my blood meant worry—Rose looked ill. The throbbing between my ears made it hard to follow the logical conversation.
Rose stood back and I entered the bathroom, shut the door, shed my clothing, and stepped into the shoe-shaped tub with a splash. The water was fragrant and its surface iridescent. Rose had added some salts or oils to it. I shouted my thanks.
“You're welcome. Have you drawn the curtain?” she asked. I gave it a rattle on its rings.
In she came. Rose said, “I have had my heart stomped upon. With a boot.”
I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I slipped beneath the oil swirls on the surface of the tub and came up only when I needed to breathe. I moved aside the curtain to study her face. Rose now wore a silk dressing gown over her mannish clothing. I reached to touch it and left a damp stain on the silken sleeve. “Is it from an American?” She nodded, sobbed, and turned away.
“What is his name?” I asked.
“I don't want to say it.”
“He's a damned fool,” I said, careless and callous, like the boy she had known before the war. “I thought you were a nun to all but your work.”
She shook her head no.
“You'll arrive here,” I said, pointing to myself, “to anger. Now you're only hurt, split in two. Eventually, you'll be mad.” It was a direct translation: my experience into hers. Thanks to you, I charted this terrain first, I thought.
Her shoulders heaved. It was terrible to see her mourn, so much so it almost knocked my own grief from its pedestal.
“We could still marry.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. I stood up in the bath (Rose gasped), wet and unpeeled, and walked into the main room. I dressed myself and stood in the doorway, my untoweled hair soaking the collar of my stinking shirt.
“You knew about my sister,” I said to Rose, who wiped her tears with a napkin.
She nodded and I stepped out into the dark hallway. A wind, somewhere in the city, sucked the door shut with a slam.
Chapter Twenty-three
I RETURNED TO RUE DE LA BOéTIE. SINCE I NO longer had the key to the front gate, I grabbed hold of it, expecting to shake it violently. I would enter at any cost. A voice from inside, rough and suspicious, called out, “Who's there?” It was my father. Chains rattled and stiff bolts unclenched their bite.
“Come in, come in quickly,” he said, and opened the door. We studied each other in the half light. He had grown a beard and his clothes were little better than mine. Father cupped my face in his hand. “You've broken your nose,” he said, and suddenly, convulsively turned from me with his hand over his eyes.
He led me through the gallery, through the ruined rooms, over the uneven wooden floorboards. I closed my eyes, which was nearly unnecessary in the darkened gallery, and heard my father moving about: clanging a pot, turning a creaky spigot, the lonely piddle of water in the teakettle. I wondered if I had not, in fact, come home at all but was instead a ghost, brought back to witness my father's comfortless state. In my mind's eye, I saw a figure ascend the stairs to the emptied rooms, pluck a withered leaf from the floor, tuck it into his lapel, and float through the roof, into the night sky. How had I forgotten that a son must care for his father, too?
Father returned to his office, and we sat on the mattress pushed into the far corner of the walls, where his filing cabinet had once stood. He explained that in fact he had not left Paris at all but had stayed in a hotel in the Eighteenth, hoping to find me. He had searched the hospitals, the DP services, the garden chairs of the Luxembourg, the benches of the Bois, the fleabag hotels near the train stations, and the alleys of Belleville and Pigalle, to no avail.
On the day he had given up and conceded to return to my mother in Le Puy, he received a telegram from Rose. I had been sighted in the Bois, she informed him. Still, even then, I had not been found. On the way back from the park, my father decided to visit 21, rue de La Boétie, one last time, and found it open and empty. The Com munists were at a rally. He entered, barred the doors, discovered the telephone in operation, and called first a locksmith and then a lawyer. He had remained barricaded inside for the last three weeks, with the lawyer—a young man my own age, I realized, to my chagrin—providing Father with his necessities. Father explained some contested French law, about apartments left vacant without their owners reverting to the possession of the State or their occupiers after a certain passage of time.
I, in turn, told him about the Morisot, Madame de La Porte des Vaux, Almonds, and Cailleux. I could not bear to say Bertrand's name.
Father replied, “I knew when I said we would return to Le Puy that you would keep looking. The bank account was reopened the day I told you I could no longer tolerate staying in Paris. Did you notice that day how I paid for everything in large bills? Didn't you think I carried an awful lot of money with me? I was fairly certain you would take it to buy back the Cézanne and the Sisley that the Americans had stolen.”
So my father had foreseen the single independent decision of my adulthood. I hardly knew what to say. “I did not anticipate that you would abandon me,” he continued. “That came as a blow.”
I asked after my mother. He said, “If you're here, she will forgive me for being away a while longer.” He smiled wistfully. “If you can believe it, the war was nearly good for your old father and mother. I don't know who relented first. Yet somehow during our time in that cellar, we forgave each other certain things.”
“Like my sister,” I said.
Father grabbed my hand and held it. Rather, he clenched my four fingers as if they were bundled stalks. I did not know the last time I had held my father's hand. In front of Almonds, my sister had gripped my right hand and someone clasped my left, and I understood then that it had been Father. We were the family trio.
“Your mother never wanted me to tell—or, rather, to remind you,” he said. “I thought this choice was a mistake. It prevented me from speaking frankly to you. After a few years we stopped commemorating the night she died. And when we gave that up, many traditions fell away.”
Eventually, my father stood and let go of my hand. I sat on the mattress on the floor, listening to the wind in the ruined chimney and the rustle of papers waiting to be burned in the fireplace. I heard Father talking to himself in the other room. It occurred to me that the child believes his parents’ behavior has everything to do with him, always, and that this will then be the source of a life's worth of misunderstandings.
Before dawn the next morning, we were awakened by a knock at the front entrance. It was the young lawyer. Through the crack in the door, he handed my father a brown sack o
f food, a bottle of milk, several cans, and an envelope wrapped with twine. Introductions and handshakes, too, through the narrow wedge. The lawyer asked my father to give him more ration tickets. Father reached into his pocket and withdrew the strips of coupons, geometric patterned things, printed in carnival colors. The young lawyer looked nervous outside in the dark, checking over his shoulder. He promised to return later in the day with more supplies and to “pick up those papers.” I was glad that he was on the outside and my father and I were inside, and that Father had not returned to Le Puy, leaving me here in his place.
Father read out loud from the papers. “Jews who have suffered a loss of property fill out this form … estimate value … will be treated with all due haste, return by the deadline—that's three days from now—be assured of most distinguished sentiments, et cetera, et cetera.” He threw down the papers on the bed. “What an extraordinary waste of time. But our legal counsel will be cross if we don't do as he says.”
So again we walked around the gallery's main room in circles, stopping at intervals to name the Vlaminck, Dufy, Braque, Picasso, Morisot, or Matisse that had once hung there. This time, for reparations. Father and I had not rehearsed the paintings, as we had done for so many years of my childhood and adolescence, while in hiding. At first my mind creaked in protest, and the paintings’ details ran together. It brought to mind the sensation of trying to recite verbs for Latin class after the summer holidays. Amitto, -mittere, -misi, -missum. To send away, to let go, to let slip. Hence, in general, to lose.
We spent an entire day on the task. Three times I named paintings that had been sold before the war, and each time father scolded me. The nib of his pen scratched through the paper. When we had finished, Father said, “Let us never speak of this again.” He placed one hand on my head, as if in blessing. He raised the other to touch the wall, as if it could yield to him what it had seen.
Epilogue
FOR THE FIRST EIGHTEEN MONTHS OF MY LIFE AS an American, i worked for the German government—or, more specifically, for a Pole, a psychiatrist named Emanuel Senek, who was paid by the German government to interview survivor émigrés in the Great Lakes region for matters of reparations and pensions. Senek, a survivor himself, worked in Polish. I conducted interviews in French, though few of those whom I spoke to and whose interviews I later transcribed were actually French. They were the orphaned children of Jews from the Pale who had fled to France but were unable, as we all now knew, to save themselves. At first, I found solace and meaning in this work.
When later in Ann Arbor, despite myself, I asked a man who had been deported on Convoy 62 in November of 1943 if he knew Bertrand Reinach, this was correctly deemed unprofessional and may have precipitated the illness for which I was hospitalized on the day prior to the election that won President Truman his second term in office.
When the crisis abated three months later, I was advised not to return to my interview work with Senek. Before my release from the hospital, I spoke often with one of my doctors about my own haphazard medical training in France. As unorthodox as it strikes me now, he suggested I sit for some exams in Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Michigan Medical School as part of my cure. I passed these, then several more, then began attending lectures regularly. Seamlessly, or so it appeared, I made the transition from patient to student to doctor.
For some time, I possessed an aversion to the idea of visiting New York City and a fear that I would encounter someone from the old world there. Most of the art dealers who had left Paris had taken refuge in Manhattan; a few were in London, a few in Los Angeles. At the height of the McCarthy era, Father reported that two or three had returned to France. This aversion remained until one day, a glimpse at a Sotheby's catalog revealed one of my father's Toulouse-Lautrecs—La Goulue with Her Partner, the dwarf painter's muse with the man who was called the Boneless One for his flexibility. I rushed to New York to claim it. Yet the seller disappeared and the auction house remained mute and uncooperative. Rather than return home, as I had no real belongings or friends in Michigan—and my kindly landlady agreed to ship to me what few things remained—I saved the money of the return ticket and stayed on in Manhattan.
I first caught sight of my future wife during the month of October, in my first year as a resident at New York Hospital. The young Ellie Berger remembered all the patients’ names but forgot the doctors’ (including mine). She was unshaken when the survivors of a school bus accident were brought to our emergency ward. I overheard her tell another nurse that her fiancé had died over the Pacific. When I introduced myself a second time and asked where she had been raised, she said, recognizing my accent, “Nouvelle Rochelle,” waited for me to smile, and then explained the joke. Through the glass of the nurses’ station, I watched her complete crossword puzzles with terrifying speed. We were married in four months’ time.
Now I understand that more complex forces drew us together. Ellie's own father (a Berliner by birth) hanged himself following the crash of the American markets on Black Tuesday of 1929. Her mother took in boarders and put her daughter to work. My family's life must have seemed a miracle of ease to her.
Our older daughter Sophie is to be married to a lawyer of Irish extraction in the winter. I cut the engagement announcement from The New York Times and sent it to my parents, who have it framed in their kitchen in Le Puy. The younger, Michelle, I am told is almost identical to me as a child. She is long and loose-limbed, with unruly brown hair and a dreamy look and disposition; perhaps it is true. I am a fortunate father, for they are doting daughters. During their childhood, I took them often to the Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library, but never the Metropolitan or the new Modern art building on Fifty-third Street. I supposed they were both ignorant of art, though at Sophie's graduation from Barnard she received a prize for an essay on Ruskin. We may have something to discuss in our later years, after all.
Chaim remained in France two years after I did, still searching for word of his wife and son. When at last he learned of their murders, he followed me here. He seemed to bury his grief in his work, opening a store that sold winter coats to the women of Milwaukee. Chaim chose Wisconsin, which he refers to as Veesconseen, because he was told that its climate would remind him of Poland. He remarried, to another survivor, though they have no children. He spoils mine instead, and Michelle is his favorite.
In January of 1965 he went back to Auschwitz for the twentieth anniversary of its liberation. “I was freezing the entire trip, Max,” Chaim wrote, in a handwriting I now know only we Europeans use. “I thought only, ‘I could not survive this now. Surely I would have died.’ I could not believe I survived it then.”
Chaim, perhaps unexpectedly, took up fishing, and I followed suit. We visit him and his wife each summer. I did not tell Chaim of my stay in the sanatorium in Michigan; hence, he thinks I am a man apt to disappear for long stretches of time, as I did when we lived together on rue de Sévigné.
ON THE OCCASION OF MY TWENTY-FIFTH WEDDING anniversary, i arranged for three weeks’ leave from the hospital and had the travel agency on our street corner book passage for two to Paris. Neither of our children would come. Sophie was at a piano workshop in Aspen and Michelle was meditating at Esalen. Ellie and I reserved rooms at the Hôtel Rousselet in the Seventh. My parents had a neighbor care for their dogs and took the train from Le Puy. My mother's seventy-fifth birthday was a few weeks hence. It was to be a celebratory visit.
Despite myself, I thought of Rose. I could find her in a crowd of a thousand, by the Greek vases with their scenes of love in the longest gallery in the Louvre. I had thoughts like this many times. And though their frequency did not lessen with the years, their yearning quality did.
During our second night in Paris, from the depths of a deep sleep, I heard my mother shouting my name. I rushed into my parents’ room. With deliberate, untrembling hands, I administered chest compressions and breathed my breath into my father. This prolonged his life by several days.
The chest compressions, as sometimes happens in older men of a delicate constitution, shattered his eardrum. He was half deaf for the final days of his life. We all had to shout our love at him, which, it occurred to me, I had been trying to do my whole life.
On the morning he would die, Ellie said, “Max, you're always on the other end of the camera. Take a picture with your parents.” Her motive seemed so transparent, as if to ask, how much time do you three have together? I protested, but my father beckoned me. He pulled me to him and kissed my forehead, holding his lips there during the long time that Ellie fumbled with the F-stop and the focus and the flashbulb. The click came too soon. My father had never embraced me for so long.
When I learned that my father had died in the night, I ran to a camera shop, as if the photographer's strong-smelling solvents might bring him back to life. I ran past the post office on rue de Sèvres and wove madly through a bakery line. I crossed the avenue while the traffic was still moving and heard it screech in my wake.
The camera shop owner must have recognized my distressed state. Although he still wore his street coat, he complied with my request to develop the roll of film with my father's last photograph. I lifted the heavy camera from my neck—I had not trusted my shaking hands not to expose the film or drop it in a gutter. He took the
Nikon into his darkroom and returned a moment later. “I'm terribly sorry,” he said, his mustache working up and down above his lips. “There is no film in this camera. Perhaps you took it out already?” And so my father's picture joined the other images in the lost museum in my mind.
WE BURIED FATHER IN OUR FAMILY'S PLOT IN MONT-parnasse, beside my sister. Micheline's grave was gray, and time had darkened the letters of her name. She lay next to Abraham Berenzon, whose tombstone looked as if it had been burned. A tower of five or six stones rested atop each, laid by an unknown hand. While the rabbi conducted the service, a jet plane flew overhead and drowned out the sound of his singing. The jet's trail evaporated in the sky, though we could hear its roar after it had disappeared above the clouds.
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