The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Unlike Yankel, my paternal grandfather, Itzhak was not very tall. I knew him for a long time and loved him as long as I knew him. He was the spitting image of Charlie Chaplin, and when we were children he would make us laugh with mimicry and making faces undoubtedly copied from his illustrious model. I laughed uncontrollably; the only way I could stifle my hilarity was to bury my face in my grandfather’s hair, which smelt of freshly baked bread; it impregnates my nostrils still. Like many pre-war Jewish merchants, my grandfather had changed Itzhak, his ‘barbarous’ first name, to the more ‘refined’ Léon, which became a surname. At the auction rooms on the rue Drouot, his business contacts addressed him as Monsieur Léon. Similarly, André, he of the shoe shop, I’m convinced, originally must have been called Moishe or Itzhak or even Yankel, why not? My grandmother Anna, for whom I wrote crude Latin, was known as Madame Léon. Léon, then, had been born in 1874 in Vileyka – a shtetl of shifting and uncertain orthography – on the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus. Typical Jewish hotchpotch: his father, my great-grandfather – though I’m not even sure of these details – ran a kosher butcher’s shop, had thirteen children, experienced appalling poverty and anti-Semitism and the call of the West, to which Itzhak succumbed at the age of thirteen, leaving his family and his village accompanied only by one older brother. A stopover turned into several years in Berlin, where he learned the tailor’s craft. I do not know the fate, nor even the first name, of his brother, who was, after all, my great-uncle. From snatches of information overheard, I know that Itzhak left Germany for France, although he thought he was merely passing through, his final destination being the United States. For better or worse, in Paris he met Anna, someone else who was also ‘passing through’. Here is another Jewish hotchpotch: Anna was born in Riga and later her father, my paternal great-grandfather, a Rabbi according to Anna, took his wife and children to live in Amsterdam. In the house in Groutel, above my grandparents’ bed, where a crucifix usually hangs in Norman houses, was an impressive photograph of the rabbi: a long face soothed by ascetism, a flowing black beard. To the eyes of the little French boy I was, my great-grandfather seemed like a sentinel to some strange and distant world, a world I could reach only through transgression, whenever I had the privilege – which was rarely – of being admitted to this holy of holies. When Anna met Itzhak, who was not yet Monsieur Léon, she too was bound for Ellis Island and the United States. They fell in love, fell in love with Paris and decided to stay there, worked at several jobs, briefly ran a restaurant. But it was on the rue Drouot, at the auction rooms, that they finally found their safe harbour. By dint of hard work, of listening, attentiveness and practice, they became experts and connoisseurs of antique furniture, carving out a niche for themselves in the world of Jewish antique dealers – who were then numerous in that area of Paris. As a small child, when she took me to the rue Drouot, I could gauge the respect the merchants accorded my grandmother. It sometimes happened that dealers colluded, agreeing not to bid on a particular lot to avoid driving up the price, thereby allowing one of them to buy the piece for considerably less than its true value – real or imagined, since an auction, like a game of poker, depends upon bluffing, and on illusion. Once the auction was over, the poker-faced bluffing recommenced in the back room or the cellar of one of the neighbouring bistros, so that the ‘real’ value of the piece could be determined. The conspirators gathered around a large oval table and the auction began once more, bidding beginning at the price paid by whoever had bought the lot. This was the ‘revision’ and it was a furtive practice, although tolerated, so it was said. Nowadays, revision is strictly forbidden – it is considered to be an inverted insider trading. Hidden behind Anna’s long black skirts, I watched, turning from the visible tension on the faces of the bidders, to my grandmother’s expressionless calm; her perfect poker-face. The undersold object – a piece of furniture, a painting, a rug or a piece of jewellery – went to the highest bidder, but the winner then had to pay, according to a complicated system, all those who had risked a bid on the lot before him, immediately, and in hard cash. More often than not, Anna walked away with crisp crackling banknotes in her purse. Perhaps the Lanzmanns and the Grobermanns attended the same ‘revisions’ – they were, after all, destined to meet, to become allies. But the war postponed the fated meeting: from August 1914 until November 1918 Itzhak Lanzmann fought as a front-line infantryman, he fought at the Marne, at Verdun, on the Somme, he was wounded three times, was awarded a Médaille militaire and the Croix de Guerre avec palme. On the rare occasions that he came home on leave or to convalesce when discharged from hospital, he refused to sleep on a soft mattress, insisting on sleeping on the bare floor, so accustomed was he to the hardship of the trenches. Anna, left alone with their two sons, Armand, my father, and his younger brother Michel, endured the war bravely and angrily, keeping shop, educating her sons as best she could in this country that was unreadable, indecipherable to her, a country where she understood neither the character, nor the codes, nor the language. My father had such difficulty accepting this ‘étrangeté de vivre’ [‘strangeness of living’], to quote Saint-John Perse, this difficulty of being French in France, that he enlisted at the age of seventeen. I have already explained how his lungs were damaged by mustard gas and how this bound us for so long to the Auvergne. I don’t know which distracted, xenophobic pencil-pusher of a registrar changed the first ‘n’ in Lanzmann to a ‘u’ when his brother was born, but Michel, my uncle, was registered as Lauzmann, married a moustachioed Aryan and so loathed his elder brother that he never reinstated his true name. I have a cousin, an anorexic girl, later a regional prefect’s wife, a perfectly charming woman, with whom I once discussed this war of names.

  My father and mother were married without ever having met. A shadchen – a matchmaker or a go-between, possibly a woman – arranged the whole thing. This Jewish Frosine matched, assessed the assets, decided on the size of the dowry. The Grobermanns were considerably richer than the Lanzmanns: Yrankel gave each of his daughters 200,000 gold francs – apparently a lot of money – and my father found himself running a vast shop selling ‘reproduction antiques’ just opposite the auction rooms on the corner of the rue Drouot and the rue Rossini. The shop is still there and the building itself has not changed, but these days it houses an auctioneer’s office. Armand and Pauline met twice before the wedding and did not dislike each other. My father was a handsome man, he remained slim his whole life, enjoyed sex, liked women as much as they liked him and was so profligate that after a few years the shop passed to his younger brother Lauzmann, notorious among the Lanzmanns for being a miser, a salesman with no charisma, and a man I barely knew, so estranged were the two brothers.

  To her dying day, my mother threatened to reveal the dark and terrible secret that would make me understand what a monster my father had been, the reason she clung so fiercely to her resolute hatred of him. It was a threat she made good on shortly before she passed away, as though conferring on me one last sacrament, but, from conjecture, cross-checks, intuition, comparisons, I thought I had already worked out my father’s heinous crime. I was not wrong: not content with having taken her virginity, on their wedding night my barbaric sire attempted to sodomize Pauline. I don’t approve of his actions. Though, as I have said, she considered religion to be little more than ‘playacting’, my mother was still very much a Jew of the Torah, an extremely prudish woman despite her loose language, and she hated everything to do with carnal relations, which she deemed to be against nature. Among our people, there are still many women of her view: when it is not in the missionary position or in some languorous side position, but bestially, or with the woman on all fours in the position known as du duc d’Aumale, such women refuse this ‘animal coupling’, crushed as they are by both the Law and the Superego, arching their whole bodies, twisting them so forcefully (I am thinking of Mademoiselle Bordelet) that every curve, every orifice disappears and the aggressor might as well not have bothered.

  Before Vau
cresson, we lived in a third-floor apartment on the place des Batignolles in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, a place I associate with cheerless memories. A world full of sound and fury that somehow filtered through to me, with names that surface like unforgotten markers: Aristide Briand, the Treaty of Rapallo, the Stavisky Affair, the election of Albert Lebrun, the Croix-de-Feu, the Ligues, a bandana-wearing murderer who hid in doorways at night and stabbed his victims to death, the war between my mother and my father that drove both of them mad. Separately, she with Monny and he with the beautiful Hélène, they experienced passionate, peaceable relationships. But together, excepting a few surprising moments of calm, it was constantly stormy, a succession of escalating confrontations and provocations, my father trying desperately to impose his authority over this indomitable creature, trying to terrify a woman who was afraid of nothing, who would strut around proudly until she died.

  I am six years old, maybe seven, Jacques, Évelyne and I are sleeping in the same room (Évelyne is still a baby, she is two years old at most), I am awake, I know my father is waiting for my mother in the entrance hall, soundlessly I open the door and, my heart pounding, I watch my father as he watches for her: apart from the lack of a bandana, he looks like the man who hides in doorways, his hand closes around the handle of a long butcher’s knife and I wait for the inevitable, incapable of revealing my presence. The key turns in the lock, the door opens, it is her, with her long black hair, she is not coming back from seeing a lover, she has not been cheating on him, she needed to get out, she couldn’t stand it any more, the prison of marriage and motherhood were suffocating her. She finds him, knife raised as though to strike her down, she laughs, she stammers and her stubborn stammering infuriates my father even more: ‘Y…Y…You wouldn’t d…d…dare… G…g…go ahead,’ she taunts him. ‘You’re nothing but a coward.’ He does not bring down the knife but plunges his other hand into his pocket, takes out a gun and fires, not at my mother, but randomly at the dining-room walls. Muted, abrupt explosions, it is a small bore pistol, a 6.35, but the bullets are genuine, the walls are really riddled, it will take days to plaster over the holes. Having chosen the path of jealousy and violence, Armand was forced either to kill or to put on an act. Paulette never missed an opportunity to call him ‘the actor’.

  Another day – I think it is still daylight – he is waiting for her in the lobby of the building and, peering over the banister on the landing, I watch, petrified, her ascent to Calvary. She comes in, sees him, tries to run, but he catches her, grabs her long black hair and drags her, step by step, up to our floor with her struggling and refusing to be dragged every inch of the way.

  Another night: the screams and moans from their bedroom are so piercing I am convinced one of them is about to die. I rush into their room, I think I can see daggers under one of the pillows, I throw the window wide open and in my most calm, most adult voice, I warn them, ‘If you don’t stop right now, I’m calling for help.’ The bedroom overlooked the place des Batignolles.

  Very early, from the age of six or seven, I felt responsible for everyone, for my parents, my brother, my sister. Sometimes, later, when I was left for the evening to babysit my brother and sister, who played around and made fun of me, I would find myself turning on the gas burners fifteen times to make sure I had turned them off properly, then later in bed, as I was nodding off, I would feel I needed to get up and turn them on and off again. Or go into the living room to check under the armchairs and the sofa and behind the curtains to make sure there was no bandana-wearing murderer lurking there.

  We left Paris for Vaucresson and a new life with a garden and a huge shaggy, impossibly white mountain dog, so powerful, affectionate and good-natured that he even allowed my father to put a bridle on him so that he could pull us around in a cart that my father had made. Because of Flaherty and his famous film, our dog was called Nanook. Vaucresson to me is Nanook; it is the terrifying Great Danes I mentioned earlier; it is my father coming home late one night, covered in dust, bleeding, caught and beaten by police in the riots of 6 February 1934; it is my mother’s letter lying on the kitchen table one day when we came home from school, marking the end of this brief new life.

  Jacques and I spent almost a year without father or mother, living in a boarding house run by a widow in Le Perche, just outside Nogent-le-Rotrou, with Évelyne lodging nearby on a farm. Every day we walked down a long hill to the primary school in Mâle where we were taught by Monsieur Étournay, our father showing up irregularly, in an American car, my mother not knowing where we were, all ties having been severed. One day Armand turned up in yet another new car accompanied by a beautiful woman: Hélène. They took us to a restaurant and, on the way, Hélène turned to us, huddled together on the back seat, and said, ‘Would you like me to be your Manou?’ ‘Yes,’ we chorused. The separation from Monsieur Étournay was heartwrenching. Pointing to me, he said reproachfully to my father, ‘You’re taking away my best pupil.’ Cycling up the steep hills of Perche in search of the places of my childhood some years ago, I ran into him. Though over ninety, he was still as tall, as ramrod straight as ever. ‘I’ve followed your career in the newspapers and on television,’ he told me. He also ‘followed’ my brother Jacques. Only recently I heard that he had died. Driving out of Mâle on the Paris road, we collected Évelyne from the farm and so began our first migration to Brioude and the Auvergne. Hélène, out of love, was prepared to take on three children who were not hers.

  Inevitably, our relationship with our mother resumed. We took the train to visit her once or twice a year, though never for more than a day, and each time she was waiting for us at the Gare de Lyon. Her friends, whom she had met through Toni, the ‘Circumcised of Venice’, were Italian anti-Fascists living in exile after Mussolini’s rise to power. I remember one of them, a man named Giulio who came with her to the station, her lover probably, an anarchist as aloof as Lacenaire in Les Enfants du paradis. Barely had we clambered down from the carriage when he asked me in a thick accent, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Taken aback and having no idea what my future would be, I gave the most conformist answer: ‘A teacher.’ ‘Silly fool,’ Giulio muttered to himself through teeth clenched in scorn. The celebration in my mother’s twelve-square-metre cheap furnished room on the rue Myrha consisted of horsemeat – cheaper than beef – chopped and served raw seasoned with salt and pepper. It was absolutely delicious; to this day I eat it often. Raw horsemeat followed by blackcurrant sorbet on a café terrace on the boulevard Barbès, a trip to the cinema, this was how our visits usually played out, not forgetting the excitement my brother and I felt when, behind a screen, my mother raised her arms to perfume her underarms or undress, without a hint of embarrassment or prudishness, oblivious to the fact that the mirrored wardrobe door reflected her naked body back to her sons.

  After leaving our mother we would go to Groutel and our paternal grandparents: Monsieur Léon whose hair smelt of freshly baked bread, and Anna, whose childhood in Amsterdam and her time in charge while her husband had been away at war had turned her into a tyrant obsessed with cleanliness. Day and night she scrubbed and polished two houses: the big house, in which we rarely set foot, and the old house, where they lived, whose polished brasses and Delft porcelain evoked a Dutch interior. And in fact, with her snub nose and despite her Yiddish accent, she looked more like a peasant woman from the polders than an East European Jew. Her tirades, when we came home filthy or muddy or with dirty fingernails, terrified us but we always ended up helpless with laughter, egged on by winks of complicity from our grandfather. Seeing this would make her even angrier, and one day, determined to prove to her son Armand that his offspring had filth in their veins, she cut our dirty fingernails, put the parings in an envelope and sent them to him. Anna and Itzhak had retired to Groutel early, they never went to Paris and, aside from a small private income in the form of ‘coupons’ – that was their word – they were completely self-sufficient. The potatoes, beans, lettuces, tomatoes, seasona
l fruits – all the produce of their extensive kitchen garden – my grandfather tended entirely by himself, digging, planting, hoeing, weeding, picking. He was a true, a seasoned, farmer and this earned him the respect of the overweight Norman farmers – with their fat paunches and bloated lands – the Labrasseurs, the Roustaings, the Clouets, who knew that Grandfather was a veteran of the Marne and of Verdun and unquestioningly accepted the fable of the Lanzmann family’s Alsatian origins. Besides his garden, Itzhak had a poultry yard of the sort that no longer exists, with laying hens, their eggs taken from the nest and swallowed immediately, fighting cocks that crowed at daybreak, ducks and ducklings, some fifty hutches with rabbits, snow-white and grey, whose back paws Grandfather tied together before stunning them with a karate chop to the back of the neck, then severing the carotid artery. He would gut them, plunging his hands into the steaming, still palpitating entrails, skinning them and drying the pelts on wooden braces. I would not have missed seeing him executing rabbits, wringing the necks of chickens, beheading ducks with an axe on a block of wood, for anything in the world. There was only one exception to this self-sufficiency: a weekly trip in the black Mathis car to the market at Alençon to buy seeds, tools, sometimes a little red meat and always some cooked ham for which Anna, in her cloche hat, doggedly haggled in her hilarious Franco-Yiddish, arguing that it was ‘for a pension’, to get the best possible price. I should say ham of that quality no longer exists: the flavour was exquisite, my grandmother kept it in a meat-safe of fine wire mesh, which she hung from the ceiling of the cool cellar next to the ‘old house’. Nowadays, a fridge keeps the best ham fresh for only a couple of days but the slices my grandmother bought stayed fresh for a whole week.