But Jakob called Lenny, a successful developer he knew in New Jersey, after the weekend, and asked him what he thought about it, and credited his son with the idea. The developer had bought several very expensive stones from him and Izzie, and Jakob trusted his advice. He had done extremely well on some speculative projects, and shopping malls in the Midwest sounded right up his alley.
“He’s a smart boy,” his friend told him. “That’s where the money is these days. It’s considered high risk, but it isn’t really. How far wrong can you go with bad cropland at rock-bottom prices and turning it into a shopping mall for a big profit? I bought one myself last year. It’s a little gold mine. I sold it in six months and doubled my money, and the construction is simple and straightforward. You pour some concrete, and presto magic, you have a shopping mall six weeks later. It’s not quite that simple, but damn close. It sounds like your boy has a bright future in land development.”
“His roommate’s father is doing it, and Max is excited about what he’s heard. Do you think I should invest in something like that?” Jakob had faith in what he’d tell him.
“In your shoes? Hell, yes. I’m sure you have enough cushion to take a chance, and there’s not that much risk involved. Tell you what, the next time I hear about one I like, I’ll give you a call. You can decide then. Your son is on the right track. He’s a bright kid.” Jakob was impressed that Max had picked up on something so potentially profitable, although he still wasn’t sure he’d want to do it. His little apartment buildings were a safer investment, although they didn’t represent a profit until he sold them, and he hadn’t yet. He was waiting for the neighborhood to improve even more. Shopping malls were a lot faster, from everything his friend Lenny had said.
He assumed he’d hear from him in a few months and was surprised when Lenny called him two weeks later.
“I just heard about one of those shopping mall deals we talked about. It’s in Kansas, near a popular suburb of Wichita. It sounds good to me, and I know the developer personally. He’s looking for investors. I’m going to put some cash in myself. The real money is if you do it without partners, but then the risk is higher,” just like buying diamonds. He told Jakob how much money was involved, and he could afford to put in that amount without selling any of his buildings. It was a good test of the market. And Izzie’s investment portfolio had been conservative and solid, and had done well. He could afford to speculate a little, or even a lot, although Jakob wasn’t a gambler by nature.
“All right, I’m in,” Jakob said, and Lenny said he’d have the developer send him the prospectus and the paperwork on it.
A week later Jakob had given the principal developer the money, and he was told not to expect any return on his investment for six months, maybe a year. They were hoping for four times their investment, which sounded good to Jakob, and he told Max about it when he came home for winter break. He was excited to hear it and thrilled his father had followed his advice.
“But don’t say anything to your mother. She gets nervous about things like that. I don’t like keeping secrets from her and I’ll tell her eventually, just not yet.”
“Sure, Dad,” Max said easily, but it made him feel very adult to have given his father investment suggestions. He had just turned nineteen. He was loving Harvard, and had recently met a girl he liked. It was nothing serious, but she was smart and pretty, and he’d taken her to dinner and a movie. She was from Atlanta, and had gone home for Christmas. He was meeting people from all over the country and the world, and he wanted to go to Europe in the summer with Steve MacMillan. His father was renting a villa in the South of France, and the boys wanted to get Eurail passes and move around. He mentioned it to his father, who frowned.
“Why don’t you and Mom ever go to Europe?” He’d asked before but never got a clear answer from him. Everyone he knew at Harvard had been to Europe many times, he never had, which was odd since he had European parents.
“It’s not a vacation spot to us. It’s our past, and a very painful one, for both of us. I understand why you’d want to go there, and there are so many beautiful cities, and so much history. But I think it would break your mother’s heart to go back. And I’m not ready for it either.” He had never been as honest with Max, but he was an adult now, or close to it.
“Even all these years later?” Max asked gently, and Jakob nodded.
“Those kinds of memories don’t fade, not entirely. And I think being in the cities where it started would bring it all back. Your mother had nightmares for years afterward.” Max had seen their scars and was familiar with them, but only the physical ones, the others couldn’t be seen or measured, especially by someone so young.
Max didn’t press the point, and they managed to have a few family meals with him, while he was in New York for the holidays. The rest of the time, he was out with his friends. Jakob didn’t mention the land development deal in Kansas to Emmanuelle until after Max had left. He forgot about it, with the joy of having his son at home. Once the apartment was quiet again, he told her about the land development investment over dinner one night, and she was horrified.
“Why would you do something like that? You don’t even know what the land looks like or where it is. What do you know about Kansas? That’s just throwing money away, blindfolded.” Jakob smiled as she said it. “What are you smiling at?”
“At least you didn’t tell me the Russians are going to drop a bomb on New York, or we’re going to wind up in prison camp in New Jersey and lose the business.”
“That too,” she said in a huff and left the table and gave him the cold shoulder for two days. He had told her they might make four times their investment on it, and he hadn’t put too much money into it. It was more of an experiment to test the waters. She always forgave him eventually, and he suspected she would again. She hated it when he rocked the boat, and he knew that about her. It didn’t upset him or slow him down anymore. He was a smart businessman and had done well for them, which she knew too.
They spoke to Max several times a week, he called frequently from college. He went to Florida with his friends for spring break, so they didn’t see him, and they had finally agreed to let him go to Europe with Steve in the summer. They couldn’t keep him from it, and Max had insisted. His mother didn’t like the idea, but Jakob had talked her into it. He said they couldn’t expect Max to avoid Europe for the rest of his life because of their war experience. It just wasn’t fair to him, and she finally relented. It made her think of Paris herself, and she was nostalgic for several days. She played old French records she had bought in thrift shops and hardly ever listened to. There were some things about Paris that she still missed, just as Jakob missed Vienna and everything he had loved about it. It was such a beautiful, gracious city, until the Nazis occupied it and the whole world had caved in and collapsed.
Max was coming home for three weeks before leaving for Europe, and they were looking forward to it. His grades for the semester had been good, and he’d managed to date several girls though no one he cared about particularly. He was hoping for a few “scores” in Europe, with beautiful young European girls, maybe in the South of France. The boys were excited about the trip, and Max was grateful that his parents had agreed to it, knowing what it represented to them. But he thought he might understand them better if he saw the cities where they had grown up. And they were planning to go to Spain and Italy too, and London if they had time. Steve had seen all of it before, but never on his own, traveling with a friend. He had always gone with one of his parents. So the trip was a symbol of independence for both of them.
* * *
—
Two days before Max came home for the summer, at the end of freshman year, Lenny called Jakob at the office to report on their investment in the site for the shopping mall in Kansas.
“I thought you’d like to know how we did,” Lenny said in a cryptic tone Jakob couldn’t dec
ipher. “I’d say our little project performed pretty well. Apparently the site was a perfect choice in that suburb. We made ten times our investment, Jakob. How does that sound to you?” Jakob was stunned for a minute and couldn’t respond as he digested it. “They sold it lock, stock, and barrel to a Japanese firm, looking for holdings in the States.”
“Good God,” Jakob said, grinning. “Beginner’s luck!” He couldn’t wait to tell Max and Emmanuelle. And he hadn’t sold anything to do it. If he’d made a larger investment his profit would have been even greater.
“The developer we invested with is a good guy. He’s going to do one in New Jersey in a few months, and another one in Louisiana. I’m going to go in on both. Let me know if you’re interested. The price of entry is a little higher but the ratio is going to be even better, fewer investors, and the locations are excellent.”
“I think I’d like to do it again.” Jakob was almost reeling with pleasure when he hung up, he told Emmanuelle that night, and she had the grace to admit she’d been wrong.
“That’s why you’re the businessperson in the family and I’m not. I don’t have the stomach for it or the understanding.”
“Thank you for trusting me,” he said kindly.
“I didn’t,” she reminded him and he laughed.
“I think Max is going to be the businessman in this family very shortly. This was his idea, not mine, the theory at least. I called a client about it, a land developer, and he told me this is the wave of the future and where the money is right now, so I took a shot at it, with very good results.” She smiled at him, and he kissed her. When Max came home, he told him, and thanked him for the good advice.
“That’s what Steve’s dad does for a living, and he’s made a fortune on it. Just don’t go crazy with it, Dad, or you’ll be building shopping malls all over the country. But I’ll bet that eventually if you sell your buildings in our neighborhood you could make some very interesting investments with the money, with higher returns.” Jakob smiled at how businesslike his son seemed, and how grown up suddenly. And Max didn’t tell him that they had added another location to their trip that was meaningful to him. It was a pilgrimage he had decided he had to make, and Steve had agreed to go with him. Max was going to tell his parents when he got back.
* * *
—
The money from his investment was back in Jakob’s hands two weeks later, and he signed on for the project in New Jersey, but not the one in Louisiana. There were fewer investors this time, as Lenny had said, and he was one of them again too. They expected results by the end of the year. They were short-term investments with big profits and a certain risk, but Jakob could afford it, and he was fascinated by it, and pleased with what he’d made so far.
After Max left, the house was too quiet again. They were used to it now. When he was there, it infused life into the apartment, and their life, and then it all went dead again once he was gone. Jakob saw a number of people, all men, through his work and his days were full. But Emmanuelle had remained shy and her entire life revolved around her husband and son. She’d made a few friends among the mothers at Max’s school, but didn’t see them anymore, after he graduated. For all of her years since they’d come to America, Jakob had been her best friend, and he and Max her whole existence.
Max had promised to spend a few weeks at home when he got back from Europe, before he went back to Harvard for sophomore year, and he promised to stay in touch while he was away in Europe so they wouldn’t worry. The boys were starting in Paris, and Emmanuelle was excited about it, although knowing that her son would be in the city where she grew up and not being there with him was bittersweet for her, but she just couldn’t do it. She had given him a list of landmarks that had been meaningful to her, and he promised to visit them all, and Jakob had done the same with Vienna, including the house where he and his family had lived when he was exactly the age Max was now, and for all his growing up years. Emmanuelle and Jakob didn’t talk to each other about it, but it meant a lot to both of them. In a way, Max was retracing their footsteps in the sands of time, and making his own. It was a rite of passage for him, and touched his parents’ hearts, whether they admitted it or not. Interwoven with so many painful memories, it was too hard to put into words.
Chapter 8
Their trip to Paris was more than anything Max could have ever dreamed of or hoped for. They stayed at a small student hostel on the Left Bank, and he had his mother’s list of important locations in his pocket, but first he and Steve did the standard tourist sights. They walked down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, had coffee at Les Deux Magots. They went to Notre-Dame and Sacré-Coeur, where they looked out over the city. They walked through the Louvre, saw the Grand Palais, and walked around the Palais-Royal. They stood outside the Ritz hotel and the Plaza Athénée but didn’t feel dressed up enough to go inside. They visited churches, and smaller museums, walked in the Tuileries and Bagatelle and the Bois de Boulogne, and stood at the Trocadéro with the Eiffel Tower squarely before them, and rode up the Eiffel Tower for an even better view. They spent three days visiting everything, and took a Bâteau Mouche down the Seine to admire the bridges and monuments. They saw the ceremony in honor of the Unknown Soldier, from the First World War, complete with military band, which happened every day under the Arc de Triomphe, and they ate macarons at Ladurée.
And then they started on his mother’s list. Max stood outside the lycée where she had gone to school and saw schoolchildren in bright blue smocks leaving their classes, and he could envision his mother there as a child. He went to Berthillon for ice cream, the park where she used to play, the carousel she loved, the bistro where his grandmother took his mother and aunt for dinner as a special treat. He went to her favorite museum, the Jeu de Paume, and last on the list, he stood outside the house where they had lived, and wondered if the same people who had taken her apartment still lived there. She had told him the story with tears in her eyes. It was more than she had ever shared with him before, and gave him new insights into her and why she was so frightened of disaster all the time. Her whole world had come tumbling down when she was eighteen. That would be hard to recover from, and he was old enough to begin to understand that now.
He was in awe of the sheer beauty of Paris and the history it represented. And he felt some kind of visceral tie to it through his mother, since he was half French. It was the first time he had felt any personal association with France, but now he did, as though a part of him belonged there, especially since he spoke fluent French, and had translated for Steve during the entire trip. Max was thoroughly American, yet part of him felt French now too.
He walked through the Place de la Concorde and dozens of smaller squares, admired sculptures in the parks, and stood at the Champs-Élysées, looking at the Arc de Triomphe at the other end, with the French flag flying under the arch, and then walked down the Avenue Foch with the beautiful Napoleonic buildings and saw people who lived there out walking their dogs. He couldn’t even imagine living in a city so beautiful, after growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which was battered, ugly, crowded, noisy, and dirty, and had no charm at all. He suddenly realized how his mother must miss the sheer beauty of where she’d grown up, along with her language, customs, and traditions. And he had never seen a sky as beautiful. It looked like a painting above the elegant architecture and monuments of Paris. It was almost too perfect to be real. Their visit was meaningful and just long enough to have fun, go out at night, and speak French to the girls they met. Max was Steve’s interpreter with every girl, but most of all he had loved seeing the places from his mother’s childhood. Steve had come with him to most of them, and was respectful when Max fell silent, too moved to speak, as he was in front of the apartment building where his mother and her mother and sister had lived. The trip to Paris had been perfect from all points of view and much more than he’d expected.
They took the train from there
to Barcelona and Madrid, went to all the museums and churches, ate dinner at midnight, watched gypsies dance the flamenco, spoke bumbling Spanish to local girls, and enjoyed making fools of themselves unashamedly with all the abandon of youth, occasionally with success.
The next location on their itinerary was harder to get to, but an important one for Max. They visited West Berlin and Munich, went to beer gardens and more museums, and parts of Berlin reminded him of Paris. Their last German destination was up in the mountains. Max was quiet in the train on the way there and wondered if coming here had been a terrible mistake and was an intrusion into a part of his parents’ lives they didn’t want him to know since they never spoke of it, or very little. Instinctively, he hadn’t told them he was coming here and he could feel his chest tighten as they approached their destination, and Steve saw the look on his face.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, he hadn’t said why they were going there, but Steve had understood it from what Max had said when they met, and he had agreed to come along, out of curiosity and for moral support for his friend.
They took a cab from the train station, and asked the driver to wait for them, and Max walked through the arch at the entrance, with Steve walking silently behind him. A sign in English and several other languages, French, Russian, and German, said “Buchenwald,” and explained that most of the camp had been demolished in 1950, but the crematorium, the medical facility, and the watchtowers had been preserved. There were photographs of barracks with captions that said the barns were designed as stables for eighty horses, and inhabited by twelve hundred inmates, five to a bunk, with one toilet for a thousand people. The sign said simply that two hundred and thirty-eight thousand people had been prisoners in the camp over time while it had functioned, and fifty-six thousand had died there at the hands of the Nazis. Men, women, and children, most of them Jewish of multiple nationalities, were deported from their countries. And there was a monument where the trenches were, where the bodies had been buried, fifty-six thousand of them. The thought of it, and the sheer numbers, were staggering, and the boys said not a word as they read the sign.
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