If I could go back to Berlin, I’d close the shutters and lie in my own bed. Afterward, I might go to the Altes and sit for a while. I’d like to see the Berlin Goddess again, with her straight back, her pomegranate. Herr Grindberg kept me after class to tell me I should apply to the art institute in Düsseldorf. He loved my watercolors, he said, stammering, beads of spittle forming on his lips. In the corridor outside the classroom, Hans Lutz mimicked him for the other pupils. They laughed until they wept. How, Herr Grindberg asked, could I prefer numbers? I was thinking too much about my own father, he suggested, believing he was psychoanalyzing me when it was hardly a mystery of the psyche that I didn’t want to end up like Father, with his execrable wire dogs that sold for less than the cost of the materials. Herr Grindberg said I was a true artist: my family wouldn’t starve. But I prefer numbers, I said, clenching my fists. I prefer the predictable, the real. I hated being seen with him, standing beside his desk, forced to listen to his drivel. It wasn’t Father I was afraid of becoming, it was Herr Grindberg, with his tongue flashing between his teeth, whatever dreams of glory he’d had worn away by the tedium of teaching boys whose only gift was a talent for mockery.
Mother wanted me to be an artist, too! Carting her cash to the grocer’s, only to find out she was still half a million marks short of the price for a kilo of potatoes. If she’d chosen a more sensible husband, things wouldn’t have gone so badly for her. They were all fools: Mother and Father drunk half the time, and Herr Grindberg with his wet, stuttering sincerity.
* * *
It’s not a very good marigold. Alive, you preferred bluebells, rock jasmine, lupine. Delicate, alpine flowers with shadowy throats. But if it’s a marigold you’re painting, you’d like to do it well.
And suddenly, they’re here: two of them in boots and armbands. Your hand freezes, the pulse in your neck is like a grasshopper, but the SS walk by, ignoring you.
The air around you is empty, suffocating; and then you dip a brush in the yellow, and your heart slows. Once again, your body comes back into itself with a sensation of pins and needles, but this time your blood isn’t so heavy. You can hold yourself upright without shaking. You try to remind yourself that you’re dead, but it doesn’t work anymore. The blood demands to keep swimming through your veins, over and over through the chambered heart, feeding every useless desire: for pâté, women, a pride of children.
A single petal. If you can’t get the whole flower right, concentrate on a single petal.
At last the shadows lengthen, a breeze lifts the hairs on your arms, and the children are called away, herded back to dinner. Mothers with painted-on stockings, bony hips. You could stay here, wait for them to arrest you in the Luxembourg, but you don’t. You pack everything away, carry the wet, unfinished canvas back along the garden path.
There’s no sign of Madame Compte in the apartment building, no sign of anyone, though it will be curfew soon and everyone ought to be heading home. It’s as if they’ve been warned: Monsieur Leclerc will be arrested tonight, you won’t want to see that. Wrinkling their noses the way the old doctor did when he examined that poor girl from Calais. Warts as big as brussels sprouts hanging off her labia, but what business did he have being a doctor if he had to look away? You’ve never had any patience for squeamishness. Yes, it will be ugly, you think, a couple of SS men carting away that nice painter, Leclerc. A Jew! We had no idea.
But you know it’s simply chance, one of those moments when the world falls still, as if it had forgotten what it was about. There’s no reason the lobby is empty, it just is; in a moment, everything will shudder back into action: Oh, curfew! Oh, dinner! And they’ll rush indoors.
The windows of your living room are violet, dusk filling the city like water. The SS have been here—your books have been knocked off the shelves, your bed is unmade—they’ve come and gone. They’ll come again. We’re drowning in this half-light, you think. If only night would fall.
Raphaël must be dead by now. They won’t send him to the camps, because they need information. Please don’t think this way. Consider instead the blood’s endlessly repetitive journey, and all you’re leaving behind. Your whole youth, never to be revisited. Lupine and bluebells. The child you were, inside a boy’s small, swift body.
All of them gone—Raphaël, Suzanne, your parents—and you saved no one, made no dent in this war. What good is a single munitions train and a few lost pamphlets?
Raphaël took you down to the river once and showed you how to skip stones. You were six or seven, Raphaël would have been sixteen or seventeen. For hours you practiced, far away from the house where your parents were fighting, where Suzanne sat in her corner, praying. Raphaël bent down, showed you the motion of his wrist, his arm, over and over.
“You’re the only one I like,” you said, and Raphaël laughed, ruffling your hair. “Nonsense. You love Maman and Papa and they love you.”
“I don’t love Suzanne.”
“Suzanne’s a pill,” he said. She would have been eighteen or nineteen. Raphaël laughed again, as if everything were a joke, and then he lifted you up, swung you onto his shoulders, and ran along the riverbank. When you got home, a chicken was roasting and your parents were sitting close together on the couch, drinking wine. Suzanne sat across from them, telling them a story that made them all laugh, even Raphaël.
Or maybe that was a different day, with the chicken roasting. The skin crisp and salty, the juices soaking the little potatoes.
There’s a knock at the door and your bowels soften, but you don’t lose control; you walk to the door and open it as you would to a friend. Of all the people in the old cell—you, Raphaël, Kaminsky, Monsieur Girard, Jeanine Bonnet—you’re the one who was most outraged by your countrymen’s silence. André, Raphaël said, they’re terrified and hungry and they don’t like us. They might not all wish us dead, but we are not one of them. And now you open the door and nearly gesture to your guests to make themselves at home. Why give them the satisfaction of your fear?
There are three of them: two Milice and a German. The two Frenchmen are ordinary, middlebrow, one young, one old, both of them dreaming of their next meal. The younger one’s jowly; the older has a wide, innocent face and a dimpled nose. The SS looks like all the other SS. Since they’re required to have certain physical features, they can’t even be considered clichés. The SS officer walks past you as if you’re not there, leaving you and the Milice in the front room while he checks the rest of the apartment. If the younger of the two policemen were not aiming his pistol at you, you could leave. Run down the stairs and out into the watery evening.
* * *
The apartment doesn’t smell. Most Jews’ apartments have been closed up for so long, everyone hiding inside like rats, that the smell is awful. A terrible sickroom odor of fear I have to scrub off with lye. But André Naquet, he’s been living out in the open like a gentile. No smell at all, not even the ordinary smell of an ordinary life. The brother was living like a gentile, too, but he’d had a woman—I could smell her in his bedroom with its big, rumpled bed—some whore who thought nothing of a Jewish dick. I loathe this job. I might as well be a schoolteacher, disciplining pupils all day. What’s a teacher, after all, but a man in a strange land, forced to round up his inferiors?
There’s nothing to find here: no odor, bare walls, a bag of turnips in the kitchen. Dishes washed and put away, the counters clean. In the bedroom, a single bed that Walden has already torn apart, and the windows open to the evening. A few clothes pulled from the armoire. A toothbrush, a razor, a towel. It could be a hotel. There’s not even a headache powder in the nightstand. Detective novels scattered around the living room and canvasses against the wall—views of the street below and one, still wet, of a marigold—but no papers, no mementoes, no actual art. If it weren’t for the books, I’d think he had just come for the weekend.
Still, there’s no reason to rush. The men will guard him as long as I need, and I could rest. The Milice are here to serv
e us; why shouldn’t I sit down? He may be a Jew, but this is a gentile’s apartment. I could close my eyes, pretend there’s a brandy waiting for me on the coffee table. Better yet, a bottle of beer. My eye doesn’t hurt as much now, a dull throbbing.
* * *
Nicole, you think, and that’s the worst possible thought. On the best of days, you avoid thinking of her. Twenty-two years old, thrown from a horse. You’d been married a year. Tall and beautiful, with her mass of long, black ringlets, her wild laugh. A Sephardi, much to your father’s dismay. Your mother laughed at him. Really, Victor? What do you care? We don’t even celebrate Passover. What’s it to us, one kind of Jew or another?
They’re superstitious, he said.
Be quiet, she laughed. Better superstitious than small-minded.
But when Nicole died, it was your father who sat up with you, night after night, when you couldn’t sleep, when you shivered in the hot August breeze.
Everything that had been held at bay floods through you now: Your mother used to sing to you, lying next to you in your bed, the smell of perfume on her wrists. On the morning of your sixth birthday, you touched her breast, though you knew you were too old, knew she would slap you away, but she didn’t; she let your hand rest on her heart. You don’t know if she’s dead. You don’t know if any of your family are dead. Some are starved and some are burned alive. Some are thrown still living into the ground. The full truth won’t be revealed for a long time, but you know enough. Sometimes it’s the thought of Suzanne, whose piety drove you crazy, that’s most unbearable: the thought of her alive beneath a pile of bodies. Please let them all be dead. Let the whole world be dead. Spare us this grief.
And then you forget them all. The two men are smoking, and you’re overcome with desire for a cigarette.
But the memory lapse is brief: you remember your wedding night, Nicole’s dark skin glowing. Other women were lustier, more experimental, but no one else glowed. No one else made you dream of children. You took precautions before you were married—but on your wedding night, nothing held you back. You spoke of children every day, and whenever she had a bit of indigestion—she loved her pastries, mille-feuilles most of all—your heart sped up. No one else died so simply: a broken neck, and she was gone, the wide world unruffled by her absence.
What could be taking the German so long? There’s nothing to find. No names, no documents, you’re not a fool. Just a few books and paints. What’s he doing? Tearing up the floorboards? But the only sound comes from the Milice, crushing their butts on the carpet.
* * *
What a delicious sleep. I haven’t slept this well since I left Berlin. It must be past midnight. I’ll have to get up soon, take the Jew down to the station, fill out his paperwork, but there’s no need to hurry, now that I have him. The Sturmbannführer admired my deliberation. You don’t rush, he said. You understand the value of patience, precision.
That marigold! As sloppy as a student’s. He’s even worse than Father was, but then again, he was a doctor; he doesn’t imagine himself an artist. Did no one tell him we’d gotten his brother? He must be mad. He knows he’s been found out, and he pauses to paint a marigold. Maybe I’ll sleep a little more.
* * *
The young policeman yawns and holds the gun so loosely you could knock it from his grip. They’re playing cards, and when he needs two hands, he lays the gun on his thigh. The German could have died in your bedroom, and the Frenchmen would keep guarding you until the last tank rolled into the last city.
It must be almost dawn, but you’re still standing in the middle of the room, like a display. Something for sale. Again, there’s a burning in your ribs, a sensation of breathing in smoke. You hear Madame Compte, laboring her way up the stairs, clutching the railing. On her way to the sixth floor for a little gossip with Mademoiselle Delunche.
The Milice open their bags and take out sandwiches. You want to leap on them, grab the bread from their hands; they’d shoot you before you touched their food and it would be a better death than what they have in store for you, but you’re frozen, and it isn’t the way it was earlier, when you stood, painting. That was madness, perhaps; this is the paralysis of fear. The ordinary, irrational fear that keeps a man who will soon be tortured from leaping to his death for a bite of bread.
* * *
This could be my apartment and I, a blessedly single man, watching the sky begin to lighten. The throbbing behind my eye has stopped. After I’d slept off a migraine, I used to be grateful, but now I know the next one’s not far off. I have only the smallest window of time. A sliver of relief as thin as glass.
I’m stalling: I need to arrest the Jew. That’s my role in this story, a role I chose. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. How else to explain our infinite capacity for evil? But I do know. I can describe more or less exactly what will happen to him in the camps, what has happened to the others I’ve arrested.
As soon as I get up, go to work, a new headache will sharpen itself into the back of my eye. It never fails. And what am I to do with a Jew who, faced with death, paints a giant marigold?
Which is the mystery? That a person arrests Jews, all the while thinking about his migraine and wishing he were home, basking in the praise of his Sturmbannführer? Or that André Naquet spent the day painting when he could have run? Naquet might be the greater mystery, but I’m the Nazi, not the Jew. I’m supposed to take him downstairs now, out into the armored truck.
I could punish him for painting. Push him over the balcony, beat him with my belt, the only thing that’s forbidden is to let him go. I could put my gun to his head and demand an explanation. “I like to paint,” he’d say. It’s always something like that, something that doesn’t add up.
Sure enough, my head’s hurting again. It scares me to death when it starts and I don’t have any powders.
Once, after Mother and Father died of their rotten livers, I dreamed I was flying. In my dream, I was back in my room at the university, and the window was open, calling to me as if I should kill myself. I went, spread my arms, and jumped, but the air buoyed me and I thought, Of course, this was always possible. All I had to do was spread my arms. I didn’t go very high—there were buildings I had to circle around—still, I was airborne and when I awoke, I knew: I couldn’t fly in this life, but I’d be able to in the life to come.
I doubt it now. Whatever greatness might have been mine isn’t going to come to me, in this or any other life. The Americans have reached the coast; we’ve been sent to catch the last Jews because we’re losing, and the Sturmbannführer will have no job to offer me when it’s over. So why not keep sitting here a while longer, pressing my thumb into my eye? Or get up and paint a marigold! Why not?
What if I did? What if I set his canvas on the easel, squeezed the tubes of paint onto his palette, and began? And if, after fixing his terrible marigold, I let him go? Why not take my clothes off and dance a jig in the street? You can’t stop what you’re doing and change course. I mean you. You, Jew. I did, in fact, like painting. When it was going well, I hardly noticed the brush, just the image taking form. I might have applied to Düsseldorf, if I hadn’t been so disgusted by Herr Grindberg.
You won’t say what you were thinking even with a gun to your head, will you? How could anyone make sense of such a thing? You blow up train tracks, get word to people about what we’re doing, pretend to be a gentile, and then, when you’ve been found out, you act as if this weren’t a war at all. As if you thought yourself a Rembrandt. You go outside to paint. Where, Jew? Where did you go for your marigold? I ought to paint it over, a black square, just to show him.
* * *
Your mouth is dry and your legs are trembling, your hands. You’ve been standing so long—days, weeks, it’s impossible to tell—and the Milice are still playing cards. You won’t be able to stand much longer, your legs will give out, and you’ll collapse on the floor, curled up like a dog, you think, your heart racing.
* * *
&nbs
p; Carmine, bone black, cadmium yellow. The marigold with its fire-tipped, fan-shaped petals, its golden throat. I hardly know how to hold the brush anymore, and yet, stroke by stroke, the colors deepen, then lighten, then deepen again. The Sturmbannführer’s promises meant nothing, they were as hollow as Herr Grindberg’s praise, and how delicate the petals are, like the edges of a breeze. My left eye’s leaking again.
* * *
The German appears and the Frenchmen leap to attention, but the German tells them to leave you—Go! he barks, a ragged yelp, and he follows them without a glance in your direction.
Your breath is so rapid it’s like not breathing at all, until you see your finished marigold—luminous and perfect with its golden edges—and you understand that the attic on rue Marcadet, the chocolates and cigarettes, are yours. You haven’t died. You wait until you hear the German drive away, and then you run downstairs and out into the morning. But you mustn’t run in public, so you walk north across the city as calmly as you can.
In the attic, marigolds will haunt your dreams: your mother’s hands, smoothing the dirt around their stalks before she pulls them up and offers them to a pair of SS officers. There are always two of them, identical in their tall boots.
When, after many months, you hear church bells, you’ll go down into the street and the light will burn your eyes. You still won’t know who’s dead. They all are. The entire family, except your nieces and nephews in America. There’s only you, in the burning light of a freed city.
And here’s the deepest mystery: not that you painted when you could have run, not that the German let you go, but that you’ll come to love the world again. You’ll see pictures of the camps, learn how each member of your family was killed, a knowledge that shuts off your windpipe every time it comes to you, and it comes to you again and again without end—and yet, the shifting light, the bones of a woman’s wrist, the Buddha posture that is every toddler’s elegance, will once more seem beautiful to you. You’ll set up a new practice, marry a birdlike pediatrician who seems always on the verge of laughter, and who can quiet a crying baby in seconds. You’ll be a friend to all your nieces and nephews, even to Raphaël’s secret children.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 9