Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Beagle, Peter S.

  The ACLU appointed a lawyer for Mr. Moscowitz, and, for all purposes but the practical, he won his case as decisively as Darrow defending Darwin. The lawyer laid great and tearful stress on the calamity (hisses from the gallery, where a sizeable French contingent grew larger every day) that had befallen a simple, ordinary man, leaving him dumb and defenseless in the midst of academic piranhas who would strip him of position, reputation, even statehood, in one pitiless bite. (This last was in reference to a foolish statement by the university counsel that Mr. Moscowitz would have some difficulty passing a citizenship test now, let alone a librarian’s examination.) But his main defense was the same as Mr. Moscowitz’s before the Chancellor: there was no precedent for such a situation as his client’s, nor was this case likely to set one. If the universities wanted to write it into their common code that any man proved to be changing his nationality should summarily be discharged, then the universities could do that, and very silly they would look, too. (“What would constitute proof?” he wondered aloud, and what degree of change would it be necessary to prove? “Fifty percent? Thirty-three and one-third? Or just, as the French say, a soupçon?”) But as matters stood, the university had no more right to fire Mr. Moscowitz for becoming a Frenchman than they would have if he became fat, or gray-haired, or two inches taller. The lawyer ended his plea by bowing deeply to his client and crying “Vive Moscowitz!” And the whole courthouse rang and thundered then as Americans and French, judge and jury, counsels and bailiffs and the whole audience rose and roared, “Vive Moscowitz! Vive Moscowitz!” The Chancellor thought of the Sorbonne, and wept.

  There were newspapermen in the courtroom, and by that last day there were television cameras. Mr. Moscowitz sat at home that night and leaned forward to stare at his face whenever it came on the screen. His wife, thinking he was criticizing his appearance, remarked, “You look nice. A little like Jean Gabin.” Mr. Moscowitz grunted. “Le camera t’aime,” she said carefully. She answered the phone when it rang, which was often. Many of the callers had television shows of their own. The others wanted Mr. Moscowitz to write books.

  Within a week of the trial, Mr. Moscowitz was a national celebrity, which meant that as many people knew his name as knew the name of the actor who played the dashing Gilles de Rais in a new television serial, and not quite as many as recognized the eleven-year-old Racine girl with a forty-inch bust, who sang Christian techno-rap. Mrs. Moscowitz saw him more often on television than she did at home—at seven on a Sunday morning he was invited to discuss post-existential film or France’s relations with her former African colonies; at two o’clock he might be awarding a ticket to Paris to the winner of the daily My Ex Will Hate This contest; and at eleven p.m., on one of the late-night shows, she could watch him speaking the lyrics to the internationally popular French song, “Je M’en Fous De Tout Ça,” while a covey of teenage dancers yipped and jiggled around him. Mrs. Moscowitz would sigh, switch off the set, and sit down at the computer to study her assigned installment of the adventures of the family Vincent, who spoke basic French to one another and were always having breakfast, visiting aunts, or making lists. “Regard Helene,” said Mrs. Moscowitz bitterly. “She is in train of falling into the quicksand again. Yes, she falls. Naughty, naughty Helene. She talks too much.”

  There was a good deal of scientific and political interest taken in Mr. Moscowitz as well. He spent several weekends in Washington, being examined and interviewed, and he met the President, briefly. The President shook his hand, and gave him a souvenir fountain pen and a flag lapel, and said that he regarded Mr. Moscowitz’s transformation as the ultimate expression of the American dream, for it surely proved to the world that any American could become whatever he wanted enough to be, even if what he wanted to be was a snail-eating French wimp.

  The scientists, whose lingering fear had been that the metamorphosis of Mr. Moscowitz had been somehow accomplished by the Russians or the Iranians, as a practice run before they turned everybody into Russians or Iranians, found nothing in Mr. Moscowitz either to enlighten or alert them. He was a small, suspicious man who spoke often of his rights, and might, as far as they could tell, have been born French. They sent him home at last, to his business manager, to his television commitments, to his endorsements, to his ghostwritten autobiography, and to his wife; and they told the President, “Go figure. Maybe this is the way the world ends, we wouldn’t know. And it might not hurt to avoid crêpes for a while.”

  Mr. Moscowitz’s celebrity lasted for almost two months—quite a long time, considering that it was autumn and there were a lot of other public novas flaring and dying on prime time. His high-water mark was certainly reached on the weekend that the officials of at least one cable network were watching one another’s eyes to see how they might react to the idea of a George Moscowitz Show. His fortunes began to ebb on Monday morning—public interest is a matter of momentum, and there just wasn’t anything Mr. Moscowitz could do for an encore.

  “If he were only a nice Frenchman, or a sexy Frenchman!” the producers and the publishers and the ghostwriters and the A&R executives and the sponsors sighed separately and in conference. “Someone like Jean Reno or Charles Boyer, or Chevalier, or Jacques Pépin, or even Louis Jourdan—somebody charming, somebody with style, with manners, with maybe a little ho-ho, Mimi, you good-for-nothing little Mimi….” But what they had, as far as they could see, was one of those surly frogs in a cloth cap who rioted in front of the American Embassy and trashed the Paris McDonald’s. Once, on a talk show, he said, taking great care with his English grammar, “The United States is like a very large dog which has not been—qu’est-ce que c’est le mot?—housebroken. It is well enough in its place, but its place is not on the couch. Or in the Mideast, or in Africa, or in a restaurant kitchen.” The television station began to get letters. They suggested that Mr. Moscowitz go back where he came from.

  So Mr. Moscowitz was whisked out of the public consciousness as deftly as an unpleasant report on what else gives mice cancer or makes eating fish as hazardous as bullfighting. His television bookings were cancelled; he was replaced by reruns, motivational speakers, old John Payne musicals, or one of the less distressing rappers. The contracts for his books and columns and articles remained unsigned, or turned out to conceal escape clauses, elusive and elliptical, but enforceable. Within a week of his last public utterance—“American women smell bad, they smell of fear and vomit and l’ennui”—George Moscowitz was no longer a celebrity. He wasn’t even a Special Guest.

  Nor was he a librarian anymore, in spite of the court’s decision. He could not be discharged, but he certainly couldn’t be kept on in the library. The obvious solution would have been to find him a position in the French department, but he was no teacher, no translator, no scholar; he was unqualified to teach the language in a junior high school. The Chancellor graciously offered him a departmental scholarship to get a degree in French, but he turned it down as an insult. “At least, a couple of education courses—” said the Chancellor. “Take them yourself,” said Mr. Moscowitz, and he resigned.

  “What will we do now, George?” asked his wife. “Que ferons-nous?” She was glad to have her husband back from the land of magic, even though he was as much a stranger to her now as he sometimes seemed to be to himself. (“What does a butterfly think of its chrysalis?” she wondered modestly, “Or of milkweed?”) His fall from grace seemed to have made him kind again. They spent their days together now, walking, or reading Chateaubriand aloud; often silent, for it was hard for Mrs. Moscowitz to speak truly in French, and her husband could not mutter along in English for long without becoming angry. “Will we go to France?” she asked, knowing his answer.

  “Yes,” Mr. Moscowitz said. He showed her a letter. “The French government will pay our passage. We are going home.” He said it many times, now with joy, now with a certain desperation. “We are going home.”

  The French of course insisted on making the news of Mr. Moscowitz’s departure public in America
, and the general American attitude was a curious mix of relief and chagrin. They were glad to have Mr. Moscowitz safely out of the way, but it was “doubtless unpleasant,” as a French newspaper suggested, “to see a recognizable human shape insist on emerging from the great melting pot, instead of eagerly dissolving away.” Various influences in the United States warned that Mr. Moscowitz was obviously a spy for some international conspiracy, but the President, who had vaguely liked him, said, “Well, good for him, great. Enjoy, baby.” The government made up a special loose-leaf passport for Mr. Moscowitz, with room for other changes of nationality, just in case.

  Mrs. Moscowitz, who made few demands on her husband, or anyone else, insisted on going to visit her sister Dina in Scottsdale before the move to France. She spent several days being taught to play video games by her nephew and enjoying countless tea parties with her two nieces, and sitting up late with Dina and her sympathetic husband, talking over all the ramifications of her coming exile. “Because that’s the way I know I see it,” she said, “in my heart. I try to feel excited—I really do try, for George’s sake—but inside, inside….” She never wept or broke down at such points, but would pause for a few moments, while her sister fussed with the coffee cups and her brother-in-law looked away. “It’s not that I’ll miss that many people,” she would go on, “or our life—well, George’s life—around the university. Or the apartment, or all the things we can’t take with us—that doesn’t really matter, all that. Maybe if we had children, like you….” and she would fall silent again, but not for long, before she burst out, “But me, I’ll miss me! I don’t know who I’ll be, living in France, but it’ll be someone else, it won’t ever be me again. And I did… I did like me the way I was, and so did George, no matter what he says now.” But in time, as they knew she would, she would recover her familiar reliable calmness and decide, “Oh, it will be all right, I’m sure. I’m just being an old stick-in-the-mud. It will be an adventure, after all.”

  The French government sent a specially-chartered jet to summon the Moscowitzes; it was very grand treatment, Mrs. Moscowitz thought, but she had hoped they would sail. “On a boat, we would be nowhere for a few days,” she said to herself, “and I do need to be nowhere first, just a little while.” She took her books and CDs about the Vincent family along with her, and she drew a long breath and held onto Mr. Moscowitz’s sleeve when the plane doors opened onto the black and glowing airfield, and they were invited to step down among the roaring people who had been waiting for two days to welcome them. “Here we go,” she said softly. “Allons-y. We are home.”

  France greeted them with great pride and great delight, in which there was mixed not the smallest drop of humor. To the overwhelming majority of the French press, to the poets and politicians, and certainly to the mass of the people—who read the papers and the poems, and waited at the airport—it seemed both utterly logical and magnificently just that a man’s soul should discover itself to be French. Was it not possible that all the souls in the world might be French, born in exile but beginning to find their way home from the cold countries, one by one? Think of all the tourists, the wonderful middle-aged tourists—where will we put them all? Anywhere, anywhere, it won’t matter, for all the world will be France, as it should have been long ago, when our souls began to speak different languages. Vive Moscowitz then, vive Moscowitz! And see if you can get him to do a spread in Paris-Match, or on your television program, or book him for a few weeks at the Olympia. Got to make your money before Judgment Day.

  But the government had not invited Mr. Moscowitz to France to abandon him to free enterprise—he was much too important for that. His television appearances were made on government time; his public speeches were staged and sponsored by the government; and he would never have been allowed, even had he wished, to endorse a soft drink that claimed that it made the imbiber twenty-two percent more French. He was not for rent. He traveled—or, rather, he was traveled—through the country, from Provence to Brittany, gently guarded, fenced round in a civilized manner; and throngs of people came out to see him. Then he was returned to Paris.

  The government officials in charge of Mr. Moscowitz found a beautiful apartment in safe, quiet Passy for him and his wife, and let them understand that the rent would be paid for the rest of their lives. There was a maid and a cook, both paid for, and there was a garden that seemed as big as the Bois de Boulogne to the Moscowitzes, and there was a government chauffeur to take them wherever they wanted to go, whenever. And finally—for the government understood that many men will die without work—there was a job ready for Mr. Moscowitz when he chose to take it up, as the librarian of the Benjamin Franklin library, behind the Odeon.

  He had hoped for the Bibliothèque nationale, but he was satisfied with the lesser post. “We are home,” he said to his wife. “Having one job or another—one thing or another—only makes a difference to those who are not truly at home. Tu m’comprends?”

  “Oui,” said Mrs. Moscowitz. They were forever asking each other that, Do you understand me? and they both always said yes. He spoke often of home and of belonging, she noticed; perhaps he meant to reassure her.

  For herself, she had come to realize that all the lists and journeys of the family Vincent would never make her a moment more French than she was, which was not at all, regardless. Indeed, the more she studied the language—the government had provided a series of tutors for her—the less she seemed to understand it, and she lived in anxiety that she and Mr. Moscowitz would lose this hold of one another, like children separated in a parade. Yet she was not as unhappy as she had feared, for her old capacity for making the best of things surfaced once again, and actually did make her new life as kind and rewarding as it could possibly have been, not only for her, but for those with whom she came in any sort of contact. She would have been very surprised to learn this last.

  But Mr. Moscowitz himself was not happy for long in France. It was certainly no one’s fault but his own. The government took the wisest care of him it knew—though it exhibited him, still it always remembered that he was a human being, which is hard for a government—and the people of France sent him silly, lovely gifts and letters of welcome from all across the country. In their neighborhood, the Moscowitzes were the reigning couple without really knowing it. Students gathered under their windows on the spring nights to sing to them, and the students’ fathers, the butchers and grocers and druggists and booksellers of Passy, would never let Mrs. Moscowitz pay for anything when she went shopping.

  They made friends, good, intelligent, government-approved friends—and yet Mr. Moscowitz brooded more and more visibly, until his wife finally asked him, “What is it, George? What’s the matter?”

  “They are not French,” he said. “All these people. They don’t know what it is to be French.”

  “Because they live like Americans?” she asked gently. “George,”—she had learned to pronounce it Jhorj, in the soft French manner—“everyone does that, or everyone will. To be anything but American is very hard these days. I think they do very well.”

  “They are not French,” Mr. Moscowitz repeated. “I am French, but they are not French. I wonder if they ever were.” She looked at him in some alarm. It was her first intimation that the process was not complete.

  His dissatisfaction with the people who thought they were French grew more apparent every day. Friends, neighbors, fellow employees, and a wide spectrum of official persons passed in turn before his eyes; and he studied each one and plainly discarded them. Once he had been the kind of man who said nothing, rather than lie; but now he said everything he thought, which is not necessarily more honest. He stalked through the streets of Paris, muttering, “You are not French, none of you are—you are imposters! What have you done with my own people, where have they gone?” It was impossible for such a search to go unnoticed for long.

  Children as well as grown men began to run up to him on the street, begging, “Monsieur Moscowitz, regardez-moi, je suis vrai
ment français!” He would look at them once, speak or say nothing, and stride on. The rejected quite often wept as they looked after him.

  There were some Frenchmen, of both high and low estate, who became furious with Mr. Moscowitz—who was he, a first-generation American, French only by extremely dubious mutation, to claim that they, whose ancestors had either laid the foundations of European culture, or died, ignorant, in its defense, were not French? But in the main, a deep sadness shadowed the country. An inquisitor had come among them, an apostle, and they had been found wanting. France mourned herself, and began wondering if she had ever existed at all; for Mr. Moscowitz hunted hungrily through all recorded French history, searching for his lost kindred, and cried at last that from the days of the first paintings in the Dordogne caves, there was no evidence that a single true Frenchman had ever fought a battle, or written a poem, or built a city, or comprehended a law of the universe. “Dear France,” he said with a kind of cold sorrow, “for all the Frenchmen who have ever turned your soil, you might have remained virgin and empty all these centuries. As far back in time as I can see, there has never been one, until now.”

  The President of France, a great man, his own monument in his own time, a man who had never wavered in the certainty that he himself was France, wrote Mr. Moscowitz a letter in which he stated: “We have always been French. We have been Gauls and Goths, Celts and Franks, but we have always been French. We, and no one else, have made France live. What else should we be but French?”

  Mr. Moscowitz wrote him a letter in answer, saying, “You have inhabited France, you have occupied it, you have held it in trust if you like, and you have served it varyingly well—but that has not made you French, nor will it, any more than generations of monkeys breeding in a lion’s empty cage will become lions. As for what else you may truly be, that you will have to find out for yourselves, as I had to find out.”