by John Lawton
§72
The following morning every newspaper had the story—one or two talked of a “new age” or an “atomic age.” Theirs had been the last weekend of the preatomic era, it was just that they hadn’t known it.
At about half past ten, Serge in his sarong, adding finishing touches to Girl with Wineglass, Méret with her nose in a huge bowl of café au lait—the fruit of Zeke’s encounter with two GIs the night before—and a naked Zozo roller-skating around the room in circles and daring figure eights, two men appeared at the door, wheezing from the burden of a big wooden packing case.
They set it down in the middle of the studio. Looked at Zozo as she shot past them and then tried to pretend they were not looking.
She could see from the expressions on their faces that neither Serge nor Zozo knew what was inside. She did. She’d been here before. She let Serge prise off the front and finished her coffee without a hint of curiosity.
Zozo lifted it out and opened the case.
“My God . . . it’s . . . it’s beautiful!”
It had caught up with her at last. Part of her always knew it would.
“And indestructible,” said Méret. “Nothing will kill it.”
They gazed at it, almost inhaling its smell as she had done with the cheese. Awed, as she had been, by beauty.
Serge looked more closely, his artist’s eye appraising, trying to read the label.
“Who made it?”
“The Venetian, Mattio Goffriler, in 1707.”
“It must be Einstein,” she thought. “Sooner or later isn’t everything Einstein?” And she remembered her lycée physics, the simplicity of E=mc2.
“Thousands die as E is freed from m, millions died in Auschwitz . . . but my cello goes on forever?”
§73
On Wednesday, in the same café on the Mouffetard, she kept her appointment with Pasdeloup.
It was a different Pasdeloup. The same baggy suit, the same gnawed fingernails, but the stammer had gone and he spoke with a confidence that was almost brash. She made no comment on the change but it was as though he had read her mind.
“We are none of us what we seem,” he said. “None of us survivors. Everything is fake. Everything is false. All a necessary deception to hide an unbelieveable truth from those who cannot begin to imagine it.”
She had nothing to say to this. She wished she had, but any answer would be engagement and she did not want to engage with this. She just wanted him to stop.
“Are we alive? How do we even know we are alive? We who have lived so long with death.”
From somewhere he produced a small enamel badge in the shape of the cross of Lorraine. He opened the catch to straighten the pin and stabbed himself in the ball of his left thumb. A blob of blood rounded out in the wound, trapped in its own meniscus, the size and shape of a sheep tick on a dog.
“If you prick us we bleed. But can we, any of us, be sure we are still alive?”
She handed him her handkerchief as the blob burst its bounds and trickled down into the palm of his hand.
“Please stop, Georges. I know you’re still alive.”
He blotted his hand. A surprising amount of blood for such a pinprick. He balled the stained handkerchief in his fist.
“How do you sleep, Vienna?”
“I sleep well, thank you.”
“Do you dream?”
“Yes. I dream. I can’t always remember them, but I dream.”
“I do not sleep. I lie awake all night. If I did not bite my nails I would tear my own flesh apart. And I dream. I dream wide awake.”
“And you dream of Auschwitz?”
“Of course, I dream of Auschwitz, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She would never answer.
“We must dream the same dreams by night. All us survivors. And by day we pretend.”
“We do? What do we pretend?”
“That we are like everyone else. A survivor is someone who pretends to be just like everyone else, but isn’t. And we’re not, are we?”
She would not answer that, either, true though it was.
§74
She was not wholly certain why she had raised the matter of Georges Pasdeloup with Serge but she had. Of all the things Tosca had asked her to do, accepting Serge as protector and mentor had been the easiest.
“It’s as though he’s two different people. Who will he be next time?”
“Was he drunk?’
“No.”
“Then it’s possible that this is what it has all done to him. One day up, the next day down. This is how he survives.”
“He said, a survivor is someone who pretends to be just like everyone else, but isn’t.”
“Do you think he’s right?”
“Of course, he’s right, but I don’t want to be in some club of survivors with him, I don’t want to join a round table of the wretched of the Earth . . . and above all, I don’t want to be in a club of just two of us with him. If I join . . . I will begin to doubt my own existence. We survived—but I don’t want the tag survivor hung round my neck like an albatross for the rest of my life. I want . . . I want to be free.”
“We can handle him.”
“No, we can’t. How soon can I leave Paris?”
“You can’t. You know that as well as I.”
“I must.”
“You can’t.”
“I must leave sometime. You must know when!”
“I don’t know. They haven’t told me but you shouldn’t be in any hurry. We can handle Monsieur Pasdeloup. And even in an age of deprivation and denial, Paris will be a pleasure.”
§75
At dusk they took their pleasure; they sat in the window, high above the street, peering down on Parisian heads, drifters crossing from the Boul Mich, gazing and dawdling, revellers—Paris seemed not to be without them on any night of the week—and customers of the brothel below, some indistinguishable from anyone else, others so obviously nervous.
Over a bottle of Chablis she raised the Russians again.
“What are they waiting for?”
“Oh, there are a few things for you to learn. Nothing quite as difficult or as important as our masters think. Spy nonsense. Basic encoding. How to use a dead-letter box . . .”
“How do you use a dead-letter box?”
“Just like an ordinary letter box, only you look both ways as though you were entering a brothel not posting a letter, thereby seeming completely shifty and attracting the maximum attention . . .”
As he spoke a man below did exactly that. He’d said it just to make her giggle.
“And, of course, we’re waiting for the war to end. France is quite convinced it ended last August but we know better, don’t we?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not taking this seriously?”
“Because one cannot take it seriously. There are things to be done; of course, there are things to be done, and things you must know before they send you on to London, but perhaps there are other things, more important things, things seemingly unconnected to the nuts and bolts of the cloaks and daggers.”
“Things? Such as?”
Serge said nothing to this. Merely stretched out his arm, grabbed the bottle of Chablis, and topped her up, smiling as he did so.
“How many know?” she said.
“How many know what?”
“About you.”
“None, I hope. I have appeared as fickle and woolly minded as every other Parisian, with a bit of effort. Not pro-Vichy, that would be too great an illusion and utterly unpalatable to me, but I have supported the Communists at times when everyone supported the Communists and seemed no more than the laziest of fellow travellers. Picasso actually joined the party quite recently. I could have done that, published a statement as romantic, self-centred, and innocent as his, and next winter I could leave as he will surely do with some equally self-centred, romantic denunciation.”
“And your friends?”
“Such as?�
�
“Zozo and Zeke?”
“Not friends, lovers.”
“Your lovers?”
“And each other’s.”
“But they’re brother and sister.”
“No, that’s just their . . . game.”
“Serge, is that all this is, a game? Is it all about just beating the system? (pause) What exactly is it you do for Mother Russia?”
Serge shrugged the way Zeke did, every inch the Frenchman while speaking as a Russian.
“As I was saying, there really are things you need to learn while you’re here. Now . . . let me be the one to change the subject. You have not played your cello yet. It has been here a day and a half. You have tuned up, I heard you, but you play nothing. Why so?”
He seemed to have a way of getting to the heart of a matter. The question deserved an answer.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Scared shitless.”
§76
On the next day, Thursday—the ninth of August she would recall later—Serge accompanied her to her next meeting with Pasdeloup at Les Hérons Rouges.
The café was fuller than usual—a delivery of coffee to draw in the punters and a front-page topic of discussion to keep them there: a second atomic bomb dropped on Japan. Nagasaki. Yet another city no one had ever heard of that would never be forgotten.
Serge joined in, standing at the bar as everyone stated one or other variation on the obvious—“it’s all over but the shouting,” “the Japs have got to give in now,” or the more rhetorical “whatever this new bomb is, why don’t they just blow the shit out of every city in Japan and have done with it?”
When Pasdeloup appeared and sat opposite her, Serge left the bar and introduced himself in exchange for a limp handshake and she knew at once that Georges was in his alternate mode, that he would stammer through their common bond and repeat himself endlessly.
Serge caught the waiter’s attention, summoned a bottle of vin rouge, and tried small talk.
“So, Georges. What do you do with yourself these days?”
“What?”
“I meant have you returned to your old job?”
“My old j . . . j . . . job?”
“Well, you must have had a job before . . .”
“B . . . b . . . before what?”
“Before . . . the war.”
“Ah . . . the war . . . I d . . . d . . . died in the war, you know.”
“You died in the war?”
“I died in Auschwitz and no one noticed.”
Georges had a point. As a survivor she knew what he meant and, clearly, Serge did not. And the alarm bells that rang in her head as Georges spoke were not ringing in Serge’s.
He produced the gun as quickly as he had produced the little cross with which he had stabbed himself. He tilted his face upwards, placed the tip of the barrel beneath his chin, and blew off the top of his head.
Even as Serge reached out for his hand Georges’s body was toppling backwards with the chair, the head flapping loosely, showering blood like a wet dog shaking itself after being out in the rain.
She had not known that men could scream like women, until they did. In moments, the bar was empty, men and women alike running for the street.
Serge pulled her to her feet, put his lips to her ear.
“Go with the crowd. Go home. Do not look back. You cannot afford to get mixed up in this. You were never here. Remember. You were never here.”
She ran all the way to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, then she slowed to a sobbing pace and sobbed all the way home.
§77
She sat in dimness. The wireless was going over Nagasaki, again and again and again. She turned it off and sat in silence. Waiting for Serge to come home.
It was dark by the time he returned.
He stood in front of her, running his fingers through his hair.
“I emptied my wallet in bribes. Shutting people up. The barman, the waiter. By the time the flics arrived it was all agreed. None of us had ever seen him before. He just walked in off the Mouffetard, sat down, and shot himself.”
Perhaps it was his professional mode, the secret agent in him to the fore, doing what a secret agent had to do to remain secret, but it was the wrong thing. It was not what she wanted to hear.
She punched him in the sternum as hard as she could. It was enough to budge him a millimetre. She punched him again and before he could grab her hands had boxed both his ears with stinging little fists.
Now he had her in his bear hug and she struggled against his strength and bulk.
“Oh, so you want to fight, do you?”
He threw her across the room. Kicked off his shoes, tore off his shirt and trousers and stood naked.
“Come on, then.”
Méret lay staring at him.
“Come on, then!”
Still she did not move.
“Come on—I’m hiding nothing. You can see that.”
She picked herself up, stripped, and squared off to him. She had never stood naked in front of a man before. And now she had, nakedness was strangely unimportant. She charged. He grabbed her left arm, spun around, put her over his shoulder and flat on her back.
He let the advantage go, circled her as she got to her feet once more, deflected her head butt to the belly by lifting her off the ground and slamming her onto the carpet. This time he landed on top of her.
“Enough?”
“You must be kidding. Of course not!”
He leapt up, held out both hands to her, and as she took them swung her up in the air, arse over tit, to land on her back once more, pinned down under his weight.
“You must teach me this,” she said. “You must teach me—does it have a name?”
“Oddly enough, it’s Japanese, and they call it jujitsu.”
They stood up again. She roared like a Scottish infantryman going into battle with fixed bayonet, charged, and Serge simply knocked her legs from under her.
“Lesson one,” he said softly. “It’s all about using your opponent’s speed and weight against her.”
“But . . . I weigh nothing.”
“And still I use it against you. But I loved the roar. Roar some more.”
For twenty minutes she roared and tumbled, and in the twentieth minute, for the first time, threw Serge on his back.
She fell to the floor drenched in sweat. Serge reached out a hand and tugged her towards him. It was not a sensual gesture, it was affection and certainly unerotic. As she lay her head on his chest, she was staring across his belly to his distinctly unaroused, limp cock.
“That was good,” he said. “You learn quickly.”
“No, you teach well.”
The change of subject was dramatic, as though they had crossed over points.
“Do you dream of Auschwitz?” he said.
“That was what I asked Pasdeloup. But no, I dream of Vienna. I dream I am playing duets with Viktor Rosen. Not in public, alone in his apartment on the Berggasse. It’s like it used to be, except that I am as I am now, twenty-one not fourteen.”
“That’s just as well.”
“Convenient, eh?”
Serge ignored this. For a while they were silent, only the night sounds of the street wafting up to the open window, then she said, “You know, Auschwitz can kill you even after you got away. It killed Pasdeloup, didn’t it?”
He sighed, a long exhalation.
“I rather think we owe a debt of gratitude to the late Monsieur Pasdeloup. I had wondered how I might ever reach into you. How I might free the wolf inside. Then Pasdeloup did it with his gun.”
“Is that what you think Auschwitz did to me, created my inner wolf?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. The point is not to let Auschwitz win.”
She turned over, locked her hands across his chest so she could see his face.
“And you and I are not here for you to teach me basic code and dead-letter boxes—you may well do that, but it’s all . . . nonsense . . . all part of
the game—you’re here to analyze me, you’re here to make me into the person who can do what the Russians want. So you tame the inner wolf. You take my rage and you give it direction.”
“How very perceptive of you, cherie.”
She touched a finger to his lips.
“Ah, I knew Professor Freud when I was a kid.”
“That, I envy you.”
“But I was just a kid, and so he was just another grown-up. Viktor was the first grown-up to become a real person for me.”
Another set of points crossed.
“Freud’s family died in Auschwitz, you know.”
“No, they left when he did! Not long after the Germans arrived. I remember my father telling me that.”
“His children left. His sisters stayed. They went to the gas.”
She dropped her forehead onto the wet, matted hair of his chest.
“Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . oh, God . . . oh, God.”
A moment passed. Serge put one hand in her hair and ruffled it.
“It’s time to cry or time to fight again. You choose.”
“No . . . no, I think it’s time to play. What piece would you like to hear from a naked cellist?”
§78
Paris: April 1946
For eight months, they wrestled, he painted, she played.
Some mornings she would climb into bed in her nightdress with Serge and Zozo or with Serge and Zeke, occasionally with Serge, Zozo, and Zeke—bring them coffee and lie with them for a peaceful half-hour before the day began, an innocent among the dissolute.
She began to think it might never end. She had always hoped it would never end.
In April, a wet afternoon, Serge stood in the studio in front of another half-finished painting and told her it was time.
“London?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing I can say, is there?”
“No. But I have something for you.”
He was holding a headscarf, some object wrapped up inside it.
“I want you to have this. Think of it as something to use in an emergency, something to get you out of trouble.”