“Moshe, would you like to give our guests a glass of tea?” Shlomo asked the man behind the counter.
Martin was about to refuse, when Jacquette accepted, and sat down beside Shlomo on one of the long benches. Martin edged onto the other end and studied the men across from him. They looked so foreign. They gave off an unbathed odor of onions and sweat, an intimate pungency that reminded Martin of his first visit to a working-class café. When he was fifteen years old, Merckx had taken him to a larger but equally humble miner’s tavern outside of Lille. Martin had been frightened and awed by Merckx’s father and the other colliers, by the eyes that glared out of their soot-coated faces, and by the dank, dark smell that clung to them. It was if they were spirits emerging from the netherworld, unable or unwilling to shed the mud that encased and shaped them. They swore and drank hard, celebrating the light of day, and cursing the heat and blackness of the pits. They spoke in a language that Martin could understand, the language that Merckx had taught him about the exploitation of bosses and the hypocrisy of priests. And, of course, they spoke in French.
Martin squinted in concentration as he heard Jacquette’s quiet questioning voice and Shlomo’s high whining translations begin. He was trying to see if he recognized any of the men from the funeral procession. He felt both intrigued and repelled by their bushy unkempt beards, their suspicious glances, their gesticulations, and their language, an incomprehensible dialect of German, with neither its authority nor its precision. When they began to respond to the dwarf, their words circled round and round, wheedling, disagreeing, complaining, questioning. Like Shlomo, they did not seem to be men of straight answers. Martin examined the glass that had been slapped down in front of him before he lifted it, with some trepidation, to his lips. Hot strong tea. A simple innocent pleasure for men who may or may not be innocent.
When Jacquette asked them their opinion of Ullmann, one of the younger men, with a curly black beard and sharp dark eyes, opined that Ullmann was a good man who opened a school for his workers’ children. In response to this, the tall man in the middle, who wore a broad black hat, slammed his fist on the table, rattling the glasses, and complained that he would not allow his wife or daughter to work in the factory because the mills ran on Saturday. He’d rather starve in order to keep the sabbath. Martin noticed that Shlomo’s translation sounded much less adamant than the original. He began to suspect that the dwarf was trying to please both the talkers and the listeners. Still, whatever grudge or praise they had for the mill owner seemed distant and impersonal.
As for Erlanger, those who knew of him had only praise. He was kind, he distributed alms, he helped people in trouble. “That’s why we prayed for him,” one of them exclaimed. Martin recognized the word said almost in chorus, “Amen.”
The question of why they didn’t go to the Temple got a much less reverential response. Who could afford it, one of the younger men asked, and complained that the rich pay for their fine seats. And who would like to sit like them, cried the tall graybeard in the middle of the table, who clamped his arms by his side, stiffened his body, and raised his eyes to heaven. The oldest man thumped the table in pleasure as others laughed. And Shlomo had to stop several times to hold his oversized hand over his giggles as he tried to translate the mimicry of his countryman. “Sometimes we dance while we pray,” he told Martin and Jacquette.
As Jacquette smiled in appreciation of the mockery of the bourgeoisie, Martin wondered what his inspector had thought of the exaggerated swaying and bowing at the edge of the crowd surrounding Erlanger’s grave. Singer, and all the others in tophats, had stood up straight, speaking their prayers softly, and had lightly thrown a handful of dirt upon the dead man. Singer had told Martin that the Consistory had made the Israelite services more “dignified.” Did the immigrants feel left out? Or were they content to have their own services in a shoe shop on Friday evening? Contrary to what the dwarf had claimed, it did not seem like his friends wanted to become French at all. It was almost as if the foreign and the French Israelites were leading parallel lives which seldom intersected. And when they did, was there enough friction to drive a man to murder?
Martin had seen one of these collisions and the angry reaction of Singer to the tinker’s influence on his wife. Martin leaned over the table toward Shlomo. “Ask them if they ever go into the homes of men like Ullmann and Erlanger, if they know their wives and children.”
The question evoked a pantomime of shrugs and head-shaking. “Monsieur le juge,” Shlomo explained, “I think all these poor honest men are out in the cold every day, selling on the streets, or in their little shops. They do not enter the homes of the rich.”
“What about the tinker with the sharpening wheel?” Martin pressed.
“Ahh,” Shlomo said, and nodded. He repeated Martin’s question to the men. Suddenly the dark eyes of the young man who had praised Ullmann lit up. “Jacob, Jacob,” he said through a set of strong, white teeth and began to laugh. Then he said something which set off an argument among the immigrants.
“What’s going on?” Martin asked, irritated.
“They are disagreeing, as Jews will, about Jacob, who we call Jacob the Wanderer. This one,” Shlomo said, pointing to first speaker, “says he is meshuge—crazy—and our elder on the end says that he is a holy man, the holiest of men. And this one,” Shlomo pointed to the tallest of them, the one who had refused to send his women into Ullmann’s mill, “agrees and says that Jacob is not crazy.” Martin could see that the defender of the tinker was not finished. The man in the broad black hat kept raising his fist and pounding it on the table, punctuating the thuds with the name “Jacob.”
The dwarf held up a finger, signaling for Martin and Jacquette to wait, and listened intensely. When the speaker had exhausted his arguments, Shlomo summarized. “It is Jacob who urged him not to send his women into Ullmann’s factories, who said it was a shanda, a shame, that a Jew should work people on Saturday; Jacob who said we must keep the old laws, as they did in Russia, as they did in the countryside, even here; Jacob who wants to make righteous Jews of every one of us.” Shlomo ended with a flourish.
“Meshuge, meshuge,” muttered the younger man beside Jacob’s tall defender. He was the one who had praised Ullmann. He spread out his arms, lifted his head, and chanted the saying that Shlomo had declaimed in Martin’s chambers: Lebn vi got in Frankraykh. Martin did not even need Shlomo to tell him what came next. He was able to surmise from his knowledge of German and from the vehemence with which the young man was pounding the table that he was insisting, “We are here. Now.”
Martin rubbed his hands on his legs. He could hardly sit still. Holy or crazy, this Jacob might be the link between the two worlds of the Israelites. He leaned toward Shlomo. “Ask why he is called the Wanderer, and why he isn’t here.”
Suddenly the jabbering stopped and all five men across the table looked askance at Martin. Was it the urgency in Martin’s voice that had alerted them and sapped all the joy out of their disputations? Yet Martin persisted. He was a judge. He had a right to know. “Ask them,” he repeated.
But a judge of France was a frightening specter to these men and just as foreign to them as they were to him. Martin realized from their silence that he should have stuck to his plan of letting Jacquette ask the questions in his friendly and matter-of-fact way. They were not about to say anything to get one of their own in trouble with the law.
Caught between their “Eminences” and his friends, Shlomo repeated the question about the Wanderer, and suddenly, rather than offering any real response, the eldest of men let out a low cry and a string of lamentations.
Martin shifted uneasily in his seat, as he noticed tears spring from eyes so old and blurred he could hardly distinguish their color. Shlomo listened and prepared to translate.
“He is saying,” Shlomo began, “why do we ask about Jacob only. We have all been condemned to wander. Why must we wander? Where is our homeland?”
Suddenly one of the younge
r men got up from the other end of the table, went over to the old man, and held him, repeating over and over again, “nu, nu, nu.”
“Shlomo?” Martin inquired. The scene was getting out of hand.
The dwarf stretched back from the table, with a sadness in his eye that Martin would not have expected from the trickster. He kept staring at the whitebeard and the younger man.
“They are father and son,” Shlomo reported. “They had to leave their town because someone set fire to their shop. Abraham did not want to leave. He misses his rebbe, his rabbi, who guided their life in everything. Everything. It is not like the laws here. We do not have our own judge, we have you.”
There was no hint of accusation in Shlomo’s words, only resignation.
“Dos iz a fremder platz, dos iz a fremder platz,” the old man moaned, before wiping his nose on his sleeve. Suddenly the old man broke from his son’s embrace. “Jacob iz frum, frum,” he insisted to his friends.
Martin reached out and tugged at Shlomo’s sleeve. “Tell me what he is saying.”
The dwarf shrugged and sighed, looking down at the floor between his two short, swinging legs. “He says he’s unhappy here, he can’t be comfortable here. It’s not like it was in his village where everyone obeyed the laws, our laws, together. That’s why he says Jacob is holy, frum, because Jacob wants everyone to remember, to obey.” Shlomo heaved his body in the bench, as if reminding himself that he must continue to be ingratiating to his important guests. “Please, Monsieur le juge, you can be sure most of us like your laws, we like coming to a place where we can have the full dignity of our manhood and not worry about the Czar’s army. He’s just lonely and old.”
Abraham was sobbing, clinging to his son. Martin heard the word rebbe again, and suddenly his heart went out to the old Jew. In Martin’s short lifetime he had gone from one corner of France to another, to escape his past and to build a future. Even knowing the language, believing in the laws, having a status and a place, Martin had been utterly lonely in Provence. But this Abraham was a stranger in a strange land with a strange tongue and too old to want to change. He had lost everything. Martin watched as the tears abated and the whitebeard leaned against his son’s chest. Abraham sighed and stared at the table. Was he embarrassed by his outburst or simply too sorrowful to face his companions? Martin almost wanted to reach out and touch the father’s withered hand to say he understood. But he knew that his gesture would not be welcome. Martin stood up. It was time to leave. He signaled to Jacquette, who was observing the father and son. Then Martin thanked the men for talking to him.
Jacquette nodded as he too rose and tipped his cap to the immigrants. It was over. They had no hope of gaining any more information.
“Wait, wait. Let me walk out with you.” The dwarf used his arms to help him pivot around the bench and hop to the floor. He had not lost his desire to make Jacquette his meal ticket. He had more to say.
After they had closed the heavy curtain behind them, Shlomo whispered what he knew, or what he was willing to tell, about Jacob. Apparently he lived like a hermit in the countryside and was called the Wanderer because he had traversed the continent many times, more times than even Shlomo himself.
“Is he holy or insane?” Jacquette asked as he pushed his fingers into his leather gloves.
“I think both, perhaps, maybe. I am not a doctor or a holy man. You might think of him as like me, a bit—” the dwarf hesitated while searching for the right word—“a bit of an eccentric.” The shrug, the evasions were back. So was the yellow-toothed grin. “Where he is crazy, I think, is when he tries to convince everyone that they should obey the old laws. We no longer live in the village. We are here in your beautiful city.”
Martin shot Jacquette a skeptical glance. Shlomo, the pleaser, was again saying what he thought they wanted to hear.
Jacquette preferred to play along. He patted Shlomo on his shoulder and said that they would talk next week. He had many more questions and—the inspector moved his head toward the curtained door—this was not the place to ask them.
Shlomo clapped his hands together, warming them, and nodded. “And now we must all go,” he announced as he pointed to the waning sun in the dusky sky. “Shabbas comes quickly on a winter’s day.”
Yes, night was coming, and the weekend. Martin owed it to Clarie to be on his way. As soon as they were out of hearing, he apologized to Jacquette for having made a mess of their “conversation.”
“Don’t worry, sir. As soon as Shlomo mentioned ‘Ehud the Anarchist,’ I realized I might be more interested in who wasn’t there than in who was. After all, we don’t have enough men to follow everyone. But an anarchist and an industrialist?” Jacquette made a clicking sound with his tongue. “Sounds like a lethal combination to me.”
Martin grunted agreement as they quickened their pace through the garbage-strewn streets. He, too, was interested in who had not been in the café. Interested in an “eccentric” who somehow had bridged the gap between the rich and poor.
30
Saturday, December 8
MARTIN WOKE UP IN A cold sweat, clinging to the side of the bed. He gulped for air as he tried to recapture the dream. He was back in Aix, in the cavernous basement of the jail where they did autopsies. The mounds of a body were under a sheet. The corn-yellow hair of his oldest friend, Jean-Jacques Merckx, stuck out at the top. Two unidentified hands pulled back the white shroud, revealing a precise, pointed black beard, and a knife in the corpse’s chest. Martin protested. Merckx was clean-shaven. He had been shot four times, not stabbed. Suddenly Martin was overcome with joy. This was not Merckx. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he had made it to Switzerland after all. Martin looked again at the pale body on the table. And saw that it was Singer.
No! Martin reached his arm across the bed to touch Clarie, not wanting to wake her, only to feel her warmth. But her place was empty.
Martin gasped as he sat up. Clarie! Did she get up in the night and walk the floors as he did? Had he not heard her, when he should have gone out to her, taken care of her? He swung his feet over to the side of the bed. His mouth was dry all the way to the back of his throat. He needed water. Just as his feet hit the floor, Clarie walked in.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Martin was stunned. Clarie was fully dressed. Was he still in the dream?
“I’m going to Mass with Madeleine, I need to put up my hair. I can’t go to the cathedral with a hanging braid.”
Martin was so groggy and parched that he barely managed to choke out a response. “My God, is this Sunday already?” Had he slept an entire forty-eight hours?
Without waiting for an answer, Martin staggered out through the dining room to the kitchen. He shook his head hard, as he poured himself a glass of water. He gulped it down, closed his eyes and swallowed. He felt the cold floor under his bare feet. He saw that the cupboards, the sink, and the stove were exactly where they should be. He was awake. He must talk to Clarie.
He returned to the bedroom and watched as she sat in front of the mirror and wound the braid in a ring in back of her head. She didn’t ask for help in putting up her hair, as she sometimes did. She was intent on her task, hardly noticing his reflection.
When she was done, she turned to him. “It’s not Sunday, dear Martin. You didn’t sleep that long.”
“Then why—”
She swung back to the mirror to scrutinize her face and pin back a few strands of stray black hair. “It’s the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,” she murmured. “A Feast of the Virgin. Madeleine tells me that the Virgin who appeared at Lourdes was the very vision of the Immaculate Conception. That proves it’s true. That Mary was conceived without sin. That miracles do happen. My mother loved the Virgin at Lourdes.”
Her voice was as toneless as if she was giving a lesson in simple logic. But none of this was logical. Her mother, the immaculate conception, miracles. This wasn’t Clarie.
Now she was staring in the mirror, w
atching him, waiting for his reaction.
“You’re sure you’re ready for this?”
“Do you mean because little Henri-Joseph was baptized there?”
Her voice was so soft, so distant, it was as if he was hearing her through an echo chamber.
“Yes.” Although he hadn’t really thought of that.
“Madeleine says the Virgin will protect me. That she comes in many ways to many people if they pray hard enough, and eventually I will find the Virgin, who will protect and forgive me.” Her lower lip began to tremble.
Martin ignored the irrationality of these propositions. He heard only the cruelty. He put his hands on Clarie’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. “Clarie, my Clarie, why would you need forgiveness?”
She moved her head away from him as she whispered, “I don’t know.”
Martin got down on one knee. “Clarie, look at me. Please. There is nothing to forgive. Our little boy died. It’s a terrible tragedy. We didn’t deserve it.”
She gently removed his hand from her waist and stood up, looking down on him. “I can imagine many things that need to be forgiven. Not going to church for years on end. Not taking seriously God’s laws. Teaching girls a Protestant philosophy in a Catholic country.”
This was Madeleine, fanaticism, speaking, not his Clarie, who had never expressed anything but respect and admiration for her teachers at Sèvres, no matter what their beliefs. If she went on this way, she might start complaining about the “godless Republic,” the Republic to which both of them had devoted their talents.
The Blood of Lorraine Page 25