FOR A DAY OR two, Jules had little feeling for home. Though far more splendid than the hotels, in comparison the house still seemed worn and improperly decorated even if he would have had it no other way. When he awoke he thought he was in Los Angeles or New York, and for some minutes he wanted to be, in the kind of retrospective yearning that, though it quickly fades, may last a lifetime in dreams.
But soon enough he was his previous self, almost forgetting that he had been away. He went shopping to replenish the kitchen, attended to his mail, went swimming, and ran gently and slowly, as if finally his years had caught up with him. Having an aging body is like living in a big house. Something is always going wrong, and by the time it’s fixed, something else follows. Very old age is when the things that go wrong cause other things to go wrong, until, like sparks racing up a fuse, they finally reach a pack of dynamite.
Soon his nearly truncated teaching schedule would put him in a Cité de la Musique practice room alone for fifty minutes with Élodi. After trying unsuccessfully not to think of her, he rehearsed what he might say. He would keep his distance, but convey – safely from behind the barrier of his experience and age – that the moment he first saw her he fell in love as strongly as at any time in his life. That when he shook her hand, formally, reining in his feelings, he hadn’t wanted to let go. That he could remember and re-create over and over in memory every second they were in contact. That he knew her virtues and her beauty and her ability to excite, but that he loved her, nonetheless, inexplicably, independently of splendor or sex, with neither knowing nor having to know why. And he would convey as well that the tremendous difference in age made it impossible, and nothing could follow or result. When he went through this little speech, intended to clear the air and yet a way for him to move close to her even if just for a moment, he couldn’t see beyond it. Because when he imagined the end of his declaration, he imagined that he did not move, and she did not move. He could never get to the point where they parted.
On Saturday he would have lunch with François. Though the last thing he wanted was to confess to François about Élodi, he knew he would, and that François would smile and say that it was right, that Jules had the obligation to live, that Jacqueline would want him to, and all the other predictable nostrums one might think France’s premier philosophe might surpass, except that, as common as they were, they were true. Jules couldn’t accept them even if they were, just as he couldn’t envision himself walking away from Élodi, as demanded of him both by his ability to see the future and his deeply felt concern for Élodi herself. François was not the proper confessor – far too lenient. It would be like confessing to a heroin dealer that one had had too much to drink. On the other hand, a priest would be severe, inflexible, and inappropriate to say the least. The psychiatrist already knew too much about Jules, and he had to be paid. François, therefore, while not the only confessor available and likely not satisfactory, would be the best.
That would be Saturday, an ordeal but also for Jules the pleasure of describing a beautiful young girl and his love for her. Confined to description, he was safe. And tonight, Friday, he would have Sabbath dinner with Cathérine, David, and Luc – another kind of love, and another kind of suffering.
WHEN HE WALKED from the RER to the little house with the terra-cotta roof so inappropriate to the North, the streets were cold and dark. The wind cut through his clothes, but still he hesitated before he went in, staring at the yellow light of the windows. Yellow was the old Jewish color: dim light from shtetl windows of parchment or imperfect glass, weakly shining in yellow; the color of chicken fat and chicken soup; the candle flame; the yellow Star of David. Yellow was the color of weakness, resignation, defeat, and feeling. It was also the color of gold and the sun.
Cathérine had been gone for more than two decades. When she was a baby the family had seemed to be as unbreakable as the nucleus of the atom. Jacqueline, Cathérine, et Jules. The ones he loved the most were always there, the ones for whom he would do his best and, if necessary, die. He knew at the time that it could not last, but was unable to imagine its end, perhaps because when it was over his purpose would have been served and nothing truly important would be left to him.
Their daughter was central to both of them. She was as nothing else had ever been or would be, just as Luc was now central to her after her own parents had, of necessity, receded. Her own identity and new life demanded it. But, secretly, they still had the same devotion and were ready to sacrifice themselves for her if required, on the instant and without the slightest hesitation. This she never knew and they never said, for not having been in the world long enough to have been taught, she thought such things entirely imaginary, at least in the France of this century, so safe, modern, and just.
Jules was suddenly startled when, from behind, in the dark, David put a hand on his shoulder. “You scared me,” he told his son-in-law.
“That’s impossible. I’m an accountant.”
“True.”
“What were you doing?”
“It’s not quite six.”
“So? In fact,” David said, after looking at his watch, “it’s six-fifteen.” His tone was affectionate, his unspoken language stating that whatever it was that Jules had done, it had something of the unpredictability of age.
“Anyway,” Jules said, “we missed sunset by a lot. Is that allowed?”
“No, but we need the money for Luc, the firm is secular, they’re laying people off, and I can’t risk my position. If necessary for Luc, we would light the candles at midnight or not at all. If God wouldn’t forgive me then He’d be wrong and I would tell Him so.”
“We never lit candles. But if we had, I would have to agree.”
ALMOST FORTY, CATHÉRINE had no idea how her father valued her even for her imperfections, which had come mainly from him, which he could trace to the charm of her face when she was a baby, and which now and always would fill him with love. She didn’t know the terrors and humiliations he faced, nor should she have. It was not her role. She had to be distant now, as he had never had the chance to be distant with his parents – who were forever vulnerable, and who had to be cared for in perpetuity and protected in retrospect, if only in the imagination. And, whatever she did and however she acted, he had to do for her and for Luc whatever he could.
She had wanted to greet him with love, but when she saw that he held a wrapped present she said, angrily, “Not again. You’ll spoil him.”
Recovering from this dart, he looked at her as if to say, “So?” It meant, of course, that he recognized that Luc might die, something of which she was aware more than anyone, but to which she fiercely would not allow anyone, including her father, to allude even subtly.
“Shall I put it in the closet?” Jules asked.
She sighed. “No, put it by his bed so he sees it in the morning. You can give him a kiss, but don’t wake him. He had a bad day, lots of crying. The fever is back and he hardly ate. It’s okay to put it by the bed.”
Jules went into Luc’s room to leave the present. A dim light came from a night-table lamp in the shape of two sheep lying next to a tree, the crown of which formed a lampshade printed with glowing green leaves. When Jules saw how hard the child was breathing he had to fight back tears.
Faithful husband, good father, and flawless auditor, David pulled a yarmulke from a pocket and put it on. This was an excellent excuse to change the subject.
“You don’t wear that on the street?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“A lot of people don’t, and it’s been that way for a long time. I kept on wearing it despite the risk. But while you were in America I went to Lyon to do the accounts at a parts supplier for Airbus: they were padding. On my way back to my hotel after dinner, in the center of town, I was attacked. I wouldn’t have been terrified had there been one, or even two” – David was as big as a bear – “but there were about a dozen.”
“A dozen! What happened?”
“It started with words. They got more and more excited and started to kick and punch me. Of course, I ran, but I couldn’t have outrun them, as they were quite young. A truck driver saw me, stopped his truck, and told me to get on the running board. The truck had huge mirrors, so I held on to the mirror bars, and he drove through centre-ville at fifty kilometers an hour, right through a red. Then I got in the cab, he circled around, and dropped me at my hotel.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“No point. It was a crowd. They weren’t out for it, and weren’t together in the first place. They collected spontaneously.”
“You should have done something.”
“What was I supposed to do, kill them? I don’t have a gun. I was never a soldier. I wouldn’t have done that anyway.”
“Didn’t you feel like it, though?”
“I just wanted to get away. I have a mortally ill child. I can’t solve this problem for France. I don’t think anyone can, but certainly not me. Even if I could, my efforts and attention must be elsewhere.”
JULES HAD ALWAYS been numb to the lighting of candles and the procession of ceremony. In his first years in the attic in Reims it would have been difficult to mark the Sabbath and holidays. They might have done so, as did others, with matchsticks for candles, but they didn’t. Since the mid nineteenth-century, with a temporary reversion during the Dreyfus Affair, the Lacours had been fully assimilated. Even had they not been, in hiding during the war they were stunned enough to exist in many kinds of silence until its end. Their hope was merely to stay alive. Ceremony might begin afterwards, but until then it seemed like something only for those who were not hunted. Throughout his life, Jules had always refused any kind of celebration for himself, and though he tried his best he was present only half-heartedly in celebration of others. As for religious ritual, he was embarrassed by the weakness of rote public prayer, perhaps because when he himself would pray in silence, his simple, improvised prayer was worth a thousand set pieces.
“How do you think it’ll go?” David asked him as they were eating.
Jules knew what he meant, and that he was supposed to know how “it” might go, given that he had lived through the war. “David, I was five when the war ended, a shell-shocked child who couldn’t speak. That warped me for the rest of my life, as I’m sure Cathérine has told you.”
David nodded.
“I’ve never been equipped to live in peace and judge dispassionately. My reality was real then, it may be real in the future, and it’s partially real now. As much as it grants me clairvoyance, it also cripples my judgment. So I can’t tell you how it will go.”
“Of course not,” David told him. “I’m just as uncertain, but unlike you, I don’t have the benefit of experience. I know you can’t know, Jules, but what do you feel?”
“What do I feel? I feel that you should get medical treatment for Luc in the United States or Switzerland, and establish yourselves there. What about Geneva? The lake is cold and blue, the shadows deep, the streets quiet and clean, everything well ordered, peaceful, and rich. The medical care is expert and precise. They speak French, it’s high up, protected from war and conflict. You can have a life there.”
“Really.”
“Really. Yes.”
“It’s expensive,” Cathérine said. “We couldn’t even begin to afford it.”
“First, consider it,” her father asked.
“Jules, you speak as if there could be another Holocaust in Europe,” David said. “Do you actually believe that?”
“I don’t. But the smell of it is in the wind, the taste is in the water. That’s enough. Why should you live your lives in continual anxiety? Why should you or Luc be beaten in the street? Why should he have to hide his identity at school? Why should you fear that he’ll be massacred in his kindergarten, or that you’ll be blown to pieces in a synagogue or restaurant? Except for me, your parents are gone. You have no siblings and neither does Cathérine. You should move. I don’t want to worry that when I’m no longer around you might have to replay the story of my own life.”
“Not that we could go anywhere else,” Cathérine said, the spoon in her hand having been motionless since David’s question, “but if we could, if it could happen, you’d have to come with us.”
“No, Cathérine.”
“Why?”
“Because, for me, France is the world, too synonymous with life. To quote a British politician, J’adore la France, les Français sont charmants, la langue est à mourir. Your mother is buried here, as are my parents, somewhere, in France. Everything I know, have done, and felt is tied to this country and laid down indelibly. Keeping faith to the theme of my life is more important than living itself. There can be changes in tempo, but one must always preserve the tone. You know how you read sometimes in the papers that old people stay behind even as the barbarians approach?”
“Yes, they do that.”
“There’s a reason for it, and it’s not just that they’re tired and have no chance for a new life.” He knew that she could not quite understand such a thing.
“What is it then?” she asked.
“When you’re of that age you’re given a certain kind of bravery that perhaps you had when you were at the peak of your powers. I don’t think it’s just because you don’t have much to lose that the calculation runs in favor of daring. Rather, you get a level-headed courage that allows you to make death run for its money even though you know it must win. I’ll never leave France, but you’re young, so you can.”
“We can’t afford it,” David said.
“I forgot. You’re the accountant.”
“That’s the reality.”
“It can change.”
“How?”
“For one thing, I’m going to give you everything I have,” Jules said. “I have some savings. There’s a bit of jewelry, and I’m going to sell the piano. A Bösendorfer concert grand, beautifully cared for, might bring a hundred thousand Euros.”
“Forgive me, Jules,” David said, “but even that would be hardly enough.”
“I’m working on other things, though nothing is certain.”
“What other things?” Cathérine asked. “And how will you live? You can’t even stay at Shymanski’s. Everything will be gone.”
“I’ll live on my pension.”
“You have something up your sleeve,” Cathérine said, almost as if she were a child. She knew him well enough in that regard.
As he might have done when she was a child, Jules made a show of looking at his forearms, raising first the left and then the right. “No I don’t.”
“If you’re going to stay,” Cathérine said, “whether we go or not, you should be more observant.”
“Religion again.”
“Don’t say it like that, it’s insulting. How are you Jewish? You’re French. How would anyone know what you are? How will the Jews survive in France, or anywhere, if they break the chain of five thousand years?”
“Who’s breaking a chain?”
“You are.”
“No. You’re the next link. You do all the stuff, I’m expendable now, what’s the problem?”
“It’s not enough just to be born Jewish. What have you done to keep the tradition alive?”
“I stayed alive myself. I managed to survive well enough so that I could work, have a family, and love my wife and my child. It was a closely run thing when I was little. I didn’t feel then that I deserved to live. I consider it an achievement that I didn’t die, or kill myself, or become even crazier than I am. What about that? Survival. I look at it as miraculous. I’m proud of you and David for reviving observance in our family, but it’s not for me. God is too immediate, splendid, and difficult for that.”
They looked at him in silence. Then David said to Cathérine, “Maybe your father’s one of the lamed vavnikim.” It was only partly sarcastic.
“What’s that?” Jules asked.
“Never mind,” David told him. “If you are, you don’t have to know. In fact, you can’t know.”
“So why did you say it?”
“I was just trying to tell Cathérine that you’re okay, and that compared to you in regard to being Jewish, we’re amateurs.” David was older than his years, and kind.
EVEN IF HIS INTUITIVE notions sometimes passed as brilliant flashes of theory, Jules had no theory of music or anything else. The potential to love abstraction had been blasted out of him forever in a single shock that had then defined the rest of his life. He thought it just as well, for the things he valued, things great and everlasting, were mysteriously self-evident yet elusive of explanation. He was loyal to the secret power of that which blessed the homely and unfashionable, the failures and the forgotten. Where theorists saw mathematical relations in music – sometimes clearly and sometimes with foolish complexity – he saw only waves and light. When sound could find and conjoin with these invisible and ever-present waves, it became music. High resolution images through great telescopes showed magical colors and heavenly light that the eye perceived only as a blur of white in the impossible distance. But there was much more to them than a pinpoint sparkle, and in the roseate clouds of effulgent galaxies was music in what was supposed to be silence.
This was, anyway, what he thought, felt, and sometimes saw, although he could neither bring it back, nor, it goes without saying, prove it. Waiting for François in the Gardens of the Palais de Chaillot he saw the same thing in the undulating spray of the fountains as the wind struck their jets. A hundred million droplets shining in the sun moved in synchrony like schools of fish or flights of birds, rising suddenly to a crest and snapping back in explosions of silver and gold against a field of blue. Jules read this and heard it no less than the “Ma di” of Norma, which was like a boat running with the wind, rising and falling gently on the sea. He never tried to explain music more than in its craft. He thought that music was almost like a living thing, that it had a mischievous character, and that, like a spirit or sprite, it would know when the trap of explanation was set for it and craftily disappear. Like electrons, it, too, was allergic to measurement.
François descended the staircase, a plastic bag suspended from his right hand. On what promised to be the last warm day until spring they were going to eat in the Gardens of Chaillot even though the crowds there looked like they were staging to tear down the Bastille. François had suggested that the masses of people would lend them comfortable anonymity, and he knew a place nearby on the Avenue Kléber that made the best sandwiches in Paris. They had had this kind of lunch all their lives, thon or jambon on baguette, with beer, outside on a bench, in a park, on a terrace, or by the river.
They couldn’t sit at the edge of the water, as the masonry was either flush with it or blocked by hedges. The benches were occupied, and the steps had too much traffic, so they had to get up onto the wall behind the benches, where the spray didn’t reach even on the windiest days. The lower part of the wall, nearest the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, was easy of access and occupied. Only as it rose, eventually taller than the tallest man in the world, was it not taken up. Jules and François chose an empty section in the middle, where in their youth they would have been able to jump up, twist in the air, and land firmly planted in a sitting position. Now they were too old, stiff, and heavy to do that, but they managed by making footholds of the iron eye bolts that ran in lines all along the wall.
No one would ever think that François Ehrenshtamm would be sitting here eating a sandwich from a plastic bag. One might conclude only that these were two old guys – maybe retired motormen or very low-level bureaucrats of the kind who thought the whole world could fit into a pencil – who, passing into the restful indolence of retirement and onto the easy ramp down which, forgotten by others, one slides into death, had nothing better to do than drink beer and eat tuna sandwiches. They were invisible to the young, who, assuming that even were they wise they would be useless in new times, were in most cases correct. In the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot, where they began their conversation, they were relaxed and well worn. Who ever thinks of an old shoe? There is no need.
As François laid out the lunch, Jules asked, “Why are the fountains of Paris more exposed to the wind than those of Rome? You know how many times a change in wind direction has soaked me in Paris? In the Tuileries, here, all over the place. But not in Rome. Roman water is disciplined as if by Mussolini. It behaves. It goes up, it goes down. But in Paris the water comes at you like machine gun fire.”
François thought before he spoke, not merely as the habit of a philosopher but because all his life when he didn’t think before he spoke he got into trouble. “You realize,” he said, “that the water in Rome is older, and doesn’t have the energy to attack. The water of Paris has sharp elbows and jumps around, like monkeys or adolescents.”
“Really,” Jules said.
“Do you have a better explanation?”
Jules thought. “Yes.”
“And what is that?”
“What surrounds Rome?”
“What?”
“Hills. Rome is almost in a bowl. Therefore, less wind.”
“Of course I knew that.”
“No, you didn’t, because you’re a philosopher, and philosophers aren’t concerned with wind and waves.”
“Jules, I’m not really a philosopher, I’m a con who talks on television.”
“That’s not going well?”
“It’s going fine – Polish television, Russian television, Brazilian television, African television. It sells books, but it’s like bleeding in the water. Though I don’t want to do it anymore, I have a young family. I wish I could retire to a cottage by the water’s edge in Antibes and put a line in the sea. All day.”
“Five million Euros would do it,” Jules said, “although you wouldn’t have a guestroom.”
“I have to keep on working, but really, television makes me sick.”
“Why not just stop television?”
“My income would decline by seventy or eighty percent. You’re lucky. Believe me. Privacy is royal.”
“I know,” Jules said. He did.
“What are you doing in your privacy, of which, truly, I’m envious.”
“There’s a difficulty.”
“What? The girl again?”
“She’s a student, my student.”
“Nothing wrong with that. I married one. If we were lake dwellers in four hundred B.C. and I was a chieftain in white furs I’d have an even younger wife.”
“François, this is not four hundred B.C., we’re not lake dwellers, and I’m not a chieftain in white furs.”
“How can you fault yourself for being in love?”
“Because obviously I’m crazy. I lose all sense at the first appearance of a lure. I’d be a terrible fish. I fall for images, voices, and, God knows, women I meet sometimes just for a moment. Not because I’m frivolous, but because I see in them their true qualities. I penetrate too fast, right to the core – which is so often angelic. It isn’t that every woman has this, but that so many do.”
“You know that a lot of them would snarl at you and deny the entire proposition. I don’t mean to pun,” François said.
“Perhaps the ones who would, would be moved by rage that they themselves aren’t angelic. When jealousy finally cracks, it releases insatiable anger. And people who aren’t innocent don’t believe that innocence exists. People who aren’t good don’t believe that goodness exists. Alcoholics believe that everyone drinks. Thieves think that everyone steals. Liars think that everyone lies. And those who don’t lie, believe even liars.”
“You see the beauty and goodness in women. So what else is new?”
“I didn’t say I discovered anything, but the fact remains that they’re superior to us – not by action but by existence. They don’t have to work at it, as we do, and as far as I can see, we do so mainly to be worthy of them. Anyway, what am I doing? I’m trying to re-create something that was lost, to make perfect something that was imperfect but still the best thing in my life. Nature has brought me to where I am, and will allow me peace only if I accept it. But leaving them behind is really difficult.”
“I’ll bet that as many hours as you’ve spent imagining it you haven’t even kissed her.”
“No. Nor should I. Even if at this late hour it was not foolish to love anyone else, I still couldn’t be unfaithful to Jacqueline.”
“It’s not as if she was always faithful to you.”
For Jules, it was as if a bomb had exploded nearby and knocked the wind out of him. (This had happened once, in Algeria, and he knew what it felt like.) “What?” he asked, as he recovered, observing in François a moment of panic quickly made unobservable by his long practice in debate.
“I mean, she died, Jules. She left you.”
“That’s not what you meant, because you said always, and that doesn’t fit.”
“It is what I meant.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s not as if I haven’t known you forever, François. I know what you meant. Why did you say that? Who told you?”
“Do you really want me to say, Jules? Because it would be better if I ….”
“Yes. You have to.”
“Do I really?”
“If you ever want to see me again.”
“Then I won’t see you again, ever, because no one told me,” François said. “No one had to. Jules, it was a long, long time ago, and we were all so young.”
Even as he dismounted from the wall, Jules reeled. It was as if he were falling off a cliff and nothing was left of the world. After he jumped down, he couldn’t look in François’ direction, much less at him. Instead, he turned and blindly made his way up the hill, the fountains on his right still bursting forth unpredictably.