AT NEARLY eight thirty in the evening on January 1, 1956, Ivy and Lajos Obersoxszki drove through Londinières in the Land Rover and took National 314 as far as the entrance to the property where Samuel Farakhan was waiting for them. They rode up the macadam drive to the house, a pile built at the beginning of the century by a manufacturer of artificial chocolate and overloaded with turrets, pinnacles, colonettes, moldings, high-reliefs, mosaics and leaded dormer windows. The local rustics called it the Château. After helping Ivy (who asked for no help) to get out her travel bag, Lajos went and parked the Land Rover in the garage alongside Farakhan’s black Aronde and the muddy, dilapidated Deux Chevaux used to get around the local roads and pastureland.
Farakhan greeted Ivy at the top of the front steps. He was a man in his forties wearing a beige pinwale corduroy suit with leather elbow patches, brown loafers, and a black silk shirt with a wide open collar. His high wide forehead seemed enormous because his blond hair was receding. He had blue eyes, a large hooked nose, a delicate fair mustache and a double chin. Ivy hugged him.
“You’ll freeze here. Let’s go in,” she said.
In the Art Nouveau living room Ivy sat down on a Vienna Secession sofa, put her wolf-fur coat down beside her and leant down over her travel bag as Farakhan poured drinks into conical glasses: top-up of scotch for himself, Coca-Cola for Lajos, vodka for Ivy. She tossed hers back, breathed out hard, and held out her glass for another. He poured.
“Careful,” he said. “It’s Stolovaya, hundred proof.”
Lajos entered, kissed Farakhan briefly on the side of the mouth, and reached for Ivy’s bag.
“I’ll take it up to your room,” he explained.
“Just a moment,” said Ivy.
She rooted through her case, took out an object wrapped in a clean cloth and placed it on the low table.
“Happy new year,” she said to Farakhan.
He undid the gift. It was a very poorly machined semi-automatic pistol fairly reminiscent of a Colt .45 with check-patterned wooden grips and an ideogram on the frame.
“For your collection,” said Ivy.
“It’s wonderful,” said Farakhan, who seemed genuinely delighted. “But what is it? I have never seen one before. Is it Viet?”
“Chinese, from Burma.”
“Ah,” said Farakhan. “The phantom army of Li Mi. Were you over there?”
“I spent a month in the Golden Triangle this summer. The KMT people are still there of course. They may have repatriated some to Taiwan, but most don’t want to leave. They have melted into the Shan insurgency and they are quite happy with that. The CIA is happy with it too. It creates a solid rear base for launching operations in Yunnan. And they produce opium like crazy. Which also suits the CIA just fine. Great for financing. It lets them conduct their ops without getting permission from above. Not even from Allen Dulles.” (Ivy drank half of her second vodka and got out her Gitanes.) “A pretty picture,” she said. “You must be very careful with that pistol if you fire it. To begin with, it looks like a .45 but it has been rebored for 9 mm Para. And then it is entirely handmade. It works—I’ve fired it. But after two or five hundred shots you can’t be sure it won’t explode. Be very careful.”
“Oh,” said Farakhan, “my collection is for admiring, not shooting. In any case I am truly thrilled. I thank you.”
“Don’t be silly,” replied Ivy. “I love you.”
Meanwhile Lajos had picked up the bag, now closed, and taken it upstairs to the bedroom prepared for Ivy. (The room was prepared for Ivy on the first of January every year.) Samuel Farakhan in his turn gave the young woman a gift: The Divine Comedy, in Alexandre Masseron’s French translation because Ivy had hardly any Italian. Each year Farakhan gave Ivy a book on the first of January, and she was tacitly bound to read it during the year even though she jibbed at reading great works of literature and preferred crime novels, illustrated magazines and comic books. On January 1, 1946, when they came to their agreement, Farakhan had told her that he would be responsible for her education. But at that time the issue was her institutional education. Farakhan had said: “You were not completely wrong when you threatened to expose my homosexuality as a way to harm me. What I propose is that you should provide me with a cover. That I send you to a school I know in Switzerland. That you spend several years there. Soon I’ll be leaving the armed forces and returning to England. You’ll come to visit me during the school holidays. The fact that I have a fifteen-year-old girl under my wing may raise eyebrows in some circles, but in the end it will be viewed as a far more acceptable idiosyncrasy than unnatural loves. Furthermore it will offer a plausible explanation for some of my more unusual behavior, especially my lack of interest in women of my own age.”
“A school in Switzerland,” said Ivory Pearl, “would be like the orphanage.”
Over several days during which the two had been talking, Farakhan had learnt that this adolescent girl had been in a horrible orphanage when the Germans invaded France. In the chaos of that time she had fled with other children. They lived by their wits until the young girl whom the nuns had called Marie Lenoir was picked up by some British infantrymen who took her along with them during the advance of 1944 and nicknamed her Ivory according to the rhyming slang method: Ivory Pearl/girl. Very soon they further shortened Ivory to Ivy. Farakhan thought it crazy for a fighting unit to adopt a little girl, but after all this was war, and the wildest things happened in war.
In any case the kid was eventually obliged to part from her English infantry friends and she made it to Berlin, where she lived from dodges and petty commerce and by selling souvenir-hunting soldiers photographs that she took and managed to get developed and printed. She had a stock of snaps taken during the final advance in 1945 thanks to a Leica and film scavenged from the body of an officer in a Mercedes military vehicle riddled with 20 mm fire from a marauding Mosquito. She wanted to become a professional photographer. She dreamt of meeting Robert Capa. She had an alarming predilection for images of dead bodies.
Farakhan said that at the school in Switzerland they could teach Ivy all the finer points of professional photography. What was more, she would receive the general education becoming all young ladies in the arts, letters and sciences, in foreign languages, sports, horse-riding, tennis and, if she so wished, golf and other “optional” activities.
“In three or four years,” Farakhan told Ivy, “you’ll take your baccalaureate exam, it’s very easy. You’ll be eighteen by then and an accomplished young woman, knowing how to talk about painting or music, also how to run a household. I’ll take you on. I possess a considerable fortune and various properties. You will be a manageress, not just an ornament. And, as I said, you will appear to be the object of my affections. What do you think?”
Ivy thought it over, then said that it was hard to answer, that while the picture painted by Farakhan was almost idyllic she was afraid of unforeseen drawbacks. It might be very different from the orphanage, she added, but like the orphanage all the same.
“I’ll have you meet Robert Capa,” vowed Farakhan.
The teenager’s dark eyes widened. And over the next few days the flight lieutenant convinced her to let him take care of her a little, and of her appearance, the result being that her hair was soon very short and she wore slacks and cardigans the right size, although she still had an oversized jacket instead of a three-quarter-length coat.
“Yes,” said Farakhan, “I can make the acquaintance of Robert Capa. It’s very simple. Society is divided into classes. Stars are accessible to men and women of the world. The poor never get to meet celebrities, which is why they idolize them. A man of the world like me can meet any celebrity. You simply have to know people who know other people who know others, etcetera. It’s very easy, really. And if you go to this school in Switzerland you will change your social class. You can’t imagine what that means. You can’t decide, because you don’t have all the facts.” Farakhan lit a Player’s with a Chinese-lacquered gold-plated lighter. “All the same, you must decide. Life is full of opportunities that never come again. And it’s rare to have all the knowledge needed to make a decision with certainty. But what do you stand to lose? Your freedom? Freedom to starve in a city in ruins until, inevitably, you are picked up and sent back to some orphanage in France?”
“I’m afraid your so-called school might change me.”
“It will enhance your talents,” said Farakhan. “As for your personality, I am fairly sure that it is already formed.”
“ All right,” said Ivy after a moment. “All right. I’ll do it.”
The two went on talking for a while and it was then that they solemnly swore to meet each year on January 1 for the anniversary of their pact.
And then, at the end of that January, right in the middle of the second trimester, Ivy entered the Swiss school, the Général Dufour College for Young Ladies, between Fribourg and Montreux. Time passed. The adolescent was taught good manners, foreign languages, science, arts and letters, and she even had special lessons in photography. She swam, she jumped, she climbed the rope, she rode in the mountains when spring came, but she disdained golf and tennis. She was good at languages but bad in other subjects. Everything was pretty much as Samuel Farakhan had predicted.
In the summers she stayed with the ex-officer, the first two in his Kent residence, and thereafter in the country house in Normandy to which he had moved.
She also visited him during winter vacations. Every New Year’s Day, since Farakhan collected guns, she presented him with one. In this way she brought him two Swiss semiautomatics, a Luger 06/29 and a Sig Model 49. Farakhan insisted anxiously on knowing where she obtained these weapons, sighing when she told him she had stolen them from an armory. He would strongly urge her not to do so again.
Ivy said: “Your so-called school may be enhancing my talents, but as for my personality, get used to it, it is already formed. Which is a good thing. I don’t think you’d like it if I got to be like the bunch of dimwits I’m with there.”
Farakhan gave her the complete works of Shakespeare in a single large volume with very thin but sturdy pages. He asked her to read it during the year. “You’ll find all the deeds and works of man in there,” he told her, “all the decrees of fate and all the revolutions in the world.”
Not long afterwards Ivy ran away from the Swiss school. It was the spring of 1950, and she was almost eighteen. She was arrested by the British police in Malaya, where she had contrived first to accompany the units operating against the Communist guerillas and then to join those guerillas. The maquisards took her Leica and Rolleiflex but showed no interest in her rolls of exposed film, which also escaped the attention of the English police. Brought back to France and roundly upbraided by Samuel Farakhan, the girl sold photos to Paris Match and Life. Later she passed the first part of her baccalaureate.
“You were right,” she told Farakhan. “It was very easy.”
Ivy never went back to the Swiss school and never took the second part of her bac. And Farakhan never kept his promise to have her introduced to the famous photographer Robert Capa, but Ivy met him nevertheless, not many years later, as a colleague, in the bar of the Ritz in Paris, just before he was killed near Dien Bien Phu.