Three

From childhood Paule had been frightened that she might be left alone. Now she discovered that the fright was over and that she might have ended it at any time by walking away from dread and leaving it behind her. On the 11th of November, 1938, twenty hours after leaving Berlin forever, she held Paul-Alain in her arms, and stared out of the train window at the outskirts of Paris. She was marveling at the death of her fear. She was free; she would never set foot in Germany again. That exalted her, but she would never see Veelee again and she could not think about that. As the train rolled into the Gare Austerlitz she felt transmigrated to another life. She was free of the helplessness and the speechlessness which her marriage had become but most of all she was free of the lifelong fear of being left behind, alone.

She and Paul-Alain raced through the halls and galleries and terraces at Cours Albert I with Clotilde and Mme. Citron running along behind them weeping. Each time they came to another side of the house they would troop out to overlook the beautiful city and Paule would point out the landmarks to her son. Over and over again Mme. Citron said that he certainly was a big boy. Paul-Alain had never seen such a big apartment. He said that he never wanted to leave it and that they could play all kinds of games with closets and fireplaces and long, open windows like these. When one of the maids rushed in with two cablegrams, one stamped from Burgos and the other from Berlin, Paule tore them in half, said there would be no reply, thank you, and threw the pieces into the fire.

While her son napped Paule called three old friends and was invited out for three nights running. She called Maître Gitlin and asked him to take her out to dinner. She called Rufin Portu and made arrangements to begin the sittings for her portrait, five years late, because her father had wanted it. She called a coiffeuse, two couturiers, an interior decorator, a toy store, and an employment agency. That afternoon she had her lustrous, long black hair cut short and dyed blond. She ordered eleven new dresses and suits; flowers for six rooms of the flat; a toy boat and a bicycle; and hired a chef de cuisine to begin work the following Monday. The next day she started to redecorate the apartment, and she installed Paul-Alain in her old room and moved herself into her father’s enormous, mirrored plantation of a bedroom.

While she was dining with Maître Gitlin, a young stage director who had been an apprentice under her father stopped at their table, and after expressing his pleasure at her return, asked if he might call her. She said that she would be in touch with him as soon as she got settled, and she took his number.

As they explored the soufflé Maître Gitlin expressed what was on his legal mind.

“Now, do you want me to begin divorce proceedings?”

No.

“Shall I seek a legal separation?”

“No, thank you, Maître.”

“Shall I petition to have a French court appoint you the legal guardian of your child?”

“No. Paul-Alain is with me and that is enough. His father has been hurt enough.”

“Will you reconcile?”

“I don’t see how we could. He doesn’t even understand why we have separated. It is a frustrating thing to have your marriage turned to stone by politicians.”

When Paule was alone at Cours Albert that night, she sat wrapped in furs on the eastern terrace, facing the hill of Montmartre, and began to think with her body again. She could feel herself shedding the anxiety about being a Jew in Germany. Her fear was moving away with the speed of a planet. She had earned the right to stay sane, and the only price seemed to be loneliness.

At a quarter to one she telephoned the young stage director who had stopped to chat with them that evening. Germany was a place of the dead, but not Paris, she thought joyously and lustfully. When she heard his voice she said that if he was alone she would like to visit him. She slept with him that night, the next, and the night after that. Then she moved on to another man.

The young director was not the second man Paule had ever been to bed with, but he was the first since she had met her husband, the first man since her husband had gone off to Spain sixteen months before; he was the first warm, quick, clean body she had held in her legs and arms since she had felt that filth in the alcove in Berlin. After him, they came to her or she went to them in endless procession. As she drowned herself in sex she would think of the ancient Teutonic concept of hell—an underground place called Nifleheim, an icy cavern of freezing pain through all eternity—and as she consumed more and more men she thought joyfully that she was punishing Veelee in a way that would leave the deepest wound, so that he could become disgusted with her and they could be free of one another forever.

The blind abandon of her nights was tempered by the cleansing and healing serenity of her days with Paul-Alain. She never brought men home, and she never stayed with them after dawn. She rose with Paul-Alain, dressed him, petted him, played with him, loved him, and lived for him. They spent their days at the merry-go-round, on the seesaws, and at the puppet shows of the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens. They sailed boats and rode the donkeys along the Champs-Elysées between the Concorde and the Rond-Point; they fed milk out of nursing bottles to little piglets and gave carrots to little goats in the Jardin d’Acclimatation; they rode the small train and tasted the delights of the Cirque Medrano. They knew every zoo and they strolled together happily, complimenting the flowers on their beauty in the Jardins des Plantes. They went to the seashore in the summer and they skied in the winter, and together they drew applause on figure skates. She taught Paul-Alain to count, to read, and to write before he went to school.

Like her father before her, every Friday night Paule told her son the ancient stories from the proud history of the Jews. “When the Greeks came to the Near East after Alexander the Great, they brought with them their philosophies of pleasure, which the Jews saw only as a threat of national suicide. We wanted nothing to do with their views on morals and art, but their philosophers fascinated us. We tinkered with the ancient Greek philosophies and debated them back and forth among us, subtly changing them until the Greeks became attentive to all our changes and took the renovated philosophies back to Greece. Thus we provided the world with a Jewish cloak called Christianity, and in exchange we found ourselves wearing a Greek robe called Talmudism.”

Paul-Alain had his grandfather’s great gifts. He could throw the whole household into convulsions of laughter when he entertained them with his imitations of the world he saw every day. Like his grandfather he was a great eater, and he never grew tired of the story of the trick played on Lesrois. He made it a point to tell people that he was a German and that his father was a colonel in the German Army. Paule made sure that he knew all of the von Rhode family tales of glory and prowess, of the historic battles they had led and won, of the great horses they had mastered and the medals they had been awarded, but she always thought of him as a French boy. They spoke French throughout the day but talked in German every evening until his bedtime. Paul-Alain was his mother’s universe, her garden, her song, her food, and her meaning.

In March, 1940, Rufin Portu telephoned Paule. She had had a standard, short-term affair with Portu during the Christmas season of 1938. Portu was impersonal about everything except his work. In painting her she had become a part of his work and he had made love to her much as the librettist of Aïda would have made love to Amneris—not to the actress who was playing Amneris. Then, after the portrait had been finished, Portu undertook to paint a likeness of the daughter of a purple chieftain from Lake Chad, and, as always, he extended the art of his art, and Paule had found another man.

“Paule?”

“Yes.”

“Rufin.”

“Who?”

“Rufin Portu. Can you come by for a drink this afternoon?”

“Why?”

“Isn’t a surprise better than a reason?”

“No.”

“Well … Now don’t be angry.”

“Now there are two whys. Why should I be angry?”

“I am not procuring you for someone.”

“Why not?”

“Paule, listen. There is this man. He knows painting—I mean it. Have I ever said that? He knows the problems and he knows the results. So I like him. He saw a photograph of your portrait and said, ‘I have to meet that woman.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe, perhaps.’ I didn’t say yes, of course. You know? He squatted and stared at the picture. I have it in half-size, in black and white, and it is very good for black and white. I thought that he was just posing, and I didn’t say anything. But he stared at it for so long that I asked him why. I suppose that I was waiting for him to say that it was a wonderful painting, which of course I like to hear. But he said, ‘Why is the hair blond?’ ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘She is not intended to be blond,’ he said. ‘You have found the wounds behind her mask,’ he said. ‘If we could retrace the way and collect all this woman’s tears, we could swim in them,’ he said.”

“Who is he, Portu?”

“My countryman, José Zorra, Duke of Miral. Good bones, wonderful nose, very silent eyes like a manager of matadors.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, yes. But I have said enough.”

“Not what he said about me. About him.”

“How can a man tell a woman about a man? Come to my house and see him. Observe his tailoring. Guess his age, which I would put at about fifty. Feel the texture of his hand when he greets you. Eat with him, hear him talk. Then, if the signals are good, sleep with him, and count a few more minutes saved from the moments after you are dead.”

Miral was waiting in Portu’s high-ceilinged studio in the rue Lavoisier. Against the baseboards there stood brightly colored portraits and scrapbooks of photographs of portraits. Paule had dressed carefully in a white wool suit and a white wool cape trimmed with silver fox. Portu introduced them, excused himself to make a drink, and never came back.

Paule could feel Miral’s eyes on her like warm hands. She leaned into his silence, and they sat, facing each other, but not speaking, for many minutes.

Finally he spoke, mocking her gently. “Well? Tell me about despair.”

“Mine, your Grace, or yours?”

“If you could tell me about someone else’s despair you would not be desperate.”

“If I am desperate it is because I know others’ desperation. I lived in Germany for six years.” I see.

“Why have you decided I am desperate, your Grace?”

“Why did you dye your hair such a color?”

“You say that as though I were more villainous than desperate.”

“Villainy is a state of grace. It believes in its own deeds for their own sake. Consider the lives of the saints, each of them struck down by their most terrible egos. That is villainy. To create a state of mind which pursues the abstract until it burns or stones one to death—that must be villainy in God’s sight. For the saints were his creatures and forbidden to take vengeance against themselves. Vengeance was His, He saith.”

“Do you say now that I am desperate because I am a villain, and that I am a villain because I take vengeance upon myself by dyeing my hair?”

“Something like that.”

“You don’t like blondes?”

“I adore blondes. My late wife was a blonde. Incredible and very beautiful. But I would not have liked it if she had dyed her hair green.”

They dined late. He started by amusing her, became fascinating, then learned, then protectively prescient. He had a long memory, a good mind, a jauntily egotistical manner, and could make her laugh.

As they strolled along the Avenue Marceau toward Cours Albert I the street light fell at an angle upon the silver of his bared head, as he walked hat in hand. The effect of this image on her was gone instantly, but it had been there long enough to save her and she never forgot it. He was like her father. She thought she saw a sanctuary.