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.