Crossing the Borders of Time (33 page)

For those who suffered the barren routine of deprivation, however, it gradually spawned tension, envy, suspicion, and hatred. Consumers reviled as greedy and opportunistic the very suppliers on whom they depended. City dwellers accused the farmers of jacking up prices, farmers resented those in the city for hoarding resources, and everyone jealously eyed what others were getting. The wealthy who managed to acquire things beyond the reach of less fortunate neighbors were despised with more vitriol than even the Germans. They turned themselves into targets for denunciation based upon the clothing they wore, the magic deliveries that arrived at their doorsteps, and the smells that wafted from their apartments like a tantalizing essence of privilege.

In June, with classes over, Roland opted for a simple life, after he and a tall and brawny Algerian Jewish friend encountered a woman selling a kayak. Though the price was steep for their means, the two young men impetuously bought it together and managed to get it to Saint-Germain-au-Mont-d’Or, a town on the Saône north of Lyon. From there they paddled to a small, uninhabited river island, pitched a tent, and decided to spend the month of July camping under the stars. They kept bicycles tied up on shore for trips to seek food, and they padded their diet with little fish they caught on a string, grilled in the open, and popped whole and crunchy into their mouths. While friends occasionally rowed out to visit the campsite where they presided like indigenous kings, they spent most of their time swimming, kayaking, lolling on the banks of the Saône, and baking themselves on their own island fiefdom. Janine was never able to get there, and she counted the days until his return, even as his eager departure delivered the message that, where she was concerned, a casual friendship suited his needs.

In the weeks he was gone, Janine tried to forget him and went so far as to agree to be introduced to a young rabbi who, Mimi insisted to Sigmar and Alice, would represent an excellent match. Aiming to cut a dashing impression in equestrian garb of fitted jacket, jodhpurs, and boots, the rabbi called at the place Rambaud in order to meet Janine and her parents. Sigmar gaped, astounded, as the young man straddled his chair, having flipped it around so that the back of it rose between his splayed thighs like the head of a horse, and then held forth for over an hour.

“So this is a rabbi?” Sigmar subsequently mused aloud, shaking his head as he summoned to mind the dignified Rabbi Zimels of Freiburg. He would have rejoiced to see his daughter marry a rabbi, but this one seemed a self-impressed fop, and Sigmar concurred with Janine’s decision not to invite his further attentions.

At the end of July, Roland returned to Lyon slim and dark, his hair grown long and his skin kissed gold by the sun, even more impossibly handsome than Janine recalled.
Basané
—tanned by the sun. That was how his friend from the island described him, and that was how she would think of him always, his skin smooth and sleek and lacquered the golden color of honey. Captive to the physical longing his grace and beauty always aroused, she worshipped him like a primeval totem. She felt complete only when near him. Roland became her reason for being. Like many others of her generation, she was under the spell of a feminine model learned from her mother, a desire to serve and worship her man. And in her it was charged by the potent force of an aesthetic attraction that held her entranced.

Once Roland was back in the city, Janine reverted to searching for him in the usual places—the cafés, the bookstores around the place Bellecour, the stalls that lined the quay of the Saône under the sheltering branches of chestnut trees, and along the stretch of the rue de la République where she knew he strolled in the late afternoons. She risked getting home late to linger in front of the Opéra, where he would have to pass by on the way to his building. But their impromptu talks, generally occurring in front of his friends, were rarely of any personal nature.

Roger came home to their room one day that August to find Roland writhing in bed, wet with fever, near delirious, and groaning in pain. His pants gaped open, and his trembling fingers were clutching his abdomen, stiff and distended. His clothes and sheets were sodden with vomit. Roger ran for help, and when he returned hours later with a doctor in tow, Roland was unconscious. Emergency surgery confirmed the diagnosis of a ruptured appendix, with pus contaminating the abdominal cavity leading to virulent peritonitis. Even after the operation, there remained serious potential for developing sepsis, a bacterial infection polluting the blood, which often proved fatal.

Each day, Janine rushed after work to Roland’s room in the Clinique Vendôme, though her parents believed she was spending time with Malou. At his bedside, she stroked his hot brow with cooling compresses, attempted to talk, held his hand, straightened his pillows, and fervently prayed for his recovery. She read to him without really knowing whether he heard her and tried to coax him back to life. She came prepared with political stories, news of the war, and gossip of friends. She watched him sleep, massaged his shoulders, and worried about the weight he was losing. Yet as he slowly roused to awareness, and the doctor said he should try to eat solid food, Janine despaired of her failure to find any dish tasty enough to entice him.

“I can’t assure you he’s out of the woods,” Dr. Pesson conceded. “He’s an extremely sick young man, and it’s too soon to tell which way this will turn. But it would help if we could build his strength to fight the infection.”

So began Janine’s career as a nurse, a role for which she had amply studied in Gray and which she would play long into the future. She quizzed the doctor and learned the importance of fluids to boost circulation; she searched the city for sources of glucose and paid for it out of her own meager salary. Miraculously, soon Roland appeared to rally a little, and her joy in her hospital visits gradually mounted, as they provided the chance to be at his side. For the first time, she knew every day where she could find him, and she made use of his weakness to anoint him with love and such tender attentions that the closeness she had strived to achieve since the day they first met now, at last, in intimate quiet started to flourish.

Still, her happiness in his budding response and her understanding of how it had happened inexorably touched off moral self-doubt. Was she secretly pleased that this brush with death had so helplessly placed him into her care? In the disconnected hospital room, as removed from life as a prison cell, she had made herself essential to him. Guilt invaded her most precious moments: when he smiled at her with thanks in his eyes, kissed her fingers, or held her hand. When she wished they might stay, forever together, alone in that room. When she caught herself hoping he wouldn’t recover and leave her too quickly, before she had taught him to love her and want her. She agonized that God would punish her for it, that to teach her a lesson about discovering joy as a by-product of another’s pain, Roland would suffer a relapse, perhaps even die. But that horrible fear evolved, she saw, from an equally horrible, selfish conception. Why would God use Roland as an expendable tool for teaching
her
something? Was
she
that important?

As Roland’s condition slowly improved and she saw him return her gestures of love, her fear dissipated. Still, five weeks passed after Roland’s emergency surgery before Dr. Pesson delivered a cheery prognosis with an avuncular clap on his young patient’s shoulder. “Well, my friend, you’re saved,” he announced. “Frankly, I thought you were finished. But it looks like you’re lucky—you’re going to make it.”

Less apparent was how much he had changed, as the awareness of death lent him some of the wisdom of age. The life of casual friendships and carefree good times had lost its attractions. Beyond gratitude for Janine’s dedication to his recovery, in the closeness of hours they had shared Roland had surprised them both by falling in love. How could he help but respond to her kind ministrations? And if, when he saw her approaching, he sank a little lower in bed—wan, parched lipped, and slightly disheveled—who could blame him for not wanting to look too much better for fear that it might slacken her care?

Over weeks of talks and peaceful silences alone with him in his room, she grew dearer to him than anyone else. Having come from a home where conversation generally meant bridging the gaps between courses at dinner, he luxuriated in hearing her stories and bathed in the calming alto tones of her voice. So she ransacked the suitcase of her experience for the most compelling memories to rouse him and nudge him back toward the land of the living, the place where he would love her robustly and never find cause to leave her again.

When Roland was well enough to be released from the hospital, the doctor nonetheless advised a rest in the country. Not allowed: climbing four long flights to the room he shared with Roger. Reluctantly, Roland agreed to spend a month at the home of a family friend in the western suburb of Ecully, which left Janine distraught. Almost two years had passed since their first separation, in the panic-whipped days when war was declared, and that parting had stolen him from her. This time, when Roland left Lyon, thin and frail, Janine feared that the man who came back would again be the one who had readily left her before to spend a month self-sufficiently camped on an island—a man content to travel alone. A man she had already seen in her dreams: a man in a kayak, his skin shining gold in the light of the sun, paddling past her, waving to her as she stood by herself on the banks of a river.

It was an image she carried back from her nights and tortured herself by bringing to mind, a vision of how she would lose him again. How helplessly she would watch him float by! She would cry to him over the rippling waters, but there were already so many cries in the world that hers would be lost and drown in the clamor, and she would watch him vanish into the distance.

“
J’attendrai
,” she would whisper the words of her favorite song, whose lyrics comprised a promise to wait. With its echo of loss and unfulfilled longing, this tune would drift above the course of her years and battle forever the onrush of time that carried Roland farther and farther into the past. Even so, her love would remain perpetually with her, like a star whose glittering beam continues to journey into the present, long after the spark of its life is extinguished:

J’attendrai, le jour et la nuit
,
J’attendrai toujours ton retour
,
J’attendrai
 …
Le temps passe et court en battant tristement
,
dans mon coeur si lourd
,
Et pourtant, j’attendrai ton retour
,
et pourtant, j’attendrai ton retour
,
j’attendrai
.

I shall wait day and night,
I shall always await your return,
I shall wait …
Time passes and runs and sadly beats
in my too heavy heart,
And yet I shall await your return,
and yet I shall await your return,
I shall wait.

THIRTEEN
A TIME OUT OF TIME

W
HEN
R
OLAND RETURNED TO
L
YON
at the end of September, the greatest challenge was finding a place where he and Janine could be alone. On the single occasion he attempted to bring her up to his room, simply to sew a button onto his coat, his concierge indignantly ordered them back to the street. Yet appearing together in public was not without its hazards, as well. One afternoon, the young rabbi whose courtship she’d spurned spotted Janine walking arm in arm on the street with Roland, and he rushed to tell Mimi what he had witnessed. The picture the rabbi painted for her, the evident physical closeness in the way the young couple touched and talked and looked at each other, propelled the unhappy woman up the Presqu’île to report to her uncle. Wings of envy sped Mimi’s arrival, so that Sigmar and Alice had already heard an ample report of Janine’s unsanctioned romantic outing on the arm of a stranger even before she walked in the door. When Sigmar inquired where she had been, she pretended a crisis had detained her at work, a lie that enraged him. As punishment, he directed his eighteen-year-old daughter straight to bed with orders not to place a foot on the floor for three days, except to go to the bathroom.