Paris Twilight (33 page)

“Actually, what he did,” Rouchard said, “he took photographs.” At some point after Carlos's death, Saxe began slipping out of his hideaway dandied up in his old friend's business suits—he had grabbed some clothes and Carlos's identification papers before the SS squatters arrived. He'd stroll through Paris in his good cloth with his excellent camera, taking snapshots of street happenings. “But not just strolling, not always. And not just snapshots.” He documented things he'd heard of through the tympanum of the closet door.

“Was this at the behest of the Resistance, the Maquis?” Rouchard asked. “I don't know. I doubt it. Regardless, it was extremely provocative. I can only surmise that he had become almost obsessed with these others, these soldiers on the far side of the wall, and he would hear all these plots and plans, and he couldn't help himself. He had to see who these people were.” Had to see their rumblings play out in the light. “You can't conceive of the risk,” Rouchard said. Surely only Saxe's aristocratic attire protected him. “Uniformed societies harbor a refined connoisseurship of social status,” Rouchard said. “I can't think of any other reason he would have survived.” Carlos's clothes were Byron's suit of mail.

“It's worth savoring, you know. A German hiding from Germans, taking photos with a German camera of
la vie française
under German rule, protected by a Spanish cravat. Well, there's a geography to many things, as it turns out.” Saxe stored the exposed rolls in his room, Rouchard said. He could hardly have developed them. The odor of chemicals would have given him away.

And then the event that brought this perilous refuge to an end. One night (so Corail Barayón's widow in Geneva told Rouchard), Saxe heard a rumor through the wall, and the very next morning he packed up his camera and left. “And I can envision even what she didn't say, because I know of the place he went to,” Rouchard told me. “Every Parisian knows it and remembers what happened there, though no Parisian wants to.” The place was a new Utopian housing development envisioned by its designers as such a peaceful spot that it had been nicknamed the City of the Silent. A mammoth modernist complex with a set of landmark residential towers still under construction when the invasion happened, it wasn't specifically requisitioned by France's new overlords, except briefly as a barracks, but it was turned to their special purpose anyway, under the groveling management of “my countrymen.”

It stood on the city outskirts, and when Saxe showed up on this morning, he could hardly have blended in. “In those clothes? Anyway, this wasn't like the crowds in town. He must have just marched right up to it,” Rouchard said, “insane as that sounds.” Then (Rouchard was told) an extraordinary thing occurred. Two men rushed out at Saxe's approach, but it wasn't to arrest him or turn him away, not at all. “You found us with no trouble?” one of them asked in French, pumping his hand, and Saxe had the presence of mind to answer in German as he was ushered along to begin his scheduled duties as a contract photographer. He spent the morning in Hades, making pictures of what he found there.

“And what he found,” Rouchard said, “were children.” Thousands of them, hordes of children heaped on one another in squalor, nakedness, and near starvation in the dank shell of a Utopian ruin, the older ones taking care somewhat of the younger, though the youngest were barely weaned and the oldest barely teenagers, “for you see, if they had been even fifteen or sixteen, big enough that the Germans could pretend they were being sent off to work, they would have been deported with their parents to the ovens. But you can't keep up the pretense it's a work camp if you're sending toddlers to it.”

The Germans had been afraid of inflaming French sentiment by openly deporting children to the camps. But the French authorities argued that, in the name of humanity—“they damned well knew what it looked like,” Rouchard said—the children should go. Outraged at the barbarity of splitting up families, the French insisted that compassion required that children accompany their mothers to their deaths. And in the standoff between these rival decencies, the children piled up, arriving from around the occupied zone and from Vichy; from other camps, established and makeshift (including a bicycle
vélodrome
turned human stockade, a circle of hell in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower); from the massive roundups of foreign-born Jews that were mounted throughout the summer. The parents passed quickly through the transit camp, while the children remained, feral castoffs warehoused for weeks.

Saxe wandered among this rabble, photographing their faces and their world, the wooden, hand-lettered dog tags supplied for each child because so many were too young to know their own names. Then the event he'd gotten wind of commenced, and gendarmes arrived to cull out the selectees who would experience the only thing Saxe could imagine that was more horrific than this captivity—sealed boxcars packed with children rolling through France and Germany and Poland, the first of the deliveries that would ultimately reunite the orphans with their families through the agency of a crematorium.

All would perish on the transport or in Auschwitz, Rouchard said, and Saxe's photos would survive the war to remain the only visual record of the day. He'd turned in his film as he'd left the compound; the photographs were printed and archived in Berlin, where they are said to represent the very finest photographic work, by leagues more profound than anything else in the oeuvre of the German photographer Saxe was mistaken for—you could see the intensity of the man's roused conscience seeping through his documentarian composure, an artistic awakening made all the more poignant by the fact that it had overtaken this man, the German photographer Saxe was mistaken for, on the very last day of his life. On his way home from the assignment, one of so many he'd fulfilled for the Wehrmacht, he was knocked down by a grocer's van while crossing the street to catch a bus.

“There's a bit of historical confusion on that score,” Rouchard said. “The police report of the incident states that he was killed in the morning, though that is obviously an error, because the film he shot clearly chronicles events that can be verified to have occurred between noon and one thirty of the afternoon of that day.” The accident report had been cited by one of the photographer's academic biographers, in her volume
The Redeeming Light
, as yet another example of the notorious slipshoddiness of French official record keeping.

As Rouchard gave out his tale, I felt only impassivity, a muffled asbestos stupor immobilizing me against any reaction at all. It was a fearful peace; Rouchard's conclusion bore down on me as inescapably as the truck that had flattened the luckless German photographer. My dinner mate, meanwhile, did not share my calm. His emotions skittered here and there as though he himself had lost control before his careening account. He'd nearly come to tears at one point. Now, concluding his rendition of the caper of the mistaken photographer, he erupted in seeming anger. “Don't you find it preposterous!” he demanded of me, a muted yell. Daisy bumped, alarmed, beneath the table.

“What?” I said.

“The whole thing!” he said. “Understand, I am a lawyer. And at the same time, underneath, I still think of myself as something of an anarchist. And in either of those identities, I am offended by this story. A man steps off a sidewalk and is hit by a truck, okay. But that this accident would then spare the life of another man that morning, one who, as a result, goes on to witness a horror that would have affected the first man not at all but that compels the second to commit a heroic rescue of yet another human being who ultimately would not have been rescued at all if a step had been slower or the delivery wagon's fender just a little to the left or the right or the windscreen not so dirty.”

Or look at it another way, he said. “A beautiful woman sits before me in a restaurant in Paris, a woman whose life has been a good one and who has benefited many other lives and who would not be here, at least not with me, and who would not be at all who she is had the man who intervened in her life so improbably, so many years ago, not himself been improbably saved by the precise convergence, according to an exquisite coincidence of direction and velocity and time and inattention, of a delivery truck and a pedestrian going to work. Does this not disturb you? Oh, it does me, madame. For it tells me that life is either a thorough game of chance and the greatest of fates at the mercy of the merest whim, which leaves no room for law, or that the hand of Providence can reach out of the future to shade the wheel a centimeter and give a sufficient tap to the pedal, in which case my liberty is destroyed.

“I leave you the choice,” he said, and he bent to comfort Daisy, who was beginning to whimper condolences. I stared at his stooped back—his gray suit coat bulged over the white tablecloth like a stone in a Zen garden—and felt grateful for the idle seconds that let my cognition catch up with the news. When he surfaced, his face was ruddy. “Where was I?” he said.

“Y
OU WERE ABOUT TO TELL
me he didn't go to Spain,” I ventured. A crazy toss.

“Saxe?” Rouchard said. “Oh, but he very much did! But how did you know of Spain?”

“Céleste,” I confessed. “She said he had contacts there but was caught in Bordeaux en route.”

“Yes, well, Marseille,” Rouchard said. He seemed unsure which thread to pick up. “It was much more than contacts,” he said. By that summer, the Maquis, “my countrymen too, I must remember, we weren't all
collabos
,” had established an underground railroad spiriting Jews out of the German-occupied zone, funneling them into Barcelona and the coastal cities of Italian-seized Provence. “Because Franco was like Mussolini, a dictator who resisted surrendering his Jews to Hitler. He'd already surrendered his pyrites and wolfram to the cause of German rearmament. Now the Führer wants his Jews as well? Ha!” So that's why it made sense that Saxe might look to Spain for safe haven. “But that's it, you see; that's the problem. They arrested Saxe in Marseille, but Marseille is not on the way to Spain,” Rouchard said. “Not from Paris. Anyway, he wasn't headed for Spain when they caught him.” He looked at me a long while, as though this were a call and response and the next line belonged to me. Then he said, “He was coming back.”

Rouchard couldn't tell me exactly what Saxe had done while in Spain or exactly how he'd done it, only that three weeks after he'd made his way south along the Côte Basque roads to La Bidassoa, he'd left Spain by another route, and that once back in France he'd followed the Mediterranean coast eastward with his companion to Marseille, “for now he was no longer alone.” He arrived in the port with a young child, a girl, whom he left with his Maquis contacts, specifically with the XIV Corps. “Do you . . .? No, of course not.” And of course Rouchard told me about the unit of the defeated army of the Spanish Republic that had regrouped in southern France as an anti-Fascist guerrilla force. The corps understood who the girl was; they'd of course have known of her parents. They placed her in the care of two American Quakers in Marseille embarking for Galveston on the freighter
Champlain Ressuscité
, via connection in Rabat.

“And so, you see, I have many details, but no essence, beyond the basics,” which Rouchard's French love of delineation divided into two equal parts: his knowledge that Saxe had gone into Spain alone and come out with a child, and his conviction, based on that knowledge, of Saxe's motivation. Saxe had paid off his grief debt to the doomed children of the City of the Silent, Rouchard said, by finding a single Spanish child and saving her.

“What you call his guilt,” I said. “Those children.”

“Let me tell you something,” Rouchard replied. In Geneva, Madame Barayón had spoken of this subject and had recounted what Saxe had told her, that on that day, as he wandered through the prison, he'd endured a sort of regression. Surrounded with urchins, knowing what was about to happen to them, he felt himself a child again as well, one more foreign-Jew orphan no different than the others. Except for the essential distinction that they were being loaded onto transports or returned to their cells while he could turn on his heel and turn in his film and exit through the front door, detained only momentarily by official exclamations of gratitude and promises of prompt payment, “and I think the monstrous inequity of it—the caprice—must have overwhelmed him. Byron became that terrible, inconsolable thing, the child who survives.”

Nevertheless, no; this wasn't the guilt to which Rouchard had alluded. That was toward another child (and this part Rouchard had from Byron Saxe himself), the very child Saxe had rescued. Saxe knew there was a more rightful heir to the property he'd inherited, a proper resident for the house he refused to inhabit. But how to make restitution? He'd lost track of the girl, and the comrades who had arranged her passage had perished in the war. “So ultimately he did something inventive.” He drafted the legal system into the task—“
Merveilleux!
All of France a bloodhound! And me!”—by appointing the lost girl his heir and willing her both of his independent properties, the smaller one bought for him by his father and the larger one given him by hers, along with the endowment for permanent upkeep and maintenance, to which Saxe had attached a not insignificant obligation, “by the way,” that his heir must uphold the continued lifetime salary and support of one Céleste Marie Bowdoin.

“Oh hell!” I exclaimed, and I felt a gush of relief, my consternations and bafflements chased away like humidity by lightning: finally, this saga had burst the bounds of credibility. “But—she loathed Saxe! Céleste.
Loathes
him! Anyway, Landers arranged her support.”

“Umnnhhh,” Rouchard said, and the single drawn-out syllable presented a thorough legal rebuttal in its intricate and irrefutable entirety. “I recall,” he said. “She's quite a dreadful Jew hater, isn't she, our Madame Concierge. But however it may contradict her feelings, or ours, the truth is she owes her great good luck to a Jew. Again, I can only guess how this happened. But that's not so hard, you see.”