Pictures at an Exhibition (18 page)

At home, Chaim did his best to hide his impatience from me, but it was unmistakable. Three questions preoccupied him: when would he learn the news of his wife and son; when would I find a job instead of loafing about Paris; and when would I leave him in peace. We had
not re-created the closeness I felt to him after his visit to the Lalieu house. It would be years before he would speak to me again about the war.

Thus, more to satisfy Chaim than myself, I found work filing immigration requests to Australia, a country that seemed about as imaginable to me as the moon. Shortly thereafter, I announced that I had taken an apartment in the Fifth, which was untrue. I told Chaim I would move in two weeks. Thus, I had two weeks to locate a flat and make my invention fact.

I understood that a career, or at least an office and a weekly salary, as well as a place for a young man to hang his hat, were important trappings of adulthood. Yet I did not understand that if the young man elects these trappings not because he wants them, but due to someone other than himself, they will tie him only loosely to the adult world.

And so I considered striking out on my own, always thinking of Rose. There she was, maddeningly shaped in a woolen bathing suit at the public swimming pool, swimming vigorous laps and knocking into the other swimmers because she had no goggles. Or glimpsed between the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, in a beret with a basketful of artichokes on her arm and a little boy who held her free hand and waited patiently to ride a mangy pony.

Nonetheless, those days of looking for everything that was not there became more and more unreal. Then it was a sunless Sunday that belonged in February. I would find Rose, I decided, at Saint-Sulpice. Before the war, gloomy days sent her to that church and its frescoes. I rode the Métro from Saint-Paul, changed trains in the human jungle of Châtelet, and emerged two blocks from the church's plaza just as it began to rain.

I entered the sanctuary's damp hush. Saint-Sulpice was a good church for a Jew. The Delacroix was just inside, on the right, built into the first crook of it, with a mural on either wall of the nave and a small lectern in between, explaining the paintings and their significance as if one were in a museum. I told myself that if I stood in front of Delacroix's
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
long enough, Rose would appear. I had learned the painting very well.

Perhaps due to my state of mind, upon my return to the Delacroix in May of 1945,I thought, This is a very erotic picture, and was confused by the androgyny of the angel, its purple flowing robes, and the pose of the figures that, at first glance, was as much about waltzing as wrestling. No lady angel, though, in the history of painting has such sinewy thighs or shoulders. I loved the white-blue flash of Jacob's garb and the effort and tenderness of his bowed head. He is muscle and strain, and his body gives the painting its movement, its crossed lines and limbs. The jab of his knee makes the angel's hem ripple like water. The angel's hands grip and grasp—the fateful touch on the thigh—but his celestial body shows no motion. The gray wings are uselessly leaden. The hind foot is raised but not flexed, the front foot is planted and the knee bent for forward motion, but Gabriel tips backward. He merely holds the struggling Jacob in place.

No, then I understood: this is the moment when the angel, still poised to wrestle, looks into the nothingness, accepts defeat, goes slack, and teeters under the weight of those ridiculous wings. Jacob still fights with all his might; he has not yet realized that he has pushed the angel away from, at least, the picture's center line. Or the son of Isaac cannot believe his victory. I marveled at the painting. Its time moves from left to right. How beautiful to capture the body so, in the flicker between movements. Jacob's form is Delacroix's technical miracle. The angel is the intellectual triumph, even if its execution is less compelling. Jacob is the one we want to watch.

My mother had read me this story once, decades before, in a book of biblical tales for children she had brought from Poland. She translated and summarized out loud, and I studied the lurid, lovely picture. I remembered the phrase, “The angel touched Jacob in the hollow of his thigh.” It was very mysterious to me, but it was one of the few phrases that my mother translated identically each time.

Then I looked up to find Rose beside me.

“Rose.” Drops of water stood out, silvery against her blue coat. The face so often imagined showed me its changes. I said, “You've grown younger.” There was a shadow between her brows, a darkening
under her eyes, yet she was more girlish than I had seen her look. Or, if she had aged, it had only made her more beautiful. It was all I could do not to clutch her to me. I had not, in the dim light, with my eyes playing tricks, realized how closely her hair was cropped.

“And you older.”

“One hopes.” I saw in Rose's hand that she had bought a box of candles from the church. I detected the honeysuckle scent that still made me dizzy. My hands trembled.

“You've seen the gallery,” she said, and it was not a question. I nodded. “What of Bertrand?”

I shook my head, and she said nothing more as she followed me out.

IT HAD CEASED TO RAIN, THOUGH DAMPNESS WAS IN
the air, and the plaza and its stones and statues were washed and darkened. The sound of the fountain was joyous. The piles of leaves blown against the trees glistened. The sky was cleared, as if a hand had brushed the clouds aside and left only stripes of pink against the blue.

Rose sat on one of the fountain's ledges, at the foot of an enormous stone bishop. The bishop's hands rested on his sturdy knees and he stared at the church before him, which I imagined bore his name. Rose tapped at the granite, saying, “Sit beside me.”

She began to talk. Her thoughts darted like sparrows. I could not follow everything she said.

“I lived in your house for two weeks after you fled. Because Auguste and Lucie were kept on in the household, I was not afraid, and I did not know where else to go. Then one morning as we ate breakfast—and it was a morose affair without you—a man wearing a toupee appeared in the kitchen and announced that he was to take charge of the gallery. That the government had assigned him as its Aryan administrator. Naturally we all protested. Lucie went crazy. I conducted my research. Of course, it was convenient for Vichy to decree that Jews could no longer own businesses, because then we
were less likely to note when the owners disappeared. Bureaucracy trundles on, unabated, through murder.”

She touched her ear, that old self-conscious habit, checking that the earring was in place. I could not speak.

“Eventually, we got used to him, the Aryan administrator. The fellow was just a clerk and, in his person, mostly harmless. He checked the gallery's vaults at the Chase Bank and had just enough of a sense of duty and national Vichy pride not to pilfer from them shamelessly. Then he filed his useless reports riddled with spelling errors. Joslin, that was his name. He misspoke when he wanted to sound clever and did not really vex any of us much except Lucie. And after she threw another fit and then a table lamp, he kept his distance. I worried, really, only over the cruelty of the insecure man.”

Rose shook her head. She did not object to my enfolding her small hand within my own, so I let her talk until she tired.

“Auguste always opened windows when Joslin entered a room to try to blow the toupee from his pointy head.

“This city became vile to me. Nazi flags draped down over rue de Rivoli, and everywhere you could hear the sound of jackboots. We bought candles at the churches because the electricity began to fail—and keeps failing.” She picked up the box she had bought in the church and shook it.

“I was moved from the Louvre, which was by then completely emptied, to the Jeu de Paume.” Rose named the king's tennis courts, now the museum of modern art, its collection made largely of gifts from Bertrand's uncle Isaac.

“The number of Germans working at the Jeu de Paume each day doubled. And how they complained of the Parisians’ sourness, the shuttered city! Still, in every perfume shop, there was a Nazi officer, handing over a stack of money to buy toilet water for his mistress. The soldiers on the Métro platforms, waiting patiently, with their false passivity, letting the women enter before them.” Rose shuddered. “Did you see children with rickets in the town where you were hidden? What was it called?”

“Le Puy,” I said.

“Lentils and lace”—she smiled—”in the Massif Central.”

“Yes.” I wanted to lean in close, to press my face to her neck, to feel her hand on my cheek, to touch her chapped lips with my own.

“The children with rickets, here in Paris, bowlegged, with heads too big for those skinny hook-shaped limbs? I was grateful not to be a mother.” I turned to look at her, but she kept staring in the direction of the bishop, at the church and its uneven spires, one square and plain, the other round and ornate.

“When did you leave our gallery?” I asked.

“November second, 1940. Late. When I returned home after work, Auguste stood outside, shivering. He had waited for hours to keep me from entering the house.”

“He is a good man,” I said.

Rose seemed not to hear me. This was the story she had waited so long to tell. Her speech was breathless. “Five moving trucks, he said.”

“Who said?”

“Auguste. Pay attention! Five moving trucks had arrived at seven that morning and emptied the galleries of everything but the nails on the walls and the carpet in the main room.”

The green carpet, like moss at night and grass during the day.

“They took the empty picture frames, the andirons from the fireplace, footstools, the Venetian mirror in the entryway—the Louis Quinze one with the acanthus leaf—everything. When the first five trucks pulled away, they returned for more. Auguste could still hear the engines turning onto Miromesnil when the next trucks arrived. The soldiers unloaded long tables and benches, from a library or school. The gallery was transformed into a soldiers’ mess, with the apartments upstairs as a boon for a group of officers.”

Rose paused, or perhaps she kept speaking. My mind returned to rue de La Boétie. I imagined an officer from this certain unit, thirty-two years in age, with a blond mustache and wiry, hairy legs. I pictured him taking my blue pajamas off the hook inside the closet door and hanging his uniform over the carved bedpost. (Surely no military
man would drape his uniform so casually, but it hardly mattered.) Then with a sigh at the soft bedclothes, the heavy coverlet, and the good whisky downstairs, the officer pulled aside the white sheets and climbed into my bed. The bedsprings squeaked. He was a rigid man; he would be embarrassed if he was overheard, if he was not sure that all the other officers—in my father's room, my mother's dressing room, the guest bedroom, the Nurse's Room—were wishing that their wives could see their finery and be there to do this for them.

“When Father and I went there,” I said, “it was so burned. We never saw what had happened upstairs, or if the upstairs even existed.”

“It doesn't, any longer,” Rose said.

It grew darker and colder. Lights appeared on the church's balcony and in the fountain behind us. They illuminated Saint-Sulpice's massive arched doorways and its Spanish-style veranda, on which two figures (a Madonna and bishop) were locked in an eternal pantomime. Saint-Sulpice would be a toy next to Chartres, to say nothing of Rome's landmarks. The temple my mother attended in Poland began two stories underground so it would not exceed any of the Christian homes in height.

“Look,” Rose said, “an American.” She gestured toward a woman in plaid.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Such shiny hair.”

Two priests in sweeping robes emerged from the church door. They walked diagonally across the square, in the direction of the Christian bookshop, nodding as they passed. The younger one turned to give Rose a second glance, which was not a kind look. Rose seemed not to notice. She withdrew her hand from mine, found a pack of Gauloises in the pocket of my coat, removed her right glove, and lit a cigarette.

“Lucie and Auguste and I returned to the house at dark, gathered our things, and fled. I did not ask after the paintings in the vault, because I did not know what information your father had entrusted to them.”

“Everything, of course,” I said.

“Then it is a pity I did not ask.” She looked crestfallen. When she shivered, I put my coat around her shoulders. “No,” she said, but left it on. “Let's walk. Then we won't be as cold.”

I followed her. We paced around the perimeter of the square. It was strange to walk in her presence. The unreal version that lived in my mind had become more real than the one who strolled by my side, unaware that the too-long sleeves of my coat were brushing my leg, as if the trembling self who had been inside the jacket a moment before were coaxing the girl who now wore it to embrace me.

Rose pointed to a yellow wall across from the Christian bookshop, with bouquets at its foot. Two men from the Resistance were shot there, at a run, she said, as they tried to escape. All the neighbors could see and were afraid. We passed the Mairie and a circle of policemen in navy uniforms.

“They're like a fistful of pencils,” I said.

“You see the funniest things,” she said.

“And you say them.”

She smiled at her feet. “I've missed you.” My heart leaped. “Where did I leave off? At the Jeu de Paume, after I moved from your house.”

“Yes?”

“Because I was French and young—”

“And beautiful,” I added. I made her smile again.

“—the Germans no doubt had been told all these lies about French girls, which made my job at the museum far more difficult. Everyone had their eye on me.” I examined Rose's cropped hair, which stuck out at odd angles. She must have cut it herself.

“It made me appreciate rue de La Boétie. I was so young when we first met. I didn't realize at the time how strange the arrangement could have been.”

“But I saw Father knock at your door.”

Rose straightened, frowned. “He never knocked.”