Pictures at an Exhibition (28 page)

OUTSIDE THE BUILDING, I LAY ON A BENCH AND FELL
asleep. Eventually, I heard the crutches of the injured girl. Night fell
quickly, and a policeman appeared who knocked at my legs with his baton. “Move along now,” he said, tapping in time to the syllables.

I had the idea that I would like to sleep in the Bois de Boulogne. It took me most of a day to walk there, and as I walked I thought about Rose. The one time I thought I had made her weep with pleasure. The pearls pinned to her ears that she always worried she would lose. I spoke out loud to her as I walked, asking her why she would not love me, telling her that I had not heard all there was to hear about her bravery in the museum. I pictured the fire she had seen burning in the courtyard of the Jeu de Paume. Five thousand or ten thousand pictures, she had said. A fire that burned all day.

I left the Seine, crossing the offices belonging to La Radiodiffusion Française. I could hear its transmissions crackling, and the sound of my mother's piano returned to me. I recalled the strange feeling of sitting at my mother's feet as a child, arranging my toy train set—laying out tracks, placing the stationmaster beside them, putting down a barricade striped like a piece of candy, building a bridge with a miniature pine tree and gaslight beside it—and hearing my mother play on the radio. I had the uneasy feeling that Mother was not really there or wholly near me. That some part of her had been stolen someplace else. I might touch her bare feet just to make sure that she was with me while I tinkered with my train set.

I found a wide bench in the Bois de Boulogne and fell asleep in the sun. I blessed the springtime. I did not know the month or the day.

OVER THE COURSE OF MY WEEKS IN THE BOIS, I SAW
many figures from my past—most often my father, and then Bertrand, Fanny, Mother, the Hungarian trumpeter who had lived across the courtyard on rue de La Boétie, and my grandfather who died on avenue de Breteuil and gave Father his limp.

With my eyes closed, with the sun beating down on my face and the rain misting it, I tried to remember my sister. In the sea of my memory, a few details rose to the surface, memories without any mooring that I began to affix to Micheline. A little girl with garbled
speech. A face so close to mine I could not see it, buttoning my coat with the utmost seriousness. Me, waiting patiently through the ritual, knowing its importance, growing stuffy indoors wearing my winter layers. A sticky hand holding mine. Sharing a bag of sweet nuts. Her arms around my head, she kissed my face and nearly strangled me. I put my hands in the corners of her elbows and struggled from her arms. We jumped up and down in a field of mossy green.

I opened my eyes. The Bois was the greenest stretch of Paris. I looked out at its fields. The grass was not the color of the moss in my memory, as green as seaweed waving on the bottom of the ocean floor. I saw myself from behind, a little boy in short pants and a sailor suit, standing next to my sister, Micheline. I could not see her face. Turn around, I begged the two figures. My sister and I don't hear me, though. We stand on the mossy green rug of the gallery, sharing a sweet bag of almonds, underneath my sister's painting with the same name.

A face stared into mine as my mind was breaking. Bertrand held a bottle to my lips.
“Les mariages du Bois de Boulogne ne se font pas devant Monsieur le Curé,”
he told me. The night fell. The trees bloomed and their blossoms blew against my chapped skin. At night, I shouted, “Turn around, show yourself to me!” How had I been her brother but forgotten her face? Micheline. I had always known it.

It grew warm. Someone stole my blanket. Micheline still did not turn around. Eventually, my mind grew tired of pleading. I thought about
Almonds
, and how the unshelled nuts clustered together like rats. I wanted to see my father, but first I needed a bath.

I slipped into the apartment building on rue de Mézières behind an old man fumbling with his keys. Then I knocked on Rose's door. When she answered, the sight of her with short hair and crescents of darkness beneath her eyes distressed me anew.

Finally, I asked, “What day is it?”

“Tuesday,” she said. I saw the chain was still on the door.

“No, I mean date, month.” My voice creaked. I apologized. “I've barely spoken in weeks.”

Rose said, “July 7, 1945,“ and, “I can see.” She paused. I had been
in the Bois nearly three weeks. Rose asked if I needed a doctor, or dinner, or a bath. I said the last.

I stood between the bed and a bookcase with documents on one shelf and tin cans and torn paper ready for the toilet on another. Rose rummaged in the bathroom. I heard the sound of running water and soon the steam from the tub began to cloud the windows.

“Go in there,” Rose ordered. “I'd give your clothes to the Red Cross, but they probably should be burned.”

“I've nothing else to wear,” I said, amazed at the practicality of her speech. It followed the pattern A, B, C, while my senses were darting around the room like gnats. I tasted honeysuckle in the air. Something was clotting at the back of my throat. My eyes smarted. My friend Bertrand had a woolly head like a lamb. The snot had coagulated in my nose. I couldn't hear. I couldn't think. The humming feeling in my blood meant worry—Rose looked ill. The throbbing between my ears made it hard to follow the logical conversation.

Rose stood back and I entered the bathroom, shut the door, shed my clothing, and stepped into the shoe-shaped tub with a splash. The water was fragrant and its surface iridescent. Rose had added some salts or oils to it. I shouted my thanks.

“You're welcome. Have you drawn the curtain?” she asked. I gave it a rattle on its rings.

In she came. Rose said, “I have had my heart stomped upon. With a boot.”

I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I slipped beneath the oil swirls on the surface of the tub and came up only when I needed to breathe. I moved aside the curtain to study her face. Rose now wore a silk dressing gown over her mannish clothing. I reached to touch it and left a damp stain on the silken sleeve. “Is it from an American?” She nodded, sobbed, and turned away.

“What is his name?” I asked.

“I don't want to say it.”

“He's a damned fool,” I said, careless and callous, like the boy she had known before the war. “I thought you were a nun to all but your work.”

She shook her head no.

“You'll arrive here,” I said, pointing to myself, “to anger. Now you're only hurt, split in two. Eventually, you'll be mad.” It was a direct translation: my experience into hers. Thanks to you, I charted this terrain first, I thought.

Her shoulders heaved. It was terrible to see her mourn, so much so it almost knocked my own grief from its pedestal.

“We could still marry.”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. I stood up in the bath (Rose gasped), wet and unpeeled, and walked into the main room. I dressed myself and stood in the doorway, my untoweled hair soaking the collar of my stinking shirt.

“You knew about my sister,” I said to Rose, who wiped her tears with a napkin.

She nodded and I stepped out into the dark hallway. A wind, somewhere in the city, sucked the door shut with a slam.

Chapter Twenty-three

I
RETURNED TO RUE DE LA BOéTIE. SINCE I NO
longer had the key to the front gate, I grabbed hold of it, expecting to shake it violently. I would enter at any cost. A voice from inside, rough and suspicious, called out, “Who's there?” It was my father. Chains rattled and stiff bolts unclenched their bite.

“Come in, come in quickly,” he said, and opened the door. We studied each other in the half light. He had grown a beard and his clothes were little better than mine. Father cupped my face in his hand. “You've broken your nose,” he said, and suddenly, convulsively turned from me with his hand over his eyes.

He led me through the gallery, through the ruined rooms, over the uneven wooden floorboards. I closed my eyes, which was nearly unnecessary in the darkened gallery, and heard my father moving about: clanging a pot, turning a creaky spigot, the lonely piddle of water in the teakettle. I wondered if I had not, in fact, come home at all but was instead a ghost, brought back to witness my father's comfortless state. In my mind's eye, I saw a figure ascend the stairs to the emptied rooms, pluck a withered leaf from the floor, tuck it into his lapel, and float through the roof, into the night sky. How had I forgotten that a son must care for his father, too?

Father returned to his office, and we sat on the mattress pushed into the far corner of the walls, where his filing cabinet had once
stood. He explained that in fact he had not left Paris at all but had stayed in a hotel in the Eighteenth, hoping to find me. He had searched the hospitals, the DP services, the garden chairs of the Luxembourg, the benches of the Bois, the fleabag hotels near the train stations, and the alleys of Belleville and Pigalle, to no avail.

On the day he had given up and conceded to return to my mother in Le Puy, he received a telegram from Rose. I had been sighted in the Bois, she informed him. Still, even then, I had not been found. On the way back from the park, my father decided to visit 21, rue de La Boétie, one last time, and found it open and empty. The Com munists were at a rally. He entered, barred the doors, discovered the telephone in operation, and called first a locksmith and then a lawyer. He had remained barricaded inside for the last three weeks, with the lawyer—a young man my own age, I realized, to my chagrin—providing Father with his necessities. Father explained some contested French law, about apartments left vacant without their owners reverting to the possession of the State or their occupiers after a certain passage of time.

I, in turn, told him about the Morisot, Madame de La Porte des Vaux,
Almonds
, and Cailleux. I could not bear to say Bertrand's name.

Father replied, “I knew when I said we would return to Le Puy that you would keep looking. The bank account was reopened the day I told you I could no longer tolerate staying in Paris. Did you notice that day how I paid for everything in large bills? Didn't you think I carried an awful lot of money with me? I was fairly certain you would take it to buy back the Cézanne and the Sisley that the Americans had stolen.”

So my father had foreseen the single independent decision of my adulthood. I hardly knew what to say. “I did not anticipate that you would abandon me,” he continued. “That came as a blow.”

I asked after my mother. He said, “If you're here, she will forgive me for being away a while longer.” He smiled wistfully. “If you can believe it, the war was nearly good for your old father and mother. I don't know who relented first. Yet somehow during our time in that cellar, we forgave each other certain things.”

“Like my sister,” I said.

Father grabbed my hand and held it. Rather, he clenched my four fingers as if they were bundled stalks. I did not know the last time I had held my father's hand. In front
of Almonds
, my sister had gripped my right hand and someone clasped my left, and I understood then that it had been Father. We were the family trio.

“Your mother never wanted me to tell—or, rather, to remind you,” he said. “I thought this choice was a mistake. It prevented me from speaking frankly to you. After a few years we stopped commemorating the night she died. And when we gave that up, many traditions fell away.”

Eventually, my father stood and let go of my hand. I sat on the mattress on the floor, listening to the wind in the ruined chimney and the rustle of papers waiting to be burned in the fireplace. I heard Father talking to himself in the other room. It occurred to me that the child believes his parents’ behavior has everything to do with him, always, and that this will then be the source of a life's worth of misunderstandings.

Before dawn the next morning, we were awakened by a knock at the front entrance. It was the young lawyer. Through the crack in the door, he handed my father a brown sack of food, a bottle of milk, several cans, and an envelope wrapped with twine. Introductions and handshakes, too, through the narrow wedge. The lawyer asked my father to give him more ration tickets. Father reached into his pocket and withdrew the strips of coupons, geometric patterned things, printed in carnival colors. The young lawyer looked nervous outside in the dark, checking over his shoulder. He promised to return later in the day with more supplies and to “pick up those papers.” I was glad that he was on the outside and my father and I were inside, and that Father had not returned to Le Puy, leaving me here in his place.

Father read out loud from the papers. “Jews who have suffered a loss of property fill out this form … estimate value … will be treated with all due haste, return by the deadline—that's three days from now—be assured of most distinguished sentiments, et cetera, et cetera.” He threw down the papers on the bed. “What an extraordinary waste of time. But our legal counsel will be cross if we don't do as he says.”

So again we walked around the gallery's main room in circles, stopping at intervals to name the Vlaminck, Dufy, Braque, Picasso, Morisot, or Matisse that had once hung there. This time, for reparations. Father and I had not rehearsed the paintings, as we had done for so many years of my childhood and adolescence, while in hiding. At first my mind creaked in protest, and the paintings’ details ran together. It brought to mind the sensation of trying to recite verbs for Latin class after the summer holidays.
Amitto, -mittere, -misi, -missum.
To send away, to let go, to let slip. Hence, in general, to lose.

We spent an entire day on the task. Three times I named paintings that had been sold before the war, and each time father scolded me. The nib of his pen scratched through the paper. When we had finished, Father said, “Let us never speak of this again.” He placed one hand on my head, as if in blessing. He raised the other to touch the wall, as if it could yield to him what it had seen.

Epilogue

F
OR THE FIRST EIGHTEEN MONTHS OF MY LIFE AS an American, i worked for the German government—or, more specifically, for a Pole, a psychiatrist named Emanuel Senek, who was paid by the German government to interview survivor émigrés in the Great Lakes region for matters of reparations and pensions. Senek, a survivor himself, worked in Polish. I conducted interviews in French, though few of those whom I spoke to and whose interviews I later transcribed were actually French. They were the orphaned children of Jews from the Pale who had fled to France but were unable, as we all now knew, to save themselves. At first, I found solace and meaning in this work.