The Sixth Lamentation (48 page)

Jacques’
voice grew strong. ‘I said it wouldn’t work, because our identity cards had a
photograph. He shouted again, “Go! Forget the detail … take all my other
papers … if you have to, produce my birth certificate … but take the
chance, go, now!” I have thought of Franz … that was his first name …
every night since … sitting in our house, alone, waiting for them to come,
knowing that he would die and I would live.’

And
Anselm thought of Mr Snyman at Mauthausen, defending Father Rochet from the
brutality of the guards, another honour that had devolved on to Jacques
Fougères, the Resistance hero.

‘We
rushed out of Paris. At one point a Gestapo official checked my father’s
papers, then my mother’s, and when it came to me a distraction occurred and he
waved us on. I didn’t care about my luck, I just hoped that Agnes would be
safe, that Schwermann would keep to his side of the bargain.’

Dense
clouds over Anselm’s mind began to lift, pushed by a quiet breeze. ‘Bargain?’

‘Yes. I
trusted him. I had to, once he put forward his proposal.’

‘What
proposal?’

‘It all
happened on the day I was arrested for wearing the Star. I walked up and down
Avenue Foch, wanting to goad Victor. If they picked me up I expected a few days’
detention, nothing more. They dragged me in after fifteen minutes and threw me
into a room with no windows. The walls were stained with blood that had hit the
plaster and dried in thick clumps, with long streams running to the ground.
There were bits of skin and hair trapped in the mess. It stank. I couldn’t stop
myself shaking, my arms, my legs, the lot. I started to cry. Then Schwermann
came in with two others. They took down my trousers and tied me to a chair. The
other two left and it was just him and me. There were screams echoing down the
corridor.’

Jacques
pulled air through his nose in slow heaves, as though labouring up a great
slope. They turned past a kiosk selling fresh ground coffee, the aroma warm on
the air. In front of them stood a delicate colonnade skirting a small lake. Its
grace stung Anselm’s eyes.

‘Schwermann
took out his pistol and forced open my mouth, resting the end of the barrel on
my front teeth. I was so scared I wet myself and started blabbing nonsense
about The Round Table, as if the disclosure of anything would save me. He put
his gun away and listened with wide, hard eyes. I calmed, spilling everything
out … even Robert’s existence. He asked lots of questions, telling me not
to worry. He was elated. Then he left the room for about half an hour. When he
came back he had a proposal.

‘Schwermann
told me he wanted to smuggle a mother and child out of France. If I helped him,
he would spare Agnes and me and Robert. The others would be arrested, of
course, but they’d only get hard labour. So I agreed. But I told him I could
only guarantee the child, because I didn’t have false papers for the mother,
but that if she could get to Les Moineaux the monks would sort everything out.’

Through
the corner of his eye, Anselm caught sight of a grotto, and flowerbeds,
immaculately kept. He turned away to Jacques and asked, ‘Did Father Rochet
help?’

‘I
couldn’t involve him because he’d ask too many questions’ —     he cleared his
throat — ‘so I thought Agnes could be the courier, using her own papers for the
child.’

‘Why
her?’

He
spoke the scalding words: ‘Because she was the only one who wouldn’t ask me
why.’

They
paused at the water’s edge. The sound of children at play floated high on a
light wind.

Jacques
said, simply ‘Looking back, he was planning how to save the mother. It was
obvious and I never guessed … and I set the run up … just for the
child.’

Their
footsteps crunched on the tiny stones underfoot as they jointly meditated on
the simple anatomy of betrayal. And Anselm reflected once more upon his
capacity to misunderstand. Schwermann, when speaking to the cameras, had not
been talking about Robert Fougères and his blackmail of Victor. There had been
someone else.

‘He’d
fallen for a French girl and had had a child,’ said Jacques dryly. ‘Only she
turned out to be Jewish when the regulations were looked at more closely. He
knew that in time she and her son would be finished. And then, by chance, I
cropped up with an unexpected lifeline. So he saved them, leaving the remainder
of her family to rot. The rest, Father, I think you know He did not keep his word.’

‘What
happened to the boy’s mother?’ asked Anselm gravely.

‘I
thought you knew That was part of the proposal Schwermann kept to himself. When
Agnes was arrested he took her papers, all of them. That enabled his girlfriend
to obtain a new identity card in Agnes’ name. How do I know? On leaving Paris
we went to my brother Claude’s home near the Swiss border. He still had links
with the Resistance around Fernay Voltaire and Gex because he’d been part of
The Round Table network — although he concealed it by vocal support for Vichy So,
my parents assumed a new role, finding placements for Jewish refugees and
helping them to cross over. One day a woman claiming to be Agnes Aubret
arrived. She’d made it to Les Moineaux, where the monks had arranged her
journey to Gex. She stayed with us for three days. I made an excuse and stayed
away until she was gone — it was unbearable. As far as I know, she was reunited
with her child. I’d like to go home now

Bringing
together what he had learned from Victor and Jacques, Anselm now finally
understood what had happened in 1942.

Schwermann
had fallen in love and had a child; a child that would be caught by the net — a
net he would throw Then, by chance, he learned about The Round Table … and
the existence of another mother and child — Agnes and Robert. That was in June
1942. By July Schwermann had planned with pitiless calculation the resolution
of his dilemma: he forced Jacques to arrange the smuggling of his own child to
safety, through Agnes, and only then was The Round Table broken. He arrested
Agnes himself — having planned all along to take her identification papers so
that the mother of his child could also escape. But that left Robert abandoned
… so Schwermann allowed Victor to keep the child on the condition he
incriminated himself to such an extent that he was trapped, and if the need
ever arose for Schwermann himself to avoid capture he could compel Victor to
use his connections at Les Moineaux. And then Anselm remembered: when the
Gestapo came to Les Moineaux only Prior Morel was shot. There had been no
search of the convent, where Schwermann’s child lay concealed. The
infrastructure of escape had been left intact for the woman he loved.

Anselm
and Jacques turned and retraced their steps back to the Fougères residence.
Jacques explained how the Resistance in Paris, mindful of his parents’ service
to the cause, concealed suspicions of Jacques’ treachery when Father Chambray
came asking too many questions. They were content to point the finger at Father
Rochet since they’d despised him as a drunkard communist. Jacques’ identity as
Mr Snyman became a form of exile, which his father, to his dying day eased with
compassion. Thereafter it was a secret, binding those in the family who had to
know After the death of his father he lived with Claude, and when Claude died
he joined Etienne — shortly before Pascal was born.

The
myth of Jacques’ death at Mauthausen had bountiful consequences for the public
reputation of his descendants. Keeping the story going led to accidental and
conscious elaboration. By the early seventies, when Pascal was asking questions,
Jacques had become the founder of The Round Table. Father Rochet, Madame Klein
and all the others became bit-players in someone else’s drama.

‘You
know, I think Mr Snyman … Franz … secretly loved Agnes.’ and he saved
me for her sake. They played a lot of duets together, her at the piano and him
with a cello.’ He paused, as if slipping back to that candle-lit drawing room,
the darkness hard upon the windows. ‘You had to be there to know what it was
like, listening to them in a room full of people who were all hunted and
homeless. The melodies have got louder as I have got older, all of them now a
single, crushing lamentation.’

They
reached the great black door and Jacques inserted his key. ‘There’s often not
much forgiveness in this life, you know, Father.’

‘Yes, I
know’

With
his rounded back to Anselm, the old man said, ‘Robert has a family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Children?’

‘Yes,
and grandchildren.’

Jacques
Fougères did not turn; he laid his head upon the door. Anselm said, ‘I’m sure I
could arrange a meeting …

The
quiet voice said in reply ‘No, Father, leave them in peace. To them I’m a dead
man. It’s better that way.’

Anselm
drew out the school notebook from his plastic bag and handed it to Jacques. ‘Agnes
wanted Mr Snyman to have this. She gave it to me after I’d read out your poem.
I’m deeply sorry it’s not for you.’

The old
butler pushed at the door as though it were made of lead.

‘Perhaps
it doesn’t matter why’ said Anselm desperately, ‘but you still helped save a
boy Schwermann’s son.

Alert
with melancholy the butler said, ‘I’ve often thought of him … growing into
a man … while I believed Robert had been thrown away.

Anselm
prickled with apprehension. He pictured a small man with haunted, penetrating
eyes … the centre of a trinity … on his left, Lucy the adopted
granddaughter of the woman who saved him; to the right, Max, his own blood. ‘Do
you remember his name?’

‘Oh yes
… Lachaise … Salomon Lachaise.’

The
butler stepped inside, extending his hand. Anselm grasped it and said, ‘Jacques,
that boy grew to be the man who avenged you.

The
butler smiled a farewell and the door snipped into its lock.

Beneath a pale sun without
heat, Anselm wandered back into Parc Monceau, back to the quiet spot opposite
the former home of Madame Klein, and sat on a bench just beneath what was once
her window

He
thought of Salomon Lachaise: had he known that Schwermann was his father? His
mother hadn’t told him. It was a secret too painful to disclose. Involuntarily
Anselm suddenly recalled their first meeting, when he’d seen the small dark
figure by the lake, cut out against the sky Salomon Lachaise had said, ‘I’ve
come to look upon the father of my grief,’ and then, moments later, he’d fallen
on his knees before a man, a first meeting with a stranger, exclaiming, ‘I am
the son of the Sixth Lamentation.’ Then Anselm remembered his friend’s
description of his mother, poring over the photographs of their lost family by
candlelight with never a passing reference to the father he’d never known …
the man whose name he’d never once mentioned in Anselm’s presence. She had kept
her secret, somehow, but Salomon Lachaise had eventually divined its shape… perhaps when she, struck with terror, had begged her son to leave the past
alone after he’d announced his intention to help track down the man whom she
knew to be his father. Yes … for sure … Salomon Lachaise had known… and he’d waited until the final moment before issuing a condemnation that
only he could give.

Anselm
looked around, ready to cry The calm of Parc Monceau had been chased away by
children; irrepressible, joyful, not yet hating school. Two or three darted
past him, trails of sand falling from cupped fingers. His eye picked out the
approach of a young woman aged about twenty-three or four. She glanced at her
watch and lifted high a small bell, the kind Anselm had once seen round the
necks of goats in Provence. She rang it vigorously releasing a thin tinkling
heard more by its pitch than its volume. At the signal, other teachers casually
appeared and ushered their urchins into a line of twos. Each child held the
tail of the coat in front, forming a train. When the counting was over they
were led off, singing a song that vanished on the wind.

After
they had gone, Anselm rose and walked slowly after them, out through the
ornamental gates and into the empty street.

Epilogue

‘I saw the Sibyl at Cumae’

(One said) ‘with mine own eye.

She hung in a cage, and read her rune

To all the passers-by

Said the boys, “What wouldst thou, Sibyl?”

She answered, “I would die.”’

(Petronius:
‘Satyricon’, translated by

Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

The second
notebook of Agnes Embleton.

Written
out by Miss Wilma Harbottle.

Dear Jacques

‘Night and day I have lived among the tombs, cutting myself on
stones.’

Do you remember that? Father Rochet said it, laughing, and he added,
‘No, I’m not afraid of dying.’

It was the day we were all called together to set The Round Table in
motion. Father Rochet said if anyone was caught they were to blame him. I was
worried on his account, about what they might do, and he just laughed. And
afterwards you said he was the sort of chap who would cave in under pressure.
Do you remember?