The Sixth Lamentation (8 page)

From that day my father wanted to go back to France, away from every
reminder of her. I wasn’t surprised because England had never become his home.
He was always making comparisons, which showed he saw things from the outside.
Even the milk was better in France. He began to tell me wonderful things about
Paris, and I would go to sleep seeing bridges, a shining river and tables in
the street lit by thousands of candles. We set sail in early 1931.

I suppose he wasn’t
to know He thought he would simply move back into his old bank. But those were
hard times and no positions were available. I know that now. At the time I
presumed we had landed on our feet. We lived in a nice flat, I did well at
school and I wanted for nothing. I was especially good at the piano and my
father bought me a monstrous upright for Christmas. Each week I went to see
Madame Klein, my teacher, and each week I came home vowing never to see her
again. She was a Jewish widow who lived in a magnificent apartment opposite
Parc Monceau. My father told me she was one of the best piano teachers in
Paris, and had once been a concert performer. That’s as maybe, I thought.
Because every Saturday afternoon I climbed those stairs dreading the scowl that
never left her face. I hated every second. I said she couldn’t even play For
she nursed her right hand and only touched the keys with her left. My father
laughed and sent me back each week. I have never written her name down before,
and doing so makes me pause. I see her now as I saw her then, dressed in black
silk with a vast coiffure of silver hair. She looks at me over quite useless
glasses that seem to be part of her nose, her eyes impossible to read.

Anyway back to my father. I never thought to ask where he worked, or
how he could afford lessons from such a lady But I came to recognise he was troubled,
despite all his efforts to conceal it from me. Children may not know which
questions to ask but they already sense the answers. He started scratching his
arms, practically scraping the skin off. Before long it was all over his body
He joked it was the lice. So I started itching, and together we’d scratch and
scratch, laughing. One morning he said casually he had to go and see the
doctor. I was fifteen so that would be roughly 1934. I came back from a school
camp three days later and, to my surprise, was met by a young nun who brought
me to a hospital. She kept glancing at me when she thought I was looking the
other way My last memory of my father is that day, sleeping in a white room
with a high ceiling, dressed in a white gown beneath white sheets, and a smell
of strong disinfectant. The nun stayed with me, trying to hold my hand. A
doctor came in and said my father had widespread cancer, and there was nothing
they could do. I was left alone, me on a chair, my father asleep in a bed.

When I turned to go there was a priest standing behind me. He was
short and badly shaven, with bags under his eyes. His name was Father Rochet.

12th April.

Father Rochet. He
had known my father from school-days and would frequently drop by usually when
I was going out. He always looked as if he’d slept badly I had never spoken to
him for long as he was a man of few words. But I saw him a great deal, going
into the flats in and around where we lived, which I suppose was strange
because it was not his parish. He was a great one for carrying something under
his coat. I used to think it was a bottle, though I know better now My father
said he was always getting into trouble with his bishop, which Father Rochet
thought very funny Anyway there he was, behind me in the hospital, looking as
if he’d just got out of bed. I followed him into the corridor. Everything had
been arranged, he said. I was to go with him and he would take me to the house
of a friend. We would talk about my future another time.

Father Rochet took me in his car. Neither of us spoke. It was a
black night and the rain was so heavy I could not recognise any streets or
buildings. I remember watching the windscreen wipers and wondering how they
worked. The water falling in sheets across the glass. Eventually we arrived. I
opened the door and saw what I least expected or wanted: Parc Monceau.

Up those stairs I went, dripping everywhere. By now I was crying.
When the door opened, Madame Klein scowled and shook her head. ‘For heaven’s
sake, stop soaking the floor.’ Those were her first words.

My father died that night.

Father Rochet came to see me after the funeral. Again he hadn’t
shaved properly, and this time I could have sworn he smelled ever so slightly
of stale wine, which distracted me from taking on board what he said. It was my
father’s wish that I now live with Madame Klein. He had seen to all the
finances.

And so I believed family resources had sustained me in the past and
would do so in the future. I didn’t realise they were both feeding me a story
to save my dignity.

I wasn’t to know Father Rochet had introduced my father to Madame
Klein when we first arrived in Paris; I wasn’t to know my father went out each
day in a suit, then changed and earned his living cleaning floors. I wasn’t to
know that Madame Klein was our landlady; that she had waived the rent from the
outset; that she had given the piano to my father; that my lessons were free;
that both of them were what some call saints.

13th April.

Madame Klein was
the most extraordinary woman I have ever known. She must have been in her early
seventies when I came to live with her. At first I thought maybe I was there to
act as a nurse. Far from it. She was too busy to want any help.

Her husband had died about ten years earlier. He’d been a gifted
violinist, and his death had come without any warning while performing on
stage. From what she said it was rather like Tommy Cooper. He made an amusing
aside, and then dropped down. Everyone laughed, including Madame Klein. They’d
never had children, and extended family were out of reach and touch. So she
found herself alone. She told me the first few years were the worst, and
getting worse. And then she had an accident.

Madame Klein was an atrocious driver, always banging into things. On
this day, for once, it was not her fault. A van collided into the side of her
car, breaking her right wrist. She never played the piano professionally again.
However, the van had been driven by a young woman who worked for a Jewish
children’s welfare organisation, ‘Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants’ (OSE) . Its
headquarters had moved from Berlin to Paris in the early thirties, after the
Nazis came to power. It became Madame Klein’s life, just when she thought she
had nothing to live for.

You have to understand what it was like then. Thousands of refugees
had flooded into France, with children separated from their parents. You’ve
seen something similar on the news. It still goes on. Then, as now, people did
what they could. So Madame Klein was out each day, doing I don’t know what. It
was not something she talked about. But she often took her husband’s violin.

On some evenings there were meetings with friends she’d made through
OSE. I was never present. But the same men and women came. To my child’s eye
they were always dressed in black and arrived in a long shuffling line after
dark. They gathered in the salon, with its low lights and drawn curtains. I
thought it was terribly exciting. And I was desperate to know what they talked
about. So I started listening at the door.

You’ll find, Lucy, as you get older you start seeing yourself from
the outside. Particularly your childhood. You’ll see a child enacting her part
innocently while you watch, knowing what is going to happen, unable to
intervene. As for me, the need to intervene, if I could have done, comes later.
For now I can see myself in my nightie, with bare feet, bent over by a great
white door with beautiful shining brass handles. I’m trying to breathe as
quietly as I can, looking through the keyhole at those gesticulating arms and
solemn faces.

They never seemed to converse. It was always an argument, even when
they agreed. What was going to happen next? That is what they fought over. Were
they on the verge of the greatest pogrom they had ever known? And what was to
be done? The killings had been under way since 1930. Within months of Hitler
becoming Chancellor, there were camps. I remember one voice from the far side
of the room say fearfully ‘If they’ve killed us in the street, they’ll kill us
in the camps.’ And then a deep voice by the door spoke, so close to me I almost
jumped back. It was Father Rochet. ‘You are not safe in France. You’re not safe
anywhere.’ There was the most dreadful silence after that. Through the keyhole
I could just make out an old man with a stick propped between his legs. He
still had his dark hat and coat on. I can’t recall his name, but I’ve thought
for years about his face, caught in the yellow lamplight. He had a look of
recognition: this was an old, familiar warning.

When I heard a chair scrape, I ran upstairs. Sitting on the landing
with my arms around my knees I would hear them all troop out, as if in rancour,
and from the window see them disperse into the night, in twos and threes, often
arm in arm.

In time, these meetings occurred more frequently Events in Germany
and France were followed closely Some talked about emigration. There was no
need, said others. The Germans have got us out of their hair, we’re safe. Not
yet, said Father Rochet.

He always stayed behind, Father Rochet, to confer in private with
Madame Klein. I never found out what they talked about. Back by the keyhole, I
only saw them huddled round a table, like mother and son, whispering. God knows
why No one was listening.

Chapter Eight

Vespers was not for
another half hour so Anselm had gone for a secret roll-up. He strolled along
the bluebell path and took a narrow track through the woods leading to a
stretch of sand by the water’s edge. Then he saw him through the laden branches
and paused. Anselm guessed he was in his late fifties. He was a very small man
with the smallest feet Anselm had ever seen. Whoever the stranger was, he kept
perfectly still, like a sculptured memorial, silently looking over the lake.

‘I
suspect you and I are asking ourselves a similar question,’ said the stranger
without averting his gaze. His voice was disturbingly deep, like wet churning
gravel; at once musical and melancholy

Anselm
stepped out of the shade. The stranger continued:

‘You
wonder why I am here. Just as I wonder why he is over there.’

Across
the lake, just visible through the surrounding trees, shone the red tiling of
the Old Foundry roof, where Schwermann had been accommodated.

‘May I
ask who you are, and what you are doing here?’ said Anselm hesitantly, walking
slowly to the stranger’s side.

The man
peered solemnly at Anselm through heavily framed glasses, his eyes enlarged and
penetrating, and said, ‘I’ve come to look upon the father of my grief.’

Anselm
followed his gaze, confusion giving way to the first flutterings of fear.

‘Don’t
worry,’ said the stranger dispassionately, ‘I’m not mad. But I do have a
penchant for’ the telling phrase.’ He smiled paternally ‘My name is Salomon
Lachaise.’

Anselm
took in the loose cardigan and galoshes, the profound relaxation in
circumstances that should have produced embarrassment — he was, after all, a
trespasser within the enclosure. Salomon Lachaise was like a man in his own
drawing room, receiving a guest on a matter of grave importance. Speaking as
much to himself as to Anselm, he said, ‘Have you any idea how painful it is for
me to stand here’ — he gestured uncertainly across the water — ‘knowing who
sleeps over there?’

Anselm
felt the slow flush of humiliation. Salomon Lachaise smiled sadly, drawing pipe
and tobacco from his cardigan pocket. He began the endless ritual of packing
with his thumb, drawing air and trailing match after match over the bowl. ‘I’m
sorry. It’s an old rabbinic trick,’ he said through a swirl of smoke. ‘Posing
the question to a man who cannot answer without discovering his own shame.
Jesus did it quite a lot.’

Anselm
was dumbstruck. Not expecting an answer, his interlocutor said, ‘It’s time for
me to go. What’s your name?’

‘Father
Anselm, but—’

‘Saint
Anselm of Canterbury? Now there’s an interesting fellow A man in search of God.
But not that fond of …’

At that
moment they heard twigs cracking underfoot and three figures emerged through
the trees, one in front, two behind. Anselm took in the calm, concentrated
glance of the police officer in his Marks & Spencer casuals, one hand inches
away from a concealed weapon, but Salomon Lachaise stared beyond, through the
branches, to a shape moving through the shadows. A voice spoke lightly to a
young man with his hands sunk deep in his pockets. Max, the grandson. He’d come
every week since his grandfather had taken up residence in the Old Foundry.

Anselm
shivered in the sun, alarmed by a sudden, dark prescience. A meeting of ways
lay ahead: one of those rare instances where the past coagulates into the
present.

Schwermann
pushed aside some brambles with a stick and stepped into the open, looking up
as if in a dream. His eyes rested lightly on Salomon Lachaise and then moved on
to Anselm with a courteous nod. He smiled briefly, as if to a friend, saying, ‘I
haven’t thanked you for your advice, Father.’