Invisible Love (11 page)

I felt extremely sad. I burst into tears. It was absurd, of course, to cry on an evening like this when I had just come back to life, regained my freedom . . . I had merely clenched my jaws over the deaths of my parents, and yet I felt sorry for a stray dog I had only known for a week.

The next day, I was part of the group that left the camp.

Once more, we walked for hours across the white plain. Nothing had changed. We were back with the same forced marches we had already suffered . . . Some collapsed, just as had happened before. And just as had happened before, nobody stopped to prevent them dying in the powdery snow.

Suddenly, to the left of the column, I heard barking.

The dog was running toward me.

I kneeled and held out my arms. He threw himself against my chest and frantically licked my mouth. His tongue surprised me, disgusted me a little, scratched me a lot, but I let him cover me with slobber. This dog kissing me with such love was the girlfriend who wasn't waiting for me, the family I no longer had, the only creature who had looked for me.
 

The other prisoners overtook us, continuing on their way in the snow. The dog and I continued laughing and yelling, drunk with joy, happy to be reunited.

I didn't get up until the tail of the convoy was out of sight.

“Come on, dog, we have to stick with them or we'll be lost.”

He nodded his flat head, grinning from ear to ear, his tongue lolling from right to left, and ran by my side to rejoin the group. Where did we get the strength?

At the end of that day, we spent our first night together. Subsequently, nothing ever separated us, not even a woman—I didn't meet your mother until he had left me.

In the school where our group stopped overnight, my animal huddled against my thighs, I suffered less from the cold than my companions. Better still, stroking his satiny skull, I rediscovered the contact, the tenderness, the weight of a physical presence. I was blissful. When was the last time I had willingly touched a warm body? For a moment, I had the feeling that my exile was over: wherever I was, as long as I had my dog beside me, I would be the center of the world.

At midnight, while the marchers were snoring and the moon hovered behind the misted-up windows, I looked hard at my sated companion, his ears pinned back against his head, his guard-dog stance relaxed, and gave him a name. “I'm going to call you Argos. That was the name of Odysseus's dog.”

He frowned, not sure he understood.

“Argos . . . Do you remember Argos? The only living creature that recognized Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca in disguise after twenty years' absence.”

Argos nodded, more to be obliging than because he was convinced. In the days that followed, he liked recognizing his name in my mouth, then proving to me, by obeying me, that it really was his.

Our return was slow, broken, and erratic. The strange cohort of Auschwitz survivors staggered across a devastated, deprived Europe, where migrants joined grief-stricken local populations uncertain who their masters were. We, the skeletons, were dragged from temporary Red Cross posts to permanent ones, depending on what transport and lodging was available, trying to avoid the last of the fighting. To get back to Namur, I crossed Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, before getting on a ship in Istanbul, sailing via Sicily, landing in Marseilles and traveling across France by train as far as Brussels. During that journey, Argos never left me. Of the people we met, some merely shrugged, but many remarked on how well trained he was . . . Not that I had tamed him or forced him to do anything—I was too unfamiliar with the world of dogs—but united by affection as we were, we were delighted to hear this. I just had to think about turning left for Argos to veer in that direction. When I examine the photograph that an American soldier took of us in a makeshift camp, I realize that, in spite of the shortages, the discomfort, the uncertainty, the anxiety, we drew our energy from being together. The only thing we wanted from life was each other's company.

Even when he was starving, Argos waited while I chewed my bread. A man would have jumped me and grabbed it; he waited trustingly, certain that I would give him a piece. Yet I wouldn't have yielded my portion to anyone! His respect was making me a good person. If men are naïve enough to believe in God, dogs are naïve enough to believe in men. With Argos looking at me, I might become a human being again.

In the course of that odyssey, I barely thought about my relatives. Whereas so many of the survivors I met dreamed of rejoining their loved ones, assuming that if they themselves had pulled through, why not their fathers and mothers, I had given up on that aspiration. Deep down, an instinctive certainty told me that none of my family were still in this world.

 

When I got to Namur, I walked up the stairs to our apartment and knocked at the door.

Seeing again the waxed landing, the familiar sounds and smells, during the three seconds when I waited at the door with its peeling paint, my heart was pounding: I assumed that a miracle might happen. The totally banal sound of the lock moved me almost to tears.

A woman in a short nightdress looked out at me. “Can I help you?”

“I . . . ”

“Yes?”

I leaned forward to peer at the two rooms behind the woman. Little had changed—not the wallpaper, the curtains, the furniture—only the inhabitants: a husband in a white singlet sitting facing a bottle, two little girls pushing a cardboard box across the floor.

Of course, the apartment had been rented out again . . . At that moment, I realized I had nothing left and that I was alone in the world.

“Er . . . I'm sorry, I must have the wrong floor.”

I didn't dare tell her that I had lived there . . . I guess I was afraid the Gestapo would immediately show up.

She made a skeptical face.

On tiptoe to give credence to my mistake, I walked upstairs.
 

While I did so, this woman who had usurped my mother's place muttered as she closed the door, “He doesn't seem very bright, that one.”

I knocked at the door upstairs. My neighbor opened, and took fright at first, her beautiful face tensing. She didn't dare trust her intuition. “Is it . . . you? Is it really you?”

“Yes, Madame Pasquier, it's me, Samuel Heymann.”

She opened her arms, I threw myself into them, and we both wept. It was mysterious. While that embrace lasted, a woman who was almost a stranger became my mother, my father, my grandparents, my sister, all those I missed, all those who, if they had lived, would have been so happy to know I had come back.

In the weeks that followed, that good woman supported me as much as she could. She provided me with a small room at the top of the building, enrolled me in high school, made sure I ate and dressed decently. Then one Sunday—the most wonderful surprise of all—she took me to have lunch with Father André, my benefactor, who hugged me so tightly he almost choked me.

Father André and Madame Pasquier acted as my guardians. Argos was our only point of friction. Madame Pasquier and the father both considered it absurd to feed an animal at a time when it was hard enough to feed a human being. Bowing my head, I would reply that I didn't care, that I would always give half my portion to Argos, however tiny it was and even if it meant that I would die. Madame Pasquier would turn red when she heard that; generous as she was, there was still an order to things, and men came before dogs. But I didn't want to hear any more about a scale of values among living creatures; I had suffered too much from hierarchies; as a subhuman in a land of supermen, I had seen people like me die. Maybe I had even consented! So I didn't want to hear anything more about inferior or superior races! Never! Even though she sensed the bitterness in my words, Madame Pasquier reiterated her principles; in practice, however, whenever she saw us together, sensing that Argos was more than an animal to me, she did not insist.
 

Now that I was back in a normal situation, I started having normal thoughts: I was hungry for revenge, I wondered who had given away the ten Jewish children hidden by Father André. While continuing with my studies, I began an investigation.

I reflected, I revisited my memories with an inquisitorial eye, retrospectively analyzing the thoughts and attitudes of some of my classmates and finding out what had become of them. I don't have time, Miranda, to tell you all the leads I followed, including the false ones, that whole tangled web of suppositions that led me to suspect one boy rather than another, I'll simply tell you the conclusion I reached: a fellow pupil named Maxime de Sire had told the Gestapo where I was hiding.

Maxime de Sire was the same age as me, fifteen. He had rich parents and an exalted idea of himself, and he loved a challenge. God knows why, but in September 1943, he had decided that I would be his rival, that the school year would be a contest between him and me. What made the idea all the more preposterous was that, being gifted with more self-importance than talent, he consistently achieved poor grades. In everything—science, arts, Latin, Greek, even sports—he'd lean toward me and whisper, “You'll see, Heymann, I'll beat you hollow.” I'd simply shrug my shoulders phlegmatically, which would make him even angrier. One day, I don't know how, he started to suspect that I was Jewish. At that point, everything changed: emulating me was no longer a spur to him, it was an expression of hatred. Even though my results were better than his, to him I embodied deception, I was the scandalous product of a cursed race that had no other purpose on earth than to tarnish, soil, pervert, and destroy. The anti-Semitism so common in his background gave him a key to understanding: no, he wasn't inferior to me at all, I was a monster descended from a hateful lineage. Several times, in catechism class, he spoke up to express his horror of “the Jewish race.” However hard Father André tried to respond, refuting him point by point and invoking the name of Jesus, Maxime de Sire, with that impeccable middle part in his hair and his brand-new leather ankle boots, would sit down again, pleased with himself, wink at his classmates, and retort to Father André that he respected him but that he also respected other intelligent men, like Charles Maurras, the intellectuals of Action française, Léon Degrelle, or the great Marshal Pétain who governed France.

I think it was his behavior that led Father André, as a precaution, to fake our departure. When I questioned him about it after the war, he refused to answer. However, I have a clear memory that one morning, from the dormer window in the attic, I had seen Maxime de Sire standing in the middle of the mist-shrouded lawn, planted firmly on his legs, head raised, arms folded, looking up at the top floor with hostile eyes. Had he seen me? As I had withdrawn into the shadows, I can't be sure of that. In the days that followed—and this was a memory that took a while to come back to me—one or other of us claimed to have heard noises behind the door that hid our hiding place. Each time, he had thought it was Father André coming to pay us an unexpected visit. There was no doubt in my mind that Maxime de Sire had been verifying our presence before going to the authorities and revealing all.

I'm sure you'll tell me, Miranda, that you need more than that to accuse a man. But it was enough for me. I was convinced. In fact, I'm even more convinced now, you'll soon see why.

Having made inquiries about Maxime de Sire, I found out that he had just given up his studies to take care of his family's estate, which comprised several farms, some stables, and the trout pond concession.

One Sunday, I came to this region of the Hainaut. After all the miles we had walked across Europe on the way back from Auschwitz, my sedentary life had weighed heavily on Argos and he was pleased to rediscover the pleasures of a country stroll. Mixing pleasure and duty as usual, he thoroughly enjoyed his task of accompanying me. From time to time, I would take the stick I was using to walk with and throw it as far as possible into the grass; victoriously, he would bring it back to me like a trophy, always with the same energy, the same pride.

As luck would have it, when we had reached the Sires' château and I was walking alongside a hedge of alders, I caught sight, not far away to my right, of a horse trotting away, ridden by a familiar figure: Maxime was setting off for a ride in the woods.

I walked faster in his direction. Of course, I didn't think I'd be able to catch up with him, but I felt the need to pursue him.

In the middle of the various paths that crisscrossed the forest, I hesitated. I turned to Argos and asked him where the rider had gone. He sniffed the wind and, as if it were self-evident, started off in a southerly direction. We continued advancing.

After an hour, we were still walking . . . I finally had to admit I had lost my prey. It was then that the tall trees cleared, letting in a pool of bright green light; we came out to a pond strewn with duckweed. The horse had been tied to a lime tree. A hundred yards from there, I saw a crouching form: Maxime de Sire was picking mushrooms between the moss-covered stones.

I walked straight toward him, my stick in my hand.

He didn't see me coming. A twig cracked beneath my feet, surprising him, and he looked up. His eyes grew wide with fright. He had recognized me!

I charged straight at him, making no attempt to conceal my rage.

His mouth opened and let out a plaintive cry.

I accelerated. I had no idea what I was going to do, but felt an obscure necessity, stronger than me, behind every movement of my muscles. Was I intending to hit him? I don't think so. I wanted to confront him with his crime, but had no idea what form that would take.