Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (19 page)

How can I be so sure that I would have been the woman with a child stowed in her attic and not the one who was counting her neighbour’s silver? Where would you have been as people are herded onto the crowded vehicles that will take them here? Is that us shepherding a friend to the basement? Or peeping out from behind a blind? Or ticking a name from a list? On the bus, it is dark, you can see nothing out the window, can’t follow the road, but trust the driver knows the route even if you fear your unknown destination. Around you there are whispered conversations, a loud question quickly hushed, some silence, even the snore of a man who has managed to fall asleep.

The bus gently shakes its way through the night. The city has dropped away, and the dark highway seems endless. Most of the passengers doze, occasionally jostled awake by the motion before dropping off again. Max and I use the odd jolt as an excuse to rub shoulders, and then leave them there, sleeve delicately brushing against sleeve, transmitting a degree of comfort to the flesh beneath.

Our friendship is fresh and flirtatious. Max has cajoled me into the art history department’s annual trip to New York when I should be finishing an English essay and he studying for a mid-term exam in chemistry. He dangles the delights of the museums we intend to visit, the paintings we will see, but I am tempted simply by his company. We are still greedy for information about the other, and have found some conversational excuse to empty the contents of our wallets into our laps. We laugh at the photos on each other’s
student cards, and pick through memberships for the independent cinema, library chits with due dates stamped in red ink, and drivers’ licences encased in plastic.

“What’s the
B
for?” I ask, gesturing at his middle initial.

“Oh, nothing.” He pulls the plastic card away.

“Come on.” I start to wheedle for the information, like a child seeking candy.

“It’s my mother’s maiden name…” He seems embarrassed by it.

“So, what is it?”

“Bensimon.”

“Bensimon?”

“Well,
Bensimon
,” he concedes, pronouncing the name in French.

“She’s French?”

“Yeah, that’s why I speak French. She came here from Paris.”

“When was that?”

“During the war. Her parents sent her over. My grandfather was a lawyer. I guess they could afford to get her out.”

“Get her out? Without them?”

“Yeah, well. They couldn’t leave.”

I want to ask what happened, but find the question too intrusive to pose, slightly shamed now by my persistence about what the
B
stood for.

“Did she ever go back?”

“Yeah, she goes back from time to time,” he replies, ignoring my real question.

“And your grandparents?”

He pauses, as though summoning the courage or perhaps evaluating the risks in discussing his family history with me. Eventually, having started down the road, he continues.

“Her parents died at Auschwitz. We don’t know exactly what happened to her mother, but she must have died early on.” His tone is matter-of-fact. “My grandfather survived, and was liberated, but he died of malnutrition anyway.”

“Malnutrition?” I persist, realizing that I have gone too far, yet seeing no way to retreat. Max is now annoyed at my curiosity.

“The soldiers who liberated the camps fed the prisoners. Their stomachs couldn’t handle the food. His gut exploded.”

We lapse into silence. I am appalled most of all by the nonchalance with which, once decided to tell the story, he relates it. We speak as though his grandparents were characters in a novel, rather than his own family. Perhaps they are, for he must know them only through his mother’s stories.

“That’s horrible.” I try some conventional motion of sympathy.

He shrugs.

There is only a cattle car at Drancy; a cattle car, a one-room museum, a stone sculpture, and a few plaques commemorating deportees, resisters, Allied prisoners of war, and the French poet Max Jacob who died here before he ever made it east. These attempts at memorial seem pale to me somehow; they are dwarfed both by the enormity of what has gone before and the banality of what has followed. The ghosts do not walk at Drancy. There are no answers here.

I retrace my steps to the station, and manage to catch the 4:43 train back to Paris, dashing through the automatic doors just as they are closing. The car is half full, with tired families returning from visits to grandmother’s house and expectant suburbanites preparing for an evening in town. I
find a pair of seats in the corner, putting my bag down on the empty one beside me. The Bibliothèque Nationale will reopen at nine tomorrow morning. I pull out my notebook and begin to review my translations.

R
ACHEL WAS DECORATING
a cake when Sam answered the door and called out an unnecessary warning: Clara Segal paraded into the kitchen carrying a huge tray covered in wax paper that she lowered with ostentatious care onto the table. Rachel was in the midst of the tricky part, coaxing the icing to cling vertically to the sides, when the bell had rung and her knife had slipped leaving a splotch of white froth on the pristine glass cake plate. She bit back her annoyance at the interruption, moved away from the counter, and came over to the table to dutifully admire the cookies and pastries Clara proudly unveiled.

“Beautiful, beautiful, and so much,” said Rachel, noticing all the while that Clara had included a large sponge cake amongst the petits fours, meringues, and cookies, even though they had agreed that she, Rachel, would take care of that. After all, everyone acknowledged it was her speciality, a sponge cake that was simultaneously richer yet higher and lighter than any baker’s dry offering, a sponge cake made according to a method handed down from her grandmother. Her mother had even kept the old notebook in which the recipe was carefully copied in Yiddish, the letters formed with thin strokes in a spidery hand that Sam had deciphered for her
when it was passed on to Rachel in her turn. Not that the secret was actually written there: no, that part was oral history. Her mother had shown her the proper technique for beating all twelve eggs when Rachel was still a girl. The results were infallible and delicious enough to be eaten plain—or with a little fruit compote overtop. Still, for this occasion, admiring the grand concoctions she saw pictured in magazines, Rachel had decided she would ice the cake, and the task was proving a little more difficult than she had expected. And now here was Clara, with her own sponge cake. Oh well, you could never have too much food at a wedding.

In truth, the preparations had proved difficult from the start, as soon as the first joyous news of the engagement had given way to practical realities. The date was agreed on easily enough, but Clara and Lionel, having recently abandoned the cramped little Orthodox
shul
of their youth and transferred their allegiance to the brand-new synagogue up on Bathurst Street where Rabbi Cohn and his congregation had moved the previous year, simply assumed that the wedding would be held there. It seemed fortuitous. The rabbi would preside, and afterwards they would hold the reception in the social hall. That was settled. But to Rachel, trying to run her household on a strict budget so that her husband could pay down the debt on the hardware store he had opened after the war, and to Sam, who only stuck his head in at a little Polish synagogue a few times a year and didn’t care much for parties, this plan sounded alarmingly elaborate. To the bride herself, it sounded alarmingly large.

“All those people I don’t know…” Sarah had complained faintly to Rachel as the numbers on Clara’s guest list climbed higher and higher with each passing day. Rachel
tried to block Clara’s plans with a little string of protests and concerns, gentle at first but growing louder and firmer as she met with resistance. Finally, Sam stepped in and put his foot down: the wedding would be held at home. That was his decision.

“It’s natural, under the circumstances,” he told Clara and Lionel. “I wouldn’t mind the expense at all, that’s not the problem, business is good, but the girl… well, let’s think of her feelings. She doesn’t want a big fuss. You can understand.”

Coaxed into acquiesence by her own son’s pleading and pacified somewhat by the idea of planning a large party for the opening lunch that month, Clara magnanimously conceded this territory—because she had little choice. She was going to have a lot of explaining to do to her cousins and her friends; she would complain to any sympathetic ear she could find that she was being required to keep her guest list to twenty-eight, but if the Plots chose to hold the thing in their own home, she could hardly stop them: the bride’s family organized a wedding, after all. With the Segals’ consent thus secured, Rachel and Sam got to work: Rabbi Cohn would perform the ceremony in the living room; the caterer would bring in enough chafing dishes and warming ovens to make the meal in the kitchen, and if all the furniture was moved upstairs, they would squeeze thirty-six guests into the dining room at four round tables rented for the occasion. There would be no room for a band, but Sarah said she didn’t care much for dancing. And the food would be kosher, of course. The Segals had recommended the caterer. Rachel knew their family to be more observant than hers; it was only reasonable that their requirements be respected. All seemed in order. But then the caterer presented his quote.

“It’s a monopoly,” Sam complained to Rachel as he sat at the dining-room table, scratching his head over this fantastical bill. “They’re in league with the butchers.” Rachel nodded but said nothing. Her mouth felt dry. This was the disaster she had feared from the start. From the day that she first met the Segals, she had suffered from a persistent anxiety that the discrepancy in wealth between the two families would prove deeply embarrassing. The Segals were uptown types, a doctor and his wife; Clara was wearing a fur coat that first day although it was only November and drizzling outside. She and Sam, meanwhile, had not only the store to worry about, but still owed monthly payments on the Chevy, even if the car itself was starting to show signs of rust, and they wouldn’t have any money for extras after they had paid for the china tea service that Rachel had already picked as their gift to the bride. They had carefully budgeted for the photographer, the flowers, the tables and the chairs, the waiters, and the catering too, but they could not cover this alarming amount. Nor could they expect any help from the Segals, since they had rebuffed all their offers when insisting on the small wedding in the first place. Just imagine what the meal might have cost if they had given into Clara’s initial plans, Rachel thought, but even with the reduced guest list, this bill was impossible. The anxiety was real fear now, rising from her stomach into her throat and mouth, where it deposited an unpleasant and slightly metallic taste on her tongue.

“You’d think religious people would have a little more respect for each other, not try to make money like that,” Sam continued. Rachel recognized the warning signs of one of his infrequent but impassioned speeches. “But that’s capitalism for you…”

She swallowed, refrained from pointing out that he too
was now a businessman, and forced some words out of her mouth to stop him before he could get fully launched.

“It’s a lot of work to make food for a crowd, and there’s all the extra work for kosher,” she said, pulling the bill from his hands to get another good look. “This salad course—we don’t need salad. And the desserts. Look how expensive they are. I can do them myself.”

“Rachel, you aren’t going to cook a whole…”

“Yes, yes. It’ll be fun.”

And so began the battle of the dessert table.

“And I’m going to make the desserts myself,” Rachel said lightly, trying to slip the item through as the two couples gathered in the Plots’ living room one evening to discuss a long list of arrangements.

“But they won’t be kosher,” Clara had promptly replied. “We are going to have meat for dinner?”

“Of course, of course. I’ll only use Crisco, no dairy, I promise,” Rachel answered.

“Still, your kitchen…”

“Surely, it would be easier to let the caterer do the desserts,” Lionel interrupted his wife with a more tactful approach. “Less work for you.”

“No, I want to do them. I’ll make sure they’re kosher,” Rachel insisted.

“They won’t be kosher if they’re cooked in your kitchen,” Clara retorted, hardening her position because she felt she had lost so much ground on the question of the synagogue and the guest list.

“It really will be much easier if the caterer…” Lionel continued, trying to pacify Clara.

“Sure, sure,” Sam agreed, now desperate to avoid embarrassment. “We’ll get the caterer to do the desserts.”

“No.” Rachel, equally desperate about the cost, was now adamant. “No, I’m making the desserts.”

“No,” Clara replied. “I’m not eating
trayf.”

The meeting ended sooner than expected.

Privately, each woman thought the other was being unreasonable and had complained to her husband.

“Why haven’t they taught the girl the rules?” Clara asked Lionel. “Surely, that was their duty.”

Lionel, reasoning that people could not be expected to adopt extra religious practices along with a child, demurred.

“It is not as though she would have kept kosher in France,” he said. “I mean, the French…” He wasn’t sure what he meant, but had some image of Parisian decadence in mind that didn’t include kosher cooking.

Rachel, meanwhile, wondered whether God really cared if the kid happened to be cooked in its mother’s milk. She was perfectly familiar with the prescriptions of her parents’ religion, but her partial observance of the dietary laws was more a matter of cultural habit than religious fervour. She would instinctively never serve pork, shellfish, butter on the potatoes or a milk pudding hard on the heels of the roast, and had separate dishes for Passover, which she took carefully out of tissue-stuffed boxes every year. But she and Sam had always considered their more Orthodox acquaintances overly observant and couldn’t help thinking there was something unsophisticated and a little embarrassing about these enthusiasts with their double sets of dishes.