Noah's Child (11 page)

By bike, and going the wrong way several times, I retraced the journey to Chemlay, and reached the Villa Jaune at about eleven o'clock.

I didn't even ring at the gate. Skirting round the
outside wall, I pushed open the rusty door in the clearing and went to the disused chapel.

The door was open. So was the trapdoor.

As I thought he would be, Father Pons was down in the crypt.

He opened his arms wide when he saw me. I threw myself at him and unburdened all my emotion.

‘You deserve another slap from me,' he said, hugging me gently.

‘What's got into you all?'

He waved me to a chair and lit some candles.

‘Joseph, you're one of the last survivors of a glorious people that has just been massacred. Six million Jews were assassinated . . . six million! You can't hide away from all those bodies.'

‘What have I got in common with them, Father?'

‘You were brought to life alongside them, and threatened with death at the same time as them.'

‘And then what? I'm allowed to think differently to them, aren't I?'

‘Of course you are. But, now that they no longer exist, you have to testify to the fact that they
did
exist.'

‘Why me and not you?'

‘I do too, just as much as you do. Each in our own way.'

‘I don't want a bar mitzvah. I want to believe in Jesus Christ, like you.'

‘Listen, Joseph, you'll have a bar mitzvah because you love your mother and respect your father. As for religion, you can see about that later.'

‘But . . .'

‘It's really important that you accept that you're Jewish now. It's nothing to do with religious faith. Later, if you still want to, you can be a converted Jew.'

‘So still a Jew, a Jew for ever?'

‘Yes. A Jew for ever. Have your bar mitzvah, Joseph. Otherwise you'll break your parents' hearts.'

I could tell he was right.

‘You know, Father, I liked being a Jew with you.'

He burst out laughing.

‘Me too, Joseph, I liked being a Jew with you.'

We laughed together for a while. Then he took me by the shoulders.

‘Your father loves you, Joseph. He may not love you very well or it may be in a way you don't like, but he still loves you as he'll never love anyone else and as no one else will ever love you.'

‘Not even you?'

‘Joseph, I love you as much as any other child, perhaps a bit more. But it's not the same love.'

From the sense of relief washing over me, I knew that these were the words I had come to hear.

‘Set yourself free from me, Joseph. I've finished my job. We can be friends now.'

He waved his arm around the crypt.

‘Haven't you noticed anything?'

Despite the poor light, I could see that the candlesticks had gone, so had the Torah, the picture of Jerusalem . . . I went over to the piles of books on the shelves.

‘What! . . . They're not Hebrew any more . . .'

‘It's not a synagogue any more.'

‘What's going on?'

‘I'm starting a collection.'

He fingered a few books with unfamiliar characters on them.

‘Stalin will eventually kill the soul of Russia: I'm collecting works by dissident poets.'

Father Pons was giving up on us! He must have seen the reproachful look in my eye.

‘I'm not abandoning you, Joseph.
You
are there now for the Jews. You're Noah from now on.'

Six

I
'm finishing writing this on a shady terrace, looking out over a sea of olive trees. Instead of withdrawing inside for a siesta with my friends, I have stayed out in the heat, because the sun injects some of its happiness into my heart.

Fifty years have passed since these events. In the end I did have a bar mitzvah, I did take over my father's business and I didn't convert to Christianity. I took up the religion of my forefathers with passion, and passed it on to my children. But God never showed up . . .

Never in all my years as a pious Jew and then an indifferent Jew have I found the God that I felt as a child in that little country church, somewhere between the magical stained-glass windows, the garland-bearing angels and the booming organ. The kindly God hovering above bouquets of lilies, gentle
flames and the smell of waxed wood, and watching over hidden children and complicit villagers.

I never stopped seeing Father Pons. I first went back to Chemlay in 1948 when the local council named a street after Mademoiselle Marcelle who never returned from deportation. We were all there, all the children she had gathered up, fed and given false papers. Before unveiling the plaque dedicated to her, the burgomaster gave a speech about the pharmacist, also mentioning her officer father who had been a hero in the previous war. A photograph of each of them had pride of place amongst the flowers. I stared at those portraits of Dammit and the colonel: the same, exactly the same, as appallingly ugly as each other, except that the soldier had a moustache. Three highly qualified rabbis glorified the memory and the courage of this woman who had given her life; then Father Pons took them to see his former collection.

When I married Barbara, Father Pons had an opportunity to go to a real synagogue; he delighted in watching the whole ceremony. Later he often joined us at home to celebrate Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah or one of my children's birthdays. But I actually preferred going to Chemlay so that I could go down into the crypt beneath the chapel, a place which still
provided comfort with its harmonious disorder. Over the course of thirty years he quite often announced:

‘I'm starting a collection.'

Granted, nothing can be likened to the Shoah, and no evil can be compared to another evil, but every time a people on this earth was threatened by other men's madness, Father Pons set about saving things that bore witness to the endangered spirit. Which means he amassed quantities of paraphernalia in his Noah's Ark: there was the Native American collection, the Vietnamese collection, the Tibetan Monk collection . . .

By reading the papers I got to the stage where I could predict when, on my next visit, Father Pons would say:

‘I'm starting a collection.'

Rudy and I have remained friends. We contributed to the building of Israel. I gave money, he made it his home. Time and again Father Pons said how happy he was to see Hebrew, that sacred language, resuscitated.

The Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem decided to award the title ‘Righteous among the Nations' to those who, during the Nazi era and the terror it provoked, incarnated the best of humanity by saving
Jews whose lives were in danger. Father Pons was named as one of the Righteous in December 1983.

He never knew, he had just died. His modesty would probably not have liked the ceremony Rudy and I were planning to arrange; he would probably have protested that he shouldn't be thanked, that he had simply listened to his heart and done his duty. In fact, a celebration like that would have brought most pleasure to us, his children.

This morning Rudy and I went to walk a path through the wood in Israel that bears his name. ‘Father Pons Wood' comprises 271 trees representing the 271 children he saved.

There are now young saplings growing at the feet of the older trees.

‘Look, Rudy, there are going to be more trees, it won't mean anything any more . . .'

‘No, it's right, Joseph. How many children do you have?'

‘Four.'

‘And grandchildren?'

‘Five.'

‘When he saved you, Father Pons saved those nine people. Twelve for me. It'll be even more in the next generation. And it'll keep on growing. In a few
centuries he will have saved millions of human beings.'

‘Like Noah.'

‘Do you remember the Bible, you heathen? You surprise me . . .'

Rudy and I are still just as different in every way as we used to be. And we love each other just as much. We can argue vehemently and then give each other a big hug goodnight. Every time I come and see him here, on his farm in what was once Palestine, or when he comes to me in Belgium, we get on to the subject of Israel. Although I support this young nation, I don't approve of all its actions, unlike Rudy who adheres to and justifies the regime's every move, even the most warlike.

‘Come off it, Rudy, being in favour of Israel doesn't mean supporting every decision Israel makes. You have to make peace with the Palestinians. They have as much right to live here as you do. It's their territory too. They lived here before Israel was established. The very fact that we have a history of persecution should make us want to say to them the words that we ourselves waited centuries to hear.'

‘Yes, but our safety . . .'

‘Peace, Rudy, peace, that's what Father Pons taught us to hope for.'

‘Don't be naïve, Joseph. The best way to achieve peace is often war.'

‘I don't agree. The more hate you build up between the two sides, the harder it will be to find peace.'

Earlier, as we headed back to the olive plantation, we drove past a Palestinian house which had just been destroyed by the tracks of a tank. Things lay scattered in the dust that drifted up into the sky. Two groups of children were fighting violently amongst the rubble.

I asked him to stop the jeep.

‘What's this about?'

‘Reprisals from our side,' he told me. ‘There was a Palestinian suicide bomb yesterday. Three victims. We had to react.'

Without saying anything, I climbed out of the car and walked over to the rubble.

Two rival gangs, Jewish boys and Palestinian boys, were hurling stones at each other. As they kept missing, one of them grabbed a piece of wood, launched himself at the closest adversary and struck him. The retaliation was swift. In a matter of seconds the boys in both gangs were beating each other
viciously with broken planks.

I ran over to them, yelling.

Were they frightened? Did they make the most of the diversion to stop fighting? They scattered in opposite directions.

Rudy came over to me slowly, completely relaxed.

I leaned forward and saw some things left by the children. I picked up a kippah and a kiffeyeh. I put one into my right pocket, the other into my left.

‘What are you doing?' Rudy asked.

‘I'm starting a collection.'

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is an internationally bestselling French author and playwright.
Noah's Child
is the fourth novel in his popular series
Cycle de l'Invisible
about childhood and religion. He lives in Brussels.

Also by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Concerto to the Memory of an Angel

The Woman with the Bouquet

The Most Beautiful Book in the World

Oscar and the Lady in Pink

Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

Milarepa

First published in France as
L'Enfant de Noé
by Éditions
Albin Michel, S. A., 2004

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

This e-book edition published in 2016

Copyright © Éditions Albin Michel, S. A., 2004

Translation © Adriana Hunter, 2012

The moral right of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Adriana Hunter to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French embassy in London. (
www.frenchbooknews.com
)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.