Pictures at an Exhibition (13 page)

Father rolled onto his side and slid both hands, their palms pressed together, beneath his cheek. I slept the same way, body curled like a fiddlehead, hands almost in prayer. So this had been coded in my blood. Not his prodigious memory and not his artistic clairvoyance. Neither his ease, nor confidence, nor grace.

“You're right, son,” Father said, after a pause so long that once again I thought he had dropped off to sleep. “If Goethe is our guide, then we leave Paris tomorrow morning.” His words came in a rush. “We've been dipped in the hatred. It's making my mind feel a little—” He shook the box of matches on the table. “I've been dreaming of my own father. Of shelling and gas. My mind plays
movie reels of the Great War, though of course I have no actual personal true memory of the battlefields. So if I am dreaming of the war, I must in fact be dreaming of something else altogether.”

I did not know how to respond. Father sat upright, opened the small black notebook he kept with him always, and withdrew from it a folded SNCF timetable.

“There's a ten o'clock train. If it's still running. That's a civilized hour. We'll be home after dinner. We shall surprise your mother.”

I do not recall if I protested, though I must have, or, as I fell asleep that night in March of 1945, if it was my decided intention to flee from my father while he slept. I know only that when I awoke, I thought, I have to give him up. The idea seized upon me with the tenacity of a spasm and I leaped from bed. I could hardly keep my hands from making a clatter as I unhooked my coat, removed Father's billfold from the drawer, and took half his money. I lifted his black address book off the table and patted my pocket for our map of the city. I took Father's hat because it was nicer than my own, bundled up my suit and two shirts, and held my shoes in my hand. I opened the door and slipped my valise, heavier than I remembered, into the hallway.

“Where are you going?” Father asked, his voice thick.

“Just to the toilet,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Won't you check on the baby?”

I hesitated in the doorway, halted by the strange question, which surely came from some dream—one parent's request that the other check on their sleeping child as if, with darkness each night, came death. I closed the door behind me.

I changed in the WC and made my way in damp stockinged feet to the foyer, where the concierge was eating a piece of buttered toast.

“I'm a creature of habit,” he said, asking with narrowed eyes if I was going to turn him in for buying, or more likely selling, butter on the black market. We called those profiteers by the acronym of their goods: a BOF, for
boeuf, oeuf, frontage.
“I was raised by nuns, you know. No one to call Mummy.”

I nodded as if I understood. “New hat?” he asked brightly.

“Just today,” I said.

“Yesterday,” he corrected. “Good for you. I could use a new one as well.” He touched his cap, a pillbox like an organ grinder's monkey might wear. We both gave a hushed laugh and I strolled out into the night.

Chapter Ten

I
FOUND MYSELF IN A BAR IN THE MARAIS, WHERE
the late-night drunks were leaving as the morning drunks arrived. I hoped a warm beer would calm my nerves. I told myself that it was Father who had forsaken me first. I only wanted to keep looking for the paintings because I was convinced they were close at hand and the time was right to find them. I could not acknowledge that I searched out of an incomprehensible compulsion, or that whenever a strange sadness crept upon me, my first thought, like a drunk to his drink, was of the gallery and my father's collection.

I must have drifted to sleep, for when I awoke, I had no recollection of the hours between five and seven. I read a newspaper (the date was March 10, the headline
AMERICANS FIREBOMB TOKYO
) and talked with a municipal worker who kept one finger hooked on the strap of his overalls and told tall tales of bare knuckle fights in the merchant marine. At ten o'clock, I staggered out onto the street.

A notice, with a six-sided star in one corner and a French flag in the other, flapped against the carousel by Métro Saint-Paul. It read:

Les absents
from the East are boarded at the Hôtel Lutetia. Friends and family are advised to visit the central information desk between seven and four o'clock, Sunday through Friday.

I thought of Bertrand. Yes, he was “absent.” The word struck me uncomfortably. But I wasn't sure what they should be called, the Jews who had been deported, who walked like skeletons on the newsreel.

No, I could not accept that Bertrand had been arrested at all. He was too clever, too bright, too quick and foxlike, too charming to have been swept into the same trap. His absence made me sick with panic. They had the museum in their family's name, for God's sake. I tried to calm myself. I decided to go to the Hôtel Lutetia.

On the stroke of ten-thirty, I rose out of the Sèvres-Babylone Métro at the eastern corner of a park with a low gate and high hedge. Children shrieked from behind the bushes and, through a gap in the shrubbery, I watched them chase after one another, raising clouds of golden dust with their feet. One child stood off to the side, a boy in a blue jumper, scratching at the dirt with a knobby stick. Every few moments he paused and leaned on the branch, as if it were a cane, and watched the other children. On the swings, girls pumped their legs: skirt hems fluttered, curls bobbed, and shoes flashed. The creaky chains brayed like donkeys. The boy returned to his solitary digging with the point of the stick.

The hotel loomed before me. Its dun-colored exterior coiled around the corners of two grand avenues. The word LVTETIA burned in red electric lights over the thrusting central facade. It was a fortress, a cement arch of Art Deco design. I smelled the dust from the park and the coal-burning cars that one still saw frequently in those days following the war.

I waited for the light to change over the boulevard Raspail so I could cross to the hotel and join the knot of people clustered before the open doors of its central lobby. That crowd parted, for a moment, into a horseshoe shape, as if it were a stage for those of us waiting on the curb on the other side of the boulevard. A man with green army pants and strange yellow shoes leaned over a woman in a spring coat who wept so forcefully that he struggled to keep her standing. He had been carrying a burlap sack, which he dropped. Beans spilled out onto the street and the audience, in the horseshoe, bent to gather them.

I noticed other faces, lurking just inside the shadows of the rooms in the Lutetia, watching the tableau as I did. Traffic raced by. I wondered if the signal system was broken. The light did not change. A woman beside me pointed at one of the windows and shouted, “Lil-ianne Rossi!” and ran into the oncoming stream of cars as if they were phantoms. A horn blared. Brakes squealed. The woman was struck and her body made a dull sound and then flopped to the pavement. She wore a dress the color of lilacs. I had gone to the hotel expecting horrors, but not this one. For a moment, I thought she was dead. Then she rose, miraculously able to walk.

Something made me glance away, and in a flash I saw that my father was seated at the café outside the Lutetia. He heralded the waiter (also held rapt by the scene of the man in yellow shoes and the weeping woman) twice, unsuccessfully. Then the waiter stood in front of my father's table and blocked him from view.

I felt a small presence brush by me. It was the boy from the park, still holding the dusty stick in his hand. He picked his way around the accident without glancing its way and walked into the lobby of the hotel. In the distance a siren started its two-pitched wail.

I fled the scene, ran down into the Métro, and boarded the first train that appeared on the platform. My father must also have seen the advertisements for the central information center at the Lutetia. He too sought news of Bertrand's family. I told myself that I was not ready to see my father yet. I would return to him in a few days’ time, once I had word of the paintings.

I WENT ONCE MORE TO THE LUTETIA THAT SPRING, IN
the very early morning, as the street cleaners sprayed down the pavement and the water jumped into the air in a fine chromatic mist. It smelled rank because it came from the Seine, which was the color of a rotted lime.

I stood in the vestibule of the grand hotel, my eyes adjusting from the bright morning outside. Before me shifted a wall shingled with hundreds of pieces of paper on which were written names in block letters, then addresses, phone numbers, dates, and places: Sobibor,

Majdanek, Płaszów, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were codes that at the time I did not understand, their digits often preceded by the letter
A:
A-8019, A-500, A-7087. Many were written by parents looking for the children they'd left behind with neighbors and nuns.

I waited by the information desk, behind an old man who whispered in Yiddish to a volunteer. When he was sent away, disappointed, the volunteer greeted me.

“Good morning, sir.” He spoke with exaggerated slowness.

“I'm here to see Bertrand Reinach,” I enunciated deliberately, so he would recognize that I was calmer than the others.

“Very good,” he said, and withdrew a slim book with gold leaf pages and a leather binding that read
HOTEL LEDGER.
He traced a tobacco-stained finger across a floor plan. His foot tapped as he looked.

From a hallway to my right, I heard a child wailing and, above us, the patter of feet. “Monsieur Reinach is not here,” the man said. “I'm happy to show you the list of our current residents—”

I shook my head.

He glanced at the snaking line of people behind me. There were lines everywhere and always. “I truly am sorry.” He spoke with an eastern accent. I pictured a map from a newsreel before the invasion of France, of streaming lines covering Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and felt a wash of shame.

“You can contact the Red Cross displaced persons bureau,” he said, the forms already in his hand, “and also UNRRA. It's all written here. Remember to consider all the different possible spellings of a name when you submit this to them. That may speed the process.

“We are glad to see you here,” he said, as if I had been a guest at the hotel. I walked away.

In an unseen room, someone played piano, a Chopin étude my mother loved. I followed the sound. Twin girls, with identical blond braids, sat beside each other on the piano bench. One played only with her right hand, the other only with her left. They swayed in time with the music, which then abruptly stopped. One twin scolded the other in an unrecognizable language and pulled her hair. The
second girl climbed down from the bench and ran to the volunteer to complain, chattering to him in the same bizarre speech. He left his podium and came to where I stood by the piano.

“Twins,” he said to me. “There are several of them here, and these two speak only their own language. They invented it in the camp. I can usually guess what they're telling me, so I respond as best I can. They've begun to speak French. They'll forget their made-up tongue soon enough.”

“Chopin,” I said to the girl who remained on the bench, and I smiled at her as warmly as I could.

“Chopin.” She beamed at me and began to play a different étude, though only the right hand. Her sister pushed past me and clambered to the bench, and the rumbling base joined the trilling treble.

“Bertrand Reinach?” I asked the girls. They twittered and kept playing.

I FOUND MYSELF AGAIN AT THE LOUVRE, AT THE ENTRY
-way to Rose's office, where I had time only to repeat my desire to see Madame Clément before a security guard built like the strongman from the circus hustled me out of the building, gripping my arm as if deciding whether or not to break it. Outside, released, I looked up at the guard and recognized him as a classmate from fourth form.

“Théo,” I said.

“Max Berenzon? How did you get here? Sorry for the rough welcome.” I remembered that Théo had also been a bully in school. I could still picture him wearing the dunce cap. During tests, his neck craned over my shoulder. After one, he had asked me,
When you read, how do you keep the letters from moving around?
I was surprisingly glad to see him.

“Everyone's very protective about Miss Clément,” he said. “Some of the Résistants wanted to bang-bang-bang her.” He made a pistol with his hand and fired it, making his finger, the muzzle, jump with each shot. “They came to the Louvre with their straight razors and the branding iron. She had to change her name, and they relocated her to a new apartment.”

Rose, then, was unmarried, as I had sensed all along. As she had promised me.

Théo sized me up and down. “Never thought you and me'd fall for the same gal, Berenzon. Oh, it's clear from your face.” He gave me a motherly pat on the shoulder. “I can tell you where Rose lives. No use in you wasting your time around this museum. All snobs, they are. They're about to send her on a trip to Switzerland or Zurich or some other place where there are caves with paintings in them?” He squinted at me.

“Lascaux?”

“No, different caves, with real paintings. Like, by What'shis-name.” He shook his head. “She lives at thirty-one, rue de Sévigné, fifth floor. Judging from her window, I'd say her door'd be the last one on the right. No point in me standing out in the street anymore, now that I've scared her, too.”

“Thirty-one, rue de Sévigné?” I repeated. “Fifth floor, on the right.”

“That's it,” Théo said. I thanked him and received a bone-crushing embrace, which I tried to return.

“There's some muscle on you,” he said, then called “Good luck!” after me as I ran. I could have lifted a house off its foundations.

Rue de Sévigné was not so far. I caught the door to the courtyard just as it was swinging shut and leaped up the stairs of the building. As I rounded the corner to the fourth floor, I recalled a teacher who had told our classroom of boys that there were a limited number of locks in Paris, and the chance that your house key could open another man's home was one in twenty-seven. On my father's key ring jangled a dozen keys or more.