Pictures at an Exhibition (14 page)

After one more flight of stairs, I was at her doorway. I frantically tried to open Rose Clément's lock. On the sixth key, the door was opened from within and I stumbled forward into the arms of a slender boy. He pushed me away. “No one is here!” he shouted. I clutched the banister to keep from falling down the stairs.

“I'm lost, my mistake,” I said.

He snarled and slammed the door. Undeterred, I tried the neighbor's, but none of the keys fit.

I left. It was growing dark and I did not know where I would spend the night. I had been staying in a fleabag hotel by the Gare de l'Est. After four days, the patroness let it be known that there was a five-day maximum. I understood that the limit did not apply to her regular clientele, only those she considered refugees. I wandered down rue de Sévigné, past the walled gardens of the great letter writer for whom the street was named. I rang the tired bells at the counters of six hotels. The only ones with rooms to let asked for more than I could pay.

Back out on the street, I heard singing, followed it, and found an open basement door. There were Jews inside—I was still in the Marais, after all—a dozen men in black, scattered like musical notes across the rows of benches. They swayed and bobbed and murmured and burst into song and then stood still, and then sat. I stood in the doorway, unwilling to enter.

“Juif?”
A man hurried over, brandishing an ear trumpet. “Where is your tallis? Do you have teffilin?” I had none, I gestured. I took off my hat. “Leave it on!” I crept farther into the chilly room and stood in the fourth row.

At first I held the prayer book open and turned its pages when the men around me did. After an hour, I folded the book closed and held it against my chest.

I wished Bertrand were with me. At various times in his life, he had taken up Torah study, never staying with it for long and yet always returning to it.

I felt as if I were falling down a stairwell in a dream. Around me, the scraps of voices rushed forward and together like birds rejoining formation. The men covered their heads with their white prayer shawls and put their hands over their eyes. Each time I was left alone, staring out over this sea of ghosts. On the third time, a gnarled hand grabbed me on the shoulder and pulled me under the tent of his prayer shawl while the men sang words that made them cover their eyes in awe. The man kept his grip. His armpit reeked like a woolen coat in the rain.

Still, in this double enclosure—arm holding me close, white silken tent—the intimacy was overwhelming and I had to shut my eyes.

When the prayer was over, I turned to thank my protector. Three identical men, all my father's age, stood before me. They could have been brothers or prophets and were all immersed in prayer. Until one Hasid looked up and, with an eye as bright as a bird's, winked at me.

The men around us broke apart, finished praying at a signal I did not recognize. I looked down at the floor, unsure of what to do. My valise sat at my feet.

“So?” the friendly Hasid asked and made a hangdog expression, which I took to be my own. Behind him was shuffling, the stacking of prayer books into an uneven tower, and the minor chords of Yiddish.

“Are you lost?” He folded his prayer shawl into a worn velvet pouch that closed with a zipper.

“I'm not,” I said.

“Lost in the spiritual sense,” he replied.

“I won't be converted.”

“Oy, I don't mean that either.” He had an accent like my mother's. “Let me tell you a story. Two Chelmites went for a walk. The first one said, ‘Look! Bear tracks!’ The second one disagreed. ‘No, those are deer tracks!’ They were still arguing about it when they were hit by a train.” He paused. “Well, you've lost your sense of humor,” he said.

I did not know who Chelmites were. I looked down at his feet. He wore the same yellow shoes of the man I had seen at the Lutetia, holding up the weeping woman. Then I too got the joke and laughed once, loudly.

“But
nu
, what's so bad? You're young, you're not unpleasant to look at, you even had parents who took you for braces on your teeth.”

“I don't know where I'll sleep tonight,” I said, without having intended to tell him.

“No place to stay, is it? Not such a tragedy.”

Chapter Eleven

C
HAIM TENENWURZEIL SHOWED ME MY ROOM
without any comment. i was to sleep in a narrow, short bed. With little else to unpack, I hung my father's coat in a closet with a splintery floor, next to a suit shrouded in tissue paper. A silken strip on the sleeve, the kind one usually removes, told me that Chaim had made the boy-sized set of clothes himself.

That night, as I lay awake, I thought of the strange series of events that had led me to this place. I rolled to my side and fumbled in my wallet for the scrap of paper on which I had written Rose's address. “Thirty-one, rue de Sévigné,” Théo had told me. But Théo had never really learned to read. Théo had asked me how to keep the letters from sliding around on the page.

I dressed quickly and crept across the parlor. Picture frames glinted and the wind rustled the pages of the songbook open at the piano. Though Chaim had retired some hours ago, light still shone under his bedroom door.

I was in the hallway, on the stairs, and then the street. I sprinted toward 13, rue de Sévigné, not 31, the high stone wall of the Musée Carnavalet running alongside me, its long halls filled with imperceptibly swinging signs from old taverns and cobblers and apothecaries. I lit a match to read the list of names by the doorbell. One was unas-signed, so I pressed it and leaned back between the lengthening rings to see if the noise made a hand reach. I rang and rang, but the rooms
on the fifth floor remained dark. The church on rue de Rivoli chimed eleven o'clock.

With a squeak, a window on the ground floor swung outward onto the street. It revealed a woman in a nightdress with an infant in her arms.

“That's enough,” she said. “Are you looking for her, too?”

“I'm Max Berenzon. I'm sorry to disturb you. Mademoiselle Clément is a family friend. I've just returned to Paris—from the camps,” I lied, to my surprise. “I live with another
absent
at forty-five, rue de Sévigné. Forty-five, like this year we've been given. Isn't that odd, to come back from the war, and move to the same street as one's dear friend?” I babbled on, as if my mind were rattled.

The woman's pinched expression flickered. She was close. Her wan hand parted the darkness and touched my cheek.

“What we have done—what France has done—it will take generations to atone, to recover.” The baby in her arms whimpered and curled his fists in his eyes. “Tired boy, tired boy,” she murmured, kissing the child but looking at me. “You could come in here,” the woman offered. “Since your friend left for Switzerland tonight. Working for the government. Or a Swiss museum. Or was it a bank?”

My mind bent around the word
Switzerland.

“Tonight?” I repeated.

“Tonight, yes, tonight, tonight,” she sang, rocking the infant from side to side. His bald head was like a pale egg.

“Won't you come in here, young man? Baby's tired, he'll be sound asleep.” Her finger twirled around my earlobe. “Or we could even leave him downstairs and creep into your friend's apartment. I have the keys—I clean it on Wednesdays. She'll never guess.”

“No!” I backed away from her and began to run in the opposite direction. A phonograph chided me from its open window.
“Tu? Tu? Tu! Piccolo iddio!”
the soprano sang, above the gathering waves of violins.

“I know what they did to you,” she rasped. “Give me a chance to repay the debt. My name is Marianne,” she said, in a loud, clear voice. “Look at me, look at me! My God, will someone look at me?”

Around us, the street stirred to life. I stared at Marianne, who held aside her dressing gown to reveal her nipple like a target and her bare breast, as if she were Marianne in the Delacroix painting.

I turned down rue de Sévigné and cut through the narrow, smaller streets. The city's old fortress walls were visible above me, silent and runic. Here was the place du Marché Sainte-Catherine.

I did not believe that Rose had left Paris.

I sat at a café table in the western corner of the plaza. I could tell the night was a pleasant one.

A wiry man with tawny skin and matted hair appeared in the plaza, wheeling a bicycle strapped with bundles of rags. A German shepherd trotted behind him. The vagabond set about displaying his collection on the plaza's cobblestones: an army canteen, a jug of liquid, matches, a flak helmet, a broken straw hat, and three metal stakes, each with a rag bound at its tip.

“Fools and fishermen,” he shouted, running in a circle in the center of the plaza. “You sit there licking your fingers while my dog chews her tail until it is nothing but raw flesh and bloody fur!” The bitch lifted her head, and her ears rose to two points. Her tail, intact, curled like a question mark behind her.

The vagabond darted to the teahouse across from where I sat and squatted down so that his face was level with the sitters’.
“I'm like the king of a rain country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolfs itch!”
he bellowed. A man with an eye patch drew his arm around his companion. In the spotlight of the teahouse, the vagabond pulled his tattered shirt over his head and threw it to the ground. He had ropes of muscles and a starved look. The square of sky above the plaza was blue-black, and I strained my eyes to follow his movements.

“Do you have gold in your veins,” he asked, “or milk from a witch's teat?” He lit a torch and held it in his right hand, then took a long draft from his jug. He spit, and the air around him exploded in flame. The crowd gasped and sighed. He danced around the square in leaping steps, rhythmically spitting out the kerosene in great bursts. Then the fire-breather approached the café tables and demanded money in an outstretched, oil-spattered hand. His arms and chest were hairless and coppery.

There was the scent of kerosene in the air, as when I had come across the wreckage of a fallen RAF plane in Le Puy near the end of the war. The British bombed at night, accurately, and the Americans during the day, from a higher altitude and with less precision. Monsieur Bickart lost his cousin this way. We grew to hate the American pilots. “Cowards!” He would shake his fist at them, running out into the yard while the rest of us dashed for the root cellar.

“One pays to look at everything!” the fire-swallower shouted. “City snobs! Bastards! You look, you pay! Hurry up now, slow-wits! Just a centime. Mulattos! Impotents and eunuchs!” He thrust his head back, and a fountain of sparks burst from his mouth. It was as if a pail of flame had been thrown against the walls of the plaza and in it, a tall woman stood beside a man holding a suitcase. They had stopped to examine the spectacle. Rose? I was far from certain. In the next burst of flame, I stood and called to her, upsetting the table.

And then, with an audible buzz, the spotlight in the teahouse exploded, and the windows around the square disappeared, as if black paint had been poured into the empty column of the plaza. A few people cried out in surprise; most groaned. Women trilled as men made their advances under the cover of darkness. The waiters cried, “Bills, please, ladies and gentleman, pay your bills, please,” and there was the sound of chairs scraping back from tables.

I ran across the square, colliding with others, jostled by them. “Stop! Stop! Pay your bills!” the waiters wailed. Couples locked hands and I crashed into their joined arms, as in a schoolyard game.

The place du Marché Sainte-Catherine was open at three corners, and I pushed through the blinded bodies toward the edge that led down to rue de Rivoli, repeating Rose's name until it ceased to make any sense to me.

Chapter Twelve

A
t the end of March, I received a battered envelope with its foreign postage stamps already torn off.,Chaim handed me the letter, puzzled. I took it to my room, which we now called Daniel's room, as that was the name of Chaim's son, in whose bed I slept. I tore open the envelope and tried to read the familiar script. Rose. Her letter began abruptly:

I've heard now from several different sources that you are looking for me, though each one describes an unfamiliar man: at the Louvre, you were an art thief with a guilty conscience and an early Manet. An Oriental asked my neighbor on Île Saint-Louis for my whereabouts. The museum security guard couldn't recall your last name. The concierge of my former residence fell in love with an
absent
from the East and remembered your address. (By the way, I have met a girl here—an American translator!—whom I think you would adore.) Is this a permanent address for you or not? I will think not and continue to take precautions: I am the intended target of a group of vigilantes who believe I was a collaborator.

I was last in Austria, where the American Monuments men have uncovered the Ghent Altarpiece. A German professor led us to it, then killed himself, his wife, and their child. One of the Americans stole the bedspread from Goering's house. If you have come this close, M., then you will find me. Which I would like. I will be in Paris again in May. I would write some code into this letter, some secret meeting place, but know little about my return, nor what Huyghe and Jaujard will determine of my security. Are you looking for your paintings? Don't. Do you know why?

By a circuitous route, the following document came into my hands and I thought I would pass it along to you. Perhaps it has some legal use, which I doubt, given the outcome of this war. More likely, it will merely serve as a curio.

RC

Clipped to Rose's letter was a revocation of my family's citizenship. She did not even write my name. I cast Rose's letter on the floor.

Chaim appeared in the doorway of Daniel's room. “Look out the window, quickly,” he ordered. I obeyed, still in my dream state.