Pictures at an Exhibition (16 page)

I explained to Madame van Seyveld that I was in fact Daniel's son, and she conveyed this information to her husband, who nodded as if he understood, though in further untranslated exchanges I heard my father's name repeated.

The wife grew quiet, awaiting the explanation of my visit.

“I'm happy to see your home remained untouched,” I said.

Madame looked down and twisted the emerald ring she wore over her gloves. Her skin hung loosely off her bones and her hair was nearly gone. Hence the hat, indoors. I imagined they had not responded sooner to my knocking because, unaccustomed to visitors, they had had to ready themselves.

“You see,” she said, “the apartment is filled with furniture. Yet, aside from the stove and the bathtubs, none of it is ours. Neither the kitchen cabinets, nor the forks or the linens. Not the bedposts, not the prints of India, not even the doorknobs.”

Her every belonging, Madame van Seyveld said, had been replaced by something that resembled its predecessor but was fundamentally different.

“The Germans emptied our home completely in ‘forty-one. Then it was refurnished to house a Vichy official, who is now in prison. I can't recall his name.” She asked Frits for it, but he turned up his palms and smiled, tapping his temple.

“I've gotten it into my head to find the lady of the house that was looted to stock ours with silver,” she said. “If she is still alive, she must want it back.” With a clink, she lifted a tarnished spoon from the table. “We had the same pattern, only the monogram is changed,” she said. Without warning, her husband began to weep. The wife seemed not to notice as he wiped the tears with the sleeve of his pajamas.

I handed my handkerchief to Monsieur van Seyveld, who blew his nose.

Madame continued for what must have been forty minutes, explaining that she had tried to get the Bon Marché's wedding registries from the same decade in which she herself had been married to see if she could match the initials on the silver to a bride from the
last century. The department store's records, however, were incomplete. At a certain point, Monsieur van Seyveld, still clutching my handkerchief, dropped off to sleep. His wife, though she appeared frail, continued. “We find the strangest things in the house—a child's penmanship book in one drawer, dentures in another, this hat I'm wearing, Frits's pajamas, bronzed baby shoes. No two things came from the same house. Rather, the Germans brought a desk from one place, an armoire from another, our bed from a third. I picture some central warehouse of furniture from all the Jews in Paris. I dream of it, in an airplane hangar, with towers of chairs, and tables stacked one atop another.”

At length, I interrupted her. “What happened to your husband's collection of Dutch drawings?” I asked.

The old woman touched her husband on the wrist and pressed her lips to his cheek. I could picture them as young lovers: Frits, blond, speaking French with his rich Dutchman's vowels; she, skittish and stylish.

She recited my question in Dutch. He beamed at me, then spoke one sentence at a time, pausing for her to translate.

“Fortunately, the Rembrandt sketches are not big. We put one or two drawings in envelopes this size.” She repeated his motions, as he held his hands out in a square. “We sent one hundred letters, registered mail, half to our address in Switzerland and the rest to our most trusted friends.

“Four did not arrive. We comforted ourselves: a few out of two hundred is not so bad to have lost. But then, when we came back here as you did, in the late summer, we found those four letters waiting in the postbox. They had been sent all over Switzerland, so it took them nearly twenty months to return home. On two, we had marked the wrong addresses. We learned from the stamps on the other two that a friend had died and we had not been notified.”

“Where are the drawings now?” I asked, incredulous.

The wife straightened her hat and repeated the question to her husband.

He answered her and she translated. “We'll never tell.”

…

I STRAINED AGAINST THE DOOR LEADING INTO CHAIM'S
apartment building. At that hour, six o'clock, kitchen windows with grease-darkened panes had been thrown open across the courtyard, and from them fell the smells of onions and boiling cabbage. The branches of a summer magnolia tree draped over the cement wall, and the round loveliness of the blossoms seemed almost obscene. A baby wailed and a cat meowed plaintively, their cries intermingling until I could not tell one from the other.

A telephone rang—an uncommon sound in this neighborhood—as if to say,
Stop all this racket!
and everyone and everything hushed for a moment, straining to hear the news and how our neighbor would react to it, good or bad, miraculous or tragic. I listened, too, but heard only the wind sucking the curtains in and out of an open window above my head. They reminded me of lungs, inflating and deflating, and I remembered my horror when we operated on live dogs in medical school. We sawed through their sternums and opened the rib cages with the same gesture as one opens a window onto the street, which revealed the dog's lungs undulating beneath. I had given my poor subject too much chloroform, and it died mid-operation. I told Bertrand of the dissections. I hadn't expected to upset him so. For days he would not stop talking about it, lecturing me on the evils of modern science.

As if summoned, Chaim appeared in the window five floors above me. Chaim did not look out but seemed preoccupied with—it must have been—the contents of my valise, which was stored where he stood. His movements were furtive and quick. I entered the building and climbed the stairs. I could not be angry at Chaim for this—I had done my own curious (and ultimately heartbreaking) reconnoitering amid his family's belongings.

Before I reached the landing, Chaim had unhooked the latch and stood shaking in the doorway.

“You eat so much that soon we'll have nothing left. I can't keep a boy who gobbles up all my supplies.” His anguished face reminded me of an El Greco. He seemed ready to howl.

“Please don't worry,” I said.

“Then what will we eat?”

“I have ten thousand francs hidden away,” I said.

“Let's see it,” he snapped. I was lying.

The apartment was stifling. The night was cool, though not unusually so. However, Chaim was burning a broken chair in the fireplace. The blue paint peeled and cracked and glowed in the fire, and one leg stuck out at a strangely human angle. Everywhere I looked were Chaim's family's belongings—his wife's hat with dust on its brim, the box with his son's lock of hair on the mantelpiece, the shelf of children's books. Chaim put his arm on my own to steady himself as we walked to the valise, where I knew I had no money hidden. The fumes from the burning paint made me lightheaded. I felt Chaim's impatience shimmering behind me. I thought, He will know that all I have in here is the fake Manet
Ham
, a concert program of Mother performing Brahms's Concerto Number 2 in B-Flat Major in 1927, and the pink sweater with the pearlized buttons that belongs to Rose. I made a show of unzipping the case's inner lining, where the forgery sagged in its gaudy frame. I rummaged through a shelf in the pantry.

“I find your lying unsettling,” Chaim said.

He sat at the table. We could hear the radio from the
chambre de bonne
above us, and the sound of emptying water rushing through a drainpipe.

“You should find your father,” Chaim said.

“I know where to find him,” I said, more harshly than I had intended.

“I'd like some tea,” he said, his eyes darting around the still room. I wondered who and what he saw.

“I'll make tea,” I said, jumping up. He waved me down.

“There isn't any,” he said. “No tea, but I'll tell you a story.” He gestured for me to sit beside him and patted my hand absentmindedly while he spoke.

“I remember visiting the family of a rich dentist when I was very young, in Wilno. They had a magical contraption in their house that kept the water boiling all through Shabbas, so we could drink tea at
any time of day. I remember watching my mother envy it, and to see such envy in her eyes made me want to steal it or break it for her.

“I dreamed of that machine for years—until we left Poland, and I was already a grown man. But from the time I was five until, oh, twenty, that machine stayed with me, steaming away, and when my mind drifted or filled with envious thoughts, or when I felt wronged in some way that was small but bitter, there it was. I had loved my mother's samovar and tea set before we visited the dentist's family, but when we returned to our house when Shabbas was over, our samovar seemed common and tarnished to me, with dents in places I had never noticed before. It must have looked that way to my mother, too, because she put it away and stopped using it except when my father asked her to take it out.

“What is amazing, though, is that the dentist and his wife, who was also educated, a doctor—they were the richest Jews in town; they had a cook and two maids—still they only had an outhouse, just like my parents and I did. I remember the dentist's backyard, the kitchen gardens to one side, the chicken coop to the other, then the apple tree with the table beneath it, and at the edge of the property the whitewashed outhouse. Though they were assimilated Jews, my father's fondness for the dentist was greater than his disapproval. The visits, however, made my mother unhappy. She worked so hard. Father would tell her,
We're rich in all the things money can't buy
, and kiss her and bless her and then the children and the house. But my mother, may she rest in peace, was a more practical woman.” Chaim clapped his hands against the tops of his knees, as if to say,
Enough of that.

“The only goy I call my friend, Gilles Lalieu, is a tailor in the same neighborhood where I worked. His customers were mostly Christians and mine were mostly Jews, though there were some Christians who thought I was better than Gilles and some Jews who thought he was better than me. Yet”—Chaim paused—”I am truthfully the better tailor. When his billy-goat mother torments him, he drinks, and this makes his hands shake. And mine have never failed me. I am as deft as Houdini. I had not wanted to visit Gilles until I
filled out. And now I say we should go. Come with me now, won't you? They too, have the tea-making machine.”

Chaim unchained the door, and I had to jockey on the stairwell to get in front of him. I preferred to walk ahead on the stairs in case he stumbled on the uneven steps. The heavy courtyard door swung shut behind us.

We descended rue de Sévigné to rue de Rivoli. The sun setting behind the gold-topped pillar at the Bastille filled me with a hope I had not felt in many months. A red convertible car honked its horn at two girls who carried a picnic basket between them. The men and women in the cafés were leaning over one another's tables and laughing, the women's elbows resting on the tables of men they did not know. A crowd had gathered before a hotel on the corner.

“What's going on?” Chaim asked the waiter at the busy café.

He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “Maurice Chevalier. He went into the apartment above the hotel two hours ago.” A man in a tweed coat with a camera slung around his neck jostled the waiter. The waiter pushed the cameraman off the sidewalk, into the street. “Watch it,” he said. “The café is still open here.”

The reporter took a picture of the building, and at the pop of his flashbulb everyone rushed forward. The singer was nowhere to be seen. “Why's Chevalier in the Fourth?” I asked the blond woman standing next to me. She had a doll's face with a black veil drawn over her eyes.

“I don't know and I don't care,” she declared. “Oh, it's been years since anyone has seen him!”

A teenage boy at my elbow said, “Chevalier's girl's a Jew—her parents live in this neighborhood.” At that moment, the singing star appeared on the doorstep of the hotel wearing a white linen suit, with his famous boater cocked at its famous angle. The crowd cried out and pushed toward him.

“Tell us about Mistinguett,” the newsman hollered. Chevalier took off his hat and looked into it. “To me, she is dead,” he said.

“Tell us about Hollywood,” a second newsman called, as he ran to join the crowd.

“I love it,” he said in English, and gave a toothy smile.

“Mr. Chevalier, what about a song?” a woman called out.

“A song! A song!” The crowd began to chant.

“Sing ‘Prosper’!”

“‘Ma Pomme’!”

“How about ‘Dans la Vie faut pas s'en faire’?”

“ ‘Valentine’!” Chaim shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth.

“Chaim?” I said, amused.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What can I say? My wife used to love it.”

“No, sing ‘Ça sent si bon la France’,” a voice shouted. The crowd quieted and the blonde to my right clucked. “What a faux pas.” I recalled the song, written during the Occupation and popular with German troops and their sympathizers.

A young man in a narrow tie and a gray hat pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Collaborator!” he shouted.
“Boche
lover!” A murmur rose up around me. The young man took a swing at Chevalier, who staggered back. The singer's hat was knocked from his head and onto rue de Sévigné. The wind lifted it and skipped it farther down the street. Two women gave chase, their high heels clattering.

The crowd parted. No one stopped the young man as he ran up rue de Rivoli, kicking his legs and pumping his arms, the tie dangling over his shoulder. The crowd fell silent and took a step back from Chevalier.

The waiter from the café handed a dishcloth through the crowd to the singer, who held it to his tanned cheek with one hand and smoothed his hair with the other. “Do you still want a song?” he asked.

“Yes!” everyone cried. Chaim and I looked at each other.

“Do you want to stay?” I whispered.

“Of course,” he said. “It's Chevalier! It's not like we see him every day in shul.”

“For the monsieur in the
impressive
black hat,” Chevalier said. “‘Valentine.’” The crowd turned toward Chaim, who nodded to Chevalier above the stares.

Chevalier took the towel away from his cheek, and two splotches of blood stood out against the white cotton. “Well, I need a girl to sing to, don't I?” he asked and his eyes scanned the crowd, which had grown to fifty or so. Many customers at the café stood at their tables. A few remained seated and continued to talk in loud, deliberate voices.