The House of Dreams (32 page)

*   *   *

We jumped down off the tram and began to walk toward Air-Bel. Annie stopped me beneath the railway bridge, just as a train thundered overhead. “Gabriel,” she said. “I'm not walking another step until you tell me what's going on.” She settled her back against the tunnel wall, and I put my hands either side of her. The train passed by, and the vibration through the brickwork stilled.

“I'm sorry,” I said hoarsely.

“Sorry? For what?” She reached up and touched my face. “Gabriel, are you crying? What's wrong?”

“No, I'm not crying,” I said, embarrassed, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand. I was, of course; I've always been a weeper. Never make it through an old movie without a tissue or two, not like Annie, she's the tough one.

“Stop it this instant. You're scaring me. Whatever it is can't be anywhere near as bad as you think.”

“It is. I've done something terrible.”

 

FORTY-FOUR

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

2000

G
ABRIEL

“What did you do, Gabriel?” The girl is there, suddenly, her face close to mine. I feel her breath, the breeze on my cheek. “What did you tell Annie?”

“The truth, missy, what you've been waiting for.” I close my eyes as she exhales. “Annie said to me: ‘Gabriel Lambert, nothing you can say will stop me loving you.' I said: ‘That's just it. I'm not Gabriel Lambert.'”

I sense the girl sitting just in front of me, the fading sun a halo of light behind her head. “At last,” she says. “Tell me the truth, just like you told Annie.”

*   *   *

The truth? It's all so long ago now, I can hardly remember where one life ends and the other begins. I was in Paris on June 14, 1940, when the Nazi tanks shook the pavements and their vile black boots goose-stepped down the streets I loved. That day, a boy arrived home from art school to find his mother had killed herself. I was eighteen, but still more boy than man. You could smell the gas as you walked upstairs to our studio. Or could you? Maybe we didn't even have gas, I don't remember. She'd barred the door and by the time the concierge helped me take it off its hinges, it was too late. Our neighbors rushed in and screamed. I remember their bent figures crowding around her, my mother's foot as small as a child's extended beyond their swirling skirts, a hole in the bottom of her shoe patched with newspaper. That's what spooked me the night the maid fell downstairs at Air-Bel—I think I'd blocked the image of my mother's body until that moment, seeing her sad little foot with its hole in the stocking and everyone crowding around.

The funny thing about life is it's not consistent. You can go through years, even decades, without aging, then bam!—something happens, and you wake up older. Loss, war, disease … these are the things that ravage you and burn the lines on your palms and your face. I reckon this is why time moves slowly when you're a kid, why summers are never as endless and sunlit again. When the knocks are coming thick and fast, as they did the summer of 1940, you grow up quickly. It's not the length of years, it's the weight of them—that's what makes people old.

There was no note, no good-bye. I have no photographs of my mother, and my memories of her are confused. All but the image of her small foot, the battered shoe. Helene was fifteen when she fell pregnant with me, to a boy a couple of years older. She never stopped loving him, even though he had abandoned her the moment he found out she was having his child. She named me after him, encouraged me to be an artist, like him. She raised me, groomed me, even, to be just like my father. Sometimes I wonder if she's looking down and regrets quite how well her pupil learned his lessons.

My mother was an artists' model, and more, I don't doubt. That's how she met my father. We lived in the eaves of an old house in the Marais, in a single room with a roof that leaked. She slept in an old cot, I on the cushions from our single chair. The room I remember more clearly than my mother—the slant of the light on a winter's afternoon, the smell of cabbage, the almost edible fug of must, and dust that settled on the place like a shroud.

It wasn't the chichi district it is now. When I went to a show at the Picasso Museum a few years back, I walked past our old building. I've tried to find her, of course, but they just took my mother's body and dumped her in some unmarked pauper's grave. It's like she never existed. But she was a good woman, and she did her best with the little she had. I guess she lives on, in my work. It's because of her I am who I am.

One of her clients must have taken pity on us when I was thirteen or fourteen, and when I showed some talent he paid for my art lessons out of charity. Or guilt, who knows. I remember wondering at the time if he was my father. My mother was nearly thirty-four when she died, but she looked decades older. When I look at thirty-year-olds now, they are soft like children. Not my mother. When the Nazis invaded Paris, she snapped like a brittle twig. As I cradled her body in my arms, she weighed little more. In my memory, a copy of Stravinsky's
Firebird
is looping on a record player near the window, the needle sliding, bumping across the smooth end of the record, a soft hiss filling the air. But maybe I invented that. I don't see how we could have afforded a gramophone, and she would have pawned it by then if we had. My mother had given up on happiness years before the Nazis marched down the Champs-Élysées, but her dream, her fantasy of art and freedom and Paris, kept her going. When that died, her spirit went with it, but she gave me a parting gift. I learned early on how easy it is for people to disappear.

*   *   *

The girl, Sophie, can't be much older than I was when my mother died and I joined the great exodus of people fleeing Paris, heading south through France away from the gray Nazi tide sweeping across the country like slops from a mop bucket. Everyone was terrified. All many of us had left was our name. Some of us didn't even have a piece of paper to remind us who we were. Stateless,
apatride,
we were trapped, fleeing who knows where, with no hope of escape without paperwork or visas. The roads from Paris sparked with fear in the night. If the troops caught up with us, what would happen? People talked in choked voices of concentration camps. I could tell you about the nights I spent sleeping in ditches, or barns if I was lucky. Whenever I see a herd of deer now, and one senses something, a predator, and raises its head, and all the others follow suit before they flee, I think of the nights I spent huddled in dark spaces with men and women, and children. I see their faces.

I could tell you about sheltering under cars as enemy planes strafed the columns of refugees snaking south. I could tell you how it feels to squeeze yourself between the earth and the hot metal chassis of a car, whose faint blue-painted sidelights illuminate the long grass near your hand. Can you imagine how it feels when a bomb explodes nearby, and every cell in your body reverberates, and you don't know for a moment if you are alive or dead? Your ears are shrill with blood, but you can just hear the moaning of those hit at point-blank range, behind you. Never look back. Like I said, the ones who look back are the ones who turn to stone, or salt. You have to keep moving forward to survive. I could tell you how it feels to walk hundreds of miles and find yourself cowering, your face in the dirt, and see bullets ricocheting like hailstones inches from your head. I could tell you how sick you feel when the four-year-old child hiding up ahead isn't so lucky.

That moment has stayed with me my whole life. What was left of the good, of the boy in me, broke then. Now, when I picture myself lying in the ocher dirt, trying not to cry, it makes me think of that line of Mehring's: “Hope cracks and crumbles.” Even now when I cradle my sleeping great-granddaughter in my arms, I think of that little girl. I was surrounded by people, but completely and utterly alone. I left everything that was pure, and soft and true, on the side of the road, and the shell of a man staggered up and walked on past the grieving mother.

*   *   *

But do you want to know about that? The world has compassion fatigue. You've heard stories like my sorry loss of innocence before, haven't you? I was a refugee, just one more face among the nameless thousands lucky to make it out alive. I can see from the look on Sophie's face that all she sees is the sorry old husk of the great man of art. She wants Vita, to conjure her back like a spirit at a séance.

“Okay, okay,” I say to her. Flick back in time. Imagine you are this boy who has lost his mother and the only home he has ever known. Your heart is broken—you just want to look your father in the eye and tell him she's gone. Of course, part of you hopes for a reconciliation, that he will accept you, love you, even. Night after night you wonder what it will be like to meet this man. You have been on the road for weeks, scavenging food from hedgerows, drinking water from streams and puddles. You are tall and broad and strong, so you can look after yourself, but you look like a bum, your unshaven face is dark with dirt, your hair is thick and long. The look in your eyes has the weariness and knowledge of a man. All you know for sure is that you have to get away. All you have is an address written in your mother's hand, an unknown village in the Languedoc, a pin in the map gleaming like a beacon. On the road south, the companions you found peel off group by group, to Toulouse, to Spain, to safety and escape, they hope. The refugee telegraph crackles, word of mouth, sightings of friends and family in distant towns. By the time you stumble into the nearest town to this village you have pinned your last hopes on, just as the light is falling, the beauty of the sunset makes no impression on your broken senses. Birds settle on the terra-cotta tiles of the church like five o'clock shadow, but you don't see them. You are shattered, heartsore, all you want to do is sleep. In the nearest bar's cloakroom you wash yourself as well as you can, and you order a beer, a
pression,
with your last centimes, and it is the best, the coldest, beer you have ever tasted in your life before or since. After this, you think, who cares what happens. Then someone slaps you on the back.

“Lambert!” he says. You turn your head slowly, his voice and face swimming in and out of your senses like you are a prizefighter on his last legs, cornered. “Where the hell have you been, you old dog? I haven't seen you for years. Are you still with Vita? No one's heard from her in an age.”

“Vita?” You have no idea who this man is, you realize, but he knows you, it seems. It takes a moment for you to click that he has mistaken you for your father.

“He's squiffy,” he says to his companions. “Thank God some things don't change. Lambert's been on one of his benders.” You look at the group and wonder if you are hallucinating. There is Pierrot and Pierrette, a jester, a Roman legionnaire, a bear. “Are you coming to the party, at least? You must! One last fling before we all get the hell out of here.” They drag you away from your drink and bundle you into an open-top car.
Why not,
you think.
Why not play along?
Perhaps there will be food at this party. What harm is there in pretending to be your father, just for a while?

“He doesn't have a costume,” Pierrette says. A mask is handed to you, a Venetian carnival mask, gold, with a long nose, and a black cape is draped over your shoulders. Your head sways as the car swings around hairpin bends, up, up into the green mountains. Your eyes are heavy, lead weighted. When you awake, they are climbing out of the car and walking along a gravel path lit by torches, through the great wooden gates of a château. You follow them.

You wonder if you are dreaming. “What a darling idea to hold one last party,” someone says as you knock back a drink at the bar. You pour another. “A last cry of freedom,” someone dressed as Nero declares, holding a slopping glass of red wine aloft. “Damn them all to hell.” Then the band quiets, and all you can hear is a girl, laughing in the shadows of the plane trees. The drummer pounds a beat, one-two, one-two, thumping faster and faster, your heart can't help but keep pace. The trombonists stand, swinging out a tune, and all faces turn to the gate like sunflowers following the course of the sun. And then, she is there.

*   *   *

Vita rode into my life—literally. She galloped through that gate on a horse—I'd like to say a white horse, but really it was a crazy-eyed bay. Did I say she was naked? The torches in the night scorched the earth between me and her. It was as if the noise of the party, the people, fell away around us. There was only her and the flames dancing in the night. Then there was a flash of light, a pop. Some guy dressed up as a faun with green body paint and shaggy thighs was taking a photograph of her. His yellow horns poked out of his hair just above the camera.

Then the party erupted into cheers, and the horn section of the band rolled into “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Vita pulled the horse up short, gravel scattering under its hooves. It reared up on its back legs, turned a circle on its heels. Everyone thought it was part of the show, but she told me later she was scared to death. She jumped down soon enough, and the host cut through the crowd of wild dancers and draped a sheet over her like a toga.

“Your best yet, Vita,” he said.

“Happy birthday,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “I never could resist a bet.” Then she pushed her way through the crowd toward the bar and picked up my drink.

“What are you staring at, big nose?” she said to me, glancing over the rim of the glass of wine.

It took a moment for me to realize what she was talking about, and then I remembered the mask. “That's my drink.”

“It's a free country.” She paused. “Or was.”

“I like your crown,” I said.