The Japanese Lover (33 page)

“The metal looks newly polished.”

“My grandfather cleans and maintains the soldiers' graves,” the caretaker said. “He put the second plaque there. You know, my grandfather was in the Resistance.”

“I don't believe it! What's his name?”

“Clotaire Martineaux.”

“I'm afraid I didn't know him,” Samuel replied.

“Were you in the Resistance too?”

“Yes, for a time.”

“Then you should come to our house and have a drink, my grandfather will be pleased to meet you, Mr. . . .”

“Samuel Mendel.”

The young woman hesitated a moment before bending over the name on the plaque again and turning around in astonishment.

“Yes, it's me. Not altogether dead, as you can see,” said Samuel.

All three of them ended up in the kitchen of a nearby house, drinking Pernod and eating baguettes and sausages. Clotaire Martineaux was short and stocky, with a resounding laugh and the smell of garlic. He embraced them both and was happy to answer Samuel's questions, calling him
mon frère
and refilling his glass time and again. As Samuel could confirm, he was not one of those heroes who appeared as if by magic after the end of the war, as he knew all about the plane brought down near the village, the rescue of a crew member, and knew two of the men who had hidden him, as well as the names of the rest. He listened to Samuel's story, drying his eyes and blowing his nose on the same kerchief he wore around his neck, also employed to wipe sweat from his brow and grease from his hands. “My grandfather has always been a crybaby,” his granddaughter said by way of explanation.

Samuel told his host that his nom de guerre in the Jewish Resistance was Jean Valjean, and that he'd spent months in a state of confusion from the brain trauma he suffered when the plane came down, but that little by little he had begun to recover at least part of his memory. He had sketchy recollections of a great house with maidservants in black aprons and white caps, but none of his family. He thought that if there was anything still standing at the war's end, he would seek out his Polish roots, because that was where the language in which he did sums, swore, and dreamed came from; somewhere in that country the house etched in his memory must exist.

“I had to wait until the war was over to discover my own name and my family's fate. By 1944 it was already possible to foresee the defeat of the Nazis, do you remember, Monsieur Martineaux? The situation started to turn around on the eastern front, where the British and the Americans least expected it. They thought the Red Army was made up of ill-disciplined peasant bands, poorly nourished and worse armed, incapable of confronting Hitler.”

“I remember it all perfectly,
mon frère
,” said Martineaux. “After the Battle of Stalingrad, the myth of Hitler's invincibility began to crumble, and we could start to have hope. It has to be said that the Russians broke the morale and the backbone of the Germans in 1943.”

“The defeat at Stalingrad forced them to withdraw to Berlin,” added Samuel.

“Then came the Allies' Normandy landings in June 1944, and the liberation of Paris only two months later. Ah, what an unforgettable day that was!”

“I was taken prisoner. My group was decimated by the SS, and my surviving comrades were executed with a shot to the back of the neck as soon as they surrendered. I escaped by chance, because I was away searching for food. To be more exact, I was scouring the nearby farms to see what I could lay my hands on. We even ate cats and dogs, whatever we could find.”

Samuel told him what those months were like, the worst of the war for him. Alone, lost, and starving, lacking all contact with the Resistance, he lived by night, eating worm-ridden earth and stolen food, until he was captured at the end of September. He spent the next four months in forced labor, first at Monowitz and then at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million two hundred thousand men, women, and children had already perished. In January 1945, faced with the Russians' imminent advance, the Nazis received orders to destroy all evidence of what they had done in the camps. They evacuated their prisoners on a forced march through the snow, providing neither food nor shelter, back toward Germany. Those too weak to leave were left behind to be executed, but in the rush to flee the Russians, the SS did not manage to obliterate everything and left seven thousand prisoners still alive. Samuel was one of them.

“I don't think the Russians came with the intention of liberating us,” Samuel explained. “The Ukrainian front was passing close by and opened the camp gates. Those of us still able to move dragged ourselves outside. Nobody stopped us. Nobody helped us. Nobody offered us even a crust of bread. We were turned away by everyone.”

“I know,
mon frère
. Here in France no one came to the aid of the Jews, and I say that with a great sense of shame. But remember those were terrible times, we were all hungry, and in those circumstances all sense of humanity gets lost.”

“Not even the Zionists in Palestine wanted to take in concentration camp survivors; we were the useless detritus of the war,” said Samuel.

He explained how the Zionists only wanted young, strong, healthy people—brave warriors to confront the Arabs, and stubborn laborers to work the arid land. But one of the few things he recalled from his earlier life was how to fly a plane, and this helped facilitate the immigration process. He became a soldier, pilot, and spy. He was David Ben-Gurion's bodyguard during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and a year later he became one of the first Mossad agents, working for Israel's new intelligence agency.

Brother and sister spent the night in a village inn and the next day returned to Paris to fly to Warsaw. In Poland, they searched in vain for traces of their parents, but only found their names on a list of the victims of Treblinka they obtained from the Jewish Agency. Together they visited the remains of Auschwitz, where Samuel attempted to reconcile himself to the past, but it was a journey straight out of his worst nightmares that only served to confirm his certainty that human beings are the cruelest beasts on the planet.

“The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister.

“Do you think that, given the opportunity, you'd also behave like a monster, Samuel?”

“I don't think it, Alma, I know it. I've been a soldier all my life. I've been to war. I've interrogated prisoners, a large number of them. But I assume you don't want details.”

T
he sly illness that was to end Nathaniel Belasco's life was prowling around him for years without anybody, himself included, realizing it. The first symptoms were easily confused with flu, which that winter was affecting nearly half the population of San Francisco, and disappeared again within a fortnight. They did not return for some years, this time leaving him with a sensation of enormous fatigue; some days he would walk about dragging his feet, his shoulders hunched as if he were lugging a sack of sand on his back. He went on working the same number of hours every day, but the time spent in his office brought little reward; documents piled up on his desk, seeming only to expand and multiply overnight. He became confused, lost the thread of the cases he was pursuing conscientiously, ones he could once have resolved with his eyes shut, and all of a sudden couldn't remember what he had just read. He had suffered from insomnia all his life, and this now grew worse, with bouts of fever and sweating.

“We're both suffering from menopausal hot flashes,” he told Alma, laughing aloud, but she didn't find it so amusing.

He gave up sports, and the sailboat remained moored in the marina for gulls to nest in. He found it hard to swallow, began to lose weight, had no appetite. Alma prepared high-protein smoothies for him, which he drank with great difficulty, then took himself off to throw up as quietly as possible so as not to alarm her. When ulcers began to appear on his skin, the family doctor—a relic as ancient as some of the furniture bought by Isaac Belasco in 1914—successively treated his symptoms as those of anemia, intestinal infection, migraine, and depression, and finally referred him to an oncologist.

Terror-stricken, Alma realized how much she loved and needed Nathaniel, and threw herself into fighting the illness, destiny, the gods and the demons. She gave up everything else to focus on his care. She stopped painting, laid off the staff at the workshop, and only went there once a month to supervise the cleaning. Her vast studio, lit by the diffused light from the opaque windows, took on a cathedral calm. Work ceased from one day to the next, and the studio was left paused in time like a cinematographic trick, ready to resume a moment later, its long tables under wraps; rolled canvases standing upright like slender sentries, and others already painted hanging on their stretchers; sketches and color samples on the walls; pots and jars; paint rollers and brushes; and the faint whirr of the air conditioner endlessly spreading the acrid smell of paint and solvent. She stopped traveling, something that for years had brought her inspiration and freedom. Away from home, Alma shed her skin and was born anew, curious and ready for adventure, open to whatever the day might bring, without either plans or fears. This migratory new Alma was so real she was sometimes taken by surprise by her own reflection in hotel mirrors, as she somehow did not expect to find the same face she had in San Francisco. She also stopped seeing Ichimei.

They had met up by chance seven years after Isaac's funeral, and fourteen before Nathaniel's illness became fully apparent, at the annual show held by the Society of Orchid Growers, among thousands of other visitors. Ichimei saw her first and came over to greet her. He was on his own. They commented on the orchids—two specimens from his nursery were included in the show—and they went to eat at a nearby restaurant. They began talking of this and that, Alma of her recent travels, her new designs, and her son, Larry; Ichimei of his plants and his children, Mike, aged two, and Peter, an eight-month-old baby. No mention was made of either Nathaniel or Delphine.

The meal lasted over three hours without a pause. They had everything to tell each other, and they did so cautiously and uncertainly, without falling back into the past, as if skating on thin ice, constantly studying, noting the changes and trying to decipher each other's intentions, aware of the mutual attraction that was still burning. They were both now thirty-seven; she looked older, as her features had become more accentuated, and she had grown thinner, more angular and sure of herself, but Ichimei had not changed: he had the same serene adolescent appearance as before, the same quiet voice and considerate manners, the same capacity to penetrate her every last cell with the intensity of his presence. In him, Alma could see the eight-year-old child in the Sea Cliff greenhouse, the ten-year-old who handed her a cat before vanishing, the tireless lover in the motel full of cockroaches, the man in mourning at her father-in-law's funeral. All these images were intact, like lines superimposed on sheets of tracing paper. Ichimei was unchanging, eternal. Love and desire for him scorched her skin; she wanted to stretch her hands out across the table and touch him, draw closer, bury her nose in his neck and confirm it still smelled of earth and herbs, tell him that without him she lived like a sleepwalker, that nothing and nobody could fill the terrible gap of his absence, that she would give anything to be naked in his arms once more, that nothing mattered apart from him. Ichimei accompanied her to her car. They walked slowly, almost in circles, to delay the moment of separation. They took the elevator up to the third floor of the parking garage; she found her key and offered to drive him to his car, less than a block away. He accepted. They kissed in the intimate twilight inside the car, rediscovering one another.

Over the years that followed they were obliged to keep their love in a separate compartment from the rest of their lives, and they lived it to the full without allowing it to affect Nathaniel and ­Delphine. When they were together, nothing else existed, and when they said good-bye at the hotel where they had just sated their love it was implicit they would not stay in contact until their next assignation, except by letter. Alma treasured those letters, although Ichimei always maintained the reserve typical of his people, in direct contrast to his delicate demonstrations of love and his flights of passion when they were together. He was deeply embarrassed by any kind of sentimentality; his way of showing his feelings was to prepare a picnic for her in beautiful lacquer boxes, to send her the gardenias whose fragrance she so loved (although she would never use it as a perfume), to perform a tea ceremony, or to dedicate poems and drawings to her. In private he sometimes called her “my little one,” an expression he never put in writing. Alma had no need to explain anything to her husband, as they led independent lives, and she never asked Ichimei how he managed to keep Delphine in the dark when they lived and worked so closely together. She knew he loved his wife, that he was a good father and family man, that he held a special position within the Japanese community, where he was considered a master and was called on to give advice to anyone who went astray, to reconcile enemies and serve as a fair arbitrator in disputes. The man who was capable of burning desire, erotic invention; of laughter, jokes, and games between the sheets; of urgency, appetite, and joy; of whispered confidences in the interludes between embraces; of interminable kisses and delirious intimacies, was someone who existed for her alone.

The letters began after the chance encounter among the orchids, and intensified when Nathaniel fell ill. For a period that to them seemed endless, this correspondence replaced their clandestine meetings. Alma's letters were stark and anguished, those of a woman deeply affected by separation. Ichimei's were like cool, clear water, but their shared passion pulsed between the lines. To Alma, the letters revealed Ichimei's exquisite inner workings, his emotions, dreams, longings, and ideals; she could know and love and desire him even more through his missives than during their amorous skirmishes. They became so vital to her that, when widowhood brought her freedom and they could talk on the telephone, see each other more frequently, and even travel together, they continued to write to each other. Ichimei strictly complied with their agreement to destroy her letters, but Alma kept his to reread as often as possible.