The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (6 page)

Before dinner I went to Bertrand, the bookstore on Rua Garrett. I wanted to see if they had any copies of Xavier Legrand’s books, and indeed they did. The one I bought was called
The Noble Way Out
. According to the jacket, it told the story of a French politician who, on the eve of his arrest for the murder of his blackmailer, is found dead in his office, an apparent suicide. The case looks to be open and shut, as they say, until the novel’s hero, Inspector Voss of the Paris
sûreté
, arrives on the scene and raises doubts not just as to whether the politician killed himself but as to whether he killed his blackmailer. So the good inspector now has two murders, not one, on his hands.

I brought the book with me to the Suiça that evening. I was thinking I might ask Edward to sign it. As soon as I saw him, however, I had second thoughts and buttoned the jacket pocket in which the book was stowed. The Frelengs had already staked out a table on the sidewalk. As we approached, Edward stood and waved. Since our last meeting, he had shaved—there were two small nicks on
his cheek—while Iris had taken off her snood and pinned her hair loosely atop her head. I had for some reason assumed that her hair was brown. In fact it was a lustrous red. She had on a peasant skirt and a crocheted blouse that gave her a sort of Edwardian poetess air. So far as I could tell, she wore no makeup, which I worried might make Julia self-conscious. Despite her initial reluctance, Julia had finally given in to impulse and bought herself a new black dress. She was wearing her pearls. She was wearing the one pair of shoes she had held aside during the long trip from Paris in case some occasion should arise that required pristine shoes. Her skin gleamed with lotion, as if polished.

No sooner had we sat down than Daisy, who was lying at Edward’s feet, hauled herself up with a grunt, stumbled over to Julia, and began licking her ankle.

“Daisy, please,” Edward said.

“You’ll have to forgive her,” Iris said. “She licks everything these days. Shoes, blankets, dirty socks.”

“It’s true,” Edward said. “Even when she goes up the stairs, she licks each one before she steps on it, I suppose to make sure it’s real.”

“Daisy, that’s enough, now, leave Julia alone,” Iris said.

“It’s quite all right,” Julia said, reaching down to pat Daisy’s head—and to push her away.

“We’ve never been to Pyla,” I said. “What’s it like?”

“Just a typical little fishing village,” Edward said. “With a few hotels that, toward the end, were full of Belgians.”

“For them it was the place to flee
to
,” Iris said.

“And your house?” Julia asked.

“Rustic. Always a fire going in the winter.”

“It was for Daisy’s sake that we moved there in the first place,” Edward said. “You see, she spent her youth living in hotels, with no
place to run except up and down corridors, being chased by maids. And so we felt that in her old age she deserved to do the things she was bred to do—root hedgehogs out of their holes, roll around on the carcasses of dead fish.”

“Daisy has a particular fondness for dead fish,” Iris said. “Every afternoon Eddie would take her for a walk on the beach, and if there was a dead fish in sight, you could bet she’d head straight for it.”

“Really.”

“Also we had a marvelous cook, Celeste, who’d make all sorts of special dishes for her, only to come to me afterward with her nose out of joint and say, ‘Madame, j’ai préparé pour le chien un ragout de boeuf, eh bien, il va dans le jardin manger les crottes de chat. Comme si c’était des bonbons!’”

“Might I hold her on my lap?” I asked.

“What a good idea,” Julia said.

I lifted the dog off the ground—which gave Julia a chance to pull her legs back under her chair. Now Daisy’s face was just a few inches from mine. Her eyes were clouded, her teeth a brownish yellow. With little in the way of fuss, she turned around twice, curled into a ball, and went to sleep.

As surreptitiously as she could, Julia dipped her napkin in her water glass and touched it to the ankle Daisy had been licking.

“And you,” Iris said. “Where in Paris did you live?”

Julia winced at the past tense. “In the sixteenth,” she said. “On Rue de la Pompe.”

“Oh, I know that area. So … bourgeois. What was your apartment like?”

“Well, you know, typically Parisian.
Parquet, moulures, cheminée
, as they say.”

“We just had it redone,” I said.

“The original decor was Empire,” Julia said. “Elegant but heavy.
But then I met this marvelous decorator, a genius really, and now we hardly recognize the place.”

“Oh yes? What did he do?”

“First he took down the wallpaper and whitewashed the walls. Then he sanded the paneling until it was practically raw. Then, where the big Aubusson used to be, he laid a plain wool carpet, and in front of the fireplace he put a white leather sofa and a couple of boxy armchairs with parchment sides, and a shagreen table—”

“What’s shagreen?” Edward asked.

“Fish leather,” I said.

“Sharkskin,” Julia corrected. “And a few Louis XV pieces to round things out. And nothing on the walls. Nothing at all. That’s his signature.”

“And a screen to hide the piano,” I said. “I don’t know what he has against pianos.”

“Maybe his mother made him play Brahms,” Edward said, and winked.

“And the work was so extensive we had to move into a hotel for two months,” Julia said. “And it was only last November that it was finished.” With the dry end of her napkin, she dabbed at her eyes.

“It was photographed,” I said. “You can see the pictures in
Vogue
. American
Vogue
. The February issue.”

“The March issue.”

“Really!” Iris said. “It must have been heartbreaking to leave.”

“Oh, it was,” Julia said.

“Do you have someone minding the place?” Edward asked.

“Our concierge,” Julia said.

“If she’s still in Paris,” I said. “My guess is that she’ll have left by now.”

“Of course she hasn’t left Paris,” Julia said. “Not everyone has left Paris. Some of the French feel it’s their patriotic duty to stay.”

“And your decorator?”

“I hope for his sake he’s left Paris,” I said, “given that he’s Jewish and—” I was about to say “queer,” then changed my mind. “We haven’t seen him here in Lisbon, though, which makes me worry he never made it out.”

“Jean has friends in Marseille,” Julia said. “He’s probably gone to stay with them.”

“Or he might be in Portugal but stuck off in
résidence forcée
,” Edward said. “This newspaper fellow—the
Chicago Tribune
, I think—was just telling us about that.”

According to the newspaper fellow, Edward went on, the Portuguese political police had, as of two days ago, stopped the regular train service from Vilar Formoso, on the Spanish border, to Lisbon. Now only British and American citizens were being let through to the capital, the only exceptions to this rule being those who could show both valid visas for non-European countries
and
tickets on ships due to sail for Africa or the Americas. “Of which there might be five.”

“And the others?”

“That’s where the
résidence forcée
comes in. Basically these are beach resorts and spa towns, places where there are plenty of hotels that would normally be full but aren’t, because of the war. Well, that’s where they’re being shipped—the refugees. And they’re not allowed to leave.”

“
Résidence forcée
,” Iris said derisively. “It’s just a fancy name for a concentration camp.”

“If you think about it, it’s a stroke of genius on Salazar’s part,” Edward said. “Because if he were to actually put them in concentration
camps, he’d have to foot the bill. Whereas this way
they
have to foot the bill.”

“But if they aren’t allowed into Lisbon, how are they supposed to get to the consulate to get their visas so they
can
leave?”

“Exactly. That’s the trouble. And there are so many more of them than will actually get visas—”

“Sir, you are correct,” said an elderly, bald-headed man sitting at the next table. “I myself was today refused a visa. My wife also.”

“Oh yes?” Edward said.

The old man nodded. He was very thin and wore a good suit that clearly had not been cleaned in many weeks. With him was a woman of small stature and regal bearing. She had immense diamonds on her ears, a fur coat slung over the back of her chair.

“Sir, we come from Antwerp,” the old man said. “By profession I am, how do you say,
comptable
. Though born in Latvia, my wife and I have lived in Belgium twenty years. Fifteen years we are naturalized Belgian citizens. Our children are Belgian, our sons enlisted in the Belgian army. Well, when the bombs came, we had no choice but to go. From the frontier we drive to Paris, from Paris to Bordeaux, like everyone, with a mattress tied to the roof—yet what good, sir, is a mattress? Everywhere, along the road, what do we see but cars with shattered windows, full of bodies, and on their roofs, mattresses, perfectly sound? You could have slept on those mattresses.

“Then in Bordeaux, at last, we obtain visas. We cross the border into Spain, we cross Spain, thinking, all the way, Lisbon, our hope. Lisbon, yes, port of freedom. And then finally we arrive, and what do we find? Freedom? Bah! A mirage! A lie! The American consul, he says, ‘Well, Fischbein, and now I need five copies each of visa application, two copies of birth certificate, a certified copy of tax,
and the same for Madame.’ ‘But sir,’ I say, ‘when the Germans came, we had two hours, we did not think to bring tax.’ ‘Ah, well, I am sorry, Fischbein,’ he says. ‘Oh, and you must also bring a paper from your bank that you have sufficient funds, and letters from two sponsors in United States.’ ‘But it is impossible,’ I say. ‘The bank is taken over by Germans, our account is seized, my business is seized.’ ‘Ah, well, I regret it, I do,’ he says, ‘but it is out of my hands, this is the law of the United States.’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘yes, the law of peace, but now is a time of war—you must change the law.’ ‘But sir,’ he says, ‘there are quotas for each country, for Belgium the quota is 492.’ Four hundred ninety-two, yes, when for England the quota is 34,007.”

“Where did you get those figures?” Edward asked.

“I have calculated myself.” From his jacket pocket, he fished out a piece of onionskin stationery bearing the logo of the Suiça. “Look, sir, according to your own State Department, the immigration quota for each European country is to take the ratio of naturalized American citizens born in that country as measured by census of 1920 and calculate to 150,000. And so I calculate—”

Suddenly Madame Fischbein threw up her hands. “Abel, why do you waste your time?” she cried. “Can you not see what is in front of your own eyes? They do not want us, no one wants us, we are
les ordures
, the best we can hope is that they shall put us on a refuse barge and ship us to, God knows where, Terre de Feu.”

“But it is not right.”

“Since when does right matter?” She turned to Edward. “Sir, I must apologize for my husband. He cannot tolerate reality, he lives in a dream. Not a pleasant dream, a dream of figures, numbers, all day doing his arithmetic, again and again, it is a kind of madness. How much quota here, how much quota there. You will forgive us. Abel, we must go.”

Majestically, Madame Fischbein rose. She had on vast amounts of jewelry: three or four strands of pearls around her neck, half a dozen bracelets on each wrist, gold rings on every finger.

“Poor things,” Iris said after they had gone. “She must be wearing all the jewelry she owns.”

“It was probably all they could escape with,” I said.

“So in ancient times, the dead were buried with coins under their tongues,” Edward said, “so they might pay Charon their passage across the Styx.”

The reader might have observed that to the conversation recorded above, my wife contributed not a word. I can assure you, however, that she was listening. I could tell by the way she ran her pearls through her fingers, like worry beads.

Of all the ironclad arguments I had made against her staying in Europe, the one she had the hardest time refuting was that she was Jewish. On this point she had always been touchy—and not because she was anti-Semitic. That is to say, she bore no secret or explicit hatred toward her race, or toward herself for being a member of it. And yet I do think she saw her Jewishness as a burden that she would have paid a good price to be rid of. This is often the case with those aspects of our identity that matter nothing to us personally but a great deal to those with whom we must conduct business in order to live in this world. It might have been different if she had possessed anything in the way of religious feeling, or had any personal experience of anti-Semitic persecution beyond knowing that her parents, had they tried to rent an apartment on Fifth Avenue,
would have been turned away rudely. But her parents never did try to rent an apartment on Fifth Avenue—and this is the crucial point. It was not the Loewi way to make trouble. It was the Loewi way to navigate around trouble, or ignore it, or both.

Paris, of course, was a different story. There was no way you could live in Paris in those years without being conscious of the deep and abiding hatred that so many of the French felt toward their own Jews and, more strongly, toward foreign Jews. Following the Dreyfus Affair, this hatred had gone underground for a time, only to reemerge, cautiously at first, in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. You felt it more as an insidious and shadowy threat than as an outright danger. Starting in the mid-thirties, our concierge, Madame Foucheaux, of whom we were otherwise so fond, and whom we would have trusted with our lives, was often to be seen sitting in her little glass cage off the foyer, reading
Je Suis Partout
and
Gringoire
by the waxy yellow light of a ceiling lamp. Her son Jean-Paul, who lived with her, subscribed to both publications, giving the old lady the back issues when he was through with them. Though Jean-Paul was an out-and-out Fascist, he was never less than exceedingly polite to us, always taking off his cap to Julia and helping her with her packages. From this I deduced that he had no idea she was Jewish. That said, we had several neighbors in the building who
were
obviously Jewish, and whom Jean-Paul refused so much as to acknowledge publicly. On the door of one of these neighbors, an Austrian doctor and his wife, swastikas and defamatory slurs were scrawled on three separate occasions in 1938. None of us doubted for a minute who was responsible for this vandalism—not even, I suspect, poor Madame Foucheaux, who shook her head and wept. Yet no one said or did anything, and when eventually the couple moved out, and Jean-Paul, passing us in the hall, took
off his cap to Julia as usual and muttered something to the effect of “Good riddance,” she either did not understand his words or pretended not to understand them.