From the back of the carriage, it seemed my grandmother and I had left France and traveled to some other country. Haussmann’s remolding of Paris had not extended to the ghetto in the Marais. The cobble streets were narrow, the buildings ancient. Signs in Hebrew identified the various shops. The setting sun glinted off mezuzahs nailed to door frames as if the houses were all catching fire.
Beside me, my grandmother seemed restless, no doubt due to the words we’d exchanged when I’d returned home earlier that afternoon. If she had noticed that I’d not slept in the apartment, she didn’t refer to it, but she did sniff the air when I came in. Her nose wrinkled as if she smelled cow dung. She told me I stunk of oil paints and requested I bathe since I was to accompany her to dinner at her cousin the rabbi’s house.
“It would be appropriate to wear your new bottle-green satin gown,” she’d said. One of the dresses Grand-mère’s dressmaker had created for me, it was fancier than my clothes from New York, with its black bows and black lace edging. The accompanying small hat, in the new style so many Parisian women were wearing that season, sported two tiny bunches of velvet grapes, one in green, the other dark purple.
Was she telling me which dress to put on to ensure I didn’t wear my art student’s costume? I didn’t argue—it didn’t matter. I’d been too preoccupied with what Julien and I had found to care. Looking back, I think that must have been why I even agreed to accompany her. The discovery of the book in the tower had shocked me. Disturbed me. And confused me.
A grimoire, Julien had explained, was a book of spells. He’d designed a special cabinet for them in Dujols’s shop. And knowing that finding one would exacerbate my interest in the strange occurrences happening around me, he wasn’t pleased with the discovery.
The grimoire I’d found was handwritten in the margins of a printed book by an entirely different author.
Some of the grimoires Dujols owned, Julien explained, contained remedies for various ailments, charms for manipulating nature and man, rituals for making pacts with the devil, incantations for summoning good or evil—or, like the spell I’d been able to read in the book in the tower, for summoning a ghost.
Dressing up that evening had actually been a pleasant diversion. Luxuriating in a bath of steaming perfumed water, I’d soaped my arms, my legs, my torso, my breasts . . . running my hands over my body, touching all the places Julien had touched and made toll like the bells.
Amazing, how his fingers had the power to inflame me so profoundly. When I touched myself, it took more work and concentration to induce the same feelings. But they did eventually rise to the surface. In this new life I was leading, painting and passion seemed to be going hand in hand. And what a feeling of power they gave me. I was finally becoming the woman who my father had always seemed to believe was inside. I even imagined that he had, in some subtle way, been grooming me for this very life by including me on all the excursions we took together, all the books that he gave me to read.
“My job is to protect you, and I will do that till my dying day. But I am not sure that protecting you will allow you to reach your fullest potential,” he’d once told me.
And he was right. I knew I was finally reaching that potential. Knew, too, that he would be proud when I joined the ranks of women painters like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot and my canvases sold in galleries alongside theirs.
But I wouldn’t be painting boring mothers whose breasts were full of milk or sniveling children in their pink and pretty clothes. I would be illuminating mysterious and difficult tales from history. Of murder and mayhem, of jealousy and revenge and pain. Spinning stories from pigment so I could warn man of the darkness that hides in every shadow, crack, and corner and that must be respected.
Where were these thoughts coming from? Even there in the bath as they occurred to me, they excited me and my fingers itched to leave, to go back to the bell tower and paint, paint, paint.
“We’ve arrived,” my grandmother said as the carriage pulled up in front of a tall, skinny house sandwiched in between a temple on one side and a Judaic store on the other. Its window was filled with books, cloths, and religious objects, the setting sun’s reflection turning the silver candlesticks, menorahs, and goblets to burning embers.
“I thought Jacob’s home was next to his synagogue on rue Buffault? Where are we?”
“The funeral was held at that shul there because this one could never fit all the mourners. But here on the rue des Rosiers is where the rabbis in your family have lived and served for over two hundred years.”
“Rabbis and courtesans.” I laughed. “What an auspicious heritage. Throw in some murderers, and we’d have a perfect novel.”
“Show some respect,” my grandmother admonished. “And don’t arch your eyebrows when I say something.”
“You usually have a better sense of humor,” I said.
She ignored me and got out of the carriage.
Inside the house Cousin Jacob’s wife, Sophia, greeted us warmly, and she and my grandmother chatted as she ushered us into the parlor.
“I’ll tell Jacob that you are here. He’s in his office, studying. Always studying,” she said, and left to get him.
The modest parlor was tidy but overflowing with books: piled on the floor, sitting on chairs, stacked on occasional tables. From where I sat, I could glimpse into the dining room, which was similarly crowded. Clearly my cousin’s studies had taken over not just his time but also their living quarters. His wife’s attempts with vases of flowers and velvet cushions only went so far in keeping the house looking like a home.
“Eva, Sandrine, welcome,” Cousin Jacob said as he entered the room with open arms. First he went to my grandmother and kissed both her cheeks, and then he embraced me.
“Sit, sit.” He gestured to where we’d been seated. “I’m so pleased to have you both here.”
I sat back down on a different spot and felt something shift beneath me. The horsehair couch was lumpy. The velvet was slightly worn, too. With Jacob came the unpleasant odor of cheap tobacco. My sense of smell was more attenuated lately, and it wasn’t always enjoyable to experience the nuances in the air. I suspected it had been brought about because of the oil paints. Or perhaps the turpentine was making me more sensitive.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I felt trapped. My cousin’s face, which before I had thought kindly, now looked sinister. His eyes were too small. His grin too miserly.
Under Moreau’s influence, I had become deft at studying people’s faces and seeing what was unique and intriguing in each one.
“Look deeply at everyone and everything if you want to find the magic and mystique of life, the life you want to commit to canvas,” Moreau had said to me that very week.
Looking at Jacob Richter, I saw a threat.
“Would you like some wine, Eva?” he asked.
My grandmother said she would. He asked me, and I said yes also.
At the sideboard, he filled up three glasses from a decanter.
After handing us our wine, he toasted. “L’chaim,” he said, and held up his glass. The gas lamp’s glow caught in the crystal cuts, sparkling with what seemed to be abandon. As if the goblet delighted in being so wicked here in the house of a man of God. The thought made me smile.
“What is it, Sandrine?” my grandmother asked. “Something amusing?”
I shook my head and sipped my wine. It was a fine Bordeaux, and I took several sips in a row. A few minutes passed in idle chitchat about various members of the family, and then we were joined by another man, whom Jacob introduced as Emanuel Zeller, his assistant rabbi.
Zeller took my grandmother’s hand, bent over it, and then did the same to me. His lips were warm, and when he looked up at me, I noticed how light green his eyes were. I had three thoughts -simultaneously—that he was quite attractive, that I should like to see him naked, and that I should leave the Richter household immediately. Just stand up and walk out and away from this street and this section of Paris and never come back.
I forced myself to make conversation to chase away my overwhelming desire to run.