“He has the best medical care.”
“No. That’s not guaranteed. I want to try America. It could mean his life. I want Cathérine and her husband to have the option of leaving France, and not as poor refugees either. Now Jews are kidnaped, tortured, and murdered here. Dieudonné mocks the Holocaust. Jewish students must hide their religion in school. The far right, far left, and the Arabs have found a common enemy in us. Our synagogues are desecrated and our shops are burned. I don’t have to tell you that my accountant son-inlaw is Orthodox. He’s spat upon in the street. You know what happened to my parents, and I know what happened to yours.”
“It’s not that bad. Hollande has been a champion of the Jews, up to a point – the president of France! I write and speak against anti-Semitism, and although I’ve been shouted down and threatened, that can be the result of holding any political opinion in public. Maybe I shouldn’t show you this, given your frame of mind, but maybe I should, given that I don’t take these things as seriously as you do.”
“Show me what?”
Fran?ois pulled from his pocket a folded, two-page print-out from the internet. As Jules opened it, the first thing he saw was a picture of Fran?ois in a montage with an enormous Star-of-David clothing patch in sickly yellow, with Juif in the center. In the background was a menorah and the flag of Israel. In the picture, Fran?ois was smiling: his likeness had been taken from a book jacket photograph. The caption was, His yellow star is his skin.
Strangely enough, the first thing Jules said was, “You have a color printer?”
“The department has one. Doesn’t yours?”
“We have really good music software. We don’t have a color printer. What is this?”
“Read it. It’s only two pages.”
Jules began to read. “The Breton Liberation Front? France is oppressing Brittany?” As he read, he didn’t know whether to be fearful or dismissive. It began, “The Jew Fran?ois Ehrenshtamm, who has the timidity of joining a French name with one that stinks of the Ashkenazi sewage effluent,” and went on to call Judaism “a syndicate of crime,” and “a biological insanity tolerated for no reason by Aryan-Christian civilization.” Throughout, it referred to Fran?ois’ body, associating it with filth. Jules stopped reading after the paragraph that stated: “Ehrenshtamm should be a vegetarian. Imagine a digestive tract at the summit of which is his grotesque Jew head. No animal, even the most vile, would deserve to exit the sphincter of this Hebrew filth that tries to pass as human.”
“Perhaps you should put them in the undecided column.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Their hatred is visceral. They see us as a kind of infection. These are the people who have a horror of sharing a swimming pool with blacks. They think we and blacks are irredeemably, physically disgusting and dirty. In the army once I shared a bunker with two soldiers who, as the night wore on, went from one thing to another: We control the banks. We make wars. We shrink from war. We’re communists. We’re fascists. We betrayed France. We betrayed Germany. We always come out on top. We’re impoverished vermin. We cheat. We’re greedy. They told me that you could always tell a Jew because he was so clean. An hour later they were going on about how we’re so filthy and disgusting.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. It made me feel helpless and sad, because otherwise they were perfectly nice people.”
“But you see, Jules, these are just the crazies and the idiots. They’ve always been around, and always will be. You mustn’t be despondent. Let them spark. There isn’t sufficient tinder. I really don’t think we’re in a replication of the thirties.”
“Not yet, maybe never, and I myself would never think of leaving. But in the years to come I would want Cathérine and David – with a healthy child – to be able to go, if they want or if they must, to a safer place.”
“Surely there’s no more lovely a place in its life and art than France?”
“But safer.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Switzerland? America? New Zealand?”
“New Zealand. I hope they like Chinese food. The country is totally incapable of defending itself.”
“No place has to be the last stop. You go where you can live.”
“And that’s why you regret not having been a businessman?”
“Had I been, my life might not have been as ecstatic, but now I’d have the means. I’ll leave behind a shelf of compositions that no one cares about and no one will ever play or hear. Instead, I could have helped them.”
“Can’t you ask Shymanski? He’s been your patron for forty years.”
“I can’t. He’s ninety-four. His sons, who’ve hated me since I first tried to teach them piano, have taken hold of all his assets. Physically, he’s almost at the end, though when he’s not in too much pain his mind is sharp. The boys – they’re half reptile – have their own places in the Sixteenth, and think Saint-Germain-en-Laye is for old people. They’re moving him to the villa in Antibes and selling the house.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. They announced no date. He protests. Nothing to be done about it. They’re vermin come home to roost. They have heavily pomaded black hair down to their shoulders. They drive Ferraris and are married to ultra-long-legged Russian fortune hunters. These women are so tall your eyes are level with their navels, and they wear ermine hats, dresses with huge cutouts, and several kilos of ugly jewelry. If you can catch a glimpse of their faces way up on the tower of their astoundingly thin bodies, you see two eyes as blue and vacant as opals, set into heads the size of grapefruits, without the charm of an Eskimo dog that pulls a sled.”
“I take it you don’t like them.”
“No, I don’t care about them. They’re just accessories. But the brothers are billionaire, adult, juvenile delinquents. They have lots of girlfriends but they keep their perfectly vacant wives because they’re, to quote one of the brothers speaking about the mother of his own spawn, ‘explosively fuckable.’”
“They sound like it,” Fran?ois said.
“You like grapefruit? I can get you their numbers,” Jules replied.
“I thought the old man was married to ….”
“He was. He lost her during the war. Much later, he married a Brazilian, their mother, who left him after a few years, took them, and transformed them into Latinized Eurotrash, rentiers nonpareils. Shymanski no longer has access to a sou, and I’ll have to leave when they sell.”
“But you’re a tenant. They can’t ….”
“They can. I’m not a tenant, but a guest. At first it was music lessons. Then just looking after the house when the old man was away, which was most of the time.”