“All of them.”
AFTER FRAN?OIS RETURNED to the domesticity for which Jules, rather than he, had been born, Jules walked through the Quartier latin as it started to rain. At almost eleven he crossed the Champs de Mars, which were deserted because of the hour and the weather. His intention was to tire himself so that when he reached home sleep would outcompete worry. If he could, he would go all the way to Passy, where he had grown up, and depart from there for home after touching the fa?ade of the house his parents had lived in before they were forced to hide in Reims. The Jews fled either south to try to cross the Pyrenees, or southeast to Switzerland, but the Famille Lacour went instead to Reims, where the ordinariness and lack of importance, as well as the fewer Jews than in Paris, might have afforded them a contrarian chance. Many of their friends, diamonds sewn into the seams of their clothes, had been captured or turned back at Annecy or Pau. Jules had no idea who lived in the house now, and had never wanted to know. But every once in a while, especially when he was troubled, he would go there and touch the wall.
He walked through a downpour that had started after the Champs de Mars, and headed for the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Bir-Hakeim was where the free French, by holding against Rommel, had begun to turn the tide and restore the dignity of France. It was the symbol of springing back from defeat, and though the bridge named in its honor was a fairly hideous structure, it was his favorite, because it was where he turned around after struggling hard against the current. Ugly and ungainly, the Pont de Bir-Hakeim was a symbol of redemption, which made sense, as redemption seldom comes without suffering.
Hardly used even during the day, the walkways were now slick and deserted. He walked in the center, between columns that supported train tracks on the upper level, as here was some protection from the rain. Almost at the midpoint, where a staircase led down to the long and narrow ?le aux Cygnes mid-channel in the Seine, he heard a commotion of angry voices echoing amid the columns and fading when an occasional car went by and the wash of its tires on the wet roadway muffled all sound.
The closer he came, the more he knew that something was terribly wrong and dangerous. He didn’t run to it, but his pace quickened. It was like being in the forest in Algeria at night and in bad weather. He was unseen, perfectly safe, with surprise and the lack of fear to his great advantage. Though he had no weapon, he had these and he had experience. By the time he saw what was going on near a buttress at the midpoint, he had partially returned to a soldier’s state of mind.
Three young men, one of whom had a knife, were beating and kicking another one, who was rolling this way and that on the ground in trying to protect himself. Jules hadn’t been afraid, but he was now – because they were three, they were young, he was old, and he was one.
Surprise itself could deliver him the first. His experience and strength might give him the second. But what of the third when Jules would be winded? So he held back. If this were between them and they were all the same, why intervene? Maybe the police would come, but now they were nowhere in sight. What could he do but watch, ashamed to retreat but unable to take action.
They kicked and pummeled the figure on the ground until it could move only agonizingly, rising into a low hump, collapsing, trying to sidle away but stopped by the buttress. Then they stopped, drew back, and the tallest one, who had a knife, approached the body on the ground, staring at it while drawing the hand that held the knife back past his shoulder.
Jules was by this time so torn between two imperatives that he trembled, though not out of fear. Then what he saw stopped his trembling. The young man on the ground, now risen to his knees and covered in blood, was wearing a yarmulke. Though he didn’t speak, his eyes were begging. What he didn’t know and surely could not have imagined, and what his tormentors did not know and surely could not have imagined, was that watching from the shadows was Jules, a man who was thrown back seventy years as if no time had passed, whose whole life had been a compressed spring in wait for just the trigger they had pulled. He knew not himself of what he was capable.
Although it was true, he wasn’t aware that here was a chance to kill in just the way as all his life he had wanted to kill, and to die in just the way as all his life he had wanted to die. They hadn’t noticed him, until, running at full speed, he burst from behind. He knew they would freeze momentarily, and they did, all of them. Before they moved, Jules was on the tall one with the knife and had opened his hand to grasp the assailant’s head and hold it as tremendous forward momentum pushed him against the stones of the bridge. Guiding the head against a sharp edge of masonry just above a more rounded course, Jules used the buttress as a weapon, killing the first one instantly.
The other two attacked even before the first one hit the pavement, windmilling their fists, because they didn’t know how to fight. In the split second in which Jules determined how to deal with this, he also managed to wonder what a Hasidic Jew was doing on the bridge at night, alone. Perhaps he was just walking, or they had dragged him there. He limped off toward the Left Bank as Jules shielded himself as best he could from the blows and struggled toward the stairs. Punches were coming fast and hard from every direction. He couldn’t keep up with them, but instead of boxing – he was no boxer, even if they weren’t either – he waited for an opening and, with a scream, seized one of them by the neck, turned his whole body, and as if diving into a pool pushed off hard into the abyss, out from the stairs, riding the one he had seized down the twenty-one steps as if on a toboggan. When they stopped, the stunned young man pushed limply against Jules, trying to get up. From above and behind came the footsteps of the other one, who now had the knife and was closing. Aching and winded, Jules understood that he could no longer deal with two, or perhaps one, so he waited until the boy struggling beneath him was in a completely unguarded position as he tried to rise, and punched him in the throat, which he knew would – and did – kill him.
At this point, the boy with the knife lost his courage. Not knowing this, Jules looked at him, expecting either to die or perhaps to kill again in what seemed like a dream and what for an instant he thought must be a dream. Then the boy threw the knife into the Seine.