Dunaif stood in silence, studying Jules as one might study a painting. People see so many other people that they look at faces without seeing them. But so much is written in the face – of the past, of truth, hope, pain, love, and potential – that each man or woman deserves a Raphael, Rembrandt, or Vermeer to see and express it.
What did Dunaif see? He supposed that the man standing before him, like so many – but here it was carved to an unusual depth – carried within him and would not abandon the life of the past, his love of those who had come before, a store of vivid memories, and, not least, the wounds of history. A smart, brave, and defeated old man sitting in front of the doctor, reticent as he might be, was more interesting than listening to the sexual travails or career disappointments of a twenty-eight-year-old.
After a few minutes, Jules asked, “Do I come in there and speak, or do you just stand in the doorway and stare at me?”
Gesturing with his right hand sweeping toward the interior, Dunaif invited him in. Two portes-fenêtres facing the street were open, their white gauze curtains moving patiently in breaths of summer air. Three times the size of the waiting room, the office was full of books – on three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, stacked on tables and his desk – but still spacious and open. Before the building had been divided into smaller apartments at the end of the war, this had once been a family’s main reception room.
“Do you live here?” Jules asked.
“Upstairs,” Dunaif said, settling into his chair. He interlocked his fingers and tilted his head a little, keeping his eyes leveled upon Jules as if to say, what have you to tell me?
Not quite ready to open up, just as in music the first movement is often quiet and tentative, Jules proceeded gradually. He said, “You seem to be the only psychiatrist now working in Paris. What kind of psychiatrist, no, what kind of Frenchman, would be in Paris in August?”
“I don’t like the beach,” Dunaif said. “That is, when everyone is on it. And this is what I do. In August the city is quiet and beautiful in its desertion. Although the young residents stay on duty in the hospitals, someone senior has to be on call to guide them.”
“Why is there no one waiting? Your secretary? I saw a receptionist’s desk.”
“She and they are all somewhere else. Paris shrinks as they take with them everything they think they’re leaving behind. On the C?te d’Azur the men play tennis as if their lives depend upon it, and the women look at each other’s handbags. It’s just like Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Everyone’s at the beach but me and you. What about you?”
“I STOPPED GOING to the beach when my wife died. We used to go to what were then, anyway, the empty Atlantic beaches north of the Gironde. Unlike the rest of France, I’m not afraid to swim in the surf. Helicopters would hover and demand through their loudspeakers that I return to shore. One landed once, and the police tried to give me a ticket. I protested that swimming in the ocean could not be a crime, but evidently it can be. They demanded my papers, which I didn’t have of course, because I was in my bathing suit. They asked my name so they could write the summons. When I said Aristide Poisson, the cop almost hit me. They looked toward the helicopter, but the pilot moved his head from side to side to say, no, they were already fully loaded. Then they flew away. It was like a dream.”
“Yes,” said Dunaif. “I had a patient yesterday who had exactly the same dream.”
“A common phobia,” Jules answered in the same spirit, “helicopters catching you in the sea.”
“Go on.”
“About the beach?”
“About anything.”
“About anything,” Jules repeated, looking down.
“Anything that occurs to you.”
“All right. It’s a shock, and I don’t like it, that when I pay monthly, quarterly, or even annual bills, and when I wind the clock each week, I’m absolutely sure that I’ve done it the day before, not seven, or thirty, or a hundred and twenty days before, but yesterday, as if no time had passed. When writing the year 2014 on a check – do young people even write checks anymore, go to the post office, or read newspapers? It doesn’t look like it – I feel like I’m in a science-fiction novel. Sometimes I date my checks ‘nineteen fifty-eight,’ or ‘nineteen seventy-five,’ and then cross it out, amazed to write the present date, staring at it like an African tribesman or an American Indian brought as a curiosity to the London or Paris of the seventeenth century. Such a creature, kidnaped from his home, would, no matter what its difficulties, long for his tranquil past. And in the Old World, new to him, his touch would be forever numb, his hearing muted, his sight betrayed and blurred. Whatever the beauties around him, only home – lost over a seemingly infinite sea – would be really beautiful.”
“I understand,” Dunaif said. “So let me ask what it is that keeps you in the past and prevents you from living fully in the present?”
“Guilt.”
“I’ve heard of that.” The psychiatrist was a Jew, and knew that Jules was as well. “This is France, after all. Devout, well practiced Catholics come here to confess. Those who are lapsed come to confess that they haven’t confessed – quite a confession. Jews, who have no confessors, are the champions of self-revelation, but telling me your sins, real or imagined, won’t wash them away. My job is not absolution but understanding.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t think you, or anyone for that matter, can help me.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Dunaif leaned forward compassionately – if this is possible, and it was. “Tell me.”
“Rationally or not, I feel responsible for the deaths of many people and even animals. When someone close to me dies, I think that because I couldn’t save him I’ve killed him. It’s not logical, but it doesn’t go away.”
“This started when?” Dunaif asked.
“With my parents. During the war. I didn’t save them.”
“How old were you?”
“Four and a half.”
“I have my job because the life of a man or a woman is forged in the wounds of infancy and childhood. You think, that was then and I can’t go back and fix things, and of course you can’t. But look at it another way. Now you, a grown man – I dare say, if I may, an old man – are blaming a four-year-old, who happens to have been you, for the inability single-handedly to defeat the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Vichy police, the collaborators …. Would you blame a four-year-old who was not you?”
“Of course not, but you’re wrong. Love is absolute. It can’t be measured, or contained, or truly analyzed. It’s the one thing that you hold onto as you fall into the abyss. When you love, you experience a power close to that of the divine. And, like music, it enables you so far to transcend your bounds that you can’t even begin to understand it. So when you love, as a child loves his parents or a parent his child, you suffer the illusion that the limitless power you sense can save them. It can’t. I know, but my soul doesn’t, and it makes me want to die so I can share their fate.”