“Since when?”
“A lot of people don’t, and it’s been that way for a long time. I kept on wearing it despite the risk. But while you were in America I went to Lyon to do the accounts at a parts supplier for Airbus: they were padding. On my way back to my hotel after dinner, in the center of town, I was attacked. I wouldn’t have been terrified had there been one, or even two” – David was as big as a bear – “but there were about a dozen.”
“A dozen! What happened?”
“It started with words. They got more and more excited and started to kick and punch me. Of course, I ran, but I couldn’t have outrun them, as they were quite young. A truck driver saw me, stopped his truck, and told me to get on the running board. The truck had huge mirrors, so I held on to the mirror bars, and he drove through centre-ville at fifty kilometers an hour, right through a red. Then I got in the cab, he circled around, and dropped me at my hotel.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“No point. It was a crowd. They weren’t out for it, and weren’t together in the first place. They collected spontaneously.”
“You should have done something.”
“What was I supposed to do, kill them? I don’t have a gun. I was never a soldier. I wouldn’t have done that anyway.”
“Didn’t you feel like it, though?”
“I just wanted to get away. I have a mortally ill child. I can’t solve this problem for France. I don’t think anyone can, but certainly not me. Even if I could, my efforts and attention must be elsewhere.”
JULES HAD ALWAYS been numb to the lighting of candles and the procession of ceremony. In his first years in the attic in Reims it would have been difficult to mark the Sabbath and holidays. They might have done so, as did others, with matchsticks for candles, but they didn’t. Since the mid nineteenth-century, with a temporary reversion during the Dreyfus Affair, the Lacours had been fully assimilated. Even had they not been, in hiding during the war they were stunned enough to exist in many kinds of silence until its end. Their hope was merely to stay alive. Ceremony might begin afterwards, but until then it seemed like something only for those who were not hunted. Throughout his life, Jules had always refused any kind of celebration for himself, and though he tried his best he was present only half-heartedly in celebration of others. As for religious ritual, he was embarrassed by the weakness of rote public prayer, perhaps because when he himself would pray in silence, his simple, improvised prayer was worth a thousand set pieces.
“How do you think it’ll go?” David asked him as they were eating.
Jules knew what he meant, and that he was supposed to know how “it” might go, given that he had lived through the war. “David, I was five when the war ended, a shell-shocked child who couldn’t speak. That warped me for the rest of my life, as I’m sure Cathérine has told you.”
David nodded.
“I’ve never been equipped to live in peace and judge dispassionately. My reality was real then, it may be real in the future, and it’s partially real now. As much as it grants me clairvoyance, it also cripples my judgment. So I can’t tell you how it will go.”
“Of course not,” David told him. “I’m just as uncertain, but unlike you, I don’t have the benefit of experience. I know you can’t know, Jules, but what do you feel?”
“What do I feel? I feel that you should get medical treatment for Luc in the United States or Switzerland, and establish yourselves there. What about Geneva? The lake is cold and blue, the shadows deep, the streets quiet and clean, everything well ordered, peaceful, and rich. The medical care is expert and precise. They speak French, it’s high up, protected from war and conflict. You can have a life there.”
“Really.”
“Really. Yes.”
“It’s expensive,” Cathérine said. “We couldn’t even begin to afford it.”
“First, consider it,” her father asked.
“Jules, you speak as if there could be another Holocaust in Europe,” David said. “Do you actually believe that?”
“I don’t. But the smell of it is in the wind, the taste is in the water. That’s enough. Why should you live your lives in continual anxiety? Why should you or Luc be beaten in the street? Why should he have to hide his identity at school? Why should you fear that he’ll be massacred in his kindergarten, or that you’ll be blown to pieces in a synagogue or restaurant? Except for me, your parents are gone. You have no siblings and neither does Cathérine. You should move. I don’t want to worry that when I’m no longer around you might have to replay the story of my own life.”
“Not that we could go anywhere else,” Cathérine said, the spoon in her hand having been motionless since David’s question, “but if we could, if it could happen, you’d have to come with us.”
“No, Cathérine.”
“Why?”
“Because, for me, France is the world, too synonymous with life. To quote a British politician, J’adore la France, les Fran?ais sont charmants, la langue est à mourir. Your mother is buried here, as are my parents, somewhere, in France. Everything I know, have done, and felt is tied to this country and laid down indelibly. Keeping faith to the theme of my life is more important than living itself. There can be changes in tempo, but one must always preserve the tone. You know how you read sometimes in the papers that old people stay behind even as the barbarians approach?”
“Yes, they do that.”
“There’s a reason for it, and it’s not just that they’re tired and have no chance for a new life.” He knew that she could not quite understand such a thing.
“What is it then?” she asked.
“When you’re of that age you’re given a certain kind of bravery that perhaps you had when you were at the peak of your powers. I don’t think it’s just because you don’t have much to lose that the calculation runs in favor of daring. Rather, you get a level-headed courage that allows you to make death run for its money even though you know it must win. I’ll never leave France, but you’re young, so you can.”
“We can’t afford it,” David said.
“I forgot. You’re the accountant.”
“That’s the reality.”
“It can change.”
“How?”
“For one thing, I’m going to give you everything I have,” Jules said. “I have some savings. There’s a bit of jewelry, and I’m going to sell the piano. A B?sendorfer concert grand, beautifully cared for, might bring a hundred thousand Euros.”
“Forgive me, Jules,” David said, “but even that would be hardly enough.”
“I’m working on other things, though nothing is certain.”
“What other things?” Cathérine asked. “And how will you live? You can’t even stay at Shymanski’s. Everything will be gone.”
“I’ll live on my pension.”
“You have something up your sleeve,” Cathérine said, almost as if she were a child. She knew him well enough in that regard.