As he might have done when she was a child, Jules made a show of looking at his forearms, raising first the left and then the right. “No I don’t.”
“If you’re going to stay,” Cathérine said, “whether we go or not, you should be more observant.”
“Religion again.”
“Don’t say it like that, it’s insulting. How are you Jewish? You’re French. How would anyone know what you are? How will the Jews survive in France, or anywhere, if they break the chain of five thousand years?”
“Who’s breaking a chain?”
“You are.”
“No. You’re the next link. You do all the stuff, I’m expendable now, what’s the problem?”
“It’s not enough just to be born Jewish. What have you done to keep the tradition alive?”
“I stayed alive myself. I managed to survive well enough so that I could work, have a family, and love my wife and my child. It was a closely run thing when I was little. I didn’t feel then that I deserved to live. I consider it an achievement that I didn’t die, or kill myself, or become even crazier than I am. What about that? Survival. I look at it as miraculous. I’m proud of you and David for reviving observance in our family, but it’s not for me. God is too immediate, splendid, and difficult for that.”
They looked at him in silence. Then David said to Cathérine, “Maybe your father’s one of the lamed vavnikim.” It was only partly sarcastic.
“What’s that?” Jules asked.
“Never mind,” David told him. “If you are, you don’t have to know. In fact, you can’t know.”
“So why did you say it?”
“I was just trying to tell Cathérine that you’re okay, and that compared to you in regard to being Jewish, we’re amateurs.” David was older than his years, and kind.
EVEN IF HIS INTUITIVE notions sometimes passed as brilliant flashes of theory, Jules had no theory of music or anything else. The potential to love abstraction had been blasted out of him forever in a single shock that had then defined the rest of his life. He thought it just as well, for the things he valued, things great and everlasting, were mysteriously self-evident yet elusive of explanation. He was loyal to the secret power of that which blessed the homely and unfashionable, the failures and the forgotten. Where theorists saw mathematical relations in music – sometimes clearly and sometimes with foolish complexity – he saw only waves and light. When sound could find and conjoin with these invisible and ever-present waves, it became music. High resolution images through great telescopes showed magical colors and heavenly light that the eye perceived only as a blur of white in the impossible distance. But there was much more to them than a pinpoint sparkle, and in the roseate clouds of effulgent galaxies was music in what was supposed to be silence.
This was, anyway, what he thought, felt, and sometimes saw, although he could neither bring it back, nor, it goes without saying, prove it. Waiting for Fran?ois in the Gardens of the Palais de Chaillot he saw the same thing in the undulating spray of the fountains as the wind struck their jets. A hundred million droplets shining in the sun moved in synchrony like schools of fish or flights of birds, rising suddenly to a crest and snapping back in explosions of silver and gold against a field of blue. Jules read this and heard it no less than the “Ma di” of Norma, which was like a boat running with the wind, rising and falling gently on the sea. He never tried to explain music more than in its craft. He thought that music was almost like a living thing, that it had a mischievous character, and that, like a spirit or sprite, it would know when the trap of explanation was set for it and craftily disappear. Like electrons, it, too, was allergic to measurement.
Fran?ois descended the staircase, a plastic bag suspended from his right hand. On what promised to be the last warm day until spring they were going to eat in the Gardens of Chaillot even though the crowds there looked like they were staging to tear down the Bastille. Fran?ois had suggested that the masses of people would lend them comfortable anonymity, and he knew a place nearby on the Avenue Kléber that made the best sandwiches in Paris. They had had this kind of lunch all their lives, thon or jambon on baguette, with beer, outside on a bench, in a park, on a terrace, or by the river.
They couldn’t sit at the edge of the water, as the masonry was either flush with it or blocked by hedges. The benches were occupied, and the steps had too much traffic, so they had to get up onto the wall behind the benches, where the spray didn’t reach even on the windiest days. The lower part of the wall, nearest the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, was easy of access and occupied. Only as it rose, eventually taller than the tallest man in the world, was it not taken up. Jules and Fran?ois chose an empty section in the middle, where in their youth they would have been able to jump up, twist in the air, and land firmly planted in a sitting position. Now they were too old, stiff, and heavy to do that, but they managed by making footholds of the iron eye bolts that ran in lines all along the wall.
No one would ever think that Fran?ois Ehrenshtamm would be sitting here eating a sandwich from a plastic bag. One might conclude only that these were two old guys – maybe retired motormen or very low-level bureaucrats of the kind who thought the whole world could fit into a pencil – who, passing into the restful indolence of retirement and onto the easy ramp down which, forgotten by others, one slides into death, had nothing better to do than drink beer and eat tuna sandwiches. They were invisible to the young, who, assuming that even were they wise they would be useless in new times, were in most cases correct. In the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot, where they began their conversation, they were relaxed and well worn. Who ever thinks of an old shoe? There is no need.
As Fran?ois laid out the lunch, Jules asked, “Why are the fountains of Paris more exposed to the wind than those of Rome? You know how many times a change in wind direction has soaked me in Paris? In the Tuileries, here, all over the place. But not in Rome. Roman water is disciplined as if by Mussolini. It behaves. It goes up, it goes down. But in Paris the water comes at you like machine gun fire.”
Fran?ois thought before he spoke, not merely as the habit of a philosopher but because all his life when he didn’t think before he spoke he got into trouble. “You realize,” he said, “that the water in Rome is older, and doesn’t have the energy to attack. The water of Paris has sharp elbows and jumps around, like monkeys or adolescents.”
“Really,” Jules said.
“Do you have a better explanation?”
Jules thought. “Yes.”
“And what is that?”
“What surrounds Rome?”
“What?”
“Hills. Rome is almost in a bowl. Therefore, less wind.”
“Of course I knew that.”
“No, you didn’t, because you’re a philosopher, and philosophers aren’t concerned with wind and waves.”
“Jules, I’m not really a philosopher, I’m a con who talks on television.”