“What scares me is that, on rare occasions, unable to overcome one another, the right and the left fall in love and make common cause against … guess who? You saw that with Dieudonné. He filled the theaters with Arabs and the FN. Don’t you have powers?” Jules asked, hoping that somehow Shymanski could summon these and set things right.
“Jules, no one has. The higher you go, the more constrained you are. Real power depends on the ebb and flow of events. It comes from riding and floating on them, but it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re just a passenger. Eventually you’re thrown off or you sink in. I was once the third-richest person in France. I succeeded in building this lovely tomb, and I’ll die in comfort. The best doctors will come. The drugs will float me away. The nurses will keep me clean. The room will be quiet and beautiful, with many flowers sent by people whom I never really knew.
“How did my wife die? How did my children? I don’t know. In a cattle car? A gas chamber? Shot? Raped, my little girls? Beaten? I don’t know, but I do know that when I die I’ll be just like them. The lifetime I’ve spent insulating myself will disappear in smoke, as they did. The swastika on the wall is a sign that at last I’m to join them. And when I think of this, I feel peace and joy such as I’ve never felt in all my life, through all my successes.”
“I know exactly,” Jules told him, “but I have a daughter and a grandson. I don’t want to part from them. I can’t leave them yet, because the child is seriously ill.”
“The child. I’m sorry.”
Jules dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Not even a year ago,” he said, “seventeen thousand people marched in Paris and chanted ‘Jews out of France,’ and ‘The gas chambers were fake.’ Children are massacred in Jewish schools; we have to hide on the streets; throughout the country there are ‘Israel-Free Zones’; some authorities instruct shopkeepers that they cannot carry ‘Zionist’ products.”
“You think next is Judenfrei?”
“It feels like that now. I myself am safe when I walk through Paris only because people think I’m a Norman, or a German. My coloring. My face. To pass was always exhilarating, and gave me a feeling of freedom and acceptance. Even now. Then I see Hasidim, I see their expressions, feel their tensions, and I think, why am I hiding? I’m hiding for good reason, but I’m ashamed even as I continue to do so. After the Holocaust we were free for decades. That freedom felt light and good, and I still experience it, but only because I’m taken for something that I’m not.
“My daughter’s husband is Orthodox. Because he was attacked, he takes off his yarmulke when he’s on the street. My little grandson doesn’t know anything about this of course. He may not even live, but if he does I want to get him out – to Switzerland, America, or New Zealand.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have the money, and neither do they.”
“I’d give it to you, Jules, if I could,” Shymanski said. “I’d give you a million Euros, two million, whatever it would take. But now I don’t have a sou. My sons control everything, and they hate you.”
“I’m not fond of them, either.”
“Jules, your life has been so much better than mine.”
“Really?” Jules asked. “I’ve come to nothing.”
“So have I, but on the way you’ve had music.”
“Music is evanescent, not even like a painting. It flees like smoke in the wind. It’s just gone.”
“Everything is evanescent. Why do you think I offered you the apartment? If there’s a God, and I do believe so even if He’s become inscrutable to me, music is the finest and possibly the last way of reaching Him. I wanted you to teach my boys so they could escape what in fact they’ve become, but they’ve always sought what they should avoid. They’re half Brazilian: maybe they have a different heaven.”
“Monsieur Shymanski, I could never sustain the elevation of music. When it stops I can still hear it, but the elevation vanishes.”
“Still, it teaches you, Jules. You of all people should know that. It shows you that there is something sublime. When I was younger I used to believe that if there’s an afterlife it would be filled with luminous color and gentle light. Now I think that it would be like music. When music, which seems more real than life itself, vanishes, where does it go? Maybe when we vanish we’ll go there, too.”
As Shymanski was speaking, Jules had caught a glimpse, almost hidden in the darkness, of a new table in a corner. On it was a stainless steel tray with a neat case of phials and another of syringes. After a moment, Jules said, “I see.” Seconds passed before he asked, “Are you going to paint out the swastika? I can arrange to have it done. Claude won’t do it, because he says he won’t do anything but garden and watch the gate. I can do it.”
“No. Let the new owners paint it out. I’m content to have come full circle.”
1944
IN THE CHAOS before the Wehrmacht drove on Paris in 1940, vehicles and pedestrians rushed in all directions, crossing and weaving pointlessly as they sought salvation in places from which others had fled. Like most of the population, Philippe Lacour had taken to heart the lesson written in his own blood as a young poilu during the Great War, which was that Paris would not fall, or, if so, only after years of fighting. In the perfect June weather, the speed of the German columns and the collapse of the French army seemed both incredible and inappropriate. It was summer, the season of awakened life burgeoning under clear skies and strong sun. Just days before the panic, Philippe and Cathérine had seen young students celebrating their start into life arm in arm in tuxedos and gowns. As usual in June, Philippe, a cellist, had a full schedule of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and parties. As he and Cathérine rode toward the Gare de Montparnasse, in a taxi for which they had paid five times the normal tariff, he was anxious that he would be held to account and lose income for failing to show up at his engagements.