All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (44 page)

I invented an excuse to disappear. Professional duty, I said. It was time to send my cable. Shraggai tried to persuade me to go with them to a restaurant. I resisted. I owed it to my readers, I said. In fact, I had no dispatch to send that night, and Shraggai probably guessed as much. “If you stay with us, I’ll give you a scoop tomorrow,” he said. Of course, I had no wish to leave, but I dug in my heels so as not to lose face. It was a suggestion from Kathleen that saved me from myself: “Why don’t you send your cable and then join us? We’ll wait for you, won’t we, Shraggai?” Of course, he said. “But hurry.” “Yes, hurry,” Kathleen pleaded. Was she already getting attached to me?

I set out for the métro station at a run, but Shraggai’s voice stopped me: “Don’t you want to know which restaurant?” Idiot. He named a well-known café, adding, “It’s not far from the telegraph office, Rue Montmartre.” True, it wasn’t far, but I had nothing to send anyway. I decided to wire Dov a brief message: “Project Mendès-France
on track again.” Let him have a sleepless night for a change. He would definitely call me in the morning, wanting to know more, but there was time enough to think about that. For the moment I had to hurry. Shraggai and Kathleen were waiting. I repeated her name to myself as I walked.
Kath-leen, Kath-leen
. It seemed the most beautiful name in the world. Sure, it wasn’t Jewish, but so what? The important thing was that she was waiting for me and that she was beautiful. And there she was, keeping an eye on the entrance.

She smiled when she saw me come in. “Thanks for being so quick,” she said. “We’ve already ordered,” Shraggai said. “What do you feel like?” Coffee. “That’s all?” Kathleen asked. “Aren’t you hungry?” I wasn’t. “Try,” she urged. Okay, I would have what she was having. “A sandwich?” Fine. “A ham sandwich?” Uh-oh. There’s your answer, I said to myself: She’s not Jewish. “Cheese, then?” she suggested. Fine. At which point Shraggai launched into a discussion about dietary laws in the Jewish tradition. Kathleen asked pertinent questions. Her voice set me dreaming and her glance intoxicated me. I told her I would explain the complicated dietary laws some other time. “So there’ll be another time?” she asked in an innocent, anxious voice. “Of course,” Shraggai said. “What about tomorrow night?” “Sorry,” Kathleen replied, “I can’t.” I added that I couldn’t either, that I was busy. “I was lying,” she whispered to me as Shraggai paid the check. “Actually I’m not busy. I was going to suggest we start the English lessons tomorrow night, but if you’re not free …” I told her I had lied too—I was at her service. I came close to confessing that I was free every night. “Call me in the morning,” she said joyously, giving me her number. When Shraggai came back he announced that he was taking Kathleen back to Neuilly. It was two in the morning, and I walked home borne by a new happiness.

The next morning was ruled by the telephone.

“What’s up?” an excited Dov wanted to know. “It’s not that crackpot Givon again, is it?” I reassured him without giving anything away. My evasiveness only sharpened his excitement. “Be patient,” I said. He laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re not impatient too.” But it was no longer Mauriac or Mendès-France I was dying to see again.

Anxious, I called Kathleen. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I wasn’t sleeping.”

“What were you doing?”

“Thinking about last night.”

“I owe you a confession. I don’t know a thing about dance.”

“I know, I could feel you looking at me.”

“But I didn’t look at you either.”

“I felt it anyway.”

There was a long silence. “Do you really want to see me again?” she asked, in her touchingly sweet voice. I threw the question right back to her. Another long silence, and then she said, “Yes, very much.” We made an appointment for me to pick her up in Neuilly.

Next came an amused call from Shraggai. “So, don’t you want to thank me? Don’t tell me you didn’t find her beautiful, charming, cultured—in a word, extraordinary.” I said nothing. “If you want to ask me anything about her,” he went on, “don’t hesitate.” But I had only one question: How had he met her? He said it was a long story. “Why don’t you come and have coffee with me?”

Shraggai looked tired—pale and drawn, his eyes bloodshot from insomnia. “She thinks a lot of you,” he said without further preamble. I thanked him and reminded him that he had promised me a scoop today. He laughed. “Isn’t Kathleen the most beautiful scoop a journalist could ask for? She told me she was afraid of you. Afraid to fall in love with you.” And that frightened her? “Yes, because she’s not free.” I almost choked. She’s married? “No, engaged.” My anticipated happiness was vanishing. I don’t know how I managed to get out the words: “So where did you meet her?”

He had noticed her a month ago standing in line at the Salle Pleyel box office. By chance, they had bought adjoining seats. During the intermission Shraggai was approached by a friend of his, a Mossad officer, who questioned him about his neighbor. How long had he known her? What did he know about her? Shraggai explained that he had never seen her before. The Mossad agent was disappointed. “Too bad. We thought you could help us. She’s German, and she lives with someone we’re interested in, a German scientist who’s working for Syria.” Shraggai was skeptical: “Even the Mossad can make a mistake. On the way in, I struck up a conversation with her, so I can tell you she’s not German but American. I doubt she knows anyone who works for an Arab country. In fact, she just arrived from the United States.”

Shraggai accompanied her home and since that evening had become her chaperon, guide, and bodyguard. She treated him not so much like a father as like an old friend of her father’s; he was her confidant. Why had he wanted to meet her? “I like helping fate,” he said. And that’s why he wanted to throw us into each other’s arms, even
though she was engaged? “Sometimes fate opens a door, sometimes it closes it. And sometimes it stands aside without doing anything.”

Then Shraggai asked me some questions about his protégée. Had I found her sufficiently attractive? Did I want to see her again? If my profession had taught me anything, it was the art of sidestepping questions with a minimum of elegance but a maximum of caution. I knew how to keep a secret and didn’t breathe a word about my appointment with Kathleen.

The afternoon seemed interminable. I had a terrible migraine and found it hard to breathe. I canceled all my appointments. I would not attend the press conference at the Quai d’Orsay tomorrow, nor tonight’s reception. Leneman suggested we take in a premiere at the Théâtre Antoine. “No thanks,” I said. “Something has come up.” Suddenly it was impossible for me to sit down at the typewriter and concentrate.

That evening I took the métro to Neuilly. Feeling like a smitten teenager, I rang the bell. Kathleen let me in. “Do you mind if we go to my room instead of the living room?” I didn’t mind at all. Her room would be more private. Besides which, Shraggai had told me that Kathleen had a live-in landlady, and landladies made me nervous. The room was not too large but tastefully furnished. Kathleen sat on a blue sofa and invited me to sit beside her. I didn’t know how to begin. A gaping hole swallowed all the words and ideas teeming in my brain. I was about to call on my old friend Kant, who had always served me well as conversation fodder, when a voice inside me screamed, Don’t be a fool! One stupid remark and she’ll show you the door.

Kathleen came to my rescue. She began to talk about her life, her quiet childhood and turbulent adolescence. Her father was Irish and her mother Indian, and she felt torn between two traditions, two cultures, two loyalties. I wondered when she would get around to her fiancé. She spoke as though he didn’t exist. Shraggai must have made a mistake. I loved her slightly husky voice. As her eyes carefully examined the tip of her shoes, she spoke slowly, as though fearful of revealing a buried secret. At one point her hand touched mine, perhaps inadvertently. I took it. She said nothing, nor did I. She raised her head. I could feel her hair. Her face was very close to mine. Her breath burned my eyelids. Her lips sought mine. I didn’t know a kiss could last so long, nor that it could blossom so deeply. Kathleen was teaching me a lot about my capacities—but unfortunately not enough.
When she whispered softly that it was time to make love, the fool that I am protested. “We mustn’t,” I said almost indignantly “Believe me, we mustn’t.” Her eyes widened. “Why not?” Why shouldn’t a man and woman who will love each other, who already love each other, make love when they feel like it? My body, tense with desire, wanted to—I was certainly attracted to Kathleen—yet I resisted her. Was it lack of experience or fear of disappointing her? She guided me to her bed, under a purple canopy. We embraced, falling onto the thick bedspread. I felt her body’s warmth. I would have given anything to receive what it offered me. But I was not ready to give—or receive—anything. Imprisoned by my inhibitions, religious or otherwise, I rejected the offering. Caresses, kisses, yes. But no more. I stopped myself at the last instant, on the threshold of joy, for deep down I was sure Kathleen was still a virgin. In those days I was convinced that all women were virgins until they married, and how could I, my father’s son, “sully” them? “What we do must be pure,” I whispered to her. “Do you understand?” She didn’t. I launched into a philosophical lesson on love’s theological components. Did she know that in the Bible the terms
kedosha
and
kedesha
, which are strangely related, mean “saint” and “prostitute” respectively? Did she know the Gitas? Now I was back on familiar ground. Between two passionate embraces I told her what I had learned in India about sacred eroticism. And had she ever heard of Jewish mysticism? Did she know that every union is a re-union? Is there any union more mysterious and pure than that of two beings imbued with the same need, the same desire? I expressed myself awkwardly, speaking many words but saying nothing, becoming agitated without doing anything she expected of me or anything I expected of myself.

At about three in the morning she gave up, exhausted. “Will I see you again?” she asked. Maybe she was afraid she had disappointed me. I reassured her: I loved her more than ever. I loved her body’s beauty and grace as much as the purity of her soul. So of course we had to see each other again. We kissed one last time, and I left.

The métro had stopped running, and the rare taxis were expensive, so I walked home. Hardly anyone was in the street, even on the Champs-Élysées, though it was spring and the weather was fair. I was accosted by prostitutes. An old woman, heavily made up and leering unpleasantly, touched my arm. I jerked it away. Farther on, near the Madeleine, a much younger girl tried to lure me: “I have a baby and
no money to feed him.” I wondered why I didn’t take her up on it. She could give me lessons I sorely needed. But I thought about Kathleen and kept walking. The young prostitute began to cry. Had I insulted her? I turned back and told her that, unfortunately, I wasn’t rich. She cursed me and told me to get lost. I was sorry she misunderstood. I didn’t mean to hurt her. On the contrary, I was in love, and I wanted to love the whole world: the sleepy passersby, the derelicts, the last customers in the last open cafés, the trees, the clouds, and the wind that drove them. Yes, blessed by a young Indian-Irish woman from Ohio, I would gladly offer blessings of love to all Creation.

The few days that remained before my visit to Mauriac were devoted almost exclusively to him. Kathleen, whom I now saw every evening, did not object, for she knew what was at stake. I rediscovered Mauriac by delving anew into his novels, reencountering his favorite themes: the power of sin and the weight of hatred, forbidden love, and grace. I reread his polemical essays on current affairs for
L’Express
and
Figaro
. I admired his mordant style, his fierceness toward his opponents, whom he demolished before offering them his pity. I disagreed with his absolution of collaborationist writers who had preached hatred and demanded death for the Jews. By what right did he pardon them? I knew, of course, that as a Catholic, he was prepared to forgive anything. But as a Jew, I found it disturbing. God Himself refuses to efface the sins one commits toward others: only the victim may do so. If I questioned him on this issue I might offend him. What questions should I ask? How to overcome my fear of seeming stupid or ignorant? Kathleen watched me and worried about how nervous I seemed. I was ashamed to admit my doubts to her, but finally did so in an effort to elicit her tenderness. It worked. She took me in her arms to boost my morale. When her lips touched mine, my apprehension vanished. The interview with Mauriac suddenly seemed inconsequential. The important thing was that I had at last been allowed to live a real love story. And what a story it was. As always when I transgressed the rules of my own making, a shiver ran through me: what if my father saw me now, what if my grandfather knew.…

On the designated day I arrived an hour early at the Avenue Théophile-Gautier. I walked nervously through the neighborhood streets, stopping at shopwindows and outdoor cafés, chain-smoking, mentally rehearsing the questions I wanted to ask. One thing was
clear: I had to get him to talk about Mendès-France. The rest would follow. I didn’t think it would be difficult, because he spoke constantly of Mendès-France in his columns.

I was glad it was a slow elevator, for I needed a moment to collect myself. I rang the bell. An elderly housekeeper told me I was expected and led me to the living room. “Please be patient for a few moments,” she said. I went to the window and gazed out at the passersby: two schoolgirls in uniform, a housewife walking a recalcitrant dog. A hoarse voice came from behind: “Excuse me for having kept you waiting.” I was immediately impressed by Mauriac’s simplicity and warmth. Both the writer and the man inspired respect. I knew of his exemplary conduct during the Occupation.
Le Cahier noir de Forez
was testimony to the man, as
Thérèse Desqueyroux
was to the novelist. I felt intimidated.

He was quick to put me at ease, speaking intimately of his work as a journalist. He became ferocious when he mentioned the “spitefulness” of this rightist agitator or that leftist editorialist. In ten minutes I learned more about Parisian politics than I had in five years. I wanted to ask him about Mendès-France but was loath to interrupt him, especially since I found his monologue fascinating. He had read and studied everything associated with the great men who shaped the literary and political destiny of this century, but his favorite theme was the life—and, more so, the death—of a young Jew from Nazareth. When he spoke his name his smile seemed to turn inward. Once started, he had no wish to change the subject. His words were brilliant, but … In my essay “An Interview Unlike Any Other” (in
A Jew Today)
I described my reaction, my indignation. Later I was angry at myself, for having said that I knew Jewish children who had suffered more than Jesus and of whom we did not speak. I had no right to hurt him, especially since he never sought to use his faith as a sword against mine. On the contrary, it was because he loved Jesus that he defended Jews, because he suffered at Jesus’s suffering, that he strove to assuage ours. But I came to understand that only later. In the end he didn’t get me an audience with Mendès-France (for the simple reason that I never asked him), but in the meantime we became friends, and that friendship meant more to me than all the scoops in the world.