Jacob's Folly (27 page)

“Gebeck,” said the count, “follow us please.”

I followed the count and the shriveled Cabanis to the count's study, where they both sat down.

“May I bring you some brandy?” I asked.

“Later,” said the count. “For now I want you to show Monsieur Cabanis some of what I have taught you. I am proud of my achievement.” I looked over at Cabanis. His wig was very dark, and curled along the front, with two pointed braids trailing down his back. He seemed like a vain, serious person. From his inside jacket pocket he produced a sheet of paper, clamping it between the tips of his fore- and middle fingers.

“Please translate into French,” he said, stretching his arm out and handing it to me. It was Latin. I recognized it as the work of the poet Virgil. I sat down and translated as best I could. This took me over half an hour, I believe. In all that time, neither man said a word. The only sound was the scratching of my quill on the paper.

“There are some words I do not recognize,” I said.

Cabanis took the paper from me and read, then looked over at my master, nodding. He then asked me questions about Aristotle. Voltaire. Diderot. I did my best to answer. Then, he turned to my master. “And the habits, the rituals?”

“Gone. You have my word.”

Cabanis thought this through for a few seconds. “The final act,” he said. “Nothing until that is accomplished.”

“In time,” said the count. Then, turning to me, he said pleasantly, “Monsieur Cabanis has been kind enough to advise me on your education, stage by stage. He is a man of letters, far better qualified than I to devise a curriculum. But I insist that such a radical reorganization of a person's mind takes time. Now. Go on. Take the rest of the day for yourself.”

I spent the afternoon in the kitchen, watching Solange add up the week's purchases in a large ledger, sipping coffee with milk.

“What's the matter, Johann?” she asked me. “You look so mopey.”

“Is he good to you, your husband?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“The personal kind,” I said.

She pushed a plate of cakes toward me. “Eat,” she said.

“Why is that your solution to everything?” I asked, piqued.

“It's not the solution to everything. Only to nosy little boys who say things they shouldn't.”

“I can't help it if I care about you,” I said. “I—I love you.”

Solange looked at me, astonished at my clumsy outburst. I had the terrible feeling she might be about to laugh.

“Oh, sweet boy,” she said.

“I am not a boy,” I said. “Not that you care, or have ever asked, but I'm married. Was—married. I am a man.”

“What happened to your wife?” she asked earnestly.

“I have no idea, and I don't care,” I said. “I only mention her because you all insist on calling me Le Naïf and treating me like a child, when I was once the head of a household!”

“Do you want to go back, perhaps?”

“I couldn't go back if I wanted to,” I snapped. “All I ask is, if I tell you I love you, treat me with the dignity I deserve.”

“All right,” she said. “I'm sorry. I cannot return your love, not because I could not love you, but because I am married.”

“But look around you!” I said. “What does marriage have to do with anything? Look at the count!”

She shrugged and smiled. “It's not the same for us.” She drew the ledger toward her and began writing in her tiny, flawless script. I bit into a cake resentfully, but I didn't leave her side.

A week later, the count had gone into the village with Le Jumeau.

I was in the library, up on the ladder, replacing some books on the highest shelf, a great distance from the floor, when the mirrored doors to the room opened and the countess walked in, shutting us in with a deliberate push.

“Madame la Comtesse,” I called down, assuming she did not know I was there.

“Come down, Gebeck,” she called up in her open-throated, sonorous voice. “I need to speak with you.” Fearing I was in trouble, I traveled down what now seemed like an endless ladder, acutely aware of my baggy britches. Reaching the ground at last, I bowed. The Comtesse de Villars was ghostly in a bone-white dress with four black silk bows tied adamantly up the front. The slender silk bodice emerged from the wide frame of the skirt like the neck of a precious vase containing a single perfect white flower. Her mask of daubed skin was unlined, yet she did not seem young to me. Her cornsilk-blond, lightly powdered hair was bedizened with flashing black birds. Diamonds spangled at her ears.

“Madame?” I asked. She walked over to the library table, surveying the messy papers spread across it and touching the edge of a portfolio thoughtfully.

“Have you ever wondered why my husband went to all that trouble to hire you as his second valet?” she asked, a little curl, like a snail's tail, rising at one corner of her lips. “I mean, why you, and not a Frenchman, or someone not in prison, for that matter?”

“I have wondered, yes,” I answered.

“He hired you because he needs a Jew. He needs a Jew because, to put it bluntly, he needs money.”

“I don't understand, madame.”

“He made a bet,” she said, walking to the window and looking out at the endless lawn with her large, heavy-lidded eyes.

“A bet?” I asked.

“My husband is a compulsive gambler. Some years ago, he bet Monsieur Cabanis four hundred louis that he could change a Jew into a Frenchman in six months. Like most of us, Monsieur Cabanis believes that your people are too obstinate, too steeped in their own primitive, superstitious world, and, moreover, too vain, to truly become a part of our civilization. My husband insists that all people are essentially the same, that all customs are learned, that there is no such thing as inherent Jewishness. If a Jew can change, anyone can change, he says. But let me ask you something. Do you think, in biblical times, hawks ate pigeons, when they had the chance?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Have hawks always eaten pigeons?” she repeated.

“I suppose so,” I answered.

“If hawks have always maintained the same character, it's absurd to think Jews will change theirs. Human nature does not change.” Her deep-set large eyes were fixed, inhuman, as if made of gray glass. I peered through those glittering windows and glimpsed an intelligence so cold it stilled my breath.

“So you see, his interest in you is scientific as well as financial,” she continued. “But the thing is—and here is the truly difficult element: the count will lose the bet unless you are baptized as a Christian within the next two months. What do you make of that?”

“Madame, why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I just wanted to know how you would answer.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“You would do it? You would betray your faith to enrich him?”

Le Jumeau oozed into my room, slid onto my bed, and settled his stocking feet on my pillow. Two grimy middle toes protruded from
the brown stockings like unearthed parsnips. I saw them through a blur of tears.

“What's the matter, Le Naïf?” asked the valet. “What are you doing pouting in your room?”

Weeping with rage, I told him about the bet. There was a pause as he let it sink in. Then he chuckled. “And that fat little bastard kept it to himself all this time,” he mused.

“Would it have been better if he'd let you in on it?” I asked, folding my clothes jerkily and setting them into my small canvas satchel. “I don't care to be used as a performing monkey to enrich that cynic.”

“Here's what I would do,” said Le Jumeau. “Confront the count, and tell him you'll only go through with the baptism if you get a third of the money. No, say half, and you'll end up with a third.”

“But I don't want to be baptized!” I said. “It's completely out of the question for us.”

Le Jumeau sighed, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Gebeck. Do you truly believe in all your rules and regulations now? It seems to me you sank your teeth into that pork sausage pretty happily. I haven't heard any of your chanting lately either. For better or worse, the count freed you, he's educating you, and now you can earn a nice fat parcel if you just play along. Ah, forget it, you don't deserve my advice. I don't know why I bother. Go ahead. Pack up, get on the highway a penniless Hebrew, and see how the fates treat you.” He folded his hands over his taut belly and closed his eyes.

I stomped over to where the count was surveying a new building project. He was having a small pyramid built at the end of a path in the woods. Six strong village men were setting the slanted stones. The count stood, plans in hand. The architect, a tall man with a pointy beard, gestured grandly at the useless edifice. Villars turned, and, seeing me, lit up.

“Le Naïf! Have a look at my pyramid.”

“I need to speak with you privately, monsieur,” I said breathlessly.

“Has something happened?”

“It's a private matter,” I insisted.

The count handed the plans to the architect, who rolled them up in an exaggerated show of discretion.

“I'll be back,” said the count. “Come. We'll walk through the park.”

As we walked through the magnificently organized park of the château, I unburdened myself, my voice shaking. The count walked for a long while in silence, his hands behind his back, a frown on his wide, froggy mouth.

“It's not as simple as you make out, Gebeck,” he said. “I need money, it's true, but there are other ways, easier ways, to get it. My wife has her own reasons to discredit me. I took you in because … I suppose I wanted to know if it was possible to … wash a Jew clean of his Jewishness. To make him simply a man. It's a debate that's all the rage, what to do about the Jews. How to make them more useful, less scheming, less ‘a nation apart.' There are those who would love to ship you all to South America. I simply wanted to prove them wrong. That it's a question of education and habit. Do you see? My project is simply … ideas made flesh. Instead of writing a treatise. You are my theorem. As for the baptism, that is Cabanis's requirement. He's an ardent Catholic. If it were up to me, there would be no religion involved whatsoever. I detest it, as you know.”

“Give me half,” I proclaimed, “and I will do it.”

“Half! Do you realize I am giving you a free Jesuit education, minus the beatings?”

“A quarter, then,” I said.

“Very well,” he said, chuckling. “I suppose there will always be a bit of the businessman about you, if you know what I mean.”

“It was Le Jumeau's idea,” I retorted. “
He
suggested a third!”

The count stamped his small foot in mock outrage. “That con artist! He's always looking for a way to fuck me up the ass.”

A date was set with the parish priest.

The count, Solange, and Le Jumeau were in attendance as I stood bareheaded beside the baptismal font and became an apostate, swearing to the doddering priest that I believed Christ was Moshiach. I did not even bother to cross my fingers, as so many of my brethren had done when converting to save their own lives. I didn't deserve to cross my fingers; my life wasn't in danger. Try as I might to shrug the feeling off, I felt the Old Tyrant's eyes boring into me, his fury gathering.
“I am a jealous God,”
he liked to say in the old days. Didn't like competition. The old priest etched a wet cross on my forehead with his trembling digit: holy water trickled down the side of my nose, spread along the seam of my lips. It was done.

As my master and his valet looked on my conversion with a depth of cynicism difficult to find even in eighteenth-century France, I saw that Solange's eyes were brimming with tears. Afterward, as we left the village church, I asked her tenderly, “What is it, Solange?”

“You are in the house of God now,” she whispered, her face glowing. “Whatever the reason for it, now you are safe.” That's why she had helped the count find a Jew in the first place. If it were up to her, we'd all be converted.

I was paid within the week.

The holy day following my baptism, which was, unfortunately, Good Friday, Solange took me to afternoon Mass in the quaint country church where I had been baptized. We were celebrating the Passion of Christ. I sang out all the hymns and recited the special Easter prayers, one of which spoke eloquently about how the Jews had insisted Christ be killed.

The congregation joined in lustily whenever it was time to yell, “Crucify him!,” playing the bloodthirsty Hebrews with passion. So did I. It was an awkward moment, but I got through it by pretending I was in a play.

The final ritual of my stay in the Château de Villars was a celebration in honor of the finished pyramid. There was to be an opening ceremony, followed by refreshments, music, and fireworks. The count invited the treasurer of the local
assemblée générale
, Lefèvre the architect, and various local bourgeois, who came dressed as if for a coronation. The countess was a disapproving cloud of black muslin, the stones at her neck flashing in the late pink light.

The count, dressed in his chestnut silk waistcoat and britches, his red stockings glowing, raised his double chin, readying himself for one of his speeches. He swayed slightly; I realized with alarm that he was drunk. The squat pyramid behind him had been wrapped with a cord of white ribbon tied in a sad little bow.

“Ladies and gentlemen, all of you gathered here, I am so happy to say that the wonderful work of our local stonemasons, as well as the superb architect Monsieur Lefèvre, has yielded this lovely edifice, an ancient shape with no purpose or use whatsoever but to perplex and entertain. And, in memory of the great people who were once enslaved by the Egyptians and yet came out of Egypt by divine intervention, according to our Bible, which so many of us here hold to be a historical document and not the product of feverish priestly imaginations—and in memory also of the character—or should I say man—revered, revered man, Jacob, also known as Israel, who, in our deepest past, wrestled with an angel of God …” By now the crowd, predisposed to
enjoy the speech, was utterly lost and moving toward being insulted. Lefèvre cleared his throat.