Paris to the Moon (14 page)

In any case, I couldn't, as it happened, get Luke much stirred by Manet or Monet (not that he was stirred by the Couture either, I'm glad to say), but searching for something that
would
stir him, I came across the handsome side chapel devoted to Daumier's portrait busts. They are caricatures of the political men of the mid-nineteenth century. Luke loved them. I held him up, and he stared at their faces behind the Plexiglas boxes and imitated each one. We guessed at the character of each one: who's mean, who's nice, who's conceited. The scary thing is that the faces are
exactly
the faces of French politicians today: Philippe Seguin, with his raccoon-circled eyes; Le Pen, with his obscene, smiling jowliness; Bruno Megret with his ratlike ordinariness. You could find the men of the left; too: Jospin's fatuous cheerfulness— they're all there.

After the success of the Daumiers, I thought of going to the park, as a release, or back to Deyrolle, for the umpteenth time, but it was raining hard, and we needed something new. "Do you want a soda?" I said, and we went over to the Courier de Lyons, the nearest thing our
haut
neighborhood has to a workingman's cafe. After he had a grenadine, and I a
grand creme,
and we had shared a
tarte Normande,
I noticed that there was a pinball machine—
a flipper,
as it is called in French. So I dragged a chair over, so that he could stand up on it and work the left flipper, and took control of the right flipper myself. It was an "NBA all-star" pinball machine, a true old-fashioned, pre-Atari, steel ball pin-ball, but with extra ramps and lights that let you shoot the ball up into hoops, get extra points, make model players jump up and down. (Luke, of course, had never seen a basketball game.) We started playing, and he loved it: the ping of the hard metal balls, the compressed springiness of the release, the fat thwack of the bumpers, above all the bounce of the flipper, hitting the ball back up, keeping it in play, making it go. We played three times, rushed home, and he told his momma about it. "It goes . . ." he said, and at a loss for words, he just raced his eyes, back and forth, rolled them back and forth crazily—
that's
how it goes.

Since then we go once a week to play pinball, always prefaced by a trip first to the Musee d'Orsay to look at the funny faces (while Daddy seethes at the nineteenth-century academicians and the small boy counts the minutes to the Courier de Lyons.) The funny thing is that the cafe changes the pinball machine every month or so, and it is always,
always,
an American machine with an American theme. Each machine has an automated bonus, something weird that happens if you get enough points, and there is something rapt and lovely, in this day of virtual everything, about the clockwork nightingale
mechanicalness
of the pinball machines, about the persistence of their metallic gears and simple slot-and-track devices. So far we have been through major-league baseball, Star Wars (Hans Solo gets blasted into that carbon sheet), Jurassic Park (an egg glows and opens, and a baby dinosaur appears), Gopher Golf (a kind of parody golf, with little chipmunks that jump up, bucktoothed), and, our favorite, Monster Bash (Dracula comes out of his coffin, on a little metal track; Frankenstein, to the accompaniment of suitably stormy music—the lights on the machine actually first go off, a lovely touch—sits
up).
All the instructions on the machines are in English, of course, as are all the details. ("I love these machines, compared to video games," another aficionado at the cafe said to me once, sincerely, as we scored big and watched Dracula creaking out on his mechanical track. "They are, well,
so real.
")

We go once a week, always get the same grenadine-coffee-pie combo, leave a ten-franc tip; I am sure that it is illegal for a three-year-old to play pinball, and I am paying protection. After a month or so, though, I noticed something odd. When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a cafe chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for him to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small cafe chair under the left flipper, for Luke to stand on. The chair, the little bistro chair, was pushed under the pinball machine, on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one mentioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that cafe: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there.

Papon's Paper Trail

Bordeaux is the town where France goes to give up. It was where the French government retreated from Paris under fire from the Prussians in 1870, and again from the kaisers armies in 1914, and where, in June 1940, the French government fled in the face of the German advance and soon afterward met not just the fact of defeat but the utter depth of France's demoralization. A. J. Liebling wrote of those days that "there was a climate of death in Bordeaux, heavy and unhealthy like the smell of tuberoses." He recalled the wealthy men in the famous restaurants like the Chapon Fin, "heavy-jowled, waxy-faced, wearing an odd expression of relief from fear." Though the bad peace was ruled from the spa town of Vichy, Bordeaux is the place that gave the surrender its strange, bitter, bourgeois character: a nation retreating from cosmopolitan Paris back to
la France profonde.

Bordeaux has always been a trench coat—and—train station, 1940s kind of town, and despite the mediocre, concrete modern architecture it shares with nearly all French provincial capitals, it remains one. The Chapon Fin is still in business, but it is not deathlike—merely nervous and overwrought, in the way of French provincial restaurants since the capitalists trimmed down and the only market left was German tourists.

In the spring of 1998, Bordeaux was invaded again, this time by battalions of lawyers, broadcasters, historians, and journalists, who had come to attend or participate in the trial of Maurice Papon—the former secretary-general of the Gironde, of which Bordeaux is the capital—for complicity in crimes against humanity fifty-five years ago, during the occupation. The Papon trial was the central, binding event of the past year in France, a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove. It was the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history.

On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, April 1, the invasion of the media became an occupation; what seemed like every European journalist resident in France, and a lot of Americans too, descended on the little square outside the Palais de Justice. The convenience of having La Concorde, a stage-set grand cafe right across from the Palais (doors open to the spring weather, bottles of good wine lined up on the wall), gave the end of the trial a strangely hilarious, high-hearted, yet self-subduing party spirit— a combination of Swifty Lazar's Oscar party and the Nuremberg trials.

Despite the mob, the national allegiance of every journalist was instantly recognizable. French journalists wear handsomely tailored jackets and share with English rock guitarists the secret of eternal hair: It piles up. Americans, rumpled and exhausted before the day begins, seem to be still longing for Vietnam. Even walking up and down the steps of the
palais,
they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible dog tags. What really depressed them was the knowledge that their stories about the
proces Papon
would sneak into the paper only "between blow jobs," as one said bitterly. The British alone were exhilarated, bouncing around in bad suits. They all speak French, they all knew they would be on the front page, and secretly they knew too that their readers would not be completely unhappy with a story whose basic point was that all foreigners were like that.

The great Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld waited outside the courthouse too. He is in his sixties, spreading at the middle, and was dressed in a black jacket and cloth cap. "If Papon is found guilty, then the
appareil
of the state will be held responsible," he was saying to another journalist. "The French people will be saying that there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures." Behind him, members of his group, the Association of Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France, were reading out the names of Jewish children whom Papon was charged with having sent to their deaths.

A few moments later three British journalists rushed into La Concorde, having just heard the accused man's last speech. Like all of Papon's interventions during the trial, this one was sonorous, unremorseful, and full of literary and artistic reference. As soon as he finished, the three judges and nine jurors had gone to deliberate 764 questions of guilt or innocence, with a tray of sandwiches to see them through the night. The three Brits now sat down and ordered wine and roast chicken, and one began reading his translation of the speech as the others ate: "He said that it was a double scandal, something about Camus in here. Oh, yes, his wife's favorite writer was Camus." The reporter looked down at his notes and deciphered. "They killed his wife ... I think." Papon's wife of sixty-six years had died, at the age of eighty-eight, the week before the trial was to end. " 'In their desperate . . . desperate search,' I think you'd put it, 'for a crime, they have killed her with . . . petite
esprits.'
What would you say? Small guns? Small steps? Little blows? Little blows. De Gaulle gave her a
Legion d'Honneur."

"
'With his own hands,' " one of the other journalists added, consulting his notes.

"Oh, yes. God, yes. 'With his own hands.'Then there was . . . Oh, yes. Here's when he turned to the prosecutor: 'Sir, you will go down in history—but through the servants' entrance!'" The reporter looked up, his eyes amused. "Well, that's not bad. Now something here about the absence of Germans. Oh, yes:

'Throughout the stages of this strange and surreal trial, there has been a notable absence of Germans.'A Notable Absence of Germans—sounds like a Michael Frayn play. Then something odd about Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Rembrandt, a ray of light? Staying his hand. Anyone get that?"

Everything came to a halt as a crowd of journalists who had gathered around the table tried to call to mind the light of an early Rembrandt, struggling to keep up with the tight web of cultural allusion spun by a French war criminal.

"Well, anyway," the British reporter resumed, "he called it the most beautiful light in painting. I still don't get it. He's comparing himself to the Jewish child about to be killed? Well, it's a point of view. Anyway, he stayed the hand. So that's it. Camus, his wife, no Germans, servants' entrance, bit about the light, Rembrandt, and then the sandwiches were sent in," he concluded decisively.

"Anyone see what kind of sandwiches?" an American reporter asked anxiously The Brits laughed. But a little later the man from the L.A.
Times
said that he had seen the sandwiches go in, and he was confident that they were ham.

***

When the French government in Bordeaux surrendered, in 1940, it was replaced by the right-wing Vichy government under the direction of Marechal Petain, the great French hero of the First World War. The Vichy regime passed anti-Jewish laws that summer, before the Germans even demanded them. Two years later, at the Nazis' demand, Vichy began deporting Jews, including children, from all over the country. Although "only" 25 percent of the Jews in France were sent to death camps, this is, as the historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, a derisive figure: Jews in France were the most assimilated in Europe. If there had not been riches and dossiers in place at the prefecture, the Germans would have had a hard time finding Jews to kill.

No one disputes that from 1942 to 1944 Maurice Papon, the secretary-general of the department of the Gironde, signed documents recording the arrest, assembly, and deportation of more than 1,500 Jews, including 220 children. The
rafles
took place between July 1942 and May 1944. The documents show that the deportees, some French, some refugees from the East, were to be sent to the transit camp of Drancy, outside Paris. Then they were to go to a
destination inconnue.
The unknown destination was Auschwitz.

Papon's history after the war is also public knowledge. By the end of 1943 Papon had begun to cooperate quietly with the resistance, and even sheltered an important Jewish
resistant.
Then, at the liberation, he delivered the prefecture to the resistance and, despite the complaints of a few locals, began a spectacular rise in the postwar French bureaucracy as an
haut fonctionnaire.
In the late fifties he became the head of the prefecture of police in Paris and, in the seventies, budget minister in the government of Giscard d'Estaing. (The division between
hauts fonctionnaires
and politicians in France is fluid; there were five
hauts fonctionnaires
in the cabinet that signed the armistice with the Germans. Today, 41 percent of the members of the National Assembly are civil servants on leave.)

Then, in 1981, Michel Slitinsky, a Bordeaux Jew who had escaped the deportations, met a historian named Michel Berges, who had been doing work on the role of the local wine negotiants during the war. Berges had stumbled on some interesting documents recording what the prefecture under Papon had been doing at the same time. Slitinsky eventually helped deliver the documents to the satiric newspaper
Le Canard Enchaine.
Later, two more Bordelais, Maurice-David Matisson and Rene Jacob, made formal accusations against Papon. (A Frenchman can bring a charge against another Frenchman to the attention of a magistrate, who may then investigate it.) President Mitterrand did everything he could to delay the trial. French justice is under the control, or anyway the influence, of the president; Mitterrand must have felt that opening old Vichy cases was not in anyone's interest, especially his. It was only in 1995 that a formal indictment was handed down. Last October, Papon was brought from his house outside Paris to Bordeaux to stand trial.