Pictures at an Exhibition (15 page)

“Her there, with the limp,” he said.

“She works in the bakery.”

“Yes, and her husband is a policeman. My wife Sorole went to her bakery twice a day. The bread woman told Sorole every morning when there was going to be a roundup so we could hide at our neighbor's house, because their door was stronger than ours. When the police knocked, we didn't answer, and they didn't break the door down. We held pillows over the mouths of the children so they wouldn't give us away. Sorole and I always debated her, the bread woman. I said she acted in defiance of her husband, out of discomfort with what he did. Sorole thought she worked with him because the policeman could not speak out and used his wife as his mouthpiece. Two different views on marriage, I suppose. The bread woman did not warn Sorole of the
rafle
in which I was arrested. Maybe she was sworn to secrecy by her husband. Or her child was sick and she did not go to work that day.”

Chaim stepped back from the window and grabbed my chin in his hand.

“You are young and full of promise,” he said. “You have ten fingers and ten toes. This is important to keep in mind when one receives a letter bearing bad news.”

THAT NIGHT WAS A SLEEPLESS ONE. MY THOUGHTS
hovered and darted around the room. At four o'clock, my thoughts turned from Chaim. I was gripped with the belief that, despite my father's and Rose's discouragement, that from their separate corners of the Continent they were both urging me on, as a rider with his whip. Both said they wanted me to stop, and yet I did not believe them. Was it the lover's delusion, where he rejects his beloved's refusals and thinks only that she wants more certain confirmation of his affection? This was not impossible. Yet I could not shake the feeling that each wanted me to find something in my search for Father's paintings that was different from what I in fact was seeking.

THE NEXT DAY, CHAIM INSISTED I VISIT THE LOCAL
police station with him. “All Jews should know how the police operate,” he said. Standing before the jailhouse, in his wide-brimmed hat and black coat with the pleated tail, he looked like an emissary from a bygone century.

Before us opened a long rectangular room with a checkerboard floor. Tobacco smoke stained the walls and ceilings. Rows of wooden chairs faced two desks, which were each occupied by policemen, one redheaded and the other bleach pale.

We took a number, eighteen, and a pair of seats. Chaim crinkled with the sound of cellophane wrappers as he leaned over me, and his breath smelled like the caramel that clicked between his cheek and teeth. His beard tickled my ear.

“I wouldn't have obeyed a German officer, Max. I wouldn't have reported to the police station if I had known the
Boches
would be waiting for me there. But it was the French police, here in
Paris
, in their blue and white uniforms, who knocked on our doors.” He
rapped once against his chair. “So I went, as obedient as my own child.”

We sat in silence. A breeze blew in from the street and sent the stacks of documents on the albino policeman's desk flying through the air.

“Ludovic!” shouted the redhead. “Use your pistol to hold those down. What a mess!” Numbers sixteen and seventeen rose and disappeared.

“Number eighteen,” a baritone voice sang out. The junior policemen fell silent and began scribbling.

The police chief stood in the doorway, tall and lean, his breast glistening with ribbons and badges. At the center of his lapel was the double-barred cross of the Resistance. He reminded me of an American actor.

I did not pay attention to the initial round of questions the chief asked and Chaim answered: name, place of birth, parents’ names. Instead, I admired General de Gaulle's slogans on the wall:
Paris résistant, Paris martyrisé
and
Paris libéré par lui-méme, libéré par son peuple.

“Year of birth?” the chief asked.

“Nineteen hundred and five,” Chaim answered, taking ten years off of his age. I feigned disinterest.

“Address?”

“Four, rue Pavée.” This must have been the synagogue where I met him.

“Business?”

“I run a shop that repairs parts for automobiles.”

“So you own a garage?”

“It is more specialized. The work is skilled and complicated. Most of my employees were trained as clockmakers.” I would learn later that this lie was a reflex from the camp, where, Chaim told me, those with mechanical skills had a better chance of surviving.

The chief paused with his pen over the form, then wrote
mechanic.

“Will you keep your last name?” the policeman asked. Chaim stared hard at him. The chief took a cigarette out and offered th e
pack to us, a generous gesture. Chaim took off his hat and looked inside its crown. Its label bore the name of the tailor's shop he had owned before the war. He replaced the hat on his head.

“Tenet. I shall change it to Tenet,” he said. “And, sir, you have no cigarettes left.”

“How strange,” the chief said. “Excuse me.” He took another pack from the desk. “How did you return to France, via Odessa and Le Bourget”—an airport outside of Paris—”or the Gare de l'Est?”

“Gare de l'Est,” Chaim said.

“How many months were you in convalescence?”

“Three.”

“At the Lutetia?” Chaim nodded. “Lovely hotel.” The chief looked down at his papers. “You are entitled to six more months of double rations, as all people absent from France during the war are given nine months’ total of double rations.”

“Fine,” said Chaim.

“And a monthly sum of five thousand francs.”

Five thousand francs did not guarantee Chaim would be well fed, let alone me. Chaim searched for the fringes of his prayer shawl to twirl around his fingers but did not find them. He had tucked them into his waistband before entering the police station.

Next, the chief wrote out a bank draft for Chaim and laid it on his blotter. He took a wide-handled stamp, pressed it against the ink pad and then to the identification card. When he lifted the stamp and saw that the word
Déporté
had come out clearly, the chief said, “Ah, good,” and pushed the card toward Chaim, who rose, white-faced. I stood, too. “I will not have this printed on my card,” Chaim said.

“All the other
absents
have the same stamp. Without it, you cannot have your double rations, your free visits to the doctor, your five thousand francs,” the chief replied.

“Then I shan't have them.”

“What?”
I said. I had been thinking about food the whole meeting. Potatoes, chicken, cheese. I had heard that all
absents
were given three jars of marmalade. I had dreamed of jam. “Chaim, this is a mistake—”
I tried to say, pulling on the hem of his sleeve. He snatched his arm away.

“Stay while he completes a new card properly” Chaim ordered me. He got up to leave.

A gust of wind blew the door shut behind him and I heard the officers in the waiting room curse. One hollered at the other again about keeping his pistol atop the stack of papers.

“I don't know where it went,” the policeman moaned.

“The war has unsettled your uncle's mind,” the chief said to me, after Chaim had left.

“He's saner than I am,” I replied.

CHAIM WAS NOT IN THE COURTYARD OF THE COMMIS
-sariat or waiting on the benches across the way. With the new papers under my arm, I turned toward home and saw his scarecrow figure stalking down the street, his coat fanning out behind him.

I called out, “Surely you've lost your senses.”

Chaim pressed against the wall as a girl with stocking seams painted on her legs passed us. He would not touch any woman.

“I could not have that word printed on my identification card, Max,” Chaim said. I nearly held out my wrist for him to grab, as I knew he would. “That police chief—”

“Yes?”

“—wearing the
Croix de la Reine
on his lapel—”

“I noticed it.”

“—the glorious sign of the Resistance?”

“I know what it is.” I struggled to keep up with him.

“In 1942 I was arrested by the same, the exact same, police chief.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Chaim winced. “How could I forget?”

I blushed with shame. “You could have denounced him right there. He should be hanged. The Resistance should kill him on the street.”

“He's not my concern now. And if I turn him in, he's probably protected. Perhaps his boss also collaborated. I don't want to be
pulled up before a judge and relive what happened in ‘forty-two. Besides,” Chaim said, “I got something from him as well.”

When we returned to Chaim's flat, my companion drew from his overcoat a pistol, the bank draft for five thousand francs, and a full box of Gitanes. “We had to learn to steal,” he said.

“You'll never be able to cash the bank draft. The police chief will realize it's missing—”

“—and keep my rations for himself. He's gotten a good deal. Why would he make trouble for us? He and I have a silent pact. He knows that some, though only a very few, of the men he sent away in 1942 have returned. He will know, then, that I may have met him before, back in the days when his office had a picture of Pétain on the wall instead of slogans by de Gaulle. That will be enough to keep him away. And I've had enough of them. ‘Paris liberated by her people?’ On the contrary.”

As I laid out our food for lunch—a baguette, some cheese, a jar of olives, a bruised apple—Chaim asked me, “And where is your family?” I said Le Puy and explained the paintings and the rift with my father.

“The first dilemma is not one I can comment on,” Chaim said. “For me, I would want the paintings in a museum, so my poor kin could go and gawk at them. Yet I have sympathy for your plight. These are not family portraits; those I would want to save. Surely those are destroyed because they are of value only to those who had them painted. Is each painting of your father's a token for a thousand of us that were killed? I don't know. These are questions for a philosopher. But that you have purposefully left your father?” He shook his head in disbelief, but his voice was not unkind. “Tell me, how long is it your plan to stay with me?”

I had never considered when I might leave, so sure was I of Chaim's need for my companionship. This is the hubris of the young, who cannot imagine that the old do not want to be with them. “Ten more days?” I asked him.

Ten days stretched into a month and then two. After we used what Chaim had stolen, there were still ten thousand francs left in my tobacco tin, which we spent on meals and bills for water and electricity
and coal. I was glad that my money—my father's money—gave us a respite, that it “came in handy,” as the Americans say. So while Roosevelt lay dying in Warm Springs and we learned of the liberation of the camp Buchenwald (named for Goethe's beech tree—Father, I thought of you), Chaim and I lived, if not in richness then in comfort.

Chapter Thirteen

I
HAD ALWAYS PLANNED TO RETURN TO MY FATHER
with my catalog of triumph and loss, but as the days extended and my catalog had only blank pages, it grew increasingly impossible for me to contact him. When I thought of him, I mourned. And then, as if Father had sent her to encourage me, I saw Madame Bernheim, immersed in
War and Peace
, across the Métro tracks at Sèvres-Babylone. So the other Jewish art dealers had begun their return to Paris. I set out to make my rounds of their homes, using my father's address book as a guide.

I began with Monsieur Léon Lethez, a collector of pre-Columbian art. However, when I knocked at his door, the woman who answered said her brother was in too poor health to see visitors. I replied that as I had trained as a doctor, I was understanding of those who were sick, and that I hoped he would allow me to call on him again in a few weeks when he was well. The sister eyed me strangely. I wrote down my address and went next to the home of Frits van Seyveld.

My resemblance to my father was useful to me under certain circumstances and a burden in others. In the pursuit of discovering the fate of my father's compatriots, our likeness was helpful in seeking information from those who had been made suspicious by the war. I was not surprised that many recognized me, for these were men whose business was recognizing a fake.

I rang the buzzer to the van Seyvelds’ apartment on boulevard de Courcelles and waited. Before the war, this man had possessed the world's finest collection of Rembrandt drawings. Standing on the sidewalk for some time, I could not conjure his face, only that he wore a pince-nez. I was about to leave when the wind rattled the front door. It was unlocked. I leaned on the handle and entered the foyer, which opened onto a set of stairs, at the top of which was another door, this one covered with a lace curtain. I knocked and called out the Dutch dealer's name.

I heard voices behind the glass, the squeal of a lock, and before me stood two elderly people very small in size. A white-haired man in striped pajamas leaned against a cane. The woman beside him wore a black dress with a pearl necklace that draped nearly to her waist. She had on a hat and gloves, as if she had been preparing to leave the house.

“Monsieur van Seyveld?” I asked.

“Daniel!” He embraced me. Then he began to speak hurriedly in a language I did not understand. He grabbed my cheeks, looked at his wife plaintively, and barked a command at her.

She said, “My husband wants me to tell you how grateful he is for your visit. He has not seen anyone from the lost world since we returned to France. We were in Switzerland during the war and he suffered a terrible stroke. It's taken years to regain his ability to speak, but finally he can converse in Dutch, his mother tongue. He used to speak such beautiful French! I've discovered that he remembers the tunes to ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Alouette’ and 'sur le Pont d'Avignon,’ yet not the words! Are not our minds miraculous and terrible machines, Monsieur Berenzon?”

Frits van Seyveld clasped my hand and spoke again, his leaking gray eyes intent on mine. I understood that he was inviting me into his home, and so we began the long, slow promenade into their salon, which was a grand one, of the kind I had not seen since before the war. Brocaded curtains hung to the floorboards, and everything wooden was gilt. On the walls were prints of elephants and rajas and women playing stringed instruments.