The occupation trilogy, p.3
The Occupation Trilogy, page 3
Since becoming a naturalised Jew, Des Essarts had unreservedly embraced our cause. Maurice, on the other hand, worried about my increasing racism.
‘You keep harping on at old stories,’ he would say, ‘it’s not 1942 anymore, old man! If it were, I would be strongly advising you to follow my example and join the Gestapo, that would change your perspective! People quickly forget their origins, you know! A little flexibility and you can change your skin at will! Change your colour! Long live the chameleon! Just watch, I can become Chinese, Apache, Norwegian, Patagonian, just like that! A quick wave of the magic wand! Abracadabra!’
I am not listening to him. I have just met Tania Arcisewska, a Polish Jew. This young woman is slowly killing herself, with no convulsions, no cries, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. She uses a Pravaz syringe to shoot up.
‘Tania exerts a baleful influence over you,’ Maurice tells me, ‘why don’t you find yourself a nice little Aryan girl who can sing you lullabies of the homeland.’
Tania sings me the Prayer for the Dead of Auschwitz. She wakes me in the middle of the night and shows me the indelible number tattooed on her shoulder.
‘Look what they did to me Raphaël, look!’
She stumbles over to the window. Along the banks of the Rhône, with admirable discipline, black battalions parade and muster outside the hotel.
‘Look at all the SS officers, Raphaël! See the three cops in leather coats over there on the left? It’s the Gestapo, Raphaël! They’re coming to the hotel! They’re coming for us! They’re going to gather us back to the Fatherland!’
I quickly reassure her. I have friends in high places. I have no truck with the petty pissants of the Paris Collabo. I’m on first name terms with Goering; Hess, Goebbels and Heydrich consider me a friend. She’s safe with me. The cops won’t touch a hair on her head. If they try, I’ll show them my medals; I’m the only Jew ever to be awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler himself.
One morning, taking advantage of my absence, Tania slashes her wrists. Though I was careful to hide my razor blades. Even I feel my head spin when I accidentally see those little metal objects: I feel an urge to swallow them.
The following day, an Inspector dispatched especially from Paris interrogates me. Inspecteur La Clayette, if memory serves. This woman, Tania Arcisewska, he tells me, was wanted by the police in France. Possession and trafficking of drugs. You never know what to expect with foreigners. Bloody Jews. Fucking Mittel-European delinquents. Well, anyway, she’s dead and it’s probably for the best.
I’m surprised by the eagerness of Inspecteur La Clayette and his keen interest in my girlfriend: former member of the Gestapo, probably.
As a memento, I kept Tania’s collection of puppets: characters from the commedia dell’arte, Karagiozis, Pinocchio, Punchinello, the Wandering Jew, the Sleepwalker. She had placed them around her before killing herself. I think they were her only friends. Of all the puppets, my favourite is the Sleepwalker, with his arms outstretched and his eyes tight shut. Lost in her nightmare of barbed wire and watchtowers, Tania was very like him.
Then Maurice disappeared. He had always dreamed of the Orient. I can imagine him living out his retirement in Macau or Hong Kong. Maybe he’s recreating his days in the Forced Labour unit on a kibbutz somewhere. I think that’s the most plausible scenario.
For a week, Des Essarts and I were utterly at a loss. We no longer had the strength to concern ourselves with things of the mind and were frightened for the future: we had only sixty Swiss francs to our name. But Des Essarts’ grandfather and my Venezuelan uncle Vidal drop dead the same day. Des Essarts assumes the titles of Duke and Lord; I have to make do with a vast fortune in bolivars. I was dumbfounded by my uncle Vidal’s will: apparently being dandled on an old man’s knee for five years is enough to make you his sole heir.
We decide to go back to France. I reassure Des Essarts: the French police are on the lookout for a Duke and Lord gone AWOL, but not for a certain Jean-François Lévy of Geneva. As soon as we cross the border, we break the bank at the casino Aix-les-Bains. I give my first press conference at the Hôtel Splendide. I’m asked what I plan to do with my bolivars: set up a harem? Build pink marble palaces? Become a patron of arts and literature? Devote myself to philanthropic works? Am I a romantic? A cynic? Will I become playboy of the year? Take the place of Rubirosa, Farouk, Ali Khan?
I will play the youthful billionaire in my own way. Obviously, I have read Larbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, but I am not about to emulate the spiritual torments of A.W. Olson Barnabooth or the puerile romanticism of Gatsby. I want to be loved for my money.
I discover I have tuberculosis and am panic-stricken. I must hide this inopportune illness which will otherwise lead to a surge in my popularity throughout the thatched cottages of Europe. Faced with a rich young man who is handsome and tubercular, little Aryan girls are apt to turn into Sainte Blandine. To discourage any such benevolence, I remind journalists that I am a Jew. Accordingly, I am drawn only to money and pleasure. People consider me photogenic: very well, I’ll pull faces, wear orangutan masks, model myself on the archetypal Jew that Aryans came to peer at in the Palais Berlitz in 1941. I evoke memories of Rabatête and Bardamu. Their insulting articles compensate me for my suffering. Sadly, no one reads these authors anymore. Society journals and the romance magazines insist on showering me with praise: I am a youthful heir of great charm and originality. Jew? In the sense that Jesus Christ and Albert Einstein were Jews. So what? As a last resort I buy a yacht, The Sanhedrin, which I convert into a high-class brothel. I moor it off Monte Carlo, Cannes, La Baule, Deauville. From each mast, three speakers broadcast texts by doctor Bardamu and Rabatête, my preferred PR people: Yes, through my millions and my orgies, I personally preside over the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yes the Second World War was directly triggered by me. Yes, I am a sort of Bluebeard, a cannibal who feeds on Aryan girls though only after raping them. Yes, I dream of bankrupting the entire French peasantry and Jewifying the region of Cantal.
I quickly grown weary of these posturings. With my friend Des Essarts, I hole up in the Hôtel Trianon in Versailles to read Saint-Simon. My mother worries about my poor health. I promise to write a tragicomedy in which she will have the starring role. After that, tuberculosis can slowly carry me off. Or maybe I’ll commit suicide. Thinking about it, I decide not to go out with a flourish. I would only end up being compared to L’Aiglon or Young Werther.
That evening, Des Essarts wanted me to go with him to a masked ball.
‘And don’t come dressed as Shylock or Süss the Jew like you always do. I’ve rented you a magnificent costume, you can go as Henri III. I rented a Spahi uniform for myself.’
I declined his invitation on the pretext that I had to finish my play as soon as possible. He took his leave with a sad smile. As the car was driving out the hotel gates, I felt a pang of regret. A little later my friend killed himself on the Autoroute Ouest. An inexplicable accident. He was wearing his Spahi uniform. There was not a scratch on him.
I quickly finished my play. A tragicomedy. A tissue of invective against goyim. I felt sure it would rile Parisian audiences; they would never forgive me for flaunting my neuroses and my racism on stage in such a provocative manner. I set much store by the virtuoso finale: in a white-walled room, father and son clash; the son is wearing a threadbare SS uniform and a tattered Gestapo trench coat, the father a skullcap, sidelocks and a rabbi’s beard. They parody an interrogation scene, the son playing the role of the torturer, the father the role of the victim. The mother bursts into the room and rushes at them, arms outstretched, eyes wild. She wails the ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders, the “Jews Whore”.’ The son grabs his father by the throat and launches into the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ but cannot drown out his mother’s voice. The father, half choking, mewls the ‘Kol Nidrei’, the great Prayer of Atonement. Suddenly, a door at the back of the stage is flung open: four nurses circle the protagonists and, with difficulty, overpower them. The curtain falls. No one applauds. People stare at me suspiciously. They had expected better manners from a Jew. I’m an ungrateful wretch. A boor. I have appropriated their clear and limpid language and transformed it into a hysterical cacophony.
They had hoped to discover a new Proust, a rough-hewn Yid polished by contact with their culture, they came expecting sweet music only to be deafened by ominous tom-toms. Now they know where they stand with me. I can die happy.
I was terribly disappointed by the reviews the following morning. They were patronising. I had to face facts. I would meet with no hostility from my peers, excepting the occasional Lady Bountiful and old men who looked like Colonel de la Rocque. The newspapers spent even more column inches concerned with my state of mind. The French have an overweening affection for whores who write memoirs, pederast poets, Arab pimps, Negro junkies and Jewish provocateurs. Clearly, there was no morality any more. The Jew was a prized commodity, we were overly respected. I could graduate from Saint-Cyr and become Maréchal Schlemilovitch: there would be no repeat of the Dreyfus Affair.
After this fiasco, all that was left was for me to disappear like Maurice Sachs. To leave Paris for good. I bequeathed a part of my inheritance to my mother. I remembered that I had a father in America. I suggested he might like to visit me if he wanted to inherit 350,000 dollars. The answer came by return of post: he arranged to meet me in Paris and the Hôtel Continental. I was keen to pamper my tuberculosis. To become a prudent, polite young man. A real little Aryan. The problem was I didn’t like sanatoriums. I preferred to travel. My woppish soul longed for beautiful, exotic locations.
I felt that the French provinces would provide these more effectively than Mexico or the Sunda Islands. And so I turned my back on my cosmopolitan past. I was keen to get to know the land, with paraffin lamps, and the song of the thickets and the forests.
And then I thought about my mother, who frequently toured the provinces. The Karinthy Theatre Company, light comedy guaranteed. Since she spoke French with a Balkan accent, she played Russian princesses, Polish countesses and Hungarian horsewomen. Princess Berezovo in Aurillac. Countess Tomazoff in Béziers. Baronne Gevatchaldy in Saint-Brieuc. The Karinthy Theatre Company tours all over France.
II
My father was wearing an eau de Nil suit, a green-striped shirt, a red tie and astrakhan shoes. I had just made his acquaintance in the Ottoman Lounge of the Hôtel Continental. Having signed various papers making over a part of my fortune to him, I said:
‘In short, your New York business ventures are a dismal flop? What were you thinking, becoming chairman and managing director of Kaleidoscope Ltd.? You should have noticed that the kaleidoscope market is falling by the day! Children prefer space rockets, electromagnetism, arithmetic! Dreams aren’t selling any more, old man. And let me be frank, you’re a Jew, which means you have no head for commerce or for business. Leave that honour to the French. If you knew how to read, I would show you the elegant comparison I drew up between Peugeot and Citroën: on the one hand, a provincial man from Montbéliard, miserly, discreet, prosperous; on the other, André Citroën, a tragic Jewish adventurer who gambles for high stakes in casinos. Come, come, you don’t have the makings of a captain of industry. This is all an act! You’re a tightrope walker, nothing more! There’s no point putting on an act, making feverish telephone calls to Madagascar, to Lichtenstein, to Tierra del Fuego! You’ll never offload your stock of kaleidoscopes.’
My father wanted to visit Paris, where he had spent his youth. We had a couple of gin fizzes at Fouquet’s, at the Relais Plaza, at the bars of Le Meurice, the Saint James Albany, the Élysée-Park, the Georges V, the Lancaster. This was his version of the provinces. While he puffed on a Partagas cigar, I was thinking about Touraine and the forest of Brocéliande. Where would I choose to live out my exile? Tours? Nevers? Poitiers? Aurillac? Pézenas? La Souterraine? Everything I knew of the French provinces I had learned from the pages of the Guide Michelin and various authors such as François Mauriac.
I had been particularly moved by a text by this writer from the Landes: Bordeaux, of Adolescence. I remember Mauriac’s surprise when I passionately recited his beautiful prose: ‘That town in which we were born, in which we were a child, an adolescent, is the only one we must forbear to judge. It is part of us, it is ourselves, we carry it within us. The history of Bordeaux is the history of my body and my soul.’ Did my old friend understand that I envied him his adolescence, the Marianist Brothers school, the Place des Quinconces, the scents of balmy heather, of warm sand, of resin? What adolescence could I, Raphäel Schlemilovitch, recount other than that of miserable little stateless Jew? I would not be Gérard de Nerval, nor François Mauriac, nor even Marcel Proust. I had no Valois to stir my soul, no Guyenne, no Combray. I had no Tante Léonie. Doomed to Fouquet’s, to the Relais Plaza, to the Élysée Park where I drink disgusting English liqueurs in the company of a fat New York Jew: my father. Alcohol fosters a need in him to confide, as it had Maurice Sachs on the day we first met. Their fates are the same with one small difference: Sachs read Saint-Simon, while my father read Maurice Dekobra. Born in Caracas to a Sephardic Jewish family, he hurriedly fled the Americas to escape the police of the dictator of the Galapagos islands whose daughter he had seduced. In France, he became secretary to Stavinsky. In those days, he looked very dapper: somewhere between Valentino and Novarro with a touch of Douglas Fairbanks, enough to turn the heads of pretty Aryan girls. Ten years later his photograph was among those at the anti-Jewish exhibition at the Palais Berlitz, accompanied by the caption: ‘Devious Jew. He could pass for a South American.’ My father was not without a certain sense of humour: one afternoon, he went to the Palais Berlitz and offered to act as a guide for several visitors to the exhibition. When they came to the photo, he cried: ‘Peek-a-boo! Here I am!’. The Jewish penchant for showing off cannot be overstated. In fact, my father had a certain sympathy for the Germans since they patronised his favourite haunts: the Continental, the Majestic, Le Meurice. He lost no opportunity to rub shoulders with them in Maxim’s, Philippe, Gaffner, Lola Tosch and other nightclubs thanks to false papers in the name Jean Cassis de Coudray-Macouard.
He lived in a tiny garret room on the Rue des Saussaies directly opposite the Gestapo. Late into the night he would sit up reading Bagatelles pour un massacre, which he found very funny. To my stupefaction, he could recite whole pages from the book. He had bought it because of the title, thinking it was a crime novel.
In July 1944, he managed to sell Fontainebleau forest to the Germans using a Baltic baron as a middleman. With the profits of this delicate operation, he immigrated to the United States where he set up the company Kaleidoscope Ltd.
‘What about you?’ he asked, blowing a cloud of Partagas smoke into my face, ‘Tell me about your life.’
‘Haven’t you been reading the papers?’ I said wearily, ‘I thought Confidential magazine in New York devoted a special issue to me? Basically, I’ve decided to give up this shallow, decadent cosmopolitan life. I’m retiring to the provinces, the French countryside, back to the land. I’ve just settled on Bordeaux, the Guyenne, as a rest cure for my nerves. It’s also a little homage to an old friend, François Mauriac. I’m guessing the name means nothing to you?’
We had one for the road in the bar at the Ritz.
‘May I accompany you to this city you mentioned earlier?’ he asked out of the blue, ‘you’re my son, we should at least take a trip together. And besides, thanks to you, I’m now the fourth-richest man in America!’
‘By all means come along if you like. After that, you can go back to New York.’
He kissed me on the forehead and I felt tears come to my eyes. This fat man with his motley clothes was genuinely moving.
Arm in arm, we crossed the Place Vendôme. My father sang snatches of Bagatelles pour un massacre in a fine bass voice. I was thinking about the terrible things I had read during my childhood. Particularly the series How to kill your father by André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre (the ‘Read Me’ series for boys). Breton advised boys to station themselves at the window of their house on the Avenue Foch and slaughter the first passing pedestrian. This man necessarily being their father, a préfet de police or a textile manufacturer. Sartre temporarily forsook the well-heeled arrondissements for the Communist-controlled suburbs of the banlieue rouge: here, middle-class boys were urged to approach the brawniest labourers, apologise for being bourgeois brats, drag them back to the Avenue Foch where they would smash the Sèvres china, kill the father, at which point the young man would politely ask to be raped. This latter method, while exhibiting greater perversity, the rape following the murder, was also more grandiose: the proletariat of all countries were being called upon to settle a family spat. It was recommended that young men insult their father before killing him. Some who made a name for themselves in such literature developed charming expressions. For example: ‘Families, I despise you’ (the son of a French pastor). ‘I’ll fight the next war in a German uniform.’ ‘I shit upon the French army’ (the son of a French préfet de police). ‘You are a BASTARD’ (the son of a French naval officer). I gripped my father’s arm more tightly. There was nothing to distinguish between us. Isn’t that right, my podgy papa? How could I kill you? I love you.
We caught the Paris–Bordeaux train. From the window of the compartment, France looked particularly splendid. Orléans, Beaugency, Vendôme, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême. My father was no longer wearing a pale green suit, a pink buckskin tie, a tartan shirt, a platinum signet ring and the shoes with the astrakhan spats. I was no longer called Raphäel Schlemilovitch. I was the eldest son of a notary from Libourne and we were heading back to our home in the country. While a certain Raphäel Schlemilovitch was squandering his youth in Cap Ferrat, in Monte Carlo and in Paris, my obdurate neck was bowed over Latin translations. Over and over, I repeated to myself ‘Rue d’Ulm! Rue d’Ulm!’ feeling my cheeks flush. In June I would pass the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure. I would definitively ‘go up’ to Paris. On the Rue d’Ulm, I would share rooms with a young provincial lad like myself. An unshakeable friendship would develop between us. We would be Jallez and Jephanion. One night, we would climb the steps of the Butte Montmartre. We would see Paris laid out at our feet. In a soft, resolute voice we would say: ‘Now, Paris, it’s just you and me!’ We would write beautiful letters to our families: ‘Maman, I love you, your little man.’ At night, in the silence of our rooms, we would talk about our future mistresses: the Jewish baronesses, the daughters of captains of industry, actresses, courtesans. They would admire our brilliance and our expertise. One afternoon, hearts pounding, we would knock on the door of Gaston Gallimard: ‘we’re students at the École Normale Supérieure, monsieur, and we wanted to show you our first essays.’ Later, the Collège de France, a career in politics, a panoply of honours. We would be part of our country’s elite. Our brains would be in Paris but our hearts would ever remain in the provinces. In the maelstrom of the capital, we would think fondly of our native Cantal, our native Gironde. Every year, we would go back to clear out our lungs and visit out parents somewhere near Saint-Flour or Libourne. We would leave again weighted down with cheeses and bottles of Saint-Émilion. Our mamans would have knitted us thick cardigans: the winters in Paris are cold. Our sisters would marry pharmacists from Aurillac and insurance brokers from Bordeaux. We would serve as examples to our nephews.
