Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  “I told you all that,” Charlotte said, “except the part about the late president.”

  “Yeah, but it was different when he said it. He sounded ashamed. Like a little kid who doesn’t want to admit he’s afraid of the dark. He wasn’t making fun of himself, like he always does, or of other people. He does that a lot, too. He was just … I don’t know … ashamed,” she said again. “I felt so sorry for him.”

  “Just don’t let him know it.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Mom.”

  “And don’t light any more candles.”

  “I already promised him that.”

  * * *

  Vivi saw it standing on the mantel in the living room as soon as she got home from school that evening. It looked a lot like the one Mr. Rosenblum had given her, but instead of space for candles there were small bulbs in the holders. The bulbs weren’t lighted, but a cord ran to the electric outlet beside the fireplace.

  “What’s that?” she asked as Charlotte came out of the kitchen.

  “What does it look like?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe.”

  “I don’t, but I decided if we’re going to have a tree, we might as well have a menorah. An ecumenical celebration. Peace on earth. Good will toward man. And God bless us, every one.”

  She stood watching as Vivi crossed the room to the mantel. “How do you light it?”

  “Twist the bulb.”

  Vivi turned the top bulb. It lit up. She stood staring at it for a moment, then turned to her mother. “Where did you find it?”

  “New York City is full of menorahs. But this one came from your friend Mr. Rosenblum.”

  “Mr. Rosenblum gave you another menorah?”

  Charlotte smiled and shook her head. “One free gift to a family. My rule, not his. I bought it.”

  “You bought a menorah?”

  Now she laughed. “I wish you’d stop repeating everything I say as a question. It’s not so strange. I may not believe in organized religion, but I’m not exactly Scrooge or whoever the Jewish equivalent is.”

  Vivi turned back to the menorah and twisted the first bulb on the right. It went on.

  “I think it goes in the other direction,” Charlotte said.

  Vivi shook her head. “That’s what I thought, but Mr. Rosenblum says you light it from right to left. The way you read Hebrew.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Vivi turned to her mother. “Like you always say—”

  “As you always say.”

  “As you always say, you could put what you know about being Jewish on the head of a pin and still have room for a couple of million angels.”

  * * *

  The laughter stopped Charlotte on the stairs. This time she couldn’t justify eavesdropping by hearing the sound of her name. It was pure curiosity. No, pure snooping. She wanted to know what Hannah and Horace were laughing at. No, that wasn’t true either. She wanted to think that she was mistaken. How could they be laughing together so easily, so intimately, after the argument she’d heard the other night? But they could be and they were.

  Several months earlier, Vivi had returned from a visit downstairs to say Hannah had shown her an album of pictures from their wedding.

  “She was really pretty.”

  “She still is—for somebody even older than your mother.”

  “And you should have seen her dress. It was long and slinky with a train that went on forever. Like something out of the movies. But it was weird seeing him standing next to her. It made me kind of sad.”

  “More than kind of.”

  “There was one picture of them kissing. That was weird, too.”

  “Married couples have been known to kiss. Especially at the end of the ceremony.”

  Vivi made a disparaging face. “I know that, but this was so, I don’t know, smoochy. I mean, I just don’t think of them that way.”

  “We were all young once.”

  “Were you and my father smoochy?”

  “How do you think you came about?”

  “Would you have stayed smoochy, do you think? Or would you have been like Aunt Hannah and Uncle Horace?”

  “We would have stayed smoochy,” she said, but the question made her wonder, not only about her own brief marriage and what would have happened if Laurent had lived—would they have aged toward each other or away?—but about Horace and Hannah’s. Had it begun to go sour before the war, or was it, like Horace’s body, one more casualty of the conflict? Or maybe it hadn’t gone sour at all. One overheard argument does not drive a marriage onto the rocks. Perhaps her own wariness of Hannah was coloring her view. And what she took as Horace’s flirtatiousness might be mere friendliness. She could decipher Frenchmen, but she was still a naïf when it came to Americans. If it was a cliché that no one knew what went on in anyone else’s marriage, she knew less than most. She simply didn’t have the experience.

  Seven

  On a wet morning, the first week in January, Horace wheeled into Charlotte’s cubicle, managing to avoid the umbrella she’d left open in the corner to dry, and swung the chair around until he was facing her across the desk. Rain streaked down the single window, and the office was gloomy even with the overhead light on.

  “I tried to give you a lift this morning, but when I rang your bell from the downstairs hall, no one answered.”

  “I left early,” she lied. “I wanted to talk to one of Vivi’s teachers.”

  She’d heard the bell and stood behind the curtains peering out the living room window until the car that came for him every morning pulled away from the curb. Living on the top floor of his brownstone made her suspect enough among her colleagues. She could imagine what they’d say if she began arriving with him in the morning and leaving with him at night. Nonetheless, she’d had second thoughts as she’d stood in the rain waiting for the bus.

  He took a manuscript box from his lap, leaned forward, and dropped it on the desk. She glanced down at the title page. Under the Yellow Stars.

  “It’s not an astronomy book or guide to camping, in case you were wondering,” he said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know why the agent didn’t send it to you. It’s up your alley, not mine. Anyway, take a look at it and let me know what you think.”

  “I can tell you what I think now.”

  “Isn’t that a little precipitate?”

  “My judgment may be precipitate, but the book is premature. Maybe in another ten years. People might be ready by then. But not now. Not yet.” She thought of the afternoon in the square just after the Liberation, the woman in the torn and soiled underwear, the mother holding the baby like an unwanted package, the jeering crowd. “Emotions are still too raw.”

  “That’s what they thought about Anne Frank’s diary. It was turned down by five houses in England and nine here. It’s too soon after the war, they said. Who’s going to fork over three bucks for the musings of an adolescent girl locked in an attic, they asked. But a junior editor by the name of Barbara Zimmerman had another idea. Doubleday printed five thousand copies. The Times ran a review on Sunday, and the entire print run sold out on Monday. That was three years ago. Do I have to remind you what’s happened since then, other than the fact that Barbara is no longer a junior editor?”

  “Barbara also wrote an introduction to it that she got Eleanor Roosevelt to put her name to.”

  “You have any objection to ghosting introductions?”

  “I just don’t think lightning is going to strike twice. Not this soon.”

  He sat looking across the desk at her. She forced herself to hold his gaze. She refused to feel guilty. Strangling a book couldn’t hold a candle to the other crimes she’d committed.

  “So much for bearing witness,” he said, and wheeled out of her office. This time, he resolved as he got back to his own, he was not going to apologize. She had to stop hiding eventually.

  She went on staring at the manuscript box he’d left behind. She
had no intention of reading it. She’d already given him her opinion. She didn’t even want it in her office. She stood, picked it up, walked across the open area, and put it on Horace’s secretary’s desk. The woman glanced over at it. “Under the Yellow Stars,” she read. “Is it a romance?”

  Charlotte could have slapped her, but you didn’t go around slapping motherly women whose only flaws were a penchant for office gossip and naïveté about the world. She couldn’t even blame her for the latter. Half the people who’d been affected had been in the dark, or denial, at least at first.

  * * *

  Surely the decree doesn’t apply to French Jews, they insist, only foreigners. Surely it doesn’t mean me, a decorated veteran of the last war, the head of an important corporation, the hostess of a salon that half the German generals would give their eyeteeth to be invited to, a nonbeliever. But the proclamation is clear even if people who are still insisting that what is happening isn’t refuse to believe it. All Jews over the age of six are required to wear a six-pointed yellow star, as big as the palm of an adult hand, outlined in black, sewn, not pinned, securely to the garment on the left side of the chest and visible at all times, with the word JUIF printed on it in black letters. That is where another question, or hope, of exemption comes into it. To French Jews, the word juif connotes immigrants from other countries, especially eastern Europe. French citizens of the Jewish persuasion, especially those whose families have been here for generations, refer to themselves, if they refer to their religious affiliation at all, as Israélites. The Germans make no such distinction. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, and as such, must be herded into this psychological ghetto of humiliation and shame, as inescapable in its way as the physical camps created by barbed wire and guards and dogs. No longer will Jews be able to masquerade as ordinary French men, women, and even children. They must be marked. It is for the public good.

  At first it seems as if the plan might backfire. Some gentile French citizens begin wearing stars, either blank or with other words such as GOI or SWING printed on them. The protest is lighthearted, but the punishment for it is swift and serious, and as the gentiles are arrested and imprisoned, fewer risk it. Until now, Jews have been slipping into first-class Metro cars, which are forbidden to them, unnoticed, despite Nazi assurances that Jews can be spotted by long hooked noses, pendulous lips, and other surefire physical giveaways. When a woman without any of those telltale features but wearing a star boards a prohibited car, an outraged German officer pulls the emergency cord and orders her off. The rest of the car follows, leaving him alone in his pure Aryan solitude. Other Christians express support by smiling, nodding, and offering words of encouragement as they pass on the street. And some Jews, determined not to be cowed, parade the boulevards with their yellow stars, heads high, faces daring others to disapprove or pity. A few even sit beside Germans in cafés. Simone is one of these. At first she refuses to wear the badge; then she takes it up as a cudgel.

  But there are others, and as time passes and the novelty wears off, they become more bold. People stare at the gaudy yellow stain and whisper among themselves that they never would have guessed, he or she had seemed so refined, so intelligent, so French. Thugs, and some who do not think of themselves as thugs, slap, punch, and kick old men, boys, even women wearing the star. In cafés, solid citizens usurp outdoor tables where Jews sit and force them inside. Supposed friends are suddenly busy. Perhaps cruelest of all, children taunt their classmates with ugly words, blows, stones, and exclusion.

  Then the other ordinances come down. Jews are forbidden to frequent restaurants, cafés, cinemas, theaters, concerts, music halls, swimming pools, beaches, museums, libraries, expositions, historic monuments, sporting events, racecourses, parks, and even phone booths. Their personal telephones have already been confiscated. The roundups grow more sweeping and violent. And still no one can believe. The French tell one another they’re arresting only the communists, the foreigners, the criminals, despite the doctors and lawyers, the writers and respectable businessmen, who are beginning to disappear.

  The professor who has been driven out of the Lycée Condorcet is sitting in the leather chair in the corner reading, his yellow star bright against his drab frayed coat. If the two customers who are picking up books and paging through them notice the insignia, they give no sign of it. Neither does the German officer, who is back again. Charlotte has got used to him. So have the regulars. He causes no trouble. He is scrupulous about not getting in anyone’s way, stepping aside to let people pass or reach for a book, executing that small stiff bow in greeting, as if he knows how hated his uniform is and wants to prove that not everyone who wears it is the enemy, though of course that is exactly what he is.

  The shop is quiet, as is the city outside. There is no warning, no screaming of sirens, only the muffled sound of automobile doors being slammed and feet moving rapidly across the sidewalk. True, the bell above the entrance rings for longer than usual as each of the four officers lets the door go and the next pushes in behind him. Who would think they need that many for the task at hand? They are not, Charlotte notices, Gestapo or even Wehrmacht but French gendarmes. The flames of anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and xenophobia that have always smoldered among the French gendarmerie have been fanned to a bonfire by the occupying forces. Even among those who are not so inclined, fear for their own skin makes them execute the Nazi orders.

  Once inside, they stop and look around, not at the books but from one customer to the next. Charlotte and the others pretend to go on with what they are doing, but each of them is suspended, senses sharpened, muscles tensed, waiting. Out of the corner of her eye, she glances at the German officer. Even he seems suddenly wary. She wonders if he is part of this, an agent masquerading as an observer. Or perhaps he has no more knowledge of what’s going on than the rest of them.

  Without a word or even a sign to one another, the four policemen move to the alcove and surround the professor. And here is something Charlotte will remember. He does not look up from his book, Montesquieu, she notices, but goes on reading. He is still clutching the volume as two of the officers grab him by the arms, lift him from the chair, and begin hauling him across the shop, his worn trousers and scuffed shoes dragging after him as if he is a rag doll. When they reach the door, one of the other gendarmes knocks the book out of his hands.

  Charlotte and the two customers stand watching them push and pummel the professor into the car. Now he is trying to struggle, but he is outnumbered, and they are younger and better fed. She looks from the scene to the German officer. He is pretending—surely it’s a pretense—to page through a book.

  She thinks of all the books he buys, and his correct manners, and the orange.

  “Stop them!” she says before she can stop herself. “He’s an old man. He hasn’t done anything.”

  The German officer lifts his gaze from the page. He looks at her, rather than the scuffle going on beyond the shop window, but doesn’t speak.

  “Please,” she says.

  He goes on looking at her, but she has the feeling he is not seeing her. His eyes are dead. His face is a mask. “I can do nothing,” he says finally.

  “Of course you can. They’re French gendarmes. You’re a German officer. Of the occupying force.”

  “I am sorry, Madame. I have no authority.”

  Later, after the war, when she reads about the trials—I was only following orders, the defendants will plead, one after another—she’ll remember the German officer’s words. But by then she won’t be so eager to sit in judgment on anyone.

  * * *

  It’s Charlotte’s turn to queue for their rations, but she pleads with Simone to go in her place. Vivi’s cough has grown worse. The spasms rack her small body. Her forehead is hot, and she probably has a fever, though Charlotte can’t be sure. When the Germans appropriated her father-in-law’s apartment where she was living, she had to leave behind most of her possessions, including the thermometer. She can’t get her hands on aspiri
n anyway. Medications are in even shorter supply than food.

  But Simone is adamant. “Now that I’ve sent Sophie to my mother we don’t have her card, and last time I tried to use yours, it didn’t work. Maybe I can fool the boches, but no Frenchman will believe I’m nursing. Not with these.” She opens the heavy sweater, which she hasn’t taken off since the weather turned cold at the beginning of October, to reveal the flatness of her breasts beneath her dress. Charlotte’s breasts are dry of milk but not as flat as Simone’s.

  “Then I’ll take Vivi with me.”

  “In this rain? Do you want whatever she has to turn into pneumonia? She’ll be fine with me.”

  Charlotte gives in. Later, she’ll tell herself that her acquiescence has nothing to do with the fact that it’s Saturday, and the German officer frequently shows up on Saturday. She doesn’t want to see him. She never wanted to see him, but her aversion has grown since the day he pleaded a lack of authority. She is too angry, or is it conflicted? How can someone who reads philosophy and history and fiction and brings an orange to a child let an old man be dragged off for no reason?

  She takes the sheet of ration cards and her string bag and leaves the shop. Her high platforms are hard to walk in. If she has to resort to wooden soles, she should find flat shoes. These are absurd, like the towering turbans some women have begun to wear to hide unwashed, unstyled hair. The presence in the city of more and more of those pathetic gray mice, the stubbornly unstylish German women in their drab uniforms who serve as nurses, secretaries, typists, and telephone and telegraph operators, and venture out only in twos and threes, like nuns, makes the Parisian women only more determined to hold on to some vestige of chic. But she finds nothing chic in those exaggerated hats, though her hair is a ragged mess, thanks to Simone’s way with a scissors. The cut accentuates how thin her face has grown and makes her mouth look even wider and more vulnerable. Now, rain drenches her kerchief and turns the shoulders of her gray coat black with moisture, but she still tries to walk like a Frenchwoman, not plod like a German in heavy oxfords.