Shalimar the Clown
Page 17
Paris wasn’t his place, either. Soon after the Levy visit he stunningly declined the offer of a partnership in one of the city’s most illustrious legal practices and announced that he was going home to work with his father. This was a refusal as preposterous as the original offer, his astounded Parisian friends said, startled into agreeing with his envious enemies: he was far too young to have been offered so great an honor in the first place, and in the second place he was evidently too stupid or—much worse—too provincial to accept it. He returned to Strasbourg, where he divided his time between working as a junior professor of economics at the university—the vice-chancellor, the great astronomer André-Louis Danjon, was “mightily impressed” with him, and called him “one of the coming fellows, the Next People”—and helping his ailing, consumptive father with the family printing business. Within a year the catastrophe of Europe brought that age of the world to an end.
Decades had passed since those times, but Paris lingered in the ambassador’s Americanized memory as a series of flickering images. It was present in the way he held a cigarette, or in the slow drift of smoke reflected in a gilded mirror. Paris was his own fist hammering on a café table to emphasize a political or philosophical point. It was a glass of cognac beside his morning coffee and tepid brioche. That innocent-uninnocent city was a prostitute, was a gigolo, was sophisticated infidelity in the guilty-unguilty afternoons. It was too beautiful, flaunting its beauty as if begging to be scarred. It was a certain precise mixture of tenderness and violence, love and pain. Everyone in the world has two fatherlands, his own and Paris, a Parisian filmmaker told him back then. But he didn’t trust it. It seemed . . . he struggled for the right word . . . weak. The weakness of Paris was the weakness of France, which would make possible the dark metamorphosis that was beginning, the trumping of subtlety by crudity, the shriveled victory of wretchedness over joy.
It was not only Paris that changed, obviously. His beloved Strasbourg metamorphosed too, from river jewel into cheap Rhinestone. It turned into tasteless black bread and too many rutabagas and the disappearances of friends. Also the sneer of conquest above the collar of a gray uniform, the living death of collaboration in the eyes of the beautiful showgirls, the stinking gutter finales of the dead. It became rapid capitulation and slow resistance. Strasbourg, like Paris, shape-shifted and was no longer itself. It was the first paradise he lost. But in his heart he blamed the capital, blamed it for its arrogant weakness, for presenting itself to the world—to him—as a vision of high civilization which it did not have the force to defend. The fall of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris’s fault.
When Boonyi Noman danced for him in the Dachigam hunting lodge in Kashmir he thought of those feathered dead-eyed showgirls wreathed in Nazi cigar smoke, flaunting their gartered thighs. The clothes were different but he recognized the same hard hunger in her stare, the readiness of the survivor to suspend moral judgment in the presence of imagined opportunity. But I’m not a Nazi, he thought. I’m the American ambassador, the guy in the white hat. I’m for God’s sake one of the Jews who lived. She swung her hips for him and he thought, And I’m also a married man. She swung her hips again and he ceased to think.
He was a Frenchman with a German name. His family’s printing presses operated under the name Art & Aventure, a name they had borrowed, in French translation, from Jean Gensfleisch of Mayence, the fifteenth-century genius whose own Strasbourg workshop had been called Kunst und Aventur when, in 1440, he invented the printing press and became known to the world as Gutenberg. Max Ophuls’s parents were wealthy, cultured, conservative, cosmopolitan; Max was raised speaking High German as easily as French, and believing that the great writers and thinkers of Germany belonged to him as naturally as the poets and philosophers of France. “In civilization there are no borderlines,” Max senior taught him. But when barbarism came to Europe, that erased borderlines as well. The future Ambassador Ophuls was twenty-nine years old when Strasbourg was evacuated. The exodus began on September 1, 1939; one hundred and twenty thousand Strasbourgeois became refugees in the Dordogne and the Indre. The Ophuls family did not leave, although their household staff disappeared overnight without giving notice, silently fleeing the exterminating angel, just as the Kashmiri palace servitors would abandon the royal Dassehra banquet in the Shalimar gardens eight years later. The workers at the printing presses also began to desert their posts.
The university was moving to Clermont-Ferrand in the Zone Sud, outside the area of German occupation, and vice-chancellor Danjon urged his budding young economics genius to accompany them. But Max the younger would not leave unless he could get his parents to a place of safety as well. He tried hard to persuade them to join the evacuation. Wiry, graceful, their white hair cropped short, their hands the hands of pianists, not printers, their bodies leaning intently forward to listen to their son’s absurd proposition, Max senior and his wife, Anya, looked more like identical twins than a married couple. Life had made them into each other’s mirrors. Their personalities, too, had shaded into each other, creating a single, two-headed self, and so complete was their unanimity in all matters, both great and small, that it was no longer necessary for either to ask the other what they wished to eat or drink, or what their opinion might be on any subject of concern. At present they were seated side by side on carved wooden chairs in a six-hundred-year-old restaurant near the Place Kléber—an absolutely charming and historical spot—feasting heartily on choucroute au Riesling and caramelized lamb shoulder in a beer and pine honey sauce, and gazing on their brilliant son, their onliest golden child, with a mixture of profound love and gentle, but genuine, contempt. “Max junior isn’t eating,” Max senior mused with an air of wonderment, and Anya replied, “The poor boy has lost his appetite on account of the political situation.” Their son urged them to be serious and they immediately put on their gravest expressions with every appearance (and none of the substance) of obedience. Max took a deep breath and launched into his prepared speech. The situation was desperate, he said. It was only a matter of time before the German army attacked France and if the border country should go the way of Poland the family’s German name would not protect them. Theirs was a well-known Jewish household in a strongly Jewish neighborhood; the risk of informers was real and had to be faced up to. Max senior and Anya should go away to their good friends the Sauerweins’ place near Cro-Magnon. He himself would go to Clermont-Ferrand and teach. They would have to lock and seal the Strasbourg house and the printing works and simply hope for the best. Was that agreed?
His parents smiled at their son the lawyer and his skillfully marshaled arguments—and these were identical smiles, cocked up to the left a little, smiles affording no glimpses of aging teeth. They put down their utensils in unison and clasped their pianist’s hands in their laps. Max senior gave a little glance at Anya and Anya gave a little glance back, offering each other the right of first reply. “Son,” Max senior finally began, pursing his lips, “one never knows the answers to the questions of life until one is asked.” Max was familiar with his father’s circumlocutory philosophizing and waited for the point to arrive. “You know what he means, Maxi,” his mother took over. “Until you have back pain you don’t know your tolerance for back pain. How you’re going to tolerate not being so young anymore, you won’t know until you grow old. And until danger comes a person doesn’t know for sure how a person’s going to think about danger.” Max senior picked up a breadstick and bit it in half; it broke with a loud crack. “So now this question of peril has been posed,” he said, pointing the remaining half of the stick at his son and narrowing his eyes, “and so now I know my answer.”
Anya Ophuls drew herself up in a rare show of disunity. “It’s my answer also, Maximilian,” she corrected her husband mildly. “I think this slipped your mind a moment.” Max senior frowned. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Her answer as well, I know her answer as well as I know my own, and my mind, excuse m
e, nothing slips it. My mind, excuse me, is a fist of steel.” Max junior thought it was time to press a little. “And what is that answer?” he asked as delicately as possible, and his father with a loud short laugh forgot his irritation and smacked his palms together as hard as he could. “I discover that I am a stubborn bastard!” he cried, coughing hard. “I discover bloody-mindedness in myself, and mulishness to boot. I will not be chased from my home and my business! I will not go to Sauerwein’s and be made to look at his trembling old man’s paintings and eat quenelles of pike. I will stay in my house and run my factory and face the enemy down. Who do they think they are dealing with here? Some common inky-fingered ragamuffin from the streets? Maybe I’m on my last legs, young fellow, but I stand for something in this town.” His wife tugged at the sleeve of his coat. “Oh, yes,” he added, sinking faintly back into his seat and dabbing a napkin at his brow. “And your mother. She’s a stubborn bastard too.” Then came a series of coughs and expectorations into a silk kerchief that declared the subject closed.
“In that case, I won’t raise this with you again,” said Max junior, admitting defeat. “On one condition. If the day arrives when I have to come to you and say, today it’s time to run, on that day I want you to run without any argument, knowing that I will never say such a thing to you unless it is the simple truth.” His mother beamed with unqualified pride. “See how he drives a hard bargain, Maximilian, isn’t that so,” she cried. “He leaves us no honorable choice except to agree.”
Professor Max Ophuls informed vice-chancellor Danjon that family responsibilities obliged him to remain in Strasbourg. “What a waste,” Danjon replied. “If you should choose to stay alive before they kill you, come and see us. Although it is possible that we will not be spared, either. I fear that this will be an L=0 eclipse.” In the 1920s André Danjon had devised a scale of luminosity, the so-called Danjon scale, to describe the relative darkness of the moon during a lunar eclipse. L=0 meant total blackness, a complete absence of the reflected earthshine that could give the eclipsed moon a residual color ranging from a deep grey to a bright copper-red or even orange. “If I’m right,” Danjon told Max, “you and I are simply choosing to die in different towns during the general blackout.”
From that day forward each of the three Ophulses kept a small bag packed in a closet, but otherwise went about their work. In the absence of domestic help, most of the Belle Époque mansion was dust-sheeted and closed up. They ate meals together in the kitchen, moved extra desks into Max senior’s library to construct a three-person office, kept their own bedrooms clean and dusted, and maintained one small living room in which to receive their dwindling list of guests. As for Art & Aventure, two of the famous firm’s three Strasbourg presses were closed down at once. The third, on the quai Mullenheim, a smaller art-book facility—both letterpress and photogravure—where for many generations volumes dedicated to the finest artists in Europe had been produced to the highest standards in the world, was the scene of the Ophulses’ last stand. At first all three of them went in every day and manned the machines. However, contracts were being canceled constantly, so that soon enough the parents were obliged angrily to “retire,” and Max junior went to the print shop alone. Every call from a grand publisher from the capital deepened Max’s scorn for the weakness of Paris. He remembered his mother shouting into the telephone, “What do you mean, this is no time for art? If not now, when?”—and then staring fire-eyed at the silent receiver in her hand as if it were a traitor. “He hangs up,” she said to the room at large. “After twenty years’ business, without so much as good-bye.” The death of courtesy appeared to distress her more than the collapse of the family business. Her coughing husband moved at once to comfort her. “Take a look on the shelves,” he said. “You see that army of volumes? That army will outlast whatever iron men come clanking across our lives.”
When Max junior, hiding behind a burned-out truck just over a year later, saw the treasures of Art & Aventure’s backlist being tossed onto a bonfire outside the burning synagogue, his father’s words came back to him. If he had been able to discuss the burning books with Max senior the old man would probably have shrugged and quoted Bulgakov. Manuscripts don’t burn. Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t, thought orphaned Max in the incandescent night; but people, of course, will blaze away nicely, given a decent chance.
Strasbourg had become a ghost town, its streets ragged with absences. It was still charming, naturally, with its medieval half-timberings, its covered bridges, its pleasing aspects and riverside parks. As he prowled the largely deserted alleys of the Petite France district, the future Ambassador Ophuls told himself, “It’s as if everyone went away for August, and any day now it will be time for la rentrée and the place will be bustling again.” But in order to believe that one had to ignore the broken windows, the evidence of looting, the feral dogs in the streets, many of them abandoned pets driven insane by abandonment. One had to ignore the ruination of one’s own life. There were traditional, time-honored ways of doing this, and during the course of that year in which his family lost everything Max Ophuls did not ignore tradition. He frequented the few brothels and drinking dives that were still in business; they welcomed him in, glad of the trade, and offered him their best goods at bargain prices. The melancholy strain that had been lying dormant in his personality revealed itself in those months, inducing periods of Churchillian depression during which he considered ending his life more than once, and was only prevented from doing so by the knowledge that he would profoundly disgust his parents. As the year 1940 moved forward, a year in which all the news was bad, he walked the city streets and squares, alleys and embankments at high speed, hour after hour, with his head down, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of a double-breasted serge greatcoat, and a dark blue beret pulled low over his frowning brow. If he moved fast enough, like an American comic-book superhero, like the Flash, like a Jewish Superman, maybe he could create the illusion that the people of Strasbourg were still there. If he moved fast enough maybe he could save the world. If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe in which everything wasn’t so full of shit. If he moved fast enough maybe he could outpace his own anger and fear. If he moved fast enough maybe he could stop feeling like a helpless fool.
These thoughts were interrupted one May afternoon by a violent collision. As usual, he hadn’t been looking where he was going, and on this occasion there was someone in the way, a surprisingly small woman, so small that at first he thought he had knocked over a child. A parcel wrapped in string and brown paper dropped from the small woman’s hands as she fell, and the brown paper tore. Her companion, a big shambling fellow as oversized as she was tiny, helped her to her feet and hurriedly retrieved the torn parcel, carefully taking off his own raincoat and wrapping the parcel in it. He also picked up and dusted off his companion’s fallen hat, with its single upright feather, placing it carefully, even lovingly, back on her head of marcelled black hair. The fallen woman had not cried out, nor did the big man seek to remonstrate with Ophuls for his clumsiness. They simply gathered themselves together and moved on. It was as if they were phantoms, ill-assorted phantoms surprised that they still possessed solidity, mass, volume, that people were still able to collide with them and knock them down, rather than passing through their bodies with nothing more than a small icy shudder of subconscious recognition.
When they had taken a dozen steps away, however, they stopped and looked back over their shoulders without turning their bodies. They saw Max staring after them and were covered in a kind of spectral embarrassment. Ghosts were probably always surprised to be seen, Max supposed. The woman was nodding furiously and the man, slowly, as if in a dream, turned and walked back toward Max. He’s going to hit me after all, Max thought, and wondered whether he should take to his heels. Then the man reached him and spoke, carefully, in a low voice: “You are the printer?” With those four words he gave Max Ophuls back a sense of purpose in life.