He slips on a sky-blue dinner jacket. I knot a tie from Sulka in front of the mirror. We plunge into the warm sickly waters, a South American band plays rumbas. We sit at a table, my father orders a bottle of Pommery, lights an Upmann cigar. I buy a drink for an English girl with dark hair and green eyes. Her face reminds me of something. She smells deliciously of cognac. I hold her to me. Suddenly, slimy hotel names come tumbling from her lips: Eden Rock, Rampoldi, Balmoral, Hôtel de Paris: we had met in Monte Carlo. I glance over the English girl’s shoulder at my father. He smiles and makes conspiratorial gestures. He’s touching, he probably wants me to marry some Slavo-Argentinian heiress, but ever since I arrived in Bordeaux, I have been in love with the Blessed Virgin, with Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I try to explain this until three in the morning but he chain-smokes his cigars and does not listen. We have had too much to drink.
We fell asleep at dawn. The streets of Bordeaux were teeming with cars mounted with loudspeakers: ‘Operation rat extermination campaign, operation rat extermination campaign. For you, free rat poison, just ask at this car. Citizens of Bordeaux, operation rat extermination . . . operation rat extermination . . .’
We walk through the streets of the city, my father and I. Cars appear from all sides, hurtling straight for us, their sirens wailing. We hide in doorways. We were huge American rats.
In the end we had to part ways. On the evening before term started, I tossed my clothes in a heap in the middle of the room: ties from Sulka and the Via Condotti, cashmere sweaters, Doucet scarves, suits from Creed, Canette, Bruce O’lofson, O’Rosen, pyjamas from Lanvin, handkerchiefs from Henri à la Pensée, belts by Gucci, shoes by Dowie & Marshall . . .
‘Here,’ I said to my father, ‘you can take all this back to New York–a souvenir of your son. From now on the khâgne scholar’s beret and the ash-grey smock will protect me from myself. I’m giving up smoking Craven and Khédive. From now on it’s shag tobacco. I’ve become a naturalised Frenchman. I’m definitively assimilated. Will I join the category of military Jews, like Dreyfus and Stroheim? We’ll see. But right now, I am studying to apply to the École Normale Supérieure like Blum, Fleg and Henri Franck. It would have been tactless to apply to the military academy at Saint-Cyr straightaway.’
We had a last gin-fizz at the bar of the Splendid. My father was wearing his travelling outfit: a crimson fur cap, an astrakhan coat and blue crocodile-skin shoes. A Partagas cigar dangled from his lips. Dark glasses concealed his eyes. He was crying, I realised, from the quaver in his voice. He was so overcome he forgot the language of this country and mumbled a few words in English.
‘You’ll come and visit me in New York?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so, old man. I’m going to die before very long. I’ve just got time to pass the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure, the first stage of assimilation. I promise you your grandson will be a Maréchal de France. Oh, yes, I am planning to try and reproduce.’
On the station platform, I said:
‘Don’t forget to send me a postcard from New York or Acapulco.’
He hugged me. As the train pulled out, my Guyenne plans seemed suddenly laughable. Why had I not followed this unhoped-for partner in crime? Together, we would have outshone the Marx Brothers. We ad-lib grotesque maudlin gags for the public. Schlemilovitch père is a tubby man dressed in garish multi-coloured suits. The children are thrilled by these two clowns. Especially when Schlemilovitch junior trips Schlemilovitch père who falls head-first into a vat of tar. Or when Schlemilovitch fils rips away a ladder and sends Schlemilovitch père tumbling. Or when Schlemilovitch fils surreptitiously sets fire to Schlemilovitch père, etc.
They are currently performing at the Cirque Médrano, following a sell-out tour of Germany. Schlemilovitch père and Schlemilovitch fils are true Parisian stars, though they shun elite audiences in favour of local cinemas and provincial circuses.
I bitterly regretted my father’s departure. For me, adulthood had begun. There was only one boxer left in the ring. He was punching himself. Soon he would black out. In the meantime, would I have the chance – if only for a minute – to catch the public’s attention?
It was raining, as it does every Sunday before term starts. The cafés were glittering more brightly than usual. On the way to the lycée, I felt terribly presumptuous: a frivolous young Jew cannot suddenly aspire to the dogged tenacity conferred upon scholarship students by their patrician ancestry. I remembered what my old friend Seingalt had written in chapter I of volume I of his memoirs: ‘A new career was opening before me. Fortune was still my friend, and I had all the necessary qualities to second the efforts of the blind goddess on my behalf save one – perseverance.’ Could I really become a normalien?
Fleg, Blum and Henri Franck must have had a drop of Breton blood.
I went up to the dormitory. I had had no experience of secular schooling since Hattemer (the Swiss boarding schools in which my mother enrolled me were run by Jesuits). I was shocked, therefore, to find there were no prayers. I conveyed my concerns to the other boarders. They burst out laughing, mocked the Blessed Virgin and then suggested I shine their shoes on the pretext that they had been there longer than I.
My objection was twofold:
1) I could not understand why they had no respect for the Blessed Virgin.
2) I had no doubt that they had been here ‘before me’, since Jewish immigration to the Bordeaux area did not begin until the fifteenth century. I was a Jew. They were Gauls. They were persecuting me.
Two boys stepped forward to arbitrate. A Christian Democrat and a Bordeaux Jew. The former whispered to me that he didn’t want too much talk of the Blessed Virgin because he was hoping to forge ties with students on the extreme left. The latter accused me of being an ‘agent provocateur’. Besides, the Jew didn’t really exist, he was an Aryan invention, etc., etc.
I explained to the former that the Blessed Virgin was surely worthy of a falling out with anyone and everyone. I informed him of how strongly Saint John of the Cross and Pascal would have condemned his toadying Catholicism. I added that, moreover, as a Jew it was not my place to give him catechism lessons.
The comments of the latter filled me with a profound sadness: the goys had done a fine job of brainwashing.
I had been warned; thereafter they completely ostracised me.
Adrien Debigorre, who taught us French literature and language, had an imposing beard, a black frockcoat, and a club foot that elicited mocking comments from the students. This curious character had been a friend of Maurras, of Paul Chack and Monsignor Mayol de Lupé; French radio listeners will probably remember the ‘Fireside chats’ Debigorre gave on Radio-Vichy.
In 1942, Debigorre is part of the inner circle of Abel Bonheur, the Ministre de l’Éducation nationale. He is indignant when Bonheur, dressed as Anne de Bretagne, declares in a soft tremulous tone: ‘If we had a princess in France, we should push her into the arms of Hitler’, or when the minister praised the ‘manly charms’ of the SS. Eventually he fell out with Bonheur, nicknaming him la Gestapette, something Pétain found hilarious. Retiring to the Minquier islands, Debigorre tried to organise commandos of local fishermen to mount a resistance against the British. His Anglophobia rivalled that of Henri Béraud. As a child he had solemnly promised his father, a naval lieutenant from Saint-Malo, that he would never forget the ‘trick’ of Trafalgar. During the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, he is said to have thundered: ‘They will pay for this!’ During the war, he kept up a voluminous correspondence with Paul Chack and would read us passages from their letters. My classmates missed no opportunity to humiliate him. At the beginning of class, he would stand up and sing ‘Maréchal, nous voilà’! The blackboard was covered with francisques and photographs of Pétain. Debigorre would talk but no one paid him any heed. Sometimes, he would bury his head in his hands and sob. One student, a colonel’s son named Gerbier, would shout ‘Adrien’s blubbing!’ The whole class would roar with laughter. Except me,
of course. I decided to be the poor man’s bodyguard. Despite my recent bout of tuberculosis, I stood six foot six and weighed nearly 200 pounds, and as luck would have it, I had been born in a country of short-arsed bastards.
I began by splitting Gerbie’s eyebrow. A lawyer’s son, a boy named Val-Suzon, called me a ‘Nazi’. I broke three of his vertebrae in memory of SS officer Schlemilovitch who died on the Russian front during the Ardennes Offensive. All that remained was to bring a few little Gauls to heel: Chatel-Gérard, Saint-Thibault, La Rochepot. Thereafter it was I and not Debigorre who read Maurras, Chack or Béraud at the beginning of class. Terrified of my vicious streak, you could hear a pin drop, this was the reign of Jewish terror and our old schoolmaster soon found his smile again.
After all, why did classmates make such a show of seeming disgusted?
Surely Maurras, Chack and Béraud were just like their grandfathers.
Here I was taking the trouble to introduce them to the healthiest, the purest of their compatriots and the ungrateful bastards called me a ‘Nazi’ . . .
‘ Let’s have them study the Romanciers du terroir,’ I suggested to Debigorre. ‘These little degenerates need to study the rural novels celebrating their fathers’ glories. It’ll make a change from Trotsky, Kafka and the rest of that gypsy rabble. Besides, it’s not like they even understand them. It takes two thousand years of pogroms, my dear Debigorre, to be able to tackle such books. If I were called Val-Suzon, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. I’d settle for exploring the provinces, quenching my thirst from French springs! Listen, for the first term, we’ll teach them about your friend Béraud. A good solid writer from Lyons seems entirely appropriate. A few comments on novels like Les Lurons de Sabolas . . . We can follow up with Eugène le Roy: Jacquou le Croquant and Mademoiselle de la Ralphie will teach them the beauties of the Périgord. A little detour through Quercy courtesy of Léon Cladel. A trip to Bretagne under the aegis of Charles Le Goffic. Roupnel can take us on a tour of Bourgogne. The Bourbonnais will hold no secrets for us after reading Guillaumin’s La Vie d’un simple. Through Alphonse Daudet and Paul Arène we will smell the scents of Provence. We can discuss Maurras and Mistral! In the second term, we can revel in the Touraine autumn with René Boylesve. Have you read L’Enfant à la balustrade? It’s remarkable! The third term will be devoted to the psychological novels of the Dijon author Édouard Estaunié. In short, a sentimental tour of France! What do you think of my syllabus?’
Debigorre was smiling and clasping my hands in his. He said to me:
‘Schlemilovitch, you are a scholar and patriot! If only the native French lads were like you!’
D ebigorre often invites me to his home. He lives in a room cluttered with books and papers. On the walls hang yellowing photographs of various oddballs: Bichelonne, Hérold-Paquis and admirals Esteva, Darlan and Platón. His elderly housekeeper serves us tea. At about 11 p.m. we have an aperitif on the terrace of the Café de Bordeaux. On my first visit, I surprise him hugely by talking about the Maurras’ mannerisms and Pujo’s beard. ‘But you weren’t even born, Raphäel!’ Debigorre thinks it is a case of transmigration of souls, that in some former life I was a fierce supporter of Maurras, a pureblood Frenchman, an unrepentant Gaulois and a Jewish collaborator to boot: ‘Ah, Raphäel, how I wish you had been in Bordeaux in June 1940! Picture the outrageous scenes! Gentlemen with beards and black frockcoats! University students! Ministers of the RÉ-PU-BLI-QUE are chattering away! Making grand gestures! Réda Caire and Maurice Chevalier are singing songs! Suddenly – bang! – blond bare-chested youths burst into the Café du Commerce! They start a wholesale massacre! The gentlemen in frockcoats are thrown against the ceiling. They slam into the walls, crash into the rows of bottles. They splash about in puddles of Pernod, heads slashed by broken glass! The manageress, a woman named Marianne, is running this way and that. She gives little cries. The woman’s an old whore! THE SLUT! Her skirt falls off. She’s gunned down in a hail of machine gunfire. Caire and Chevalier suddenly fall silent. What a sight, Raphäel, for enlightened minds like ours! What vengeance! . . . ’
Eventually, I tire of my role as martinet. Since my classmates refuse to accept that Maurras, Chack and Béraud are their people, since they look down on Charles Le Goffic and Paul Arène, Debigorre and I will talk to them about some more universal aspects of ‘French genius’: vividness and ribaldry, the beauties of classicism, the pertinence of moralists, the irony of Voltaire, the subtleties of psychological novels, the heroic tradition from Corneille to Georges Bernanos. Debigorre bridles at the mention of Voltaire. I am equally repulsed by that bourgeois ‘rebel’ and anti-Semite, but if we don’t mention him in our Panorama of French genius, we will be accused of bias. ‘Let’s be reasonable,’ I say to Debigorre, ‘you know perfectly well that I personally prefer Joseph de Maistre. Let’s make a little effort to include Voltaire.’
Once again, Saint-Thibault disrupts one of our lectures. An inopportune remark by Debigorre, ‘The utterly French grace of the exquisite Mme de La Fayette’, has my classmate leaping from his seat in indignation.
‘When are you going to stop talking about “French genius”, about how something is “quintessentially French”, about “the French tradition”?’ bellows the young Gaulois. My mentor Trotsky says that the Revolution knows no country . . .
‘My dear Saint-Thibault,’ I said, ‘you’re starting to get on my nerves. You are too jowly and your blood too thick for the name Trotsky from your lips to be anything other than blasphemy. My dear Saint-Thibault, your great-great-uncle Charles Maurras wrote that it is impossible to understand Mme de La Fayette or Chamfort unless one has tilled the soil of France for a thousand years! Now it is my turn to tell you something, my dear Saint-Thibault: it takes a thousand years of pogroms, of auto-da-fés and ghettos to understand even a paragraph of Marx or Bronstein . . . bronstein, my dear Saint-Thibault, and not Trotsky as you so elegantly call him! Now shut your trap, my dear Saint-Thibault, or I shall . . .’
The parents’ association were up in arms, the headmaster summoned me to his office.
‘Schlemilovitch,’ he told me, ‘Messieurs Gerbier, Val-Suzon and La Rochepot have filed a complaint charging you with assault and battery of their sons. Defending your schoolmaster is all very commendable but you have been behaving like a lout. Do you realise that Val-Suzon has been hospitalised? That Gerbier and La Rochepot have suffered audio-visual disturbances? These are elite khâgne students! You could go to prison, Schlemilovitch, to prison! But for now you will leave this school, this very evening!’
‘If these gentlemen want to press charges,’ I said, ‘I am prepared to defend myself once and for all. I’ll get a lot of publicity. Paris is not Bordeaux, you know. In Paris, they always side with the poor little Jew, not with the brutish Aryans! I’ll play the persecuted martyr to perfection. The Left will organise rallies and demonstrations and, believe me, it will be the done thing to sign a petition in support of Raphäel Schlemilovitch. All in all, the scandal will do considerable damage to your prospects for promotion. Remember Capitaine Dreyfus and, much more recently, all the fuss about Jacob X, the young Jewish deserter . . . Parisians are crazy about us. They always side with us. Forgive us anything. Wipe the slate clean. What do you expect? Moral standards have gone to hell since the last war – what am I saying? Since the Middle Ages! Remember the wonderful French custom where every Easter the Comte de Toulouse would ceremoniously slap the head of the Jewish community, while the man begged ‘Again, monsieur le comte! One more, with the pommel of your sword! Batter me! Rip out my guts! Trample my corpse!’ A blessed age. How could my forebear from Toulouse ever imagine that one day I would break Val-Suzon’s vertebrae? Put out the eye of a Gerbier or a La Rochepot? Every dog has his day, headmaster. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And don’t think even for a minute that I feel remorse. You can tell the young men’s parents that I’m sorry I didn’t slaughter them. Just imagine the trial. A young Jew, pale and passionate, declaring that he sought only t
o avenge the beatings regularly meted out to his ancestors by the Comte de Toulouse! Sartre would defend me, it would take centuries off him! I’d be carried in triumph from the Place de l’Étoile to the Bastille! I’d be a fucking prince to the young people of France!’
‘You are loathsome, Schlemilovitch, loathsome! I refuse to listen to you a moment longer.’
‘That’s right, monsieur le proviseur, loathsome!’
‘I am calling the police this instant!’
‘Oh, surely not the police, monsieur le proviseur, call the Gestapo, please.’
I left the lycée for good. Debigorre was upset to lose his finest pupil. We met up two or three times at the Café de Bordeaux. One Sunday evening, he did not appear. His housekeeper told me he had been taken to a mental home in Arcachon. I was strictly forbidden from seeing him. Only monthly visits from family members were permitted.
I knew that every night my former teacher was calling out to me for help because apparently Léon Blum was hounding him with implacable hatred. Via his housekeeper, he sent me a hastily scrawled message: ‘Save me, Raphäel. Blum and the others are trying to kill me. I’m sure of it. They slip into my room like reptiles in the night. They taunt me. They threaten me with butcher’s knives. Blum, Mandel, Zay, Salengro, Dreyfus and the rest of them. They want to hack me to pieces. I’m begging you, Raphäel, save me.’
That was the last I heard of him.
Old men, it would seem, play a crucial role in my life.
Two weeks after leaving the lycée, I was spending my last few francs at the Restaurant Dubern when a man sat down at the table next to mine. My attention was immediately drawn to his monocle and his long jade cigarette holder. He was completely bald, which gave him a rather unsettling appearance. As he ate, he never took his eyes off me. He beckoned the head waiter with an insolent flick of the finger: his index seemed to trace an arabesque in the air. I saw him write a few words on a visiting card. He pointed to me and the head waiter brought over the little white rectangle on which I read:
La Place De L'Étoile Page 4
