Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  She raced off to the library and when she came back she said, “Study?”

  “They’ll look there,” I said. I don’t know if she attended to my deliberations, for they required only a second, although they were exceedingly and exhaustively thorough, and then it was all decided and I said, “Come on.”

  I grabbed her hand and we ran as fast as her aches permitted through the living rooms and hunt room and the conservatory, and after we passed the piano, the last object of sufficient bulk that a person might hide behind or in or under it, and headed into the empty oval chamber with the sylvan vistas and the summer sky and the chandelier dangling like the basket of a fabulous balloon, I could feel her leaning back, jamming on the phantom brakes like a passenger in a runaway buggy, for now we were careening across the very last room at velocity toward the wall. I held up just short of a crash and snatched her to me. “There’s a shoe,” I said, “prop it against the inside and wait for me,” and I told her I wouldn’t knock but would call her name, “so you’ll know it’s me. Okay?” And to her astonishment, I pushed open the panel in the wainscoting and more or less tossed her through it. Then I fled back to answer the front door.

  It was no small effort to come off arranged and relaxed, and I thought I’d faint for trying not to breathe like a bellows. But I got myself as composed as I could as I waited for the elevator to complete its ascent, and when the grate opened, three of the uniformed men emerged. (Where were the others? Taking up positions?) The trio seemed reluctant to proceed any farther down the hall. The gate shut and the elevator hummed downward and then back up again, disgorging, this time, a single short man in a suit who walked through the others without acknowledgment and led them like goslings to the door.

  “Is there some emergency?” I asked when they’d reached me, and the suited man got straight to business, introduced himself as a captain, Cassell was the name, and asked if I was Alba and showed me a badge. “May we enter?”

  “May I ask what this is about?”

  “Only some questions,” he said.

  “I see,” I said, “of course,” and I ushered the little regiment in. I was less spooked by the detective than by the patrolmen, each identical. They reminded me too indistinguishably of the guard guarding Corie’s hospital room.

  “Do they all have questions?” I asked the suit, leaning my stage whisper near to his ear. I thought he smiled, just slightly, at the delicacy of the suggestion, but he got the point, at least, and he motioned with his head for his troops to continue to vigilantly secure the entry hall, and I led him into the apartment.

  I was pulling rank, frankly. I’d heard somewhere just recently that uniformed societies harbored a refined connoisseurship of social status, and I thought I’d give the theory a try. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to allow him a gander, let him compare the grandeur of these rooms with whatever he’d imagined his scofflaw’s lair to look like.

  Even through my nervousness, I confess that I felt a dizzy little thrill; it was my first time entertaining in the consul’s “gracious apartments,” and I was indulging in a little pride of place. I was glad all the lights were on (and relieved to see only one cup of tea on the table). I was also pleased to be able to receive my guest in a nice dress and hose. At dinner with Rouchard, I’d worried that maybe I’d overdone it a wee bit, finery-wise, but the lawyer hadn’t objected, that was for sure, and the lawman didn’t either.

  “I should assure you, you are not a suspect in any matter,” he said as we reached the library and I motioned him to sit. The décor had done its job. He didn’t sit.

  I let a small and terribly astonished laugh burst out and said, “Well, I’m relieved to hear it,” and secretly, I was. I added, sweetly, “But for whom are you searching, if not for me?”

  “A young woman,” he declared, and then, flustered by his own indiscretion, “student age.” American, supposedly, or possibly British, a girl called Alba, “but it’s undoubtedly not her name. She’s witnessed certain matters and may have information for us.” She was involved with others who were wanted for more serious questioning, and he stressed that it was important, “or we wouldn’t have inconvenienced you,” and that he couldn’t tell me any more than that, but in the course of their investigations my address had come up, and he asked me again if I wasn’t Alba.

  “No,” I said. “I’m very sure.”

  “But this would be the home of an Alba Landers,” he asserted, preening until I looked at him funny.

  “Name’s by the bell,” he admitted.

  “It would be, Captain, yes,” I confirmed, and he twitched to attention as though I’d yanked his tail and said that he wished to speak with Mademoiselle Landers immediately, s’il vous plaît, recouping enough gravitas to impress upon me that, delicacy aside, he wasn’t the sort to be detained from his target.

  “I’m sure mademoiselle would be delighted to speak with you,” I said, and I walked to the fireplace and brought back the photograph of a young woman and two young men in a 1930s roadster. “Sadly, she cannot.” I handed over the evidence. “Alba died fifty years ago.”

  The captain frowned at me in a way that tried to split the difference between scolding and surprise and condolence and irritation, and he concluded in surrender. “Perhaps I should back up a bit,” he conceded. “Whose home am I in, then? If you would be so kind.”

  “Hers,” I said. “Back then. It’s mine now.”

  “And you are . . .”

  “My name is Magdalena Landers,” I told him; it was the first time I’d said it to anyone, but then, he was the first to ask. “Alba’s daughter. But please just call me Matilde, everyone does.”

  It was some minutes more before I got the inspector and his drones back out the door. I latched it, as Corie would, with the chain lock and watched through the study window as the cohort squeezed into their cars and drove away, and then I traipsed back through the rooms, kind of giddy, to give the Little One the all-clear.

  XX

  “OF COURSE,” ROUCHARD HAD said, “he may have been the only one to see things differently, our young Mr. Saxe. Lovely for everyone else to find his friend’s suicide romantic. He thought it a crime, pure and simple. An abandonment. And, what is your phrase—I can see from whence he comes.”

  Rouchard had used his two days in Geneva well, he told me as we sat in l’Urquidi awaiting our dinner. He’d gone through the document trove in the lawyer’s office, dry legal filings, most of which he’d trucked home in his accordion valise, “along with some bric-a-brac,” and he placed on the table one of his company envelopes. “To view the rest, you must see me in my office.” He now considered the disposition of the estate to be complete: everything reposing in the Swiss attorney’s files he was confirming through French property registries . . . cleared up considerable mystery . . . all in order.

  The story of the estate was another matter, and pursuing it had taken him into two long bedside chats (the word was his: des bavardages; they sounded to me more like des bedside interrogations) with the Swiss lawyer’s infirm last wife, who had met Saxe once, soon after the war (she had been fascinated by his personal saga even as her husband administered his legal one), and whose memory of him hadn’t in any way dimmed. She told Rouchard of Saxe’s verdict on his friend’s romantic Spanish final act: that it was despicable.

  “In Saxe’s world,” Rouchard said, “fathers put their children first. No other grief or love displaced that responsibility. That was the gist of it.” It was the very thing that had saved Saxe’s own young life, after all. “So, a week after Carlos received the telegram, he kills himself for love of his wife. But where was his love for his child? I will say in defense of my friend, Carlos must have felt he’d lost his child as well. Likely she was dead, and if she wasn’t, how would he ever find her? It was impossible.” If alive, she would be swept into Franco’s giant social-aid baby mill—the Francoists had trafficked in babies, it seems, like the Tontons Macoute in blood. Their state orphanages had bulged with child-
of-a-Red infants stolen from Republican mothers in accordance with government decree; the children were renamed, their birth records were destroyed, and they began their lifetimes in “moral reform” limbo. Carlos would have no way of knowing her. “The letter that would tell him otherwise arrived long after the telegram,” Rouchard said, and after Carlos had jumped. When it came, via Geneva, it came to Saxe.

  “Through the attorney Barayón.” Barayón, whom Saxe was now in touch with on account of Carlos’s estate. Carlos wished to have the home where he’d lived with Alba preserved as a shrine to their romance. And with no family left, he willed it for safekeeping to the closest friend he and his marriage had had, “along with enough money to maintain the premises in perpetuity. Of course Carlos meant it as a thumb in the eye of his tormentors—making this glamorous property the possession of a Jew. Not that the Nazis would know or care.” They assumed he died intestate and would never have seen the will. Anyway, Carlos didn’t file it with French courts; “that would have been absurd.” But he understood that if the Allies won, Occupation property settlements wouldn’t be valid anyway. So he filed it with his friend in Geneva. It was the last act of his life, and it made his young friend Byron Saxe rich.

  I broke in to observe the obvious. “But—” I said.

  “But Byron kept living in his room, yes, I know. Of course that would be necessary in 1942, wouldn’t it, considering his neighbors’ temperament. But in 1946? Or ’60, or ’90?” He shrugged. “Byron could have knocked down the door and lived in luxury any moment he chose. Yet he didn’t. And—I’m surmising here—it goes back to how much he detested his friend’s decision. He refused to profit from it. Carlos made Byron wealthy, and Byron hated him for it.” He’d rather remain in the home of a parent’s love than in a headquarters of parental desertion. “By his terms, he picked the grander palace. That’s why he did it. At least, that’s what I imagine. That and one other thing,” Rouchard said. “His guilt.”

  He paused there. The first of the food had arrived and he could see that until he quit talking to eat, I wouldn’t eat for listening. Or maybe he was grappling as hard with his composition as I with my comprehension. Whichever, when he put the tale aside, he put it aside completely, and it wasn’t until we had commenced our main course that he segued out of more general talk and picked up where he’d left off. “Guilt,” he said.

  “But to make that argument requires some evidence, and so I will describe what I found in Geneva.” But first he had to tell me that what he’d found had made him “exceedingly sad. Sad that this is an individual I never got to know in life, for now I’ve come to admire him. He is both outside my history and part of my history, but he is very much what I wish my history had been,” what Rouchard wished his home and generation had represented. “He redeems us, at least a little. Even his guilt redeems us.”

  So it seemed that right after Carlos died, “Saxe lived on here. In the little room, of course. The big place was full of Germans, only centimeters away. He could hear them through the wall. There was a piano in that room, I remember that, a big old Steinway, and apparently that’s where they liked to socialize. Imagine. What a hell it must have been! Eventually someone would discover the back stairs, climb them to Saxe’s place. Even to use the toilet, he had to cross the hall. A sneeze, a dropped pen, the tiniest noise at the wrong time might give him away. He couldn’t warm food, or light his lamps. If he slept, he might snore. He must have been constantly terrified, for he was worse than just a Jew. He was a foreign Jew, and he was a fugitive.” In 1940, when the Germans required every Jew to register at the prefecture, Saxe didn’t. Two years later, the decree came that every Jew had to wear a star, “but again, he did not. He refused.” He took the chance.

  “Actually, what he did,” Rouchard said, “he took photographs.” At some point after Carlos’s death, Saxe began slipping out of his hideaway dandied up in his old friend’s business suits—he had grabbed some clothes and Carlos’s identification papers before the SS squatters arrived. He’d stroll through Paris in his good cloth with his excellent camera, taking snapshots of street happenings. “But not just strolling, not always. And not just snapshots.” He documented things he’d heard of through the tympanum of the closet door.

  “Was this at the behest of the Resistance, the Maquis?” Rouchard asked. “I don’t know. I doubt it. Regardless, it was extremely provocative. I can only surmise that he had become almost obsessed with these others, these soldiers on the far side of the wall, and he would hear all these plots and plans, and he couldn’t help himself. He had to see who these people were.” Had to see their rumblings play out in the light. “You can’t conceive of the risk,” Rouchard said. Surely only Saxe’s aristocratic attire protected him. “Uniformed societies harbor a refined connoisseurship of social status,” Rouchard said. “I can’t think of any other reason he would have survived.” Carlos’s clothes were Byron’s suit of mail.

  “It’s worth savoring, you know. A German hiding from Germans, taking photos with a German camera of la vie française under German rule, protected by a Spanish cravat. Well, there’s a geography to many things, as it turns out.” Saxe stored the exposed rolls in his room, Rouchard said. He could hardly have developed them. The odor of chemicals would have given him away.

  And then the event that brought this perilous refuge to an end. One night (so Corail Barayón’s widow in Geneva told Rouchard), Saxe heard a rumor through the wall, and the very next morning he packed up his camera and left. “And I can envision even what she didn’t say, because I know of the place he went to,” Rouchard told me. “Every Parisian knows it and remembers what happened there, though no Parisian wants to.” The place was a new Utopian housing development envisioned by its designers as such a peaceful spot that it had been nicknamed the City of the Silent. A mammoth modernist complex with a set of landmark residential towers still under construction when the invasion happened, it wasn’t specifically requisitioned by France’s new overlords, except briefly as a barracks, but it was turned to their special purpose anyway, under the groveling management of “my countrymen.”

  It stood on the city outskirts, and when Saxe showed up on this morning, he could hardly have blended in. “In those clothes? Anyway, this wasn’t like the crowds in town. He must have just marched right up to it,” Rouchard said, “insane as that sounds.” Then (Rouchard was told) an extraordinary thing occurred. Two men rushed out at Saxe’s approach, but it wasn’t to arrest him or turn him away, not at all. “You found us with no trouble?” one of them asked in French, pumping his hand, and Saxe had the presence of mind to answer in German as he was ushered along to begin his scheduled duties as a contract photographer. He spent the morning in Hades, making pictures of what he found there.

  “And what he found,” Rouchard said, “were children.” Thousands of them, hordes of children heaped on one another in squalor, nakedness, and near starvation in the dank shell of a Utopian ruin, the older ones taking care somewhat of the younger, though the youngest were barely weaned and the oldest barely teenagers, “for you see, if they had been even fifteen or sixteen, big enough that the Germans could pretend they were being sent off to work, they would have been deported with their parents to the ovens. But you can’t keep up the pretense it’s a work camp if you’re sending toddlers to it.”

  The Germans had been afraid of inflaming French sentiment by openly deporting children to the camps. But the French authorities argued that, in the name of humanity—“they damned well knew what it looked like,” Rouchard said—the children should go. Outraged at the barbarity of splitting up families, the French insisted that compassion required that children accompany their mothers to their deaths. And in the standoff between these rival decencies, the children piled up, arriving from around the occupied zone and from Vichy; from other camps, established and makeshift (including a bicycle vélodrome turned human stockade, a circle of hell in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower); from the massive roundups of foreign-born Jews that
were mounted throughout the summer. The parents passed quickly through the transit camp, while the children remained, feral castoffs warehoused for weeks.

  Saxe wandered among this rabble, photographing their faces and their world, the wooden, hand-lettered dog tags supplied for each child because so many were too young to know their own names. Then the event he’d gotten wind of commenced, and gendarmes arrived to cull out the selectees who would experience the only thing Saxe could imagine that was more horrific than this captivity—sealed boxcars packed with children rolling through France and Germany and Poland, the first of the deliveries that would ultimately reunite the orphans with their families through the agency of a crematorium.

  All would perish on the transport or in Auschwitz, Rouchard said, and Saxe’s photos would survive the war to remain the only visual record of the day. He’d turned in his film as he’d left the compound; the photographs were printed and archived in Berlin, where they are said to represent the very finest photographic work, by leagues more profound than anything else in the oeuvre of the German photographer Saxe was mistaken for—you could see the intensity of the man’s roused conscience seeping through his documentarian composure, an artistic awakening made all the more poignant by the fact that it had overtaken this man, the German photographer Saxe was mistaken for, on the very last day of his life. On his way home from the assignment, one of so many he’d fulfilled for the Wehrmacht, he was knocked down by a grocer’s van while crossing the street to catch a bus.

  “There’s a bit of historical confusion on that score,” Rouchard said. “The police report of the incident states that he was killed in the morning, though that is obviously an error, because the film he shot clearly chronicles events that can be verified to have occurred between noon and one thirty of the afternoon of that day.” The accident report had been cited by one of the photographer’s academic biographers, in her volume The Redeeming Light, as yet another example of the notorious slipshoddiness of French official record keeping.