Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  I ran down to the waterside. Our boat had slipped its ropes and was being carried away on the river current. Empty. I jumped into the water, but my artificial arm, heavy and useless, prevented me from getting very far. How I cursed that German mortar that day! I called out to some sailors, who came running, diving from their boats or the end of the jetty. Following Ilse’s directions from the embankment, where she pointed towards the site of the accident, these good men did their best … But the dark waters and the powerful current held on to their prey, invisible and lost. We searched until twilight before returning to land, death in our souls.

  My daughter-in-law explained what had happened. The wake from an enormous empty barge tearing along the Seine had rocked the skiff, giving little Hermione a sudden fright. The child had scurried to the side, and Ilse, afraid she would tumble overboard, had leapt forward to grab her. As a result, the boat had rolled again, more violently this time. Ilse, carried by the momentum, had fallen into the water with the child. Jeanne had immediately dived to their assistance.

  Having saved her child, Ilse had pulled herself back on board with great difficulty, only to find no trace of my daughter. There was no sign of her in the water, either.

  Had Jeanne been hit on the head by one of the oars? Or struck the bottom of the boat as she rose from her dive? Or was she the victim of cramp or hypothermia? We never knew. Forty-eight hours later, a body was found at Saint-Pierre-du-Vauvray lock and brought to town. I went to the police station alone to identify it. My Jeanne was just a horrible thing, swollen and greenish, that I recognised from her bathing costume.

  Dr Dimey had been called to the house to give sedative injections to my wife and Ilse, both of whom were in shock. The doctor’s wife took Hermione home with her for a while.

  I refused all medication, retreating into silence.

  I tried to meditate on Malherbe’s consolation:

  To want what God wants

  Is the only study

  That can give us peace.

  The burial took place at Andigny cemetery, in the family vault. Marguerite did not have the strength to attend. And in any case, I preferred it that way. The Academy sent several members, among them the two Abels – my friends Hermant and Bonnard. The fiancé arrived from the provinces accompanied by an uncle. They offered their awkward condolences. At least my Jeanne will never belong to that nonentity, I thought, and was immediately stricken with nausea at the idea that I had been reduced to grasping at such straws in order to stave off despair. Olivier, alerted by telegram in Scotland, was with us by then, supporting his wife, whose pale and haggard face was frightening to behold.

  The next day, which also marked the return of Daladier and Chamberlain from Munich, we went to retrieve Hermione, the innocent cause of my daughter’s death, and I found that I could not bear to be near her.

  And yet, I found it impossible to blame Ilse.

  5.

  Alone with my wife, I stayed at the villa on the banks of the river that had taken Jeanne.

  Olivier, the German and the little one did not join us either for Christmas or for New Year, preferring to spend the holidays in Megève.

  Marguerite appeared to have put her depression behind her. At least, in the eyes of those who did not know her very well. Towards the end of winter, she returned the manuscript of my latest novel – I made her read everything I wrote before sending it to my publisher – with a comment that escapes me for the moment, but which struck me as odd at the time. A somewhat peculiar sentence that troubled me. I let it pass. But then, a few weeks later, my wife began with increasing frequency to struggle to find her words. One might perhaps have put it down to her age, which I did to start with, but the symptom began to occur more and more frequently. I noticed, too, that she was favouring her left leg, moving heavily and painfully, and that she complained of the weight of her basket on market days. I decided that the cook should go in her stead, but when Marguerite dictated the shopping list, she could no longer find such commonplace words as ‘potatoes’ or ‘cheese’.

  Dr Dimey was called in for a consultation, and diagnosed an acute form of melancholy brought on by the shock of Jeanne’s death. He prescribed herbal remedies and vitamins, and suggested a cure in Divonne, where the waters were reputed to be excellent for neurasthenia.

  One morning, before I had even had a chance to buy our train tickets or book a hotel room, Marguerite was unable to rise from our bed without my assistance. Dismayed and fearing meningitis – for she had been feverish and vomiting the night before – I drove her at once to Paris in our old Rochet-Schneider to see a famous nerve specialist whom my cousin Henri had recommended. Following a lengthy examination of his patient, Professor Jacob beckoned me into the neighbouring room, his face a picture of solemn concern. He feared a brain tumour, and recommended immediate hospitalisation in his ward at Salpêtrière, where he could do more thorough testing with a view towards possible surgery.

  I chose for the moment not to inform Olivier or to move in with him on Rue Richer; instead, I took a room in a hotel by the Gare d’Austerlitz in order to be near my wife and visit her every day. I had a meeting with the professor a week later in his consulting room at the hospital. The Jew, all puffed up with his scientific wisdom, announced bluntly that there was indeed a brain tumour, and that it had already grown to such an extent that it was inoperable, even with the widest possible trephination. Crushed, I asked him how my wife’s condition would develop.

  ‘Injections will temporarily reduce the inflammation,’ Jacob explained with a serenity that I found unbearable, ‘so you can expect a mild improvement for the next three or four weeks. Then your wife’s mental and physical health will gradually weaken as the tumour grows. I advise you to have Madame Husson hospitalised near your home. She is in no pain. You can keep the gravity of her condition from her until the very end.’

  I asked in a subdued voice when that end might come. The Yid shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

  ‘There is no way to predict that, my dear Monsieur. It could be anywhere between four and nine months …’

  An ambulance took Marguerite home to Andigny, while I followed in the car. I will spare you, Monsieur le Commandant, a description of my feelings on that funereal journey. My wife was found a room in the Saint-Jacques hospice only a few paces from our house, and enjoyed a practically identical view of the Seine.

  I visited Marguerite there every day. The first month, as the hook-nosed specialist had predicted, she seemed to return to normal, and I allowed myself to hope once again. Perhaps the tumour would vanish as it had appeared, mysteriously and in silence? Perhaps the injections and the medicine were enough to stop it, shrink it, eradicate it? I told my wife that she was suffering from a nervous ailment that was better treated here than at home. She seemed to be satisfied with the explanation. Olivier, Ilse and the child came to see us every weekend. We took tea and pastries in the sickroom, which we filled with chatter. Marguerite would fall into a doze, sinking into a vague torpor that I attributed to inactivity or the drugs. We hugged her and tiptoed from the room. The others pretended to share my optimism when I accompanied them to the railway station. On the way there, I noticed the first signs of spring, the budding trees. I took these signs to indicate that Our Lord, in thus demonstrating his eternal power, would come to our assistance. ‘Help yourself, and Heaven will help you.’ Yes indeed, we had to hold fast, as we did at Verdun! The illness, and the prognosis delivered by the sinister Jew of Salpêtrière, would be overthrown!

  One Sunday in early April as I joined my family in the sickroom, I witnessed an unusual spectacle. Marguerite was holding Hermione and teaching her what I took at first to be a new game. The girl was told to rub her nose with the index finger of each hand in turn, drawing the skin upwards towards her brow, while my wife sang a little ditty, smiling and saying over and over, ‘My nose is growing straight, my nose is growing straight, pretty little nose so nice and straight …’ My son was absent, but Ilse was livid,
watching the performance in silence. The tension in the room was palpable. Upon catching sight of me, my daughter-in-law threw me a furtive glance before grabbing the child forcefully from her grandmother. I forgot the incident as we chatted about one thing or another. Marguerite, her eyes wandering, soon lost interest in Hermione as she followed, or rather pretended to follow, the conversation.

  On my solitary walk back to the villa from the station, I found myself humming a tune, and realised that Marguerite’s childish and catchy song had stuck in my head. ‘Pretty little nose so nice and straight …’ I stopped in my tracks, suddenly understanding what it was that my wife, without ever having mentioned it, had seen. Or believed she had seen.

  And it struck me that this thought, this vague and nebulous suspicion, had been nagging at me for months without my having been consciously aware of it.

  Yet I could hardly confront my daughter-in-law point-blank with the question. What about Olivier? He was sensitive and might well take it amiss. As things stood, our relations were already embittered enough. I decided to wait for an opportune moment to bring it up casually. That in itself would be no simple task, as my son continued to object to my articles in the French press, although they merely addressed the self-evident truth that in every country where the children of Abraham decide to proliferate they pose a significant national and social threat. But as I generally sought to avoid family quarrels, I chose to put the matter off to another time.

  The following month, on a sudden whim I bought a First Empire painting that I had seen in the window of the Galerie Charpentier. The canvas belonged to some wealthy Parisian Jews who were selling their collection before emigrating to America. The dealer sold it to me at a reasonable price, while still ensuring a handsome profit for himself, since the Yids were in a hurry. The painting, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, was entitled Amour familial. In a corner of a bourgeois drawing room, a lovely young brown-haired woman is sitting on a sofa, dressed in an ample silk negligee. Even as she embraces her three children, her face in profile, she places a tender kiss on the cheek of her husband, who, one arm draped across the back of the sofa, leans in turn across the tight little ensemble to kiss the forehead of his eldest daughter. The latter raises her eyes to her father, while the two little ones hug one another as they cling to their mother’s bosom.

  This edifying and touching image of a close-knit family, reminiscent of the allegorical work of Greuze some decades earlier, unsettled me for I recognised in it the protagonists of a true story, or one that might have been. The man was me in my younger days. The woman bore a striking resemblance to Marguerite as a young mother. The eldest child was Jeanne; the son, in the middle, was Olivier at six or seven. And the exquisite youngest one, with her blue eyes, anxious expression, round cheeks, porcelain complexion and blonde hair, being affectionately kissed on the ear by her brother – wasn’t she the very picture of Ilse? The relative ages matched in any case. I chose to decide that the painting did indeed portray my daughter-in-law, that ravishing poppet from beyond the Rhine whom our Christian family had adopted.

  I paid the dealer, took the painting home to Andigny, and had it hung forthwith in the drawing room.

  In May, the season of flowers and communions, a processional of girl communicants heading towards our cathedral rekindled an inchoate anxiety in my heart. The children of our city, draped in guileless probity and immaculate veils, were on their way to bring their reverent dreams to fruition beneath the splendours of the stained glass. I followed the processional in a fog. I entered the cathedral, greeting a few acquaintances, neighbours and tradesmen. At the centre of the nave, decorated for this holy day, the communicants gathered like a troupe of white angels – some of whom, the prettiest, resembled Ilse on her wedding day – enveloped in the symbolic purity of lilies. They held hands in solemn silence, little brides of the faith trembling with sacred anticipation as they awaited the mystical moment of divine revelation. One girl, overcome with emotion, dropped her candle, knocking down the one in front, which set off a chain reaction like a game of skittles. Murmurs of disapproval rose from the pews. The girl who had started it all fainted and was carried off. Calm was restored in the church, and I fell to thinking.

  In a few years it would be our Hermione’s turn to join the May processional in white. Her brown hair haloed by the insubstantial veil, she would be full of devotion reciting her catechism, a book of canticles on her knees, as she prepared to be brushed by the wings of a great happiness. But as I sat and watched among the murmuring crowd in the ancient cathedral, I was thinking: Is my granddaughter fully entitled to receive that divine and sacred communion? Is she truly a member of the flock of God’s children?

  6.

  I could no longer bear to remain in such a state of uncertainty. On the occasion of a weekly meeting of the Academy, I put in a request at the Institute for the address of a service specialising in private investigations. Our secretary provided me with the requisite information, and I proceeded to the office, which was located, rather poetically, on Rue de la Lune in the second arrondissement, next door to the School of Wireless Telegraphy. I explained to the man who received me that I was seeking any available information about a Monsieur and Madame Wolffsohn of Berlin, whose daughter had been an actress in the early thirties. The investigator replied that such an inquiry would be very costly, as an assistant would have to be sent to Germany for several weeks, and in these troubled times. I insisted that expense was no object, adding that what I most wanted to know was whether these people might by chance be Jews. The man gave me a knowing look, as if to say that my request was more common than I had thought. He promised me results within two months at the latest, and asked for a rather sizeable advance that I paid without haggling.

  That night I had dinner with Louis-Charles Royer, the gifted author of La Maîtresse noire. Maurice Dekobra was there too. Like Geneviève Tabouis, who had so accurately predicted the latest crises, he believed that war was now inevitable. Having spent the night at the flat of Olivier and Ilse – whom I no longer dared to look in the eye – I returned to Andigny, where I was alarmed by a change in Marguerite’s demeanour. She would fly into a temper at the least provocation, raging, her gaze fixed and hard and lit by a spark of madness, demanding information on a subject that, once again groping for the right word, she was unable to explain to me.

  This interlude of abrupt and frequent tantrums lasted barely a month. As summer approached my wife grew slowly but irremediably weaker. I was the disconsolate and powerless witness to this irreversible deterioration. Marguerite spoke less and less, her conversation for the most part without sense. Ilse threw me long, sorrowful looks. Olivier rarely visited. The harvest came three weeks late because an early frost the previous autumn had compelled our farmers to re-sow a third of their fields. On 4 July, I was invited to the wedding of my old friend (and new member of the Académie Goncourt) Sacha Guitry at the church of Fontenay-le-Fleury, in the parish of the Château de Ternay, which he had recently bought.

  The great throng of notables included Monseigneur Merio, Bishop of Versailles, who sanctified the union between Sacha and young Geneviève; Prince Poniatowski; Monsieur André Magre, Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic; Prefect of Police Langeron; Monsieur Huisman, the Jewish Director of the Beaux-Arts; Goncourt academician René Benjamin; Maurice Martin du Gard, Max Maurey, Lisette Lanvin, the humorist Tristan Bernard (another Jew, but very witty) … Our dear host took us on a tour of Napoleon’s room, which he had reconstructed most faithfully. This wonderful, worldly day in the country was a welcome break from the monotony of the bedside and the nauseating miasmas of the sickroom, and the sole happy interlude from the nightmare that held me in its grip.

  Upon my return, the maid informed me of a telephone call received in my absence from an agency in Paris. I called back immediately. It was from the detective agency – their man was back from Berlin, and a confidential report awaited me at Rue de la Lune.

  I reproduce that rep
ort for you here, Monsieur le Commandant:

  DARDANNE AGENCY

  14 Rue de la Lune, Paris 2e

  Investigations, surveillance.

  Discretion guaranteed.

  File: WOLFFSOHN/BERGER

  Client:

  Monsieur P.-J. Husson

  20 Quai de Verdun

  Andigny, Département de l’Eure

  FIRST REPORT

  Thomas WOLFFSOHN, born 8 January 1882 in Berlin, Germany.

  Marta LEESER, wife of WOLFFSOHN, born 29 June 1887 in Frankfurt, Germany.

  Domicile (until November 1938): 32 Lützowstrasse, Berlin W 35.

  Children: Ilse Maria Dorothea, born 3 April 1913 in Berlin, and Franz Emil, born 24 October 1915 in Berlin.

  Profession of Thomas WOLFFSOHN: Chemical engineer. Former employer: I.G. Farben company. Dismissed in March 1938.

  Religion: Jewish. The WOLFFSOHNs are an Israelite family originally from Hamburg but for the past six generations resident in Berlin, where they are members of German high society; the LEESERs are Jews from the Palatinate; Thomas WOLFFSOHN is a distant relative of Rabbi Chacham Tzvi ASHKENAZI, who came to Hamburg in 1690, where he founded a Talmudic school before being appointed rabbi of Amsterdam.

  Current address: unknown. Monsieur and Madame WOLFFSOHN reserved two berths for Palestine at the Berlin branch of Palestine & Orient Lloyd on 6 November 1938 (shortly before the nationwide pogrom of 9 November). Their names were not found on the list of embarked passengers. The house at 32 Lützowstrasse has been stripped of its furnishings, and most of its windows have been smashed.

  Ilse WOLFFSOHN (under the stage name Elsie BERGER) began her acting career with a small role in Spies (director: Fritz LANG) and has featured in a number of German and Austrian films since 1927, including Das Lied ist aus (director: Géza VON BOLVÁRY), Das Flötenkonzert von Sans-souci (director: Gustav UCICKY), Mädchen in Uniform (director: Leontine SAGAN), Der Kongress tanzt (director: Erik CHARELL), and Anna und Elisabeth (director: Frank WISBAR). Miss BERGER had to abandon her career because of her religion. It would appear that she no longer lives in Germany.