The Cloister

by James Carroll

  The shock of what the man said was compounded by her instant question: How does he know I’m Jewish?

  But then he said, “The wandering days of les youpins are over,” and she realized he was including her not in the insulted group but in the group having the right to slur. He did not know. She turned away and began to gather her papers, but he touched her arm. “You should not go out. Let the Krauts do their business.”

  “Their business?”

  He shrugged. “It’s only Jews.”

  “Only Jews?” she replied sharply. And then, at the mercy of a bolt of anger, she added recklessly, “My father is a Jew.”

  He drew back, quizzically.

  “And so am I,” she added, although it was only her father of whom she was thinking.

  “But you…” He glanced at the pages on the table, her own handwriting and the manuscript facsimiles that she was copying—musty texts that he himself had delivered to her. The clerk had seen her at this table for months—an unusual doctorante, so young and pretty. He’d used the rumor about the Jews as a pretext to approach her.

  “But what? I work on Peter Abelard?” she said. That unforgotten man of le haut Moyen ge had spoken from and to the soul of la France for most of a thousand years—but what meaning could the infamous Catholic monk have for Jews? “Is that your question?” she asked. Rachel read the confusion so clearly in the man’s eyes that she sternly made his question even more explicit: “What is Peter Abelard to a Jew?”

  “Nothing,” he answered, but he was backing away now.

  “That’s what you think,” she’d said. She’d left the manuscript stack for him to refile, pushed the last of her own pages into her briefcase, and rushed out of the archive.

  Now, at Rue Dante, she dashed across the oddly vacant boulevard into the narrower street that would take her to the river at the Pont au Double, and to the islands beyond, including hers. Now she ran along the very center of the street itself. That the city was deserted frightened her. Over the previous year, the other rumors of Jews being arrested had never proved accurate, and she hoped that this one, too, was false. At each of those other reports, a new clique had disappeared from the Marais, the Jewish quarter on the Right Bank, a mile or more from the apartment she shared with her father. But those Jews had not been arrested; they had fled Paris. And each time, Saul Vedette had pleaded with his daughter to go, too. But her father, severely diabetic, was tethered to the local chemist who supplied his insulin, and she’d have had to go without him—unthinkable. Since his wife had died five years before, Vedette had become wholly dependent on Rachel, even as the disease had progressively weakened him.

  Rachel was like her mother in thinking of herself as French first, which meant being more detached from Jewishness than her father, who was a professor, after all, of medieval Jewish history, specializing in Talmud. In the beginning, she’d found it impossible to believe that the jeopardy of the Jews of France could be real, but the sequential promulgations of the Statut des Juifs since 1940 had made her, too, understand that a noose was tightening on the Israélite throat—especially once her father was dismissed from the university. Still, they encouraged each other in the belief that they’d be safe because they did not live in the Marais, among kosher butchers, Judaica shops, and synagogues. Indeed, few Jews lived on their island in the Seine, and since her father’s banishment, when even the institute was closed to him, he had rarely shown himself in public. The Germans were said to be scouring municipal census records for Jewish names, but “Vedette,” a military term meaning foremost sentry, had been adopted by a forebear serving in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, an assimilationist betrayal of God’s people for which, at last, Saul Vedette could be grateful.

  Rachel, for her part, had easily continued to blend in as just another Sorbonne étudiante, even as she surreptitiously took up her father’s research in the archive. As far as most of his former colleagues knew, Saul Vedette was simply one of those Jews who’d already taken the hint and fled Paris. So once more, the terrible thing she’d done hit Rachel: as of only the month before, there were some who knew very well who and where he was—and they knew because of her.

  As she drew closer to the river, with her satchel banging at her side, Rachel pictured him, dozing in his chair by the window. Beside him would be a last ribbon of smoke rising from the ashtray on the table. Next to the ashtray would be the worn leather volume Historia Calamitatum: Heloissae et Abaelardi Epistolae, a text that he had come to know so well he needed not to read but only to fondle it. On that table, also, would be assembled numerous pages of manuscript in her own hand, alongside other pages that she had herself put through the typewriter—his dictation. Behind his chair, on the small bookcase, would be other stacks of such pages, in both handwriting and typescript, Latin and French. Flanking the bookcase would be the bentwood chairs that had last been used when the review committee had come to the apartment for that awful hearing—again, because of her.

  Now, running along the boulevard, she conjured images of home as a way to fend off panic—the picture of her father dozing. Her mind flew ahead. As always, she would rouse him softly with a kiss on the forehead, then stand aside while he made his way to the water closet. She would go to the sink in the small kitchen to wash her hands. When he returned, he would have left his shirt out of his trousers, ready for the injection. By then, she would already have prepared the cotton swabs with rubbing alcohol, and retrieved the insulin syringe and the rubber vial-cap, both of which she’d have sterilized after the morning shot by boiling them in a small cast-iron pressure cooker on the stove.

  When he sat again, she would take from the shelf above his chair the mahogany jewelry box in which, once, Rachel’s mother had kept pearls and rings, and the small silver mezuzah she had from her rabbi grandfather—the mezuzah she could neither hang at the door nor part with. But the box now held Saul’s insulin vials. Rachel would open it, remove the active vial, and cap it with the rubber stopper. Raising the syringe to eye level, against the window light, she would expel its air. She would push the needle through the vial cap and, once more against the light, carefully draw exactly eight units of serum into the barrel. Eight units in the late afternoon. Six units in the early morning. Then, with her father pinching a fold of flesh at his abdomen, she would stab the needle in, expertly push the plunger, pull it out, and swab the pasty flab, all in one continuous movement. “Voilà, Papa,” she would always say, putting the needle aside. Only then, having winced not at all, would he greet her, reaching up to grasp her shoulders, pulling her cheek down to his, first one, then the other, and saying, as he always did, “Merci! Merci! I would be lost without you, my dearest, dearest girl.” Then he would turn away to hide his eyes—so full of water, not from pain, but from feeling.

  She tore across the Pont au Double, onto the Île de la Cité, ever more troubled at how godforsaken Paris felt. There seemed to be no river traffic, no taxis at the stand. Approaching the Cathedral, she was relieved to see a clutch of people in the plaza, but they were heading into the great church—a dozen old women, she saw now, widows of the Great War, famously appointed to pray the daily rosary for the dead heroes of France. Rachel had heard it said that Catholics, when they recited the Ave these days, substituted the name of Marshal Pétain for Mary.

  Notre-Dame, of course, was the storied demesne of Abelard and his famous lover, Héloïse, but that day it was a mark on her passage home, that’s all. The towering Cathedral was roughly the midway point between the museum and the book-lined apartment she shared with her father on Île Saint-Louis, the villagelike cluster of faded mansions and subdivided townhouses on the Cathedral’s sister island. On most days, coming home from the museum, she would see off-duty German soldiers sunbathing on the grass behind the apse, but now they were not there. She imagined the soldiers mustered, fully uniformed, at loose in the streets, rifles at the ready, in their brown trucks, mounted on motorcycles, blowing whistles, slamming through doors, boots loud upon stair
treads. And, indeed, just then she heard the faint wailing of far-off sirens, the urgent up-and-down of a screeching beast. The high-pitched squeal was coming, yes, from the Right Bank, around Rue Saint-Paul—the Marais, with its closed-in streets, lanes, and squares, to which, for more than a year, her father had forbidden her to go.

  Of course, what were sirens in occupied Paris? French police rushing from one bureau to another; ambulances carrying the valorous near-dead from the Front; Wehrmacht brass in train with their escorts. Sirens were nothing, she wanted to tell herself. But these sirens, she was certain, were coming from the Jewish quarter. Thank God, we don’t live there! She might have dropped her satchel, to run faster—to hell with the thing—but at the archive she had gathered up two weeks’ worth of copying and frantically stuffed the pages into the bag. Pages, she believed, despite the dismissive verdict of the Sorbonne reviewers, that were still keeping her father alive. However desolate he’d become, she had helped him continue with his project. Each page she carried home was a token of his hope. Each one a talisman. Magic.

  Normally, when crossing the last bridge into her own home enclave, she relaxed, comforted by the special island air of exemption from the stresses of Paris that had defined Île Saint-Louis for two hundred years. But now she became even more frantic. These streets, too, were empty, and that seemed, if anything, still more ominous than the far-off sirens. At the corner café, Deux Garçons, where Rue Jean du Bellay met Rue Saint Louis, she had an impulse to rush in and ask Monsieur Beguin if it was true, the Germans were coming? She glimpsed him, standing in the window in his black vest and bow tie, perhaps raising his hand to wave, but she simply ran past.

  Two blocks along Rue Saint Louis, she came, finally, to their apartment house. She turned her key quickly and bolted through the small entrance foyer, but not so swiftly that she failed to notice Madame Boudreau’s firmly shut door. Usually, the door was kept slightly ajar at all hours, enabling the concierge to track the comings and goings of the two dozen people who lived in the once-grand old building. Rachel ignored the closet-sized elevator—its electricity had been shut off the year before—and took to the winding staircase. By the time she reached the fourth floor, she could hardly breathe, but then she saw that the door to their apartment was standing wide open. She forgot her exhaustion, and stopped.

  She stood at the threshold, looking in. The main room, with its glass-fronted armoire and stuffed sofa, was orderly, as was, beyond the separating arch, the far alcove that served as her father’s study. His chair was there, by the window, but with her father gone from it, the piece of furniture seemed defective. The pair of bentwood chairs were in place, at the bookshelf. The only sign of disarray was a fan of papers on the floor. But then she saw that the sheets half covered her father’s black yarmulke, which, when he was awake, indoors, was always on his head. On the floor beside the yarmulke were his spectacles. Rachel dropped the satchel and moved slowly into the apartment. “Papa? Papa?”

  He was not there. This recognition, oddly, cauterized her panic, and all at once a calm detachment came over her. She stooped to retrieve his yarmulke, held it briefly to her breast, then put it in the side pocket of her dress. His meerschaum pipe was in its ashtray. She picked it up. Cold. She crossed to his bedroom, then to her own small, curtained-off corner. She opened the door to the water closet. She craned into the tiny kitchen. Back in his study, she stooped to retrieve her pages from the floor and carefully aligned them on the table, beside the worn leather volume that always sat there. She flicked a pinch of spilled ashes away.

  Slowly turning, she surveyed the bookshelves, the typewriter, the reams of manuscript. The jumble was normal untidiness. On impulse, she went back to her father’s bedroom and opened his closet door, to see his heavy winter shoes properly in place on the floor. If she’d been a detective, she’d have been making notes on her pad. But then, in her father’s study again, her eye went to the shelf above his chair, and, snap, like that, the rush of feeling returned, a dammed torrent breaking loose in her breast again. The mahogany chest was gone: Papa’s insulin!

  Saul Vedette’s diabetes meant that his pancreas failed to produce a sufficient quantity of the hormone that allowed his body to process sugar properly. Without his shots, his body would not absorb sugar, and would effectively starve itself. His blood-sugar levels would quickly become impossibly high, causing severe dehydration, and within days, coma would follow, and radical organ failure, beginning with the kidneys.

  Whoever had taken her father had taken the chest, too. She imagined her father having the presence of mind to insist upon it. But that would have meant taking also the syringe and rubber vial-cap, which, after sterilizing, she routinely kept in a freshly laundered linen sleeve on its own shelf in the kitchen. She went there now and, to her dismay, found the needle still in its cloth holder. Saul Vedette, without his shots, was dead.

  Rachel left the syringe where it was, and rushed from the apartment and rapidly down the stairs; she was quickly at the door to Madame Boudreau’s room, and banging on it. The woman’s voice, plaintive and obviously afraid, came back at her: “Please, please…” The door opened. The bent old woman looked up at Rachel as if expecting to be hit. Over her black housedress, she wore a dark-blue smock. She was clearly startled to see Rachel, and opened her mouth to speak. But no words came. The blow of her foul body odor hit Rachel.

  “What happened? Who came?” Rachel asked. An inane question, of course.

  “They did,” the old woman answered. “They did. They took the professor.”

  “Who? Who? Germans?”

  “No. Not Krauts. Gendarmes. French police.” The woman tried to close the door, but Rachel stopped her.

  “French police!?”

  “Yes. French.”

  “Took him where? Where?”

  “Who knows? Gone. He is gone. If you were here, they’d have taken you, too. You would not fool them, as you do everyone else.” Suddenly, the woman uncurled herself, almost straightening her back, to lunge up at Rachel, contemptuously. “You have brought trouble on this house. You and your father.” She pushed on the door again.

  This time, Rachel shocked the old lady and herself by forcefully slamming the door all the way open. The woman fell roughly to the floor, and Rachel crossed into her room, a tiny space, holding only a narrow cot, a cluttered deal table, and a doily-backed chair. A small wall-shelf had been converted, by means of an unevenly pleated faux-satin scarf, into a pathetic Marian shrine. Behind a thin vase with its bud, and a curled rosary, stood the Virgin. Made of cheap molded plaster, shoddily painted blue and white, the figure was poised with her face demurely down, as if averting her eyes from what this ferocious, invading Jewess was about to do.

  Only then did Rachel see what was on the table, amid the clutter of newspapers and dishes: the mahogany chest. Her father’s mahogany chest; her mother’s. Its lid was up, showing its store of glass vials, insulin. At once, Rachel understood. After the police took her father away, the concierge stole into their apartment, saw the jewelry box, mistook it for what it once had been, and made off with it.

  Rachel wheeled on Madame. “You dare to take this! You thief! You fiend!”

  The woman’s eyes cast about, as if help would come. She shielded her face. “I saved it for you,” she whimpered.

  The lie so infuriated Rachel that she slapped the woman. It was the first blow she’d ever struck against another human being, and at once Rachel fell back, her hands at her mouth, mirroring Madame Boudreau. Rachel lurched toward the table, closed the lid of the mahogany box, clutched it inside her left arm, and turned back toward the door. But the old woman was in the way. Furious, she sent a wad of spittle into Rachel’s face. “Jew!” the woman screeched. “Stinking Jew!”

  Once again, Rachel’s reaction was visceral, instant, and unwilled. Instead of hitting the woman, she swung her right arm toward the wall-shelf and swept the statue of the Virgin away. It crashed to the floor, smashed into pieces. Quickly, she w
as out, rushing up the stairs. The words “Stinking Jew!” were alive in her ear, but her mind roared with the question, Who am I now?

  By the time she was back in the apartment, the vise of her will had closed down on the terrors. With the back of her hand, she had wiped her face clean of saliva. She moved swiftly and steadily, as if through a routine instead of through a sequence of actions she had never imagined. Yet she knew exactly what to do. First, she gathered the foolscap typescript from the bookshelf, and a stack of her own handwritten pages. She stuffed them into the satchel she had carried from the institute, then went into her father’s bedroom. At his closet, she knelt and pushed his brogans aside, along with a hodgepodge of old journals and items of soiled laundry. She pulled out a small battered suitcase. This left exposed the wide pine boards of the narrow floor space. Craning in, she pushed down on the rearmost floorboard, at a knot by the wall, a particular pressure point that brought the other end of the board up just enough for her to grasp it and pull it free, opening a below-deck space between the joists. She pushed the satchel into the well, an ad hoc vault, then closed the plank again, snapping it back into its close fit.

  She took the suitcase to the small table by the kitchen and, in short order, carefully filled it with the insulin vials, the syringe kits, the linen sleeves, and the pressure cooker. She took a brick of chocolate from the counter, wrapped it in paper alongside a small folding knife, and put it in the case, together with three precious bananas, a sack of nuts, and a pair of apples. From the highest shelf, she took the hoarded coupons—cartes de rationnement—essential to acquiring meat, bread, and eggs, as well as a stash of several thousand paper francs. From the edge of the sink, she took the toothbrushes and tooth powder. Then, from their separate drawers across the room, she took underwear for both of them, his fresh shirt, her sweater. At the suitcase again, she cushioned the medical gear with this clothing and with a small pillow from the sofa. Before closing the suitcase, she looked around carefully. Her eye fell on the small stack of books on her father’s table—the Bible, a commentary by Nachmanides, and, on top, the worn leather volume of Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum. She retrieved all three, and placed them on the pillow, as if enthroning texts on the bimah. The Abelard struck her: yes, a story of calamity—precisely.