The Cloister

by James Carroll

“What terms?” she repeated.

  Finally, Peter said, “I would be received into the community as a penitential monk.”

  “Penitential monk! What? A life of imposed silence? Of manual labor?” Héloïse was aghast. “What of your philosophy? What of the school?”

  “The school is over for me, Héloïse. Surely, you see that. At Notre-Dame I am anathema.”

  “But there is Rheims. There is Rouen. Young scholars all over Europe would follow you anywhere. The rivals to Notre-Dame would vie for you.”

  Peter and Prince Isaac exchanged a look—more than a hint of patronizing skepticism, which made her anger flare. “Your Holiness! You, of all people, must see this. The wisdom of the Moors, who, with the Hebrew readers in Toledo, are bringing the ancient wisdom back to life—the rebirth of thinking! What you will be to Ashkenaz, Peter Abelard already is to Christendom. You know this. The Church needs him. And not only the Church. You need him.”

  “Lady Héloïse,” the Jew said quietly, “Master Peter’s physical rehabilitation is far from complete, as you yourself say. The fever always threatens. A great danger remains of poisons and humors, biles in the wound. Saint-Denis has the best infirmary in Paris.”

  Peter put in, “Because Prince Isaac instructed them.”

  Héloïse stood and rounded on Peter. “But what of us?” She drew the gold ring up and out from her bodice, bringing it as far forward as the cord allowed. “In a school—Rouen, Metz, even Canterbury—you have the freedom we need to be together in our way, with discretion, and with our son.”

  Prince Isaac interjected, “Your son is at issue.”

  “What?” Héloïse said.

  “The Abbot expressed an interest. If the rumors about Peter Abelard and the Jews are true, he said, perhaps the rumor about a child is true as well.”

  Héloïse exchanged a look with Peter, then turned back to the Jew. “What did you answer?”

  “That rumors are the night pollutions of Beelzebub. The Abbot seemed disinclined to pursue it, although he added that the Bishop is known to be asking if there is a child. He is asking if the child is male.”

  Peter said, “All the more reason for my permanent disappearance. As my name fades, the Bishop’s interest will wane.”

  Prince Isaac leaned forward to venture, “It is unseemly for a Jew to express an opinion about interactions of Christian prelates, but the Abbot of Saint-Denis can be counted on to oppose the impulses of his rival, the Bishop of Paris.”

  Héloïse cared nothing for such intrigue. She said, “But, Peter, our dear infant! How can we—?”

  Peter lifted up on the furs to say with feeling, “Violence! This violence!” He tapped his leg, indicating his wound. “The violence is unleashed because of me! I was blind to this threat, but no more! The threat continues! Our dear infant—yes! His hope lives with Lucille and Marcus, where he must remain, far away from this brutishness. You sensed as much when you turned from my name to the name Astrolabe.” Clearly, Peter had considered this. He lay back, calmed himself. He added, more quietly, “In Nantes, our Astrolabe is safe. Anywhere else, he will be subject to sanctimonious conscription and enslavement.”

  Tears overflowed the eyes of Héloïse, yet she saw the thing clear—how she, too, in all her notoriety, was a danger to their child. Reflexively, she fingered the gold ring. After a heavy-laden silence, she found it possible to ask, “And what, then, of us?”

  “Us? Us? Héloïse…” Peter was speaking out of an abyss of despair. “Have you troubled to take notice of my condition? I am a eunuch now.”

  “Not to me! Never to me!”

  “Woman, how explicitly must I lay bare the depth of my shame?”

  “You need not be ashamed with me.”

  “You are the only object of my shame. I have, in every way, dishonored you.”

  “I deny that. I forbid that. I love you. And you love me.” She silenced herself, abruptly. When her silence fell upon the room now, it was a demand.

  When Peter did not speak, she commanded, but quietly, “Say it.”

  Nothing.

  “Say it!”

  In response, finally, he said, “You should have let me die.” Again, he turned his face to the wall.

  The Philosopher Knight, she thought—but not bitterly. She backed away from him. He was willing his own death, but she would not permit it. “Peter Abelard,” she said, “I will never accept this from you. Are you hearing me?”

  Far from unmoved, he yet remained at the wall, unmoving.

  Wiping away her tears, Héloïse said with fresh firmness, “If you entomb yourself in strict monasticism because of what my wicked uncle did in the name of my honor, then I, too, will so entomb myself. In that way, I will be dead to everything in the world, and everyone—excepting only you.”

  Gently, she buried the gold ring back inside her clothes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Once Rachel succeeded in getting Saul Vedette’s blood-sugar levels stabilized, he returned to himself—not fully, by any means, but enough so that the prospect of his survival began to lengthen out from minutes and hours to days and weeks, if never months. Rachel began actually to imagine that the future tense, even foreshortened, might once more have meaning. As it happened, her father had regained the necessary strength just in time.

  By the time the main Drancy population was set—something over six thousand in housing blocks built for seven hundred—the Gabardines had forced their French minions to impose a new, lasting discipline. Posters with commands and mottoes were hung on walls. One read “Jedem das Seine,” which Rachel’s dull neighbors translated as “To each his own,” but which she recognized as the threat it was: “To each one what he deserves.” The imposed regimen divided prisoners by category—Jews, criminals, and politicals; yellow star, green star, red star. All prisoners were mustered for regular lice examinations, and they were checked for swollen bellies, jaundiced skin, and rashes. Large digits were painted on stairwells, rooms, and beds, and prisoners were supplied with cards that identified them by those numbers. That Rachel’s father found it possible to leave his bunk for the roll call twice a day—once at eight in the morning, and once at six in the evening—meant that he was not hauled off to the Drancy railhead, from which the sick-trains departed three times a week. Those livestock cars carried whoever had become obviously infirm, as well as troublemakers—and newly arrived small children. That the gendarmes herded all children onto the trains, ironically, convinced most of the interned that the transported were not necessarily doomed. Since the little ones would surely be left unharmed, perhaps the others would be, too.

  Rachel and Saul alike mastered the habit of behaving as if they always knew what to do, and as if they always understood what they were told. With her bunk above his, they both slept with their most precious possessions wrapped in bundles, ad hoc pillows. In Saul’s case, that meant the three small books his daughter had managed to bring with them: the school edition of the Torah, footnoted with his own commentary; the dog-eared copy of the treatise Nachmanides wrote at the end of his life, Torat Ha-Adam, “The Law of Mankind,” which was a meditation on the problem of evil; and the worn leather volume of Historia Calamitatum. In Rachel’s pillow was the insulin kit, together with whatever stash she had of nuts, fruit, sugar cubes, and, rarely, cigarettes for herself, which she always cut in half.

  The insulin was ample, and readily obtained. For the nuts, fruit, and sugar, she bartered with bread, but also with francs and ration coupons, which to gullible inmates she insisted would have doubled in worth by the time of their release, which she heard was coming soon. For the insulin—and the unsought occasional bonus of tobacco—she bartered, without her father’s knowledge, with her body.

  In the third week of their time at Drancy, the medical officer had come upon her and the dispensary clerk having sex in the file room. Instead of disciplining the clerk and sending Rachel to the railhead for immediate transport to the East, the officer had arranged to have her assigned as
the dispensary night cleaner. From then on, the officer, the clerk, and two other doctors—all considerate Frenchmen—had their way with her in periodic rotation. This structured, almost polite arrangement of nighttime liaison was insisted upon by the medical officer, a man of authority. Rachel realized soon enough that her open legs and willing lips were the solution to his staff morale problem. She was the doctors’ reward for putting up with Drancy, and the grim duty of selecting inmates for dispatch to the East. Rachel almost never had to be with more than one of them a night, and almost never for much more than an hour. Yet the ground of her new condition was clear: survival—her own, and her father’s—depended on these men’s enjoying her.

  At a certain point, after the stroke of midnight, she regularly put aside her bucket and mop, loosened her hair, removed her shoes, and took her place on the largest cot in the intake room, which was down a long corridor from the overnight ward. A dozen beds stood in that ward, but because prisoners regarded it as the antechamber to the cattle car, they did everything to avoid being admitted there. What patients it held were too sick to notice the trysting down the hall. In truth, as she experienced the ordeal, the doctors and the clerk required practically nothing of her. The barest pretense of engagement—a receptive mouth, a rhythmic movement of her hips at the proper moments, a timely moan, a little smile at the end—was enough. She herself, meanwhile, developed the skill of mental transport, so that, as one grunter or another pawed her breasts, her mind took flight, carrying her elsewhere, like a great bird of rescue. Thus, she could find herself strolling, behind her firmly shut eyes, on the pebbly quay among the bridges of Paris on a summer afternoon, idling at the book stalls along the Seine. Or she could be bent over the filigreed leather desktop, focused on text work—Abelard’s letter to Philintus, say—under the cone-shaped hanging lamps of the high-vaulted reading room of the Musée de Cluny. Oddly, perhaps—in this sustained trick of the mind—it was the figure of Héloïse who often came to her uninvited in the grotesque hours of sex. Considering that later, she guessed it was because Héloïse, too, had found it necessary to live in sin, refusing both to deny that’s what it was, and to sink into regret. The bond between Héloïse and Rachel was forged, however dissimilar their experience, in the throes of what was most forbidden. For wholly different reasons, they were blasphemers both. Héloïse, alone of the women of whom Rachel knew, would have understood, and would have refused to condemn her.

  Because Rachel’s work assignment, as a night cleaner, occupied her through the hours of darkness, she was allowed to sleep during the day, which meant that she could be with her father, tending to him and protecting him. Rachel Vedette was surrounded by people who had lost all sense of purpose, but she had never felt hers more intensely.

  At the Sorbonne through the 1930s, and until the Statut des Juifs banished him, Professor Vedette had famously transformed the ancient Talmudic tradition of havruta into an Age of Reason mode of communal textual analysis. His seminars in the literature of early-medieval France—the chansons de geste, for example, and the coming of the Crusader ethos—featured vigorous exchanges between teacher and students, which were themselves an instance of democratic liberalism. A stark exception to the lecture formelle, Vedette’s method conveyed Vedette’s message: that truth proceeds not from the conforming of one mind to another, but from multiple minds’ taking off together from the given text—always attending to the context of its provenance—to formulate thoughts that had never been ventured before. Saul Vedette, with his yarmulke, heavily framed spectacles, and rabbinic demeanor, had begun at the university as a narrowly perceived scholar of Hebrew studies, but, attracting students from an ever-broader set of concentrations, he had opened wide a gate into a new realm of the critical imagination.

  Strangely enough, such an esoteric academic approach—interrogation over declamation—perfectly suited the profoundly unacademic condition of those interned at Drancy, where questions were all. With the building of a trustworthy structure of insulin supply, and the near normalizing of his blood sugar levels, Vedette regained enough of his former strength to make Rachel lift her gaze above the horizon of mere survival. She saw that his survival required more than medicine and proper nourishment.

  In the Gabardine-imposed tightening of Drancy discipline, her father should have been reassigned to an all-male housing block, but, without officially citing the diabetes that would have had him promptly transported, the medical officer discreetly intervened to keep him where he was. The officer, an army captain, was a silent, middle-aged man whose delicate mouth and slender limbs hinted at the emotional fragility Rachel had come to sense in him. Because she seemed unjudging, he found himself confiding in her. His name was Jacques Rivière. He was from Toulouse. In civilian life, he had been a pediatrician. When war broke out, he’d been conscripted. He had then been forced into service at Drancy, where, to his unspoken horror, his main duty was not curing, but selecting. As the prison complex expanded with the arrival of more and more internees—Jews from all over France—Captain Rivière was charged with establishing satellite dispensaries throughout Drancy, which meant the transfer of members of his medical staff. This gave him the opportunity to dispatch the men with whom he could no longer bear to share the nighttime assignations with the femme de ménage. The sad toubib was infatuated with her. After a period of months, that is, this conflicted French physician had become the only man to whom Rachel had to make herself available on the intake cot, a relative intimacy that licensed him, apparently, to imagine that they were lovers. To protect that illusion, the doctor was prepared to protect Saul Vedette.

  Thus, in the sprawling high-ceilinged dormitory room that was given over, mainly, to several dozens of elderly women, Saul Vedette continued to occupy the bunk below his daughter. That meant, once the population of Drancy internees had swelled, that he was the rare male in the entire complex with a bed to himself. Among the prisoners, such privilege loomed as blatant unfairness, and Rachel was aware of the resentful glances thrown her way by the fatherless and husbandless women around her. One in particular, Madame Picard, a former baker whose husband had disappeared in the first days of their time at Drancy, took to hissing “Putain!”—whore!—whenever Rachel passed by. Rachel, pretending to ignore such insults, understood them.

  Saul Vedette did not register the umbrage of the women, and the men whom he brushed up against, if they knew of his privilege, preferred his company to complaining about him. Always hungry for bread, the inmates were hungry for talk as well. Males encountered one another in various settings: before and after roll call, in the dusty central square; in lines outside the latrines; on the stairwell landings where bread and gruel were distributed twice a day. In these circumstances, men—the still-stooped and the formerly upright alike—maneuvered in the queues to exchange a word with Monsieur le Professeur. Vedette seemed a rod around whom snatches of real conversation gyred, a longed-for antidote to the cryptic rumors, flash-point quarrels, or muttered inanities that flooded in on continuous waves of French, Hebrew, or, among the refugees from Germany or Poland, Yiddish. Such untethered fragments of expression made even the mute and the inhibited want more.

  So it was that, with his daughter’s help—she obtained the key to the cramped utility closet on the third floor of their housing block, a remote corner that the day guards ignored—Saul Vedette found himself at the center of an unnoticed weekly gathering of eight or nine men, including a Paris architect, a clerk from Marseille, a garment merchant, a lawyer from Hungary, a schoolteacher, a former member of the National Assembly, and a Pole whose teeth had been knocked out in an incident he refused to discuss. They met on Sunday mornings, because the ranks of the Gendarmerie were thinnest then. Despite the day’s meaning for Catholics, these Jews, making the most of what they could get, regarded the Sunday-morning hours as an annex-in-time to Shabbat, and they thought of their cramped closet as a true Beit Midrash, a house of study. Having begun hoping only for conversation, they made a bold leap
into nothing less than the study of Torah.

  The architect, sitting proudly on a crate, was silver-haired and straight-featured, oddly Aryan-looking, the only sign of his Jewishness being the palm-sized, well-cut yellow star worn precisely at his lapel. The clerk, sitting on an upended bucket, was decked out in baggy overalls and a much-patched worker’s smock, yet he still managed to sport a fastidious, pencil-thin mustache. The Hungarian was lithe, and claimed a ledge in the corner. The Pole with no teeth was content to hunch on the floor, beside and below the rancid mop sink. The only true chair, an armless straight-back, had a thronelike aspect in that space, and all took for granted that Vedette should avail himself of it. His daughter, on whose elbow the professor moved, was the only woman in regular attendance. She sat on the floor beside her father. She never spoke, and the men took no apparent notice of her. She did not know if that was the unfeigned indifference of the Orthodox Jewish male, or the calculated snub of high-minded disapprovers who knew what she did at night. She did not care.

  One day, the gathering came to a climax that she would not forget. Having settled on their crates, buckets, ledge, chair, and haunches, they let the silence fall, as usual—the silence that changed the foul little room into their yeshiva. They pulled from inside their shirts, coats, or trousers bits of cloth—soiled handkerchief, napkin, fragment of a sleeve—and covered their heads. Only Vedette and the architect had true yarmulkes.

  “The Ramban says,” the architect began, “ ‘Ein yisurim be-lo avon.’ Let that be our text. ‘There is no suffering without sin.’ ” He spoke with the assurance of one picking up the thread of a fierce exchange, as if an intervening week had not interrupted their ongoing debate about theodicy.

  Rachel expected her father to speak, and probably so did others, since “Ramban” referred to Moses Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century sage who was the subject of Saul Vedette’s most widely cited book. But her father said nothing.