She gasps, “Is this what it’s like? Oh, God!”
He says, “Yes, pray for it.”
She says, “Madonna!”
She looks up at the Virgin. She thinks Holy Mary, Mother of God, thank you. Her fantasy had been to have someone come up behind her and do this, and never to know who it was. Three hours ago she didn’t know his name. Over the door of the studio, Chamfort’s ‘Les passions font vivre l’homme; la sagesse le fait seulement durer.’ The reasonable people survive; the passionate live. Why hadn’t she realized it? She’s not Lolo any more, or Laurence. She’s Laure, complete at last. And free. Free of Dermot, free of the memory of her uncle’s fumbling, of her father’s refusal to understand it, of her mother’s religious fascism.
5. Armand and The Fall
It was early morning when Armand fell, steamy, threatening more rain in between the gusts, the sky now a grey eiderdown, all lumpy but completely overcast. Clouds moving fast from west to east. There was the scent of wet cut grass and a healthy whiff of cowdung which drifted over from the farm next door.
The clock on the church tower in the village, not yet advanced for summer time, struck an uncertain eight. He floated in and out of consciousness and looked up through the branches of the tree at the family château, built by the miller of Guise when he came up in the world, with his shield over the door and the date in iron figures set in the wall, half on either side of it, 17 and 82. Built just before that misconceived Revolution. Improved with the money from local banking, the mine at Lille, the ownership of the northern railway line.
He could just see the top of the iron gates of the park. He imagined seeing the faces of the Germans pressed against the rails. He knew the Germans. They visited regularly. They came on cavalry chargers, they came marching up the drive in their coal-scuttle helmets, they arrived in Panzer tanks, and they showed up nowadays in Mercedes and BMW cars. Nostalgia brought them. To see the old H.Q. They peered in the big iron gates and they said, “Papi was there, in that big house! Im Schloss, Baby!”
The Irish came too. First, in 1914, in the uniform of a British cavalryman, then in 1956, in a Ferrari. Occasionally an Englishman from the Natural History Museum would come to talk butterflies or look at his precious library. Aliens. All so different to the French. Connections but no real communion.
He looked at the tower window from which Laure used to shout down at him when she was young. Bloodlines and landscape, he thought, it’s what happens to you first, between birth and the age of seven, that decides the way you end. Yes, of course the Jesuits knew that years ago. It’s the fragments. The little things. The ceiling in your bedroom. The branch of the tree from which you swung. The first funeral you went to. Your first bicycle. The taste of your first strawberries of the season. The racist conversations.
More drift. Armand de Coucy would confess to being an unreconstructed Royalist, like his family before him. He didn’t much care but he would have preferred an autocratic king in Versailles to an autocratic (socialist!) president in the Elysée. He maintained that the murder of Louis XVI and the establishment of the Republic in 1792 had achieved nothing except to destroy the stability and the fabric of French properly structured society. A properly structured society would be a pyramid, with the de Coucy family—and selected entomologists—up near the apex.
The Marshal had been an acceptable substitute for a monarch for a while, until it became too much of a good thing. The Vichyists may have gone too far at times but in the beginning he believed they had the good of the country at heart. Unity, no communists, no freemasons, no Jews. Well, that was a mistake. The arrest of Max Farber decided him. Still, France was France and England the traditional enemy. But better to be saved by the British and the Americans than to live under the murderous Huns.
He dissolved into his library—and Max Farber. The books were nothing by comparison with the butterfly collection, his lifetime achievement, his proper memorial. The universities of Florida and Bonn had been after it for years. But the rare books, some very rare, were valuable, especially the Hübner from Augsburg of 1793 and the Rambur on the ‘faune entomologique de l’Andalousie’ of which only eight examples exist. The gem of the library was ‘Tome VIII (1901) de N.M. Romanov, Saint Petersbourg,’ of which only four copies were known, and of which he had one, obtained for him by Max Farber in 1938. He had searched the world for it. It was the last book he found for Armand de Coucy.
The last time he saw Max. He wrote it down. It was in the box in the small room in the grenier, the space under the roof that ran the full length of the house. For Laure to read. Maybe he put a spin on it to exonerate himself.
14 July 1942: They came and took Max and Karen Farber away this morning. There was a big commotion on the stairs and I looked out of the window and saw about eight gendarmes take them to the bus. They were each carrying a small suitcase. The gendarmes were pushing them along. Oriane, my wife, joined me at the window. She told me to come away from it but I could not. As Max went to step up into the bus, he turned and looked up.
He waved. A feeble and resigned movement. Oriane turned away but I held up my hand in a salute. Nobody saw me, I think.
Laure was in Paris at the time and she kept asking where they were being taken and where was Sarah, her friend. Her mother, Oriane, said they were going on a long holiday. I looked at her sadly.
It was the night before last that he came to the door. The maid was off duty and Oriane answered it. She came into my study, where I was cataloguing the last lot of butterflies.
“It’s the Jew from downstairs,” she said. “He wants to see you. Don’t ask him in.”
I went out. Poor Farber was standing there, holding this portfolio. He was hunched over, hopeless with anguish. But his eyes were clear. Even angry. Anguished he may have been, for his family mainly, but disgusted also. He was resigned to the fate that had overtaken him, as it had his family. His fine Semitic features were more hawklike than ever. His tall forehead betrayed an intelligence which would not permit any self-delusion. He has found rare books on Lepidoptera for me, and I have known him, more than once, to advise me against buying a particular volume because he questioned its provenance.
“Monsieur de Coucy, I’m sorry to disturb you. And your wife, especially.” He had heard her remark.
“It’s not important, Monsieur Max. What can I do for you?”
“I want you to buy these drawings from me.”
“But I’m hardly in a position to buy drawings now.”
“No, no. I didn’t make it clear. I want you to keep them for me. I have made out a bill of sale, so you can prove that you bought them, in case anyone questions your ownership. It’s for five hundred francs, but you don’t have to pay it. The bill is made out two years ago, and there’s a receipt in with the drawings.”
“What’s it all about, Max?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know, Monsieur?”
“Are they giving you trouble?”
“Can I come in for a minute? Just inside the door? For your sake as well as mine.”
I let him in and we stood in the hall. Oriane came out of the kitchen and looked at us. I was ashamed.
“What is it, Armand?”
“Mr. Farber wants us to look after some drawings for him.”
“You must do no such thing.”
“Listen, Oriane, I have bought various books from Mr. Farber. This is just something else. Please leave us.”
“It’s very foolish. Think of Didier.”
Didier was my brother-in-law. He was an inspecteur des finances, and had just taken a post with Vichy. I didn’t know it then but he was a colonel in the Milice. He had ingratiated himself with Abetz, the German Ambassador. He and his friend, Robert Brasillach, were both publishing pro-German tracts for Drieu la Rochelle, who had just become editor of Nouvelle Revue Française. I never liked Didier. He was an ineffectual opportunist type. Polished, like all the rest of them but a bully.
“Yes, all right, Oriane.”<
br />
She left.
“Monsieur de Coucy,” Max Farber said, “I hope this doesn’t upset your wife too much but I must ask it of you. The shop has been requisitioned under the Aryanization Law. I expect them to arrest me any day.”
“My dear fellow …”
“It’s all right. Don’t fret yourself. My brother and sister-in-law in Hamburg have already been sent away, and my father, too. I don’t know where they’ve been sent but there are rumors and they are hard to believe. Father said he’d be safe because he had an Iron Cross from the first war. And they boasted that Hitler was afraid to go to Hamburg. Safe! He was one of the first to be picked up.”
“Tell me about the drawings.”
“Family property, not inventory. My grandfather bought them in Italy, and they have never been out of the portfolio since then. Said to be Correggios. Six drawings for a series called ‘Amours des Dieux’. Rather more erotic than those paintings in the museums in Vienna and Berlin and elsewhere. Not worth a great deal even if genuine. Old Master drawings aren’t expensive. Yet. But these have been a family puzzle for a century. My grandfather had one painting which he bought at the same time as these drawings. I suppose it is now hanging on the wall of some lecherous Nazi. My father had it in his study in Hamburg. We have each made it a sort of game to trace the others. I think I have a clue. It’s written in the ‘history’ inside the portfolio. I think it’s your kind of puzzle. We have had fun tracing those rare editions.”
“We will do it again, some day.”
“I think not. First, we were obliged to leave Poland. Then Berlin. Now Hamburg and Paris. I think there is nowhere else to go. I should have gone to America in 1933.”
“What about your daughter, Sarah?”
He turned away. It was too much for him.
He said, “I’m hoping she’s on her way to her godmother at Cap d’Antibes. I hope they let her past the frontier. They say they don’t want Jewish children, but Bousquet is rounding them up in Paris. If she leaves, I wonder if we will ever see her again. Her mother is crying all the time. In Germany they have a saying, ‘to live like God in France.’ Strange kind of heaven. We were hoping some French family would take her in and keep her safe, but everyone is afraid.”
He looked up at me and a flicker of hope crossed his face. It faded when he saw me look away.
“No. Your wife and her brother. I understand.”
I changed the subject. It’s easy to look back and condemn me. But I was not the only one to consider.
“Does anyone know about these drawings?”
“No. I wrote to my father to tell him that I was looking for a secure hiding place, but he had already been arrested before the letter arrived.”
“Suppose they open the letter?”
“Don’t worry. Nobody knows I have given them to you. You do realize they are of little value? Just a family game.”
“Come in and have a drink.”
‘No, thank you. I must get back. They are afraid every time there’s a knock on the door.”
I let him out. We shook hands. Impulsively, I embraced him. For all the French. After all, I am not a monster. His cheeks were wet. He stumbled downstairs.
I took the portfolio into my study and locked it in the wardrobe where I kept certain valuables. It was hidden behind my army uniform. Me, a cavalry officer! Trained at Saumur, demobilized at Tours, without firing a shot in anger. The portfolio shamed the uniform more than the surrender in 1940. My wife met me as I came back to the dining-room.
“You haven’t taken them?”
“Forget about them, please.”
“I wonder what Didier will say.”
“Didier will say nothing, Oriane. Because he won’t know. You will not mention this to anyone. There is nothing subversive or dangerous about it. They are just drawings of no particular value.”
“Can I see them?”
“I suppose so.”
I unlocked the wardrobe and opened up the portfolio on the big table. The first drawing did it properly. It showed a man wheeling a woman around the room on her hands. Her legs were around his thighs and his penis, a sizeable member and rendered in precise detail, had entered her equally well defined vulva.
Oriane went white. She shook with anger.
“You see. Jewish art. Pornography. My father is right. To think we have that sort of thing in the house. We should never have let that flat to them.”
“We also have a translation of Aretino’s erotic poems. Would you like to read them? Don’t be silly, Oriane. Correggio makes them respectable. His religious paintings in Parma are in the Duomo and the Monastery. But I will take these to the country where their presence will not induce in you sinful thoughts.”
Nothing more was ever seen of Maximilian Farber or his family. They perished in Auschwitz. Two gendarmes came back and helped themselves to whatever they could carry away, and even brought a van for the furniture. I asked them what they were doing and they said it was only the property of ‘un sale juif.’
Max Farber. Disappeared in 1942. Perhaps I could have saved him. If Oriane had not been so violently anti-Semitic it’s possible that we could have saved young Sarah. Who knows?
He tried to focus again on the window from which Laure used to wave at him, but he could not fix the memory, and the branches of the big cedar wiped a series of images across it. One dissolved into another and blood rippled across them. The cedar, the oldest tree in the park, and the tallest. The killing tree. He should have had it cut down years ago. But you can’t murder a tree.
Under it a group of Résistants had been executed by the Milice, the French ‘Gestapo,’ at the direction of his brother-in-law, Didier. This was in 1943.
And under it Didier had been shot in retribution in 1945. Armand was not blameless for the summary justice to his wife’s brother.
Laure, la petite Lolo, unaware of the background affiliations, had discovered her Uncle Didier’s corpse under the cedar. It had unbalanced the child. She was relieved at his death, but shocked when she became aware of her father’s involvement in it. It was a natural execution post. And it attracted shells.
Zooming in and out from dreams to reality, the dominant image was of Laure. Little Lolo. Laure and her unrelenting attitude towards him. Remembering her hysterical fear of his brother-in-law’s demands. A real fear, which he minimized at the time. Then her conviction too that he was personally responsible for all the crimes of Vichy, including the disappearance and presumed death of her childhood friend, Sarah, and the agony of Marcel, her first escort at ‘Sciences-Po,’ the Institute of Political Science, unwelcome in the family, being a Jew, who was hidden in a wardrobe in the Dordogne throughout that shameful period. The gods may not visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, but the fallout from their acts casts a shadow that stays with the children for the rest of their lives.
Laure, little Lolo, on his butterfly hunt that time. Telling him things about Didier. Pleading for help. “Papa, it’s not nice. It hurts! Make him stop!” Armand’s embarrassment. His anger. But his excuses. And his impotence.
He was determined to confront Didier but his brother-in-law, now a colonel in the Milice, had discovered a wireless transmitter in the forester’s cabin in the wood on the Colonfay estate. Didier said he accepted that Armand had nothing to do with it but it was on his property and the Germans would not be so accomodating as he, Didier. Were it not for the fact that Armand was married to his sister, Oriane … and he left the sentence unfinished but with an unmistakable hint of menace. So how could he have assured Laure that Didier would never do it again? His own daughter. Unable to protect her.
More image slippage to the day in the wood.
A voice from behind a tree said, “Pssst!”
He said, nervously, “Come out.”
A man in a strange uniform emerged.
He asked, fearfully, “What do you want? Who are you?”
“A friend of your son, Patrick. He’s in London. He told m
e about the cottage. Said it was deserted, almost a ruin. That I could hide there.”
From his voice he was probably English but his French was fluent.
“Who are you? What do you do?”
“It would be better for you not to know. Pretend you’ve never seen me. But I need a key and others may come here from time to time.”
“You know I’m a functionary of the government? I should turn you in.”
“Your son, Patrick, would thank you for that. Already he despises you for working for Vichy. If you want to lose him forever, turn me in. There are many more like me in France. Sooner or later, we’ll be back in force. Then your friends the Huns won’t know what hit them. My job is to report the movements of troops and generals. I ask nothing of you, except that you forget you’ve ever seen me.”
Armand opened the cottage and took the box of butterflies he had stored there. Gave the key to the Englishman. As he turned to go back up the lane, he said, “I will deny all knowledge of your presence but I will not inform on you. Do not compromise me.”
“Merci, Monsieur. Any message for Patrick?”
“Tell him to come home when it’s all over. His mother needs him. And his sister. And his father who loves him.”
“That I will, Monsieur. But for God’s sake don’t say a word to your wife or your daughter. You’ll only put them in danger.”
Laure now, and The Legacy in the attic. Plus the proof that she never gave him the chance with which to exonerate himself. Locked-up family secrets, tales of shame and glory. Never told because he could not bring himself to admit the shame of it, and some glory that seemed minimal. That and the secret pictorial ‘treasure’ of indeterminate title and extraordinarly salacious effect. The portfolio. Ticking away like a time-bomb, ready to destroy his reputation. Finders keepers, as the English say. ‘Biens meubles’ is the French legal term, meaning any objects you can move you can claim title to. Blood money, Laure would say, if she knew the origin of it. Lord knows what she would say if she saw the pictures.
Armand was clear-headed for moments. Then he had a feeling of panic. She must understand that he couldn’t help himself. That he didn’t mean to allow her to be hurt.
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