The Travels of Daniel Ascher

by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

  Down below, the air was icy, far colder than in the street. A voice behind her startled her, can I help you, miss. It was a very old woman, she was very short and slight with a black hat worn askew, trailing a shopping trolley and carrying a baguette in her hand. When she saw this extremely old, extremely small woman, Hélène realized she’d finally found what she was looking for. She asked the woman if she was from the neighborhood, and did she know what used to be here, repeating her question more loudly to be sure she was heard, yes, where the gallery is there used to be a passage, a narrow street with all sorts of workshops, cabinetmakers, printers, locksmiths, children used to come and play here. Hélène followed the old woman back up the slope, and as she reemerged onto rue d’Odessa, she took a great lungful of air. Standing facing the apartment building, the old lady outlined buildings in the air with her loaf of bread, one on either side of the passage, there was a hosiery store at number 18, and two little businesses at number 16, a photo studio on the left and an upholsterer on the right. Hélène saw them appear magically thanks to that wand of bread, the two shops at number 16 with white lettering on the narrow frontage: STUDIO ASCHER, PHOTOGRAPHY. Did the passage have a name, not an official name, no, but we used to call it Odessa Passage, and the people who lived on rue du Départ called it passage du Départ, Departure Passage. It was all razed to the ground in 1970, along with the station and a good chunk of the neighborhood, so they could build the tower and all the other stuff, imagine the noise, rubble everywhere, like after an air raid, it was a living hell for fifteen years. She couldn’t remember the photographer’s name, Agère, Ascher, you say, it could have been, the studio had changed hands, she didn’t remember the new people, or whether they’d had children. They left during the war, the upholsterer took over the premises to expand his workshop. He repainted the whole shop front brown, it was blue before, dark blue. She didn’t know why those people had left, whether they were Jews, no, no idea, she hadn’t heard. The upholsterer had left the area after the Liberation. But why do you want to know all this, I’m an archaeology student, I’m interested in old stones, the old woman raised her eyebrows and nodded her head, oh, that’s good, that’s a very good thing.

  On her way back to rue Vavin, Hélène thought about a demolition site she’d once seen in Orléans. The walls of the neighboring building still had expanses of wallpaper, the outlines left by paneling, wardrobes, and fireplaces, and even photos of boats decorating a child’s bedroom. There must have been a moment when 16 rue d’Odessa had just been demolished and the already outdated vestiges of Daniel’s and his family’s life could still be seen, a scrap of wallpaper here, the mark left by a mirror or a painting there.

  SHE SLEPT ALONE THAT NIGHT and dreamed of the Odessa Baths. In her dream it didn’t look like the place she’d seen, there was a large brick building with strange music emanating from it, like the whistling of an organ with twisted pipes. Dozens of people, mostly children, stood in line, waiting by the door, they were naked and each of them held a piece of soap. Her brother was there, too, much younger than her, they were trying to see what was going on inside, but the windows were frosted, you couldn’t see anything. She noticed a familiar face in the crowd, but she couldn’t say where she’d seen the girl before.

  The dream woke her, and she lay there wide-eyed for a moment with the peculiar lucidity that sometimes comes in the middle of the night. She got up and removed the photo of the earth from the air that was hiding the Soutine painting. It looked different in the half-light, what she now noticed was not so much the suffering of a deformed body as the girl’s eyes. Those eyes were too big and were staring right at her.

  She ran her hand gently over the portrait as if to soothe the terrified face, and felt a bump in the surface. The frame opened like a door to reveal a small compartment carved into the wall. Inside it was a scroll of yellowed paper with a few words handwritten in Hebrew script:

  PART TWO

  December 1999–April 2000

  13

  Aboard a Junk on the Yangtze

  HÉLÈNE HAD PASSED IT DOZENS OF TIMES, Félicie’s Sweet Nothings, a store on rue Bréa that sold all kinds of candy. She went in with Guillaume just before the Christmas break, when they were to be apart for two weeks, he was going to his parents in the south and she to her family in the Auvergne. The tiny shop smelled of caramel; strings of gingerbread Santa Clauses hung under tall glass jars labeled Ardoise Tiles, Vichy Pastilles, and Pau Freshwater Pebbles. Guillaume wanted to buy a few of everything, to taste them, and the saleswoman looked listless and disgruntled as she climbed up the steps to take down the jars one after the other. Hélène had bad memories of hard candy: when she was very little she’d dropped her grandma’s candy box, and she could still see the candy all muddled in with pieces of broken porcelain, she could hear her grandfather’s deep voice, look at your brother, he’s younger than you and better behaved. And her father had said softly, perhaps so that only she would hear, that he too had always been shown his brother as an example, look at Thierry, good as gold, and you’re always clowning around.

  Guillaume was looking at the old-style metal tins, Montargis Pralines, Nancy Bergamots, Cambrai Mint Candy. The Nevers Negus reminded him of one of the Black Insignia titles, The Heirs of the Negus, it was set in Ethiopia and featured alcohol-soaked colonizers and despicable child-slave traffickers. The saleswoman stopped what she was doing, her hand in midair, did you say something about The Black Insignia, and as if she’d taken off a mask, she was now smiling, I know the author, you know, he lives just around the corner. He’s my great-uncle, said Hélène. The woman nearly kissed her, Daniel Roche was an old acquaintance, when he’d stopped smoking he’d taken to coming and buying licorice sticks, and they’d got along well, he put dedications in all his books for me, To my beautiful Félicie, that’s my name, you see. Her cheeks were flushing at this point. She and Guillaume swapped anecdotes from the books, he liked all the colorful characters you came across, she preferred passages full of mystery, her favorite was the latest book, the twenty-third, Theft in the Fugitives’ Garden. Guillaume wasn’t so keen on it, it wasn’t really an adventure story, almost a whodunit, he turned to Hélène, it’s set in Pompeii, and it’s about archaeology, you might like it.

  The saleswoman closed up the bags with small red ties, she had a soft spot for the hero, for being so well traveled and absentminded, and for his tattoo, she called him Pete, overfamiliarly. Guillaume couldn’t really see what a woman would find attractive about a globe-trotter, never there, always on the far side of the world, she smiled, you wouldn’t understand, well, for instance, Daniel’s always traveling too, but Lord knows he’s had plenty of female admirers, she was slowly putting the parcels into a bag, I mean, take me for example, I can talk about it now, if it had been up to me …

  Hélène wondered what she would have looked like twenty years earlier, she was still pretty, with her cute chin and finely drawn eyebrows, but the thought of Daniel having an affair with a woman seemed preposterous, she’d never imagined her great-uncle in love, perhaps because of his childish streak. Félicie was still smiling, her head tilted down toward her calculator, they say sailors have a woman in every port, but Daniel and Pete are the same, their hearts are taken by just one woman and they couldn’t ever really love another. Guillaume asked her whom Peter loved, there was no mention of a particular woman anywhere in the books, she smiled and popped an extra packet of biscuits into the bag, they’re Wise Word Wafers, have you seen them before, they have things written on them, they’re on the house, because you like reading.

  Guillaume put the eleven parcels of candy onto the desk in Hélène’s bedroom and tasted every one of them, then they lined up the wafers, What’s eating you, Can you keep a secret, Don’t say a word, and they ate them until there was only one left, I love you, which they saved till last.

  Late in the evening they went to eat at the Jade Lotus, a little Chinese place farther up rue Vavin. They were the only customers and th
ey chose a table in the small back room. The left-hand wall was decorated with a landscape, steep mountains and women carrying parasols, and this was reflected in a mirror on the right. The radio was playing a monotonous chant sung in a high-pitched voice. This kitsch version of China was all it took for them to travel. They sat side by side practicing their chopstick skills on five-spice duck, giggling when they lost a mouthful. Guillaume told Hélène about the episode in The Clay Army of Xi’an, when the young peasant woman finds the first of Emperor Qin’s terra-cotta soldiers in a well and realizes with fascination that he has the exact same face as her.

  That night the little garret bedroom was a junk drifting over the Yangtze. They slept spooned together, as had become their habit, his arm around her body, soldered to each other, they thought, for all eternity.

  14

  Grandma Guyon Unraveling Her Knitting

  THE RAILS SPOOLED PAST SLOWLY, crossing over each other and fusing together as the train drew out of Lyon station, a drum rhythm crackled from her neighbor’s earphones. Hélène opened up her notes on a lecture, “Byzantine Mosaics, Restoration Techniques,” but her own words made her feel tired. Before they were over the river Seine, the boy next to her had fallen asleep. She took Theft in the Fugitives’ Garden from her bag, the cover showed Peter Ashley-Mill walking through the dead city with Vesuvius smoking in the background, she just wanted to leaf through it.

  “Furto stranissimo all’orto dei fuggiaschi.” This headline in a local newspaper attracts Peter’s attention as he sips his cappuccino beside the Bay of Naples. He is holidaying at the Pensione Miramare because his doctor has told him to get some rest. A strange theft has just taken place in Pompeii, in the garden where dozens of victims were trapped within the glowing cloud. The molds of two bodies have disappeared, a woman and a young child. The article discusses likely collusion, the site is full of people during the day and guarded at night, and these molds are substantial things. Absorbed in his reading, Peter brings the sugar bowl up to his mouth instead of his cup, ponders for a moment, and then gets to his feet. His vacation was not to be a long one.

  The police are dragging their feet over the case, Peter explores Pompeii in search of clues, the Baths, the Marketplace, the Villa of the Mysteries. He gets hold of photographs of the stolen molds, the woman lying on her stomach with her arms folded over the face, the child curled up on himself. Why did the thieves choose these particular molds, perhaps they were hoping to retrieve jewelry embedded in the plaster. By blowing up an image from the inquiry, Peter makes out a silhouette in the background. He also uses the old trick with ashes: spread over the floor of the archives room at the Naples Museum of Archaeology one evening, they reveal footprints in the morning.

  Hélène suddenly realized that the boy next to her had left, and the train had gone through Nevers, she went back to her reading. In the museum’s visitor book Ashley-Mill sees messages in Latin signed Octavius Quartio, the name of a man who owned a grand villa in Pompeii before it was demolished by Vesuvius. These messages lead him to the famous volcanologist Jihap Ostrov, who’s frequently been heard predicting catastrophes in his strong Russian accent. His neighbors on the island of Ischia where he lives haven’t set eyes on him since the theft. Peter manages to get into his house and goes into every room. In one of the bedrooms he finds a peculiarly heavy trunk. He opens the lid.

  She was finishing the chapter when the train started to slow down, Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will be arriving in Moulins. Hélène only just had time to get her things together before alighting.

  SHE ARRIVED AT HER GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE at lunchtime, and as soon as the meal was over she went to look for the photo album as usual, but Suzanne said, for heaven’s sake, you know those photos by heart. She’d been a widow for only ten months, and Hélène had expected to find her submerged in grief, as she had been back in the summer. But the moment Hélène had stepped into the apartment, she’d noticed Suzanne was almost rejuvenated, wearing a new brightly colored sweater, her eyes brought out by a hint of eye-liner. They were alone together, the rest of the family wouldn’t arrive until the next day. Over lunch, Suzanne had talked about how she was keeping busy, still teaching at the hospital, the tai chi, that was new, she’d even done a demonstration in the kitchen, I’m repelling the tiger, I’m shaking up the clouds, stop laughing or I’ll fall flat on my face. She had plans, too, she wanted to see a bit of the world, she’d always dreamed of going and listening the whale song in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Maurice didn’t like travel. Hélène wondered whether the lady was protesting a bit too much in order to convince her, or to convince herself. Could she start a new life at her age, you can start a new game of cards or redecorate the living room, but life itself, can you do that again?

  After wiping down the oilcloth, Hélène opened the album on the table. She knew these old family photos well, she and her brother had looked through them every time they spent their vacations in Saint-Ferréol when they were little. At the time, the photos had been strewn pell-mell in a large drawer in a dresser. When Suzanne’s mother died, Suzanne had claimed them, Paule didn’t put much store by memories of the past. Then Hélène’s grandfather had sorted them into big albums, adding headings and dates in his beautiful handwriting.

  Hélène thought she remembered the class photo in which Daniel appeared for the first time, she could picture him in an overall and clogs like the other boys. She was wrong. Posing in front of the school’s stone façade, captured among some thirty other little lads, Daniel was the only one wearing ankle boots. He was the last child in the middle row, standing slightly apart from the others, you couldn’t tell whether he was smiling, he was also the only one whose eyes weren’t turned toward the photographer but were looking in a different direction. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t recognized him in the Peyrelevades’ wedding photo.

  The two women pored over the photograph, their heads almost touching, and Hélène could feel Suzanne’s breath, with its smell of coffee, on her cheek. Don’t you think he looks a bit lost, she asked, who do you mean, Daniel, no he doesn’t, why lost. Suzanne pointed at his sweater, its collar peeping out under his overall, I remember that sweater, it was dark red, it was mine before he had it, Grandma Guyon had knitted it up again for him. Suzanne left her finger on the neckline of the overall for a moment, the first time I saw Daniel he was wearing that sweater. As she arrived home that day, she’d found her mother and grandmother pulling the sweater over a child’s head. In the end Grandma fetched a pair of scissors to cut the seam, and a stranger’s faced popped out. It was only then that Suzanne’s mother noticed her, come over, this is the little refugee boy we told you about. She’d pictured a much younger child, one she could mollycoddle, I thought I was going to be able to mother him, no way, he was ten years old and I was twelve, oh, the disappointment, I thought I’d never get used to him, and then in the end.

  She’d been jealous at first, like when a baby brother is born and takes your place, how funny, I’d completely forgotten that business with the sweater. Grandma Guyon spent the war years unraveling our knitwear, she’d get Daniel to sit down with his arms in the air so she could wind the hanks of yarn around them, stop scrobbling about, my little goose. She would tell him stories to make him sit still, he always begged for the one about the goat who wants to marry the king’s daughter, do you know it, the king insists he provide a palace and a garden, and the goat builds them, but whatever the goat does, the king never keeps his promise.

  On the following page, May 1944, Daniel was posing outside the church, with a communicant’s armband over his sleeve. He’d been baptized two years earlier, immediately after he arrived, so that he had a certificate. We still used his first name, which didn’t sound too Jewish. In the picture he was standing up straight with Paule and Suzanne on one side, and Angèle, their mother, and tiny Grandma Guyon on the other. The sun was making them all squint, giving them a family resemblance, look, his breast pocket’s on the right, mommy cut h
is jacket out of an old one of Daddy’s by turning it inside out.

  We used to play Happy Families together a lot, could I have Master Block the Butcher’s son please, the one with the pig’s head in a basket, we still have that game, you know, I should think there are some cards missing now. Daniel always won at hide-and-seek, he’d hide in the attic, under the sink in the back kitchen, in the broom cupboard, in the hayloft, not in the cellar, never, you could walk straight into ours, and he felt that a proper cellar had to be underground. He used to stay hidden until I gave up and stopped looking for him.

  Hélène asked whether Daniel talked about Paris, or his family, whether he’d brought any photos or belongings, no, just some clothes in a little suitcase, a few Bayard magazines and one tiny little book, but no mementoes. When he talked about his parents, it was just to show off in front of his friends, to big himself up, he used to say his father had a fabulous car, that his aunt in America was a millionaire, yeah right, we all knew that was make-believe. He never said anything about his real life, not even later. All through the war, it didn’t matter that the three of us, me, him, and Paule, lived in the same house and slept in the same room even, Daniel was just a sort of temporary brother. A few years after the Liberation, Angèle and Joseph adopted him. When he showed Grandma Guyon his real ID card with the name Daniel Roche on it, she said my goose, my little one, and she cried.