The Travels of Daniel Ascher

by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

  SUZANNE WAS NERVOUSLY FINGERING a corner of the album, June 1950, her marriage to Maurice, the family in the yard, the little cousins standing in front of the bride and groom, their heads hiding her already swollen stomach. She wanted to turn the page, but Hélène held back her hand, people always said they looked alike, particularly in this photo and, hey look, Daniel’s not there. Daniel had gone off on his first journey, to the famous aunt in America, who really did exist even if she wasn’t a millionaire. Since the end of the war she’d been sending him letters in English, in airmail envelopes, written on paper as thin as the pages of a Bible, he used to reply using a dictionary. In 1950 she paid for his passage by boat, Daddy went all the way to Le Havre with him on the train.

  At the end of the album there were a few photos that hadn’t been stuck in, including one of Suzanne and Maurice on the beach with their two sons, someone had written Arcachon, August ’59 on the back. Alain was eight and a half, and Thierry seven, but the younger had already caught up with his older brother and would soon overtake him, Alain was still jealous now, at nearly fifty. Hélène adored this photo, the way her grandfather was kneeling on the sand, holding his two boys by the shoulders, their three heads close together, and their mother sitting beside them, watching them. Hélène kept it.

  THAT EVENING SHE CAME ACROSS the gray-and-red spine of The Ferrymen of the Amazon in the bookcase; it was the only Black Insignia title there. It had no dedication, the title page had been torn out. She started reading from where Guillaume had stopped telling her the story, when Peter is getting close to the Indian village, and an arrow whistles past his ear and drives into his backpack. She read on as the hero doubles back through the forest, then slips into the village at night to warn the shaman, Peter is captured and the tribe is attacked by members of the expedition. She became quite caught up by the battle of the Carinaua, led by Zensuna, the cacique’s daughter, who was once a friend of the hero’s but then withdrew her friendship, in the end she releases him in order to enlist him among her warriors. After that the whites are routed, Peter leaves and crosses the river by canoe while the Indians salute him from the bank, and Zensuna is the last to turn and walk away.

  TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS, when all the family had left, Hélène stayed on in Moulins for a few more hours. Just before saying goodbye to her, Suzanne remembered that Daniel had taken a knife or a bradawl to school one day and had hurt another pupil. The teacher had punished him and confiscated his weapon, and the child had fallen sick as a result of this. Paule probably remembers more about it than me, she has a better memory, and you know what she’s like, she always knows everything.

  15

  Daniel’s Dagger

  HÉLÈNE CAUGHT THE TRAIN TO CLERMONT-FERRAND, fairly sure that Aunt Paule wouldn’t be able to spare any time for her. Since she’d retired, what with the parish and her various associations, she’d never been so busy, not that being a midwife was exactly a picnic, as she used to say. When she was at Saint-Ferréol in the summer, she busied herself in the garden. When Hélène and her brother spent the Easter vacation and the month of July with their grandparents, Aunt Paule was always there, she was the one who planned the meals, bandaged up wounds, and predicted the next day’s weather from the color of the sky at sunset. Whatever the situation, you had to ask Paule, she would know. Being a widow herself, she’d known which psalm to read in church at her brother-in-law Maurice’s funeral in February, and she’d supported her devastated sister. She was dependable, indefatigable, she lived up to the family name of Roche: she was a rock.

  When Hélène arrived at Paule’s house, she felt, as she always did, in the way. The little house was teeming with volunteers making up parcels to give to the poor on New Year’s Day. They took a long time to leave and, because the TV was warning of strong winds, Hélène and Paule closed all the shutters before sitting down to eat. Paule opened a jar of preserved beans and made an omelet, breaking the eggs with one hand, the way Suzanne did. When Hélène had slipped her napkin into its ring at the end of the meal but before she began to clear the table, she finally plucked up the courage to say, do you mind my asking, do you remember when Daniel first arrived. But instead of replying, Paule put a finger to her mouth and strained her ears. A low moan from the living room was growing louder, turning into a roar, a violent booming sound, it was the wind in the chimney and the metal draft stopper rattling demonically.

  A moment later the lights went out, Paule fumbled and lit a candle, and the flame guttering in the draft projected shifting shadows behind her. This was far more than the gusts they’d forecast, more than any ordinary storm. Paule turned on an old battery-powered radio, and they sat back down at the table to listen to the news, like during a blackout. A hurricane the likes of which had never been seen, even more violent than the one that had blown across northern Europe the day before, was sweeping over the whole of southern France, here in the Auvergne it wasn’t yet at full strength. Sure enough, they could hear it howling more and more loudly, whistling under roof tiles and into pipes, shaking the walls, the whole house creaked, it felt as if the place might collapse. The worst of it was being condemned to listen to this racket without being able to see anything. All along the street around them, shutters smacked like pistol shots, tiles and all sorts of loose items shattered on the ground or against walls, sirens sounded in every direction, it felt like an air raid. Paule wanted to call Suzanne and the rest of the family, but the telephone was cut off and Hélène’s cell phone had no signal. At seventy-three, Paule had never seen anything like it. Luckily the houses on her street were a terrace so they would hold each other up. The building Suzanne lived in was solid and modern, she would be in no danger.

  It seemed to have reached its paroxysm, the noise was not growing any louder, they could go to bed. Paule gave Hélène a flashlight, and she herself walked up the stairs with the nonchalance of someone who’s seen it all before, but the candlestick quivered in her hand. Hélène settled down for the night on the living room sofa, under a picture of Paule’s son as a communicant, flanked by photos of Mother Teresa and Sister Emmanuelle, who looked rather less reassuring in the dim light. She thought of Guillaume, he would be safe in the far south, but she’d have liked to call him, just to hear him describe this as some kind of adventure. Zipping up the sleeping bag, she thought how they’d have clung to each other if they’d been together, like lovers swept away into the torments of hell.

  The noise was still too loud for her to sleep so she eventually decided to read Theft in the Fugitives’ Garden by flashlight. The strangely heavy trunk that Peter finds in Jihap Ostrov’s house is actually empty, it is secured to the floor, its false bottom hiding a trapdoor. Lying on beds in the basement, the molds look as if they’re sleeping, and Ostrov is just there gazing at them. He’s gone half mad and thinks he’s Octavius Quartio who left the city the day before the natural disaster, and who searched in vain for his family. Peter grasps that Ostrov also lost his wife and son in an accident. He wants to save these two figures from the next, even more terrifying eruption, which will bury the living along with all memory of the dead.

  The wind gradually calmed while she read. Perhaps because she’d been reading through a hurricane, the book left her with something more than its slightly facile detective mystery, an impression of terror. The cover said for readers 10 years and above. You’d have to be thoughtless, she felt, or even cruel, to talk about grief and the death of a child and pain that drives people mad to such young readers. She eventually fell asleep. In her dream, the ground at the cemetery in Toulouse was covered in hardened ash and, using her trowel and brush, she exposed a small head. She recognized Jonas’s mop of hair. He was so deeply asleep that she couldn’t wake him, even when she screamed his name.

  In the morning there was still no power in the house, and the radio was announcing dozens of deaths, whole neighborhoods ravaged, forests flattened all over Europe, Paule kept saying, poor people, those poor people. She suddenly jumped to her fee
t, it must have been even worse in Saint-Ferréol, they had to go and see. Hélène wanted to stop her going, there was no rush, the radio was advising people against making any unnecessary journeys, but Paule never changed her mind, she’d go alone if no one went with her.

  Hélène drove Paule’s Citroën AX, at least she’d held her ground on that, she had to drive cautiously, slowing down at every corner for fear of finding something blocking the way, driving around fallen branches, sometimes whole trees that the emergency workers had simply pushed to one side. Aunt Paule kept her eyes pinned on the road as if she were driving herself. Hélène made the most of her enforced inactivity, when Daniel was at school in Saint-Ferréol, do you remember him having a knife that the teacher confiscated? Paule turned to look at Hélène, do you think this is the time to talk about that, you’d do better to look where you’re going.

  At the Issoire exit, the road was partially blocked by a fallen road sign, Hélène slammed on the brakes, the car stalled, and Paule clutched at her heart. A dagger, I remember, that’s what he used to call it, it was a pencil he’d had when he first arrived, he always kept it in his pocket, a normal pencil but sharpened into a really spiky point, he sharpened it on a stone like the knife grinders in Thiers, he said it was very special, its lead was made of black diamond, it was worth a fortune and he could give someone a nasty poke in the eye with it. He scratched Henri Gachon’s arm with it one day, what a palaver. The teacher punished Daniel, of course. The next day, maybe it was coincidence, Daniel had a fever, he missed several days of school. Paule heaved a long sigh, our parents had some times with that boy, especially at the beginning, he was so spoiled, before, at home, he must have got away with everything, I don’t like cabbage, I don’t want this, don’t want that. He helped when it suited him, feeding the rabbits, collecting the eggs, he was happy to do that, but he’d pinch his nose and say the chickens stank. We didn’t put up with that sort of behavior in our house, Daddy was kindhearted but you couldn’t rebel.

  The road was climbing up into the mountains, covered in a thin layer of snow; after Chambon-sur-Dolore it became narrower and snaked between the trees, dropping gently back down through Champétières and Susmontargues to Saint-Ferréol-des-Côtes. In places some of the fir trees had been blown over by the storm, and large chaotic clearings now gaped where they had stood. With her hands clamped on her knees, Aunt Paule gazed at the expanses of devastated forest, what a disaster, my God, what a disaster. Before she even stepped out of the car she saw the great oak tree in the courtyard to the house lying broken on the ground, its roots full of earth rearing up toward the sky. She didn’t say anything but went straight over to it, put her hand flat against its trunk, and stroked its bark as you would an invalid’s forehead. She looked as her mother had at the end, when Hélène used to visit her in her nursing home, and the old girl would mistake her for Suzanne.

  They had no electricity here either. Hélène made some tea in the freezing kitchen, and Paule sat down holding her cup in both hands to warm them. Hélène couldn’t remember coming to Saint-Ferréol in winter, and for the first time the house, which was empty, closed, and unlit, felt unfamiliar. They went upstairs and opened the shutters in her bedroom, the blue room, and Hélène sat on the bed. Three knots in the joist overhead still made the shape of an elephant’s head, and she knew without opening it that in the drawer of the bedside table there was bone cutlery from a child’s tea set and an incomplete pack of Happy Families. She thought about the first night Daniel would have spent in this room, with two girls he didn’t know, who weren’t yet his sisters.

  Hélène indicated the bed she was sitting on, when you were little, did you sleep here, yes, with Suzanne, the two of us always slept there. And his little bed was over there, you see, sometimes he talked in his sleep, he would say me too, wait for me, the words didn’t mean anything, he’d always forgotten in the morning. She picked up a tuft of wool that had escaped from a seam on the mattress and rolled it around between her fingers. At the end of the war he was too big to sleep with girls, we cleared out the junk room to make a bedroom for him. It was around about then that he went off to boarding school in Clermont, to Lycée Blaise Pascal, the teacher let him take the entrance exam late because of the circumstances, and he caught up afterward. He used to come home to Saint-Ferréol on Saturday evenings.

  Hélène opened the door to the attic stairs and climbed up, she didn’t remember the ceiling being so low, even in the middle you couldn’t stand up straight, a bit of daylight came in through tiny windows at floor level. The little bed had been put away up here, dismantled, she could remember sleeping in it, like every child in the family, and her hand recognized the relief of a sailing ship sculpted into the headboard. It was okay for Daniel, who was small for his age, but he wriggled a lot and was always bumping into the side panels. Their father had replaced these panels with horizontal rails so that he could put out a foot or a leg, you could still see the screw holes. Paule showed her the little wooden shutters Joseph had made to stop the cold air coming through the windows, which had had no glass in them at the time. It was in case Daniel had to hide in the attic, he’d slept there only once, and nothing happened in the end anyway. But he’d liked it in here, so he used to sneak up to read, his teacher would lend him Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, that sort of thing. It was cold in the attic and there was condensation coming out of Paule’s mouth as she spoke.

  Maurice came over almost every evening at the end of the war, he taught primary school in Saint-Amant-Roche-Savine. He’d set himself the task of finding Daniel’s parents in the lists in the papers, it took weeks, months, and then one evening, it was something about the way he rested his bicycle against the wall, we just knew. He went over to Daniel and put his hand on his shoulder, like he probably did with his pupils, but Daniel ducked away and ran up to his bedroom. Maurice spoke in an undertone, he’d seen three names on a list, the father, the mother, and the daughter. Until then we’d thought Daniel was an only child, had he led us to believe that or had we assumed it? Just once, much later, in 1950, he told me, and just me, that she was about the same age as me, well, she would have been. Then nothing more, not even her name. It was right before he set off for Le Havre. Daddy took him up and when he got home he was all in a state, poor Joseph, he told us he’d stayed on the quay watching the ship until it was far, far away, and then he didn’t say another thing until the following morning. Hélène pictured her great-grandfather, whom she’d seen only in photographs, an impressive figure of a man with his hand shielding his eyes, watching the liner disappear over the horizon.

  When Daniel returned from America, he went to live in Paris, and it was only several years later that he took to coming back to Saint-Ferréol. Paule had taken him in her Citröen to visit their father in the hospital in Ambert a couple of times, and later they’d gone to see their mother in her nursing home. Angèle had forgotten his name, but she would squeeze his hand in hers and say, you know I’ve still got your medal. It was the Righteous medal that Daniel had ensured they were awarded.

  They went back down to the second floor, Hélène closed the shutters up in the blue bedroom. Shortly after the war, the aunt in America, his mother’s sister, wanted to adopt him, she was meant to be coming to collect him and had had a letter translated into French, saying she was coming. Our parents didn’t say anything, Grandma Guyon shut herself in her bedroom to cry. The aunt could have insisted on having him, there were court cases at the time, she would probably have won. And then they received a second letter, in which she abandoned her claim, without explaining why. Daniel could stay with the Roches, he could come visit when he was eighteen. No one said anything more about it, but at eighteen, or not even quite that, Daniel set off for New York, if she’s still alive now that aunt of his, she must be over ninety. Her name’s Mala, I think.

  On the way back through the kitchen, Paule opened the cupboard with all the preserved fruits and vegetables, and took a few jars to bring back to Clermont
. In the old days, this cupboard didn’t have any shelves, we kept brooms in it, one time Daddy shut Daniel in here for God knows what misdemeanor, and he wrote on the wall with his famous pencil that he always kept in his pocket. You could still make out the word SHIT in large letters, and a picture of a dog with its jaws open and a speech bubble saying BEWARE I BITE! They got back into the car, Paule watched Hélène at the wheel, it’s amazing how like Suzanne you are, Suzanne at the time of her marriage, twenty, it’s very young, when you come to think about it.

  HÉLÈNE WENT BACK TO PARIS on one of the first trains to run again, passengers piled in as best they could, sitting on armrests, in corridors, on their bags, a real exodus. Guillaume had stayed down south, so she celebrated the year 2000 with a girlfriend from the Institute of Archaeology. Everyone was waiting for midnight more impatiently than usual, talking loudly, getting excited, and with good reason, they weren’t just changing year, but changing century and millennium, it was the eve of a new era. Listening to the old Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” they messed around blowing smoke rings, the zeros in 2000, then they blew at them to break them up. However much they made fun of millennium scaremongers, of the millennium bug, and the end of the world foretold by astrologers, they still believed in it all a bit, and as the evening wore on and they drank more and more, their laughter became tainted with anxiety. The recent cyclones could have been signs of something; meteorologists had named them Lothar and Martin, like a couple of escaped fairground bears. A very pretty, totally drunk girl stood on the sofa with her hair tumbling loose, invoking the gods and prophesying the end of our civilization, a turning point in the history of the world.