The Travels of Daniel Ascher

by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

  Still, Daniel had always shown a preference for Alain, an indulgence he didn’t show Thierry. Hélène thought of all the presents he’d given her parents, and still gave them, for the house, for her studies and for her brother’s.

  Maurice was definitely her grandfather, though. How could her parents and grandparents have lied to her all these years, when they’d always taught her to tell the truth? She’d rather not know, she’d prefer never to ask Suzanne this unthinkable question, is Maurice really your son’s father, nor ask Daniel either, and her father even less. And waiting until one or another of them confessed, on their deathbed, in a cracked voice, like in the movies, that was ridiculous.

  Her grandfather was definitely Maurice Chambon. Her ancestors were Chambons and Roches, Auvergne stock whose names and dates were known, the places where they were born and where they died, she’d seen their houses and their tombs in the cemetery. She wasn’t about to replace them with ancestors she knew nothing about, uprooted people scattered goodness knew where in the world, a family of ghosts, a nomadic tribe, glimpsed through the fog, on the far bank of a river. They were nothing to do with her. Otherwise nothing would mean anything anymore. Who would her father’s grandparents be, and what about her, where would she be from? No, her name was Hélène Chambon. Not Hélène Ascher.

  The plane rose above the clouds, the ocean disappeared. Perhaps that was what becoming an adult was, emerging from the clouds, leaving behind the sweet half-light of childhood, coming out into the blinding clarity of a truth you haven’t asked to know. And now for the first time, this girl who’d never been afraid of heights was aware of all thirty thousand feet of emptiness beneath her.

  PART THREE

  April–July 2000

  20

  The Horn-Handled Magnifying Glass

  DANIEL WAS NOT AT HOME when Hélène returned from New York, he was traveling again. It was surprising that he’d left without warning her, without even leaving a note, when back in December he’d let her know he was going to Mauritania. The caretaker hadn’t seen him in the last few days, usually when he went away, he came past with his suitcase to say goodbye and ask her to keep his mail, but not this time. Perhaps the Peyrelevades would know, Hélène said, no, Mrs. Almeida couldn’t think why he would have told them rather than her. Hélène knew there was no reason at all to worry about Daniel, he was a grown-up, he didn’t have to explain himself. And anyway, as when she first came to Paris in September, she didn’t really mind him being away, quite the opposite, she was apprehensive about seeing him again.

  Luckily, she had a deadline to hand an essay in at the institute, and she was completely absorbed in writing it. She had chosen as her subject the mosaic at Germigny-des-Prés, which she’d known since her childhood. Her father had first shown it to her, he liked the little Romanesque oratory, a curved white building like churches in the south, transported by mistake to the middle of a village on the banks of the Loire, and they’d spent many minutes side by side gazing up at the mosaic in the semicircular vault, with him crouching to be level with her and pointing at various details. As a very young girl she’d fallen in love with the two perfectly androgynous archangels whose vast wings brushed together tenderly.

  She took out some photos she’d taken at Germigny and taped them to the walls of her room, in front of her desk and around the bed. She was living inside the mosaic, inhabiting it, she knew every detail of it by heart, the empty Ark of the Covenant, the flitting cherubim in the center, the Savior’s hand marked with a stigma, emerging from a dark rainbow. In fact she could have drawn them with her eyes closed. The symmetrical archangels were as alike as twins, but if you looked more closely, there were four marks forming the shape of a cross on the halo of the one to the left, he was the Christian archangel, and the other, with the plain halo, was the Jewish archangel. And this reminded her of Daniel. The Ark of the Covenant, which is thought to have housed the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, reminded her of Moses, Elie Frailich, his story of escape, and Daniel again. She dreamed of that mosaic almost every night, she saw herself picking up tessellated tiles that had fallen onto the floor of the apse, and putting them together like a puzzle, or deep inside the Ark of the Covenant finding a Jivaro Indian shrunken head whose unstitched mouth sang Hebrew prayers.

  Her only moments of respite were spent reading the Black Insignia books, but even here she was confronted with Daniel’s story in every volume. In The Diamonds of Madagascar, it was children hiding at the bottom of a mine; in The Bloodied Carpets of Lahore, it was a little slave boy, the sole survivor of a massacre; in Aunt Lucy’s Cabin, it was an orphaned Haitian girl torn between her two families; in The Three Tigers of the Taiga, it was an aging Mongol wandering the world to try to forget the wife and children he’s lost.

  She found more and more pleasure in reading the books. Although not fooled by the plot twists or the facile writing style, she let herself be carried away by the stories. But when she talked about them to Guillaume, she still didn’t feel his childish enthusiasm. She pointed out the perennial triumphs of the good, generous white man, saving the dispossessed all over the world. That’s not right, Guillaume protested, raising his voice and making his Adam’s apple jut out from his neck, in Sanders’s books the victims are never passive or defenseless, it’s completely the opposite, they take the initiative, in fact they often go to Peter’s aid when he’s in danger. Look at the women, especially younger women, they’re bold and combative, like the young Roma girl in The Road to Transylvania, or the little servant girl in The Soul Merchants of Bangkok, or the teenage girl who unmasks the terrible headhunter in The Black Cobra of Borneo. He gave other examples, quoted passages, spoke as an expert. Running out of arguments, Hélène cited The Warriors of Mururoa, in which the three women in the crew play only auxiliary roles. The discussion became more heated, they found they were arguing about it, as if not talking about the same books at all.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER SHE RETURNED FROM AMERICA, Hélène received a postcard. It was a view of Odessa, the courtyard of a dilapidated white house and its arched porch, with a caption translated into English, Moldavanka, old Jewish quarter, on the other side were just these few words, Next year rue d’Odessa! Lots of love, Daniel. So he was in the Ukraine, on the shores of the Black Sea, in the city that had given its name to the street where he grew up. She found the card reassuring, but slightly resented Daniel for disappearing without saying anything, at his age, like a runaway teenager. Anyway, the stamp was magnificent, a large ship with square sails, she put the postcard on her bookshelves to show Guillaume, who was also something of a philatelist.

  He studied the stamp for a long time with the magnifying glass, the one Daniel had given Hélène. He was particularly interested in the postmark, OДCÉA, yKPAÏHA, some of the letters weren’t printed clearly and the ink was not the same throughout. He gave a sort of cry of triumph, the postmark was faked. Hélène took the magnifying glass now, perhaps Ukrainian postal workers franked the stamps by hand. Guillaume smiled, what are you talking about, Sanders did this. She couldn’t see the point of going to so much trouble for the price of a stamp. No, no, come on, he put it into your mailbox himself, maybe he didn’t even go to the Ukraine, he could have gone somewhere else, or just stayed in Paris, you can buy new postcards from all over the world and all sorts of stamps from those stalls along the banks of the Seine. Hélène immediately thought of the Vernaison market. She felt she’d been caught out, as if she’d cheated on Guillaume, as if Sanders, the globe-trotting writer, was not her great-uncle. But she hadn’t actually invented anything, Daniel really had spent half his life traveling all over the world, she had proof of it, all those presents he’d brought back for her, like so many pebbles sown by Tom Thumb.

  Guillaume, on the other hand, thought it was a wonderful stratagem, he punched his fist into his other hand and started dancing around the room, looking as ridiculous as the mad sages who warn Tintin of the end of the world in The Shooting St
ar. He really was a big kid. As far as he was concerned, this fake postmark was just a clue in a treasure hunt. It reminded him of The Call of Gibraltar, which Hélène hadn’t yet read, a book set in Tangiers in which Peter meets Ismaïl Seff, who makes false papers for emigrants. Guillaume loved the opening sentence, Call me Ismaïl. He leafed through the book to find the passage: Ismaïl Seff’s forgeries were perfect, but he sometimes took pleasure in smuggling in clues: for example he might add a feather to Hassan II’s fez in an official stamp. He also falsified the postmarks on the postcards he sent to his friends. “Did you have a good trip?” they would then ask him, when Ismaïl had not actually set foot outside the old port.

  Hélène snatched the book from Guillaume, she didn’t want to hear any more, she felt like having a fight, like throwing him out, more than anything else she felt like crying. Guillaume tried hard to persuade her that this trickery did nothing to detract from his admiration for Sanders, in fact it made his travels seem all the more incredible if they were invented, after all, Daniel Defoe had never left London and yet everyone still believed in the story of his Robinson Crusoe. Hélène wasn’t listening. And there on that evening, in that low-ceilinged room, they didn’t realize that this discovery, that meant such diametrically different things to them both, heralded the unraveling of their relationship.

  THE NEXT DAY HÉLÈNE WENT TO PICK UP JONAS from school to take him for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. In his pocket he had the little yellow taxi she’d brought back from New York for him. The apple trees were in blossom, Jonas opened his hand to show her a crumpled petal that he’d caught flying through the air, she said well done, but she wasn’t really there with him. She was thinking about that postcard, wondering whether Daniel was really on the shores of the Black Sea, or actually in Little Odessa in New York, or perhaps rue d’Odessa in Paris, or somewhere else, anything was possible, she conjured a mental picture of him roving over a multicolored globe. And all those other times, had he really traveled or had he lied to them, to her and to all the others, for months, or even for years, perhaps all along? These questions rekindled the suspicions she’d had in the plane on the way home from New York, about Daniel and Suzanne, and the birth of Alain, her father. If Daniel was lying, if the postmarks couldn’t be trusted now, nothing was sure anymore. Jonas had come over to her and was trundling the taxi up her leg, her arm, what are you thinking about, Hélène, look at my car, look at me, what are you thinking about?

  THAT NIGHT GUILLAUME DIDN’T STAY WITH HER. She opened her bedside drawer and took out the postcards Daniel had sent her from Tierra del Fuego and Mauritania. She just wanted to check the postmarks, to reassure herself that her great-uncle wasn’t an impostor. Studying it under the magnifying glass, she saw that the purple NOUAKCHOTT MAURITANIA postmark had the same imperfections as the Ukrainian one. Next she looked at the card from Tierra del Fuego, hoping that this one at least wouldn’t let her down. How had she not noticed straightaway, even with the naked eye you could clearly see a J instead of an F in the postmark, in fact TIERRA DEL FUEGO had been turned into TIERRA DEL JUEGO, not land of fire but land of games.

  21

  L’Chaim

  ON JUNE 11, PENTECOST SUNDAY, the Roche family celebrated Suzanne’s seventieth birthday in Saint-Ferréol. They’d set up a long table in the open barn, and the young, such as Hélène, took on the job of serving the food. It was a very hot day, Aunt Paule was busying away indefatigably in the kitchen, you go and sit down Aunt Paule, I will, I will, a bit later. Glasses in hand, the guests started sitting on green or white plastic chairs, Suzanne had been seated at the head of the table. It was her sons, Alain and Thierry, who’d thought of having this birthday party, she’d been reticent at first, what’s the point, without Maurice, but she’d let herself be persuaded, he would have liked to see her celebrating her birthday in Saint-Ferréol surrounded by the whole family.

  Hélène’s parents were there, of course, and Antoine, her brother, with his brand-new camcorder, Uncle Thierry, cousins from Saint-Amant-Roche-Savine, neighbors from Saint-Ferréol, some friends, at least thirty people, even Pascal, Aunt Paule’s son, had made the journey for the occasion. Daniel hadn’t come. He’d promised to, mind you, but he wasn’t there. Since he’d come back from Odessa, or from God knows where, Hélène had only caught glimpses of him, he stayed at home working, he desperately needed to finish his latest book and deliver it to his editor. Late into the night she could see the light from behind his closed shutters, which he didn’t open even during the day. In the mornings, Mrs. Almeida dragged the garbage cans across the courtyard as quietly as possible so as not to disturb Monsieur Roche, poor man, he was working como um escravo.

  THE CHILDREN GOT DOWN FROM THE TABLE between courses and went to play the French game of bowls, pétanque, or to balance like tightrope walkers along the trunk of the great oak that had been uprooted in the December storm, now stripped of its branches and roots. Antoine filmed the guests, the feast, they’d been cooking for three days, he filmed the teenagers coming and going serving food, and the children scattered about the garden.

  Before the dessert, Alain handed a rectangular parcel to Suzanne on behalf of everyone there, she slowly peeled off the wrapping paper with a mystified expression, even though she probably had her suspicions about what was inside, a gorgeous camera. Then they served the cake, which had been ordered from a patisserie in Ambert, it had a small rectangle of marzipan on top with the words Happy Birthday Suzanne and two candles, one shaped like a seven, the other like a zero. When everyone had a piece of cake, Thierry clinked his knife against his glass, and Hélène was immediately reminded of her grandfather who’d always done that to get everyone’s attention around the table, he had the same voice, the same slightly solemn turn of phrase, in fact, as he neared fifty, Thierry was getting more and more like him. He talked about his father, and in his honor he broke into song with “Le Temps des cerises,” a stirring piece associated with the courage and loss of life in the Paris Commune. Maurice had always sung it for his wife at celebratory meals, and now the older guests joined Thierry in the chorus, but the younger ones didn’t know the words.

  It was at this point that a taxi came to a halt on the road. Before even coming into the courtyard, when he was still on the far side of the gate, Daniel joined in with the others, singing as he drew closer, And ever since then my heart has borne an open wo-o-ound. The moment he saw Daniel step out of the taxi, Thierry had stopped singing.

  By the end of the song, Daniel was coming through the gate and the children ran to meet him, Antoine, standing back slightly, filmed the scene. When the young had left him alone, Daniel kissed Suzanne. She was very touched, I thought you wouldn’t come, then he went around to each of them to say a personal hello, so, our little Parisian, late as usual, you’ve arrived in time for dessert, like the kids. He was quickly found a free chair and given a slice of cake, he mopped his brow and glanced around the table. Conversations gradually resumed where they’d broken off. He’d made a special effort to look smart, his hair neatly combed, clean shaven, a new shirt, the plastic loop from its price tag was still attached to the back of the collar. A few of the younger children came and tugged at his arms, asking him to join them at their end of the table to tell them stories, shhh, shhh, not right away.

  Two women, a cousin and a friend, stood up and said a few words, complimenting Suzanne on how she was looking and expressing kind thoughts about Maurice, people sang and drank to each other’s health, the men slumped against the backs of their chairs because of the heat, the women fanned themselves with paper plates.

  Daniel stood up in turn, he’d never made a speech at a family gathering, it wasn’t his style. Standing there with a full glass in his hand, which was shaking slightly, he dedicated a song to the Roche family, to my parents Angèle and Joseph, to my sisters, and to Maurice too, the Resistance fighter, my brother-in-law, my friend. Everyone knew that Maurice and Daniel had never got along, Hélène was amazed, this was like a
reconciliation, like extending a handshake to Maurice, across the river. Perhaps it was also a revenge, Daniel would never have dared speak up like this in his brother-in-law’s lifetime, until now he’d been happier staying to one side, being with the children, and putting on his usual performance, as if to prove right anyone who called him a clown, starting with Maurice. Out of the corner of her eye, Hélène watched Thierry, who was usually so calm, she thought he looked strained, he was refilling his glass, Suzanne was watching him, too, anxiously, she knew her son tried not to drink too much because he didn’t hold it well. Alain, who was sitting on his mother’s right, put his hand on hers every now and then, reassuringly.

  Daniel raised his glass higher and said L’chaim, it means “to life” in Hebrew, and the guests responded, each in his or her own way, then he drank his glass down in one gulp and broke into a song by Georges Brassens, Elle est à toi cette chanson, toi l’Auvergnat qui sans façon—This song is for you, my dear, you from the Auvergne who showed no fear, and everyone who knew it joined in, there were more of them than there had been for “Le Temps des cerises.”

  Thierry didn’t sing, he was looking at Daniel, he’s no right to sing that, he hissed between his teeth, Hélène was close enough to hear him, despite the stirring voices. Suzanne heard him, too, but she pretended not to notice and carried on singing with the others.

  TOWARD THE END OF THE AFTERNOON, people started to leave the table, the women shaking their skirts that had stuck to their thighs with sweat. The older guests went inside and sat in the cool of the house, while the young cleared the tables and the children sprayed each other with water bottles. Daniel went inside with Suzanne and the others, and they sat around the kitchen table, Aunt Paule, Hélène’s parents, and a few cousins. Thierry had stayed outside, alone at one end of the long table, he’d lined up all the half-drunk bottles and was diligently emptying them one by one. When there was nothing left to drink, he headed unsteadily toward the house and, halfway there, he bent down and picked up a stone. Hélène was just coming out to get a chair, and he pretty much barged past her to get in, he smelled of wine, he positioned himself near the door, holding the stone behind his back. Everyone inside turned toward him, Hélène stayed on the doorstep, he said and now a speech for Daniel, my so-called uncle. For years now I’ve wanted to ask you why Alain always got the best presents, never me. Suzanne stood up, she was very pale, Thierry, I’m ashamed of you, and Alain put his hand around his mother’s arm to stop her, let him speak, Mom. Thierry’s blood was up, he was talking more and more loudly, the ten-speed bike, the stereo, and all that stuff, he was your favorite, he was always your favorite, you took his side even when he was wrong, can you explain why, what had I ever done to you. He was shouting now, unrecognizable, his face purple, you’re not even my uncle, anyway, you’re not part of this family, you’re not from around here, do you get it, so get the hell out of here.