There was a small kitchen in a recess and, behind a curtain under the stairs, there were deep shelves full of provisions of every sort, condensed milk, canned food, shampoo, crackers, and dozens of bags of sugar piled up like bricks, enough to survive a siege. Apart from these stores, nothing in the apartment was modern; it was a meticulous reconstruction of a prewar interior, even the stove and the cooking pots were from the period, as if time had stood still.
A door led to a second, smaller room with ocher-colored wallpaper, a bedroom with a single bed up against the wall, shelves filled with old books, and a desk with a writing case. A bathroom had been fitted into one corner, with a bathtub with lion’s paw feet, and here, as with the rest of the place, all the lamps were lit. Hélène noticed some yellowed books next to a Jaz alarm clock with unmoving hands on the bedside table, and she suddenly realized that nothing in this underground home suggested travel, no suitcases ready for an imminent departure, no artifacts brought home from abroad, no maps, no guides. Just as the apartment upstairs was a stopping-off point, this one down here, its music, carpets, warm lighting, old wooden furniture, and heavy smell of amber, engendered a sort of languor, made you want to stay and never leave. Daniel was nowhere to be seen, but the phonograph playing and the candles implied he’d just been here and was still nearby.
On the far side of the bedroom, a door had been left ajar, Hélène opened it gently, she knew Daniel wouldn’t be here. It was the smallest of the three rooms, its white walls and ceiling formed one continuous vault and were covered with dozens of black-and-white photos, portraits of men, women, children, married couples, families. Some bore the signature of Ascher Studios, others didn’t, but they all had something in common, a recognizable armchair, a column, a carpet, and more particularly the same poses, the body at a slight angle, the head turned toward the camera. Hélène picked out Colette and Jim Peyrelevade on their wedding day, with little Daniel sitting cross-legged in the first row, and the photos of the Ascher family that she’d been shown in New York. They’d all been printed on very fine-grained, off-white matte paper and had been retouched in minute detail, making the oval of the subjects’ faces a little too perfect. They were most likely portraits taken and retouched by Daniel’s parents, in the Ascher Studios on rue d’Odessa. It felt to her as if all those faces almost took on a family likeness, that they reflected some of the photographer’s kindliness in the moment when he captured their image.
A brown leather chair in the middle of the room beckoned to Hélène to sit down, its legs must have been sawn off, it was so low that she felt she was falling. Facing her was a framed photo, larger than the others. It was the last portrait of the Ascher family taken on Daniel’s tenth birthday, the one she’d seen in a smaller version at Mala Seligman’s apartment. The father looked like Daniel as she’d known him when she was a child, the mother with her slightly tired smile was wearing a dark dress and a brooch, her children had her eyes, almond eyes with long lashes, but the girl’s face was too sharp and her expression too severe for her to be entirely pretty, her chestnut brown curls were held up by a barrette to one side, and she was wearing a polka-dot blouse. The little brother, with his buttoned-up jacket, was smiling so widely he had creases at the corners of his eyes, and a lock of curly hair lolled over his forehead. He was holding a book so small that his fingers almost completely obscured its cover, but in this blowup of the picture you could make out the word WORLD. This framed photo stood on a set of shelves, on which there were also three lighted candles and a neat line of little pebbles.
Hélène gazed at those four faces for a long time, she was trying to find some anxiety in them, some suffering, a foreshadowing of calamity, but she saw nothing, they were serene, all smiles, brought together by their pose and by likenesses that the retouching process may have accentuated. The more she looked, the more interchangeable Isaac, Rywka, Hana, and Daniel became, and they blended with the reflection of her own face in the glass of the frame. She knew she’d come to the end, she couldn’t go any farther, like when you reach the lowest stratum on a dig. She was no longer looking for Daniel; she’d found him. She was at 16 rue d’Odessa. The languorous feeling produced by the smell of amber was growing stronger and stronger, making her sleepy. Unable to fight it, Hélène let her head drop against the back of the chair and gave in to sleep.
SHE COULDN’T TELL HOW LONG SHE’D SLEPT, but the sound of a door being closed far away woke her. The chair was so low that she had to grasp onto the armrests to get up. A small gust of fresh air was circulating around the basement, dissipating the smell of amber and the lethargic heaviness that went with it. The candle in the first room was no longer lit. A large picture above the divan attracted her attention, she hadn’t noticed it earlier, perhaps because it was on the same side as the staircase. It was Soutine’s Girl with a Menorah, the same as in her own bedroom, but this was a larger reproduction and it was in color. The young girl was in a pale yellow dress and she was in front of a dark blue wall, next to a bronze menorah. Her face and body were distorted, as if the painter had seen her through tears, but Hélène recognized Hana, with her chestnut curls pinned to one side, and her face that was too sharp to be entirely pretty. Her hands were clamped on her thighs and threw two scarlet shadows over the pale fabric of her dress, like two bloodstains. The sheen of her eyes was a blazing red, as if they were watching a huge destructive fire. Hélène could now see what made this portrait so unbearable. Soutine had painted everything that couldn’t be seen in the photos, on those overly smooth, overly retouched images that harbored so many illusions and lies. He’d foreseen the torments to come, the blue of bruised bodies, the red of open wounds and firestorms.
Hélène climbed slowly back up the wooden staircase and out through the trapdoor in the brown suitcase. The other suitcase had gone. She didn’t look around the apartment, she knew Daniel had left. There were four messages on the answering machine, including hers, but she didn’t recognize her own voice. One was from Prosper, Allah y hafdek, my brother, God keep you, I wish you fair winds. The other two were from Daniel’s editor, one left that same day, Daniel, stop reworking your manuscript, let me read the thing, I’m sure it’s great. You said it wasn’t really an adventure story, it’s too personal, but that’s exactly why your loyal readers are going to love it. I sent you a courier but you didn’t answer the door. I’m getting worried. Give me a sign of life, Daniel, I really need you to.
He might have left his manuscript on the desk. If she found it, she’d be its first reader. But try as she might to find it, turning over the accumulated papers, she couldn’t see it. All the files had been deleted from the computer’s memory, images of the planets just drifted across the screen, indefinitely. She hoped that by searching through the notebooks and jotting pads scattered pell-mell around the place, she might exhume a rough draft, some fragments that would at least give her an idea of what this last book in the Black Insignia series would be like. She spent a long time studying the diagrams, drawings, and plans he’d sketched out, and opening screwed-up balls of paper. He’d clearly vacillated between a first- and third-person narrative, between Peter and Daniel. In the wastepaper basket she salvaged a list of titles with alterations and crossings-out: Peter’s Childhood, The Fall of the House of Ascher, The Travels of Daniel Ascher, The Last Book of Daniel.
The smell of burning she’d noticed when she first came in was coming from the fireplace in the living room. The door of the wood burner had been left ajar. On top of some small charred logs lay a thick wad of paper that was completely burned up, she could make out only For H on the top sheet, the rest was illegible. She reached out to take it, but the moment she touched it, it dissolved between her fingers, dispersing into specks of ash. A gray and black dust so infinitely light that it hung in the air and settled on the wooden floor, this was all that was left of Daniel’s last book. Hélène stayed kneeling in front of the fireplace for a while, too exhausted to stand up. If she’d come earlier, she could have saved the m
anuscript. She struggled to her feet and leaned against the mantelpiece. There on the marble, between the stuffed alligator and a Chinese terra-cotta soldier, she saw something new. It was an unassuming little book, no larger than a cigarette case. The title, The Smallest Atlas in the World, stood out against a background of brick-red continents and pale green oceans. On the first page she recognized the assertive handwriting from the postcard from Drancy. On June 2, 1942, to my little , on his tenth birthday, to make you dream of traveling, Your sister, Annette.
The beige parka was no longer on a hook in the hall. Hélène went back up to her room, taking The Smallest Atlas in the World with her, stowed deep in her pocket.
IN HER BEDROOM she leafed through the little book under the glare of her lamp. Some pages had annotations in black pencil, in extraordinarily small handwriting, and she managed to read them using the old horn-handled magnifying glass.
On the first planisphere, the pale blue background of seas and oceans was filled with writing, I have told many stories, never my own, I have made up twenty-three adventures, but when I tried to write the last one, the real one, about someone who was left behind, who is left here still, who is left without words, who is left to live his life after all the others have gone, I could not do it, my memory betrayed me, I betrayed their memory, I abandoned the task, afraid I would not be worthy of it, can anyone be worthy of the dead, I took my pages and I burned them, perhaps one day someone will be able to write this book for me,
On the map of Western USSR, a tiny ribbon of text had its source in the Black Sea, just where the name Odessa was printed, and it went like this, Odessa was the name of an eastern princess who had magnificent baths built in Paris, embellished with emeralds and turquoise, my father takes me there on Friday evenings, then the words climbed northward, skirting around Kiev, Minsk, and Smolensk, crossing Russia and losing themselves on the icy plains toward Arkhangelsk on the banks of the White Sea,
Germany punched great fists into the flesh pink of Poland; Kamieńsk, which was too small to feature, had been added by hand to the south of Łódź, the close-knit lines of numerous railways left little room for the words to continue with their journey, in his darkroom my father counts the seconds in Polish, jeden, dwa, trzy, cztery, because Polish is exactly the right length of time, he and my mother and sister tell each other secrets in Yiddish, they think I’m a schmuck,
setting off from Jerusalem, the sentences ventured toward the East and Arabia, racing over the arid sands of Hedjaz and Nedjed, every year when we say the blessings for Yom Kippur, we huddle under my father’s prayer shawl as if it were a tent, and the courtyard at the synagogue is like a small-scale desert encampment,
under the table Races and religions, beneath the columns Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Confucians, a single line, one day, on the door to my baths, No entry for Jews, the end of the world,
the table of Principal means of transport, railroads, commercial fleets, left just enough room for words to weave between the names and numbers, Sister Annette, Sister Annette, did you not see any of this coming, my sister who feels farther from me than Paule or Suzanne, I never shared her room, never knew anything about her dreams, Hana, seven years older, seven times better behaved, follow her example, Daniel, you never listen, jealous of her for going with her mother, jealous of her death even,
in order to see France you had to tilt the atlas, it was cut horizontally by the crease in the middle of the page, the sentences snaked along the coastline, tracing out an increasingly sinuous maze over the seas, the woman traveling with me is reading the paper but not turning the pages, I don’t know her real name, we take several trains, walk a long way in the dark, depending on the time of day my terror swells or vanishes, forgotten, on a moonless night I cross a river, probably the Cher, in a boat steered by a wordless ferryman with silent oars, it is wide as an ocean, on the far bank another woman, dressed in black, is waiting for me, Daniel Ascher has become Daniel Roche, the two pages overlapped slightly, hiding a whole strip of land, right where Clermont-Ferrand and Ambert should have been, the Livradois region is invisible, it’s the safest place in the world, they’ll never find me here,
the table for the world’s largest islands and highest peaks was loaded with lines of writing cramped together in the margins, when the bus stops a woman takes my suitcase and pulls me under her umbrella, inside the house an old lady talks as if I were a baby, he’s all wet, he needs changing, give him a bowl of milk, it’s Grandma Guyon, and it’s Angèle, and farther on, Joseph’s palms are as hard as pebbles, he sometimes puts his hand on my head, he’s always wanted a son to take over the farm handed down from his father and his grandfather, could I be that son,
along the jagged coast of Scandinavia, on the sinuous image of the Baltic Sea, the writing was more and more cramped, barely legible, in Saint-Ferréol in winter boys play games peeing in the snow, I run over with my hand on my fly and stop myself at the last minute, that’s a stupid game, no one here has seen me naked, not even Angèle, I wash very quickly, especially in winter, my filth keeps me warm,
other sentences zigzagged between the archipelagos of Oceania, to read the names of the Micronesian archipelagos in my little atlas I gently take Grandma Guyon’s glasses when she’s dozed off in her armchair, Solomon Islands, Erromango, Vanua Levu, I sail between the atolls for a few minutes, here are your glasses, Grandma, you went to sleep, no, my little goose, I wasn’t asleep, I was resting, even when she snores, Grandma Guyon’s never asleep,
on the lists of average temperatures, from Algiers to Spitzberg, of the most populous states, and the most widely spoken languages, lists that leave few spaces, the words battled to pick out a halting, angular route, I can’t remember when I stopped hoping they would come back, for a long time I dream my parents come home and I don’t recognize them, or I refuse to go with them, I can see the reproach in their eyes because I’ve been happy without them, I see my parents, never my sister,
on the Time zones page, a white world with red stripes, the contorted penciled lines covered the expanse of the Antarctic Ocean and converged toward the South Pole, growing increasingly hurried and untidy, making them unreliable to read, being the wanderer, the man with no shadow, not knowing the place, not knowing the date, no yahrzeit, no kaddish, not knowing how they died, and imagining all sorts of possible deaths, endlessly, did they think they were taking a shower, were they still clutching a piece of soap in their spasming hands, imagining the moment when they realized, hoping it was as late on as possible, just in time to recite the Shema Yisrael and to cover their heads, but how do you cover your head when you’re naked,
on the vast plains of North America, the words were back in their stride, I once read a piece about Indians who take the bones of their dead everywhere with them, rolled up in a blanket, I am an Indian, and on the blue of the Atlantic, along the East Coast, my Aunt Mala made me promise to come back and see her before she died, she wanted to give me something, she’s so old, she must be tired after all these years spent living instead of her sister, when I go back to New York she can finally let herself die,
in South America, the sentences cut across the Amazon tributaries, Purus, Madeira, Tapajos, Xingu, venturing out, in order to tell the story of this Peter Schlemiel I need to find a pseudonym, Ascher means happy in Hebrew, a heavy name to bear, Ash-err, full of firestorms and aimless wandering, how to disguise these ominous, onerous meanings, hide them behind two letters, H. R., which in French would be pronounced Ascher, and then Sanders, which conjures sand as well as cinders, but I’ve also kept the name of the Roche family who saved my life, roch means head in Hebrew, with these two names I am flesh, I am in my head and I am cinders, all at the same time,
at the foot of the index page, where there was a blank space, verses that were an eerie distortion of the Book of Daniel had been carefully written out,
And so Daniel and his friends were sought out to be killed,
All those whose names were inscribed in the Book,<
br />
They were bound and thrown into the blazing furnace,
The wind bore them away and left no trace,
Then Daniel was taken from the furnace and found to be unharmed,
and on the blank double-page spread at the end of the tiny book, in tightly spaced lines, for the first time in all these years, I’ve dreamed of you at last, Hana, you were asleep on the divan in the living room like when I used to wake you as a practical joke on Sunday mornings and you’d call me a little idiot, but you didn’t scold me this time, you got up and you looked just as you did when I last saw you, I was happy, wonderfully happy, I said so you’re alive and there I was thinking, what were you thinking, little idiot, I was in the room upstairs, you were mussing my hair, where did you get all these white hairs, little schlemiel, you’re only ten, so I whispered, they’re the hairs of a grandfather, a long time ago, my soul sister secretly gave me a son, and he had two children of his own, his daughter looks like you, she has your eyes, Hana, you can sleep easy, one day our descendants will be as plentiful as the stars in the sky.
Epilogue
JULY 16, 2012
SHE’D NEVER NOTICED THIS VIDEOTAPE sitting among the others, labeled only with a date, June 11, 2000. She slips it into the video player and the twelve-year-old images appear on the screen, intact. Her father laughing, his hairline barely receding, the little cousins walking along the fallen tree trunk, their arms out for balance, her mother there, too, Aunt Paule in the kitchen, Suzanne, everyone else, and herself, tray in hand, sticking her tongue out to the camera, they’re all so young. People raising their glasses, women fanning themselves, someone calling, Antoine, film this, there’s a close-up of the cake. They sing “Le Temps des cerises,” the camera pans around the table, moves over toward the gate, frames Daniel who’s also singing, will never ease my pain.
The Travels of Daniel Ascher Page 11
