Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Jacob looked on silently. Sylvie’s expression was one of intent concentration. The trace of a smile seemed to hover over her lips. After a while, he asked quietly, ‘Is that the name you want to give him then, Tadzio, like your brother?’

  Sylvie nodded vigorously.

  Jacob waited. Then, he said, ‘Perhaps we could give him another name as well, one all for himself?’ He was acutely aware that Sylvie was in some shadowy way reliving an aspect of her relationship with her brother. The identification seemed to have some positive benefits. But she also needed to recognize the baby’s separate existence. He didn’t want to press her. He waited.

  She was studying the infant. The tip of her finger played over his face, then his hand. The baby’s tiny fist closed round her finger. After a while Sylvie said, ‘Leo. Leo Tadzio Kowalski.’

  ‘Leo Tadzio Kowalski,’ Jacob murmured imitating her pronunciation and giving the middle name its long ooo sound.

  Sylvie suddenly looked up at him as if at last aware of his existence. ‘Leo Tadzio Kowalski… Jardine.’ Her eyes met Jacob’s for a fleeting instant. Then she returned her attention to the baby.

  Life in the big house at Fontenay took on its own orderly pace. Sylvie had not blinked when Jacob, masking his anxiety, had simply settled into the bedroom next to hers. Her concerns were all directed at Leo.

  Anita supervised the house’s running with a controlled precision which belied her soft tones and demure bearing. Meals were served punctually and were copious. When Jacob returned from the hospital not a speck of dust nor an item out of place could be seen anywhere. Only the nursery and Jacob’s desk were permitted their own comfortable chaos.

  Sylvie’s time was dedicated to the baby. She was totally immersed in his small life. Jacob wondered at the concentration which she brought to the task. As soon as the clouds lifted, Sylvie was out with the large pram, airing Leo, walking the width and length of the woods. Indoors, she would sit by his side for hours, playing with him, watching the flow of his expressions, his tiny hands grasping at air. At night, his little cot was placed by her bedside and the smallest cry stirred her awake. The nanny became a mere shadow.

  When Jacob so much as lifted his son into his arms, he would see fear invading her eyes. She watched him jealously, jumping in nervousness if he attempted any mildly boisterous games and snatching Leo from him. Her anxiety was so palpable that he sadly refrained from touching the child. He began to feel like a stranger, excluded from the magic circle which was mother and child. They did not talk about this. They did not in the ordinary course of things talk very much at all. They lived side by side, but not together.

  In early spring, when the trees in the Bois de Vincennes had donned their fresh green coats and daffodils and bluebells carpeted the woods, Princesse Mathilde and Violette came to visit. Jacob spent an entire Sunday romping with the little girl. She shrieked in delight over elaborate games of hide and seek, clung to him as they chased invented monsters through the trees, presented him with a haphazard bouquet of drooping flowers. All the love he was unable to lavish on his son, Jacob poured out on Violette, while Sylvie and the Princesse paraded slowly through leafy lanes, Leo’s pram in front of them.

  When they returned to the house in late afternoon, they gathered in the spacious room which looked over the garden. A fire crackled merrily in the hearth. Anita served them creamy coffee and her own freshly baked cakes, rich with the memory of Vienna. Violette, taking a sudden interest in Leo, while the adults chatted, tried to lift him.

  ‘No,’ Sylvie’s shout punctured the atmosphere. She leapt up and grabbed Leo away from Violette and followed her action with a swift slap.

  ‘Sylvie,’ Jacob was angry. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he chastised her severely and lifted Violette protectively into his arms.

  Sylvie cradling Leo, made no response for a moment. Then she looked venomously at Jacob. ‘You don’t care about him at all. You’re not interested in him. All you care about is her. That little girl.’ She strode out of the room, carrying a now wailing Leo with her.

  Jacob looked helplessly at a pensive Princesse Mathilde and shrugged.

  In the summer of 1939, when Leo was eighteen months old and his dark hair had been transformed into a blond mop, Sylvie took it into her head that she would bring him to Poland. She wanted Babushka and her grandparents to see him. Perhaps she could even bring Babushka back to Paris with her so that she could look after Leo as she had looked after her and her brother. No amount of argument from Jacob - no considered analysis of a Europe marching inexorably into the arms of war, no tirade about the fact that Poland stood directly in the path of Hitler’s call for Lebensraum, living space - could deflect her from her aim.

  Poland would stand up heroically to Hitler, Sylvie felt. And in any case didn’t her native land now have the backing of the British who had promised to keep her safe against German aggression?

  ‘But it’s ludicrous, Sylvie. You don’t even know if the woman, this Babushka, is alive,’ Jacob said for the umpteenth time.

  ‘She’s alive. I know,’ Sylvie said firmly.

  Over the months, as her figure had returned, Sylvie had grown even more beautiful than she had been before the pregnancy. Her eyes had a peculiarly deep lustre as if their light came from some stormy ethereal place. Her movements were slow, languorous and her skin glowed with an inner fire. On a number of occasions, Jacob had not been able to prevent himself from touching her, from stroking the golden blaze of her tumbled hair. Normally she paid no attention. Once she had looked at him as if he were a stranger and offered him her lips. There was a nascent hunger in them and Jacob kindled it. They had begun wildly to make love. At the last moment, she had stopped herself and walked abruptly away from him. He had driven dangerously fast to the Rue St Denis and for the first time obliterated his desires in the arms of a prostitute.

  But Jacob’s thoughts these days were decidedly not with women. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, together with France’s own Daladier may have thought they had appeased Hitler at Munich in October 1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Germany. But Chamberlain’s proclamation of ‘peace in our time’ had an increasingly hollow ring as 1939 unfolded. Jacob, in any case, had never believed in it. The appeasing forces were merely deluding themselves, happy to turn their eyes from what to nearly all now seemed inevitable. Hitler would go to war to impose his dream of a Nazi New Order.

  Refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia crowded into Paris in ever-growing numbers. Jacob listened to their tales of concentration camps, of hideous brutality, with barely containable rage. European civilisation, he sensed, was nearing its end. He did his best to help in the only way he could. He found jobs, housing, funds, pulled intricate strings to engineer visas and official papers.

  The workers’ clinic his father had established on the outskirts of Marseilles became, by the summer of 1939, a haven for a group of refugee medics and psychoanalysts.

  ‘Who would have thought,’ old Dr. Jardine mused ironically, ‘that I would spend my declining days immersed in the one branch of medicine I feel is utterly alien to me.’

  Jacob patted his shoulder affectionately. He, Sylvie and Leo spent as much time as they could in the parental home set in the pine-strewn hills above the city. ‘You may yet change your colours.’

  Dr. Jardine grimaced as he looked out on the blue of the Mediterranean spread at a distance of miles beneath them. ‘Never,’ he said.

  But he had given over not only part of his clinic, but much of his capacious home to these colleagues from the East. Leo, toddling in its grounds amidst refugee children, had already spoken his first words of German. Meanwhile Madame Jardine organized the increasingly complex running of what was an ever-growing household. Her face, despite her years, still had the delicacy of the porcelain dolls she so loved, but as the July days rolled on, it took on an increasingly preoccupied air.

  ‘Your father is not well, Jacob. He’s working too hard. I’m worrie
d about him. I want him to come to Portugal with me next week. I wish you would all come. Speak to him, please.’

  ‘I will, maman,’ Jacob looked at his mother and for the first time noticed the strain in her features, her sudden frailty. He hugged her. ‘You know how grateful I am to you for all you’ve done here.’

  She shrugged and met his eyes. ‘We must all help in these hard times.’

  Ever since Jacob had at last married Sylvie, and Madame Jardine’s Catholic conscience could be put to rest, an easy understanding had once again developed between mother and son. Jacob had realised that his mother’s religious conversion had transformed itself into a frenzy of good works which ran parallel to his father’s interests. Madame Jardine was active in the Equipes sociales. She read the Christian Democratic press and if she opened her house to refugees from the East, it was as much in keeping with the dictates of her mentors as in accord with her husband’s and son’s wishes.

  But now, she longed to see her daughter Nicolette and her grandchildren. Her son-in-law’s business had taken their family to Portugal in the early part of the year. It had always been intended that Mr and Mrs Jardine would join them there for the summer. Madame Jardine had hoped to convince her other children to come along as well. It had been so long since they had all been together. Marcel her younger son had agreed, and was already in the house on the Algarve. She and her husband would have been there already too, but Dr. Jardine had postponed and postponed.

  ‘You’ll speak to your father, Jacob,’ Madame Jardine entreated him again.’

  Jacob nodded, ‘Straight away.’

  Early that Friday morning, Jacob drove his parents to the station in Marseilles. A second car followed with their cases. Old Dr. Jardine did not cease listing the things Jacob would have to take care of in his absence until the jostling station crowds made it impossible for him to continue. Jacob boarded the train with his parents and settled them into their compartment.

  It was only after he had kissed his mother goodbye and was shaking his father’s hand that he was filled with a sudden premonition. His ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ rang hollow in his own ears. He met his father’s eyes and the older man drew Jacob to him.

  ‘I don’t worry with you in charge,’ Dr. Jardine gripped his son’s shoulders. ‘Oh here, I almost forgot. I found this in the library the other day and thought you might want to have it.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a small tattered notebook.

  Jacob looked at it, opened it. A child’s clumsy hand. His own. Drawings of birds. The spread of wings. Then, more sophisticated patterns. His father’s.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. There were tears in his voice. He saw them reflected in his father’s eyes as he waved to his parents through the open window. The train lumbered into action, shivered and chugged slowly away.

  ‘If you can’t join us, then try and convince Sylvie to bring Leo,’ his mother waved, called after him, her voice barely audible in the din.

  But Sylvie was wrapped in her own dreams of a return to childhood haunts. She made elaborate plans for her trip to Poland. Caroline would come with her. They would take the nanny. There would be so many bags to carry. She booked their tickets for September. Autumn in the Polish woods. The trees would be russet.

  Before Sylvie could make her trip, Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland. Their rapid march obliterated much more than Sylvie’s plans.

  Chapter

  Nine

  __________

  ∞

  ‘Jude!’ The word slipped from the nurse’s starched lips with the force of an expletive.

  Jacob Jardine followed the line of her gaze and saw it rest, as if transfixed, on his penis. He almost grinned. There it was: his tell-tale mark, plain for all to see. His circumcised penis. His father’s concession to his grandmother. Jacob’s insignia as a Jew. He might well think of himself as a Frenchman. But the Nazis summarily classified him otherwise, identified him with a category they considered sub-human. The world in a foreskin.

  ‘Fräulein Kalb,’ Dr. Schrader’s tone was the closest Jacob had yet heard it to a bark, ‘You will see to the patients in the infirmary now.’ The German doctor ordered the nurse from the room and quickly himself administered the tetanus injection to Jacob. With swift, sure movements, he cleaned the surface wound on Jacob’s leg and bandaged it. ‘You should have shown me this before.’

  Jacob shrugged. ‘There were more pressing cases.’

  He looked at Lieutenant Schrader. They were of a height, of an age. For three days they had worked non-stop side by side in the infirmary of the POW camp and Jacob knew, whatever the colour of Schrader’s uniform, that he was not the enemy. He was simply a harassed doctor trying to cope with too many patients under difficult conditions. In another life, they would have been friends. Fräulein Kalb was a different matter: she was severely put out to find that the interpreter she had been rubbing shoulders with, the interpreter who was so helpful and knew so much about medicine, was a despicable Jude. This time, as Jacob remembered the nurse’s astonished face, the grin spread over his features.

  Schrader half met him on it. ‘Ja, ja, it is also funny. A woman looks down at your manhood and all she can say is Jude. I know, I know. But these are not ordinary times.’ He clenched his lips, ‘If I were you, Dr. Jardine, I would try to be as far away from us as possible.’ He nodded curtly and left the room.

  No, not ordinary times, Jacob thought as he donned the prisoner’s garb which had been left out for him.

  The endless stretch of absurd waiting, that phoney war, which had been the French condition for the last nine months, had not been ordinary. France’s farcical defensive strategy - which consisted in waiting for the Germans to attack across the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line - was not ordinary. Playing football in order not to go mad - a therapy he had instituted for the demoralised soldiers in his army camp - had not been ordinary. Listening to German loudspeaker exhortations floating across the waters of the Rhône telling you that the Germans were friends, that the French needn’t die for Poland or Britain, all while you were playing football was also not ordinary.

  Even less ordinary was the unexpected suddenness and unimagined strength with which the Germans had finally advanced. Belgium, Luxembourg, and now France, all toppling in a matter of weeks. Never mind the expensive Maginot line. Never mind the Rhône. Only that blind bulk of armoured cars, lumbering vehicles of destruction.

  And bombs. And blood. Blood and dust everywhere. It pervaded his nostrils.

  Jacob grasped the set of identity papers and the small gold cross he had taken from Jules Lemaître’s pocket. He held them in his clenched fist for a moment and nursed that knot of anger which had been coiling in the pit of his stomach for weeks. With a savage gesture he transferred the papers into his new uniform. Jules was dead, gratuitously killed in that first battle. A waste. He blotted the image from his mind and looked instead at the small picture of Sylvie and Leo he always carried.

  His thoughts flew to Sylvie. She had been so shy and then so ardent when she had last come to see him at the camp in February. Like the Sylvie of old, the Sylvie he had fallen in love with. Her voice like quicksilver. Recounting stories: stories about Leo and his most recent pranks; embroidered stories in which the difficulties of everyday life - the search for Leo’s favourite bread and pastries, the treks through the piles of snow which gathered in the Paris streets now that there were no men available for cleaning, the heroic attempts to cope with the boiler in this coldest of French winters - emerged as so many hilarious adventures.

  One name he didn’t know kept recurring in these stories: Andrzej.

  ‘Andrzej? Who is this Andrzej?’ he had asked her at one point.

  ‘Oh, you know, Andrzej Potacki. He’s a relative of sorts,’ she had replied casually. She had then turned to finger the bright buttons of his uniform, trace the major’s insignia on his chest and had looked up at him provocatively with sea-blue eyes. ‘Jacob, is there anywhere we
can be alone together?’

  He had forgotten his questions in the course of their subsequent embrace.

  During the night in their small, cold hotel room Jacob had begged her to leave Paris, to go to Portugal where his parents had been trapped by the advent of war. Old Dr. Jardine was ailing. He would love to have her and Leo by his side. The family would take care of them. And Portugal would be safe. It was not at war. Jacob urged, persuaded, outlined details. Sylvie simply said. ‘And you? Then we would be without you.’ Finally, she had acquiesced. ‘I’ll see.’

  She had kept from him until the very last the fact that Erich and Anita had been interned as enemy aliens. She was living alone with Caroline and Leo.

  ‘Jardine, schnell, kommen sie hier,’ the nurse’s brusque tones stirred Jacob from his reverie. Quickly he fastened the last buttons of his prisoner’s garb and stepped out into the noise of the crowded infirmary. He looked up and down the length of the room, the men huddled in their beds, the bandages, the moans, the blank staring eyes. There was pain here, but more than that, fear. For a brief moment his own anxiety shaped itself into the figures of Sylvie and Leo, supine on the narrow camp bed.

  The next instant the vision was dispelled by Fraulein Kalb’s repeated ‘Schnell’. Jacob focussed on a French soldier struggling, shrieking, ‘Ma main! Ma main! Qu’est ce qu’ils ont fait de ma main?’ He worked to calm the man whose left arm ended where his hand should have been. But at the back of his mind, his own questions took on the insistence of a refrain. Where were Sylvie and Leo now? Where had the war taken them?

  Sylvie was on the road. A road leading from Paris towards Orleans, a crammed road reeking of human fear, carnage, desolation. All of France seemed to have taken to this road. Whole families trudged. Old men, women and children. Vehicles of all description loaded with the possessions of countless houses. Perched atop them, struggling along beside them, their owners or any strays who had been picked up on the way. A human trail moving slowly, silently. Breath was too precious to lose on words.