Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  He was also struck by the reserves of cunning individuals had - a defensive cunning which prior to the war he had only seen openly at work in his patients, who could fabricate endless ploys to keep the integrity of their madness intact. Now he saw instances of that cunning blossoming everywhere - in the rich spontaneous fictions people concocted to get themselves out of a tight spot, in the ingenious games of hide and seek they devised, in the subtle ruses and masterly feats of timing. The paranoias of occupation had given birth to countless novelists.

  They had also, he reminded himself grimly, given birth to a slew of informers. He must take greater care in the future to guard the network against them.

  Nadine of the hundred eyes, sallow-faced Nadine behind her till at the Hotel du Midi did not like Sylvie. She did not like Sylvie under whatever name she bore, Latour, Kowalska, Jardine. For, oh yes, she knew that Sylvie had several names, and what reason for several names if there was nothing to hide?

  Nadine did not like the way Sylvie looked. The way she swung the blonde mane of her hair over her shoulders. The cut of those vampish dresses which clung too close to her body. She did not like the way Sylvie flounced round the hotel like some grande dame, acting as if she owned it, when the fact was the hotel belonged to her motherin-law and would by rights soon pass down to Nadine and her husband. She particularly did not like the way the attention of each and every man at the hotel, including her husband, focussed on Sylvie as soon as she walked into the room.

  That was how it began; it was only the start of it.

  Her loathing for Sylvie became an obsession. It entered into the realms of madness. She rocked herself to sleep with it at night, detailed its parts in her dreams, woke to the confused throb of it, fuelled it with new matter in the course of the long days.

  All the lacks in Nadine’s own life found their cause, their reason in Sylvie.

  And, as is the way of things, what had begun as a pungent private envy took on with the passing months the gloss of a public virtue. Envy rationalized transformed Sylvie into a public enemy. She became, for Nadine, the focal point of everything which stood in opposition to the reigning moral order of France: the sanctity of family, patrie, church. A visible threat, an outsider from the capital with its loose ways, its squalid morality, its lack of patriotic fervour.

  From early on in Sylvie’s employ at the hotel, Nadine would purse her thin lips in distaste and comment to her motherin-law, ‘Maman, don’t you think you should tell that new performer to dress with a little more propriety?’

  ‘Mmmnnn,’ Madame Castelnau would usually mumble obliquely, and pay little heed to her daughter-in-law.

  Or Nadine might say, ‘Maman, we run a respectable establishment. Just watch that performer sidling up to the men. Why, she’s no better than a slut. It isn’t proper.’ She never spoke Sylvie’s name, as if her lips might be sullied by the sound.

  When, after a time, Nadine’s comments had taken on an irritating frequency, Madame Castelnau one night turned on her daughter-in-law. ‘I want to hear no more about this, Nadine, Do you understand. I am in business. Since ‘that performer’ as you keep calling her, has been with us, business has been better than ever. We run the most successful bar in Marseilles.’ She looked shrewdly at her daughter-in law’s narrow, sullen face, her thin, rigid soldiers, and was filled with a sudden repugnance. Why, the girl was now almost thirty and still she had given her no grandchildren. ‘The customers don’t come here to watch you sitting behind the till, you know,’ she added with a touch of malevolence. ‘If I were you I would forget about Sylvie and pay a little more attention to your husband.’

  With as much majesty as her plump frame would permit, Madame Castelnau shuffled away.

  Nadine was silent for a few weeks. Then she tried a new tack. ‘Albert,’ she said to her husband one night. ‘You know, I think that singer we employ is Jewish.’

  ‘Jewish,’ Albert said amiably. He was a slow-moving man with soft undefined features. ‘Why she’s as blonde and blue-eyed as a Bosch goddess.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘And even if she were, what does it matter to us. Maman knows what she’s doing.’ He switched off their bedside lamp. ‘Now go to sleep and don’t worry your head about it.’

  ‘Albert, I was in her room the other day, and I found a store of ration coupons,’ Nadine hadn’t meant to confess her prowling, but now that it was done, she rushed on. ‘She could get us into trouble with the police. We should get rid of her.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Albert mumbled. A deep snore escaped him.

  My husband has the instincts of a coward and a traitor, Nadine thought.

  With all the stealth of vengeful envy and the cunning of pettiness, Nadine watched Sylvie, made enquiries, pursued her. She knew Sylvie dealt in the black market, knew she sometimes spent nights elsewhere, knew about the house on the hill, knew Sylvie made regular visits there. What she didn’t know was quite what to do with her knowledge. Her loathing of Sylvie was only tempered by a fear of her motherin-law. She bided her time.

  Her time came early in the autumn of 1942. It was then that the step by step amassing of anti-Jewish laws, aimed first at refugees, then at restricting the activities of French Jews and turning them into second class citizens, crystallised into deportation orders which extended to all Jews in France.

  Sylvie knew that Nadine of the hundred eyes had all of her eyes on Sylvie. She had even once caught her unmistakably trailing her towards the house on the hill. But with the easy contempt of a woman at once beautiful and fearless, Sylvie could not imagine what Nadine could do to her. Madame Castelnau, she knew, was on her side. In the two years since she had had Sylvie on her stage, her hotel had become one of the most successful establishments in the Vieux Port and one which drew an increasingly select clientele. Various other hoteliers had tried to tempt Sylvie away. Each time, Madame Castelnau had raised her salary, offered her a share of the proceeds. Except on weekends, Sylvie now only performed in the evenings, had her own supporting band, an expansive wardrobe, two of the rambling Hotel’s best rooms designated for her use. The Hotel du Midi suited her: she was effectively her own mistress there.

  And so Sylvie became only a trifle more vigilant. She had in any case more important things on her mind than Nadine.

  Andrzej had disappeared. She had heard nothing from him since the Spring. Nor could she make contact with him through any of the usual sources. The secret decoding centre where he had worked had been raided. She didn’t know whether he had escaped or been arrested. With Andrzej gone, so too was her source of orders. She felt rudderless. And also stricken with worry for the man who more and more had taken the place of her lost brother.

  Sylvie wished she could take advice from Jacob, wished he would involve her in the work he was doing. He came to see her, always unexpectedly, every three or six or eight weeks. Every time, just after he came a few of the changing flow of inhabitants in the house would disappear, a few more arrive. She knew he was involved in the organisation of an escape route, but he would never tell her the name he used or where he was based. She only had the number of a poste restante, in case of emergencies. Nor, no matter how much she pleaded, would he engage her in any of his work. ‘It’s too dangerous, Sylvie,’ he would say stroking her skin, so that she curled closer into him, ‘too dangerous. Who knows what either one of us might say, if we were rounded up, tortured…’ The phrase, left hanging, always stopped her questions.

  Increasingly, their nights were spent in a coupling which left little space for words. It was as if language carried with it the threat of betrayal, while the continuing menace of the war left solace only in the flesh.

  With Andrzej gone and Jacob away, Sylvie, outside her working hours at the hotel, now spent more time with Caroline at the house on the hill. There was a good reason for this. In April, Caroline had had a baby. Sylvie sometimes joked to her friend that the baby was partly hers. In any event, its arrival had been impelled by her intercession. This is how it had come about.

&n
bsp; From the very beginning of their stay in Marseilles, Sylvie had noticed that Caroline was nurturing a secret passion for Joseph Rittner, a gaunt Austrian Jew, whose gentle ways and soft speech calmed and ordered the floating and often frightened population of the house on the hill. He was a tall, erect man whose face would have been ugly but for the luminous brown eyes which transformed it and settled it into a precarious beauty. He had large capable hands whose movements reassured, steadied.

  Caroline clung on his every gesture, ran to his unbidden command. When after some six months, Rittner was still politely addressing Caroline as Mademoiselle, Sylvie decided to do something about it. Life, particularly in these times, was too short for unrequited passions. Then, too, Sylvie felt, Caroline needed some happiness. Over the long years of their friendship, she had grown progressively quieter, as if she were old before her time, as if Sylvie’s tumultuous existence displaced her own, made it recede.

  Sylvie, when she was not preoccupied with her own needs, was capable of great generosity.

  One day, she asked Caroline to come and have a walk with her through the cypress-clad parkland which bordered on the elegant old house. She took Caroline’s arm and when they had gone a little distance, said, ‘Caroline, you’ve been working too hard. Why don’t you borrow that blue dress of mine you’ve always fancied, do your hair and take Joseph to the opera and dinner at Castelmuro’s. It’ll do you both good to get away from here.’

  Caroline flinched. ‘You’re mad, Sylvie. It would be too dangerous for him. We might be stopped. In any case,’ she added softly, ‘I couldn’t ask him.’

  A note of exasperation crept into Sylvie’s voice. ‘You’re in love with him. I know you’re in love with him. And you’ve got to do something about it. You can’t just go on and on and on like this. This endless politeness.’

  Caroline flushed crimson, extricated her arm from Sylvie’s.

  ‘Well, say something. Do something. If you can’t take him out, invite him to your room. You know he won’t take the initiative. He feels he’s a guest here, on sufferance, a Jew. Most of the people here think this is your house, you run it, you’re the grande dame.

  ‘Caroline,’ Sylvie shouted at her friend who had begun to walk away from her.

  ‘Caroline, if you don’t do something, I’ll talk to him myself.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Caroline veered round, looked at her friend threateningly.

  ‘I would,’ Sylvie taunted. ‘You know I would. I give you a week.’

  The two women stared at each other, unconsciously assuming the expressions, the very posture which had characterised them as schoolgirls. Sylvie, daring, provocative; Caroline, angry, a little hurt, a little bullish. But suddenly, because of it, because of the taunt, spurred into her former self again. The girl who would take up Sylvie’s dares.

  A week later, when Sylvie returned to the house, she knew without having to ask that everything had changed. Little secret glances sped between Caroline and Joseph. There was a softness about her friend’s lips, a new ease in her movements.

  ‘Well?’ Sylvie stole a moment with her friend away from a meager lunch table which that day catered for eight.

  ‘Well,’ Caroline squeezed Sylvie’s hand, flushed crimson and then hugged her. ‘Oh Sylvie, he’s wonderful, it’s wonderful.’

  ‘Good,’ Sylvie grinned. ‘You deserve a little happiness.’

  The little happiness had blossomed. It had lightened the atmosphere of the house. Caroline now bustled, spreading hope amidst the fleeing transients, trying to rid them of the past nightmares which travelled with them, trying to lessen their fears of an apocalyptic future. Her energy grew at the pace of the baby within her, fuelled by Joseph’s steady smile. She had never, Sylvie reflected, been so beautiful.

  Even on that Sunday when they learned that Walter, one of the refugees who had been longest in the house, was dead, Sylvie reflected, Caroline had only trembled a little, and then rushed to assuage the fears of the others. Walter, having at last built up his precarious strength enough to make the arduous and treacherous journey through the Pyrenees, had taken his own life, just as he had almost reached the last hurdle in his trajectory towards America, the new world.

  Joseph, that afternoon, had told them one of the many stories he slowly unfurled through the long days of the house’s enclosed existence. His arm lightly on Caroline’s shoulder, he had recounted the story of a little German boy with a great love of books. A gentle little boy, who as he grew into youth and manhood had gradually collected a vast treasure trove of books. A library of precious tomes which charted the history of Europe - arcane editions, picture-laden folios, recondite philosophy texts, fictions, cabbalistic scripts in German and French and Greek and Hebrew and Italian, the languages he had learnt. A library which in time began to include slim volumes of essays, gem-like epigrammatic narratives which bristled with insight and gnomic utterances. His own.

  On the day when Hitler and his henchman decided that books, with the exclusion of Mein Kampf and its ilk, were to be burned as repositories of semitic decadence, the precious library found its place amidst the flames. Its owner, physically and morally beaten, unable any longer to earn his living by publishing, accepted the invitation of friends to France. He mourned his library, a little world which encapsulated a vastness. He tried to do battle against its destroyers in the only way he knew: by writing. But sadness engulfed him, deflecting his efforts. His friends told him stories of a new world, a world where he could rebuilt his collection, but his loss trailed him, made him heavy so that he dragged his steps ever more slowly. And it seemed to him to be not only his loss, but the world’s. The loss of centuries of civilisation. His friends counselled hope, drew pictures of a civilisation built afresh, a better world. But he could only look at them blindly, through the mists of his own pain. On the precipice of the new, he decided he could not bury his bitterness at the loss of the old. So in generosity, he flung himself backwards over the precipice, to be buried with the past and the culture he mourned. So as not to contaminate the spirit of the future for others. For us.

  The nine pairs of eyes focussed on Joseph were wet.

  ‘That was Walter’s story, wasn’t it Joseph,’ Sylvie murmured. ‘I never knew…’

  He smiled at her gently from his gnarled face, then lovingly stroked Caroline’s stomach. ‘The angel of the future. It is our task to prepare for it,’ he said softly.

  Caroline glowed.

  In April the baby had come, a tiny red-faced girl with vast brown eyes. They named her Katherine. Joseph had delivered her himself and Sylvie, watching the proud father and attentive mother, had thought of Leo, of Jacob. Though she was hardly prone to self-reflection, Sylvie knew that she had robbed Jacob of something in those early days of Leo’s life. She would make it up to him, she thought with a sudden pang. When the war was over. When the sales boches were defeated and Poland and France were free. She missed her little boy, missed Jacob, missed Andrzej.

  Meanwhile, there was more work to be done than ever. Caroline could no longer run the large house, make the countless necessary visits to Marseilles, get in supplies, deal with petty officials, barter. Everything grew scarcer and scarcer as the French economy was bled dry to support the occupiers and their war machine. Everything more and more difficult. And paying for help could prove treacherous in this clandestine household. No matter how much Joseph and the guests helped, the burden now fell on Sylvie. She didn’t mind. Caroline was happy. And the two of them had grown closer than ever. At every turn, Caroline looked to Sylvie - for advice on how to deal with the baby and in order to share her pleasure in that small life. A small life which had come amongst them through Sylvie’s intercession.

  Sylvie reflected on all this as she sped towards the house on the hill early one September morning. She was pleased with herself. She had managed to get, amongst other things, a whole side of lamb and the soap so essential to little Katherine’s nappies. She was looking forward to her visit. Every
three days seemed to bring vast changes in the tiny creature.

  The drive leading to the house had its usual peaceful grandeur. Tall poplars huddled against blue sky and then the house appeared, etched on a precipice, behind it the vast stillness of the sea. As always there was a hush about the place and Sylvie thinking nothing, leapt out of the car. Suddenly she heard a rustle behind her. She turned and saw a small shy boy emerging from the bushes.

  ‘Gabriel, tu joues cache-cache?’ she smiled at the boy. He had arrived only two weeks before, a timid creature with those haunted eyes, too old for his years, which she now knew as the mark of the refugee. She didn’t want to know what those eyes held, but she liked this little curly-headed boy from Berlin with his broken French. She held out her hand to him.

  As he approached, she saw that he was crying. ‘What’s wrong, Gabriel. Have you hurt yourself?’

  He shook his head. Sylvie gazed at him and then suddenly her skin prickled. ‘The others. Where are the others?’ she asked, her voice thin.

  ‘Partis. They’re all gone. The police came. There’s only me.’ Tears rolled silently down his thin cheeks. ‘I was playing in the park. Two days ago. When I came back they were piling them into a big van. I hid.’

  Sylvie held him tightly. Her mind raced. ‘Come with me,’ she pulled Gabriel after her towards the house. It was locked. ‘You’ve been sleeping out?’ He shook his head and pointed to an open window. ‘Good, clever boy.’ Sylvie patted him as she unlocked the door.

  The elegant ordered rooms looked as if they had been struck by a tornado. Books, papers, chairs, were strewn everywhere. Madame Jardine’s antique porcelains which had graced the airy sitting room lay in smithereens. Sylvie looked round with a shudder, refusing to allow her mind to dwell on the scene which had led to this devastation. Briskly she locked the door behind her, all the while making soothing noises to Gabriel. But her mind sped, tumbled, baulked. Where had they all been taken? Where was Caroline? Little Katherine?