by Adrien Goetz
Fifteen years later, in 1917, in an ambulance, I spoke Greek with a wounded German soldier—he had studied the comedies of Aristophanes at Heidelberg—and together we recited in Greek a comic dialogue between two frogs, full of onomatopoeia, and we swore to do everything in order that one day there would be peace. He gave me his pocketknife. I still have it. Perhaps it seems naive. But two people had had their legs amputated next to us, the air was foul with the sweet smell of putrefaction, we had seen our comrades die; and because he quoted Aristophanes I did not consider him, lying there on his cot, as just a Boche to be left to die so that we would have more water. When I told my children this, they looked at me mockingly. My grandson, in a disrespectful tone, rolled his eyes and whispered, “No more war!”
That sunlit day, in my memory I see windows that don’t exist. Monsieur Reinach picked up the sketchbook I’d placed alongside the coffee cups on the little bamboo table, and drew doors and bay windows where they were going to go. He explained how the largest ones would go here, there would be a simple aperture, that was the location of the staircase, in this room he wanted three, like a lantern.
I saw the windows being put in during the months that followed; my mission was to draw their progress every day. Even today, I still know how to open them, with the system of a handle fixed to a runner along the vertical bar. It moves both up and down to turn the latch into the window casement; it’s very modern, but from a distance it looks ancient. Eiffel was astonished when he saw the small geared wheel turning in the center of the mechanism. Archimedes himself might have invented it. Monsieur Reinach and Monsieur Pontremoli would sit and discuss these technical issues for hours. That year I saw them spend entire days poring over the plans: since windows that wide did not exist in the fifth century before Christ, they had to invent an entirely original system for opening them that would appear old. There was no question of making latches with dolphins or sphinxes. You cannot put Greek decorations on a modern window, or copy a genuine ancient window that doesn’t open and has a polished alabaster plate through which one cannot see a thing; they had to invent a window with a Greek appearance, that allowed the sun in and through which one could see the sea. This difference delighted me. And while they were at it, they had fun designing the tableware. Christofle had reissued in silver several pieces from the Villa Boscoreale, copied from the Louvre—a fabulous gift from the Baron de Rothschild. Monsieur Reinach bought some of these pieces, which were in vogue at the time. But a family in ancient Greece would not have used such bowls, heavy with decorative reliefs, every day, and they were going to need forks that looked like they could have been used centuries before the fork was invented. I found that very amusing. That was my environment, the one that I loved. Theodore Reinach was, as much as Pontremoli, the architect of his house, and between them they thought of everything. They were like me with my boxes of little soldiers. One thing only struck me after two years of construction, though it’s quite obvious: houses in the Mediterranean, in Algeria, Morocco, and Greece, the ones we saw in L’Illustration, don’t have so many windows, and they open only onto patios and courtyards. Theodore wanted windows everywhere; that would be the main difference between his “Greek villa” and the houses of antiquity; he was not going to imitate, he was going to create, to compose an entirely new text in archaic Greek. Not an ersatz palace of antiquity, but a home for him, for Fanny and the children.
Each of these windows served as a frame for a fragment of landscape. I became aware that this coast I thought I had known forever was beautiful, that nature becomes a painting if an architect creates an opening through which to see it. During the Kerylos years, whenever I sat studying with my friend Adolphe, Theodore’s nephew who was the same age as me, I would open all the windows wide; I could sit for an hour on one of the top floor balconies, “Daedalus” or “Icarus,” staring at the clouds. I drew all these windows with their red shutters. I still have the watercolors I painted in a series, like Claude Monet, at different hours of the day, different seasons, always the same rectangles of light, year after year. Before leaving here, I am going to open the window in the bedroom that bears the name Philemon, the central window in the Andron, one of the windows in the library. I would never have written the word “window” ten times in my notebook if I hadn’t come back here. Today I’m going to use my movie camera, the latest Kodak, to frame, film, fix what used to be my sky, one last time. I like filming static shots: when I get home later, it will be like having one large photograph with moving clouds.
My mother, to my great surprise, objected to what was in effect the kidnapping of her son—Monsieur Reinach had declared the very first day that, before the building work was finished, as soon as a part of the house was habitable, I would move into Kerylos. I thought it would make her very happy. She ranted and raved. Was she not capable of raising her son properly? A Corsican woman doesn’t let her children go. And when she was old, she would need her eldest son. By what right did these gentlemen of Paris think they could take her cherub from her? I didn’t dare protest too much, for fear of her fury. It was she, after all, who had pushed me toward Theodore Reinach, she who told me so often how much she liked the family; she liked to look at my sketches, she too was interested in the new house. I perceived it all as the most terrible injustice. She thought that “Monsieur Theodore” did not pay me enough for my drawings, given all the time I spent there. It seemed to me she was, deep down, accusing him of being miserly. My mother knew no Jewish families in Corsica. She and the sour dairywoman said things that made me feel ashamed; with knowing looks they said that everyone knew these Reinachs had “crooked fingers,” at which point I exploded and I took the side of my new benefactor. She realized that nothing was going to make me change my mind. One day she knocked over the pile of books at the foot of my bed: “Did your Monsieur Reinach give you those? Your bedroom will end up looking like a hovel.” I was old enough to shout back. Monsieur Eiffel had to intervene in person to pull us apart. He told me that I should not raise my voice in the presence of my mother. But afterward he took her to one side, and then she ignored me for two weeks.
It was not until a year and half later that she finally allowed me to leave with my notebooks and my boxes of soldiers— Monsieur Eiffel had given me some, Gauls from Vercingetorix, to complete my battalions, of which I was extremely proud. The house was not yet habitable, but I was the first to be given my own room, in what later became one end of the corridor on the ground floor of the servants’ quarters. I had a cot, my drawing materials, a few clothes that I washed myself. It was an observatory, I did favors for the workers, helped the cook who made their meals, watched everything, followed the progression of each floor as it went up. I thought it was going to take ten years. In fact, it all came together very quickly. Even before the upper floors were finished, the painters were already setting to work on the ground floor rooms. The plans were so well executed that there were no nasty surprises. Inside the house I felt like I was on a ship, an apprentice sailor atop the main mast. Some winters the waves were violent; the rocks protected the house, but I had to spend entire days cleaning windows that were cloudy with salt. I couldn’t stand it after a while. Every day my mother had given me work at the Eiffel villa, silverware to shine, shoes to wax; she had a well-developed theory that children are slaves sent by God, and she looked at me coldly when I didn’t obey fast enough. It was Madame Reinach, not my mother, who bought me my first pair of long pants, from the Lily of the Valley boutique in Nice. She chose a warm, light fabric. I didn’t dare show them to the children of Beaulieu. I swaggered around the principality of Kerylos dressed like a prince, and happy to have found a family that wanted to make a man of me. Gustave Eiffel was undoubtedly the first to grasp that the time I spent living with the Reinach family, for whom I did a minimal amount of work, would be enormously valuable to me, and would help me gain a basic education, because I was quite clever. He brought over the brass to be polished and the shoe cream. My mother, who never lo
st face, told me, “Monsieur Eiffel says this Monsieur Reinach is a fount of knowledge.” She lingered with relish over the word fount: “A fount of knowledge, my little one. And you will be someone too, one day, I know it”—but when she couldn’t tell me who I laughed at her, and she ended up laughing with me.
What intrigued me at the age of fifteen was why Theodore Reinach, so witty and warm, was called a thief. Whom had he robbed? Why was he, in the eyes of the notary and the priest, some kind of crook? An agent in the pay of the enemy? There was a story that no one wanted to tell me. I was an idiot: I thought that by getting close to the family, I would find out when, why, and how they became so rich; I was planning an investigation— and all I discovered was a man filled with passion, who told me about distant countries, the rivers of the Russian Empire, the mountains of Ceylon, the royal dynasties of Java, the French Republic, the caravans that cross Arabia Felix, the love affairs of the gods; he was authoritarian too, he wanted to teach me a whole host of things, I was discovering a whole other world. I loved it. Every Saturday I went home to help my mother, and then on Sundays, to please her, I sometimes agreed to go to Mass at the Russian cathedral in Nice. At Easter I finally dared to put on my new pants, like a young dandy, and a slightly too-short jacket that Adolphe no longer wanted. I added a folded pocket handkerchief and borrowed a tie pin. She looked me up and down with an expression that made me tremble—I had decided to face her down—and hugged me.
Learning archaic Greek meant a lot of grammar. It was torture for me. I worked five or six hours in a row, copying out pages of texts, which I then learned by heart and recited when I was alone in my room. At night, I dreamed of little Greek words with paws, clambering in line along my pillow. I could recall snatches, which impressed the Reinachs, but I never experienced that moment when learning a language you feel as if you have crossed a border, the barrier lifts and everything is natural, easy, with its own logic and beauty. Plato’s Greek was still a rock-face for me, on which I tore my nails. I was never tempted to give up. I wanted to be taken seriously. I began sneaking out at night again—I couldn’t stop myself. After whole days spent with my head inside my books, I wanted to be in town, I craved the long tree-lined streets and rows of apartment buildings. I had my bicycle now, a De Dion-Bouton, bought with the money I had earned. No one was keeping watch on me, but it felt like I was fleeing as I headed into the night for Nice. With each push against the pedal, I’d hear the declensions, intone a verse, try to sense the stress. I couldn’t read Demosthenes’ speeches in Greek, I used to cheat, I used the translation, I knew no one would help me and I was desperate to earn my place in the Reinach orchestra. My mistakes made them laugh, which incensed me. Theodore remained patient and kind. Whenever he sensed that I couldn’t keep going, he would give me a history lesson, and I liked listening to him talk about Spartan warriors, Philip of Macedonia’s wars, the defeat of the great king Darius. I asked him questions about ships, the lines of rowers, triremes, I wanted to understand how there was room for so many soldiers in such small vessels. Had any been found? I stroked Cerberus. How did we know what the ships in the Battle of Salamis looked like, in the “night with the dark face”? I even managed, I think, to say it in Greek. It’s all gone, wave after wave, like an exhausted swell in the cavern of my brain: I can’t remember any of the things I knew when I was eighteen. The builders had completed the foundations. I was drawing the rooms and corridors in the basement: that’s how I know there is no hidden underground room, no secret chamber. At least it will save me some time today. Monsieur Pontremoli didn’t end up walled up like the pharaohs’ builders in the Hollywood blockbusters that I loved so much in later years. Once, I had all the plans in my hands; this morning, I have them all in my head.
Playing this game whose purpose was to turn me into a historian, Theodore often used to tell me stories of the great adventure of the Jewish people. If he had chosen to make films, he could have been one of the great directors of the early days of cinema, making French epics in the Victorine studios. He showed me photographs of ancient coins in books, told me about Solomon’s Temple, the seven-branched candelabra and the Ark of the Covenant that contained the Tablets of the Law and was carried on a golden bier surmounted by two carved cherubim. He described the molten sea, the large basin the Hebrew priests used for their ablutions. Always standing, he would mimic the Queen of Sheba all-aquiver, linger on the Jews’ captivity in Babylon or the Golden Calf. He explained the Athenian constitution at the time of Cleisthenes—what a strange name—or the construction of the Greek temples of Paestum—I learned that the most beautiful Greek temples are found in Italy, that people photograph old coins and make books about them, that it was not only in the Bible that the Hebrews are mentioned, and that people only burn incense in front of Orthodox icons. My astonishment lasted all of two minutes, after which I knew it all, and later I would astonish my mother and the dairywoman.
At the lycée I was soon one of the top students in the class, though my mother of course was the kind who was entirely unsurprised and never rewarded me. She’d adopt the tightlipped air of the head housekeeper and say: “Well done, keep it up.” It was so unfair: when everyone complimented her on her cooking, she would cock her head like a little dog at the sight of a sugar cube. I think I hated her then, when I was winning prizes and she never said a word. One day she tried to go and see Fanny Reinach, to explain that she had lent the family her son, and they ought perhaps to pay her a little something. Madame Reinach looked at her and didn’t answer. My mother shouted when she told me. I was ashamed. She was right though, if I put myself in her place; what had happened to us was very strange. She denounced Theodore and Fanny’s greed, and went to talk to the priest. I was afraid that they would send me packing if all this came out at Kerylos. She talked about sending me to live with one of my father’s brothers, a gardener at the prefecture, who would be able to get me a paid job as a day laborer. I wept. I knew I would never be good enough at Greek and history to be kept on at the Reinachs’. I began to have nightmares.
7
CONVERSING IN THE ENEMY TONGUE
The people of Beaulieu had no idea how to pronounce this “German” name: the butcher and the blacksmith said Reinasheu, with a strong accent. The people who said Rynack didn’t like Jews. They didn’t much like Germans either, and they never tired of repeating that the Germans had defeated us in 1870 and stolen not only Alsace but also the most beautiful part of Lorraine. One might have thought that for Corsicans, all those operations in the east were a long way away, but no: it was as if someone had torn off yet another piece of Napoleon’s greatcoat, the final stages of the dismantling of the great French Empire. My mother forgave the Germans nothing.
One winter morning, I was horrified to overhear—without understanding a word—Theodore Reinach, who was holding Cerberus on a leash, and Gustave Eiffel speaking German together as they stood on the seawall.
I was alarmed. I wondered if I had arrived at a very bad time, if I had been right to leave my mother, if I should return to Corsica to look for work in Ajaccio. There were some Germans in the village, right next door in fact: in 1905 the Villa Livesey—built by a very elegant British railway engineer who had once hosted James Gordon Bennett, the man who established the world’s first hot air balloon race—had been sold to Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, governor of Haute Alsace. No one ever spoke to him, nor to any of his servants, but everyone knew his complicated name by heart. In Beaulieu, Eiffel was admired, but no one spoke of the “Villa Eiffel,” instead it was called the “Maison Salles.” That was how letters there were addressed. As far as the postman knew, the real owner was Monsieur Eiffel’s son-in-law, his eldest daughter Claire’s husband, Adolphe Salles; the brilliant engineer wanted neither to draw attention to nor advertise his name, which rang so oddly to southern ears. Was he afraid of an attack? I only understood much later. Why were Reinach and Eiffel speaking German? Were my mother and I living among spies? I couldn’t bear
for her to start spreading another scandal, so I told no one, kept it to myself, one more anxiety to nurse as I memorized the pages of my books of Greek. Fanny Reinach’s smile when she brought me cakes while I was immersed in my studies barely soothed my anxiety.
The next day Monsieur Reinach, as though he knew I had overheard his conversation, said to me in his reedy voice: “You know, learning German, because it’s the language of our enemies and we are going to have to fight them again, is like already having committed to fighting another war; learning English, to fight alongside other men in red uniform, that’s also wanting war; even going into some kind of passing trade, if that kind of thing grabs you, learning any living language, means thinking about defending borders, conquering, invading. But the man who studies Greek is going to learn how to think, how to love, and anywhere he goes in the entire world he will find other people who chose to learn the language so that they could share the understanding, the sense of nuance, and the progress that we all make, to some degree, in self-knowledge.”
He didn’t really say all that to me that day, of course, in one go; I’m embellishing. But it was what he led me to understand, during my first six years there, the period when the villa was being built. A man who knows a little Greek, or who learned some in his youth, will be drawn to other cultivated people, people who love theater, architecture, history, the beauty of statues, the feeling you have when you weigh a coin in your hand, thinking about all the people who held it before you, over the centuries—so many things that are beautiful and serve no purpose, serious and joyful, tragic and poignant, comical and sad—and you don’t even think about whether they were German, Italian, or British. Learning Greek is like loving music, or speaking a universal language.
