You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  The church bells had stopped ringing, and police on motorcycles now cruised by slowly, along with journalists, photographers, and television crews. They were followed by four policemen on horseback, then by a phalanx of several dozen police marching in lock-step. Behind them came two teams of horses, one following the other, each team pulling a coffin—a large coffin first, a smaller one second—each coffin covered with a garland of braided red and white flowers.

  “The French are really good at this,” Sam whispered. “They’re terrible at many things, but when it comes to ceremony, they’re terrific.”

  Behind the police, at a distance of some fifteen to twenty yards, a crowd of mourners now appeared. From newspaper and television images, Allan recognized the man in the middle of the front line, a tri-colored sash across his chest, as Doctor Henri Bertrand. Hatless, and wearing a gray three-piece suit—Allan gauged him to be in his early- to mid-forties—the doctor was strikingly handsome in the manner of an Italian movie star, with wavy, graying hair, deep set eyes, and a square chin. His arms were linked with the arms of two elderly women, one to each side of him, and the elderly woman to his right had her arm linked in the arm of a much older woman who walked with difficulty, dragging her left leg slightly. Doctor Bertrand stared straight ahead, and from the proud way he carried himself, he might, Allan thought, have been a hero returning to his hometown in order to witness a statue being unveiled in his honor.

  A boy, perhaps five or six years old, in suit and tie identical to Doctor Bertrand’s—his surviving child, Allan assumed—walked several feet to his left, hand in hand with a middle-aged woman. A priest, in long black robe, walked to Doctor Bertrand’s right, and in the line of people immediately behind Doctor Bertrand walked four other priests, along with three women in brown and white habits, this group followed by a group of two to three dozen others, the women in dresses and topcoats, the men in suits, some of the women pushing baby carriages. Despite the chill in the air, Allan noticed, none of the men wore coats.

  On television, the evening before, they had learned the news: that Doctor Bertrand’s wife and three-month-old daughter had been found dead in their home, and that the police had taken the family’s Algerian housekeeper into custody and would be charging her with the murders.

  “Summer afternoon,” Esther said.

  “Summer ? ” Allan said. “But it’s December. I don’t understand—”

  “Summer afternoon,” Esther repeated. “Henry James thought those were the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

  Stepping out from behind the barricades, people now moved onto the road to join the funeral procession. Allan turned to Esther and opened his mouth to speak—to ask how she could, in such a moment, be thinking such a thought—but as he did, something caught in his chest and he found himself doubled over, gasping for breath. He could hear Esther, a retired New York City high school English teacher, talking to Sam about Henry James, saying that there was not, as far as she could recall, a funeral anywhere in James’s novels or stories. The same was true of Jane Austen. Nor were there any references she could remember in either writer’s work to war. And yet, she was saying, everything was there—everything that mattered.

  “I’m sorry,” Allan said. “I didn’t want…”

  He sat on a bench, Esther on one side of him, Sam on the other, Sam telling him that the same thing had happened to him once, at the funeral of an old girlfriend. Allan’s heart began to slow down, to beat more regularly, and he told himself that in a week or so he would visit Doctor Bertrand in his office and have him listen to his heart, and perhaps the doctor’s laying on of hands would provide the pretext for conversation. Although the doctor would hardly be a stranger to death, he might now be experiencing a more acute sense of loss than any he had previously imagined possible. The doctor might not want to burden friends and family with his situation, and it might, Allan thought, give the doctor’s heart some ease to be able to talk with a stranger—with someone he didn’t know…

  The speaker, on a platform in front of the village’s school, was talking about the National Front’s mission civilatrice, and how the two great dangers facing France were unemployment and immigration. Three million unemployed Frenchmen, he declared, were three million immigrants too many. What had happened in Spéracèdes would soon be happening not only in Paris, Marseilles, or Lyon, but in every village where good and honest Frenchmen and Frenchwomen lived. North Africans and others from that continent were draining France of its resources, and undermining the integrity of French national identity.

  The French nation grieved with Doctor Bertrand and his family. Of course. In such a dark time, however, there was hope and there was light, for the National Front had solutions to France’s problems: repatriate these immigrants, restrict their access to French citizenship, create and deploy a special National Guard to prevent civic unrest and subversion…

  Allan saw that some of the people applauding most enthusiastically were villagers with whom he exchanged friendly greetings when he walked to and from town. The speaker—not Le Pen, who had sent his regrets and who, since Sarkozy’s ascendancy, was limiting his public appearances—was listing items on the National Front’s agenda: reintroducing the death penalty, criminalizing abortion, blocking France from further integration with Europe, encouraging French women—their patriotic duty—to have more children. Allan pointed to one of the placards: Pour le SIDA—SIDAtoriums.

  “Does that mean what I think it does?” he asked Sam.

  “Sure does,” Sam said. “According to these clowns, people with AIDS are to be placed in special camps.”

  “Even if they’re Jews?” Allan asked.

  “Despite my wishful musings, irony won’t be selling well here today, I’m afraid,” Esther said. “We should leave. I’m feeling distinctly uncomfortable—sick to my stomach actually.”

  His voice low, Sam was explaining that many of the founders of the National Front had been members of the Nazi Waffen-SS and of terrorist OAS Algerian settlers organizations. Did Allan and Esther know that Le Pen had called the gas chambers a minor footnote in the history of World War Two? Allan looked around, at other slogans on other placards: La France et les Français D’Abord… La France pour les Français de Souche… Non à l’Islamisation…

  Although the three of them, with Pauline, had, during the Vietnam War, marched in anti-war protests together, Sam had, with the years, become more politically conservative, and unashamedly so. During the sixties he had been arrested several times during anti-war protests—for sitting in at induction centers, for advocating draft resistance—and in his new political incarnation he had taken to using this fact to chastise Allan—to remind him that for all his ideals and beliefs, Allan had never put his body where his mouth was.

  To Allan’s surprise and pleasure, however, Sam had within the past year, become a critic of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Sam continued to believe that the United States had a moral and political obligation to use its global hegemony for good, his verdict on these wars was that they were carelessly conceived, badly executed, and, for the most part, politically counter-productive. Still, he maintained, when it came to Iraq, there was something to be said for getting rid of at least one brutal dictator, and for letting the Arabs know that if they messed with Israel, the United States would bomb the crap out of them.

  When at dinner, their third evening in Spéracèdes, Esther mentioned the fact that on the first day of the American invasion of Iraq, Allan had sent a letter of protest to the White House in which he declared that the war was not being waged in his name, Sam had scoffed, and said this proved one of his major points—not about Allan so much, whose sincerity he didn’t question, but about liberals in general, and their lack of realism—the softness of their views.

  Not to speak ill of the dead, he had added, but his wife, Pauline, bless her sweet bleeding heart, had done the same thing—had often written letters to the president expressing her disp
leasure with American policies.

  “Puerile,” Sam said. “I told her that such acts—letters to the president, or to newspapers or congressmen—protest marches, e-mail petitions—these were all puerile acts. I called them—” he paused for effect “—‘ T he Pueriles of Pauline.’ ” He had tried to laugh then, but had coughed instead, wiped at his eyes. “Sure,” he said a moment later. “ ‘ The Pueriles of Pauline’—that’s what I used to call them…”

  A speaker was recounting the story of Joan of Arc, the National Front’s patron saint, who had martyred herself to prevent British domination of France. The speaker talked of ways ethnic minorities would soon dominate French life, and of how all those who championed them—the Left, the Socialists, the Communists, the trade unionists—intellectuals, feminists, homosexuals—were contributing to the degeneration of the nation.

  “Are you coming?” Esther asked.

  “Not just yet,” Allan said.

  “I’ll meet you back at the house then. Sam—?”

  Monsieur and Madame Merle, who owned one of the village’s two grocery stores, approached. “I am pleased to see you all here today,” Monsieur Merle said.

  Allan said he had seen Monsieur and Madame Merle walking with the crowd of mourners, and asked if Madame Bertrand and her children were relatives. Monsieur Merle said that yes, Madame Bertrand was—had been, he corrected himself—his niece.

  Allan and Esther offered their condolences, and Monsieur Merle thanked them, and said that the reason their presence pleased him was because, as Americans, they could now see for themselves the problem that the good people of Spéracèdes, like good people everywhere, were facing in France.

  “Intolerance,” Allan said. “Yes. It’s despicable.”

  “Intolerance?” Monsieur Merle asked. “How intolerance? What we have in common with you Americans—our great and unfortunate bond—is the knowledge of what happens to a society when it refuses to take strong measures to save itself.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sam said.

  “I don’t understand,” Allan said.

  “Esther’s right,” Sam said, a hand on Allan’s arm. “Time to head for the exits.”

  Allan pushed Sam’s hand away. “Tell me about what we have in common,” he said to Monsieur Merle. “Please.”

  “I speak, of course, of your Negroes,” Monsieur Merle said. “You set them free within your borders more than a century ago, yet you are still paying the price. They defile your wives and daughters, they destroy your cities, they steal your cars—”

  “Excuse me,” Esther said, and to Allan: “Coming?”

  “I want to hear more,” Allan said to Monsieur Merle, “because it seems to me that you and I have nothing in common. I would, in fact, be ashamed to have anything in common with you.”

  “Are you then—how do you say it in your country—” Monsieur Merle asked “—a lover of niggers?”

  In his left hand, Allan held one of the flyers the National Front had been distributing, and, with a backhanded swing, he lashed out at Monsieur Merle, but Monsieur Merle, a stout man who stood at perhaps five-foot-four, jerked his head back with surprising quickness so that the paper fluttered past his nose.

  “You are not French, sir,” Monsieur Merle stated calmly. “If you were, you would understand what we live with here. I admire you greatly, you know—you Americans. In Indochina first, and again in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have been the defenders of the West—of Christian civilization—whereas our leaders…”

  “I am, for your information, a Jew,” Allan said.

  Monsieur Merle made a slight percussive sound—Pouf !—across his lips, as if to say: Well then—that explains everything, of course, doesn’t it?

  “Don’t say another word,” Sam whispered. “These birds make born-again neo-cons like me look like liberal groupies. Come on, Allan—forget the noble sentiments, and let’s just get the hell out of here, okay?” Sam took Allan by the arm. “I know what the French can be like, believe me. When they’re not selfserving cowards, they can be exceptionally gifted at being really mean.”

  Allan looked toward the speaker’s platform, where a man was holding forth about the necessity of repealing anti-racist legislation—the so-called liberticides—about giving the police more power, about ridding the nation of the scum that was fouling its waters, about the sacredness of the nuclear family…

  Allan pulled his arm from Sam’s grasp. “Shame !” he began shouting. “Shame… ! Shame… ! Shame on you! Shame on all of you! Shame… ! Shame…! Shame…! ”

  Then he felt his arms being wrenched behind him, his head yanked downward, chin to chest. Policemen surrounded him, pushed him forward roughly. A large man, not in uniform, stood in their path. Someone pulled Allan’s head back by the hair and when he did, the large man, grinning broadly, said something about Allan’s wife, after which he drew back his fist and smashed it into Allan’s face. Allan heard something click inside his nose. He tasted salt. He heard Esther scream. He saw Sam, arms flailing, fall and disappear into the crowd. But why, he wondered a moment later, had being called a nigger lover—why had this been capable of triggering his rage? Of what real use, far from home, were the words he’d shouted? And—a passing thought—was it easier, he wondered, to be openly enraged, or outraged, because he was far from home?

  When, later on, they would talk about the incident, he imagined that Sam would probably trace the intensity of Allan’s feelings to a time when, as boys, they had revered Jackie Robinson—had taken pride in the fact that Robinson played for their home team, the Brooklyn Dodgers—to how, like most of their Jewish friends, they had schooled themselves in the ways Robinson, as fierce a competitor as ever existed, had had to curb his ferocity and turn the other cheek in order to make better lives possible for others. But why, he wondered, too, had the old cliché about Americans being les défenseurs de la civilisation Occidentale et Chrétienne riled him so? There were a multitude of more pernicious ways in which people with power and access to power exploited others, or murdered, or were complicit in murder…

  While people kicked at him, Allan lay on the ground—on one of the village’s boules courts—curled into a fetal position. Although he had, forty years before, attended many civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, this was the first time he had ever been attacked physically, and—a not unpleasant thought—the first time he had acted so as to cause police to intervene and take him away.

  Make-A-Wish

  Charlie Teitlebaum, a forty-two-year-old surgeon born and raised in the same Boston neighborhood in which Howard had grown up, had not been one of Howard’s residents, but while Charlie was doing his internship at The George Washington School of Medicine, where Howard was on the faculty, Howard and Charlie had become friends. At the time, Charlie had been going through a difficult stretch—his wife, Caitlin, had, it turned out, been in and out of mental hospitals during her late teens and early twenties (Charlie only learned this after they were married), and, following their move to Washington, had begun throwing tantrums during which she would physically attack him.

  When, during rounds one morning, Howard noticed how uncharacteristically distracted Charlie seemed, he suggested that Charlie come see him, and when Charlie did, and Howard asked the obvious question—Is everything okay?—Charlie had begun talking, and had kept on talking for the next two hours.

  Howard met with Charlie regularly for several weeks, and during their talks he repeated what he saw as the essential questions: If you stay with her, will you be able to finish your internship? Can you see yourself living with her for the rest of your life? And: If you think her life will continue to go down the tubes, why the duty—the need—to join in her descent?

  Seven months later, Charlie divorced Caitlin, and eighteen months after that—and after a brief romance with Deirdre, who was one of Howard’s residents at the time—Charlie remarried. Charlie’s second wife, Claire, was a pediatrician, and by the time Charlie had completed a six year residency in genera
l surgery at Johns Hopkins, followed by a two year fellowship in surgical oncology, they had had three children. By this time, too, Charlie owed the Army a dozen years of service.

  In 1999 Charlie was assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he distinguished himself in general and oncological surgery. In October, 2001, less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, he was sent to Afghanistan with a medical team that accompanied the first troops landing there.

  Following a year-long tour in Afghanistan, he returned to Walter Reed, and four years later was deployed to Iraq. In Iraq, he reported in a letter to Howard, his Forward Surgical Team traveled more than twelve hundred miles within four months of its arrival. Medical teams had been designed and trained for swift, mobile military operations, but the war in Iraq was proving to be slow-moving and protracted; blast injuries from suicide bombs and land mines brought about higher incidences of penetrating wounds, mangled extremities, and blindness. Charlie saw astonishing rates of pulmonary embolism and deep venous thrombosis, and, what alarmed him most, a near epidemic of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection.

  Two weeks before Howard received Deirdre’s letter, telling him of her situation, and asking him if he would do what they were now doing—travel with her in France for ten days—he had received a letter from Charlie’s wife Claire. Three days prior to Charlie’s scheduled departure from Iraq, Claire wrote, while making his weekly telephone call home from outside his barracks, he had been hit during a rocket-propelled grenade attack.

  Despite the Forward Surgical Team’s best efforts, Howard now told Deirdre, they had been unable to revive him.

  “So that means that later this year, Charlie and I will be having a mini-reunion,” Deirdre said.

  “Don’t,” Howard said.

  “Why not?” She jabbed Howard in the side, and when he winced, she did it again. “Come on—why not?”