But I chose to come back to Paris and shout Monsieur Laferrière’s heroism from the rooftops, as much to thank him as to shame others. He was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor Israel bestows on gentiles who helped a Jew during the dark years of the Occupation at great risk and with no thought of reward. I later married Jacques Laferrière’s granddaughter, and he is truly my family now, great grandfather to my children. He is proud that when they ask what he did during the war, he can look them in the eye and say, I was among Les Justes Parmi Les Nations.
Thanks to him, I am alive today, no longer a boy on the verge of manhood, but a man of almost sixty. But one thing has not changed in all the intervening years: in my dreams my hand still reaches up to pull the safety chain, forcing the train to stop, to return time to that instant, so that it is I who hold my brother’s hand and descend with him to the platform, and each time at the moment of waking I realize that no train and no clock on this earth can take me back, that I can only keep moving forward, relentlessly forward.
Dazed, Sylvie looks again at the old photograph, examines each face with close attention, not just the little boy, but the stocky man with him, squaring up to the soldiers, the faces looking out of the windows of the moving train with expressions of surprise, pity, indifference. She rereads the author’s note, which says Ari Wolkowsky lives in Paris and is working on a documentary film for the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine. And then she is struck by a notion so daring that it hardly seems credible.
She rushes to Julien’s desk but finds only a pile of his scientific journals, neatly stacked and freshly dusted by Ana Carvalho. In a frenzy she looks through the boxes of books and papers she and Alexandra had moved from Julien’s study during the recent remodeling. Sylvie cannot explain why she feels this sense of urgency. She empties out the boxes, rummages through the papers, until at last she is ready to admit defeat. Maybe she hadn’t seen it in Julien’s study at all, it’s not the kind of magazine he would have bought. Perhaps she had seen it at a newsstand, or at someone’s house. But whose? She hasn’t visited anyone since last summer, not after the quick progression of Julien’s disease, from diagnosis to death in a matter of months. In any case, she had better start putting away the books and tidying up the papers, she doesn’t want Ana Carvalho to see the room in such disarray.
She sighs and picks up one of Julien’s books. Freud’s L’Interprétation des rêves. She places it back in the box with as much reverence as Julien himself accorded his teacher. Though the windows are closed, a slight gust of air blows some papers across the floor, and as she bends to pick them up, she notices a folded-over periodical that had fallen behind one of the boxes. She unfolds it and smooths it out. Yes, it is the same cover, she wasn’t mistaken after all.
Hardly daring to breathe, Sylvie opens it to the back page, which is dog-eared with Julien’s characteristic fold. And at the bottom of the page, in his unmistakable hand, is a telephone number. Feeling she is being guided in some mysterious way, Sylvie goes to the phone and dials the number. It is indeed the CDJC.
She asks for an appointment with the documentary filmmaker. She can’t explain why she has this strong impulse to connect with him, what can he tell her, after all? But in any event, she feels compelled to tell him that she has been pierced to the heart by his story, that his sorrow has helped her to understand Julien’s sorrow, to grasp the scale of the Shoah, that there were six million such stories, and so few left now to remember.
She puts away the magazine, strangely impatient to meet Ari Wolkowsky, haunted by the words which continue to echo in her mind over the following days: Each time at the moment of waking I realize that no train and no clock on this earth can take me back, that I can only keep moving forward, relentlessly forward.
I am filled with a rush of emotions so mixed that it is impossible to peel one away from the other to examine them closely, to articulate them even to myself. All I know is that the torch has been passed to Sylvie, that she is carrying it into the darkness with the courage I have always admired. For Sylvie, as for me, that photograph has raised the same hopes, Ari Wolkowsky’s words have struck the same chord.
It’s true that no one living can make that return journey, those who still have the power to act must move forward, relentlessly forward, leaving us further and further behind, until we are mere undifferentiated shadows in the great procession of history. And today history itself will parade through the streets, announcing its arrival with the promise of glorious weather and resounding celebrations. When they were little, my children loved to wake up early on le quatorze juillet though they were still sleepy from the torchlight processions of the night before. It’s as if they had a personal stake in the holiday, their chests puffed up with pride and thankfulness that of all the countries in the world, it was in France they had been born, unquestionably and unquestioningly French.
My own attitude to France is more complicated, of course. Though French to the marrow of my bones, I was made to feel like an outsider in my own country. A foretaste of my present existence…in the world but not of it.
Yet I find myself swept up in the celebration on this fourteenth of July which marks two hundred years of the revolution that led to the stunning declaration: “All men are born and live free and equal in their rights.” ALL men, without exception. Because who does not thirst for freedom? Who does not hunger to believe his own life is worth as much as another’s?
Two hundred years ago, a crowd listened to Camille Desmoulins as he balanced himself unsteadily on a makeshift platform and recounted their long tally of grievances. Simmering with anger because their children were hungry, the crowd’s rage boiled over at his words, transforming their hunger for bread into a hunger for liberty. And two days later they surged toward the Bastille, symbol of the king’s absolute power, where thousands of prisoners were rumored to languish based on nothing more than secret letters and royal whims. But when the Bastille fell into their hands, they discovered only half a dozen prisoners in the fortress, seven, to be precise, and the faces of the freed men gaped at their jailer’s severed head, both wearing identical expressions of astonishment at this shift of power from the grasp of kings into the hands of people. What a dramatic turnaround! The very definition of a revolution.
How we long to believe that revolutions will change the world! That indeed Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité will remain our birthright, and that the first line of our anthem will live up to its promise, that we are all children of France. I think of my sister Clara putting on her bonnet of black lace and running down to the village square for the flag-filled ceremonies of le quatorze juillet, singing in her piping little voice: “Allons enfants de la Patrie-ee-uh.”
Yes. Well.
As always, when I am profoundly moved, I gravitate toward the banks of the Seine. The river’s arms bear Notre Dame like a chalice, and I climb the spiraling staircase in the cathedral’s north tower, its stone steps steep and then steeper still, narrowing like a constricted windpipe until I finally reach the doorway at the top, where the first breath of air, even to a disembodied unbeliever, feels like a prayer.
I cross over to the second tower through the grand gallery of chimeras that gaze at the city with their petrified stare, and pass by the oak belfry housing the bourdon bell named Emmanuel, its voice so rich and gleaming it seems cast not from bronze but gold when it summons the devout, celebrates the living, laments the dead. At present Emmanuel’s great clapper is still, yet the bell is eloquent even in its silence.
The south tower leads me higher still, and the city lies spread out at my feet, a symphony of spires and domes and towers. Here and there, monoliths of glass and steel thrust themselves like brash adolescents into a conversation they don’t quite understand. People said the same about the Eiffel Tower when it went up for the first centennial, but I admire the way its sequined lights shine like early stars in the dusk, the filigr
eed ironwork making it seem for all its substance to float weightlessly, an inspired emblem for the City of Light—in both senses of the word—not just luminosity but also lightness, which we prize above all, in wit, in art, in life.
It vexes me that the buildings commissioned for the second centennial are grandiloquent without being grand. I turn my gaze instead to the pleasing works of Le Vau clustered on the island behind me; the parks and gardens spread out like Aubusson rugs; the neat apartment buildings, which look like dollhouses from this height; the idiosyncratic bridges that, despite their quirks, form a harmonious ensemble; and the river on which this beauty converges and shimmers.
The throbbing beats of a thousand drummers are audible even up here, like the accelerated heartbeat of the city. My own pulse quickens at the sound of marching footsteps, of rolling wheels, and how recent seem those dark days when such celebrations were banned, “La Marseillaise” forbidden, a giant swastika draped the Eiffel Tower, and all clocks in Paris were turned forward an hour to Berlin time, as if time itself was occupied territory. But deep time cannot be reset like clocks; it inhabits a zone impervious to chronology.
Tonight’s festivities sweep me into a crowd of other jubilant faces, other voices cheering on le quatorze juillet. The Great War was over—no one called it the first war then, no one imagined there would be a second—and on July Fourteenth, the mutilés de guerre led the victory parade to the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’s “Faust,” their mutilated faces and amputated limbs evidence of the irreparable costs of war. But people’s spirits lifted as the hero of Verdun rode by on his white horse, seven stars on his sleeve proclaiming Philippe Pétain the newest marshal of France, and the sight of young girls in their Alsatian bonnets of black lace reminded the crowd that we had recovered the stolen provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, her two million lost children were back in the embrace of France, the statue of Strasbourg had cast off her mourning cloak. It seemed a fitting tribute to the glorious day that the words to “La Marseillaise” were composed not in Marseilles but in Strasbourg, and with tears running down our cheeks we knew that finally “le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
Last night those words resounded again, when a new opera house was inaugurated on the spot where the Bastille once stood, and the world’s greatest opera stars joined together to sing “La Marseillaise.” And tonight the spectacle is out on the street. When Marianne, symbol of the Republic, rises out of the ground like an earth goddess to sing “La Marseillaise,” I’m pleased she is represented by a black American, a visible embodiment of our commitment to égalité. The crowd falls silent at the clarion call: “Allons enfants de la Patrie,” and while the anthem’s bloodthirsty words arouse no emotion in my breast—I have seen enough blood to know that friend or enemy, we all bleed alike—the music stirs me all the same. As the singer circles the obelisk, I blot out the image of the guillotine that once stood there, glad that tonight it is only fireworks that will slice through the darkness like a thousand shining blades.
Will and Alice feel the palpable thrill of watching the parade from the bleachers. The judge was astounded that the Americans wanted to go in person; he and his wife preferred to watch it on television, away at their country house. “This way,” Madame de Cheroisey added as they were driving off for the weekend, “we will avoid the rabble.” The judge stepped on the gas before Will could retort that the rabble is the very point of the celebration.
When the festivities begin, cheers go up from the million spectators, some of whom have camped all day along the parade’s route, and they are joined by five hundred million more in front of their televisions around the world and for a few hours what Benjamin Franklin said still rings true: Every man has two countries, his own and France.
As the sound of drumbeats draws closer, Alice says, “We’re watching history with a capital H.”
“Hokey with a capital H,” retorts Will. But he has to admit the parade is visually spectacular, and no wonder, it is the work of an adman after all, plenty of Kodak moments, like the women in black twirling down the street in giant motorized skirts or the pyramid made up of African drummers, all selling a “new, improved” revolution, with liberty and fraternity given their due though equality’s a touch problematic seeing how leaders from the world’s richest countries, gathered here for the G7 summit, are separated from the rabble by bulletproof glass.
The parade moves down the Champs-Élysées to the thrumming of a thousand drums, a surreal fusion of military march and folk spectacle, resembling nothing so much as a circus, which is fitting, thinks Will, the French are crazy about circuses. And about revolutions, obviously, the flavor du jour, spotlighting countries that can lay claim to them. France, needless to say, and its old enemy Britain, along with their former colonies, including America and India. Russia is well represented, but not China, which backed out at the last minute. Replacing the official Chinese entry is a makeshift float on which a massive Chinese drum sits silent, flanked by students wheeling bicycles, their faces painted to conceal their identity. It’s little more than a month since Tiananmen Square, and the image of a lone man facing down tanks is on everyone’s minds; not all revolutionary acts are in the distant past. It’s unlikely, though, that anything revolutionary will happen today, the place is crawling with police. A surveillance blimp is up in the air like a giant eyeball, and a good thing, too, it’s just the kind of event that’s a magnet for terrorists.
A stroke of luck, Will thinks, that the weather’s exceptionally balmy in Paris tonight, which gives the French yet another thing to feel superior about, since so many of the floats riff on the vile weather of foreign lands, English rain, Russian snow. The cloudless sky provides a welcome touch of nature to a pageant whose effects depend so much on fakery, there’s fake snow, fake rain, a fake bear, and even, come to think of it, fake zebras; had it actually rained, their stripes would have washed off, revealing them as horses. But “artificial” is not a pejorative word for the French, they admire artifice as much as Americans admire naturalness.
He and Alice can’t decide which is the parade’s greatest moment; for him, it’s either Jessye Norman singing “La Marseillaise” in a billowing tricolored robe that makes her look like a frigate in full sail, or the chuffing old locomotive greeted so enthusiastically by the French, they love trains the way the English love horses and Americans love cars. Alice says her favorite is the black marching band from Florida, given the honor of ending the parade to rapturous cheers, nice to see the French so wholeheartedly pro-American for once. But the image that stays with Will long after the night ends is the crowd spontaneously breaking through the barricades to rush into the street and mingle with the pageant in instinctive realization that what they are celebrating today is themselves. Then the fireworks start, a dazzling exhibition over both ends of the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe at one end and the obelisk at the other.
I admire the fireworks filling the sky with their coruscating light. And yet.
And yet, a niggle of unease persists. I try to trace it to its source. Did it begin this morning, when a crowd of protesters threw six hundred severed heads into the river? The police fished them out before they could float away and frighten the wits out of people. As well they might. Fake or not, severed heads are a staple of our collective nightmares. Children are weaned on tales of Saint Denis, bishop of the Parisii, whose head was sundered by a sword while he preached the holy word, and he picked it up and carried it in his hands, still exhorting the unbelievers to convert, a disembodied voice that must have seemed an emanation from God. He was buried where he fell, and there his basilica now stands, the final resting place of the kings of France, including the only one who lost his head to the guillotine. Beheaded bodies were as common as pollarded sycamores during the revolution and its aftermath, and surely this must be the only city with an entire cemetery just for the décapités. Statues of saints and kings had their marble heads lopped off; not even the dea
d were immune, as royal remains were dug up and destroyed, and the embalmed head of Henri le vert galant mysteriously disappeared. And on Île Saint-Louis, you can still see a name chiseled into stone, the Street of the Headless Woman. People assume the “femme sans tête” is the headless statue there in an angled niche, but they are wrong, that torso is in fact Saint Nicholas, patron of children and the wrongly accused, guardian of those without guilt and without guile, the innocent of the world.
Headless torsos, floating heads. No wonder they awaken an old unease. And yet my perturbation started well before today. When? Was it when the Americans came to Sylvie’s, as a fresh wind stirs up sediment in the water, or a log added to the fire breaks the old pattern of flames? No, it dates further back, though I cannot pinpoint when. Something trembles in me on the verge of recognition, but wayward memory does not always come when called.
As the last fireworks spangle the sky, I let my mind wander, thinking of other things, of Sylvie, of the Americans who have briefly alighted here but will soon be gone, like countless others before them. I think of Thomas Jefferson, who by a chance of history was in Paris on the day the Bastille was stormed, and then I think of the man who was ambassador to France before Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, of whom one of my compatriots said, “The lightning shaft from heaven he snatched, and the scepter from tyrants.” I am glad to have remembered those words today, given the occasion. However splendid the fireworks, they can never hope to compete with lightning in the sky, its terrible beauty flashing from darkness with the power to blind even as it illuminates.
Haunting Paris Page 15
