Sins

by Gould, Judith

  'Dr. Rosen?' she said in a small, frightened voice.

  He shook his head and smiled. 'You must call me Simon. We are friends, non?'

  She smiled. 'Yes, we are good friends, Simon.'

  He smiled slowly and looked pleased. Tenderly he brushed aside the hair that fell down over her forehead. Suddenly her violet eyes clouded over. He was startled to see them change color so rapidly. One instant they had been violet; now they were a dull amethyst. It was as if a cloud had pushed its way in front of the sun.

  'I have to ask you something, Simon,' she said in a quiet, heavy voice. 'I need to know the truth.'

  He nodded in silence. He knew what she was going to ask. He had wondered how long it would be until she did. But he hadn't thought it would be so soon.

  She stared at him, and her voice dropped to a whisper. 'Simon? Will I. . .will I be able to bear any more children?'

  He closed his eyes. He who had managed to comfort so many people all his life found that words failed him at this moment.

  'Thank you, Simon,' she said softly. 'Thank you for not trying to deny it. For not giving me false hopes.' She turned her head sideways on the pillow and stared at the wall. She felt an agony like she had never thought could exist. She didn't make a sound, but the tears streamed down her cheeks. Only now did she realize the true gravity of what she had done. Her lips trembled. As far as she was concerned, she was now only half a woman. She could never have another baby. Then her lips stopped trembling. Yes, she would! She would have a baby of the spirit. She would have Les Modes!

  Now her recovery speeded up. There was no time to lose, she told herself. Time was a luxury she couldn't indulge in. Every day she spent in bed would be a day's delay for Les Modes. And the very next day, she was able to walk around the room. At first she felt wobbly on her feet, but she forced herself to exercise them. Dr. Rosen was surprised by this sudden willpower, but he said nothing. He was relieved. Now he knew that she was emotionally stronger. That night he carried a little table into the bedroom and spread a cloth over it. 'We shall dine together,' he said.

  She smiled. 'That will be very nice.'

  A little later, he helped her into a chair and she looked down at the table. It was simply set with inexpensive white china. She thought that these simple plates were far more beautiful than any of the gold-rimmed flower-patterned Limoges or Meissen plates she had been using in the town house. Somehow the plain white looked refreshingly honest and unpretentious.

  When they finished dinner, she carefully laid her knife and fork in an X across the plate. 'While you were out earlier, I went into the other room and used the telephone,' she said slowly. She stared down at her plate. 'I'm afraid I won't be able to stay here much longer. I am expected home tomorrow.'

  He nodded, thinking how peculiar it was that she had wanted him to contact only Odile Joly, and no one else. Was it because she had no friends? But surely a beautiful young woman had many friends. And what about the man who had made her pregnant? 'I think you will be strong enough to go home tomorrow,' he said. 'You have a strong will and incredible recuperative powers. But you must take it very easy for the next few weeks. You must promise me that.'

  She nodded. 'I promise.'

  'And no. . .' He made an agitated little gesture.

  She smiled. 'I know. No sex for a few weeks.'

  He nodded, his face reddening suddenly. Then he cleared his throat. 'Also, I insist on escorting you home. You will find that even getting in and out of a taxi takes a lot of energy.'

  She looked at him gratefully. 'Thank you. You've been so kind. I. . .I don't know how I can ever repay you.'

  He waved her to silence. 'Someday you shall run across someone who is sick and in need of help,' he said. 'You can repay me by helping them.'

  'I will do that,' she promised solemnly.

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. His voice was filled with sadness. 'I cannot help but feel sorrow that we must part.'

  'I, too,' she said. 'I will miss you. I hope we can visit each other.'

  He smiled. 'I would like that very much.' Then he looked at her intently. 'Tell me,' he said carefully. 'Now that you are on your way to physical recovery, how do you feel. . .emotionally?'

  Her eyes dropped. 'How can I feel?' she asked softly. 'Except ashamed and dirty?' She gave an ugly little laugh. 'It's funny, isn't it? I thought I was doing the right thing. The only thing. But I realize now that I was wrong. I murdered my baby.' She was silent for a moment. 'I saw it, you know. It even looked like a baby.' She shook her head. 'I don't know if I'll ever really get over that.'

  He took out a pipe and looked at it thoughtfully, turning it over and over in his hands. 'I think you have a right to know what I am about to tell you,' he said, looking back up at her. 'I do not know whether you are emotionally ready to hear it now or not. But perhaps. . .yes, perhaps it will help you feel better about yourself. You see, we all suffer, Hélène. We suffer many times in our lives. Some of us suffer more, some of us suffer less. I don't want you to misconstrue what I am going to tell you. I am not trying to show you how little you have suffered. But that we all have suffered. And that, sometimes, exposure to immense suffering helps ease our own. Do you understand what I am trying to say?'

  'I. . .I think so,' she said haltingly.

  He filled the pipe with tobacco and lit it carefully with a match. Then he smoked in silence for a long time. Finally he spoke. 'Hélène, I am a Jew. We Jews have suffered for thousands of years.' He smiled bitterly. 'Sometimes I tend to think we have cornered the market on suffering.' Then his face grew extremely sad. 'But it is no joke. Every so often someone comes along who tries to wipe us off the face of the earth. So far, we have always managed to survive somehow. We have bled and been decimated, but all the pogroms could not get rid of us as a race. I don't think I need to point out to you the last time such a tragedy occurred.'

  She nodded quietly. Ever since she had been a little girl in Saint-Nazaire she had heard about the camps. About the unspeakable horrors that went on in those wholesale slaughterhouses of hell. About the millions who had been shot and starved and burned and gassed to death.

  'It was my lot in life to endure the last such attack on my people,' Dr. Rosen said. Slowly he unbuttoned his cuff and rolled the sleeve of his white shirt up to his elbow. Hélène stared at his arm. The dark blue numbers stood out clearly beneath the light matting of his hair. Her eyes were moist and fathomless. Slowly she reached out and traced her fingers across the numbers.

  'It was hell on earth,' Dr. Rosen said tightly. 'And the devils were in uniform.' He put down his pipe as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. 'You cannot imagine the horrors unless you were there.'

  Hélène nodded. 'The concentration camps were the shame of all mankind,' she said gently.

  'They were,' Dr. Rosen said. He took a deep breath. 'But you must remember that there were two types of camps. Concentration camps and extermination camps. They were all horrible, and people suffered and died in all of them. The concentration camps were in France, Holland, Germany, and Austria. But the extermination camps? They were in Poland. Their only function was to kill millions of people. Just the names of those places still fill me with dread. Names like Belsen and Treblinka and Stutthof and Auschwitz.' His voice was trembling uncontrollably, and the muscles in his cheeks twitched. 'I was in Auschwitz.'

  'Please stop,' she said softly. 'Haven't you suffered enough? Telling this will only make the pain so much worse.'

  He shook his head. 'I have to tell you. You see, not only we Jews were sent to Auschwitz. There were Gypsies and homosexuals and 'enemies of the state.'' He stared at her sadly. 'There were even members of the French Resistance.'

  Hélène suddenly went cold. She couldn't speak. Somehow she knew what he was going to say next.

  His voice suddenly rose with a cry of anguish. 'I met a woman there,' he said, tears flooding from his eyes. 'Her name was Jacqueline Junot.'

  Hélène closed her eyes. For
a moment she sat in shocked silence. Then she leaned across the table, her face an expressionless mask. 'Tell me!' she whispered. 'Tell me everything! Please. I have to know!'

  And so he told her.

  Maman had been gassed in Auschwitz.

  3

  It was ten o'clock in the morning when the two taxis swung into the Avenue Frederic Le Play and pulled to a halt alongside the curb. The girl dresser and the tall male hairstylist climbed out of the first car and watched as the driver lifted three suitcases out of the trunk. Hélène and Jacques emerged from the second cab. While he paid the drivers, she looked down the Champs de Mars toward the Eiffel Tower. It rose up from the intricately laid lawns and swirling paths of the formal gardens high into the clean winter sky. She cringed. She was frightened. Something told her that she should never have agreed to this. But when Odile Joly had taken her aside, it had sounded like a good idea.

  'There is a very fine photographer doing a spread for Paris Vogue' Odile Joly had said. 'He will use seven pieces from my summer collection. He saw you on the catwalk and insists that you be the model.'

  Hélène had been flattered and excited. The magic word, of course, was Vogue. How often had she leafed through the slick pages of that magazine, hungrily staring at the models? But more important, she had kept in mind what Madame Dupre had said. That perhaps she had more steps to take in order to realize her ambition. Maybe this was yet another such step. Plus there was the matter of the photographer.

  Jacques Renault had already made quite a name for himself as a free-lance photographer. His trademark was 'daring.' He posed his models on the unthinkable—on cliffs, cranes, precipices. One winter morning, he shot various models dangerously posed on the parapets and gargoyles of Notre Dame Cathedral. The pictures had turned out to be fantastic. They were everything Jacques Renault had hoped for. The models' faces were white with fear, as if they were trying to get away from Quasimodo himself. Their fear looked very genuine for one reason. They really were terrified.

  There had been only one problem. Jacques had simply taken his models, gone inside the cathedral, and climbed the steps in the north tower up to the roof. There the models threw off their coats. Underneath, they were scantily clad in slips and brassieres. The ad was for Bonaparte Lingerie.

  There had been a public outcry. The film had been confiscated, and Jacques retaliated by going to court. The case was lengthy, and Jacques became a kind of cause célèbre. After six months, the court ruled in his favor. Overnight he became a major celebrity, a martyr for art. He had made such a sensation that Conde Nast immediately offered him a lucrative contract. Jacques signed it and had worked for Vogue ever since.

  When Hélène discovered that the photographer who wanted to use her for the spread was Jacques, she did not hesitate. Of course, she had known that his trademark was danger. But she had thought it had been overplayed by the press.

  Now, looking toward the black pig-iron girders rising up from the edge of the Seine, she felt sick. Ever since she was a tiny girl, she had been afraid of heights. And on top of it all, it was cold out. And up there, on the second platform of the Eiffel Tower, the wind would be much stronger yet. She looked at Jacques; he was watching her.

  You mustn't think of the height, she told herself as she gritted her teeth. You mustn't think of the danger. You must think only of other things. Comforting things. She smiled wryly. She knew of nothing that could comfort her. The Comte? That was a laugh. Right after Dr. Rosen had taken her home, the Comte had arrived. He had been furious that she had been gone for over a week. She knew that he didn't believe that she had been ill, so she decided not to tell him about the abortion. She had a feeling that he wouldn't have understood.

  Instead, she defied Dr. Rosen's orders and dutifully went to bed with the Comte. She had to get good and drunk in order to deaden the pain that tore through her abdomen. It was a terrible pain. The wounds inside her had not yet healed completely.

  She thought back to how she had quietly climbed out of the bed and gone to the bathroom when the Comte had fallen asleep. Carefully she had washed the blood from her pubis. The Comte hadn't even noticed how he hurt her. Only in the morning, when he awoke to the bloodstained sheets, did he realize that something was wrong. He had slapped her awake. 'Why didn't you tell me that you were having your period?' he demanded. 'You know I can't stand making love to a bleeding woman!' He threw her arm loose. 'Don't ever let that happen again!'

  'All right, first we'll take some shots using the tower for the background,' Jacques said swiftly. He shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets and looked around, shoulders hunched, his young face twisted in concentration. 'Merde! That grass looks all dried up. That's always the trouble with shooting summer clothes in winter.' Irritably he signaled to the dresser and the hairdresser. 'Lug that stuff down to the water fountain.'

  They picked up the suitcases and started walking. The oval fountain, halfway between the Eiffel Tower and the Coeur d'Honneur, was dry. When they got there, Jacques looked pleased. He turned to Hélène.

  'Good. We'll take the first pictures down in there, with the tower rising above you from behind. After that, we'll take the rest of the shots up on the second platform.'

  Hélène glanced over at the tower. She closed her eyes. The second platform was a dizzying hundred and fifteen meters off the ground.

  Half an hour later they were standing on the roof of the second platform. Hélène had changed into a simple pale evening dress that hugged her bosom and then flared to a full skirt below the waist. With a few expert flicks of his wrist, the hairstylist dusted her face with a powder puff; then, noticing the wetness around her eyes, he dabbed them carefully with a piece of tissue. The wind was powerful. It whipped at the carefully pinned-up hair, flogged the skin of her bare back like an icy whip, and forced the tears right up out of her eyes. The makeup had been carefully applied; tears would ruin it. Hélène narrowed her eyes, fighting to keep the tears back.

  A few feet away, Jacques looked through the viewfinder of his Hasselblad. He grunted and fiddled with the lens. Without needing to be told, the dresser and the hairstylist quickly got out of the way. With one hand he signaled for Hélène to move sideways.

  'Hold it!' he yelled above the noise of the wind. She froze and he grinned suddenly. 'That's great! The sun's right behind you, and I can see straight through your dress. Your figure's good. Very good.'

  'Come on, Jacques!' she shouted, briskly rubbing her arms and doing a series of quick little hops. 'My teeth are chattering and I'm freezing to death!'

  Suddenly he started snapping away, his mouth twisted in a frown of concentration. She began to move fluidly, like a dancer swaying to some music only she could hear. Jacques picked up the rhythm of her dance and edged closer, backed up again, stalked around her, all the time clicking his shutter. He stopped a few times to reload the camera. Each time, the hairdresser hurried over to her and dabbed her eyes.

  After a while Jacques stopped. Hélène looked across at him. His face was serious now. 'Move to the edge of the platform, cherie. And careful. We don't want to have to scrape you off the Champs de Mars.'

  She tightened her lips across her teeth. Now came the famous Jacques Renault touch. The acrobatics. She knew just what the girls straddling the Notre Dame gargoyles must have felt like. She could feel it in her gut.

  For a moment she couldn't move. Then she managed to turn around, lifted one foot slowly, and began taking half-steps toward the edge of the platform. Careful, she told herself, there's no railing. Easy does it. . ..

  When she reached the corner girder, she grabbed hold of one of the pig-iron struts and clung to it for dear life. She closed her eyes. She couldn't bear looking down and seeing the distance between her and the ground. It was a long drop. Forty stories.

  Jacques's voice was harsh. 'Come on, we're not in a church. Turn around and open your eyes, for God's sake!'

  Slowly she opened them. Then she twisted around awkwardly and faced Jacques. He
was crouching low, once again studying her through the camera. Suddenly he grinned. 'That wasn't so bad, was it?' he shouted.

  'Not bad for you, you bastard!' she called out in a frightened, wavering voice. 'You're nice and safe!'

  'Come on, give me a smile.'

  She bared her teeth.

  'That's the girl. Now, step right to the edge.'

  She took a deep breath, loosened one hand from the strut, and cautiously backed up a few centimeters until her heels hung out over space and only the toes of her shoes were balanced on the riveted platform. With her free hand she reached down and grabbed hold of the hem of the dress. She lifted it and held it up at arm's length like one shimmering unfolded butterfly wing. The light fabric caught the wind like a sail and began to billow. She held tighter to the strut. It seemed as if the wind delighted at her vulnerability and suddenly flung even angrier gusts at her. Her teeth were chattering. All too easily an unexpectedly powerful gust could propel her backward and cause her to lose her balance.

  Jacques pointed. 'Look down at Paris!' he shouted. 'And hang out over the edge a little!'

  Her face went even whiter. Almost paralyzed, she tightened her grip, let her body angle out sideways into space until her arm was stretched stiff, and slowly lowered her head. The city sprawled beneath her like an endless sea of stone divided by the gray, snakelike S-curve of the Seine. She forced her face to assume an unafraid, blasé expression. As if hanging off the girder was the most natural thing in the world.

  Finally Jacques grinned widely. 'All right,' he shouted. 'Wrap it up!' He came close and held out his hand. She tottered forward. A few steps later, she felt him grab hold of her, and she collapsed into his arms. He caught her and held her close. She was sobbing uncontrollably. 'Hey, it's all right,' he said soothingly into her ear. 'It's finished.'