by Auster, Paul
Alec smiled at us from across the table. Unusual, he said. My friend wouldn’t have been born if this thing hadn’t happened, and she called it unusual. As far as I’m concerned, it’s bloody astonishing.
His friend’s grandmother was born in Berlin in the early twenties, and when the Nazis took power in 1933, her Jewish family reacted in the same way so many others did: they believed that Hitler was nothing more than a passing upstart and made no effort to leave Germany. Even as conditions worsened, they went on hoping for the best and refused to budge. One day, when the grandmother was seventeen or eighteen, her parents received a letter signed by someone claiming to be a captain in the SS. Alec didn’t mention what year it was, but 1938 would be a reasonable assumption, I think, perhaps a little earlier. According to Alec’s friend, the letter read as follows: You don’t know me, but I am well aware of you and your children. I could be court-martialed for writing this, but I feel it is my duty to warn you that you are in great danger. If you don’t act soon, you will all be arrested and sent to a camp. Trust me, this is not idle speculation. I am willing to furnish you with exit visas that will allow you to escape to another country, but in exchange for my help, you must do me one important favor. I have fallen in love with your daughter. I have been watching her for some time now, and although we have never spoken, this love is unconditional. She is the person I have dreamed of all my life, and if this were a different world and we were ruled by different laws, I would propose marriage tomorrow. This is all I am asking: next Wednesday, at ten o’clock in the morning, your daughter will go to the park across the street from your house, sit down on her favorite bench, and stay there for two hours. I promise not to touch her, not to approach her, not to address a single word to her. I will remain hidden for the full two hours. At noon, she can stand up and return to your house. The reason for this request is no doubt evident to you by now. I need to see my darling girl one last time before I lose her forever …
It goes without saying that she did it. She had to do it, even though the family feared it was a hoax, not to mention the more dire possibilities of molestation, abduction, and rape. Alec’s friend’s grandmother was an inexperienced girl, and the fact that she had been turned into an adored Beatrice by some unknown Dante from the SS, that a stranger had been spying on her for the past several months, listening in on her conversations and following her around the city, threw her into an ever-mounting panic as she waited for Wednesday to come. Nevertheless, when the appointed hour arrived she did what she had to do and marched off to the park with her yellow star wrapped around the sleeve of her sweater, sat down on a bench, and opened the book she had carried along as a prop to still her nerves. For two straight hours, she didn’t look up once. She was that scared, she told her granddaughter, and pretending to read was her only defense, the only thing that kept her from jumping up and running away. Impossible to calculate how long those two hours must have felt to her, but noon crept around at last, and she went home. The next day, the exit visas were slipped under the door as promised, and the family left for England.
* * *
The last story came from one of Sonia’s nephews, the oldest son of the oldest of her three older brothers, Bertrand, the only other member of her family who had become a musician, and therefore someone special to her, a violinist in the orchestra of the Paris Opera, a colleague and a pal. The afternoon following our dinner with Alec, we met him for lunch at Allard, and midway through the meal he started talking about a cellist in the orchestra who was planning to retire at the end of the season. Everyone knew her story, he said, she talked about it openly, and so he didn’t feel he would be breaking any confidence if he told it to us. Françoise Duclos. I have no idea why her name is still with me, but there it is—Françoise Duclos, the cellist. She married her husband in the mid-sixties, Bertrand said, gave birth to a daughter in the early seventies, and two years after that the husband vanished. Not such an uncommon occurrence, as the police told her when she reported him missing, but Françoise knew that her husband loved her, that he was crazy about their little girl, and, unless she was the blindest, most obtuse woman on earth, that he wasn’t involved with another woman. He earned a decent salary, which meant that money wasn’t an issue, he enjoyed his work, and he had never shown any penchant for gambling or risky investments. So what happened to him, and why did he disappear? No one knew.
Fifteen years went by. The husband was declared legally dead, but Françoise never remarried or lived with another man. She raised her daughter on her own (with help from her parents), was hired by the orchestra, gave private lessons in her apartment, and that was it: a pared-down existence, with a handful of friends, summers in the country with her brother’s family, and an unsolved mystery as her constant companion. Then, after all those years of silence, the telephone rang one day, and she was asked to go to the morgue to identify a body. The person who accompanied her into the room where the corpse was waiting warned her that she was in for a rough experience: the deceased had been pushed from a sixth-floor window and had died on contact with the pavement. Shattered as the body was, Françoise recognized it at once. He was twenty pounds heavier than he had been, his hair was thinner and had turned gray, but there was no question that she was looking at the corpse of her missing husband.
Before she could leave, a man entered the room, took Françoise by the arm, and said: Please come with me, Madame Duclos. I have something to tell you.
He led her outside, took her to his car, which was parked in front of a bakery on an adjacent street, and asked her to climb in. Rather than put the key in the ignition, the man rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette. Then, for the next hour, he told Françoise the story of the past fifteen years as she sat next to him in his little blue car, watching people walk out of the bakery carrying loaves of bread. That was one detail Bertrand remembered—the loaves of bread—but he couldn’t tell us anything about the man. His name, his age, what he looked like—all a blank, but finally that’s of scant importance.
Duclos was an agent for the DGSE, he told her. She couldn’t have known that, of course, since agents are under strict orders not to talk about their work, and all those years when she thought her husband was writing economic studies for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was actually operating as a spy under the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Just after the birth of their daughter seventeen years ago, he was given an assignment that turned him into a double agent: ostensibly acting in support of the Soviets but in fact feeding information to the French. After two years, the Russians found out what he was up to and tried to kill him. Duclos managed to escape, but from that point on returning home was no longer possible. The Russians were keeping watch on Françoise and her daughter, the phone in the apartment was tapped, and if Duclos tried to call or visit, all three of them would have been murdered instantly.
So he stayed away to protect his family, hidden by the French for fifteen years as he moved from one Paris apartment to another, a hunted man, a haunted man, stealing out to catch an occasional glimpse of his daughter, watching her grow up from afar, never able to talk to her, to know her, observing his wife as her youthful looks slowly vanished and she lapsed into middle age, and then, because of carelessness, or because someone informed on him, or because of sheer dumb luck, the Russians finally caught up with Duclos. The capture … the blindfold … the ropes around his wrists … the punches to his face and body … and then the plunge from the sixth-floor window. Death by defenestration. Another classic method, the execution of choice among spies and policemen for hundreds of years.
There were numerous gaps in Bertrand’s account, but he couldn’t answer any of the questions Sonia and I asked him. How had Duclos occupied himself during all those years? Did he live under a false name? Had he gone on working for the DGSE in some capacity or other? How often was he able to go out? Bertrand shook his head. He simply didn’t know.
What year did Duclos die? I asked. You must remem
ber that.
Nineteen eighty-nine. The spring of eighty-nine. I’m sure of it, because that’s when I joined the orchestra, and the thing with Françoise happened just a few weeks later.
The spring of eighty-nine, I said. The Berlin Wall came down in November. The Eastern bloc threw out their governments, and then the Soviet Union fell apart. That makes Duclos one of the last casualties of the Cold War, doesn’t it?
* * *
I clear my throat, and a second later I’m coughing again, retching up gobs of sputum as I cover my mouth to stifle the noise. I want to spit into my handkerchief, but when I reach out and search for it with my fingers, I brush against the alarm clock, which falls off the night table and clatters onto the floor. Still no handkerchief. Then I remember that all my handkerchiefs are in the wash, so I swallow hard and let the goo slide down my throat, telling myself for the fiftieth time in the past fifty days to stop smoking, which I know will never happen, but I say it anyway, just to torture myself with my own hypocrisy.
I start thinking about Duclos again, wondering if I might not be able to tease a story out of that awful business, not necessarily Duclos and Françoise, not the fifteen years of hiding and waiting, not what I already know, but something I can make up as I go along. The daughter, for instance, thrust forward from 1989 to 2007. What if she grows up to become a journalist or a novelist, a scribbler of some sort, and after her mother’s death she decides to write a book about her parents? But the man who betrayed her father to the Russians is still alive, and when he gets wind of what she’s up to, he tries to stop her—or even kill her …
That’s as far as I get. A moment later, I hear footsteps on the second floor again, but this time they aren’t heading for the bathroom, they’re coming down the stairs, and as I imagine Miriam or Katya going into the kitchen to look for a drink or a cigarette or a snack from the refrigerator, I realize that the steps are coming in this direction, that someone is approaching my room. I hear a knock on the door—no, not exactly a knock, but a faint scratching of fingernails against the wood—and then Katya whispers, Are you awake?
I tell her to come in, and as the door opens I can make out her silhouette against the dim, bluish light behind her. She seems to be wearing her Red Sox T-shirt and gray sweatpants, and her long hair is tied back in a ponytail.
Are you all right? she asks. I heard something fall on the floor, and then a lot of terrible coughing.
I’m right as rain, I answer. Whatever that means.
Have you slept at all?
Not a wink. What about you?
In and out, but not much.
Why don’t you close the door? It’s better in here when it’s completely dark. I’ll give you one of my pillows, and you can lie down next to me.
The door shuts, I slide a pillow over to Sonia’s old spot, and a few moments later Katya is stretched out on her back beside me.
It reminds me of when you were little, I say. When your grandmother and I came to visit, you always crawled into bed with us.
I miss her like crazy, you know. I still can’t get it into my head that she isn’t around anymore.
You and everyone else.
Why did you stop writing your book, Grandpa?
I decided it was more fun to watch movies with you.
That’s recent. You stopped writing it a long time ago.
It got too sad. I enjoyed working on the early parts, but then I came to the bad times, and I started to struggle with it. I’ve done such stupid things in my life, I didn’t have the heart to live through them again. Then Sonia got sick. After she died, the thought of going back to it revolted me.
You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.
I’m not. I’m just being honest.
The book was supposed to be for me, remember?
For you and your mother.
But she already knows everything. I don’t. That’s why I was looking forward to reading it so much.
You probably would have been bored.
You can be a real fathead sometimes, Grandpa. Did you know that?
Why do you still call me Grandpa? You stopped calling your mother Mom years ago. You must have been in high school, and suddenly Mom became Mother.
I didn’t want to sound like a baby anymore.
I call you Katya. You could call me August.
I never liked that name very much. It looks good on paper, but it’s hard to get it out of your mouth.
Something else, then. How about Ed?
Ed? Where did that come from?
I don’t know, I say, doing my best to imitate a Cockney accent. It just popped into me little ole ’ed.
Katya lets out a brief, sarcastic groan.
I’m sorry, I continue. I can’t help myself. I was born with the bad joke gene, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
You never take anything seriously, do you?
I take everything seriously, my love. I just pretend not to.
August Brill, my grandfather, currently known as Ed. What did they call you when you were little?
Augie, mostly. On my good days I was Augie, but people called me a lot of other things, too.
It’s hard to imagine it. You as a child, I mean. You must have been a weird kid. Reading books all the time, I’ll bet.
That came later. Until I was fifteen, the only thing I cared about was baseball. We used to play it nonstop, all the way into November. Then it was football for a few months, but by the end of February we’d start in on baseball again. The old gang from Washington Heights. We were so nuts, we even played baseball in the snow.
What about girls? Do you remember the name of your first big love?
Of course. You never forget a thing like that.
Who was she?
Virginia Blaine. I fell for her when I was a sophomore in high school, and suddenly baseball didn’t matter anymore. I started reading poetry, I took up smoking, and I fell in love with Virginia Blaine.
Did she love you back?
I was never sure. She went hot and cold on me for about six months, and then she skipped off with someone else. It felt like the end of the world, my first real heartbreak.
Then you met Grandma. You were only twenty, right? Younger than I am now.
You’re asking a lot of questions …
If you’re not going to finish your book, how else am I going to find out what I need to know?
Why the sudden interest?
It’s not sudden. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. When I heard you were awake just now, I said to myself, Here’s my chance, and I came down and knocked on your door.
Scratched on my door.
All right, scratched. But here we are now, lying in the dark, and if you don’t answer my questions, I’m not going to let you watch movies with me anymore.
Speaking of which, I came up with another example to support your theory.
Good. But we’re not talking about films now. We’re talking about you.
It’s not such a pleasant story, Katya. There are a lot of depressing things in it.
I’m a big girl, Ed. I can handle anything you dish out.
I wonder.
As far as I know, the only depressing thing you’re talking about is the fact that you cheated on your wife and left her for another woman. I’m sorry, chum, but that’s pretty standard practice around here, isn’t it? You think I can’t handle that? I already have, with my own father and mother.
When did you speak to him last?
Who?
Your father.
Who?
Come on, Katya. Your father, Richard Furman, your mother’s ex-husband, my ex-son-in-law. Talk to me a little, sweetheart. I promise to answer your questions, but just let me know when you last heard from your father.
About two weeks ago, I guess.
Did you make any arrangements to see each other?
He invited me to come to Chicago, but I told him I wasn’t feeling up to it. When the semester’s over next mont
h, he said he’d come to New York for a weekend and we could stay at a hotel somewhere and eat lots of good food. I’ll probably go, but I haven’t decided yet. His wife’s pregnant, by the way. Pretty Suzie Woozy is with child.
Does your mother know?
I didn’t tell her. I thought she might be upset.
She’s bound to find out eventually.
I know. But she seems to be doing a little better now, and I didn’t want to rock the boat.
You’re one tough cookie, kid.
No, I’m not. I’m a big soft jelly doughnut. All ooze and mush.
I take hold of Katya’s hand, and for the next half minute or so we look up into the dark without saying a word. I wonder if she might not drift off to sleep if I don’t resume the conversation, but a moment after I think that thought she breaks the silence by asking me another question:
When was the first time you saw her?
April fourth, nineteen fifty-five—at two-thirty in the afternoon.
For real?
For real.
Where were you?
Broadway. Broadway and One Hundred-fifteenth Street, walking uptown on my way to Butler Library. Sonia went to Juilliard, which was near Columbia at the time, and she was walking downtown. I must have spotted her about half a block away, probably because she was wearing a red coat—red jumps out at you, especially on a city street, with nothing but drab bricks and stones in the background. So I catch sight of the red coat coming toward me, and then I see that the person wearing the coat is a short girl with dark hair. Quite promising from a distance, but still too far away to be sure of anything. That’s how it is with boys, you know that. Always looking at girls, always sizing them up, always hoping to run into the knockout beauty who will suck the breath out of you and make your heart stop beating. So I’ve seen the red coat, and I’ve seen that it’s worn by a girl with short dark hair who stands approximately five feet five inches tall, and the next thing I notice is that her head is bobbing around a little bit, as if she’s humming to herself, and that there’s a certain bounce to her step, a lightness in the way she moves, and I say to myself, This girl is happy, happy to be alive and walking down the street in the crisp, sun-drenched air of early spring. A few seconds later, her face begins to acquire more definition, and I see that she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and then, as the distance between us continues to narrow, I simultaneously absorb two important facts. One: that she is indeed humming to herself—a Mozart aria, I think, but can’t be certain—and not only is she humming, she has the voice of a real singer. Two: that she’s sublimely attractive, perhaps even beautiful, and that my heart is about to stop beating. By now, she’s only four or five feet away, and I, who have never stopped to talk to an unknown girl on the street, who have never in my life had the audacity to address a good-looking stranger in public, open my mouth and say hello, and because I’m smiling at her, no doubt smiling in a way that carries no threat or hint of aggression, she stops humming, smiles back at me, and returns my greeting with one of her own. And that’s it. I’m too nervous to say anything more, and so I keep on walking, as does the pretty girl in the red coat, but after six or seven steps I regret my lack of boldness and turn around, hoping there’s still time to initiate a conversation, but the girl is walking too quickly and is already out of range, and so, with my eyes on her back, I watch her cross the street and disappear into the crowd.
