One of the factors in his decision, he said, had been the proximity of Mont Saint-Michel. Upon hearing this, I went to fetch my half-read biography of Littré, and showed Yann a section which contained a quote about his childhood. Littré had been born in Paris, on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, but his father, Michel-François, had been born in Avranches, into a family of gold- and silversmiths that had lived there for generations. Littré wrote, in the preface to one of his books, about his father’s hometown:
I love Normandy, and I belong to Normandy. My father was born in Avranches. It’s a small, isolated town, perched out on a kind of cape. But you must see the area when the apple trees are in blossom. It is bewitching, and as you gaze over its glory, you can also take in Mont Saint-Michel and its surrounding shoals without a single soul upon them. The effect of this ancient and much-lauded granite building, thrown into the ocean as though in defiance, is absolutely majestic. Twice a day the tide roars in, and the monastery is cut off from the world.
I’d visited Mont Saint-Michel more than ten years before. It was an incredibly cold day, even for winter, and I’d been on holiday in Brittany. On the way back, I stopped in Dinard and took a bus to the monastery. I was really tired and had fallen asleep, only to be woken by the excited voices of the other passengers. I looked out of the window, and there it was, at the end of the road which stretched out across the shoal: the centuries-old Gothic abbey of the Benedictine monks. I’d seen countless photos of Mont Saint-Michel and had read all sorts of articles about it, but its overwhelming mass as it soared into the sky took my breath away. At high tide, the water rushed in, surrounding the abbey and completely cutting it off from the mainland, making it look like an enormous rocky fortress emerging from the sea. The view of the abbey from Avranches, however, would be rather different from the south, which is what is usually in photographs. The distance might also mean that the abbey really would look about the size of something that had been “thrown” into the sea.
“That description sounds about right,” Yann said. “In fact, Avranches is even further east than that village on the hill where we couldn’t see anything from. Hey, what time is it now?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“Then I think we can make it.” Yann was already halfway up from his chair.
“Make what?”
“Mont Saint-Michel. We’ve got a while before the sun goes down. I’m hoping to take you to a secret spot that I know. Then we can eat something on the way back.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I picked up the phone and called my hotel in Paris, telling them that I wouldn’t be coming back that evening, and not to worry about me.
Then to Yann, I said, “All right. I’m ready to go with you wherever you take me.”
Yann smiled, and suddenly he was in a really good mood.
In his truck, Yann floored it. The evening sky was brooding and unsettled, light showers suddenly pierced with rays of purple sun. The main road was pretty busy, as large delivery trucks that had made the trip from England on the ferry sped past. The drive was taking longer than I expected. Cars switched their headlights on, as the sky turned a light yellow, with layers of cloud and light forming what resembled a piecrust. We were running out of daylight, and if we wanted to get somewhere for a view, we’d have to get there fast. The signs said no overtaking, but Yann did so anyway, boldly pulling into the other lane whenever he had the chance. We turned on to a gravel road, which gradually got narrower and narrower, as we headed for the outskirts of Saint-Jean-le-Thomas. Eventually we cut across a piece of farmland with a white picket fence. A placard told us that we were on a private road.
“Is this OK? We’re trespassing,” I said.
“It’s fine. I know the person who owns this land. Every summer teachers from the local high school bring students here to see the geological strata. They stay in that big house over there. I joined in one year after I got interested in geology while working at the stone factory. Exposed cliffs like these are the best for studying limestone. And don’t worry, the light is OK. We’re going to make it. Now, close your eyes for the next two minutes.”
“Close my eyes? Why?”
“Just close them.”
I did as I was told and closed my eyes. At times like these, Yann became a kind of hero who was in charge of everything. It was the same when he threw a winning pétanque—I could picture his face. The car went over a few bumps and dips in the road. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t tell if we were driving straight ahead or taking a corner. Eventually the car stopped, and Yann turned off the engine. “Don’t open your eyes until I tell you to,” Yann said, as he got out of the driver’s seat. He came round to my side, opened my door, then took my hand.
He led me up a gravel path that didn’t feel very solid underfoot. There was a strong wind buffeting me too. Before long, I could hear the sound of waves, echoing from below, as they crashed against the shore.
“Open.”
I opened my eyes to find Yann and me standing on a bluff, jutting out about thirty or forty metres above the sea below. There was no handrail, nothing, just a natural observation deck with spectacular views. The sea glittered in the evening sun, and we could see the tide moving in small waves, almost like crawling foam. To my right I had a clear sightline to the castle town of Saint Malo, fifteen kilometres away. To my left, at the bottom of the cliff, I could catch glimpses of old structures that had been built by the fishermen who lived here in ancient times. Further out, the sun was shining on the exposed sand, forming glowing yellow bands. Mont Saint-Michel was directly in front of us, seeming to float, enveloped in a pale, misty light. The abbey looked like a solitary chess piece that had been deployed in the water, and the vision of it from the side completely cleared away the stroppiness I’d been feeling from having my eyes closed. A fierce wind came up from below, blowing hard against me, my clothes and my hair rippling in the gust, almost taking my glasses away. It pushed me backwards, and as I inhaled, it blew straight up my nose and down my throat. I found myself struggling to breathe.
In the next second, the wind seemed to die down, and the view that Émile Littré had written of 150 years ago was laid out before me. The harmony between ocean and sky. The subtle changes in colour that permeated every nook and cranny of the wall of clouds. Everything seemed perfectly controlled. In the exposed section of the beach below, a fisherman was walking along slowly, examining his nets. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so he might not have been checking his nets at all, just taking a walk, but every now and again he would bend down and touch the sand. When he did this, he looked like he could have been a bird. Over in the east, houses lined the coastal road that ran along the embankment. It didn’t feel possible that just that morning I’d opened the window of my grimy one-star Paris hotel and looked down into an inner courtyard that was about as airy as the bottom of a well.
“This is my favourite place,” Yann said.
I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say.
“Say something!” Yann shouted.
“It’s amazing!” I shouted back.
“Anything else?”
“It makes me want to throw a Camembert as far as I can.”
“A Camembert?”
He had been staring out to sea, but he now turned to face me, looking as though he were smiling through tears. I pulled my right arm into my chest and crouched. Then mimicking a discus throw—slowly, so that I wouldn’t tumble off the bluff—I launched my invisible cheese into the ocean at a 45-degree angle.
“53.28 metres!” I announced.
Yann was clearly amused, or bemused, but he stood silent, as though he had no words.
When we got back into the car and out of the wind, Yann turned to me and said, “You haven’t changed at all! Only you would think of a Camembert in a place like that.” He was shaking his head and laughing. I explained how the student on the train had told me about the Camembert discus throw and apologized for ruining his elaborate romantic choreography
. Now we were both laughing.
Talking about Camembert made me realize I hadn’t had anything but that little sandwich earlier in the afternoon. “Let’s go to a restaurant,” I said. “I’m starved, and my stomach is growling.”
We drove to Avranches and looked around for a restaurant, but there were only pizza and crêpe places. I kept saying how that wouldn’t really satisfy us, so we drove north, to the port town of Granville, where we turned off the main road and found ourselves at a quiet wharf, lined with touristy restaurants. We settled on one that seemed appealing and walked in. Most of the customers were elderly tourists, seemingly refined, apparently from across the channel. The two young waitresses shyly made their way among them, taking orders with their limited English. When our turn came, Yann ordered mussels and sautéed cod, holding off the wine because, as he said, he was responsible for driving me home. I ordered the same, opting for mineral water. The mussels didn’t have much salt or wine in the broth, allowing for a nice, simple flavour. The cod, on the other hand, was dry and tasteless, and it was immediately obvious the fish had been frozen, even though we were right next to the sea. It was pretty disappointing.
“Well,” Yann said, “at least we made it to Mont Saint-Michel in time, but it might have been more useful for your work if we’d gone to Avranches instead.”
“No, no. It’s been years since I went to Mont Saint-Michel, and that was via Pontorson so I experienced it in a totally different way. I really enjoyed it. Hey, do you remember that bit of Littré you read? Right after that there’s an anecdote about the abbey at Mont Saint-Michel. I’ll read it to you—better than me trying to summarize it.”
I dug the book out of my bag, and began reading the passage to him in a low voice:
This is a story I have heard my family tell. One of my ancestors—he was a metalworker, just like his father and his children—was summoned to the abbey to undertake a complete restoration of a bronze sculpture that depicted the Archangel Michael triumphant over Satan. He was a conscientious man, my ancestor, so when he had finished examining the artwork, he gave his honest opinion to the Brothers. “Your devil’s good, but the angel’s worthless,” he said. Unfortunately for him, he was a Huguenot, and his words were misconstrued by the monks as a comment on their faith. My ancestor became uneasy, and frightened, and in time converted. My family have called themselves Catholic ever since. What a reason to convert! If my ancestor hadn’t made his fateful remark, my family would still be Huguenots, cursed forever.
Yann had listened to me with an utterly blank expression, massaging his temples with his thumbs. When I’d stopped reading, he took the book from my hands and started going through the passage again, slowly, silently, seeming to be underlining it in his mind. Except for the quiet conversation of the other customers, the restaurant was quiet. I could hear ropes banging against boats in the harbour, sounding as though some creature was ringing a cluster of bells. Everything seemed to be on the same wavelength as Yann read in silence, his earrings hanging from his lobes and seeming to clink with the ringing of the bells. I hadn’t had anything to drink, but my brain felt drunk. It was as if I were wearing heavy headphones, the kind used in hearing tests, and there were an irregular, almost imperceptible electronic tone coming through.
Yann now looked up at me. “Have you read Literature or Life by Jorge Semprún?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t read it, but I know about it.” I was familiar with Semprún. He was best known for having survived a couple of years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was near the city of Weimar. Several of his novels are about this period. Literature or Life was supposed to be the culmination of his work, and was a big best-seller, but there was something in-your-face about Semprún, and it put me off. “What’s the connection to Littré?”
“Semprún was like most survivors of Buchenwald—he didn’t want to ever see the place again. But forty-seven years after he left it, a German journalist invited him to visit the site, which had been preserved as a museum, and to be part of a TV programme about the mixed history of Weimar. After all, Goethe had lived there too. Semprún was interviewed in the camp itself, and the climax of the interview was this story he told about a ‘fateful remark’. Up until that point, the programme didn’t seem so interesting, but this part was intense.
“The story went like this: In 1987, Semprún for some reason had decided to awaken his memories of Buchenwald and write about his time there. He wrote in the first person, rather than from the perspective of a third person, looking from the outside in. But soon after he’d begun the book, he heard on the radio that Primo Levi, a fellow concentration camp survivor, had jumped to his death at his Turin flat, although there was the possibility that he had fallen accidentally. The news stunned him. Levi had been a model for Semprún, and his death contained a despair that undid everything. Semprún stopped writing. He did a stint as the Spanish Minister of Culture under González, and then, in 1992, he was given this completely unexpected chance to visit the concentration camp, which his book was to be about.
“Prisoners at Buchenwald were either dispatched to large factories that produced V-1 and V-2 rockets, or kept in the camp to maintain the place. If they were sent to factories, the labour conditions were so horrible that many never returned; it was like a death sentence. Semprún had been active in the French Resistance, got arrested in 1943 and was sent to Buchenwald in January 1944. Upon his arrival at the camp, the guard issuing registration cards asked Semprún what his occupation was. Semprún answered that he was a ‘student der philosophie’. The guard replied that ‘student ’ wasn’t an occupation; if he wanted to survive in the camp, he needed to have a real trade, like electrician or plasterer. But Semprún was young and impudent and insisted that he was a student of philosophy, nothing else. The guard said OK and wrote ‘student’ on the registration card. Years later, Semprún, who did indeed survive the camp, recounted this scene in one of his novels—as a heroic moment of defiance at the gates of hell.
“When he revisited Buchenwald, forty-seven years after the fact, to be interviewed by German TV, he shared this anecdote with the people at the museum. That was when a staff member, who was an avid reader of Semprún, piped up and said Semprún’s account was incorrect. This staff member, in anticipation of Semprún’s visit, had gone into the camp’s archives and looked up the registration cards of prisoners who’d arrived in January 1944, and he had a copy of Semprún’s card with him. What the guard had written down was not ‘student’ but ‘stuckateur’—plasterer! Semprún’s attitude with the Buchenwald guard had convinced him that he had prevailed, and the fact that the first three letters of the two words were the same made it easy for him to think that was the case. But this was the fateful detail, for one month after Semprún arrived at Buchenwald, prisoners without utilitarian skills were transferred to a hard labour camp. So this one word on Semprún’s registration card allowed him to remain in Buchenwald. It saved his life.
“It’s a bad joke if life hangs on what’s written in the ‘occupation’ box on a prisoner’s registration card. It’s the same with the angel and the devil. Who’s to know what was the ‘right’ thing? If Littré’s family had stayed Huguenot, they’d have been oppressed during the religious wars, and would have had to live through a really tough history. It’s not like because they were Catholic they were safe, but they definitely were on a safer path, and it was all because of that stupid remark. The same with Semprún. There’s nothing stupid about saying you’re a plasterer, of course. But in the end, what the guard deliberately wrote on that card saved his life, and that’s pretty ironic. And Littré’s ancestor knew how to work with metals, right? He wasn’t a religious devotee or anything. Maybe that’s why they let him get away with it?”
I caught the attention of the waitress and ordered us two coffees. The conversation had gone off on an unexpected tangent, and as Yann was talking, I suddenly remembered something that had happened soon after we’d become friends—on the same d
ay we went to the Jewish deli together, in fact. Thinking about it now, I’d probably imagined it was symbolic.
“Do you remember when Bettelheim killed himself?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about that while I was speaking.”
It had been shortly before I moved out of my shared apartment, so in 1990, maybe early spring. I’d woken in the morning, switched on the radio and heard that the great child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had killed himself in a senior citizens’ home in Chicago. He was eighty-six, and had been a survivor of Buchenwald too. Yann had studied child psychology and communication theory before getting a science degree and had occasionally mentioned Bettelheim’s name, so I called him immediately to let him know. He’d been listening to the same news bulletin, and kept saying he couldn’t believe Bettelheim had killed himself. Bettelheim’s theories were pretty heavy-handed, and there were many things I couldn’t agree with, but the larger body of his work had a power that transcended simple psychology. And when he wrote about treating children with autism, he often reflected upon his experience in the concentration camps.
Yann’s reaction to Bettelheim’s suicide hadn’t been what I expected: “Even if you’re really scared of getting old, how can a person like that kill themselves at this stage in life? I don’t understand it. First Levi, now Bettelheim, what’s going on?” He wasn’t grieving the loss of someone. He was lamenting their failures.
“Talking about Littré got us to a weird place,” I said as the coffee arrived.
“Sorry about that. Meeting again after all these years, I should be talking about something more cheerful.”
The Bear and the Paving Stone Page 3
