The Bear and the Paving Stone

by Toshiyuki Horie

  “I don’t feel that way at all. It was good. Anyway, since you’ve got to pack for tomorrow, why don’t we leave here and continue the conversation at your place? This meal is on me.”

  “You mean you’re going to pay? Now that really is stupid… This is on me.”

  “No, it’s fine. I was the one who made a fuss about being hungry. And besides, I’ve got a favour to ask.”

  “What’s that?”

  I pointed at the porcelain dish in which the butter had come to the table. It was white, with the curious name of the local manufacturer, Elle & Vire, printed in blue. It didn’t have a lid and was probably mass-produced.

  “It’s not anything special, but I want to take it home with me as a memento of this trip. I’m too embarrassed to ask, but could you?”

  “Sure, though it’s not really a fair deal for your listening to all that heavy stuff.”

  Yann asked for the bill, and explained my request to the waitress. I paid by credit card, wrapped the butter dish up in a napkin and stuffed it in my rucksack. As we made our way back to the truck, the ropes continued to clank against the hulls of the boats in the harbour.

  Yann had the radio on as we drove back, and he rapped along with a song I didn’t know, moving his upper body in time with the music. After a bit, he turned off the highway on to an unpaved village road, and announced that since he was leaving tomorrow he wanted to introduce me to his landlady, eventually stopping in front of a farmhouse on the hillside. Whoever lived there had heard us coming because the heavy wooden door swung open before we’d even got out of the truck.

  “This is Catherine,” he said, then introduced me as his old friend from Japan.

  Catherine didn’t look like someone who lived on a farm. She was petite, slim and elegant. We kissed on both cheeks, and I detected a slight scent like she’d just come out of the bath.

  “My friend here came all this way to see me, but all the shops are closed so I can’t buy anything. Could I trouble you for some tea or coffee?”

  “What about food?”

  “If you’ve got anything you could spare, that would be great.”

  “I’ve got some basics I would be glad to give you. Please wait a moment.”

  While Catherine was indoors, Yann explained that she was unmarried, or rather, that she had split up with her husband.

  “She doesn’t look like a farmer,” I said.

  “No, she doesn’t. She was a teacher before she had her kid. I used to find her a bit unapproachable, but now we’re good friends. My house belonged to her husband’s family actually, but Catherine got the property in the divorce. She’s got other houses around here, so she can get by on the rental income as long as she doesn’t live a life of luxury.”

  Catherine came back carrying a basket with coffee as well as a loaf of roughly shaped bread, fresh tomatoes and Gruyère.

  “Catherine, I didn’t expect all of this. Thank you!”

  “Oh, I’m happy to share.”

  “Well, I really appreciate it. But—and I know this is really cheeky—I have another favour to ask,” Yann said, pointing at me. “I have to go to Ireland tomorrow morning, unfortunately, and I don’t know if we’ll be leaving together or not. He might stay in my house and work for a day or two. If he does, do you think you could drive him to the Avranches train station when he goes back to Paris?”

  “Sure. The day after tomorrow in the afternoon would be perfect. We have an appointment with the paediatrician, so it’d be no problem to take you into town with us. Call me in the morning if you want me to pick you up.”

  Catherine had turned to speak to me directly, catching me unawares, and I involuntarily responded with a bow, Japanese-style. This made them both laugh.

  Back at the house, Yann showed me his photos, talking me through his work. Many of the black-and-white photos were of the granite quarry, but others included a row of eerie-looking black mounds, which were piles of straw fermenting in the sun under sheets of black vinyl held down by tyres; the plaster wall of a house with a deep cut in it; a stone apple-press for making cider; a sixteen-wheel truck, stuck in stationary traffic on the highway. These were Yann’s photos all right, there was no doubt about that. There were also photos of people: Armenian twin girls he’d met at a dance studio in Avranches; an old woman, wrapped in a thick shawl, sitting in silence on a bench; a homeless person lying next to some driftwood on the beach. I was impressed, and I asked if I could have one to take home with me, one that he’d be willing to part with. He started leafing through a box that hadn’t been sorted, and finally pulled out a photo of a wooden shed—with a façade of horizontal planks and four small, evenly spaced windows. At the base of the structure, on the grass, was a three-layer shelf made from crude pieces of scrap lumber, on which sat rows of pipe joints of various sizes, each in the shape of a curled index finger. The pipes were weather-beaten, their surfaces were corroding, and their openings all pointed in the same direction, making them resemble tired men lining up in military formation. In the foreground of the photo was stretched some barbed wire that looked brand-new.

  “See how the windows are different? Do you know what this building is for?”

  It wasn’t a fisherman’s hut, and it wasn’t a barn. There was something austere about it, but it had a kind of geometrical elegance too. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been a science lab.

  “A cider mill?”

  “You’re on the right track, but no.”

  “A place for quarry workers to take a break?”

  “Nope. It’s a place for smoking pork.”

  I’d never seen a smokehouse before, so the mystery escaped me.

  “When I took this photo, I thought it would be interesting. I didn’t think about anything in particular beyond that. But then, when I saw the print, I suddenly got an uncomfortable feeling. I mean, look at these pipes. See over there, on the left? There’s a black one that’s longer than the others, right? That’s the father. The head of the family. The pipe on the right, the bendy white one that’s propped up on the top shelf, that’s the mother. The rest are their kids. There’s sixteen of them, total. Sixteen. That’s how many were in my grandmother’s family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I looked up, but Yann’s eyes were focused elsewhere.

  “Those four small windows,” he went on, “you don’t push and pull them open and shut—you raise and lower them. They’re just like windows in isolation cells.”

  “Like in a concentration camp? You mean this reminded you of a concentration camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like these pipes would be used to pump in gas? Or they’d use this place as a crematorium?”

  “Well… I guess that’s possible. But the reason I imagined something so absurd was the barbed wire. Can you imagine, I didn’t even notice it until the photo was developed? Anyway, it’s yours now. I don’t want to throw it away, and I don’t want to keep it. I guess the roles are reversed, and now I’m asking you a favour. Take it with you, OK?”

  “When was it taken?”

  “Quite recently. I happened on the place while I was driving around.”

  “But old houses and ruined workshops, stuff like that, they’re a theme of your work, right? So, in that sense alone, I’d say it’s an interesting photo. Maybe you’re overthinking this. Maybe it’s because of reading Semprún?”

  Yann got up and went over to the stove. He put the kettle on to boil and then, without saying a word, headed upstairs. He came back down with a large picture frame, which he handed to me, then proceeded to make coffee in an old aluminium drip pot. In the frame was a family photograph, with several people surrounding an old woman seated in the middle. Was she Yann’s grandmother? Everyone had very similar facial features, and it occurred to me that the old woman’s face was the prototype for Yann’s.

  “That’s my grandmother,” Yann said, leaning over me. “She died before I moved here. You know, you say I’m overthinking things, a
nd that’s probably true. It’s just that I have been wondering a lot lately about the education I received. Not at school, obviously. The education I got at home.”

  As he spoke, Yann poured coffee into the same chipped bowls we’d had our tea in that afternoon. The coffee from Catherine was supermarket coffee, from Beaumont, a large chain, and it smelled stale. Still, I had no right to complain about something that had been gifted to me and that I’d received with a bow.

  “Do you remember when we went to Saint-Paul together?” Yann asked, picking up the thread of the conversation. “There’s a Yiddish library in that area that my grandmother would go to sometimes—to read the newspaper, borrow books, talk to folks in Yiddish. But Yiddish wasn’t spoken in my house. My parents knew it, and when I was a kid and relatives would come and visit us, they’d all speak this language that was completely foreign to me. I guess Yiddish was already beginning to die out. And now, the time when Jews from wherever they’re from could communicate in Yiddish is long gone. The traditions still exist, of course. They’re deep-rooted. We celebrate all the holidays and stuff. But the Yiddish language—my parents didn’t teach it to my brother and me. Or maybe it’s more correct to say, they didn’t force it on us. They didn’t try to pass it on to us. It seemed my grandmother was fine with that too. She never spoke about the past. My mother told me some stories of when she was a little girl, but that’s all.”

  It was now pitch black outside, and there was no noise at all. Not the sound of the wind, or the sound of insects, or the sound of cars that would be ever present in the city. Yann didn’t have a TV, we hadn’t put on any music, and the only sounds to be heard were the coffee being drunk and our chairs creaking as we shifted in them. I picked up two lumps of sugar from a blue cardboard box and mindlessly dropped them in my coffee, even though I usually drink it without. I stirred the coffee, and the clinking of the spoon against porcelain was startling.

  “There’s a difference between the generation that knew the camps and the generation that doesn’t,” Yann went on. “A definite difference. Why didn’t my parents teach me anything? It’s strange, isn’t it? When I asked them why, they said they didn’t know the details. But my grandmother received a pension from the German government until the day she died. An indemnity, I guess you could call it. It was enough to get by on, and she used the money to live out her later years. That alone had to be enough to keep her from escaping her memories. She also never stopped speaking Yiddish, or Polish, to my grandfather.”

  “You know, I still remember the carrot cake we had at your studio. You made it from your grandmother’s recipe.”

  “Did we do that?”

  “We definitely did.”

  “Yeah, I think I remember, now that you mention it. Anyway, what I always wanted to know was what their lives were like when they lived in Poland. She wouldn’t talk about it, though. I never heard anything about what happened there, how they used to live, tales from their childhood. Nothing. Sure, I know their story isn’t un usual—there are families with similar stories all over Europe.

  “I mean, think about it: sixteen people in my grandmother’s family, and only four of them survived the war. You wonder if she had some magic word like ‘plasterer’ that allowed her to live. She was a pâtissière, so I guess she could bake bread. People need bread, even in a concentration camp.” Yann now paused for a moment, then turned to face me. “Look, this isn’t about righteous indignation, or crimes against humanity or anything like that. It’s just that seeing the photo of the smoking hut made me sad, that’s all, on a totally personal level. Maybe ‘sad’ isn’t the right word.”

  Personal sadness. Was there any other kind? Wasn’t sadness something that everyone had to endure individually? Just like anger. The idea that you can share anger or sadness with others is nothing more, really, than a compelling illusion. We can only communicate the pain we feel on an individual level. Maybe one reason Yann had an awkward relationship with his parents was less their silence about the past, and more their inability to understand the nature of Yann’s sadness. He had often complained that neither his father nor his mother had ever tried to get out, to leave their town and go somewhere else. That might be why they didn’t understand why he was always on the move and never went to visit them.

  “The Wandering Jew is a cliché,” Yann continued, “but there’s a reason for it. Why shut yourselves in? Why hide away and close the door, pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist? That’s why I don’t understand about Anne Frank. Well, about her father. The war wasn’t imaginary, they needed to flee. They had lots of chances to do that, but they didn’t. ‘No, this is our home,’ they thought, ‘we’re staying.’ If I wanted to be cold about it, I could say they had a chance to escape and they missed it.”

  I was unclear why that one photo of the smokehouse had fired up Yann so much. Was he being dramatic—like he used to be in his twenties? Was he was getting high off the sound of his own voice? No, his words were forceful, but his demeanour was quite calm.

  Yann went on: “I saw something similar in Bosnia. The news was all about people being killed, persecuted, beaten, raped, forced to work… I wanted to see the situation with my own eyes. I should say that this was before I read Semprún. A charity based in Avranches arranged for me and a girl who spoke the language to go to a town that had been bombed in the war to do some reporting. I didn’t take my camera, though. I didn’t think photographing it would make any difference. I just wanted to witness it. The area we went to was on the border, which was marked by a river. The local kids used to come and go over the bridge merrily, but then overnight people on one side of the river became enemies of people on the other side. Kids were shot just for crossing the river to play. One day we encountered a family on the move—they’d had to flee a bombardment. I had the interpreter ask where they were going, and they said they were going back. Can you believe that? Going back to their bombed-out house. They let us go with them, and they took us to an apartment block that had been reduced to rubble. I asked why they wanted to come back here, and they said, ‘This is our home.’ The same thing that had happened to my family during the Second World War was happening here. I felt dizzy. It was exactly the same thing, happening again.”

  I got up and went to the toilet. I wasn’t sure how to respond and thought it best to change the subject. When I returned to the room, I picked up some photos from the table, thumbed through them, laid them back down. In the limited reality that I knew, I’d never had to flee for my life, and it was unlikely to happen now. If I went somewhere, I always returned. I left Paris and came to this village; soon enough I would go back to Paris, then I would go back to Tokyo. But in a way I was always at home. If you were to make a contact sheet of all my journeys, and looked at them retrospectively, it would be clear that all my travels were return trips, and that I never drifted anywhere. In that sense, Yann and I were different. Even though there’s something about us that’s connected, we’re moving in different directions, and we’re never going to collide. Maybe the shell fire I sought out was a different species from his.

  “Welcome to chez Yann,” I suddenly said boldly.

  “What?”

  “Welcome to chez Yann. That’s what you said, when we first got here this afternoon and you showed me in. You looked really happy too. I know that it was a big step for you to move here from Paris, but you didn’t tell your father that you were living here, did you? You told him you’d ‘put down anchor’. You don’t welcome people to your house like that if you’re just putting down anchor, though.”

  “I guess so.”

  There was an awkward silence. I picked up the photos again. There were several shots of the doors of old buildings—some houses, some sheds—made of planks of coarse wood. Individually, they looked rather ordinary, each with a square opening to let the light in. Viewed one after another, however, they started to form an uncanny rhythm with all the differences in size and shape. There were also shots of a corner of a
barn filled with pulleys and ladders, a kitten staring at a chicken, a dog closing its eyes as it basked in the sun, a crumbling pillbox of the sort that were still to be found on the coast of Normandy. Yann was focusing on my fingers as I silently leafed through the photos. A waiter in a cafe sweeping the floor, all the chairs stacked up on tables; three fat girls buying crêpes; a pure white cow’s head in a butcher shop window… It slowly occurred to me that the photo of the smokehouse, which had reminded Yann of a concentration camp, was bothering me. I didn’t think I could accept it and I didn’t think I could refuse it, so I guess I was going through the other pictures half intending to see if I could find one I could take instead. I came across a series of photographs of a play that had been staged outdoors at night. In one, a middle-aged woman was crouching down in the middle of the stage, and a man in a suit was embracing her. A spotlight was on them.

  “Those photos are of a drama festival celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. It was staged in the square in Avranches—your favourite place.”

  “It’s not my favourite place at all. I haven’t even had a chance to look around it yet.”

  “Right. Well, anyway, the Avranches town council commissioned this particular play, asking that it be set in the town itself. The playwright interviewed lots of people, people who’d lived in Avranches for years, and wrote his play based on the stories they told him. It’s weird that you’d pick that one photo out of the bunch, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because, like it or not, it’s connected to what we were talking about before. The main subject of the play was a Jewish family who lived in Avranches. The young wife had just given birth to a baby. Knowing that it was a matter of time before the Gestapo came for them, she sneaked off to the neighbouring village and gave the baby to a farm family there. You remember Saint-Jean-le-Thomas, that nice place we went through today? That’s where she took her baby. The farm family was surprised, and scared. Even if the kid wasn’t Jewish, if the Germans found out they were hiding a baby, they’d be done for.