News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

* * *

  Imagine, then, that it’s spring, 1944. Chestnut trees are blooming all over Paris, and the flower beds in the Luxembourg have been laid in neat, geometric patterns. For the first time in years, you’re not thinking about a leg of lamb, sweetbreads, a tongue and watercress salad. You’re not preoccupied with the tiniest particulars of long-ago meals—the feel of a bread crumb pressed into your fingertip, the sheen on a pat of butter. Nor are you watching every shadow for the officer who will step out and order you to drop your pants. You aren’t dreading the embarrassment you’d feel, with your underwear around your ankles, handing over papers that claim you’re a gentile.

  You’re in the Luxembourg Gardens, with your easel and paints in front of you, but you can’t remember setting it up. Apparently, your idea was to paint the fountain where, after the long winter, children are once again racing their boats. Their excitement fills the air, and you wish they’d shut up. You’ve always wanted a houseful of children, but now you want silence. The fountain isn’t an original subject, but you’re not an original painter. It’s just a hobby. You’re a gynecologist—one of the best in Caen—though you haven’t practiced for three years; since you moved to Paris and became Vincent Leclerc, gentile, you haven’t even owned a stethoscope.

  Earlier today, Madame Compte, the concierge, hauled herself upstairs to see you: blue apron, red face, red hands. The war has cost her ten kilos, but she still shuffles like a fat person, and, because she’s in menopause, she sweats profusely. She laughs that she’s the only Parisian who doesn’t mind the lack of coal, and you smile vaguely, as if you have no idea why she overheats.

  This morning, however, she wasn’t laughing. “Monsieur Leclerc,” she said, and before she went on, you knew: Raphaël, your older brother, has been arrested. Madame Compte is the one who must have realized you were Jews, who must have informed on him. Maybe. Or maybe not. It’s impossible to know. But if not Madame Compte, who? Hardly anyone else knows you and Raphaël are even brothers. Madame Compte will have informed on you, too, then. How else to explain the delicious scent of pâté and cognac on her breath?

  But then, what? A wave of regret, and she came to warn you? And here you are now, in the Luxembourg, painting. It seems there’s helium in your lungs, and where your stomach was, nothing, as if you’d been neatly eviscerated. And then your body rushes back into itself, a sensation of pins and needles, the blood in your veins so heavy that the effort of holding yourself upright makes you tremble. But still, you aren’t thinking clearly. You’ve forgotten so much in the last few hours that it seems your life happened to someone else, an acquaintance you barely recall. You have no idea how you got to the Luxembourg.

  Oh, Raphaël, who taught me everything I know. Who taught me nothing. Who, until he became his own gentile (Jean Carreau, landscaper), was a pediatrician in Caen. Eyes even bluer than yours, filled with more laughter. He was beloved by every mother who brought him a sick child. He loved those mothers in return and gave some of their children little bastard siblings. A half dozen boys and girls scattered around the Calvados whose Jewish blood’s a secret.

  On the north side of Paris, there’s an empty house with a well-stocked attic. You can go there if you hurry. Tins and tins of food. More food than you’ve seen in years, to last however many years remain. Peas, asparagus, tomatoes, herring, pâté. Sweetened condensed milk. It was your idea. Chocolate and cigarettes. Food from before the war. No one else had your prescience. As soon as Poland fell, you remembered the rickets of your childhood and wrote to your niece in Paris: Hoard. Store as much food as you can where no one else will find it. There’s a place on rue Marcadet. You and your siblings will still be able to eat if the war drags on.

  She did what you said—the nieces and nephews hang on your every word; you’re the young, fun uncle—but your sister, Suzanne, the children’s mother, sent her sons and daughters to America. And then Suzanne and your parents were arrested in the street, and you changed your name—Kaminsky, the forger, gave you and Raphaël new papers before you’d even asked—and you moved to Paris with one change of clothes and a set of paints. Raphaël found an apartment on rue Stanislas, you found one around the corner on rue Vavin.

  You’d never intended that food for yourself, but who could you feed, once you were so newly, lightly, a gentile? So the attic with its stores became yours and Raphaël’s, though neither of you went there, or spoke of the food, hidden away for the worst of emergencies; you barely spoke at all as gentiles, barely set foot in each other’s apartments.

  Clearly, your memory isn’t completely shot. You can reconstruct the events of your life, even the events of this morning, if you put your mind to it, but so much is breaking apart; who can say which pieces are important? Madame Compte at the door, the news about Raphaël, the sight of your suitcase, already packed for just this moment—and then the circular staircase down to the lobby, the weight of the easel under your arm, right onto rue Vavin, left onto rue Guynemer. The bright spring air, the gates of the Luxembourg. Details as tedious to list now as the muscles of the foot, and as seemingly irrelevant: you’re a gynecologist, after all.

  Once, you dynamited a munitions train. You know this to be true, as you know that you’re thirty-two, widowed, and responsible for various crimes against the state, including the distribution of pamphlets, as punishable an offense as the dynamite and the composition of your own blood. “Once” sounds like the beginning of time, but it was just two years ago, when you were still a Jew, before you went into hiding out in the open. After dynamiting the train, you crawled away under a blackberry thicket. There was a late frost, and you could probably see your breath, but that’s too fine a detail to picture now; you can’t imagine the weight of the dynamite in your hands, or the chill of the iron rails.

  What you do remember, as vividly as if her scent were still on your hands, is Mademoiselle Maurois. Her thin, reedy voice, as if she’d never fully come into the world. You were barely out of medical school, but you had examined hundreds of women before her, and never with any desire; you hadn’t guessed that desire could stun you this way, in the middle of an examining room with a speculum in your hand. Docteur, she said, in that small, empty voice. My cramps. They’re so painful that every month I vomit for a week. You laid the speculum down and put your hands in your pockets, where you found a piece of candy, which you unwrapped and put in your mouth. Buying time. It’s the candy you remember most clearly, butterscotch. Some nights, weak with hunger in your gentile apartment, you’ve thought of going to rue Marcadet and plundering all those supplies—you’ve eaten almost nothing but turnips and horse marrow for a month, and the rickets have come back—but you’ve always been able to resist temptation. You dip your brush, mark the canvas, dip again, mark, dip. Raphaël will be dead soon, you hope. You hope it will go quickly for him.

  A giant marigold? That might be it, that smear of red on the canvas. And next to it, it seems, a tiny rubber tree. This isn’t the way you paint. It’s hard enough to paint what’s right in front of you, to be faithful to the minute, incredible, shifting details of ordinary life: the flickering, silver underside of a leaf, the bones of a woman’s wrist. Who could ever record such things the way they are? The blur of children playing. If you had the six children you’ve always wanted, you’d bore them to tears making them sit for portraits. Best not to picture a wife, but children—they’re always a possibility. Six children by six different women or six by one: three boys followed by three girls. A house ringing with laughter, toys everywhere, music, squabbles. Maybe more than six. You might need to keep procreating until your oldest has children of his own, so there’s always a tiny one underfoot, or sitting in a corner somewhere, a plump little Buddha, earnestly turning the pages of an upside-down book. Even so, you’d like the children at the fountain to be quiet. You yourself are very quiet, standing at your easel as if you’d been ordered to. As though, if you stood long enough, you might dissolve into the bright, windy day.

  Years later, people wi
ll speculate about why you didn’t run. He was too sad, they’ll say. He was in shock. He’d used up all the adrenaline of a lifetime, and nothing further could alarm him.

  Three and a half years of evading capture: even asleep, dreaming your fitful dreams of food, you were afraid. You’d see something on the ground—a glistening lamb shank, or a bowl of ice cream—and you’d bend down for it, but it was always a trick: everything revealed itself to be a yellow star, a kippah, a tallit. And how was that possible? A bowl of vanilla ice cream! Who could mistake that for a piece of cloth? You wept, trying to explain yourself, insisting the game was rigged, you ought to be given another chance. You sobbed, howling finally, and that was the stupidest move of all: if you would stop, they might forget about you, and you could slip away. You awoke on your back with your eyes dry, your arms frozen at your sides. There were variations in the opening scenes, but the end was always the same: the shouting, the pointless self-defense. You slept two hours at a stretch, three at the most; the rest of the time, you were in the back room of your apartment, working on pamphlets, and little by little your heart stopped racing, because the typesetter was an old Linotype Model 8, half broken, and it required all your attention.

  Until the day you transformed yourself into an ordinary, anti-Semitic little bourgeois, and then there was nothing to do and you were always afraid. Why lock yourself now in the half-light of the attic, and begin the infinite process of doling out smaller and smaller portions of tinned food to yourself so that it will last forever? Like the turtle in the arithmetic problem who, going always half the distance he went before, never reaches the wall.

  * * *

  Prisoner’s Name: Raphaël Naquet. Alias(es): Jean Carreau. Race: Jew. Criminal Activities: Terrorism. List of crimes:

  Somewhere in the city an SS officer is filling out the paperwork on Raphaël; it shouldn’t take long, and when he’s finished, he’ll come for you. Who is this man, so hell-bent on sending you both to your deaths? Let’s assume he isn’t a monstrous aberration. Let’s assume, given the endless repetition of atrocities throughout history, that he’s an ordinary man. I have to give him qualities of my own, if I’m to be him, so let’s say he has a headache.

  He’s already taken three powders, and he can still feel it, like a knife lodged in his eye. The light’s too bright. Everyone raved about Paris in the springtime, how beautiful the light is; and Greta said, Oh, the girls in Paris, you’ll have a good time, wanting me to reassure her. I have to imagine his wife, too: Greta. What he thinks of her.

  No girl in Paris could compare to you, Greta, with your fat belly and your mustache. Spiess Walden says Paris is like a beautiful woman he’s grown to despise. All he wants, he insists, is to go back to his little house in the country, be greeted by his dog like Odysseus, and spend a week in bed with his wife. What I want is never to have come here at all. I was happy in Berlin, working in the property division, and what is the ERR going to do now that so many of us have been conscripted? Someone needs to keep track of the inventory, and if we’re all over here, tracking Jews, who will keep the books?

  That was a nice job: a private office, the lamp with its green shade, the heavy door. I rarely had to speak to anyone. I only had to make sure that all the records were correct, that the value of the repossessed paintings and antiques and silverware and bank accounts was properly noted, that there were no misplaced commas, no careless errors. No one kept the books more beautifully than I. The Sturmbannführer praised my work, he said when the war was over he might hire me to run the mines with him. He’s growing old, needs a younger man with a clear mind. But the Americans and the Soviets are closing in; they want us to be soldiers now, and this is a messy job. The job of a dogcatcher.

  I’d take a fourth powder if it would help—hell, I’d swallow a cupful. But to go out that way, I’d like to be in a private room, not this cavernous office with the others barging in all the time. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. If I could just close the door, lower the blinds, I’d press a gun to my own eye.

  I wouldn’t want a French girl anyway, Greta. Even with a boot to the back of the neck, they let you know what they think of you. That little tsk, tsk of disdain if you don’t hold your fork just right. I’d have bedded my own mother if I wanted that kind of scrutiny.

  In Berlin, I kept regular hours, slept a decent night’s sleep. Sometimes, at the end of the day, the Sturmbannführer offered me a brandy. I don’t like brandy, but that isn’t the point. It was an honor.

  An ice pick seems to be sticking straight through my left eye to the back of my skull, and the light is bouncing off the walls like shards of glass. But I’m not crying. Note that my right eye is perfectly dry. When a man weeps, he weeps with both eyes. Still, I had to start over: Prisoner’s Name: Raphaël. I had to throw out two tearstained pages. I don’t want a French whore as my reward, I want a dark room. I want to lie at the bottom of a cool, dark lake.

  When Walden arrests someone, he ransacks drawers, riffles through papers, tips over a couple of armoires, and he’s done. He never cleans himself afterward. I’m slower, but more thorough, and I touch almost nothing. There’s no one here to appreciate my efforts, and still I do my best. I imagine the Sturmbannführer with his white gloves, his small, slow smile.

  If I press my fist to my eye, I can think. I’d like to scoop it out of its socket.

  * * *

  This is the only thing that’s wholly yours, these paints, shimmering in the sunlight: carmine, bone black, cadmium yellow. The thick, soft texture of the oil, and the brush, so light in your fingers.

  You understand that for all intents and purposes, you’re dead. You died when they arrested your parents and Suzanne and you had to become someone else, a little man who paints, who sits in cafés now and then, pretending to read the official news, though mostly you’ve kept to your apartment, painting the view from the window. It was better than hiding in an attic. If you couldn’t work against the Germans, you could at least see the sky, the trees, the children racing home from school. You could go down the street to the Luxembourg now and then. But your old comrades—your fellow terrorists!—don’t know where you are, and you can’t risk a radio. Only Raphaël knows you anymore. Knew. And the SS, of course. They know. If you run to rue Marcadet, they’ll hardly give up the chase, and when they find you, they’ll pause just long enough to gorge themselves on your food.

  Which means you’re yourself again, you might as well pin a star to your chest, but still, for all intents and purposes, dead. What remains between now and the moment you give up the ghost entirely are formalities—terrible formalities, it’s true, but formalities nevertheless.

  You pause, considering the marigold and the two red, fan-shaped petals you’ve completed. Is that what marigolds look like? There are none in front of you at the Luxembourg, and it’s hard to remember. A yellow throat, or yellow on the petals’ edges? Not a big, round, pom-pom marigold, you don’t like those; you like to count the individual petals.

  Yellow at the throat and on the edges—those were the marigolds your mother grew. One of the children bursts out laughing, as if she’d been following your train of thought and is delighted by its conclusion: Yes, her laughter says, yellow at the throat and on the edges! Excellent! You’ve got it now! Her laughter’s quickly spent, but you still hear its bright echo, suspended among the boasts and reprimands of the boys and girls who are instructing each other in the proper technique for sailing a toy boat.

  You gaze over at the children. It’s already impossible to tell which of the girls laughed. The one with the long black braids? The little redhead? There’s nothing funny about this business anymore. The boats are getting tangled up, someone’s done something wrong—and yet, you still hear a girl’s laughter, and you can’t imagine having been irritated by the children. What could be lovelier than these stern little adults with their sailing missions? If you could—if you weren’t dead—you’d steal the children away to rue Marcadet and give them chocolate, as
paragus, pâté, whatever they want. Inside their mended socks and wood-soled shoes, you know, are feet still raw with chilblains.

  The thought of pâté momentarily blurs your vision. A wave of hunger comes over you, as sickening as nausea. But that’s just life, clinging to you in its cobwebby way. Still, all that food going to waste breaks your heart, which, mysteriously, will not stop beating, and so it’s best to look away from the children, to focus on your marigold.

  You brush a bit of yellow on the tip of one of the petals, and suddenly it comes to you: to be dead is to be weightless, a miracle! You wish it for everyone, even the Germans, why not, with their impossibly heavy boots. And yet, though the world is horrifying—so much rot and grief from the very beginning—how beautiful it is: light drifts down into the Luxembourg, onto the sandy paths, the lawns, the statues, the sparkling water.

  And nothing further is required of you. You can stand here forever, dead, tending your marigold.

  * * *

  As if it’s not enough to have an eyeful of broken glass, through which I still have to work, still fill out endless documents for a single arrest, I can’t even sit here without needing to vomit. Another man might have given up, but I am not that man.

  In Berlin, I had a migraine once a year at most, and I could go home, sleep it off, be back at work the next day. I didn’t get any sleep last night, and I’ve still got the brother to find. Walden’s already gone to the brother’s apartment, and he wasn’t there, so I’ve got to go and wait for him. Walden thinks nothing of making other people finish his work, and everyone tolerates it—admires it, even—because he’s charming, with his sad, gray eyes and his smooth laugh. But I’ll never get to the brother if I keep starting over with the paperwork, and I’ve got to get to him. Müller botched an arrest in the Marais and was gone within a week, sent to the front. It’s not the fighting I’d mind so much if I were Müller—though the thought of the noise and filth makes my teeth ache—it’s the humiliation.