Twilight

by Katherine Mosby

  “Luberon should have taken a few Nazis with him if he was heading for Hell,” the old man said. “Still, I admire him for the counterfeiting. I thought he was just a lout. Just goes to show you never know about people.”

  “But I thought it was his brother who was doing the counterfeiting,” Lavinia said. Monsieur Vedrian rolled his eyes at her innocence and exhaled a dismissive puff of air from his pouted lips, “They were like this,” he replied forcefully, twisting one knobby finger over the other, “so I can assure you he was involved somehow, even if he was just the brawn.”

  For a seemingly endless handful of nights, Madame Luberon wailed and ranted, drunk and beyond comfort, throwing breakables into the courtyard, snarling at anyone who tried to help. No one, however, called out for quiet in the dark courtyard. No one complained on the stairwell. The circumstances were so deeply disquieting that Madame Luberon’s loud anguish was a relief from the inevitable reflections that were otherwise disturbing the building’s sleep.

  Then, abruptly, Madame Luberon stopped keening. She cut her hair with pinking shears and let the gray show; she stopped wearing housedresses, stopped drawing the seam of an imaginary stocking down the back of her leg with eyebrow pencil the way other women did to keep up an appearance. She started wearing her husband’s clothes, and continued to discourse on the laws of nature and the nature of betrayal but her delivery was dispassionate, almost academic.

  Madame Luberon became fastidious about the care of the building, polishing the ornate brass sconces that flanked the stairwell or scouring the paving stones in the entrance-way, or repainting the numbers on the apartment doors with black ink. But there was nothing apologetic about her behavior. If anything, she seemed more fearsome, as if anger and grief had only invigorated her. Madame Luberon still smiled when she saw Boswell though, and insulted him affectionately.

  When sugar was rationed, Lavinia left her first allotment outside Madame Luberon’s door. By the time Lavinia collected her second allotment, however, she had become more circumspect about her altruism; 750 grams of sugar was too precious to bestow like that, no matter how satisfying the gesture.

  My Dearest Gaston,

  Jean-Marc is looking more and more derelict. Yesterday he had a black eye. Isn’t there anything you or Delphine can do? There must be a better way to keep him out of trouble and out of bars than using him as our messenger, which no longer has the Dickensian charm it had before he started drinking all the time. Please don’t be annoyed with me for mentioning this, or being so hypocritical as to send it with Jean-Marc. I didn’t want to sully our evening later. The more precarious things become everywhere else, the more precious our time together, and the more fiercely I want to protect it.

  For her birthday they met at La Mère Catherine, behind the Basilique du Sacré Coeur, for a dinner neither of them could eat. Lavinia had never been to the restaurant before, though she’d heard of it. It dated back to the French Revolution. Sven had told her about the words Danton had scrawled across its wall: BUVONS ET MANGEONS, CAR DEMAIN NOUS MOURRONS. “Let’s eat and drink for tomorrow we will die.” Staring glumly at the motto that had been a magnet for tourists in better days, Lavinia thought about what had brought her to this: the eve of her fortieth birthday, in an occupied city, in a foreign country, without family or fortune, with a married man who sometimes seemed to love no one but himself.

  There was not much on the menu; all the good cuts of meat, all the good anything, went to the Germans. Lavinia ordered pot-au-feu and thought about what Gaston had said earlier in the evening in a brief but bitter skirmish between them, the cause of which was already forgotten. “You do not have a sufficiently nuanced view of the truth,” he had insisted. She had accused him of being an opportunist and he had replied, “Throughout history great men have always been opportunists. As an American of privilege I would have thought you’d noticed.”

  They were both on edge and Lavinia drank half a carafe of house wine before she relaxed enough to tell him what she’d heard from Anne Aubretton whose husband, Col. Aubretton, had just returned from Angers. He’d been among those who accompanied Count Metterich, head of the German army’s artistic conservation unit, to the depository in Brissac, where the treasures of the Louvre had been moved for safekeeping during the war. Metterich had been persuaded to supply adequate coal to ensure heat for the artwork that would otherwise be damaged by a hard winter. Lists had been made too, of châteaux, which by virtue of artistic merit or historic value would not be occupied by German forces.

  “I’m sure that will comfort the old and ill who will freeze to death this winter while they keep the statues warm,” Gaston had said bitterly.

  Lavinia ignored him and continued.

  “He also told Anne that internment camps were being built all over France. It’s very organized, apparently. Different camps for Communists, and Jews and prisoners of war, and even ladies like me, foreign nationals. ‘Tea bags’ we were called, lumping all the English-speaking women together.” Lavinia paused, and took a sip of wine. She had been looking at Gaston while she spoke, noticing how drawn his face had become in the last few months. As he poured more wine for her from a carafe on the table, she avoided his eyes and continued.

  “Anne thinks I should go to stay with Clarissa Dobbs Duvallet. I’ve never met her but she used to work at the Herald Tribune and she’s rumored to be taking in strays. Her husband was killed in Dunkirk and she’s taken her little boy to his grandparents’ charterhouse, in the Auvergne. It has a history going back to the revolution of being ‘commodious’ in times of trouble.”

  Gaston took her hand in his and examined it, as if looking for the answer there, instead of in her eyes. “What did you tell her?” he asked, tracing with his finger the pale half-moons of her nails.

  “I said I had compelling reasons to stay in Paris for as long as I could.” Lavinia looked at Gaston, who brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, but neither of them smiled.

  It was raining the day Gaston told her he was a Jew. Beads of water streaked the window and a small cascade spurted from a crack in the gutter. Lavinia kept her eyes at the window for a long time. It was the first time he’d come to her home, though after the war began she’d often suggested it.

  “I’m not really Jewish,” Gaston explained. “I was raised as a Catholic by my father and for better or worse that’s what I believe, when I believe. My mother was Jewish, but she didn’t practice. She didn’t like religion of any variety including Catholicism. ‘The world’s my temple,’ she’d say, ‘and observation is not limited to Sundays.’

  “When my parents divorced, she moved back to England and then to the sanitarium from which she never emerged. By then she’d lost a lung and most of the will to live. My memories of her are troubled and sad. That my mother came from a Jewish family never featured in my view of her. Or of myself. It wasn’t important to either of us.”

  As Lavinia watched the rain erase a child’s chalk drawing from the courtyard, it seemed as if Gaston’s voice were washing away their past with the same weary detachment. His words fell steadily, blurring everything, dissolving what was true. They pounded out everything else. She didn’t care that he was a Jew; she cared that he had lied. It was almost like vertigo the way the revelation swept her off balance. All the times he could have told her rushed to her temples and pounded in her ears.

  Lavinia wondered if it was a failure of feeling or trust on his part that had excluded her from his secret, though both were painful. She wondered what other secrets he had kept from her and the thought made her feel hollow and sweaty. All the time she had been endeavoring so vigorously to be known, he had been equally exerting himself to remain unknown.

  She remembered holding hands in the warm darkness of the cinema, watching the Pathe newsreels, hiding together from the usher’s flashlight: safe from all the world. All that footage mocked her now: the reels showing the broken storefronts in Berlin, armbands on overcoats, swastikas painted on temple doors, all
that time, thinking she had been his only secret. She remembered his anecdote about the American named Robert Kahn who had been turned down at Gaston’s club. At the committee meeting, the club president had said, “There will be no Kahns at this club, unless the first name is Genghis.” She thought back to their conversation about Léon Blum, and Dreyfus and Céline’s Ecole des Cadavers. Lavinia remembered the day Poland was invaded and Gaston had quoted Proust, “Pacifism sometimes multiplies wars.” Looking back, there had been so many occasions for candor and now those memories were tainted by its absence.

  Everything they had together was a secret predicated on a lie. Did he even love her or had she been just as much of a fool as Céleste? A poem long forgotten returned to her in a broken rush. She couldn’t remember the title, or its opening line. She couldn’t remember the author, or even most of the verses, but she remembered its devastating conclusion:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! For the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And here we are as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  It was either Longfellow or Arnold. Shelby Sterling would know; he would probably be able to recite the poem in its entirety, Lavinia reflected fondly. Even so, Shelby had lacked the passion to be true on the darkling plain. Now, that was all that mattered. It was the only thing she had thought she could count on.

  As the import of Gaston’s words registered, Lavinia realized her left hand was so tightly clenched her nails were cutting into her palm. Now nothing was sure. Nothing was safe, not even their love.

  All afternoon it rained, bringing down the last leaves of autumn, and banging the loose shutter on the apartment Madame Braun hadn’t occupied since the end of August, when, according to the terms of the Armistice, refugees were returned to Hitler. Madame Braun had chosen to go with her sister and the children, one hand holding a baby on her hip, the other carrying a red alligator train case.

  “I have a French passport,” she’d explained. “I’ll come back once I’ve gotten things straightened out.” Lavinia had watched the group of them file across the courtyard, accompanied by two gendarmes, one of whom helped to carry some of the luggage. Madame Braun was wearing a hat with a spray of black feathers and very bright lipstick. She had looked stylish again, as if she were on her way to something very chic and sophisticated. When Madame Braun turned for a final glance at the courtyard, Lavinia waved to her from the window. Madame Braun’s hands were full so she couldn’t wave back, but her shutter, banging against the window, had been waving good-bye all fall.

  The rain was letting up, changing octaves as it drummed the rooftops, and plinked against the copper flashing on the eaves. It was getting chilly and Lavinia pulled the window closed and sighed.

  “It could be worse,” Gaston said, with forced levity. “I could be a Nazi.” The darkness of the afternoon was melting into evening, turning the windowpane into a mirror reflecting Lavinia’s face back into the room.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “I didn’t realize it would be a problem until the prefectures were asked to supply all the records of births and marriage registrations. Even then, I was sure I could find a way.”

  “Because for you exceptions are made?” Lavinia asked, recognizing the familiar fallacy. It was the one on which she had been raised.

  “Because I am not some dirty Gypsy beggar. I’m a French citizen with standing. Because I am Catholic, damn it.”

  “No,” Lavinia said, angrily. “According to Nazi law, you are a Mischling ersten Grades.” As she spoke she watched her breath fog the window, the heat of her words making the world momentarily opaque. It was a term she’d first seen in an editorial in Le Figaro. Harold had explained it to her. Hybrid first degree: the offspring of an Aryan father and a Jewess mother. Until 1934, Hitler had allowed them to keep their jobs provided the Aryan father was still alive. Later, no consideration at all was made for their paternity.

  “Think of it this way,” Harold had elaborated, “Louisiana may distinguish all the degrees of negritude from mulatto to octaroon but when it comes to intermarriage there is no gray: just black and white, and never the twain shall meet.”

  Lavinia turned from the window; her heart was fluttering in her chest. Boswell pawed at her legs and whined, wanting to be taken out. The afternoon had vanished and twilight was falling.

  “I have never felt so utterly alone,” she said. “And all I have ever wanted was to be with you.”

  In the days following Gaston’s disclosure, Lavinia noticed that shop windows displaying signs excluding Jews now seemed to be everywhere.

  “Isn’t it enough,” Lavinia had asked at their parting, as she dried her tears with the back of her hand, “that I have to worry about my own safety without now having to worry about yours too?” Since she’d learned his secret, she’d done little else: new regulations under the Statut des Juifs restricted work to only certain jobs, and then in quotas. No business ownership, partnership, or civil service was permitted now. The current definition of a Jew, and this had been a subject of animated debate in several newspapers, was someone with three Jewish grandparents, or two Jewish grandparents, if also married to a Jew. Unfortunately for Gaston, his paternal grandmother was adopted, so he had no way to prove she wasn’t Jewish. The practice of another religion, even baptism or confirmation, was not a consideration.

  Lavinia was practical; she’d done her homework. She’d educated herself since she’d seen Gaston last, researching their fate like a schoolgirl. She’d made notes, assembled names of lawyers, clipped articles. Arming herself with information had helped to steady her and fill the time until she saw Gaston again. It did not prepare her however, for the way in which he wept when he told Lavinia about his imminent departure, and Céleste’s accident.

  Lavinia had never seen him cry with such abandon and it was deeply upsetting. He sat on her bed with his head in his hands while he talked.

  “Céleste was hysterical. She was at the top of the stairs screaming as if her hair were on fire, cursing at me. It looked as if she stamped her foot and it slid out from under her. She was halfway down before her ankle got caught between two of the spindles in the stair rail.”

  “You mean Céleste didn’t know you were Jewish?” Lavinia asked. It had never occurred to her that Céleste didn’t know. Lavinia’s attention had been so consumed by her concern for Gaston she hadn’t even considered how it might affect Céleste.

  “Céleste’s leg was broken above the shin,” Gaston continued. “You can’t imagine what it was like on the way to the hospital.” Gaston sighed and ran his hand through his hair, extending the curls with his fingers.

  Céleste hadn’t wanted him to leave La Rêveline, Gaston explained. All of the servants who lived on the property, in either the main house or the attendant buildings, had left. But for Céleste, it was deserted. Gaston took his time with the story, weaving together the answer to Lavinia’s question with the story of the accident, building a defense on the circuitous narrative path that led to Céleste’s fall.

  She’d gotten the idea at Easter time, he continued, when the gardener wrote reporting a burglary. A window had been broken but not much had been taken, only a large copper cauldron and some jewelry, which had almost no value now that everyone was selling their bijoux, and nothing drove down prices like desperation.

  Whoever robbed La Rêveline had missed the point. The cellar was still full of coal and potatoes. Enough for the winter. The barn was stacked with cords of wood; the smoke-house had fifty pounds of seasoned game. Céleste was very proud of that, Gaston said, and Lavinia thought, just like a good burgher’s wife.

  Lavinia noticed that Gaston didn’t mention their ex
cellent wine cellar; she remembered him having once described the superior bottles he had selected over the years as compensation for spending time with his wife’s family. For the first time in more than a year, Lavinia felt the sharp fang of jealousy as she envisioned Céleste converting the greenhouse from roses to rutabagas, providing for Gaston, in this time of war, the sanctuary she’d never been able to provide in marriage.

  “Céleste has devoted the last decade to restoring La Rêveline, treating it as if it were a wayward child that only she could civilize,” Gaston went on, “and the house became her folly. She imagined nothing could touch us there, not even the Nazis. She became hysterical. It’s even possible she fell deliberately, to keep me from leaving. When she became hysterical,” he said, turning his face away from Lavinia so that she could not see his eyes, only the lines pointing to them, like a spray of arrows that have hit their mark, “I didn’t know if it was because I was leaving, or Jewish, or both or neither.”

  In the courtyard, a bicycle bell trilled impatiently, followed by a shout from one of the de la Falaise children, calling to another, “Hurry.” The word swelled with import, muffling the childish laughter and sound of the entrance door slamming.

  “Céleste was very young when we married,” Gaston explained. “She was fresh from the nuns, and straight from the country. Her branch of the family, as I’ve told you, is provincial; even old Marcel Feydeau made fun of Céleste’s mother, spending her fortune on hideous religious kitsch. There would have been objections to the marriage. Why should I have ruined Céleste’s happiness and my own for a God I didn’t worship?” he said with quiet conviction. In his hand he held a cigarette he was too distracted to light.

  “It was an irrelevant complication. By the time it became relevant it was much too late. And who could have known it would come to this?” Gaston asked, his voice beginning to crack. It was ironic, Lavinia thought, that of the three of them, she should be the calmest. Lavinia realized too that she’d hardened, the way even the most sensitive skin abraded over time becomes callused.