Samuel felt guilty for having made her recall a bitter memory, and so he fell silent, but Irina picked up the thread of the conversation.
“There is nothing left for me in Russia, so I never want to go back.”
“‘Never’ is too strong a word, don’t you think?”
“Are you thinking about returning?”
“Every now and then I get letters from Konstantin. He tells me about our friends and about what’s happening in Saint Petersburg, and I feel nostalgia. But I know I shouldn’t go, I wouldn’t be safe, that’s what Konstantin tells me. Also, after the attempted revolution in 1905, the Okhrana has gotten even more suspicious, so I suppose I’m an exile along with you.”
“But I am a happy exile, and I don’t think you are.”
“And what about Mikhail, does he feel any nostalgia for Russia?”
“He still has nightmares. He often wakes up calling for his father to lie down next to him. He remembers how we had to run away, how you asked him not to cry, how you told him that he had to be a man, and pretend that we were his parents . . . How can you expect that he’d feel nostalgic, all he does is miss his father.”
“Marie says that he will be a great musician.”
“Music is his obsession, and he has talent, a great talent. When you left he was devastated, he barely ate for days. We were very worried, and Marie finally said that if he ate then we would give him whatever he wanted. You know what he asked for? He said, ‘I want to be a musician like my father. Can you make me a musician?’ Marie found him the best teacher in Paris, Monsieur Bonnet. Ever since then he only lives for music, he wants to be a conductor. Monsieur Bonnet tells us that Mikhail is already a violin virtuoso, although in fact he has a special gift for any instrument that falls into his hands.”
“He doesn’t seem very happy that I’m here.”
“He’s very shy, and I’ve told you already that he suffered a lot when you left. Within just a few months he had to deal with his father’s death and your disappearance. No, so many losses have not been easy for him to deal with. I think he’s scared that you will go away again, so he does not want to establish any close link to you. It’s his way of protecting himself. And . . . well . . . Are you going to leave?”
“I don’t know, Irina, I don’t know; I’m here and I’m staying here. I don’t have any plans for the future.”
“But you told us that you bought a farm in Palestine. Your house is there, isn’t it?”
“It’s a farm that I share with some good friends; well, they are good friends now, but it was difficult for us to adapt to the situation at first. All of us Jews who emigrate to Palestine have our own ideas about socialism, but it is difficult for us to put them into practice. We all have to renounce our individuality, we have nothing that we personally own, we decide everything together, even if it is a question of something so petty as whether to buy a new hoe.”
“I find it hard to imagine you as a farmer.”
“Konstantin says the same in his letters. He has promised me that he will visit me in Palestine, simply because he wants to see me with a hoe in my hand. But I promise that that is what I am now, a simple farmer.”
Samuel went to visit Benedict Peretz, the French merchant. He was pleased to see Samuel, and asked for news of Jerusalem, and also brought him up to date with the situation of the Jews in France.
“A few years ago, in 1906, the military tribunal had no option other than to rehabilitate Captain Alfred Dreyfus. You know the case, right? He was accused of passing secrets to the Germans. This was a false accusation, and proved to be so. But the fact that Dreyfus is a Jew served to fan the flames of hatred toward our community. Nothing new, nothing that we haven’t experienced already, for all that the revolution of 1789 seemed to have overcome prejudices against Jews. But this change had not really taken root here, and you see what happened, that France, which had set herself up as a beacon of liberty, ended up reviling a brilliant and loyal soldier for the simple fact of his being Jewish. I don’t want to worry you, it is still possible to be a Jew in France, although there are people who see us as a foreign body without understanding that we are French and can be just as patriotic as they are. We are Jews, yes, but not before being Frenchmen.”
The two men felt sympathy toward each other, and without arranging anything official they started to meet up regularly. Samuel was well received in the Peretz household, both by Benedict Peretz and by his sons. As for the merchant, every now and then he would go to Irina’s house and try to convince her to take up Monsieur Elijah’s business again.
“It’s a real shame that Irina won’t take advantage of the good reputation that your grandfather’s business has, as well as the extra value that Marie has given it by running it so well. Lots of women are complaining that they can’t find fur coats now like the ones that used to be made here. Maybe you could open the workshop again,” he suggested to Samuel.
“No, I can’t. I don’t know anything about making clothes, and I can’t bring furs from Russia anymore. My good friend Konstantin Goldanski tells me that it would be better if I didn’t. I have already told you about my father’s death, an unjust end for a man who had not committed any crime. If I went back I too would end up in one of the Okhrana’s cells. Also, I don’t want to lie to you, my feelings are much the same as Irina’s, the business just doesn’t interest me.”
Benedict Peretz asked him worriedly what he did want to dedicate his life to.
“I studied to become a chemist, although really I can only aspire to become a pharmacist. My benefactor, Professor Goldanski, and later my university teacher, Oleg Bogdanov, both made me see that chemistry is a good friend to pharmacy. I would like to work on making painkillers. However, fate has played its tricks on me and I have become a farmer who makes medicines on the side. My good friend Abraham orders what he needs from me, and sells some of my remedies.”
“Will you go back to Palestine?”
Marie and Irina had asked him the same question, and he did not have an answer to give them. He didn’t have much money to spend, and when it ran out he would have to decide whether to return to that inhospitable land that was now his own, or to stay in Paris, as Marie wanted him to.
“I will let fate decide for me,” was his reply, and it was a sincere one.
Marie seemed happy to have him at her side and enjoyed the time they spent talking about the past. Samuel asked her to tell him about Isaac.
“I loved your father so much! I imagine him in Saint Petersburg, in the house with those two widows . . . He was fond of them, and he made me very angry by saying that Raisa Korlov cooked better than I did. One day I surprised him by making him borscht from a recipe Monsieur Elijah gave me.”
He had been in Marie’s house now for two months, and suffered to watch her die a little more every day. For the first few days after his arrival, Marie seemed to have regained enough strength to get up out of bed, not without effort, every afternoon, but now she could no longer do even that. She scarcely ate anything, and complained of intense pains in her bones, although she refused to take the morphine that the doctor had prescribed.
“If I take it, it will be like dying ahead of time, I won’t feel the pain, but I won’t feel anything else either.”
Even so the pains grew so intense that Irina, on the doctor’s advice, put some morphine in Marie’s soup. Marie realized this and protested.
“What have you done? I don’t want you to trick me . . . Please, Samuel, I don’t want to go to sleep! Help me!”
Irina and Samuel debated about whether to help alleviate the old woman’s pain or to obey her wishes, and this led them into long and fruitless discussions about life and death.
“I can’t bear to see her suffer!” Irina said, crying.
“But she prefers the pain to not feeling that she is alive,” Samuel replied, tormented by doubts about what was the
right thing to do.
The moment came when Marie could no longer move by herself. Her legs had become inert and her hands were no longer capable of holding a spoon. Irina washed her every day with Samuel’s help, in spite of her protests.
“You shouldn’t see me like this . . . ,” she complained.
“Come on, Marie, you’re like my mother, let me move you so that Irina can change your shift. I like to see you looking good.”
She closed her eyes, smiled, and let him move her.
One morning, just after they had gotten her dressed, Marie asked Mikhail to go and fetch a priest.
“I want to confess,” she murmured in a thin little voice.
“And what do you have to confess? You are the best person in the world,” Mikhail said as he stroked her face.
“Listen, son, we all have our accounts to settle with God, and I need to be in peace before I enter eternity. Will you find me a priest, Mikhail?”
The young man nodded and left the room with tears in his eyes.
“What’s happening?” Irina asked, alarmed to see him crying.
“Marie has asked me to go and find a priest, she wants to confess, she says . . .” But he could not carry on. He embraced Irina without being able to hold back his tears or stop his body from trembling.
She held him tight for a few seconds and then she pushed him away to arms’ length and made him look her in the eyes.
“Mikhail, we need to help her, we need to do what she asks of us to make sure that her last days are as she wishes them to be. Go to the church and find a priest, please, and hurry. Oh, and tell Samuel. He’s in his room.”
It was difficult for Marie to breathe, and she complained of a sharp pain in her chest. Irina decided not to go to work. When Mikhail came back with the priest, she asked him to go out again, to the florist’s, and tell them that she would not be coming. Meanwhile she waited impatiently for the doctor’s daily visit. Dr. Castell came punctually as he did every morning, and after examining Marie he made a sign to Samuel to come and speak with him in the corridor.
“I don’t think she’ll last the day, she can’t hold out any longer. I know that she is refusing the morphine, but she is suffering more than any human being should have to bear. You are a pharmacist, you know about pain, so I suggest that you give her morphine and make her sleep peacefully until death finally comes for her.”
“She wants to make her confession,” Samuel said.
“Let her confess, but give her the morphine, it’s inhuman for her to suffer as she is suffering. If she had been my mother I would not have allowed her to suffer so much. I have explained that there is no cure, that I can’t do anything except relieve her pain a little. You have allowed her to refuse to take the morphine.”
Samuel did not reply to the doctor’s reproaches. He was right. Although he knew about Marie’s suffering, he had not been able to force her to take more than the bare minimum of that liquid that traveled through her veins and gave the appearance of death. When Mikhail came back with the priest, they found Marie extremely agitated. They left her alone with the minister of God and were unable to talk to or comfort each other. Each was wrapped up in personal pain at the loss that seemed imminent.
When the priest came out of the room, he told them to go in one by one.
“She is a good woman, and the Lord will take her to his bosom. Now she wants you to go in, Samuel, and then Mikhail, and then you, Mademoiselle Irina.”
Samuel went in with a smile on his face. He did not want her to see him cry, he knew that this would make her suffer. Marie tried to raise a hand, and he sat next to her and kissed her forehead. Then he took her hands in his.
“I want to ask something of you . . . ,” Marie murmured.
“Just one thing? Alright, granted,” he joked.
“I made my will a while back. The house is yours, that was the condition your grandfather put on it to allow me to live and work here.”
“But I thought . . .”
“That he had sold it to me? Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. Monsieur Elijah said that you were his only grandson, the son of his dear daughter Esther, and that you should enjoy the fruits of his life’s work. I promised him that this was how it would be, although really I couldn’t have done anything else—you are the son I never had, and to whom would I have left the house if it really had been mine. Your grandfather also had some money saved up, but he did not want you to have it until you had decided what to do with your life. He insisted that you had to find your own way in the world, and that you needed to believe that you had no more resources than those that you yourself could obtain. Your father knew about this, but he did not have time to tell you . . . I thought about telling you when you came from Russia with your heart set on going to Palestine. But I did not do so because I thought you had to find yourself first. Now is the time for you to take control of your inheritance. The house is yours, and the workshop is as well. Monsieur Farman the notary will give you the documents of ownership and the money that you have inherited from your grandfather. There is a large envelope in my desk. Open it when I am gone. Ah, and one more thing: Monsieur Farman has my will.”
Marie closed her eyes and Samuel stood up in fright. But she immediately opened them again.
“Don’t be afraid, I’m not gone yet . . . I want to say something else, about Mikhail . . . You have to be patient with him, he hasn’t forgiven you for abandoning him. I know that you feel some affection for him, but that also for you he is no more than the son of a friend of yours, someone you had to save, but for him you are the father he had lost, and he could not bear to lose you again. I . . . Well, you’ll see, but I want you to know this before you speak to Monsieur Farman. All of my savings are divided into three parts, one for you, one for Mikhail, and one for Irina. After my mother died, and after Monsieur Elijah and your father died, you are all the family I have left. Mikhail and Irina have brought me great joy and I feel responsible for them, so . . .”
Once again she fell silent and closed her eyes. Samuel felt his palms sweating out of fear of losing her. He was very still and listened to Marie’s agitated breathing.
“I am so tired! I won’t ask you to take responsibility for them, you have to live your own life, but I would like you to let them live here unless you marry and come here with a wife. This has been his house, the only house that Mikhail remembers . . . Irina . . . Irina is strong, she can start again, but Mikhail . . . Are you going to Palestine?”
“I don’t know, Marie, do you think I should?”
“I don’t know either, Samuel . . . All I want is that you should be happy, but I can’t tell you how to be. For years I would have liked to see you married to Irina, but don’t you believe that this was an entirely unselfish idea, I wanted to have you three close to me. But whatever you do, don’t abandon them . . .”
“I promise, Marie.”
“The lessons . . . Mikhail’s music lessons . . . He mustn’t give up . . . The Lord has given him a gift . . .”
Samuel could no longer bear to see this woman, her face contorted with suffering and the tiredness that came from forcing herself to speak. He bent over her and hugged her and kissed her forehead.
“Don’t worry . . . I am ready . . . I will be with my mother soon, and I will see your father, dear Isaac . . .”
Mikhail spent a good while with Marie, and Irina was with her for a shorter time. Marie was finding it very difficult to breathe, it was as if she were drowning. Irina went out for help. The doctor, whom she had not allowed to leave, was with Samuel and Mikhail.
He went in to see the patient and came out immediately.
“If you refuse to give her morphine then I will leave at once, it’s the only thing I can do. She is in unbearable pain and can scarcely breathe. Do you want her to choke to death?”
This time Samuel did not lower the dosage the doc
tor recommended by even the tiniest amount, and soon Marie sank into a sleep from which she did not awaken.
They wept for her. Her death made them feel isolated. She had been the link that kept them all together, and now suddenly they looked at one another without knowing what to expect.
Mikhail fell into a silence that lasted days. He didn’t want to share his pain with Irina, much less with Samuel, in spite of what he had promised Marie: that he would give this man, with whom he had fled Russia, a chance.
For all that Irina insisted that he return to Monsieur Bonnet’s lessons, Mikhail refused. Not even music was powerful enough to overcome the depression into which he had sunk.
“We have to do something, he’ll fall ill, he barely eats,” Irina complained.
“Let him be, he needs to mourn in his own way. Marie has been a mother for you, it will take him a long time to recover,” Samuel replied.
A few days after Marie’s death, Samuel looked for the large envelope that she had told him was in her desk. In it was a letter addressed to him.
Dear Samuel,
I don’t know if I will have had a chance to say goodbye to you when you read this letter. Palestine is a long way away, and maybe you will not get here in time.
Samuel, son, let me call you “son” because that is how I feel about you even though I have never dared to use the word. If I had ever had a son I should have wished for him to be like you. Now that I am gone I want you to look after Irina and Mikhail. Neither of them will say that they want you, but I know that they both need you. I have helped Mikhail, with the aid of Benedict Peretz, not to forget that he is Jewish. He has had his Bar Mitzvah, the celebration of his entry into adolescence, and I myself have gone with him to the synagogue . . . He would like to forget that he is a Jew, just like you would, but if he does that then he will end up not knowing who he is . . . Help him to find his own path, and if it is necessary, take him to Palestine to show him the Holy Land from which the Jews were expelled two thousand years ago . . .
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 23
