by André Aciman
He knew I had changed the subject. I was hoping that something would lift this sudden cloud between us, but nothing came, and neither he nor I attempted to dispel it, perhaps because neither was quite sure what lurked behind it. So he enlightened me about the Calvados, and its history, and I listened, and read the tiny hand scrawl on the bottle’s label giving a history of the house that produced it. Which was when he had a stroke of genius, and used an expression that had become a catchphrase between the two of us: “I want to make you happy.” I knew exactly what he meant. “So, keep reading the label, I don’t want you distracted. I don’t even want you looking.”
He picked up the glass of Calvados and sipped from it. Then I felt it, felt his mouth, felt the slight tingling. “I love what you’re doing,” I finally said, shutting my eyes, trying to put the bottle down somewhere until I decided to place it on the carpet, at the foot of the sofa.
I remembered the housemaid.
“Gone already. Didn’t you hear her car?”
* * *
We spent Sunday in the house. As Michel remembered, it always seemed to rain on Sundays, and the wood, where we’d planned to take a long walk, was growing darker and bleaker by the hour. Late that morning I practiced for a couple of hours while he leafed through some papers from his office. But ours was mostly perfunctory activity, and in the end we were both relieved when the other tactfully suggested that perhaps it might be good to head back to Paris before traffic got heavy with Parisians returning late from the weekend. As we neared the city, there was a slightly awkward moment when it became clear he was planning to drop me at my address first—and that he was doing so either because he didn’t want me to feel pressured to head straight to his home or because he suspected I had other plans before our evening concert. Or, I thought, he needed some time alone. After all, he had a habit of coming back to Paris on Sundays, and who knows, perhaps this was what he’d done for years and didn’t want it changed. When he double-parked in front of the entrance to my building, he didn’t turn off the engine. I was meant to step out, which I did. “See you in a bit,” I said, to which he gave that silent, wistful nod of his. And then I simply found the courage. “I don’t need to go home. I don’t want to go home.” “Get back in,” he said. “I adore you, Elio, I adore you.” We went straight to his home. We made love, even dozed a bit, then quickly rushed to the concert, followed by the intermission cider, and then the three-course meal during which he held my hand. “Tomorrow is Monday,” he said. “Last week’s Monday was agony.” Why, I asked. But I knew the answer. “Because I felt I’d lost you—and for what reason? Because I was scared you’d say no and was trying not to seem depraved.”
He looked at me for a while. “Do you have to go home tonight?”
“Do you want me to?”
“We’ll pretend we met tonight and that instead of walking away with your bike, you said, ‘I want to sleep with you, Michel.’ Would you have said it?”
“I was on the verge of saying it. But no! You, sir, had to walk away!”
* * *
Monday morning I decided to take a taxi and went straight home to change. The place looked slightly unfamiliar, as though I hadn’t been there for weeks, months. The last time I’d seen morning there was on Saturday when I’d dashed upstairs, picked up a few things to wear, and rushed down to where he was waiting in his car. That afternoon, after teaching, I headed straight to the conservatory office to find whatever I could about Léon.
When I saw Michel at our usual bistro that night I told him that the trail had gone cold. Not a trace of Léon anywhere. He was more disappointed than I’d expected, which was why I had another idea on Tuesday. I tried two music schools and searched their yearly records. But once again, nothing.
We both made the reasonable assumption that either Léon had studied abroad or that, like well-off Jews in the early years of the century, he had studied with a private tutor.
Two more days went by this way. I had run out of clues.
On Friday, however, I finally discovered Léon’s identity in the records of the lycée where both Michel and his father had been enrolled and where the secretary had searched through the records in my presence after I’d claimed to be Michel’s nephew. In the car to the country that day, I couldn’t hold back and broke the news to him. “I was even able to obtain his old address. The family name is Deschamps. The only problem is that Deschamps is not exactly a Jewish name.”
“Could be an acquired or changed name. Think of Feldmann, Feldenstein, Feldenblum, or just Feld.”
“Could be. But there are many Léon Deschampses on the Web, assuming they are all alive, or still live in France. The search could take months.”
He looked perplexed. What I couldn’t help thinking was why he hadn’t made the school connection himself. Finally, I asked him why after all those years he was still searching for Léon.
“It may tell me something about my father that I never knew. I’m also curious to know when and how Léon disappeared.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just a way of reaching my father, to know what made him stop doing what he loved most, and to understand his friendship or love for Léon, if love and friendship it was. It’s the one thing my father never mentioned and yet by the time I was eighteen he could easily have opened up to me. Or perhaps I was not unlike my own son and was trying to put some distance between us. Or maybe it’s my way of atoning for not making time to know the man who’d stopped playing music. But how many of us ever make time to know who our parents really were? How many sunken layers deep are those we thought we knew simply because we loved them?”
“In any event,” I said, interrupting him, “I’ve even found Léon’s picture in the yearly class photo. Here, take a look.” I produced the photo I’d had copied that same day in the school office. “He is very handsome. And looks very Catholic, very conservative.”
“Indeed. Very handsome,” said Michel.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“Of course I’m thinking what you’re thinking. It’s what we’ve been thinking all along, isn’t it?”
When we arrived, the first thing he did after depositing his bag and greeting the cook was to head directly to the living room, open a slim drawer in a little table by the French windows, and produce a large envelope. “Take a look,” he said.
It was a blown-up old class photograph, taken a year or two before the one I’d had reproduced. He pointed at Adrien with his pinkie; he looked younger in this picture. We were both looking for Léon.
“Find him?” he asked. I shook my head. But then there he was, standing right next to Adrien. The resemblance between the face in my photograph and in the old class photograph was stunning. “So you knew all along!” I said.
He nodded with a guiltily amused smile. “I knew about the picture. But I needed someone else to confirm it.”
I thought about this for a while.
“Is that why you brought me here last week?”
“I knew you were going to ask this. The answer is no. There was another reason, and I’m sure you’ve guessed it. I want to give you the score. By giving it to you, and to no one else, I am fulfilling my father’s last wish. All I ask is that you play it at a concert.”
A heavy silence fell between us. I wanted to protest and say what people say when they’re given an expensive gift: I can’t accept it—which also means I am not worthy of your gift. But I knew this would offend him.
“I still think our discovery is too neat, too easy,” I said. “Part of me doesn’t trust it. Let’s not rush to conclusions yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t think of a single reason why a well-to-do young Catholic man from the Lycée J. whose parents probably subscribed to the Action Française would want to touch Kol Nidre.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That our Léon may not be Léon Deschamps.”
* *
*
In my attempt not to leave any stones unturned, I spent the whole of the following week looking for clues.
There were more dead ends, and another false start, but then, that Saturday afternoon in his country house, it suddenly hit me.
“Something kept gnawing at me. First that your father continued to go to the Sainte U. concerts on Sundays. Might the church have been tied in some mysterious way to Léon? Perhaps the church itself also had something to do with the Florian Quartet. I knew that the Florian had been playing for years at that same church and you yourself told me that your father had subsidized their concerts. So I looked them up online and eventually found out, as I suspected, that there were not one or two, but three incarnations of the Florian. The Florian started in the mid-1920s, not as a quartet but as a trio: violin, cello, and piano. And now comes the part that shows I’m a true genius. The pianist of the trio was not Léon Deschamps, as the two of us thought, but someone who had been with the trio for ten years, who played the piano but also the violin. His name was Ariel Waldstein. So I looked up Ariel Waldstein and sure enough he was a Jewish pianist who didn’t just die in the camps but was beaten to death there because he owned an Amati violin and refused to part with it. He was sixty-two years old.”
“But the name Ariel is not Léon,” said Michel.
“I put the puzzle together early this morning—how, I’ve no idea. In Hebrew Ariel means ‘lion of God’: in short, Léon. Many Jews have a Jewish and a Latin name. In the twenties the violinist is listed as Ariel; in the early thirties he becomes Léon, probably because of rising anti-Semitism. The easiest way to find out more about him is to inquire at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.”
I felt I needed to add something else here, as though all this digging and excavating into the life of Ariel Waldstein were also bringing to light a subject that might seem totally incidental but that I knew was subliminally related if only because it involved the passage of time and the rediscovery of a beloved person. I could almost sense where this could head and was already reluctant to fathom any deeper for fear that Michel’s thoughts were already inclined that way. He didn’t bring it up, I didn’t either. But I was sure it had crossed his mind.
* * *
We showered together that Sunday morning, then went out for a short walk, using the back door, which I hadn’t seen before. Everyone in the village seemed to know Monsieur Michel and greetings flew back and forth across the way. He led me to a café on the corner of a street that looked as though it had nothing to recommend it, but the moment we stepped inside, I immediately felt warm and sheltered. It was filled with people who had parked their cars or vans to have something hot to drink before getting back on the road. We ordered two cups of coffee and two croissants. Three girls in their late twenties were sitting next to us, basically grumbling about the men in their lives. I liked it when Michel, who was eavesdropping, smiled and then winked at me. “Men are terrible,” he said to one of the girls. “Horrible. How you men can face yourselves every morning is beyond me.” “It’s not easy, but we try,” said Michel. There was laughter. The waiter, who overheard, said that women were better than men and that his wife was the most perfect person in the world. “Why?” asked one of the girls who kept going through the motions of lighting a cigarette only to put off doing so. “Why? Because she made me a better person. And let me tell you, with me this was something only a saint could accomplish.” “So she is a saint then.” “Let’s not exaggerate. Who wants a saint in bed.” Everyone was laughing.
After coffee Michel extended his legs all the way under the table and seemed majestically satisfied with breakfast. “Another?” he asked. I nodded yes. Michel ordered two more coffees. We didn’t speak. “Three weeks,” he finally said, perhaps to fill the silence. I echoed his words. Then, from nowhere, he reached out and held my hand. I left it in his, feeling awkward because the place was filled with people who were standing at the bar. He must have sensed my unease, and let go. “Tonight they’re playing Beethoven again.” He was saying it as though tacitly trying to coax me into going.
“I thought we had a date.”
“Well, I didn’t want to presume,” he said.
“Stop!”
“I can’t help it.”
“But why?”
“Because the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he’s afraid of asking, because he thinks you’ll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult. I’m shy, I’m scared, and I’m old.”
“Don’t think this way. We’ve almost solved a mystery today. What we need to do is ask the cellist tonight if he remembers Ariel. He may not, but all the same, we’ll ask.”
“Will it bring my father back?”
“No, but it might make him happy, which will make you happy.”
He considered my words for a moment, then shook his head as he’d done before, to signify resigned and quiet comprehension. Then, as though he’d jumped across all the unstated subjects between us: “Can you promise that you’ll play the cadenza—one day soon, I hope?”
“I’ll play it late this coming spring when I tour the States, and in the fall when I’m back in Paris. I promise.”
I saw him hesitate and I realized why. Now was the time to tell him.
“In America, I’m planning to drop in on someone I haven’t seen in ages.”
I watched him ponder the matter.
“So you’re traveling solo then?”
I nodded.
Again I watched him weigh my words.
“The marriage canard?” he finally asked.
I nodded. I loved that he was able to read me so well, yet I feared what he was reading. “Being with you reminds me of him,” I said. “If I meet him, the first thing I’ll want to do is tell him about you.”
“What, that I fall short of such a high standard?”
“No, because you and he are the standard. Now that I think of it, there’s only been the two of you. All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.”
I looked at him, and this time it was I who reached out and held his hand.
“Walk?” I said.
“Walk.”
We stood up and he suggested we go back through the wood to reach the lake.
“What I think we should do is find out who Ariel Waldstein was. Perhaps there is someone who might know more about him.”
“Perhaps. But he was sixty-two when he died, which puts a living relative at a very, very advanced age.”
“So Ariel was probably twice your father’s age at the time.”
He suddenly looked at me and smiled.
“You’re a snake!”
“I wonder about the two of them. Maybe this is what feeds our search in the end.”
“Us, you mean?”
“Maybe. If the church has records, we’ll know. We can even try to find Ariel’s address, maybe in an old telephone book. And if we do find the building, what we should do is commission a Stolperstein in his name.”
“But what if there are no descendants, what if the line stopped with him, what if there isn’t a trace of him and there is not a thing more to learn?”
“Then we’ll have done a good deed. The stone will be in memory of all those who perished and couldn’t even smuggle a word of warning or of love or even their name before the gas chamber. Except for a score with a Hebrew prayer. Did anyone in your family die in the Shoah?”
“You know about my great-uncles. I also think my great-grandmother died in Auschwitz. But I’m not sure. You die and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You’re extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn’t drop ashes.”
I thought of Ariel. The score was his love letter to a young pianist, his secret missive. Play it for me. Say Kaddish for me. Remember the tune? It’s hidden in there
, under the Beethoven, next to the Mozart, find me. Who knows under what dreadful, unthinkable conditions Léon the Jew penned his cadenza to say, I am thinking of you. I love you, play.
And I thought of old Ariel the Jew who’d visit Adrien’s home even though he knew he was unwelcome, Ariel seeking refuge but being turned out or, worse yet, denounced either by the father or by the mother or by the servants, probably with the blessing of the parents. I thought of Ariel attempting to flee to Portugal, or England, or far worse, Ariel arrested by the French Milice during one of those terrifying raids when Jews young and old were torn from their homes in the middle of the night and forced into packed trucks. Then Ariel penned up somewhere, Ariel in the cattle cars, and finally Ariel being beaten to death because he wouldn’t part with his violin, which is likely now sitting in a German home with a family who might not even know the instrument was looted after its owner perished in a camp. Was Michel’s father perhaps atoning for not having helped to save Ariel? Since I couldn’t give you and your loved ones shelter, I’ll never play again. Or: After what they’ve done to you, music is dead to me. I could just hear the older man imploring: But you must play. For the love of me, never stop, play this then.
And once again I thought of my life. Was there anyone who would send me a cadenza one day and say, I am gone, but please find me, play for me?
“What is the name of the Jewish prayer?”
“Kol Nidre.”
“Is it recited for the dead?”
“No, that prayer is called the Kaddish.”
“Do you know it?”
“Every Jewish boy learns it. We’re taught to rehearse for the death of loved ones before we know what death even is. The irony is that the Kaddish is the only prayer one cannot use on oneself.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you can’t recite it and be dead at the same time.”
“You people!”
We laughed. Then I thought for a moment. “You know, there is more than a strong possibility that this whole Léon-Ariel thing is nothing more than fiction.”
