A Dove of the East (19 page)

And he loved so much to love that he wondered if he were drawn to it by all but love itself. Walking in the Champ de Mars, a place of orange and blue awnings and quiet curving streets, he felt at twenty so hypnotized by love, by its idea, by the beauty of the women he saw. He stared at them—not with the pompous, self-worshipping, suspiciously homosexual gaze of the Mediterranean strutter, but rather with an openness and humility, a simplicity which for a numbing moment worked its way even to his fingers and back and caused the whirling of an electrified moment to become a feeling of history. History, the means by which he loved, the recollection of all men and all women gazing at one another in times past; the graveyards of Paris, strangely untended and quiet as before a war, full of charted lives which had seen such hot permanent moments as he felt on the Champ de Mars, the hollowness and waste of societies of men and their deeds in the face of these breathless confrontations when the world went silk and eyes moved as if they could feel.

And how refreshing it was afterwards to go back and reflect once again on things and quantities, the books in his shelves, the small everyday machines, speculation, conversation, a new suit of clothes, buttered bread and tea in a café on mornings before school, the grandeur of what he studied, and the excitement of a winter night at work under his light inscribing equations in fine pen across the pages of a blank book.

But these were only the general, and Ann the specific. He had fallen in love with her in the station years before, and then again at the camp when she had spurned him, if only because she loved him too much. With Ann it was not a question of silken moments, but just Ann, not a single association, just Ann. Her singing at Kreuzlingen had so much entrapped him in a lifelong love that he remembered each day several times the way she was sitting at night by the fire, in a blue jacket, her dark auburn hair falling beyond her shoulders. Her voice was clear and especially beautiful, and she was embarrassed to sing, but she sang and her French songs rang out among the hills. For him they still sounded there, having survived all the years of ice and snow, the new roads and buildings, the children getting older and dying. Her songs were still heard.

Later in Paris he knew her at school, loving everything she did. But for several years it was just dreaming, for they hardly even spoke and their manner was such that anyone else never would have had the vaguest notion that they were aware of one another, much less passionately in love. And then one day she broke her ankle on the playing field and he carried her up the steps to his car and drove her to the hospital. He had never touched her except accidentally or to take something from her hand. When he held her, her arms around his neck, he sensed for the first time that far from hating him she loved him; that she thought of him just as he had thought of her, in enveloping dreams; that she was thrilled by his presence as much as he had always been by hers; that she wanted to kiss him; that he was loved back. Then there was a golden fall when he scouted for perfect places in the woods and took her there on weekends. Her hair, lightened in the summer, fell from her blue student's cap. The weather was dry and cool and wavelike winds moved the trees and grass like breathing as they lay together for the first time in the diminishing October sun, its rays weakening into a cool sigh.

His aspirations were as great as his experience was little, but he could do no more than enjoy the impressions he felt so keenly. Life was a powerful confusion with rewards to those who did not control it. Those times were marked by the strangest remembrances: the heavy wooden door of her house, the black metal of his car, the letters they wrote, how Spain had passed them by and they had been hated for being so finely able to achieve what all the world's revolutions and all the red armies, what neither fascists nor pilots nor propagandists, nor the righteous or the daring or the obsessed, could do—and that was to create a heaven on earth. They had been hated for not noticing the definitive and terrible approach of the whitest winter ever to be seen. But had they feared and been oppressed by just the pressure of its advance, then they would have had nothing at all.

In no time they had finished university and found themselves hurtling through the June fields of Normandy on a fast black train, one car of which was filled with their families and friends on the way to the wedding at Honfleurs. He was uncomfortable at the wedding itself: they thought it too beautiful and too much a part of the nineteenth century to be their own, but they wanted the old men and women—for whom the white dresses and morning suits, the flowers and childrens' carts, the canopy, glass, and ring, were real—to be happy and to remember, as memory was all they had. But the great thing for Leon and Ann was the train ride itself, something which had not been planned as enjoyment.

They all met at the North Station early in the morning when the streets were still wet and being swept. A cool wind came into the train shed from the north, and everyone was dressed informally but Leon, who wore a three-piece black suit with two fountain pens in the vest pocket. He had just published a paper in an important journal of biochemistry and won recognition as the
Majeur
of his department. This was published with his picture in all the newspapers of Paris and people had been recognizing him on the street—not many people, but some. The car they had reserved was supplied in each compartment with champagne, fruit, and cheese. Leon and Ann went from one group to another, being toasted in each compartment and drinking back until they became riotously intoxicated and staggered down the corridor as the train lurched back and forth, sending them crashing into walls and doors. In one place they played cards for half an hour with an old uncle of hers, in another they received gifts—for her a black gem of some sort set in a gold foil, for him more fountain pens, the kind with an edelweiss on both ends which looks just like a Star of David. All the time unbeknownst to them they passed the rusted cannon and common graves of the Great War. The old men and not so old men looked out the windows at places they had heard of or fought in, never dreaming that they would have the opportunity to glide by so peacefully in a car laden with champagne. They thought quietly and looked at the new summer fields; some of them managed to smile.

After the wedding they stayed at Honfleurs boating and swimming. When they returned to Paris, it was the middle of summer and they settled down to work. She often wore a white silk dress and a white hat. They went to museums and walked in the parks at night—it was almost as if Paris were again the city of the century before. But winter came, and then the next summer, and the twentieth century clicked suddenly back into place like the sharp closing of a rifle bolt.

 

A
GAIN THEY
were on a train, he and Ann, with just the beginnings of real fear about what Paris would become. Early one morning his father had driven to their apartment and burst in during breakfast looking like someone they hardly knew. “You must get out of Paris now, immediately,” he screamed. His sons reaction was one almost of dumbfoundedness; he began to compose himself for analysis of the risks and probabilities, but the father took him by his dressing gown and lifted him from the chair. “Listen to me. I tell you to leave and go south. It is not at all like the last time, for Paris is going to burn, and we will burn first of all. You must leave.”

“But how can we, Papa? You are here, and Mother, and Ann's parents and the family. The banks are closed, what nonsense, I am not even dressed,” he said somewhat sheepishly before he was slapped across the face and knocked down. He then began to understand his father's understanding.

“All right,” he said with a red eye, “we will leave.” They dressed, he took his bank books and magazine article, and the three of them drove to the house of Ann's father, who agreed to leave that day because he too felt it was the opportunity, and “If they don't take Jews as I suspect they will, then we can return. We will always be able to say, if anyone should think to ask, that we are on holiday.” He thought because he was so old that he should take charge.

“Monsieur Orlovsky, take the children to the station. We will follow later today after I arrange some business. If all goes well, shall we meet in Aix at the house of Pellegrin?”

“Good idea,” said Leon's father, a bit of the fight returning to him, “we will all go separately and meet at the Pellegrins. The children this morning, we in the afternoon as there is some business that I too must finish before leaving, and you at night.”

He took them to the station and gave them money enough for several weeks' travel. “I want to see Mother,” said Leon, and his father replied that he would see her at Aix and shortly. And then as it became clear that the train was going to leave, the father kissed Ann as he would have kissed a little girl, and turned to his son.

“Until Aix,” he said, but just stood there with his hands at his sides. “At the house of Pellegrin.” A column of soldiers marched into the back of the station filling it with the rough cloth color of their uniforms. The father, who had seen and lost so much, embraced his son and they gripped one another as if for the last time. Leon remembered his father's tweed jacket, and the smell of cigars even on the shoulder. He remembered how suddenly his father looked so old, and how the old man had grasped his hand with a pathetic strength as if to say, Although we could never communicate and cannot communicate now, I love you very much. And then he backed away and said, lifting his head a little, “Your wife.” Leon nodded, climbed on the train with Ann and turned to see his father for the last time standing in a Paris station looking hopeful and childlike, in a black and white tweed jacket which was easy to see against the soldiers' cloaks of the darkest gray. The train pulled away, and Leon feared for him. When they had embraced he noticed how the power of his father's grasp had so lessened with the years. And he thought of the tweed jacket pushing its way through the masses of soldiers.

This train fell southwards instead of climbing north. The fields and trees were crazily indifferent to streams of refugees along the roads. It seemed to Leon that this was yet another battle in the Great War, for much of the equipment looked the same and the feeling was that the dead had risen to take revenge upon the living, that the trenches had suddenly burst open from the pressure of all that had grown within, and that a hideous rotted whiteness was about to envelop the land.

Unlike their wedding train, this one was not rapid. It often pulled over onto sidings for several hours, sometimes for the night, and it had a curious habit of going backwards for scores of kilometers and then coming to a dead halt in the middle of countryside as quiet and lush and black with night as in a dream. Then the conductors would walk up and down with red lanterns, the current would cease, and a tiny old man's voice weave its way through the corridors saying, “Stop for the night. Sleep outside or in. Leave at daybreak.”

The trainmen replied to all questions with upraised shoulders and eyebrows. “It is war,” they would say, “not a cafe.”

“All the trains have been requisitioned,” said Ann authoritatively, “and therefore our parents must have gone in a car. This must be. They are already in Provence.” Leon kept busy buying food, bribing conductors to return to him his seat, and looking over and over again at his article as if it might have given him answers. On one of the seats a soldier had left a pea-green great coat with many pockets. With the practice of an established refugee Leon appropriated it, and used the pockets on food-gathering expeditions. He even brought back a bottle of good perfume for Ann, who was as overjoyed as if she had been impoverished all her life. He remained clean-shaven because a barber was also fleeing Paris and had brought his artillery. When the train halted the barber cut down oak branches and heated fresh river water in a large vat he had paid a soldier to steal, and then shaved most of the men on the train in return for food or money, and sometimes for free, just because he missed his home and his shop and the streets he knew so well.

Several days passed, and although Leon and Ann had been used to leaving Paris in the morning and arriving at Aix that evening they were still somewhere in the middle of France—surrounded by cursing farmers, refugees, and confused army detachments hurrying in retreat as if to a battle already won. The life itself was not so bad, somehow there was always fresh food, the weather was good, but his impatience was tremendous regarding the house of Pellegrin, good friends in Provence sure to help. He was sure that his parents, even if they had started by train, would have then taken a car and gotten to Aix after a pleasant journey through the countryside in new summer. Undoubtedly they were in Pellegrins garden, reading and talking. “My country is being invaded, and yet she contrives to be beautiful.” It was early then for Provence, perhaps a little quiet, but a summer bursting out amid the mountains and white-faced cliffs. “I am sure they are there, and they must wonder about us. It is war after all and the sirens are real enough.”

Ann, on the other hand, did not seem to worry, but was instead very quiet and happy. This angered him but he said nothing, thinking her very selfish for her lack of concern: she behaved like a schoolgirl on an outing, a little crazy, and he thought that callous indeed, but it only made him love her more.

There was a halt again after yet a few more days, in a small town which they guessed to be in the Midi (it was difficult to tell after being shuffled around for days on nameless sidings and rusted one-track lines). The engine hissed down, the electricity ceased, and the voice of the little old man passed through the train, “Leave tomorrow morning, express South, all tracks now clear, no hotels here.” In an instant the passengers had their cooking tools and orange crates alongside the train turning the freight yard full of military trains and matériel into a temporary camp. But this was not unusual as all of France had become a camp of one sort or another.