Foreign Bodies (21 page)

Such properly Christian ruminations reassured him. He was doing good. The unseemly remnants of these persecuted tribes had not all been carried off — he saw every day how Paris still teemed with them and their polyglot garble and the melancholy hungers in their alien faces and their strange fits of inquisitive exuberance, as if they would not be denied. Denied what? Normality, he supposed, everything they had been deprived of. But here they were not normal; they could never become normal, like those old-line Sephardim, French nearly to the bone, who had been sojourning in France since the fifteenth century, and were by now as acceptable as anyone else. He had put his money into the Centre solely that it might disintegrate itself: in five years there should not be a foreign Jew left in Paris. And he had situated it in the Marais because that is where the foreigners lingered.

He rarely visited the place. He had an active distaste for it: he fancied that it kept its old smell of ritually slaughtered meat, though he acknowledged to himself that this was a foolishness, and even a prejudice, unworthy of his generosity and his public compassion. The running of the Centre he left to his manager, a Pole named Kleinman, himself one of the displaced, who hired and trained the staff, which consisted of five men and two women. It was Kleinman who had devised the plan of the cubicles, so that each interviewer might provide privacy to each woeful applicant. There were often sobs behind the partitions. The more these people wailed, the sooner they were likely to vanish. The difficulty, of course, was not so much in getting them out of Paris as it was in getting them in somewhere else. La Terre Sacrée, the part of it in the hands of the Jews, had open doors and welcoming arms; yet it was beyond reason why any normal person (these people were
not
normal!) would want to live under a withered Golgotha and beside a dried-up Jordan. Still, many had swarmed there as to a benison bestowed by their worn and half-forgotten god. Many, but not all: the most stiff-necked among them
were also the most given to hallucinations of sentimental reunions with ghostly kin scattered all over the resisting earth. They stood patiently in the long queues and entered the cubicles grasping torn bits of paper, somehow preserved though decades old, inscribed with superannuated far-off addresses of obscure family relations faintly recalled from childhood. Did these dreamlike relatives actually exist? It happened on occasion that some putative cousin, or the cousin’s offspring, could be excavated out of Buenos Aires, or Cincinnati, or Stockholm, or Melbourne, or Santo Domingo, or who knew where. Kleinman, as obstinate as these hopeful seekers, had had his few successes. And if not, there was always Palestine, the part held by the Jews, to fall back on. The main thing was to hack through the babble of the queues; to achieve this, Kleinman had found, in the mottled streets of the Marais, his many-tongued crew. He could not keep them long — they too had their hearts set on elsewhere. Kleinman himself had already given notice, and was soon off to, of all queer places, San Antonio, which ought to have been in Spain, but was, absurdly, in the American State of Texas.

At half past five this Monday afternoon, the Baron had come for the latest figures. Kleinman tallied them: in the last week alone, twenty-three to Rio de Janeiro, eighteen to Rome (but only as a step-pingstone), fifty-one to Israel. And to New York how many? The usual lot.

It was the end of the workday; the staff had departed. Kleinman put on his hat. He had stayed on to sweep away the fragments of crumpled paper that littered the floors, thrown down in despair — too many of those ancient street names were dead ends. The Baron surveyed the gaunt man in the hat: it made him look like an ordinary citizen. It was awkward that his employee was as tall as he, if several inches more slender at the waist, and that his eyes were as gray as any Frenchman’s, and that his hat had the temerity of looking nearly new, and on the Baron’s francs, no doubt. In fact, sir, Kleinman reported, the queues were beginning to thin out, and Lipkinoff, his valued Russian and Georgian speaker — remarkably, he also knew
Kivruli — was one of those lucky ones headed for New York. That left six to man the cubicles when, truth be told, five would surely be enough, at least for now.

“Then let one go,” the Baron ordered. “I won’t have my payroll fattened to no purpose.”

“It would be a pity,” Kleinman said in his Polish-accented French. “They are all so needful.” He pronounced the
r
of
pauvre
with a machinelike trilling of the tongue against the palate. The Baron was disgusted — that repulsive Slavic noise was one of the several reasons the Centre des Émigrés had been brought into being: to clean out all such offenses. Generations, he believed, were required to produce the purity of French, and Paris, let alone France itself, was being sullied by these ugly frictions and betrayals.

Out of one of the darkened cubicles came a low sound, something between a purr and a hiccup.

The Baron moved his feet to make an irritated little circle. “I thought,” he said peevishly, “your people were released for the day.”

“They were,” Kleinman said.

“Are you sure? I hear something.”

They both listened. The Baron’s gaze seemed to penetrate the fragile partitions that marched in geometric rows all the way down to the rear wall, where the rusted butcher hooks protruded like scythes.

“A straggler perhaps,” Kleinman said. “Sometimes —” But the sudden flush of his employer’s face stopped him.

“What do you mean, a straggler? The property is to be cleared for the night, that is your responsibility.”

Kleinman struggled: but in five weeks he would be greeted by a certain Mrs. Davis, the elderly sister-in-law of a newly discovered great-aunt, long deceased. Mrs. Davis had signed a paper on his behalf, and never again would he be accountable to the Baron. He said, “Sometimes, sir, when they are newly arrived in the city, when they are adrift and have no bed to sleep in . . . I do keep a blanket to soften the floor, and what harm if —”

“So you are running a hotel in my Centre?”

“No, no, only sometimes to offer a roof, which hardly contradicts the purpose —”

“This is not a mission house for vagrants!” the Baron bawled, and turned again in the ring his feet were following, and saw the woman standing in the opening of the farthermost cubicle, weeping.

“Lili,” Kleinman cried, “did something happen, are you all right? What is it, are you sick? Tell me!”

But the Baron began, “If this is one of your people —”

She said nothing. She was wearing her coat. The collar was wet.

“Then this is the one you will let go,” the Baron pronounced.

“Sir, she is excellent in every respect —”

“This woman was hiding. What normal woman hides? And blubbering. We don’t want a weeper, she will incite the queues, and then comes a flood” — here the Baron smiled — “and no Noah. I am not anyone’s Noah, Kleinman, and this place is not an ark, n’est-ce pas?”

Kleinman thought, no, not an ark. A chute. A siphon. Before the war, before the onslaught, he had been a statistician for a well-known insurance firm, with a wife and two daughters. Now he was alone. Mrs. Davis had promised him the position of bookkeeper in her grandson’s dental office. In his youth, before his marriage, before the war, before the onslaught, he had relished all those cowboy movies, the cattle, the cactus, the horses, the sky. Already he knew the possibilities of Texas.

L
ILI SWITCHED OFF
the lamp and got into her coat. November at the close of the day was bringing on a northern chill. All around, the chattering of goodbyes, the shufflings, the hurryings, a sneeze or two (the usual contagions in progress), momentary whiffs of street air. And now the whooshing of Kleinman’s broom. They were all gone, all but Kleinman and his broom. Still she could not leave; she would not. She fell back into her chair and pressed her cheek flat on the desk, unwilling to stir. Her head felt as fixed as waxworks, or stone, or some fallen meteorite. She thought to call out: she feared Kleinman would lock the place up and trap her inside. Yet what if he did? She knew where he kept the blanket — a tattered old
perene,
really, a down quilt leaking its feathers. There were worse ways to live through a night; she had lived through far worse, when a
perene
would have been paradise. But to go home . . . where was home? The rundown room Julian had found for them? Julian — a boy, only a boy, homeless, helpless!

The sweeping had stopped. Voices, the native one with its syllables sliding like oil down the gullet of a glass jar, and Kleinman’s deferential murmur; and then, though she fought to resist it, a stinging behind the eyes, half suppressed, as if something volcanic was about to erupt. A heaving sea brooded in her head. She lifted it, and a thicket of tears swam into her mouth, and a latch gave way, she could not force it shut again, and a noise sprang from her, and she knew she was discovered.

She had never before seen the Baron, but she understood at once who he was — the man Kleinman called their benefactor, the man who had pledged to pay, one by one, the passage out of Nineveh. He was large all over, Kleinman’s height but so much vaster, a continent next to Kleinman’s slim peninsula. He flicked at the floor with an ornamented walking stick; he wore green leather gloves. He was smiling even as he was ordering her never to return — an ingratiating smile, more kindly than sardonic. And how could he not be kind, the Centre’s founder, the befriender of the displaced? She hadn’t caught what the two of them, the Baron and his manager, were saying; her little booth under the hooks was too far back to hear, but it had to be, it had to be, otherwise why was the Baron sending her away? She had come to the Centre hours late this day, many dreadful hours, she had come in her unwellness, but able somehow to conceal it all, it was numbly concealed, no one could tell, Kleinman could not know, he knew only that instead of commencing at nine with the others, she had arrived at two in the afternoon, and surely she recognized, Kleinman said, what an infraction it was, the rules weren’t his, they were the Baron’s, and of course he would never expose her, it was only that he was himself afraid of exposure, there was no way to predict, morning or night, when the Baron, who guarded his francs against waste, would burst in to inspect . . .
But he is one of us,
Lili thought,
Kleinman is one of us, why should he betray me? It has never happened before, only this once.
This terrible once. And she thought again:
Because he has become careless, he no longer minds, he is on his way, already in his feelings he is gone, he is free, and how are we to live, where will we go?
A mistake! She had supposed it was possible to seize the living moment for its own sake, as if past and future were no more substantial than mist. As if this life, this boy, were all there was to be grasped in the doom of having been born. As if birth were a thing of no value.

She stood in the street and breathed in the small cold wind of dusk. She had Julian to face, after all. Turning away — she was still
in pain — she could not hear the last of the colloquy behind the Centre’s door.

“That woman,” Kleinman was saying, “is maimed.” In the summer, when she was alone in her cubicle examining papers, he had looked in to see the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat.

“I did not maim her,” the Baron retorted.

“Intolerable, sir,” Kleinman began again, and frowned under his hat. He had taken it off, but now he put it on again. Also, he had intended to omit the “sir,” a habit he hoped to erase. “To sack her for no reason —”

“No reason? You saw what I saw. Hysteria. Breakdown, no self-control. Given what our aims are here, to succor the unfortunate, to place the morally discontented in more favorable circumstances elsewhere . . .”

The Baron was assuming his public tone, the fluently memorized phrases that so often earned him communal admiration — and, on one brilliant occasion, a framed commendation and a medal from an important city official. But he could sense how ridiculous he sounded — he glimpsed it in Kleinman’s look, Kleinman who dared to judge him! Why trouble to scatter these pearls before this foreigner, who either did or did not take them seriously? So, still smiling and teasing, he planted his stick against the manager’s chest, and said, “You will see, M’sieur Kleinman, how they will deal with you in Spain!”

B
UT JULIAN
was not there. The room was almost dark, only a ribbon of white on the wall from a streetlight; the window had no curtain. Lili threw herself on the bed — her groin ached still, she was hollowed out, an iron comb had hollowed her out, she was too weary to stand or walk or even cry. And again the tears broke from her, why should she not cry for the old man who had died in this very bed? She cried for the old man, and for herself, and for what she had made happen that day, and she cried with a deep relentless anger because Julian was not there, because she had permitted him to go — it was senseless, she had argued against it only weakly. He had gone in search of François, who could always get him employment in the cafés, he didn’t care if it looked a bit shady, François the friend of that Alfred who was dead, as dead as the old man, and she cried for the old man, and for Alfred, and for herself, and for what she had made happen that day. Senseless and useless, that hand-to-mouth life of the cafés, how would it help them now? How were they to get on? They had parted in the morning, Julian to seek out François — but unnerved, distracted, she had argued against it only weakly; her thought was on what she would make happen that day.

She lay on the bed, shoeless and curled up with folded knees to assuage the ache in her groin, waiting for Julian.

In less than an hour he returned, carrying a paper bag.

“Supper,” he said. Two rolls and some uneven lumps of hard cheese — his old trick, he’d cadged them from leavings on plates.
He hadn’t found François. He’d looked in one café after another, the Napoléon, the Monaco, all the usual places. No one had heard from François, he hadn’t been seen in weeks. One of the fellows at the Deux Magots (but he was new and unreliable) guessed that François had been in trouble with the police — drugs, or drink, or a boy prostitute, how could anyone know?