Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (8 page)

“The France you entered in 1928 was not as wonderful as you’d have us believe. How could you live in Marseille, or in Nice for that matter, with no money and no relations? You might have had two years of French at school and been a passionate francophile, but it’s impossible that you could have felt at home.”

Mina turned as pale as if Louise had slapped her across the face. Rebecca didn’t like the way the conversation was going. She took Mina by the arm and sat her back down, inquiring politely how they found things in Nice when they arrived.

“You have to understand that this pretty little southern city was like paradise to us. We had come from the gates of Hell,” Mina explained. “We had already been uprooted when we arrived in Poland, even though we were staying with my brother and his family. You can’t imagine how they treated my beautiful Romouchka. Like some common child! They had no idea what greatness was in store for him and I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“You sold jewelry and silver door-to-door, even daring to knock at the finest homes in Nice, pretending that your goods came from the Russian Imperial family, but you never would have made ends meet without your brother’s help,” Louise reminded her.

“He was horrible to us. However, we had a neighbor in our building who believed in Romain. He was only eight at the time but this neighbor was impressed by my predictions about his future. He would insist that Romain describe for him the immortal glory that awaited him and he would feed him Turkish delight. Mr. Piekielny was his name. He looked like some forgotten clerk out of Kafka. He used to ask Romain to say his name to the important people he would meet when he becomes famous. He was preparing him for his future. He believed in him while my own family made fun of my dreams of glory. I just refused to be a poor immigrant. My son was going to be an ambassador and a writer, and that would change everything for us.”

“I would never have dared to dictate Albert’s future like you did to Romain.”

Mina seemed not to hear Louise, continuing her story unperturbed.

“We slept for a time in the waiting room of a dentist friend of ours. We had to be out every morning, but anything was better than my family’s mockery. The dentist was a marvelous man who treated Romain like a prince.”

“And you like a princess.”

Mina blushed slightly at the mention of this trivial flirtation.

“Oh, I have to admit, he was charming and he seemed attracted to me. It lasted three months, until his nurse put a stop to it. She either had enough of us encroaching on her waiting room or she was jealous. She clearly had a thing for Gabriel. His name was Gabriel,” she said with a far off look that betrayed some affection for his memory.

“She forced you out?”

“The dentist’s wife complained to the nurse that her husband was coming home later and later and asked her to stop making evening appointments for him. She thought there was something going on between the two of them. So, to prove her innocence, the nurse told her about us, implying it was our fault he was so busy. He threw us out the next day.”

“But your life must have been easier in Nice than in Warsaw?” Rebecca prodded.

“We were happy because we were together. I was content just knowing that everything I did was for Romain’s good and that he had a proper childhood. I held every job imaginable: cleaning lady, dog groomer, saleslady at the Negresco Hotel. Finally, I became the manager of the Mermonts Hotel. That was luck! It was a Ukrainian whom I’d helped to buy a building who hired me.”

“Is that so?” Louise scoffed.

“That’s quite enough!” Mina burst out, truly angry this time, and with that, she was gone.

Louise Cohen now turned to Rebecca and pulled out a photo taken at the time of her arrival in Marseille: she was young and a little plump and was wearing a summer dress and a straw hat with a bunch of cherries on the brim. She and her son were walking and he was holding her skirt. It was hard to know who was protecting whom. Was it Louise, the Jewish mother, or was it little Albert, who, at five years old, was already careful to hide his fears from his mother so as not to worry her?

“It was difficult for Albert to adjust to Marseille, and for me as well,” she began. “We felt quite alone in this France we hardly knew. Albert was my brave little man, wide-eyed, trying hard not to cry. But the big city was overwhelming for him, the noise of passersby, the speed of the cars. Marseille gave us a fright after our little island.”

Jeanne Proust had come in solemnly, looking like a grand noblewoman, sat down next to Louise, and Mina followed. Had she gone to find an ally?

Jeanne interrupted, addressing Louise Cohen:

“You were an Italian in Corfu, you were used to being a foreigner by the time you came to France. I spent my whole life in Paris but I can imagine how hard it must be to feel at home in a strange country.”

“There’s no comparison! We were Italians in Corfu, it’s true, but four centuries of Venetian rule left their mark. We felt at home there. In France, however, we were utterly lost.”

“Now you’ve hit the nail on the head!” Mina joined in. “I was already French in my soul before I arrived there. You on the other hand, didn’t even know who you were or where you came from. I don’t know why, Louise, you insist on believing we endured the same hardships. Our experiences weren’t alike in the least.”

Rebecca looked from one to the other. Mina was heavily made-up and her short hair was carefully combed around her face. More discreet and natural, Louise emanated a certain grandmotherliness. Physically, they were opposites, but their personalities were strikingly similar: determined, domineering, inflexible and hypocritical. Two peas in a pod!

Louise Cohen was unstoppable now on the subject of her exile.

“I wanted Albert to be French but it was just as important to me that he understood where he came from. So I did what I could: I put him in Catholic school in the hope he’d rub elbows with the French elite and at home, I told him stories of the Jewish royal houses and all their customs and ancestral traditions. I would never have allowed him to become one hundred percent French; it would have created a gulf between us. On the other hand, nothing delighted me more than to read about the adventures of the Valiant family. They were eager, imaginative and sincere, as all of us are who call Corfu home.”

“I suppose the Valiants’ grand arrival in Geneva took place with a bit more pomp and circumstance than yours in Marseille?” Rebecca wondered.

The allusion made Louise laugh; how could anyone compare her to Albert’s daring and resourceful characters? She was not too shy to admit, however, that she admired his novels’ portrayal of the immigrant’s fear of rejection. He had written from experience.

“No matter how much Albert thought of himself as stateless, each move was an uprooting for him,” Louise continued. “He grew to like every city: Marseille, Paris, Geneva, London, Jerusalem, and he wanted to become a French citizen, but wherever he went, he always said the same thing: ‘My home is somewhere else.’”

“Perhaps he felt he was Jewish above all?”

“He could hardly have forgotten that fact. We left Corfu as so many Jews did, just as a tide of anti-Semitism started to grow. This was in 1900. A young Jewish girl, Rubina Sarda, had been found murdered just before Passover. Suspicion immediately fell on the Jewish community, including the girl’s father. People thought it had been a ritual sacrifice and some arrests were made. But this gave rise to more generalized violence, insults and attacks against Jewish businesses. The family was acquitted but the damage had been done and the atmosphere was suffocating, even though Corfu had been admirably tolerant to Jews up until then. Jews had even obtained equal rights from the French in 1791. If we were persecuted, we remained united, and resigned. In Marseille, however, things were far worse.”

“How so?”

“For one thing, we arrived just after the Dreyfus Affair.”

Jeanne Proust interrupted curtly. She had no interest in hearing tell of the unfortunate captain; it brought up so many unhappy memories for her. Her Adrien had been stubbornly pro-military and anti-Dreyfusard and their differing opinions on the scandal had provoked disintegration of their marriage. In fact, they had had a bonafide argument about it that only cemented their lack of understanding. After that, she had always felt that she was living with a stranger.

“That may be,” Louise Cohen replied dryly. “But you had the good fortune to live in Paris, such a cosmopolitan city, not like us in Marseille. We had hardly gotten settled in our hotel room when we were robbed of everything.”

Tears welled in her eyes at the memory.

“I got over it, but Albert became more and more withdrawn. He avoided boys his age and seemed different from them. He had such a fine imagination, I thought he would adjust, but the humiliation he endured on his tenth birthday was the final straw. We were out, and he was dressed in his sailor suit: such an innocent soul! He stopped to watch a street peddler selling a sort of stain remover. The peddler was a smooth operator, and Albert was fascinated. I remember him smiling, looking at the crowd that had gathered. He had found a good spot in the audience from which to observe the man’s performance and for a moment he felt as if he belonged among these French people, whom we had idealized so much. Emboldened by that thought, probably, he decided to buy three sticks of the stain remover and held the birthday money I had given him out to the man. But the peddler yelled right in his face: ‘You? You’re nothing but a kike, a dirty Jew; I can see it on your face. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you one of Dreyfus’ pals, come to steal the food out of the mouths of the French.’ Well, I won’t repeat any more of his anti-Semitic slurs. They were common coin back then. That was the end of Albert’s childhood, though. He lost all his joy from one day to the next. That happened on August 16, 1905, and he wrote many years later that that was the day his life became his destiny. The episode comes up many times in his work. I knew nothing of his feelings at the time, however. Albert didn’t share anything with me; he was too sensitive to burden me with his sufferings.”

Jeanne Proust was deep in
The Guermantes Way
. She was looking for the passage where Bloch wonders if Norpois, the ever prudent diplomat, was a Dreyfusard or not. She knew the page by heart. Her expression brightened when she found it, and then she began to chuckle indulgently as she read the Duc de Guermantes’ reply: ‘When one goes by the name of “Marquis de Saint-Loup,” one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?’ She never tired of rereading the literature of the great Marcel Proust, her son! She was still bristling from Louise Cohen’s snub and, holding a book in her hand, allowed her to follow the conversation without having to say a word.

“Why must Louise Cohen always bring the conversation back to anti-Semitism?” Mina was asking Rebecca. “Was Albert particularly bothered by it? He must have had a depressive nature. My Romain, on the other hand, was the most carefree child, despite all we endured. All the pogroms in Poland alone! I can give you figures . . .”

Louise interrupted her: “Do you really believe that Romain was happy?”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. If you want to carry the worries of the world on your shoulders, go right ahead. It all depends on how you look at things.”

“I don’t know why I bother to talk to you, Mina. You think you’re the only person who has ever known what it’s like to work hard for something. And evidently, you’ve never felt the slightest doubt, either. I can’t say the same. I was never sure my son would be successful, and I sometimes felt powerless to fight off life’s unexpected turns. I forced myself to be a good little soldier, though: I did what I had to so that Albert would have a better life than mine, and I tried to give him what he didn’t have. But I knew I couldn’t work miracles, either.”

“You’re right,” Mina conceded. “The difference between you and me is that I always believed in miracles, in large part because I could never tolerate complainers, whiners or cry-babies. God gives us a life; it’s up to us to make something of it. It took a lot of work to hide our difficulties from Romain so he wouldn’t have to worry. I wanted him to have a better life, just like you, Louise, and he did. Things weren’t always rosy at the Mermonts, but we had a roof over our heads and our clients often became our friends. And however bad things were, I always made him believe that ours was the most wonderful life. We were different and we were proud of it: we were Russians in Nice, Jews in Russia, atheists among Jews. We had no allegiances, belonged to no clan; we lived for each other, by ourselves, on the outside. We weren’t unlucky. It was just the way we wanted to live.”

Mina’s words had a humbling effect on Louise Cohen. She drew her hand across her forehead, patted her chignon in place and sank a bit more deeply into her armchair.

“I was mistaken, perhaps. Maybe you really were happy.”

“I think Romain was,” Mina replied with a victorious smile.

She began to animatedly paint a scene of their domestic bliss: picnics of rustic bread and Malossol pickles at the beach and how she would hold her son close to her in those tranquil moments at the seaside that filled her with happiness.

Louise excused herself:

“It’s natural to judge from one’s own experiences, so it seemed to me our situations were similar. But I was thinking about Albert, as usual, not about myself,” she added wearily.

Rebecca was worried again for Nathan. Like Louise, she couldn’t get her mind off her son, and she was sure he was grieving for her. There’s no shame in showing one’s pain, but eventually that has to end. She was afraid he would tire his best friend, even though Arthur would certainly have tried to shake him out of his depression and get him back in the swing of his daily activities. What was Nathan doing now? What was Nathan doing now? Had he returned to his classes at the university? Or was he home alone, grief-stricken and shut off from the world? What if he couldn’t get over her death? Her son seemed to have none of the emotional strength of Romain Gary or Albert Cohen, who had weathered so many storms. Nathan had never had the time or the occasion to become famous; why was Rebecca in this place anyway?