“But we might be Jewish,” a twelve-year-old Jeremy protested to his father. There had been a youthful period of genealogical interest, during which time Jeremy turned up evidence of Polish families with names like Papierbuch and Papierczyk. Papierovitch and Papierin. Jews all. Jeremy had been hopeful.
“Indeed. We might be. We might have this history. We are, for starters, both circumcized.”
The Professor never spoke down to children.
“But that we cannot know our history for certain would be your grandfather’s point, I imagine. He chose a surname. He chose this name with an intent, by a method, that is lost to us. You might think of it as the punchline to a joke Felix can no longer explain.”
A hard concept to understand, then. The appeal of a given history—with the set of answers and instructions that Jeremy presumed came with such a legacy—had been so clear. Appealing still.
Outside the church in St. Seine l’Abbaye, Jeremy crossed the narrow highway that ran through the town, walking along the shoulder a short distance, smoking and inhaling deeply, squinting into the wistful, rose light of sunset. Contemplating
personal history had made him lonely, only the second time since arriving in France. The first had been just before school began. He had gone to Lyon by train, again questing back through time. Seeking without any plan beyond wanting to find the building where his mother and father had met, where her extended family had lived. He didn’t expect to find relatives; he understood they had long drifted away into the newly traversable landscapes of the European Union. But the idea of the building had appealed to him as an iconic place, a site he might identify with his own beginnings.
A site of important kitchens too, Jeremy understood. The kitchen of the large restaurant where his mother’s father and uncles had worked as busboys and dishwashers. The kitchen at home in which they had eaten and in which his mother and father had had their first conversations. Jeremy carried a composite mental picture of it based on his parents’ separate, scattered recollections. A cold tile floor. A wooden table big enough for the entire clan, where the Professor had done his interviewing—copious notes on sheaves of yellow paper, Jeremy imagined.
The young man was interested in the
vardo
, Hélène’s father had explained to her. How some of them still lived, yes, although he also seemed interested in how they liked living in an apartment after having known the
vardo
.
Hélène told her father to tell the young man with his paper and pencils that she liked their apartment very much, and that she had been far too young to remember her short life in the wagons. But when she cooked dinner that night, it had been a stew of lamb marinated in yogurt and lemon juice. An old recipe, an open tribute. Tart and unexpected. The flavours contradicting themselves by being at once deep and light. Difficult to pin down. The Professor ate, watched her. Hélène looked away.
Handsome and beautiful, Jeremy imagined. His father described a small woman, with a precise figure, smooth
dark skin, a large mouth and shining volumes of mahogany-coloured hair. His mother remembered a young man of strikingly intelligent eyes, angularity, likeable oddness. Jeremy wondered if perhaps she had also liked the young man’s permanently erased history.
They married in a civil ceremony. Her father’s suggestion. The once-traveller now proud to wear his black city suit in front of the Justice, proud to wish them well, his daughter and her new husband. To bless their trip across the sea to Canada. To bless their remaining days with a touch of his thumb to each of their foreheads, a kiss on the lips. It was a serious but unsentimental goodbye at the Gare Part-Dieu.
As it happened, Jeremy never found either building. He had an address torn from the corner of an envelope found in his mother’s desk drawer. Even so, no luck. The streets seemed to have changed. At a grocery store that looked to date from the same time, Jeremy stumbled over his words, asking about an apartment building that might have been across the street. A large restaurant that might have been nearby.
The man thought he remembered a restaurant. He didn’t think it was a very good one.
“Pas Bocuse,” he said, chortling.
He felt lonely then, riding the train back to Dijon. And now, school finished, work begun—in a very different part of the country, a place for his own new beginnings—Jeremy drew deeply on his cigarette and felt lonely a second time. He thought about climbing out of the valley and up onto the ridge above St. Seine l’Abbaye. From there he might have a view of the whole town. But setting out in that direction, he passed the
relais
and stopped instead.
To his surprise, there were lights in the window and cars parked in the gravel lot. To his further surprise, there were no gleaming salon cars. He counted instead a couple of dented Renault Cinq, a Citroën 2CV and several flat-bed trucks like those the local farmers used.
He went inside, and there Jeremy found that the dining room was noisily full. There was a scumble of country French conversation with no pause for his arrival. Nobody noticed him as he entered the room, except Patrice, their waitress from Pellerey, who was out front alone that evening. She came out of the kitchen with a chicken carved in the bourgeois style—cut up and reassembled for presentation on the table with a bunch of watercress sprouting from the cavity.
Patrice flashed him a crooked-toothed smile and gestured back towards the kitchen. When he went in, he found Claude sprinkling hard-boiled egg on a butter-lettuce salad and Chef Quartey plating a portion of langue de boeuf à la moutarde. Jeremy wordlessly pulled on his whites and his apron, washed his hands and, following Chef Quartey’s nod, went over to help on grill. Much later, after everybody had gone and the broken tail lights of the farm trucks had disappeared up and over the hill, they all sat together out front for a snack and a nightcap. He returned Patrice’s encouraging smile from earlier. He smiled at her Roman nose, brown eyes and black hair, and she smiled back. Chef Quartey poured them all more wine.
“Santé,” he said, and tore off a piece of bread to dip into his own glass. “On the seventh day, Ger-ah-mee,” Chef Quartey continued, pausing with something like respect and waving a paw around the empty room, “we serve the people with the rubber boots.”
The words stayed with Jeremy as he walked home with Patrice, his arm around her shoulder, hers along his waist. The Rubber-Boot People, the people from here. Their simple words.
He woke up with the very earliest light, his hand on the strong curve of her hip. The light broke into the valley, through his window, across Patrice’s brown shoulder, and there was, for a moment, utter simplicity and coherence.
He cooked seven nights a week from that point onward, eager for the seventh day when the stiff cardboard menu was
put aside in favour of a chalkboard where Chef Quartey or Claude, or even Jeremy eventually, would write down their ideas. And during his few morning off-hours, Patrice began to show him the secrets of the surrounding countryside. In the Fôret de Gens above town, there were hollow trees in which the women of the village had once hidden pots of soup for resistance fighters. They never saw the men, Patrice told him, but they would return in the still-dark morning to retrieve their cold tureens.
Sometime later she took him to the source de la Seine. It was on the far side of the ridge above the town, the side of the ridge that faced away from the quiet of rural Burgundy and down towards the tumult of Paris. Here, in a little park of Parisian symmetry, a statue of the goddess Sequana guarded the famous source. She lay in a grotto built by Napoleon III, vacant eyes cast upwards as if imagining the City of Light, where this bubbling water would eventually flow under the Pont Neuf and around l’Île de la Cité and on to the sea.
In her direct manner Patrice only explained: “Here from the ridge flows the water that will wet the grass that the cows will eat to make the cream for your coffee when you leave me and go to Paris.”
He climbed across the low iron railing that separated Sequana from her visitors.
“Ger-ah-mee,” Patrice scolded.
He took a long step across the pool that surrounded the goddess, stood next to her, then climbed into her lap. She held him securely. He lay his head in the hard valley between her stone breasts and gazed out of the grotto at Patrice.
She was laughing. “Wait,” she said. “Do not move now.” And she produced a Polaroid camera from her handbag and took a crooked shot.
He remembered that after taking the photo, they heard the diesel snort of an arriving bus, trucking in the tourists
from Paris to visit Sequana, to understand something of how Paris came to be.
“You must come out,” Patrice said, holding the developing Polaroid.
“Tourists,” Jeremy said, affecting a weary, spoilt tone. “I cannot bear them.”
“I think the goddess likes the tourists better than you,” Patrice said after he had climbed out. “They are maybe not so familiar.” But they stood there for a few minutes longer and watched the picture become clear. It had turned out nicely.
Of course, he knew he had to return home eventually. Work visas aside, there came a month during which thoughts of leaving came up once a week, in each case riding sidecar on a sweeping memory of his mother’s death. Of how she had launched him, sent him across the world to escape the vacuum of grief. To escape the palpable sense of guilt that emanated from his father at the funeral and in their few abortive conversations that followed. He had fled, Jeremy knew, and fled successfully, although now he heard the silence between them ringing. He sent a letter, a note really—part warning, part reassurance.
Coming home. Things are fine
. He enclosed the Polaroid from the source de la Seine, hoping it would help rebuild bridges.
“Well, you must go home then,” Patrice said, looking out the window when he finally told her.
They went on one more long walk together, his last day in Burgundy. He suggested a parting visit to the source de la Seine, and Patrice looked at him curiously. It had just occurred to her that Jeremy thought that little park captured the region, with its gurgling brook artificially routed between the green benches, its gaudy statue and tour buses.
“Oh, no,” Patrice said. But she laughed. She could let him take away this false impression. But he had a sweet way of looking at her, and he had lived here long enough that he deserved to know the truth.
She explained the geography of the area as they walked from the car down a small road, just a few kilometres north-west of St. Seine l’Abbaye. The ridge formed a break point in the countryside, like a continental divide on a small scale. To the west, the Seine ran its course to Paris, to the Atlantic, to places beyond. To the east, down the other side of the ridge, ran the Ignon River.
“The Ignon?” Jeremy said.
He hadn’t even heard of it. He was, Patrice thought, such a boy. She took his hand and led him down an embankment next to the road.
It was quite different from the other side of the ridge. There was no signage, no park or statue. But at the bottom of the hillside, water emerged from the soil. From a hundred spurts and eddies coming out under roots and stones and a carpet of white flowers. The ground flowed with water that gathered and gathered again until it formed the top of the Ignon River flowing northeast and into the Burgundy countryside.
“The water of this region,” she said, looking at him. “All around you.”
The blood, thought Jeremy.
They stopped by the restaurant to say final goodbyes. Claude pumped his hand in the militaristic way he had, once up, once down. Chef Quartey clapped Jeremy’s head in his hands and kissed him on each cheek.
“You will be,” Chef Quartey said, looking for the English word, “exceptional.”
Patrice drove him to the train station in Dijon, where they kissed a final time. She surrendered no tears, but said only: “Bonne chance, Ger-ah-mee.”
The cheapest flight from Paris had a twenty-four-hour stopover in Amsterdam, where he wandered the streets without purpose. He drank glasses of beer at a string of cafés until he could feel nothing but a light humming throughout his system. He sat on a bench near the Prinsen Gracht, thinking of
the
relais
but watching the trolleys. One after another they would arrive, brilliantly lit in the night air, the entire length of the train an advertisement for Nike or Panasonic or Kit Kat chocolate bars. People spilled from each car and joined the traffic tumbling down the canal roads into the bars and restaurants and smoky cafés. Amsterdam was teeming: slackers and clubbers and queens; the Euro-homeless now free to wander and be poor on the streets of any city in the union; businessmen in French blue shirts and gold ties; Amsterdam women who looked like whooping cranes, all hips and shoulders mounted high on gaunt black bicycles. And every three minutes, another train with another load of people, and another marketing message designed to address the tumult.
He felt sick. He imagined he had macroscale motion sickness that came from moving between St. Seine l’Abbaye and Amsterdam, such a great distance in so short a time. The next morning he hid in the Rijksmuseum for relief. He would have been happy only for some quiet, but he found instead three paintings that combined into a single lasting image of his entire experience in Europe.
The Beheading of John the Baptist
. He stopped primarily to admire Fabritius’s depiction of Salome, a frivolous aristocrat, which brought to mind the Audi or the Saab or the Benz that might as well have been waiting for her out front of the prison. But the image lingered as he moved on; Salome the patron had so airily inspected the proffered head as it dripped in front of her, held high in the hand of the workmanlike executioner, whose face reflected technical satisfaction in a distasteful assignment.
Bueckelaer’s
Well-Stocked Kitchen
. It made him smile. A meta-image of thankfulness and plenty. Christ sat with Martha and Mary, surrounded by skewered game birds, Dutch hares, ducks, finches, pheasants, partridges, roosters, sandpipers, zucchini, cauliflower, tomatoes, grapes, artichokes, plums, cucumbers, lemons, apples, squash and blackberries.
Jeremy imagined working with the large clay oven in the background.