The Birthday Buyer (10 page)

Or else:

Paul Roux. Originally Polish but naturalized in France. He doesn’t know what his name used to be or which city he was born in. He is only sure that he put in a sudden appearance, as if he’d fallen from the skies, in an orphanage in Alsace, that he left in order to enter a seminary of the Brothers of La Salle in Paris. He became very religious, a feature of his personality he never lost, not even when he gave up his vocation to devote himself fleetingly to the cinema. He met Georges Annenkov, the old friend and tailor of Ophuls and Renoir, by chance in a hotel, who introduced him into those circles. He played secondary roles in films directed by Sautet, Bresson, Truffaut, Clément and Chabrol. In the early eighties Susanne Lepape crossed his path. A cheerful, witty woman, she was shortish, robust and full of charm, and owned an opticians in Marseille that supplied lenses to the Gaumont production company. Susanne, like Paul, loved the cinema. They married and Paul began to work in his wife’s business. He left Paris for a life in the provinces and never regretted it. Paul is a good man with simple tastes who likes a tranquil life, and Susanne enjoys the small things of life, the “small everyday pleasures” as she calls them. But together they nurture the passion that unites them: the cinema. On every anniversary, whether it be their wedding, respective birthdays or some personal occasion—given that any is a good excuse to give presents—they give each other items related to their common passion. Paul and Susanne are fetishists and cultivate an extraordinary, irrepressible taste for small myths. Thus they have given each other as presents a gold chain that belonged to Jean Marais (Paul), mother-of-pearl eyeglasses that were Romy Schneider’s (Susanne), an almost new white bootee that belonged to Arletty (Paul), one of Alain Delon’s handkerchieves embroidered with the initials A. D. (Susanne) and a Renoir zoetrope plus the original screenplay of
Les portes de la nuit
signed by Jacques Prévert (Paul) and Clouzot’s amber cigarette case (Susanne). Valuable items, increasingly sought after by collectors. Year after year, the Rouxs’ tastes become more sophisticated and they now have to go to auctions or involve intermediaries who sell objects belonging to famous actors and directors through the back door. However, Paul Roux’s greatest fetish, one he longs to possess every twilight when he shuts the opticians and takes a stroll through the port of Marseille—the city that Walter Benjamin dreamed was being transformed into a book—and gazes at the yachts moored there, is
Marge
, Maurice Ronet’s yacht in
Á plein soleil
. He plays a small role in the final scenes of that film shot in a fishing port on the Adriatic. His love of boats is an impossible love: they are unattainable for him.

I am afraid Paul Roux doesn’t know who Walter Benjamin was and hasn’t read any of his books. That’s why he doesn’t know that early in the morning of September 27, 1940 he committed suicide in Portbou fleeing from the Nazis. He would have ended up in a train heading toward Auschwitz. He might have been gassed on arrival, or might have lived long enough to get to know little Hurbinek, to breathe the same pestilent air in that infirmary and die when some anonymous person rescued that child from death so he could become Paul Roux, former actor and optician, bringing them together historically, in a terrible, magnificent museum, a mountain of lost names, of deceased, displaced people, an artificial mountain of encounters and non-encounters.

The Rouxs don’t have children and like to travel through Europe, and they celebrate their love in their journeying. Susanne drives since Paul has a few problems with his legs, where he lost a great deal of sensitivity, though he doesn’t know when or how. Quite simply, he was born that way. But he holds himself up well, and does remember that he used a walking stick in the La Salle Seminary. Whenever they can, they go to the cinema or tirelessly watch films on video, and when they go up to Paris they visit their old friends: Léaud, Chabrol and Denner. In 1982 Susanne is to give him a present, the brooch in the form of a silver arrow that Joan Bennett wears on her beret in
Man Hunt
. It cost her a fortune, but it will make Paul happy. She was to give it to him in a hotel in Portbou, where they were to stop to break up their journey to Barcelona, on a special fictitious anniversary, when Paul was to turn forty. Or that was what they chose to believe. “But where were you born, Paul, what was the town?” No one knows.

Or perhaps:

In April 1982, the famous Bulgarian conductor Ribo Varelisy, while on tour in Italy, made an unexpected request of the Uffizi Museum in Florence. He did so via a formal letter requesting permission to spend each night of his five days in the city in one of the rooms in the museum, specifically, the one displaying Boticelli’s
Birth of Venus
(the greatest work of art ever created by man, in his opinion). He thought they should equip the room in a particular way for his overnight stays. They should provide bed and blankets and perhaps a basin. He made it clear he wasn’t referring to the cubbyholes for security guards and room attendants, or the museum’s administrative offices, but the exhibition rooms where paintings were hung and visited by the general public. He acknowledged that he was suffering from a kind of incurable pathology, one rather neglected by psychiatrists, in which the patient, when suffering anxiety attacks, needed to live in a museum or places with similar characteristics. He added that the pathology was known as shut cage syndrome. Ribo Varelisy suffered a crisis on that tour, one he described as among the worst in his life, and that was the reason for such an extraordinary request. To justify his eccentricity, Ribo Varelisy maintained he was in Auschwitz as a child—though his memory was blank on the subject—and as a result of the harsh conditions he was forced to endure they amputated his legs from mid-thigh down. He moves around in a motorized wheelchair, like a little car, and is world famous because he is the only orchestra leader on the planet who conducts seated thus.

Or else this other possibility:

The following scene takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, three years after they opened the doors of the most famous museum in Florence to Varelisy as if it were a hotel. Now Hurbinek might be a botanist, a conservationist in Kew Gardens, a man by the name of Augustus Hubbard, whose real profession was that of art valuer, and who is to find out his true origins in 1985. Hubbard had travelled extensively around Asia over the last fifteen years as an agent prospecting for the Antiquities Department of Sotheby’s. His profession, in which Gus—as everyone calls him—is a distinguished authority, has little or nothing to do with botany, Hubbard uses it as a front because it gives him access to houses, villages, plantations and ruins on the excuse that he is searching for a specific flower or vegetable that he wishes to study. That’s why his visiting card says
AUGUSTUS HUBBARD – SPECIALIST IN ASIAN BOTANY, KEW GARDENS
. The works of art he is obliged to discover and catalogue for his firm, that are sometimes camouflaged as crude deities in hovels in Tibet or as domestic utensils in Vietnam, find a growing market in Europe. He heads the Asian commercial section of the hundred-year-old English antiques auctioneers. He doesn’t do this by himself, as is obvious to anyone who knows anything about Gus Hubbard, since he cannot lift his feet off the ground, and walks or drags himself along very clumsily, as if he were wearing lead shoes or very large sizes of footwear. He has assembled a team of helpers, two Englishmen, a Burmese, a Philippine, and a Taiwanese woman, who do the selection work for him. Gus Hubbard considers himself to be an unusual offshoot of those Californian gold diggers. He is obsessive, always in pursuit of a jewel that is unique of its kind, like a pristine Ming vase, or a Mogul terracotta from the tomb of Genghis Khan, or an ivory screen from Kyoto, or one of the Buddha’s eighty books of prophesy, or Japanese netsukes or sumptuous gold Siamese tapestry from Chiang Mai. Meanwhile, his team finds minor items that are much less fascinating, even commonplace, but that can nevertheless pass as highly valuable because they are so authentic. They fetch high prices in London auctions. Gus keeps his headquarters in Hong Kong, where he has lived all these years, but travels frequently to big cities in the region: Delhi, Calcutta, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, Taiwan, Manila . . . He is a business man who looks like an explorer and the best way to define him would be as a laboratory analyst or a
maître d’
. Because Gus has nothing of the adventurer about him, quite the contrary in fact: he is short and thin, sweats, breaths asthmatically, is short-sighted and quite unappealing. He has never worried about his looks, truth be known, since his passion, ever since he can remember, although he is an adoptive son, has been Asia, and what he has succeeded to do in life is to travel there extensively, to get to know it in depth. And his body has never been an obstacle in that regard. One cannot say he has never enjoyed what life has to offer. No pleasure slips from his grasp; he loves every minute that passes as if some subconscious sense were telling him that everything around him and everything that happens to him exists in a web of time that is a gift, a time that no longer belongs to him, because there was another era when he was dead and part of a nightmare of History which few, very few managed to wake up from and forget. And that is something that Gus discovered today in Bangkok at the luxurious Oriental Hotel, opposite the sloops and motor boats that ply up and down the Chao Phraya River. His high bedroom windows have turned iridescent in the twilight glow from the Noi railroad station. It’s warm and Gus is relaxing after a day spent evaluating remains from small temples in Kanchanaburi. He is listening to the radio, but hearing nothing: somewhere in the Atlantic they have found the real remains of the
Titanic
. Thousands of miles from there, in the Polish city of Rzeszów, Raca Cèrmik, a woman who is almost a hundred, can now die knowing where her beloved brother Thomas Zelman is resting. But why should that interest Gus Hubbard? A young waitress has brought him something for supper. Gus doesn’t try even a mouthful; he sips whisky while he reads a long letter he has anxiously been expecting. You can hear the noise of the aeroplanes making their descent to the airport. When they pass overhead, the music from the Rim Room, the elegant nightclub on the opposite bank of the river, wafts up to his room. The street lights in China Town glow in the distance, against a black background of tall skyscrapers. He has found out from his step-brothers who’ve been investigating their true identity for several years, at Gus’s expense. He is now holding the long letter from John, his elder brother, in which he tells him about Auschwitz, a place that he, Gus, could never have imagined was linked to his life (or, in fact, to his death, I would suggest). He then mentions a Russian soldier, a frightened young man from Simferopol, in the Crimea, as they discovered. He goes on to talk about a sick, paralytic child at death’s door; and of a black market, just after the war ended, in morphine, of barter, of sales, of an Englishman who sells morphine in that black market among mutually repelling allies who are Russians and Englishmen, disgusted by a frightened Russian morphine addict who is about to kill a child by putting his hand over his mouth, of an Englishman who is a doctor who offers the Russian from Simferopol the morphine he is demanding in exchange for the life of a child who is dead already, of an English doctor who kept that child with him without giving him too much thought. A Polish child. No doubt a Jewish child. “Look at your arm, and draw your own conclusions,” ends the letter from John Hubbard. What Gus had always thought of as the incomprehensible features of a whimsical tattoo, turned out to be numbers that were hardly legible even if you stretched the skin. Night is falling in Bangkok and suddenly he has ceased to be Augustus Hubbard, art valuer.

This Israeli photographer of Polish origin became notorious in the most liberal sectors of his country’s society in the sixties, when he wrote comic strips for the
Jerusalem Post
under the pseudonym of Norman. He satirized Golda Meier and Moshe Dayan with caricatures that reversed their most obvious traits: he made Dayan seem very fat with a moveable bun on the top of his head, and his Meier wore a patch over one eye. However, Bienenfeld soon got bored of that and opened a photography studio in the new part of Jerusalem. His camera has taken photos of all the most renowned Israelis and many official photos carry his signature. One day in 1992—he remembers it was very early because he was in a bad mood and unable to utter a word, and that may be why it was the best time for her to choose—his wife told him she was divorcing him. Lena left him for another man, although she didn’t make it that clear at the time. He was a cardiologist, Ariel Kreptchuk, but Icek only found that out later. To begin with, she went to live with Sonia, a friend, with whom Icek had had an affair. Fifteen years ago, for God’s sake! He soon found that he was fifty—he only later fully realized—with a life as full as his house, with piles of possessions, and a future it was better not to burden with too many deadlines. He smoked and he coughed. Tobacco had taken many of his good friends in the neighborhood to the other side, and he, a man whose lungs had been damaged by tuberculosis and pneumonia as a child, had purchased, with excessive foresight, tickets in the raffle for cancer. And had bought them in abundance, what with the forty plus cigarettes he smoked a day. Perhaps that is why, when he’d assimilated the news of his divorce (Lena was much younger than he was, and had realized that her role from then on would be to fill in the cracks in the boat before it sank and had thus opted to re-make her life, since their love was marooned in the stagnant waters of the past), Bienenfeld burned all the photos he had of Lena, even those he had of them as a couple together, sold their house, split the money with her and decided to set out on a journey he had been deferring and never found an opportunity to undertake. “Out of insecurity, or fear, because I’m one of those birds that thinks that the forest floor is up there.” He put himself on a passenger list held by a travel agency, Shalom, that offered tours around Europe with a variety of itineraries. Almost all began or finished in Barcelona, because of that year’s Olympic Games, but others were very different, with visits to some of the concentration camps: Dachau, Buchenwald, Mathausen . . . Auschwitz. He chose the last one because he knew it was the place where he had been born twice. “That’s literally the truth: my mother and the Russians,” he told me. He remembers nothing of either; perhaps with the help of pyschoanalysis he might have extracted from the pit of memory a great gray cloud of suffering, as gray as the Zyklon B produced by Farben, since that was all there had been to his childhood, suffering and more suffering. His mother? His father? His grandparents? His brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins? Did they ever exist? “They are as real as a set of prints of the Crusades!” he would say. These questions had buzzed around his head for years but never found a possible answer. He barely managed to establish that his family origins were Polish. He liked to think they came from Warsaw because he liked people who were born there. Someone who had survived told him that he might perhaps be a child of a family that had immediately been scattered around the camp, some gassed and others tortured. Bienenfeld was sure that fellow had got it wrong, that he had mistaken his family for another, or at least had no proof of what he was affirming. And what proof would have been eloquent enough? But it was better than nothing, better to have one probable scenario, rather than a hundred unreal ones, as went one of the titles of the popular writer Sholem Aleichem, and the day he bought his ticket from the Shalom travel agency with stops—according to his itinerary—in Vienna – Munich – Amsterdam – Hamburg – Berlin – Warsaw – Krakow – Auschwitz – Prague and then back to Israel, he wagered on that remote possibility. Hurbinek was returning to Auschwitz and was returning by himself.