The Keeper of the Walls (22 page)

“Then, two years later, I was born. But my mother hadn't had a healthy pregnancy, and never fully recovered from my birth. It wasn't anything like your problem after Kira. My mother was a small woman, and I was a large child. My mother suffered horribly, and afterward, was never again the same. I adored her; but the brief years we were together, I can't remember seeing her once on her feet. She suffered intermittently from internal bleeding, and eventually, when I was twelve, she died from a hemorrhage that couldn't be stopped. Medicine wasn't so sophisticated in 1892.”

Claire closed her eyes, and continued. “After that, everything seemed to go wrong. They'd been so happy—
we'd
been so happy. . . . Papa couldn't keep his mind on the shops, and his competitors took advantage of our tragedy to close in on the business. By then, of course, women weren't relying so exclusively on handmade lace, so this, too, contributed to his collapse. By the time I was eighteen, there was almost no money left.

“And so Papa decided that in Brussels, I would have no future. He collected a small sum, and sent me to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. I, like you, possessed a few talents. He made a tremendous sacrifice, both financial and personal: for I had become his right hand, and his dearest companion. But he wanted me to make something of my life. What could I have become, in Brussels: poor, without dowry?

“Through some connections, I was able to find a room in a small boardinghouse on the Left Bank. My life was very frugal. I studied, I painted, and I cooked my own meals over a Bunsen burner when I couldn't afford to pay the landlady for my board. Of course, I considered myself the Marie Laurencin of the turn of the century. I wasn't nearly so good—but I wasn't bad.

“But I was very lonely. There were so few people I knew in Paris, and my student friends were all so much wealthier than I! I couldn't afford to go anywhere. I felt lost in my room, or walking alone on the edge of the Seine. I needed to feel that there was one place where I belonged. And I found that place. It was the Jewish Consistory.”

Lily was staring at her, her eyes wide, her lips parted. Claire nodded. “Because, Lily, my parents were both Jews. In Braila, my mother had grown up in a kosher house; and in Brussels, she and my father had dutifully observed all the traditional holidays. I wasn't just brought up a Jew: I was brought up a religious Jew, with respect for all the Jewish laws and taboos. You are right: Maryse's world, Wolf's world, is a very special place, where customs are venerated and culture is prized, and where the outsider has no place. Because the outsider, Lily, is never absent. He lurks just outside the borders of the golden ghetto, which, however gilded, is still a ghetto. And, as a lonely young art student, I found comfort in the synagogue, and comfort in the friendship of a young rabbi whose wisdom helped me through many a tear-streaked moment.

“Thus began my friendship with Julien Weill. But I was eighteen, living alone in Paris. All the kind words of Rabbi Weill weren't enough to fill my life. Inevitably, I met a young man. He was rich, he was attractive, he was Jewish. I met him at the synagogue, where his parents were great patrons. I fell in love with him. He was tall, dark, slender—and spoiled, by generations of incredible wealth. He said that he wanted to marry me, and I accepted. I never really found out the truth. I suspect his love was only words, but Julien Weill told me that it was his parents who sent him away when they learned of our plans and of my expectations. It doesn't really matter, though, does it? I was already pregnant when I learned that he'd sailed for New York.”

She looked pointedly at her daughter, her face impassive. Lily was sitting, hands clasped beneath her chin, her neck muscles taut—waiting. Not breathing, it seemed. Claire wet her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. “I couldn't go home, to face Papa like this. And Julien Weill really couldn't help me. In all my desperation and sense of betrayal, I blamed the rich French Jews who had allowed this injustice to happen: these selfish philanthropists who had sent their son away because the girl had been too poor. But I did listen to Julien when he advised me not to have the pregnancy . . . taken care of. Somebody like me, reared in the utmost respect for human life, couldn't have ended the new life that was being created inside me. And so, without resources, I waited until my baby was born. Claude was born when I was not yet twenty, and I did the only thing I could: I gave him up to the Assistance Publique.”

Claire's eyes had filled with tears, and she let them fall, twin streaks upon the fine cream of her cheeks. She sat, wringing and wringing her hands, the tears falling unheeded down her cheeks—exactly the way she'd sat in the synagogue during the ceremony of Maryse and Wolf's wedding. Then she appeared to turn in on herself, and the weeping stopped. She said, in a trembling voice: “All that they gave me in exchange for my child was a number, written on a piece of cardboard! That was all I had of my son. All day and all night, I used to think about him, to wonder what he had become. I sat in my small room, holding that cardboard number, thinking about my own mother, who might not have died if I hadn't been born—and wondering if I would ever have the chance to see my son again.

“But life is so unpredictable. I was sitting by the Seine one day, eating a piece of cheese and watching the barges sliding by—dreaming, maybe, of my Rumanian grandfather's ships on the Danube—when a young man came up and started to speak to me. It had never been my custom to acknowledge strangers. But I was so alone—more alone now than ever—that I simply listened, and nodded my head, and let him talk. He wasn't good-looking; not bad-looking, but without distinction. He obviously hadn't had my education. He was pure French, a working-class boy—but full of life, full of ambition. I listened to him and imagined a different life: without the old traditions, those traditions that I felt had betrayed me. Without the old elegance. But with a roof over my head, with a big stove on which to cook a meal, instead of a miserable Bunsen burner. I listened to him, but after, when we had coffee, I told him that I could never see him again, because I was an art student who had a brilliant career ahead of me, and no time for stupid courtships. But he persisted, following me home, calling for me after his job ended. He was called Paul—the name of Jesus Christ's most devoted apostle. Paul Bruisson. He was a simple construction worker, and he brought me daisies with enormous yellow centers and big happy white petals. As if I'd been a virgin who'd deserved this, and not an unwed mother who had given up her son.”

Her tone had turned hard again—bitter. “I married him. One day, when he came, with a half-dozen eggs and a bottle of wine, he told me of his plans. He was saving money and learning all he could about construction. He was going to become a building contractor, and build me my own big house on the outskirts of Paris. And I? I'd spent the last two years dreaming of a high-ceilinged old apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, with tall, louvered windows of beveled glass. But I realized that the rich couple who had sent their son away were only exemplary of their entire class, of their entire world: I no longer could belong there, because my father had lost his money. Who, if not a Paul Bruisson, would have married me and given me a child I could keep, my head held high? I accepted Paul's offer, and we were married. And he never asked me my religion. He was a Catholic, of the nonpracticing sort, and so we were married like you and Misha, in the city hall near where I lived.

“I didn't love him. In fact, not a day went by that I didn't feel that I was better than he. I'd hoped to become pregnant at once, to take my mind off Claude. But—I didn't. Paul worked hard. How he loved me! He used to come home at lunchtime and sit across the simple wooden table in our kitchen, in the small house we rented in Vaucresson, and tell me of how he was progressing, and how he would make my life beautiful and meaningful in the only way he knew how: with money. We were poor. I never wrote my father about the poverty we lived in. To him, it was bad enough that I'd married a gentile. I was trying to keep all my lives separate, so none would impinge upon the other: my Jewish upbringing, my Jewish father; my working-class French husband, who knew nothing or my past; and my child, of whom I had retained only a cardboard number. For I'd learned to listen to Paul, and knew that he, like many outsiders, was so afraid of Jews that he had learned to hate them. What, then, would he have said about my child?

“One day, he came home early, and found me weeping, holding the number in my lap, my old suitcase open on the bed. I was frightened, and ashamed, and tried to stuff it back inside and close the lid. But he stopped me, and asked me what this number was. I burst into tears. It wasn't that I loved him—but I didn't want to lose him, because whom else did I have?

“And so I told him that I'd borne a son, and given him up. And then, he did the most extraordinary, unexpected thing: he took me in his arms and held me. He told me that he'd always surmised that I was better than he, and that it didn't matter about the child. He said: ‘If this is your son, then I want him as my own. I'm going to help you find him, and he will grow up as my eldest child.'

“But, Lily, there was one thing I'd omitted from my story. I was afraid to tell Paul I was Jewish. I'd heard him speak against the Jews, and was certain he'd find my background even more objectionable than the fact that I'd been an unwed mother. You see ...he came from an uneducated, prejudiced family, the kind that believed that the world's catastrophes, beginning with the Crucifixion, could be blamed on the Jews.

“At the time of my marriage, my dear friend Julien Weill advised me to be honest with Paul, and even to bring him to the temple. He offered to speak to him about our religion. But I was adamant. Perhaps I was merely young, and stubborn. But perhaps, too, I knew the man I planned to marry. And so, when I admitted my ‘feminine mistake,' I realized that he might forgive me this foible. Many of the girls he'd grown up with had committed similar ‘errors.' In his society, this was a venal sin. Whereas being a Jew was like being a pariah.

“After Paul's generous offer to look for Claude, I went to Julien Weill, and begged him for his help. I showed him the number. He gathered the oldest employees of the Consistory together: Monsieur Walbert Salomon, the accountant; Georges Salomon, his brother the cashier; Monsieur Muslack, in charge of weddings; and Oscar Berg, janitor of the temple, who knew useful bits and pieces about how everything worked in Paris. They all decided that even though Paul Bruisson wasn't a Jew, he had acted beyond the call of duty: he, a poor man, wanting to take in his wife's illegitimate child! They thought that he deserved their help. And so, anonymously—so that Paul would never know of my connection to the temple —the Jewish Consistory assisted us in our search for Claude.

“It took two years, Lily, for us to locate him and have him back. And Paul recognized him as his and gave him his name. I wasn't a better person than he, never; he was always better than I, even if he sometimes shouted and if he had opinions I didn't agree with. I suffered during my marriage because he wasn't the kind of man I'd hoped for as a husband. But he remained faithful, and he always treated Claude as his own son. And God repaid him more than I ever could have: For Claude came to
be like
Paul . . . much more so than you, his blood child, ever were.

“And so, Lily, I was always two people: the wife of Paul Bruisson, the mother of his children; and a woman who could not practice her religion freely: a religion she had deeply loved, but which she'd also blamed for the loss of the man she had once hoped to marry. I was always torn between my love of Judaism, and my hatred for the family that had shattered my dreams. And it was Rabbi Weill who helped me to understand that the religion was not to blame, only the particular individuals. It was he who showed me how similar had become my hatred to the hatred of all the gentiles, like Paul, who were afraid of the ‘foreignness' of Jews, the ‘difference' of Jews, the power and arrogance of some Jews. It wasn't their Jewishness I hated: it was, simply,
them.
And it was Rabbi Weill, also, who helped me to accept my family: the good man who, for all his faults, had become my son's father; and you, my daughter, who had turned into such a devout Catholic. I learned to accept Paul's anti-Semitism, and your own devotion, because there is only one God, and as long as you believed, it was all right.”

They were sitting in the opaque darkness, both of them unaware that dusk had fallen. Finally Claire asked: “Was it really worth it, Lily, to dig up these memories? What good can it possibly do you, to know these sad secrets that don't really belong to you?”

Lily shook her head. She couldn't speak. In front of her sat a woman she had never known. The quiet little Belgian bourgeoise had been anything but that; and her father? Not an ogre, although surely a limited man. Where was the point beyond which human beings transgressed from purity to sin? Where was the neat, clean definition in her catechism lessons? “Father, I have sinned . . .” But who, here, had sinned?

She sat staring across the darkness at the dim outline of her mother, the beautiful mother who, all her life, had been her symbol of goodness and fineness and nobility, the ethereal model for her own femininity. She'd loved Claire more than anyone—more even than Misha, from whom she'd sometimes felt estranged. She didn't understand why her whole body was trembling, nor why she felt twin, conflicting impulses. She rose, unsteadily, and stood over her mother, looking down.

And then, when the words came out, Lily spoke them with a bitter intensity she had never known before. “You lied. You lied to everybody, all your life. You lied to your own father, you lied to Papa—and you lied to me!”

Claire was holding her hands over her breasts, and whispered: “I lied to protect us all.”