Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (29 page)

Daniel bounded up the front steps of the house and pulled open the front door with unnecessary force, anxious to give Sarah his news. After the long winter months of apologetic replies informing him only that his correspondents had no records that would be of interest to his wife, Daniel had received that morning an answer from the Banque Centrale de Paris.

“
Cher Monsieur …
We are privileged to inform you that the branch of the Banque Centrale de Paris that is located on the Avenue Victor Hugo has a safety deposit box in the name of Philippe Bensimon. We record no movement into or out of this box since 1942. Under the circumstances, we understand that it is difficult for your wife to produce the documentation we would usually require in order to open the box. However, in such cases, it is the bank’s policy to accept legal affidavits in lieu of proper documentation. Can you please forward to the bank an affidavit provided by a lawyer and signed by your wife stating her date of birth, affirming that she is Philippe Bensimon’s daughter, that to the best of her knowledge her father is dead, and that she believes herself to be his sole heir.
You mention in your letter Red Cross files that would record M. Bensimon’s believed date of death. Could you also provide the bank with copies of these files?

It is our experience in such cases that some of the documentation we might normally require from an applicant in order to open the box is, in its turn, located in the box itself. On receipt of your affidavit, we would propose therefore to open the safety deposit box in your wife’s presence, before making our decision on the ownership of its contents. If she finds herself unable to journey to France for this purpose, we would ask that she appoint a legal representative here in Paris, in whose presence we would open the box. To avoid any hint of conflict of interest in these cases, it is the bank’s policy never to recommend a lawyer. If you do not already have legal representation in France, we would suggest that you might seek help from the Canadian Embassy in finding a local lawyer.

Please accept, monsieur, my most sincere…”

It was to be three years, however, before Sarah and Daniel made the trip to Paris. Inside the safety deposit box, they did indeed find Sarah’s birth certificate along with a few worthless stock certificates and a gold brooch that had belonged to Sophie. Daniel wondered if the Bensimons had not emptied it of other valuables, perhaps removed all Sophie’s jewellery, to finance Sarah’s escape, to attempt to purchase their own safety, or merely to live in the last desperate months of 1942.

At the time, it seemed worth all their trouble just to have the gold brooch, to give Sarah a second memento of her mother, but fifteen years later, Daniel was to finally abandon a torturous attempt to have a French court pronounce on the legality of the 1946 sale of the apartment at 22 Rue de
Musset, a sale transacted by an owner whose deed to the property was not registered with the city hall of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. He would never manage to find any record of a bank account despite his pleas to the Banque Centrale, nor would he ever trace the contents of the apartment. So the Segals would never know that the Delisle family uses the Bensimon silver to this day, occasionally telling each other as they cut with a knife blade solidly affixed to a carefully weighted handle or stir with a teaspoon delicately etched with a tracery of vines that these beautiful things were the gift to their mother, the concierge, from a grateful Jewish family she helped during the war.

It would be three years before Sarah and Daniel made that trip to Paris and the bank on the Avenue Victor Hugo, and it would even be a whole day before Daniel remembered to tell Sarah about the letter, because he could not get his news out of his mouth that evening. As he hurried into the house, Sarah ran out from the kitchen to greet him.

“I was at the doctor’s again this afternoon.” She shone with pleasure, wanting him to guess, and then blurted it out herself: “I’m pregnant. I really am, this time, I’m pregnant.”

For nine years now, they had struggled to make their love a physical one. Their bed had been a place of small joys and small disappointments, gentleness, frustration, and occasional delight. He would utter one single sigh as he came; she would moan quietly during the brief moments when he stroked her. Gradually, over time, affection built what passion had not: she took her pregnancy as a sign that they had sexually come of age. It was her belief that if she had not conceived before, it was because only recently had her body proved capable of the spasms that would draw his seed into her, welcoming it shuddering into her womb.

This one child, her only child produced by her only pregnancy, she would name Maxime, not because the tiny wrinkled peanut who was born less than eight months later, in December 1965, could be counted on to grow large—neither the Segals nor the Bensimons had height in their genes—but rather because he figured so large in her life.

By the next winter and spring, slowly changing his diaper or preparing him for a careful bath in tepid water, she would gaze upon the new baby in amazement, delicately touching the tiny penis that sat between his chubby legs, admiring his pink flesh, at first still wrinkled from the womb but later perfectly smooth, and repeat to herself the miracle of it all: that he belonged to her and she to him.

She sensed that miracle from the start, within a few days of this soft May evening, and knew it for a certainty by summer’s end. For as this child grew inside her, she glimpsed the implications of her every pang, his every kick, her every discomfort: Sarah had at last re-established the bonds of blood.

Very worried that Marcel is overdoing it with all these politics. His bowel movements are not what they should be, and I fear he will catch cold rushing about from the cold streets to the heated cafés. The doctor is speaking to his sons again—it is impossible to maintain such silence forever, it just takes too much energy to remember not to talk—but we now maintain an appearance of calm only by avoiding any mention of D.

Georges will drop by tomorrow to discuss settlement of the estate. How these things drag on. Marcel and Dick will do well by both their uncle’s and grandfather’s wills, but one would rather have the dear men back again than any amount of money. One is forced nonetheless to pay attention and make decisions, which inevitably makes me feel sordid, as though we were all birds of prey picking over the carrion. Still, I am glad Uncle did not live to see his lovely house ploughed underneath for the sake of the new Avenue Mozart.

The trial begins tomorrow. Marcel plans to attend, although it will mean rising no later than eight if he is to be there for the start of the proceedings. Hahn and the young de Flers have promised to save him a seat. Dick has a lecture and cannot attend but Marcel will come back straight away and inform us of all the details before his father gets home.

Marie-Marguerite and I visited the Louvre yesterday, ostensibly to continue our investigation of the Venetians, but instead I unburdened myself to her, telling her of
our recent quarrels. I feel caught between my duties as a wife and my sympathies for Marcel and Dick’s beliefs, and fear I have damaged our family by making it clear to the doctor where I stand, but Marie-Marguerite consoled me. “Well, we are in the right, and he is in the wrong, and it will do the man no harm to hear you disagree with him for once. For my part, I have told Anatole frankly that the government’s refusal to revisit the case is sheer cowardice—if not something much worse.”

Then, she said something that surprised me greatly: “If our homes lack peace these days, just imagine what poor Mme Faure has to contend with.”

“You can’t mean she doesn’t support her husband in this matter?” I asked her, and she replied that she had heard on good authority that Mme Faure closets herself with the Dreyfusard papers every morning and is barely speaking to the President. And to think, I haven’t left a card with my friend in months only because I assumed she was of the other camp!

As always, Marie-Marguerite’s frankness was a bracing tonic and I returned from the Louvre in a better frame of mind, although I doubt the affair will be over soon. I fear Zola’s trial will resolve nothing, despite Marcel’s best hopes for it. If he is acquitted, it will mean the government must then give Dreyfus a retrial, and there will be yet more scandal. If found guilty, the whole thing will just keep simmering along as it has for months now.

Marcel set out very excited yesterday, as though he were looking forward to a particularly gay party, but came home rather downcast, saying the whole day had been spent on complex preliminaries. Zola looked fabulous, he said, with his great beard and fierce look, like some biblical prophet squeezed into a black suit. The crowd cheered him when he entered, until the judge threatened to expel the lot of them. We do not expect a verdict for several days. Adrien avoids us all.

The lawyers were expected to conclude their remarks yesterday and so we began the day in anxious anticipation of a verdict. Marcel and Dick left early for the Palais de Justice, for it is very difficult to get a seat, and I spent the morning pacing about, picking up a book but not reading it, fiddling with the ornaments on the shelves. I tried to read the papers that Jean brought me—he smuggles them into Marcel’s room every morning now so the doctor will not see them—but I had time neither for the inflamed rhetoric of those predicting certain victory nor for those few calmer voices who argued that by successfully narrowing the charges to Zola’s more outrageous statements, the prosecution had craftily won its case from the start. They were proven right, of course, as I was to find out.

Lunch with Adrien was difficult. He must have known my anxiety about the outcome of the trial, but we spoke of nothing but his plans for his next book and
where we might spend the summer. He was quizzing me on how well I liked Kreuznach, and had I spoken truly, I would have said that in my current state I could barely remember the place. I complained of feeling poorly—indeed, I have had a little pain in my side these past few days, so it was not altogether a falsehood—and I escaped to the bedroom to be alone.

I hid there for a while waiting for him to leave for the faculty, but after a half-hour or so I could hear him still moving about in his study and I could stand it no longer. I took up my hat and coat and, checking there was no one about, slipped across the hallway and out the front door without even bothering to tell Jean I was going out. I passed Mme Leotard in the lobby where she was polishing the banisters. Seeing there was neither carriage nor cabman at the door, she professed some surprise, asking, “Surely, Madame is not going out on foot? The streets are hardly safe these days.” But I just shook my head and brushed past her.

The day was warm enough and I had some notion that I would walk over to the Louvre, but once I had crossed the Tuileries, I thought it was not that far to reach the Palais de Justice and perhaps I might find Marcel and Dick there and discover if a verdict had come down. As I crossed the river, I realized I had been naive: a huge crowd had gathered outside the Palais and it was unlikely I would find anyone in such a mob. I could see people waving placards and hear the noise of the throng, but at first I could not make out their cries. Then, as I drew nearer, words began to emerge from the chaos and their awful slogans were
now borne back to me on the breeze: “Death to Zola!” “Death to the Jews!”

Marcel had told me the crowds cheer Zola daily, but no one here was championing him. I was appalled by their spectacle and began to wonder if such demonstrations took place every day and Marcel had hidden the fact from me. I had come such a way, but I could hardly plunge myself into this mob to discover if there was any news. Instead, I turned down the quay to skirt the Palais, in hopes perhaps I would find fewer people at its back door. And indeed, as I approached the Place Dauphine, the crowd here was smaller, and jubilant now, as some news seemed to pass through them. I hurried forward as far as I could and watched as two men embraced each other while another looked on in amusement. This one smiled politely at me, so I asked him, “A verdict, monsieur?”

“Oui, madame
. Guilty, of course.” He grinned broadly as he said the words, but when he did not see an answering smile, he looked at me with increasing puzzlement. I turned from him and hurried across the Pont Neuf, anxious only to get away from this place. But, in truth, as I reached the Right Bank again I did not know which way to turn; both the streets of Paris and the rooms of my own apartment were hostile to me now.

A
FTER MY MORNING TRIP
to the Jewish Museum, I bought a sandwich from a bakery, ate it sitting on a bench in front of the nearby Pompidou Centre, and walked the short way back to the
salle des manuscrits
where I have translated these few
entries. I stop here, in February 1898, and flip through the remainder of the year. The entries are increasingly short and sparse that winter, and there is a long gap from the late spring well into the fall: the pain in her side proved to be a cancerous growth in the pelvis and Mme Proust was operated on that summer. She survived but clearly lost many months to convalescence. I see little of interest in the rest of the year, and scanning my last translations, I read her restlessness on the day of the Zola verdict as a sign. It is three-thirty and I will contain myself no longer. I rise, return my box to the desk, and follow my diarist’s lead—out into the streets.

Leaving the library, I begin to cross its cobblestone courtyard but hesitate there. Where am I going? I pull a Métro map out of my bag, consult it briefly, and move forward through the library’s gates to the street outside. I could simply walk south down the Rue de Richelieu to the Louvre, turn left, and I would, like Mme Proust, have breath to spare for an easy walk across the Pont Neuf to the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité. Instead, I turn north and get on the Métro at the top of the Rue de Richelieu. From here, it’s a direct line westwards to La Muette, at the outer reaches of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. From their nineteenth-century headquarters in the Eighth, the Parisian bourgeoisie has grown steadily westwards and now the neighbouring Sixteenth is also described with the same kind of scornful adjectives—staid, suburban, quiet as a tomb, bourgeois—with which Proust’s biographers routinely dismiss the streets on which he lived.