Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (51 page)

I walk back down the shady dirt paths of Père Lachaise, to the Métro stop on the avenue outside the cemetery, and travel back to the studio. At five o’clock I board a plane at Charles de Gaulle and fly home.

O
N THE SOUTHERN EDGE
of the island of Montreal, along the bank of the St. Lawrence River, there stand a few remains of New France. These narrow eighteenth-century streets are lined with low stone houses, their hard facades now softened by a fresh paint job on the front door or a window box full of pansies. Nearby there are the warehouses that once stored the pelts destined for Europe: their upper storeys have been converted to offices while antique shops are tucked into their ground floors. Horse-drawn carriages carry American tourists over the cobblestones.

I live on a forgotten street in the northeast corner of Old Montreal. My building was made from red brick in the nineteenth century and looks neglected rather than picturesque; the tourists never venture down the butt end of the Rue du Champs-de-Mars.

This neighbourhood suits me. I like its history: these streets might be mistaken for the Norman towns that my father’s ancestors left three hundred years ago. The location is convenient: the conference centre where I often work is a short walk northwards, towards the new city. And the neighbours, singles or childless couples, keep to themselves. When we do speak, we converse in French.

My parents, on the other hand, chat in English with their neighbours. They live uptown, in Westmount, with its ample brick houses and, above them, the mansions of the truly rich perched on the side of the big hill that Montrealers call the Mountain. Politics may have chiselled away at this enclave of Anglo entitlement, but it remains a place where my mother can still call out, “Lovely day, Mrs. McIntosh,” to a lady who is pruning her roses.

Montreal is a rarity, the truly bilingual city. There are these pockets—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Westmount are
English; Outremont, Saint-Henri, and the east end are French—and there is a tapestry, of signs and billboards, announcements and conversations, orders given in a downtown café; homeowners lamenting as they shovel snow. You can live exclusively in one language, in splendid isolation in the other; you can resentfully speak a foreign tongue, you can instinctively embrace a dual heritage. French and English are everywhere, so are pride and humiliation, joy and frustration, choice and obligation, reality and desire. Where shall I begin with the taxi driver, the waiter, the bilingual colleagues, the English-speaking friend and her francophone husband? How can we assure that the children will learn proper English, will speak good French, will become bilingual? Things are getting better. No, clearly, there’s been a turn for the worse. We are complacent. We are insecure. We are never comfortable. We love it here.

Since my return from Paris last week, I have realized that I feel at home not only amongst the historic streets of Old Montreal but in the whole jostling city north of it. Its edginess suits me, its instability matches mine. Here, half of us are outsiders and none of us fit.

I got back Thursday to find a message on my answering machine. I have not heard from Max in several months, not really much at all since last winter’s trip to the museum. He says he will be visiting Montreal on business the following week, staying for the weekend. Can we get together?

Yes, we can get together one last time. We are now five years late for a final showdown. He can find my apartment at 6 Rue du Champs-de-Mars.

So, Max pays me a visit and sits awkwardly on the edge of a chair in my apartment. He smokes now—I suppose if you have seen a lot of people die, you worry less about
these things—and I have to search about for a saucer that he can use as an ashtray. Sensing that no talking will get done in this way, I suggest we move to the roof.

Behind my living room, there’s a galley kitchen that runs across the back of the apartment, with a window that opens onto an iron fire escape. Climb these stairs and you discover my garden—a tar-papered rooftop dotted with battered lawn chairs. The building is a full six storeys, just high enough that from this perch you can see over the rooftops to the St. Lawrence, a few streets away. Directly beneath us lies the Old Port where pleasure craft now tool about the marina. Look eastward, towards the giant silos of the Molson brewery and the Ferris wheel that still operates on the site of Expo 67, and you can see the modern port, where the heavy freighters await the cargo they will carry across the Atlantic.

It’s a fine day in late October, almost warm enough to sun ourselves outside. We settle on the lawn chairs, and leaning forward but with my eyes cast down, I start to talk. Slowly, I recount the progress of an affair, crafting from each little episode a single perfect pearl of pain.

Do you remember the time you stuffed leaves down my back? I thought you wanted to hold me.

Do you remember the time, in the deli, when you asked me if I wanted children? I thought you meant you wanted children.

Do you remember the time you said that fresh snow was like falling in love because it made you see the whole world differently? I thought you meant you were in love.

I string my pearls together for him, finding a thread of narrative on which each bead can hang. I hold them out towards him as though if he were just to see my pearls, to admire them for a moment, then I could finally take off this necklace.

Sometimes in this recital a smile crosses his face, sometimes a frown suggests he is puzzled or disagrees; sometimes he nods. When at last I finish, he says nothing, puckering his uneven lips forward as though to speak and then dropping them back in place with only an “Mmm…”

I tell him that I forgive him, for that is what he has come to this place to hear. I forgive you my mistake.

Yet if he is forgiven, it is I who have confessed. And who is to say that tomorrow I will not sin again. The sin of anger, the sin of pity, the sin of lust, the sin of chastity, the sin of patience, the sin of haste, the sin of speaking, the sin of silence, the sin of lies, the sin of honesty, the sin of remembrance, the sin of forgetfulness, the sin of having loved too little, the sin of having loved too much.

This night, after he has left, I cannot sleep. As dawn approaches, I give up trying, pull on jeans and a warm sweater, and climb back upstairs to the rooftop where we sat.

The slow October dawn is gently rising over Old Montreal, and the St. Lawrence is awakening, the first light catching the water on one edge of one bank, and the river joyfully beginning its dance towards the ocean. It is only morning here, but in Paris it is already afternoon, and on the Champs-Elysées Marcel Proust is playing Prisoner’s Base with Marie de Benardaky, while in the subterranean corridors that one day soon will be tunnelled beneath their feet, David is chasing me around a corner of the Métro station and calling my name. At No. 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, the narrator is longing for little Gilberte Swann while over on the Rue de Courcelles, Marie Nordlinger lies trapped on the divan in an overheated bedroom. On a frigid Polish morning, an officer of the Red Army unwraps his most precious belonging, a hoarded bar of chocolate, and offers
it to an emaciated man in striped pyjamas while a military photographer snaps pictures that will one day shimmer in the darkened classroom where M. Delvaux teaches history. Across the Atlantic, in a lab in New York, an AIDS researcher sighs in frustration and wonders whether she will not simply test the vaccine on herself. Miles north in Toronto, you are safely back in your apartment near the Don Hospital, asleep in the arms of a boy who looks as if he were painted by Caravaggio. But I am sitting here, on this rooftop, alone.

And at this moment, at dawn in Montreal and midday in Paris, as the waters of the St. Lawrence meet the waters of the Seine and the Loire somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, at this particular moment, I do not long for our games on the Champs-Elysées. I am finally resolved to replace nostalgia with forgetfulness. I will wear bright colours again.

I shiver and, as the day begins, I go downstairs and settle at my desk. Because I lost Max, I went looking for Marcel but instead I found his mother in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the pages of her diary, it was often the voice of Mrs. Segal, my mother-in-law who wasn’t, that I thought I heard calling to me across the century. I read in the paper the other day that they are testing a vaccine, just in time for the millennium, which, if you accept the popular notion about zeros, begins in two months’ time. Maybe I too should phone the journalists: I have found the cure for heartbreak. It is literature. But then I have not discovered anything that the son of Dr. Proust did not know a century ago.

Perhaps it is time for me, like the great man himself, to stop translating and begin a work of fiction. Perhaps the moment of my maturity is at hand. But first, I will publish my translations. They are not without interest. I will make
inquiries of the appropriate journals and prepare a proper introduction. Here is my first draft.

Mme Proust was born Jeanne-Clémence Weil on March 21, 1849, the daughter of a prosperous Paris stockbroker and a loving and cultivated mother who passed on to her an enthusiasm for the writers of the
grand siècle
, the seventeenth century, most especially for the letters of Mme de Sévigné. Comfortably raised in a wealthy and well-established Jewish household, Jeanne was gentle, pretty, refined, a lover of music and painting who was well read in French and English literature. She was twenty-one when she married Adrien Proust, a Catholic and an ambitious young doctor who had risen well above his family’s origins as shopkeepers in the small town of Illiers, near Chartres. He was thirty-six but already had won the Légion d’Honneur for his tireless work fighting infectious diseases. He was a lecturer in medicine at the Sorbonne and the principal proponent in Europe of the
cordon sanitaire
, a barricade of health officials at ports of entry that would stop the spread of cholera from the Orient.

The Prousts had two sons. Robert, the younger, known to his family as Dick, was a robust man who followed his father into medicine, specializing in the study of the female genitalia. He married in 1903 and had one daughter, Suzy, Mme Proust’s only grandchild, born the same day Dr. Proust died.

Robert’s elder brother was Marcel, Mme Proust’s firstborn, delivered in 1871 when Paris was under seige during the Franco-Prussian War. For her confinement, Mme Proust escaped Paris to her uncle’s house in suburban Auteuil, but the anxiety of the times led to a difficult
delivery. Sickly at birth, Marcel remained so throughout his life, prone to crippling asthma attacks from the age of nine. He was a continual source of worry to his loving mother, who agonized over his every symptom, while his gruffer father, although sympathetic, accused her of spoiling him. Albeit very different in character, the outgoing Dr. Proust and his more retiring wife were always agreed that their son Marcel needed most of all to exercise willpower in regards to his health, his studies, his career, and his life.

Despite continual encouragement from his parents and some abortive attempts to study and practise law, Marcel never chose a conventional career and remained under his parents’ roof until their death, always supported by family money. In his twenties, he was an exuberant socialite whose romantic looks and poetic speeches won him a place in Paris’s most fashionable salons—a development that made his mother worry he was wasting time that would have been better spent preparing for a profession. By his thirties, his poor health and literary ambitions kept him increasingly indoors, writing at night and sleeping during the day, a schedule around which Mme Proust organized her household.

Despite his bad health, odd hours, and the presence of his ever-anxious mother, Marcel took many lovers, all of them men. Youthful sexual relationships with the composer Reynaldo Hahn and Lucien Daudet, son of the writer Alphonse Daudet, gave way to unrequited crushes and passionate friendships with handsome young aristocrats like Antoine Bibesco, Bertrand Fénelon, the Marquis d’Albufera, and the Duc de Guiche, as well as paid encounters with waiters and chauffeurs. Neither Mme Proust’s diaries nor their copious correspondence, including holiday letters and everyday household notes, directly record whether or not
she acknowledged Marcel’s sexuality, but they do give firm evidence of a large understanding and deep love for her son.

Similarly, we can guess that she must have glimpsed his genius, but can say for certain only that she would never know the great success that would eventually crown his literary efforts. In the last years of her life, he was translating into French, with her help, works by the English art critic John Ruskin, having already published a handful of essays and abandoned a young attempt at an autobiographical novel. It was in 1913 that he published
Swann’s Way
, the first volume of what had become, by the time of his death in 1922, the million-word masterpiece,
In Search of Lost Time
. His loving mother had left him long since: Jeanne Proust was ailing throughout 1904 and succumbed to kidney failure at the age of fifty-six in September 1905. It was then, closeted with her memory yet liberated from her presence, that Marcel Proust began to write.

I save the file, close it, and shut off the computer. I reach towards the printer, and from the stack of white paper sitting in its tray, I take a single sheet. I pluck a pen from the nearby jam jar, and in a small corner of the desktop not taken up by the machines, I bend my arm to the paper. Hesitant now, I begin to pen a phrase that has echoed in my head since my return from Paris.

“There will not be any more letters…”

I pause, wondering. What saviour is here? Is this kindness or cruelty? Who speaks? I write again.

Ruth Silver said the words softly as she took the mail from Sarah’s hand: “There will not be any more letters.”

Here then is my beginning.

O
F COURSE, JEANNE PROUST
and her son Marcel were real people. In imagining Mme Proust’s diary, I have drawn my inspiration from the actual events and personalities that filled their lives. Marcel did break his mother’s Venetian glass in anger and had a misunderstanding with the English artist Marie Nordlinger. Still, literature makes different demands from those of scholarship. Not only have I invented conversations, arguments, holidays, meals, and weather conditions, I have also tinkered with chronology, repeated some tales that may be apocryphal, and embroidered fictional details into the factual. For example, not all Proust biographers would give credence to the story of his encounter with Oscar Wilde, which I, meanwhile, have moved from 1894 to 1892. And it is only literary speculation to suggest the young Marcel discussed memory with the great philosopher who married his cousin.