Noah's Child (10 page)

One evening Father Pons came back from Brussels bright red in the face from pedalling so quickly, and ran over to Rudy.

‘Rudy, your mother's alive! She'll be getting to Brussels on Friday, in a convoy of survivors.'

That night Rudy was so racked with sobs of relief that I thought he would die, suffocated by his own tears, before he even managed to see his mother again.

On the Friday Rudy was out of bed before dawn to get washed and dressed, polish his shoes and do himself up like a smart townie with neatly waved, slicked-back hair, so that he was only recognizable by his prominent ears. He was so excited he couldn't stop chattering, skipping from one subject to another, leaving sentences half finished so he could get on to the next.

As he had arranged to borrow a car, Father Pons
decided I should join in the journey so, for the first time in three years, I put aside anxieties about my own family's fate.

In Brussels light rain, a dusting of water, wafted between the grey buildings, misting the car windows with a transparent veil, and making the pavements shine. When we arrived at the big, smart hotel where survivors were being dropped off, Rudy hurried over to the red- and gold-liveried concierge.

‘Where's the piano? I need to take my mother to it. She's a fantastic pianist. A virtuoso. She gives concerts.'

Once we had located the long, lacquered instrument in the bar, we were told the survivors had already arrived and, having been deloused and disinfected, were being given a meal in the restaurant.

Rudy ran all the way there, accompanied by Father Pons and myself.

There, stooped over bowls of soup, scrawny men and women with dull skin clinging unbearably to their bones, all with the same rings under the same vacant eyes, and so exhausted they could barely hold their spoons. They paid no attention to us at all
because they were so frantic to feed themselves, afraid someone might try and stop them.

Rudy scoured the room. ‘She's not here. Is there another restaurant, Father?'

A voice rang out from one of the benches.

‘Rudy!'

A woman stood up and almost collapsed as she waved to us.

‘Rudy!'

‘Maman!'

Rudy ran over to the woman calling to him, and took her in his arms.

I couldn't reconcile her with the mother Rudy had described to me; a tall regal woman, he had said, with a magnificent bosom, steel blue eyes, and long thick luxuriant black hair that people couldn't help admiring. Instead he was hugging a little old lady who was almost bald, with staring, frightened, washed-out grey eyes, and whose wide, flat, bony body showed through her woollen dress.

But there they were whispering Yiddish sweet nothings in each other's ears, and crying on each other's shoulders, and I concluded that Rudy might not have got the wrong person but had probably embellished his memories.

He wanted to take her away.

‘Come on, Maman, there's a piano in this hotel.'

‘No, Rudy, I want to finish my meal first.'

‘Come on, Maman, come here.'

‘I haven't finished the carrots,' she said, stamping her foot like a stubborn child.

Rudy was taken aback: this wasn't his domineering mother any more but a little girl who didn't want to miss out on her food. Gently touching Rudy's arm, Father Pons suggested he should respect her wishes.

She finished her soup slowly, conscientiously, dipping some bread into the broth, wiping the china bowl till it was spotless, oblivious to everyone else. All the survivors around her polished their plates with the same application. Underfed for years, they now ate with brutal passion.

Then Rudy helped her stand up by offering her his arm, and he introduced us. Even though she was exhausted, she had the good grace to smile at us.

‘You know,' she told Father Pons, ‘I only kept myself alive because I clung to the hope of seeing Rudy again.'

Rudy blinked and changed the subject.

‘Come on, Maman, let's go over to the piano.'

He led her through the hotel's grand sitting rooms, with their alabaster columns and doorways swathed with heavy silk curtains, sat her carefully on the piano stool, and lifted the lid of the piano.

She gazed at that concert grand with some emotion, then wariness. Could she still play? She dragged her foot towards the pedal and stroked the keys with her fingers. She was shaking. She was frightened.

‘Play, Maman, play!' murmured Rudy.

She looked at Rudy in panic. She daren't tell him she was afraid she couldn't do it, wouldn't have the strength, didn't know how to . . .

‘Play, Maman, play. That's how
I
got through the war, thinking that one day you'd play for me again.'

She swayed, steadied herself on the frame, then contemplated the keyboard like some obstacle she had to overcome. Her hands moved over, shyly, then came down gently on the ivory keys.

And then came the sweetest, saddest lament I have ever heard. A bit shaky, a bit haphazard at first, then richer, more assured as the music blossomed, intensified, developed, devastating, passionate.

As she played, Rudy's mother came back to life. Beneath the woman I saw with my eyes, I could make out the one Rudy had described to me.

At the end of the piece she turned to her son.

‘Chopin,' she whispered. ‘He never experienced what we've been through but somehow he felt it all.'

Rudy kissed her neck.

‘Will you take up your studies again, Rudy?'

‘I promise I will.'

Over the next few weeks I saw Rudy's mother regularly because an old woman in Chemlay had agreed to take her in as a paying guest. She gradually got her colour and shape back, as well as her hair and air of authority. Rudy went to spend the evenings with her and stopped being the determined dunce he had always been, even displaying a remarkable aptitude for maths.

On Sundays the Villa Jaune became a gathering place for all the children who had been hidden. Children aged from three to sixteen who had not yet been claimed by their families were brought in from the surrounding area. They paraded on a makeshift stage set up in the covered yard. Lots of people would come, some to find a son or daughter, others a niece or nephew, still others searching for more distant relations for whom, after the Holocaust, they now
felt responsible. Couples wanting to adopt orphans also put their names down.

I longed for these mornings as much as I dreaded them. Every time I walked across the stage after my name had been announced I hoped to hear a cry, my mother's cry. Every time I headed back in that polite silence, I wanted to mutilate myself.

‘Oh Father, it's my fault my parents haven't come back: I didn't think about them during the war.'

‘Don't talk nonsense, Joseph. If your parents don't come back, then it's Hitler's and the Nazis' fault. But not yours or theirs.'

‘Don't you want to put me up for adoption?'

‘It's too soon, Joseph. Without papers certifying that your parents are dead, I wouldn't be allowed to.'

‘No one would want me, anyway!'

‘Come on, you must keep on hoping.'

‘I hate hoping. I feel useless and pathetic when I hope.'

‘Be more humble and hope just a little bit.'

That Sunday, after the ritual orphan fair, unrewarded and humiliated yet again, I decided to go along with Rudy to see his mother for tea in the village.

We were walking down the path when I saw two
figures in the distance climbing the hill.

Without making the decision, I started running. My feet weren't touching the ground. I could have been flying. I was going so quickly I was afraid my legs might come away at the hip.

I hadn't recognized the man or the woman: I had recognized my mother's coat. A green and pink tartan coat with a hood. Maman! My maman! I'd never seen anyone else wear that green and pink tartan coat with a hood.

‘Joseph!'

I threw myself at my parents. Breathless, unable to utter a single word, I touched them and felt them and hugged them to me, I checked them, I held on to them and stopped them leaving. I kept on and on making the same uncoordinated gestures. Yes, I could feel them and touch them, yes, they really were alive.

I was so happy it hurt.

‘Joseph, my Joseph! Mischke, look how handsome he is!'

‘You've grown, my son.'

They said silly, meaningless things that made me cry. And I couldn't say a thing. Three years' worth of pain − that was how long we had been apart − had come piling on to my shoulders and floored me. With
my mouth open forming a long silent cry, all I could manage was sobbing.

When they realized I wasn't answering any of their questions, my mother turned to Rudy.

‘My Josephshi is just overcome, isn't he?'

Rudy nodded. Having my mother understand me, read me like that, brought on another wave of tears.

It was more than an hour before I recovered the power of speech. For that whole hour I wouldn't let them go, one hand clutching my father's arm, the other buried in my mother's palm. During that hour I learned, from what they told Father Pons, how they had survived, not far from there, hidden on a huge farm where they worked as farm labourers. They took so long to find me because, once back in Brussels, they discovered that the Comte and Comtesse de Sully had disappeared, and the Resistance sent them on a false trail for me that took them all the way to Holland.

As they told the story of their eventful travels, my mother kept looking round at me, stroking my face and whispering, ‘My little Josephshi . . .'

I was so overcome hearing Yiddish again, a language so gentle you can't even call a child by his name without adding a caress, a diminutive, a syllable
that lilts in your ear, like a sweet wrapped up in the middle of the word . . . On a diet like that, I started feeling better and all I could think of was showing them round my world, the Villa Jaune and its grounds, where I had spent such happy years.

When they had finished their story, they turned to me.

‘We're going back to Brussels. Can you get your things?'

And that was when I regained the power of speech.

‘What? Can't I stay here?'

My question was greeted with silent consternation. My mother blinked, not sure she had heard properly, my father stared at the ceiling, clenching his jaw, and Father Pons stretched his neck towards me.

‘What did you say, Joseph?'

I suddenly understood how terrible what I had said sounded to my parents' ears. I was flooded with shame! Too late! Even so, I said it again, hoping that the second time would have a different effect to the first.

‘Can't I stay here?'

Uh-oh! It was worse! Their eyes filled with tears; they looked away towards the window; Father Pons's eyebrows shot up in surprise.

‘Do you realize what you're saying, Joseph?'

‘I'm saying I want to stay here.'

The slap struck me before I could see it coming. Father Pons, his hand smarting, looked at me sadly. I looked at him, astonished: he had never hit me before.

‘I'm sorry, Father,' I mumbled.

He shook his head sternly to mean that wasn't the reaction he wanted; he flicked his eyes at my parents. I did as I was told.

‘I'm sorry, Papa. I'm sorry, Maman. It was just my way of saying I was happy here, my way of saying thank you.'

My parents opened their arms to me.

‘You're right, my darling,' said my mother. ‘We'll never be able to thank Father Pons enough.'

‘That's right,' agreed my father.

‘Have you heard, Mischke, he's lost his accent, our Josephshi has. You wouldn't know he was our son.'

‘He's right, though. We should stop all this wretched Yiddish business.'

I interrupted the conversation by staring straight at Father Pons and explaining, ‘I just meant it's going to be hard leaving you . . .'

*

Back in Brussels, it was all very well happily exploring the spacious house my father had rented now that he had started up in business with vengeful energy, and it was all very well succumbing to my mother's caresses, her gentleness and her lilting intonations, but I felt lonely, drifting in a boat without any oars. Brussels was huge, endless, open to the four winds, lacking the boundary wall that I would have found reassuring. I could eat my fill, and wore clothes and shoes that fitted properly, I was amassing quite a collection of toys and books in the beautiful bedroom that was for me alone, but I missed the hours spent with Father Pons thinking about the world's great mysteries. My new school friends seemed insipid, my teachers robotic, my lessons meaningless, my home boring. You can't settle back down with your parents just by kissing them. Over three years they had become strangers to me, probably because they had changed, probably because I had changed. They had lost a child and got back an adolescent. The hunger for material success that now drove my father had altered him so much that I had trouble recognizing the humble, plaintive tailor from Schaerbeek beneath the prosperous new import-export entrepreneur.

‘You'll see, my son, I'm going to make a fortune,
and you can just take over the business later,' he announced, his eyes shining with excitement.

Did I want to be like him?

When he suggested preparing for my bar mitzvah by signing me up for a cheder, a traditional Jewish school, I instantly refused.

‘Don't you want your bar mitzvah?'

‘No.'

‘Don't you want to learn to read the Torah, and to write and pray in Hebrew?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I want to become a Catholic!'

The response wasn't long in coming: a swift, sharp, violent slap. The second in only a few weeks. After Father Pons, my own father. For me, liberation meant mostly liberating people's slapping hand.

He called my mother and asked her to listen. I said it again, I confirmed that I wanted to adopt the Catholic faith. She cried and screamed. That same evening I ran away.