The Keeper of the Walls Read online

  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?”
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  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.”

  “You lied to protect yourself—all your selves! And to protect Claude, because he was, finally, the only one of us you ever loved! He was the son of the man you’d wanted; I was the daughter of the man you settled for! Oh, damn it, damn it—I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to think! I hate you right now—for not telling me this before, when I could have helped you—when I might have felt you were trusting me with your life. I don’t think you love me, Mother. I think you never loved me. I was the child you had to pay him back with for accepting Claude.”

  Claire stood up, unwrinkling her skirt. Her hands were shaking. She said: “I’d better go home,” but the words came out muffled. Lily remained on the floor, and Claire sidestepped her hurriedly, her footsteps making small staccato noises in the hallway. Lily heard the footsteps, felt them like small stabs inside her heart, and the words: Don’t let her go! rang inside her head. But she tamped them down, shutting out the noise of the front door being opened, and Arkhippe’s voice.

  When Misha came in, he found her sitting on the floor, her hair over her shoulders, her eyes dry but rimmed with red. Kneeling beside her, he touched her cheek, but she bristled away from his fingers. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Lies. By the time the first lie’s been told, it’s too late to stop the rest. And then, there’s no turning back. The truth has ceased to exist.”

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  She smiled then, uncertainly, and shook her head. “Nothing. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Arkhippe and Nicky told me that Claire was here.”

  “Yes. But she left a while ago. She had to go help somebody arrange a concert.”

  He looked at her quizzically, and she shrugged. “Maybe I misunderstood her,” she murmured. “I thought that’s what she said, but then I fell asleep here, and had a bad dream.”

  Giving her his hand, he pulled her up, and said, with joyous relief: “Oh ...so it was only a nightmare. . . . Thank God, because you had me worried.” And then he pressed her close.

  There was an odd moment of awkwardness when Lily stepped into the hall of the Villa Persane, to pick her mother up for Sudarskaya’s recital. They hadn’t seen each other since the afternoon when Claire had told her story to her daughter. Neither had been able to take the first step. The memory of Lily’s words had wounded Claire; as for Lily, she couldn’t forgive her mother for having hidden the truth from her for so long, and about so many things. She felt as if her entire life had been based on a lie: or worse yet, on a series of lies.

  She hadn’t been able to sort everything out for herself. But somehow, she hadn’t gone to confession once in the intervening month. Something stopped her there. Her foundation of faith had been shaken by all that her mother had told her. Her mother didn’t believe in the same things she did. And so now, what had seemed so natural for all these years appeared, all at once, questionable. She’d been a Catholic not simply for her faith, but also, because she’d thought it had been the familiar faith of her whole family—of her whole world. Yet, all the time, Claire had been going to the Rue de la Victoire to hear prayers in Hebrew that Lily had never imagined existed—because she’d simply never thought about the question at all.

  She kept Claire’s story a secret, knowing, without having to be told, that somehow, threads of her life, Claire’s life, and even the lives of her children would come apart if anyone else learned the truth. She felt that with Misha she was being deceitful for the first time in their marriage, and had the sensation of being unclean. But how could she tell him when she had no idea of how he would react? And Claire had called her story “these sad secrets that don’t belong to you.” It wasn’t her right to reveal them, therefore, to her husband.

  She wished she might have been able to write freely to Maryse and Wolf. But obviously they hadn’t been told the truth either. She wondered how much Eliane knew—how much Rabbi Weill had told her; how much Claire had confessed. Knowing her mother’s extreme discretion, she thought: probably very little. And so she had no one to confide in. She was beginning to realize the cell of loneliness in which Claire had had to live, all these years. She understood it; but this didn’t make it easier to bridge the gap and make peace with her mother. Somehow, Lily couldn’t help thinking that the truth had come at the wrong time. And so, instead of bringing them closer, it had destroyed a fabric of trust between them—and initiated a thin wall of distrust now between Lily and Misha, because of her inability to tell him everything that had happened.

  She waited in the hall, fingering the shawl around her shoulders. Suddenly, Claude appeared, dressed for the evening. Lily scrutinized him for a moment, the regular features, the slender nose, the dark hair and eyes. She’d always thought he resembled Claire. Now, for the first time, she saw traces of another influence, a more pronounced . . . exoticism. She’d never spent much time wondering about her brother; now she was filled with a new curiosity: Who was he? Who was his father? And she thought, shocked: He’s completely Jewish, and I’m only half. I know all about him, and he knows nothing about himself.

  “Hello, Lily,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Waiting for Mama?”

  “Yes. We’re going to Sudarskaya’s recital. And you?”

  “Just a dinner party at a client’s. Really, Lily, if I were you, I wouldn’t encourage Mama to associate with that woman.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, a little exasperated. “Come on. She’s not really our sort.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s common,’ he said.

  “She’s a fine pianist,” Lily answered. “We’re going to hear her play, not critique her habits.”

  “Suit yourself,” he tossed off. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time.”

  He pulled his coat off the rack, and put it on. “Well,” he murmured. “Good night, little sister.” And he was opening the door and stepping outside, leaving her alone.

  A few minutes later, when Claire arrived, there was no time to break the ice between them. They were late, and hurried to the car and to François. And in the car they were conscious of his presence, and spoke, somewhat perfunctorily, about the children.

  Sudarskaya’s recital was at the home of Raymond Duncan, brother of the celebrated Isadora. He and his wife lived on the ground floor of an old one-story house in the Fifth Arrondissement. They had covered the interior yard and set up a stage, and had bought about one hundred chairs. They were standing at the entrance to greet the guests. Lily remembered that Sudarskaya had told her that they were Quakers, dedicated to helping others. So as not to have to pay the thirteen percent tax, Sudarskaya had accepted their offer to give the recital in their home and to sell the tickets as if they were for a private performance.

  They were dressed in long white robes belted with a cord, and their feet were s
hod only in sandals. Raymond was tall, thin, gray-haired, and his face was interesting, his voice deep. His wife was shorter and plumper, her pretty face animated by enormous black eyes. They had no children. Lily and Claire shook their hands and went to sit down. The covered yard was already full, and soon Sudarskaya came in and sat at the piano. There was a silence, and then she plunged into one of Chopin’s nocturnes.

  Lily clasped her hands on her knees, and leaned forward. Her piano teacher didn’t often play for her, and it was amazing to hear such beautiful sounds coming from her short, pudgy fingers—those same fingers that could stuff a tart in its entirety into her small, round mouth. The tone was clear, the notes moving, and one forgot one was in Paris, sitting in someone’s courtyard. One thought only of the sounds, of the emotions that rose to the surface through Sudarskaya’s hands. It was, Lily realized, like a miracle. This small, vulgar, prying woman was creating magic.

  Lily stared at her, and wondered. She’d always accepted Raïssa Markovna Sudarskaya as someone who was in her house for only one purpose, to teach her to improve her playing. As someone who was better gotten rid of when her husband came home, and in whose presence it was best not to be seen by friends. Now she felt acute shame. Sudarskaya was a magnificent artist. But she was also a person. A lonely, hungry person whom her mother had befriended out of kindness. Her mother had been right; not she, not Misha.

  Feeling the trembling notes in the air, she felt, all at once, a surge of empathy toward this virtual stranger at the piano. A connection had sprung up from one’s ears to the other’s heart. Lily felt proud of Sudar-skaya. It was almost as if her piano teacher had been her own child, performing for a hundred people in awe of her magic. She thought, with consternation: But why should I be feeling this way?