The Keeper of the Walls Read online

  When he had exerted himself and finally collapsed, his perspiring face lying between her neck and shoulder, the quiet told her that the rain had stopped, and that, indeed, this moment would remain indelible in his mind. And she felt, for the first time that afternoon, for the first time in many months, a serene security within herself. He was asking her, suddenly ashamed: “You’re not sorry? I hadn’t planned this. . . . Are you sure it’s all right?”

  She nodded, unblinking. “Now I can let you go,” she murmured, and her voice was almost detached, far away, as if, for her, the magic moments had already been locked up in their treasure box. For she and Pierre had passed a threshold, and now she wouldn’t be alone anymore. She wouldn’t have to be afraid. He’d have to come back—God owed this to her now.

  Chapter 23

  Claude stood, tall and straight in his dark gray suit, his face almost scornful in its removed, withdrawn expression. Claire, on the small sofa, smoothed out a pleat in her skirt, and reflected, as she had so many times in the past, that, had he allowed emotion to penetrate his features, he would have been, like Lily, a most handsome individual. But there was a woodenness about him. Even she, whose love for him had flowed in spite of his flaws, felt an edge of apprehension, watching him.

  “I wanted you to know at once,” he stated. “But I also felt certain you wouldn’t approve. So I waited, until it could wait no longer. I’ll be leaving the fourth of September for a German training camp in Poland, with the first contingent of the Legion of French Volunteers to fight the Red army in Russia.”

  Claire shook her head. “You can’t be serious. Claude—it isn’t true!”

  “I’ve admired the Germans for many years, Mother. And I approve of the way Hitler wants to run Europe. Father always said that the worst plague of all was the Red plague from the Soviet Union. If there’s something I can finally do to help, then I must sacrifice my comfort, and enlist. I’ve already enlisted, in fact. And received my commission as lieutenant.”

  Claire’s face was so pale that he could see a vein beating at her temple. “But the Legion will be fighting on the side of the Reich—the Reich that plowed into our country and demolished it, and has now subjugated it into an affiliate state. You . . . my son! want to fight with them, with the Nazis— it’s more than I can bear, Claude! You’ve disappointed me before . . . but never have you ripped the heart from me, until now.”

  Claude’s eyes were the only proof of life in that icy face, and now they shone with an odd, disquieting light, like twin embers. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I came for you to send me away as mothers always do, with a show of maternal affection! But I suppose I was wrong! I should have known you’d be against me—as you always were. All my life, you preferred Lily. All my life, I had to feel like an unwanted member of the family. Even after I married Henriette, you put Lily and her children first, before us and our child! But what could I have expected, from a woman who’d marry a Jew?”

  Claire stood up, upending a small tray of odds and ends that had been lying in front of her on the long coffee table. “What do you know about the Jews?” she whispered, her heart beating twice as fast. “You, a traitor to your country, a collaborationist? You thought perhaps I didn’t know. But I had to learn of it, sooner or later. Jacques found out! Yet still, I loved you enough to try to pretend that this was just a phase you were passing through! I’ve never been so deeply ashamed as I am today.”

  His cheekbones gleamed red and shiny. “Jacques! A kike! It’s I who am ashamed, Mother, that you’d lower yourself to marry a Jew. How could you have done that?”

  Her eyes on his, she said, her voice trembling with rage: “How? I married a Jew, Claude, because I am one. And because I’m proud to be a member of an old and venerable tribe that has remained, through the ages, pure and honorable. Jesus was a Jew, a fact that Hitler has chosen to forget! But I never have forgotten. I am a Jew, and you are a Jew. It’s time you knew this and digested it, and came to your senses.”

  Claude stood stock still, incredulity painted on his face. “No,” he said.

  “Yes. You’ve joined up with a reactionary group that wants to kill us all, to wipe us from the face of this earth. But you can’t hate the Jews without hating yourself. You’re as Jewish as Jacques.”

  “But Father was a Christian,” Claude finally countered, his chin jutting out in defiance. He could feel his legs going weak at the knees. His mother ...his own mother . . . Jewish. It was beyond his imagination.

  Claire, sixty-one years old, her white hair swept into a fine French knot, her composed, cameo face set in an unaccustomed hardness, declared: “That’s not exactly true. Lily’s father was a Christian. You accused me of always having loved her best. But you were wrong! I always loved you more, Claude, because you, not she, was conceived in love.” Unrelenting, she pursued, her eyes holding his: “You are not Paul Bruisson’s child. Your father was a Jewish man, whom I knew before I ever met Paul. So you see, you are one hundred percent Jewish. There’s no escape, Claude. You’re going to have to live with it, and come to your own terms.”

  He was backing away, shaking his head, grasping the door handle with a blind man’s desperation. “No! You’re just telling me lies, to prevent me from going to Russia!”

  “I’m telling you the truth. My greatest mistake was not to have told it to you before. Then, I might have stopped you from committing the gravest error of your life.”

  “I’ll never believe it!” he cried. “But nothing will hold me back from the Legion, not even your disgusting lies! You are no longer my mother! I abhor you, and wish you were dead! But you’ll be sorry, when I come back a hero and you’ll be left on the outside, like a dog!”

  When he had departed, and she was alone in the apartment, Claire sat down, shaking. Why had she told him the truth, just like that, out of anger? Had it really been necessary? Tears welled up in her eyes, and she let them fall, a terrible agony. She’d lost her son.

  But then, she’d never really had him. Their relationship had been based on that first, inexcusable lie, and if today he had become a man whose values were a twisted web of anger and hatred, then she could only blame herself.

  Yes, she’d given in to the right impulse, telling him. It had been not only necessary, but, at this late date, even unavoidable.

  Maybe he’ll reconsider, she thought, a surge of hope cresting. But she knew, as surely as she breathed, that the truth had come too late for Claude . . . too late, perhaps, for all of them.

  * * *

  At forty-one, he was one of the oldest Legionnaires, and, at Camp Deba in Poland, he’d felt his age and his lack of physical preparation. He hadn’t known what to expect, but had looked forward to the rigors of training in order to forget himself, his aching mind and heart. When Henriette had seen him off, he hadn’t been able to look at her. I am a Jew, I am a Jew: these words had kept reverberating in his head, and a dull fever had throbbed through his body.

  On the way to Poland, he’d listened to his companions exalting their mission, and trying to get over their own disappointment at the lack of support the Legion was receiving in France. He’d listened, but as if a veil had parted him from them. His intense shame had kept him quiet, even more so than was usual for him. But then, crossing the cleanliness of Germany, his spirits had momentarily been revived. She’d lied; it was as simple as that; and his duty was to return a hero of the French people, to show her that there was no way he, Claude Bruisson, could have had Jewish blood coursing through the vessels of his fine, Aryan body. She’d lied, to show him the full extent of her rejection of him. What better way to have humiliated him, than to have insulted his very birth, labeling him one hundred percent a Jew?

  She wasn’t Jewish, of this he was certain, as well. She’d been a Belgian Catholic, lapsed but still believing. And, of course, he wasn’t a bastard, but the son of stolid, conservative, unimaginative Paul Bruisson.

  At Deba, the Germans had put them through muscle-wrenching exercises,
but he’d welcomed the pain, hoping it would obliterate the searing memory of what his mother had told him—the horrid lie. It had been strange: all the French had expected the Germans to be grateful for their help, but instead, had found them barely tolerant of their brothers-at-arrns. A multitude of uniforms had paraded together, each the emblem of a partisan group from another nation; but only the French had been forced into the feldgrau of the Reich itself. Some of Claude’s fellow Legionnaires had balked at this, and later, at the oath that they’d had to swear to the Führer. But he hadn’t balked. To him, his willingness to be clothed as a Nazi, and to swear allegiance to the Nazi ruler, had seemed only another, ultimate proof that he could not possibly have been a Jew.

  Later, they’d been put on yet another train, to Smolensk. And now they marched on foot. The cold was so great that, crouching behind machine guns in the bleak afternoon, Claude thought that never had he felt such burning pain as that which was paralyzing his fingers and joints. They were on the road from Golokovo, and Moscow, their destination, seemed continents away: though, in fact, it was less than fifty miles from where they were advancing, inch by inch, through snow so deep that his feet had stopped hurting, stopped reacting to the frostbite, and he could not feel his extremities at all.

  How long had this absurd march been going on? And which day was it now? The day before, they’d taken a small village, killing three Russians. But five of the Legionnaires had died of cold. This morning, when he’d tried to relieve himself, and had removed a glove, his fingers had almost turned to ice, and a companion had had to rub them immediately to revive them. How had the Russians learned to endure such a glacial climate?

  At night, they huddled inside peasant huts owned by partisans, everyone around the stove at the center of the miserable single room. But tonight he had guard duty, by the machine guns. He and the young sergeant who could have been his son ate their bowls of soup and left the warmth of the small dwelling, their breath curdling in front of them, their noses immediately sending shoots of pain through their nervous systems. “Which day are we?” Claude asked.

  “It’s the night of December first,” the young man told him.

  Behind the machine guns, Claude prayed: I’ve never been a believer, but, dear Lord, if you exist, remove me from this cold. The sergeant, whose name was Marcel Lepuis, was crying softly into his gloved hands. “I’m going to die,” he moaned. “I’m from Provence, where the heather blooms and the tomatoes ripen on the vine, and where the sun flirts with you like a pretty girl, way into the winter season. But I’ll never see the sun again.

  “Shut up,” Claude said roughly. He didn’t want to think of his family: of his wife, whom he’d always loved, of the child, Alain, now eight years old, to whom he’d given his name—even of his sister, who’d always been a victim, because of the stupidity of her convictions. He didn’t want to think of his mother, the beautiful, the betrayer. Above all, he didn’t want to think of her.

  “I can’t see!” Lepuis was screaming, and Claude, immersed in his own physical anguish, had to move to take a look at him. Horrified, he saw that the sergeant’s tears had frozen over his eyes.

  “You idiot,” he spat out, but nevertheless, a surge of compassion filled him. He took the young man’s face in his own gloved hands, and gently massaged his cheekbones, until the movement seemed to thaw the shards of ice. “This isn’t the moment to indulge in any excess of emotion,” Claude admonished him. “We have to keep our circulation going, or we’ll die.” His own voice sounded ominous in the dark gloom, and he asked himself why he had left the comfort of his plush apartment at the Carlton to risk his life at the ends of the earth . . . battling the cold, rather than the Bolsheviks.

  After a while, enveloped by silence, Claude felt himself drift off into a torpor. He blessed the fact that neither his feet nor his hands had any feeling anymore: the excruciating pain appeared to have numbed. Perhaps they’ll have to amputate a limb, he thought, but even this eventuality failed to rouse him. He simply prayed for the day to dawn and this tormenting vigil to come to an end.

  I should shift positions, he warned himself. Keep the circulation going. But his legs refused to budge beneath his weight. I can’t move! Marcel Lepuis was making no sound, not even the slightest whisper of a breath, and Claude called out: “Hey! Sergeant! Answer me!” But only the steady, wheezing wind replied, with its inhuman lack of pity.

  My God, he’s dead! Dead, like the five bastards from the night before. Claude had a visual image of the hut, with his companions huddled around the stove. How cold was it now? Probably at least minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. In Paris, a person shivered when the temperature fell below sixty, and when it descended to fifty, piled thermal blankets one on top of the other to block out the chill.

  But this, here, was no chill: it was deadly cold, and Claude knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that his young companion had frozen to death at his side.

  Claude felt no pain inside his heart, for really, this lad had been nothing to him. And if I went, would anyone miss me? Only his thoughts now stood between him and the black abyss of nothingness ...his thoughts, and his hatred. Misha Brasilov, the bête noire of his existence, whose child he, Claude Bruisson, had reared as his own son, had been born in this enormous land, where in winter the night lasted four hours and bleak daylight, twenty. Already the white light of dawn had risen, outlining miles and miles of white, unchanging landscape, and the bowed figure of Marcel Lepuis near Claude. Like Lot’s wife, turned overnight into a pillar of salt . . . only, Lepuis was ice.

  For a moment, he thought again of his family.

  They’d all used him, and then thrown him away.

  Even his mother.

  Now the wind no longer whistled, and Claude’s mind was alive with a giant buzzing, as if a thousand bees had set up housekeeping in his head. He could feel nothing, no part of his body, and he thought: Thank you, God. No feet, no hands, no legs, no arms, no ears, no nose.

  He thought he’d fallen asleep, and that an angel, with blond hair and a straight nose, had come to take him away to the Aryan heaven. He tried to part his lips, willing himself to speak. But there was no need for words: the angel understood. The angel knew that Claude Bruisson, one hundred percent Aryan, one hundred percent pure, honest, and true, deserved, at last, to be loved unconditionally. No more picking up other people’s broken toys; no more sister, no more mother, no more wife in love with an enemy brother-in-law who, for no reason, had wanted him, Claude, out of the way.

  The angel was reaching a long, elegant hand toward him, to pull him up. Claude’s heart felt as if it had burst, as if all inside him had combusted; and it felt good, like a release, like the ultimate orgasm shuddering through his body. And he said to the angel: Don’t leave without me.

  When his companions came to relieve them, they found both Sergeant Marcel Lepuis and Lieutenant Claude Bruisson dead, like frozen statues, behind the machine gun they had been guarding. But the Nazi colonel who commanded them had no time for an Aryan burial. He kicked them twice with his boot to unjam the wheels under the machine gun, and left them to be buried by God under fresh piles of newborn snow.

  * * *

  Nicolas leaned over the railing, hailing in the New Year with a silent toast, his eyes lifted to the star sprinkled winter night. The tiny Gonçalo Velho, a bare fifteen hundred tons, was carrying him and twelve other passengers to the New World…to a new life. His heart felt heavy, and for a moment, fear strangled him. Perhaps he should have gone along with Pierre, to London, instead of embarking on this strange expedition. Pierre, he’d heard in Madrid, had reached his destination. And would be doing something to help his country.

  He, Nicky, had received his visa just in time, before his seventeenth birthday. For the line of demarcation between the two zones had become officially closed to all men over that age. He’d taken a train to Madrid, a transit visa for Spain and Portugal safely tucked in his wallet, along with his exit visa from the Vichy government. He’d left
Nice, and his studies, with hardly a regret. The baccalauréat, which had seemed so important to him a year ago, now mattered very little. He’d had to interrupt his last year of high school, without passing the second bac—but now, it looked as if, for a Jewish boy, survival alone mattered, which, in France, was risky business.

  His train to Spain had been the last before Pearl Harbor. The sudden entry of the United States into the war had blocked all travel out of France, for no one knew how long. So on the one hand the late December date of his birthday, and on the other, the Japanese attack, had wedged his trip into the only possible period when he could still have departed, legally.

  Nicky had paid forty pounds sterling to reach Lisbon from Spain, and then, the outrageous price of four hundred additional pounds to embark on the small Portuguese ship, the Gonçalo Velho. Now, leaning to smell the sharp salt of the sea, he thought how unpredictable life could be. When he’d returned from Paris to Nice, he’d found that the landlady had given his room away at the boardinghouse. In a panic, he’d wandered through the streets until he’d seen a sign in the window of a slim, badly lit building: room to let. He’d walked in, and asked, and been given a key. It hadn’t been until three weeks later that he’d become aware that the small hotel, where pretty, made-up girls waved him their friendly greetings every day on the worn-down staircase, had been, in fact, a brothel, and the pleasant girls, prostitutes. But then, none of them had supposed that they’d had a real prince in their bawdy house. . . .

  Nicky smiled, remembering Myriam, the thirty-year-old blonde who’d made it her business, after six months, to see to it that he became initiated to the rites of manhood. He’d only once thought of Trotti, during their encounter in the whore’s narrow room. Now he wondered about his sister; war turned some timid virgins into passionate mistresses, and Kira had never been timid. But things had been more serious between her and Pierre, and Trotti had told him of a commitment between his sister and his best friend. And if he could trust anyone not to harm Kira, it had to be Pierre: kind, truthful Pierre.