Chapter 1
Paris
August 1967
He had written to the old address, almost expecting his letter to be returned to him, but Rose had written back with such delight that his qualms had been dispelled. Ari planned to take a taxi to a hotel in Paris, but as he came through the doors from customs he saw, in amongst the throng come to welcome travellers, a middle aged woman was waving at him. He looked away, searching the crowd for a more familiar face and then realised that for an unwary moment he had been expecting to see a 20 year-old girl. He approached the waving woman. ‘Rose? Bourgeon? C’est toi . . .?’ She flung her arms around him before kissing him on both cheeks.
‘Look at you. Little Aristide, but maybe not so little anymore, hein?’ She poked him in the ribs.
‘I didn’t know if you had received my telegram about getting to Paris sooner than I expected. I was going to take a taxi . . .’
‘Voilà! Me voici! I am delighted to see you, my dear,’ she beamed at him. She had not changed much, had only become a little plumper. Now in her mid-forties; her once lustrous dark hair was quite grey, wiry and caught back in a bun with untidy wisps at the neck. Her pretty face had aged of course, but her smile transformed her lighting up her dark eyes as it had always done. She wore a green floral caftan that billowed around her and concealed any shape she might have had. The same well-remembered delicate perfume rose to his nostrils.
‘I’m sorry I gave you such short notice, Rose. I had advertised my apartment a long while ago and suddenly there was someone to take over the lease, but they wanted to take occupation almost immediately. I got a shipping company to pack my few things and I was able to get on a plane without too much trouble. I sent the telegram when I got my ticket yesterday. I have an interview with Professeur Du Maurier the day after tomorrow so I’ve cut it a bit fine, but it has all worked out . . .’
‘Well, don’t let’s stand here. Come. We’ll get a taxi and you can stay at my place until you find your own apartment.’ She turned on her heel as he picked up his case, slung his cabin bag over his shoulder and followed her out to the exit. The trip into Paris thrilled him, although he was shocked at the amount of traffic that swirled around them, but what he could see of the city made him realise that not too much had changed. He felt a lump in his throat when the taxi turned into her street and they climbed the familiar stairs to the door with the lead-light window. She stood aside to let him in and as he walked past her into the apartment the years simply rolled away. It looked as though she had not changed a thing, not moved a stick of furniture since he had left. She showed him to the spare room where he had hidden with Matthieu all those years ago.
‘Unpack your things and have a wash. You remember where the bathroom is of course . . . then come through and help me with the tray.’ Once he’d unpacked and freshened up the cheering aroma of percolating coffee drew him into the kitchen and he helped her carry the cakes and plates through to the sitting room. There was a companionable silence while she poured and he cut himself a slice of tarte tatin.
‘Mmmm. I haven’t had this since I left Paris. It was always one of your specialties, Rose!’
‘It wasn’t so easy to get ingredients when the Boches took over, but one always could contrive a bit of sweetness!’ she chattered on about the deprivations of the war years.
‘What happened to your parents? Are they still alive?’ he asked, almost anticipating her answer.
‘No. My father was arrested soon after you and Matthieu left.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that. I loved your father. He was always good to me and it meant so much, his coming to look for me when my father was arrested, although at the time I felt I would have preferred to have gone with him to Auschwitz.’
‘My father loved you and your family too. He would have done anything for Henri. He was old and he died doing what he knew to be right. You and your brother were only two among many whose lives he saved. Seeing you again gives me peace to know he didn’t die in vain. Didn’t you know that he and your father worked together in the Résistance?’
Ari shook his head, ‘I just thought they knew each other because your father taught us at school.’
‘Not only that. My father co-ordinated an underground cell and your father was his second-in-command. Your father was a wonderful help to him. I still miss my father so much. And my mother died too, soon after he was taken.’ She choked and then tears fell as she put her arms around his neck and hugged him. He turned in her embrace and they clung together. Soon she wiped her face and blew her nose. ‘Sorry, but seeing you again brings back all the memories so clearly. They always take one by surprise. I haven’t cried for my parents for years!’
‘Neither have I.’ He was silent for a while. ‘One of my motives for coming back was to try and find the man I think had a hand in my father’s arrest, but I have no idea where to start. He could be dead for all I know. Just before he died, Matthieu was very restless and feverish. He was obviously reliving the arrest and he said suddenly, “Papa told me to tell you he loves you, and to warn you to beware of Jacques.” He slipped into a coma soon afterwards. I couldn’t ask him more questions, but I have never forgotten what he said. It is something that has been bothering me more and more lately. This man would have been 35 years old in 1942, maybe a bit older. Perhaps Jacques was his nom de guerre. He was in the street when the gendarmes were taking my father and Matthieu away. Your father was the one who told me he thought his name was Jacques Marteau. He was almost certainly the same person my father warned me to be careful of, not long before he was arrested. You wouldn’t remember a Jacques from those days by any chance?’
Rose was bustling around washing up and she shook her head thoughtfully as she considered his question, ‘No. No-one comes to mind, although Jacques is not an unusual name, but there are still a few people around here from the war years. I’ll make enquiries if you like.’
‘Thank you, Rose. I have thought of this man all these years and the idea in the back of my mind has always been that I should try and find out if he’s still alive. I have no idea what I will do if I trace him, but I feel an obligation to my father’s memory, to somehow right the wrong of his betrayal and death.’
Rose patted his face affectionately, ‘I’ll do my best.’ She made them a light supper and they sat in front of the open French windows and shared a bottle of wine. When the warm evening turned chilly, they lit the gas fire and sat reminiscing until it was quite late. He realised how much he had missed her and the easy friendship they had had all those years before.
‘What are you doing now, Rose?’
‘I teach small children to play the piano.’
‘Oh yes, I remember that you played beautifully. But didn’t you want to become concert pianist?’
‘The war ruined that for me. I would have had to play for the Boches if I wanted to get anywhere in those days and I couldn’t do that. When my parents died I had to support myself, and I earned a little bit of money by teaching. But things got better after the war and now I enjoy it, the teaching I mean. I love the children. They are so fresh and we have a lot of laughs.
‘But tell me, I always wondered what happened to you, Aristide, you and your little brother, after you drove away with those men. You were so . . . fragile, somehow. Two young boys being sent out into a void! I’m so sorry to hear that Matthieu died. You obviously didn’t do so badly, seeing as you have come back. But where did you go? You disappeared into the night like phantoms!’
Ari thought for a bit before he began slowly, ‘When we left here with your father’s friends, we were taken to a mosque, where kind people took us down into the sewers underneath the city. From there we were put on a wine barge that took us south beyond the Demarcation line. Then another man put us on a ship at Marseilles. I have never since been as frightened of anything as I was that night when we left here, leaving everything that was familiar. We stayed hidden most of the way, having chunks of bread pushed under the sacks for us.
I will never forget the awful smell of old burlap. And I was seasick all the way to England!’ he smiled ruefully at the recollection. ‘Everyone was very kind to us anyway. I was also worried that my father would miraculously return somehow and find we’d gone.’ He was silent for a while staring into the glow of the fire.
‘And then?’ her question brought him out of his reverie.
‘Well, we were taken to Scotland and we stayed with a wonderful family, the Goldsteins. They lived in a small village north of Edinburgh which was a relief, because it was out of the way of the bombing raids. We went to school there and lived a fairly normal life. Country living suited us well and Scotland is a wonderful place in which to grow up. The one thing that marred Scotland for me was Matthieu’s death.’
‘The poor little thing. How did it happen?’
‘There was a scarlet fever epidemic at the school some months after we arrived. We all had it, but Matthieu didn’t get better. None of us had it very badly and we were back at school within a few weeks. All of us, except Matthieu. He just seemed to go into a decline, although the doctor said he should have been improving. They put him in hospital but there was nothing they could do for him and sent him home. He died soon after that. I always wondered if he just lost his will to live . . . he never really got over the shock of the arrest.’ Rose patted his hand gently.
‘I was devastated of course, but the Goldsteins were very good to me. They became my family and I grew to love them. The elder Goldsteins died within months of each other, soon after the end of the war. Sarah, their only child, married about that time, and went to live in Venice. Her husband is an Italian who had escaped from Mussolini’s terror with his parents in the mid-Thirties. After she left there was nothing to keep me in Scotland. So in 1949 when I finished my studies, I changed my name from Benoit back to Mayer and I went to Israel.’
‘Why Israel? I would have thought you would come home to Paris?’
‘My father was a Zionist and he always spoke of going to Jerusalem. I went just after it became the independent State of Israel and there was a sense of excitement, a day of new beginnings. I went expecting some marvellous, mystical place but the reality was very different to the dream and I realised after a while that it was my father’s dream to go to Israel, not mine. He had always repeated the mantra, “Next year in Jerusalem” and I wondered after a few years of living there myself, if he would have been able to cope with the realities of a very brash new society, very far from the utopia he had dreamed of.
‘I like a quiet life and I suppose that is why I loved being out in the desert so much. I helped out on archaeological digs during the holidays, for the silence as much as anything. I rather thought that the other people were out there for the same reason. Lots of peace and quiet, you understand. We didn’t really socialise much even when there was just a handful of us. We’d communicate when we had to about the work we were doing, but there wasn’t a lot of chitchat, and the desert is very beautiful. It gives you time to think, when it impresses its own peace deep into your soul. It was easy for me as even as a child I preferred my own company.
‘For the rest of it, Israel is an amazing place, but it is always on a knife edge, always in a state of readiness in case of attack and it can be quite nerve-wracking. And I am a coward at heart. I was tired of being called up for military duty, wondering if this would be the end of me. I wanted to run for cover every time but I was too much of a coward even to run!’ he grinned.
‘You exaggerate, Aristide! If you hated it so much, why did you stay away so long?’
‘Inertia, plain and simple. It takes a lot of energy to change your life, and I’m naturally very lazy,’ he said dryly. ‘However, after the Six-Day war this past June, I decided I’d had enough of all that tension and decided to come back to Paris. Voilà tout. I thought I could still do something for my father’s memory, even if I had abandoned his dream of Eretz Israel, and see if I could find the man who put him in Auschwitz. And that required that I come back to Paris!’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, Aristide, you can’t tell me that was all you did in twenty five years!’
‘Well, I’ll tell you some more about it one day, I promise. But for now, let me refill your glass.’ He would not be drawn and Rose had to be content with that. She remembered how reserved he’d been as a child and she realised he hadn’t changed. In fact, she had never before heard him say as much as he’d said in the last few minutes.
‘Do I now have to call you Professeur Aristide Mayer?’ she twinkled at him. ‘You will always be le petit Ari Benoit to me, my friend!’
‘And you will always be Bourgeon! My rosebud,’ he chuckled. They raised their glasses and toasted each other. Now more than ever he was glad he had returned to Paris.
He leaned forward suddenly and kissed her firmly on the lips. ‘I am so glad I found you again Rose!’ He heard her gasp of surprise and before she could say anything he went to bed. He felt for the first time in many years that he had a family, as his father had lost touch with everyone from their past life when they changed their name and moved to Paris before the war.