Tania sings me the Prayer for the Dead of Auschwitz. She wakes me in the middle of the night and shows me the indelible number tattooed on her shoulder.
‘Look what they did to me Raphaël, look!’
She stumbles over to the window. Along the banks of the Rhône, with admirable discipline, black battalions parade and muster outside the hotel.
‘Look at all the SS officers, Raphaël! See the three cops in leather coats over there on the left? It’s the Gestapo, Raphaël! They’re coming to the hotel! They’re coming for us! They’re going to gather us back to the Fatherland!’
I quickly reassure her. I have friends in high places. I have no truck with the petty pissants of the Paris Collabo. I’m on first name terms with Goering; Hess, Goebbels and Heydrich consider me a friend. She’s safe with me. The cops won’t touch a hair on her head. If they try, I’ll show them my medals; I’m the only Jew ever to be awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler himself.
One morning, taking advantage of my absence, Tania slashes her wrists. Though I was careful to hide my razor blades. Even I feel my head spin when I accidentally see those little metal objects: I feel an urge to swallow them.
The following day, an Inspector dispatched especially from Paris interrogates me. Inspecteur La Clayette, if memory serves. This woman, Tania Arcisewska, he tells me, was wanted by the police in France. Possession and trafficking of drugs. You never know what to expect with foreigners. Bloody Jews. Fucking Mittel-European delinquents. Well, anyway, she’s dead and it’s probably for the best.
I’m surprised by the eagerness of Inspecteur La Clayette and his keen interest in my girlfriend: former member of the Gestapo, probably.
As a memento, I kept Tania’s collection of puppets: characters from the commedia dell’arte, Karagiozis, Pinocchio, Punchinello, the Wandering Jew, the Sleepwalker. She had placed them around her before killing herself. I think they were her only friends. Of all the puppets, my favourite is the Sleepwalker, with his arms outstretched and his eyes tight shut. Lost in her nightmare of barbed wire and watchtowers, Tania was very like him.
Then Maurice disappeared. He had always dreamed of the Orient. I can imagine him living out his retirement in Macau or Hong Kong. Maybe he’s recreating his days in the Forced Labour unit on a kibbutz somewhere. I think that’s the most plausible scenario.
For a week, Des Essarts and I were utterly at a loss. We no longer had the strength to concern ourselves with things of the mind and were frightened for the future: we had only sixty Swiss francs to our name. But Des Essarts’ grandfather and my Venezuelan uncle Vidal drop dead the same day. Des Essarts assumes the titles of Duke and Lord; I have to make do with a vast fortune in bolivars. I was dumbfounded by my uncle Vidal’s wilclass="underline" apparently being dandled on an old man’s knee for five years is enough to make you his sole heir.
We decide to go back to France. I reassure Des Essarts: the French police are on the lookout for a Duke and Lord gone AWOL, but not for a certain Jean-François Lévy of Geneva. As soon as we cross the border, we break the bank at the casino Aix-les-Bains. I give my first press conference at the Hôtel Splendide. I’m asked what I plan to do with my bolivars: set up a harem? Build pink marble palaces? Become a patron of arts and literature? Devote myself to philanthropic works? Am I a romantic? A cynic? Will I become playboy of the year? Take the place of Rubirosa, Farouk, Ali Khan?
I will play the youthful billionaire in my own way. Obviously, I have read Larbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, but I am not about to emulate the spiritual torments of A.W. Olson Barnabooth or the puerile romanticism of Gatsby. I want to be loved for my money.
I discover I have tuberculosis and am panic-stricken. I must hide this inopportune illness which will otherwise lead to a surge in my popularity throughout the thatched cottages of Europe. Faced with a rich young man who is handsome and tubercular, little Aryan girls are apt to turn into Sainte Blandine. To discourage any such benevolence, I remind journalists that I am a Jew. Accordingly, I am drawn only to money and pleasure. People consider me photogenic: very well, I’ll pull faces, wear orangutan masks, model myself on the archetypal Jew that Aryans came to peer at in the Palais Berlitz in 1941. I evoke memories of Rabatête and Bardamu. Their insulting articles compensate me for my suffering. Sadly, no one reads these authors anymore. Society journals and the romance magazines insist on showering me with praise: I am a youthful heir of great charm and originality. Jew? In the sense that Jesus Christ and Albert Einstein were Jews. So what? As a last resort I buy a yacht, The Sanhedrin, which I convert into a high-class brothel. I moor it off Monte Carlo, Cannes, La Baule, Deauville. From each mast, three speakers broadcast texts by doctor Bardamu and Rabatête, my preferred PR people: Yes, through my millions and my orgies, I personally preside over the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yes the Second World War was directly triggered by me. Yes, I am a sort of Bluebeard, a cannibal who feeds on Aryan girls though only after raping them. Yes, I dream of bankrupting the entire French peasantry and Jewifying the region of Cantal.
I quickly grown weary of these posturings. With my friend Des Essarts, I hole up in the Hôtel Trianon in Versailles to read Saint-Simon. My mother worries about my poor health. I promise to write a tragicomedy in which she will have the starring role. After that, tuberculosis can slowly carry me off. Or maybe I’ll commit suicide. Thinking about it, I decide not to go out with a flourish. I would only end up being compared to L’Aiglon or Young Werther.
That evening, Des Essarts wanted me to go with him to a masked ball.
‘And don’t come dressed as Shylock or Süss the Jew like you always do. I’ve rented you a magnificent costume, you can go as Henri III. I rented a Spahi uniform for myself.’
I declined his invitation on the pretext that I had to finish my play as soon as possible. He took his leave with a sad smile. As the car was driving out the hotel gates, I felt a pang of regret. A little later my friend killed himself on the Autoroute Ouest. An inexplicable accident. He was wearing his Spahi uniform. There was not a scratch on him.
I quickly finished my play. A tragicomedy. A tissue of invective against goyim. I felt sure it would rile Parisian audiences; they would never forgive me for flaunting my neuroses and my racism on stage in such a provocative manner. I set much store by the virtuoso finale: in a white-walled room, father and son clash; the son is wearing a threadbare SS uniform and a tattered Gestapo trench coat, the father a skullcap, sidelocks and a rabbi’s beard. They parody an interrogation scene, the son playing the role of the torturer, the father the role of the victim. The mother bursts into the room and rushes at them, arms outstretched, eyes wild. She wails the ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders, the “Jews Whore”.’ The son grabs his father by the throat and launches into the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ but cannot drown out his mother’s voice. The father, half choking, mewls the ‘Kol Nidrei’, the great Prayer of Atonement. Suddenly, a door at the back of the stage is flung open: four nurses circle the protagonists and, with difficulty, overpower them. The curtain falls. No one applauds. People stare at me suspiciously. They had expected better manners from a Jew. I’m an ungrateful wretch. A boor. I have appropriated their clear and limpid language and transformed it into a hysterical cacophony.
They had hoped to discover a new Proust, a rough-hewn Yid polished by contact with their culture, they came expecting sweet music only to be deafened by ominous tom-toms. Now they know where they stand with me. I can die happy.