Settling back, like a long-distance driver who knows the road, Pascal said, ‘It’s all about guilt, really’ — he flipped the beer mat — ‘even though none of us were around at the time. To put it bluntly, the whole family ran off to the south, leaving my great-uncle Jacques behind in Paris. Okay it was his choice, but it’s an unpleasant fact. If they’d stayed with him, maybe they could have done something after he was arrested.’ He sipped his beer, thinking. ‘That’s probably not true, but it’s one of those peculiar notions. Once thought, it won’t go away They settled on the Swiss border and Jacques was deported to Mauthausen. They survived. He didn’t. The lack of symmetry says it all. After the war they made sure Jacques was remembered. It was all they could do. Schwermann and the rest had vanished. So I grew up with a complex memory of remorse, pride and what you might call unfinished business.’
But, as Pascal explained, the family memory had become complicated by the political career of his father, Etienne, and the complex mood in France during the 1960s. Myths assembled after the war to smooth out the realities of Occupation —the mix of resistance and cooperation — had come under attack. Heroes were denounced, villains rehabilitated. And it was within this public struggle that Pascal’s father had deftly trodden the political stage. He’d had considerable ambition and a considerable problem: his father, Claude, had been a supporter of Vichy and he couldn’t refer to Jacques’ exploits without placing a spotlight on collaboration and plunging his name into the maelstrom of conflicting views about the past. So while Pascal had grown up with a memory of stolen retribution, the official family line on war crimes had become one of merciful forgetfulness. Let the past bury itself. Thus, when Paul Touvier was arrested in the late eighties, Etienne had been for understanding the moral complexity of the time, but the high-minded Pascal, then seventeen, had advocated judicial retribution. After all, he’d been a French servant of the Reich. That row had caused no lasting harm. For his parents it had been just one of the more extensive entries in the Register of Differences filled out by Pascal as he defined himself against them, made colourful by adolescence and by that fact destined to fade back into unanimity once he’d grown up and seen things as he should.
Pascal did grow up, and things did fade, but, as always happens, far less than his parents expected. He became a political journalist with a side-interest in Vichy, producing one or two scoops about notorious figures who had lived comfortable lives in post-war France undisturbed by their past. This was closer to the family bone, and, looking back, it was only a matter of time before Pascal’s research touched upon Jacques’ life and, by default, upon his father’s understanding of his prospects. It was Pascal’s career, however, that flourished. Appointed as the Washington correspondent for Le Monde, he moved to the United States, and that was when the door to his present life opened. By chance he found the memo referring to Schwermann and Brionne. He said, ‘After reading that I knew there was a good chance of finding them. It was a moment of crisis, believe me.
That moment took Pascal home to a bright Paris morning, the sort that could generate a song. His mother was happily moving in and out of the salon, relieved to have her boy at home again; father and son were enjoying the bashful pleasure of shared manhood come too soon. Pascal spoke, knowing the coming cost, the loss of amity: ‘I want to find him.’
Etienne put down Le Monde, read with a new enthusiasm since his son’s elevation, and stubbed out a cigar. Monique came in, buoyantly suggesting a walk in the park. She withdrew, uneasily, at a signal from her husband.
‘You can’t,’ he said.
That command had a peculiar effect on Pascal, pushing him down the road. ‘I can.’
‘You mustn’t.’
‘What about must?’
Another silence.
‘Pascal, France has suffered enough.’
‘That’s not the test.’
More silence, with a chasm opening wide. Pascal’s father reached over, with both hands: ‘I beg you,’ he said with barely suppressed panic, ‘look at things with older eyes, just for a moment, with the wounds of those who endured the Occupation. Why do you think de Gaulle, of all people, reprieved the death sentence on Vasseur and Klaus Barbie in the sixties? Why do you think d’Estaing honoured Pétain at Douaumont in the seventies? Why did Mitterrand shake Kohl’s hand at Verdun in the eighties? Because sometimes we cannot make a synthesis of the past, and there comes a time when we have to forgive what we can, when it is better to forget what cannot be forgiven. Your generation is obsessed with the failures of your forefathers. Let them judge themselves. You wouldn’t have done any better.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t, but that’s why an obligation rests on the next generation — to expose the past for what it was. This is not just about Jacques. It’s about history. Getting it right. The same year Barbie was convicted, Le Pen said the gas chambers were a minor detail of the war. There’s a kind of forgetting we have to stop.’
His father, exasperated, said: ‘Pascal, I’m asking you to leave it be. Leave the past alone.’ Etienne went angrily to his study without waiting for a reply as if parental censure was sufficient to deflect a disobedient son.
As with most adult passions, they are born in childhood. The strength of Pascal’s conviction had not come from his family as such but from their butler, Mr Snyman. He’d known Jacques and had told Pascal all about The Round Table. For Pascal he was a patriarch, the only survivor of the times. After his father left the room, Mr Snyman slipped in.
‘Did you hear all of that?’ asked Pascal.
‘Yes.’
‘What would you do?’
‘It’s not what I’d do that matters; it’s what Jacques would do. If he could.’
‘And what’s that?’
Mr Snyman took a step closer, his hands raised as if what he had to say was so fragile it might break if not physically handed over. ‘He’d hunt him down. Schwermann is one of those few people responsible for something that lies on the other side of forgiveness. ‘
Pascal went upstairs and knocked on the study door.
‘Papa, I’m sorry. I have to do this.’
‘You’ll regret ignoring my advice.’ His father stood with his back to his son. With profound disappointment he said, ‘You care more for the dead than the living.’
Monique stood at the door, wavering between husband and son. She was crying.
Then Pascal said something untrue, something he did not mean and which he bitterly regretted afterwards. But it sounded good. ‘And you care more for political preferment than the truth.’
They had, of course, spoken since; and Pascal had said sorry, and his father had said it didn’t matter, and his mother had run out to the patisserie. But it was too late. Certain things, once said, can change at a stroke the interior workings of love, leaving the outside architecture untouched. Perhaps, thought Lucy, that was why Agnes had taken such deep refuge in silence.
Pascal made contact with Jewish groups and Resistance organisations in Paris who formed a consortium: the laborious process of gathering evidence began. The anxiety of the investigators was that Schwermann had kept a low profile as far as the paperwork was concerned. His name rarely appeared in print even though sources demonstrated he must have been at certain meetings and received particular memos. And no one knew the name under which he was hiding. Then Pascal received an anonymous letter posted from Paris. He said, ‘It contained one line: “The name you seek is Nightingale.” I thought it was a hoax but I passed it on.
The problem of building a case strong enough to secure a conviction, however, remained a concern. It was while discussing this matter with Mr Snyman that Pascal had been urged to find Victor. Mr Snyman had said: