The headmaster handed me an anthology of Greek orators and told me to open the book at random. I had to gloss a passage by Aeschines. I acquitted myself brilliantly. I went so far as to translate the text into Latin.
The headmaster was dumbfounded. Was he really ignorant of the keenness, the intelligence of Jews? Had he really forgotten the great writers we had given France: Montaigne, Racine, Saint-Simon, Sartre, Henry Bordeaux, René Bazin, Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. . On the spot, he suggested I skip the first year and enrolled me straight into the second year — khâgne.
‘Congratulations, Schlemilovitch,’ he said, his voice quavering with emotion.
After we had left the lycée, I rebuked my father for his obsequiousness, his Turkish Delight unctuousness in dealing with the proviseur.
‘What are you thinking, playing Mata Hari in the office of a French bureaucrat? I could excuse your doe eyes and your obsequiousness if it was an SS executioner you were trying to charm! But doing your belly dance in front of that good man! He was hardly going to eat you, for Christ’s sake! Here, I’ll make you suffer!’
I broke into a run. He followed me as far as Tourny, he did not even ask me to stop. When he was out of breath, he probably thought I would take advantage of his tiredness and give him the slip forever. He said:
‘A bracing little run is good for the heart. . It’ll give us an appetite. .’
He didn’t even stand up for himself. He was trying to outwit his sadness, trying to tame it. Something he learned in the pogroms, probably. My father mopped his forehead with his pink buckskin tie. How could he think I would desert him, leave him alone, helpless in this city of distinguished tradition, in this illustrious night that smelled of vintage wine and English tobacco? I took him by the arm. He was a whipped cur.
Midnight. I open the bedroom window a crack. The summer air, ‘Stranger on the shore’, drifts up to us. My father says:
‘There must be a nightclub around here somewhere.’
‘I didn’t come to Bordeaux to play the lothario. And anyway, you can expect meagre pickings: two or three degenerate kids from the Bordeaux bourgeoisie, a couple of English tourists. .’
He slips on a sky-blue dinner jacket. I knot a tie from Sulka in front of the mirror. We plunge into the warm sickly waters, a South American band plays rumbas. We sit at a table, my father orders a bottle of Pommery, lights an Upmann cigar. I buy a drink for an English girl with dark hair and green eyes. Her face reminds me of something. She smells deliciously of cognac. I hold her to me. Suddenly, slimy hotel names come tumbling from her lips: Eden Rock, Rampoldi, Balmoral, Hôtel de Paris: we had met in Monte Carlo. I glance over the English girl’s shoulder at my father. He smiles and makes conspiratorial gestures. He’s touching, he probably wants me to marry some Slavo-Argentinian heiress, but ever since I arrived in Bordeaux, I have been in love with the Blessed Virgin, with Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I try to explain this until three in the morning but he chain-smokes his cigars and does not listen. We have had too much to drink.
We fell asleep at dawn. The streets of Bordeaux were teeming with cars mounted with loudspeakers: ‘Operation rat extermination campaign, operation rat extermination campaign. For you, free rat poison, just ask at this car. Citizens of Bordeaux, operation rat extermination. . operation rat extermination. .’
We walk through the streets of the city, my father and I. Cars appear from all sides, hurtling straight for us, their sirens wailing. We hide in doorways. We were huge American rats.
In the end we had to part ways. On the evening before term started, I tossed my clothes in a heap in the middle of the room: ties from Sulka and the Via Condotti, cashmere sweaters, Doucet scarves, suits from Creed, Canette, Bruce O’lofson, O’Rosen, pyjamas from Lanvin, handkerchiefs from Henri à la Pensée, belts by Gucci, shoes by Dowie & Marshall. .
‘Here,’ I said to my father, ‘you can take all this back to New York — a souvenir of your son. From now on the khâgne scholar’s beret and the ash-grey smock will protect me from myself. I’m giving up smoking Craven and Khédive. From now on it’s shag tobacco. I’ve become a naturalised Frenchman. I’m definitively assimilated. Will I join the category of military Jews, like Dreyfus and Stroheim? We’ll see. But right now, I am studying to apply to the École Normale Supérieure like Blum, Fleg and Henri Franck. It would have been tactless to apply to the military academy at Saint-Cyr straightaway.’
We had a last gin-fizz at the bar of the Splendid. My father was wearing his travelling outfit: a crimson fur cap, an astrakhan coat and blue crocodile-skin shoes. A Partagas cigar dangled from his lips. Dark glasses concealed his eyes. He was crying, I realised, from the quaver in his voice. He was so overcome he forgot the language of this country and mumbled a few words in English.
‘You’ll come and visit me in New York?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so, old man. I’m going to die before very long. I’ve just got time to pass the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure, the first stage of assimilation. I promise you your grandson will be a Maréchal de France. Oh, yes, I am planning to try and reproduce.’
On the station platform, I said:
‘Don’t forget to send me a postcard from New York or Acapulco.’ He hugged me. As the train pulled out, my Guyenne plans seemed suddenly laughable. Why had I not followed this unhoped-for partner in crime? Together, we would have outshone the Marx Brothers. We ad-lib grotesque maudlin gags for the public. Schlemilovitch père is a tubby man dressed in garish multi-coloured suits. The children are thrilled by these two clowns. Especially when Schlemilovitch junior trips Schlemilovitch père who falls head-first into a vat of tar. Or when Schlemilovitch fils rips away a ladder and sends Schlemilovitch père tumbling. Or when Schlemilovitch fils surreptitiously sets fire to Schlemilovitch père, etc.
They are currently performing at the Cirque Médrano, following a sell-out tour of Germany. Schlemilovitch père and Schlemilovitch fils are true Parisian stars, though they shun elite audiences in favour of local cinemas and provincial circuses.
I bitterly regretted my father’s departure. For me, adulthood had begun. There was only one boxer left in the ring. He was punching himself. Soon he would black out. In the meantime, would I have the chance — if only for a minute — to catch the public’s attention?
It was raining, as it does every Sunday before term starts. The cafés were glittering more brightly than usual. On the way to the lycée, I felt terribly presumptuous: a frivolous young Jew cannot suddenly aspire to the dogged tenacity conferred upon scholarship students by their patrician ancestry. I remembered what my old friend Seingalt had written in chapter II of volume III of his memoirs: ‘A new career was opening before me. Fortune was still my friend, and I had all the necessary qualities to second the efforts of the blind goddess on my behalf save one — perseverance.’ Could I really become a normalien?
Fleg, Blum and Henri Franck must have had a drop of Breton blood.
I went up to the dormitory. I had had no experience of secular schooling since Hattemer (the Swiss boarding schools in which my mother enrolled me were run by Jesuits). I was shocked, therefore, to find there were no prayers. I conveyed my concerns to the other boarders. They burst out laughing, mocked the Blessed Virgin and then suggested I shine their shoes on the pretext that they had been there longer than I.