THIRTEEN
Every couple who goes through a crisis imagines that travel will provide a miracle cure. That’s what they call an idée reçue. They believe that seeing new landscapes, meeting new people, and learning a foreign language is an infallible cure for their distress. Stephen and Rosélie were no different. In early summer, Stephen proposed they leave. Europe? Africa? Asia? He himself was in favor of Japan. For a long time Fumio had given him the desire to know this country, a little more than by the sushi bars in Soho or the Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes, which he had read dozens of times.
Rosélie refused, still smarting from her wounds to risk curious or racist looks flung full in her face or as a stab in the back. Despite Stephen’s loathing for the beach, a stay in Montauk on Long Island had to make do. Montauk is what the East Coast has that is closest to a village. No movie theater. A drugstore where sleeping pills are shelved side by side with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Wooden houses strung out along miles of beach. The ocean and the sky stretching to infinity. In Rosélie’s eyes, the sea at Montauk, like the English Channel, had nothing in common with that coquette with green eyes who, picking up her lace petticoats, sashays into the bays of Guadeloupe or seethes against its reefs. It was dull and lifeless, strewn here and there with tufts of foam clinging to her colorless garb. Nothing elating. Swimming was anything but exhilarating.
Whereas she had trouble getting over Ariel, La América, and the sound and fury of adultery, Stephen recovered extremely quickly and extremely well. He had become friends with a group of rugged men wearing yellow oilskins and sou’westers who initiated him in deep-sea fishing. Every morning he would get up at dawn and return in the evening loaded with swordfish and marlin that slowly decomposed in the fridge, since Rosélie had always loathed fish and its tasteless, anemic, strong-smelling flesh. When he was not out at sea, he would go and drink mugs of beer at the local tavern with his newfound friends. We must admit that, to his credit, unlike his companions he never got drunk, and came home around midnight, fully sober and not bawling “My Funny Valentine.”
One day a brunette, her pretty face crowned by a powder puff of curly hair, called out to Rosélie over the hedge and proposed they go for a swim. The invitation stunned her, especially as the other holidaymakers carefully avoided her. At the supermarket they would go out of their way not to find themselves in front of the basmati rice shelf at the same time as her. The stranger was called Amy Cohen, her husband, Caleb. They had three sons. They were Jews.
What is a Jew? Jean-Paul Sartre posed the question in Anti-Semite and Jew. Did he answer the question? Like every teenager, Rosélie had received The Diary of Anne Frank as a birthday present together with Wuthering Heights. She had read Emily Brontë’s tale over and over again, much to Rose’s surprise, since she could never get Rosélie interested in a novel, but she had never opened the Anne Frank. During endless discussions by Stephen and his colleagues, she had heard some maintain the Jews were victims turned perpetrators, while others claimed they were victims fighting for their survival. She was certain of one thing, though: they wore the yellow star as a mark of their singularity and exclusion, like her. Amy described to her journeys that, although they hadn’t taken place in the hold of a slave ship, were nevertheless wrenching experiences. Fleeing fires and pogroms, hunted from one Central European country to another, her family had stopped in Vienna long enough for her grandfather, who was a violinist, to play in Aïda for the inauguration of the Wiener Staatsoper. Then they were on the run again. This time, for safety’s sake, they had crossed the ocean and taken refuge in America. But that was where any resemblance to the naked migrants Rosélie knew, stopped. Amy’s father had invented a fake mother-of-pearl for making shirt buttons that had made him rich. In a just twist of fortune his sons preferred music to shirt buttons, and the five boys played in the various city orchestras. Only Amy had decided to devote her life to her family. She left university without graduating, and ever since, her days were reduced to mashing vegetables into puree, filling babies’ bottles with bottled water, and getting rid of foul-smelling diapers.
“Motherhood is the noblest of functions,” she would say, up to her eyes in poop. “Alas, ever since the feminists, it has been discredited. It makes me furious!”
Rosélie, usually not very bold, was bold enough to come out with Stephen’s famous axiom: “The most beautiful creations are those of the imagination.” Amy’s children, in fact, scared her. Three famished, howling children like vultures gorging on their mother’s liver and entrails. Unperturbed, Amy smiled.
“If I’m going to be devoured, I prefer it to be by my children.”
Did she mean Rosélie was being devoured by Stephen?
On weekends the men did not set out to sea. Grandparents, parents, and friends streamed in from New York. The city dwellers’ cars jammed the streets while the tavern was always full. One Sunday Amy invited Rosélie and Stephen to lunch. Aaron, her youngest brother, with a mane of hair like Beethoven on the box sets of his complete symphonies, had just played Gustav Mahler in Paris and, together with his wife, Rebecca, had been horrified by the anti-Semitism of the French. What a terrible lot! Not surprising they produced a Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Vichy, and Papon! Everyone had an anecdote to tell. The atmosphere became openly Francophobe.
“During the last war, guess what all the French soldiers wanted to learn in German?” Aaron asked.
“….”
“‘I surrender!’ They all wanted to say ‘I surrender!’”
As a rule, Stephen was the first to jeer at the French, but he liked nothing better than to sow dissension. In the midst of a chorus of laughter, he declared:
“I could turn Sartre’s phrase round at you. Instead of ‘It’s the anti-Semite who makes the Jew,’ ‘It’s the Jew who makes the anti-Semite.’”
Following a deathly silence, there was a general outcry. Stephen reveled in the effect he had produced and persisted.
“It’s the same with Rosélie. Her individualistic behavior provokes a reaction. She then interprets it from a perspective she has fixed in advance.”
Even Caleb, an overworked obstetrician, who only turned up at Montauk on weekends, stopped dozing in the sun beside his sons and came to join in the conversation. Amy was the shrillest of them all.