We made love almost every night; we did it in the big white bed or on one of his furs; we did it limitlessly, without forethought, whenever the mood struck us, sometimes tattooing each other in scratches and bite marks, at others, trembling with tenderness. After midnight, our fountains gone dry, floating, we would find each other again, through words, professing our love and saying that everything was just right and how lucky we were to be together and that when the war ended we would move to Foix and go hunting and give grand banquets and dances and watch many children grow up and grow sweetly old together among horseback rides and pastoral violins. Sometime we fought. We fought over silly things and he would shout at me and I’d hurl shoes, bottles, and elaborate Hussar insults at him. But soon we’d make up, each of us taking the blame for having started the quarrel. On Sundays we’d stroll through the city and have lunch at the hostelry or at a café. In the afternoons we’d entertain ourselves playing cards or chess, although we played other games too; that we were God and could create the world anew, for example, beginning with a second Earthly Paradise—which we would describe in exhaustive detail on the embossed Intendance paper—full of everything except forbidden fruits, talking serpents, and trees of the knowledge of good and evil. Other times we played the difficult-to-attain-treasure game, searching the house for an imaginary prize, guided by a crack in the parquet floor, the gaze of the Florentine lady in the painting that hung in the vestibule, the slant of a nail, or a sudden ray of sunlight filtering through a slit in the window, finally reaching a hand under a piece of furniture to pull out a stray stocking, a button from his fur cape or a dusty plum, finds we would celebrate with great merriment and Rhine wine, pretending that life was an eternal lark, as if, in some way, we already knew that it was to be our last summer together.
And in the middle of the summer Corinne arrived, with her beautiful eyes and her shabby shoes. I can still see her in the doorway, a cheap traveling case in her hand, asking resolutely after her brother Robert. Stunned, with no idea what to say, I stepped aside to allow her in.
“Robert is away for Field Exercises. Four days. He’ll return on Saturday,” I said, motioning for her to sit on the davenport.
I knew for certain that she was Robert’s old lover. Surely she had presented herself as his sister in order to avoid any uncomfortable explanations; perhaps, in her place, I would have done the same. I don’t know why but, seeing her seated rigidly on the edge of the sofa, looking obliquely at the tapestries, it occurred to me that she’d had a baby by Robert and had now come seeking money. But as she spoke, I realized with growing alarm that she seemed not to be lying, that Corinne was revealing herself to be, quite plausibly, Robert’s sister, and not just that, but his Jewish sister because, to begin with—as difficult as it was for me to believe—Robert’s name wasn’t Robert, but Yossel Dorfman, although she’d always called him Yossi. They had been born in Haguenau, near Strasbourg, first him and then her, as she was a year his junior.
“My father, like his father before him, was a shoemaker, a poor man, though not uneducated,” she said, after drinking a glass of wine, hurriedly, in the same way she was telling her unlikely story. “Yossi and I left home years ago, although not together. Times had changed and it was the young people’s moment. It was not uncommon for Jewish boys of Yossi’s age to buy a birth certificate with a Christian name and go off in search of a better destiny, a patriotic destiny. Wars claim lives, madame, but they also offer opportunities. My experience was also fairly common. I went to Italy with a man, Jean Blanchard, a quartermaster who obliged me to be baptized before he’d give me his name. He wasn’t a bad person. He died in a dark alley, stabbed to death. I never found out why. In any case, with what little I had, I went to Paris. There I found work as a seamstress in a uniform factory. Do you know how many stitches there are in a Hussar’s dress uniform, madame?”
“Many, I’m sure,” I said, perplexed, asking myself what this woman, who’d fallen on my home like a mortar shell, could possibly want from me.
“Many, no, madame. So many. Thousands upon thousands. You have no idea how long it takes to sew an entire uniform. I made sleeves. How many sleeves must I have made! Thousands and thousands. As for Yossi, I can tell you that he always dreamed of becoming a cavalry soldier. When he was twelve years old, when he was still a shoemaker’s apprentice, he ran away from home to go to work as a stable boy at the guardhouse in Strasbourg. From there he went to war under a different name and has not been home since. He doesn’t even write. And it’s not that Yossi is a bad son, madame. Surely you’ll understand that being Jewish is quite a disadvantage,” she said, pausing, as if to give me time to take in her turbid tale which, for some reason, although I told myself it couldn’t be true, was slowly turning my insides to ice. How could I ever accept Robert’s deceit, his hypocrisy?
“Of course Yossi will have told you all of this. And it’s not just religion that makes us different; it’s also our customs, our traditions. My father, for example, used to throw my letters into the fire without reading them, and if my mother heard anything from me it was because I wrote to her at a friend’s address. Even today, mute and paralyzed though he is, I can read the rage in my father’s eyes at my presence. Our tradition is strict. Don’t misunderstand me, madame, but I know Yossi much better than you do. You should forgive him his . . . how shall I put it? His eccentricities. It’s not easy to pull the past up by the roots, the name of one’s father and grandfather, the rituals of the faith one was born into. It’s not easy, madame. You must know of the poverty, of the filth of our neighborhoods, and, more than anything else, of the hatred and the scorn that we inspire; that’s the worst part. Jews are conscripted into the army, but only as cannon fodder. You’ll not find a single Jewish name among the Hussars. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to go to Boulogne and pass myself off as his lover.”
“But what do you mean, madame? Please, explain yourself!” I said, standing up and backing toward the wall.
“Well, just think of it. The troops had been deployed for so long, for more than two years, and Yossi would have called attention to himself had he not had a woman in all that time. After all, he was a Hussar, a man of honor and reputation. But is it possible that you didn’t know that we lived together in Boulogne?” she said, seeing my expression of disbelief. “Well, if you don’t believe me, just ask his friend, Madame Polidor. She visited us on occasion. An enchanting woman. Yossi fought a duel for her. Don’t worry, madame, it was not a romantic entanglement. Her lover, an officer with a foreign-sounding last name, hit her in public and Yossi cuffed him. ‘A lovely gesture that will add to my reputation,’ he told me when he returned home. Reputation. That’s the most important thing to Yossi, madame. To have a good reputation. To be respected in his regiment. To be loved by women such as yourself.”
Crying with indignation and shame, I let myself sink down the wall to the floor. Crouched in the corner, I covered my face with my hands. Just when I thought I’d hit the bottom of that well of humiliation, along came the biggest insult of all: “But what camp follower in Boulogne