An Infinity of Mirrors, Page 3

  Three

  Paul-Alain Bernheim slumped against the wall of the lift, thinking that all of the things which had made him an actor might be the things which would ruin his daughter’s life. If he had been a banker he would have seen it as his duty to tell her both sides of the story of being a Jew: the thrilling, unbowed, glorious, unbending side, and also the assaulted, exploited, and outcast side. But he had become an actor, and he had found that his carefully nurtured theatrical pride could not bear to acquaint her with such degraded realities as ghettos and pogroms. Perhaps he had pushed her too far away from him tonight; was he taking her too far and too fast? How he wished that he had more time—but the German was being sent home on July 1st.

  A handsome woman, new to the building, got into the lift from the fourth floor, but Bernheim remained slumped against the side of the lift with his hat on. She thought he was drugged. She recognized him and she had heard that actors took drugs.

  Bernheim considered that he could tell Paule that the Germans had no perspective about themselves, and that a lack of insight is the worst of all curses. They took history event by event as it happened, and still they could not distinguish between evil and good. They served each event and each master until they could not turn back when their leader urged them forward, because they were unable to remember the meanings they had left behind. Change took the place of choice, but there could never be freedom without self-understanding and there could be no self-understanding without the ability, the hunger, to choose.

  Bernheim strode out of the lift ahead of the handsome lady passenger, walked through the main door, and got into his car, a new Delage sport cabriolet which he had won at chemin de fer and which he had decided to give to Carmen Victoria Lopez-Figueroa, the Mexican poetess, when he next saw her. He turned the car into the rue Freycinet and moved toward the rue de Belloy, changing gear instinctively and thinking that he could hold off speaking about the habitual German attitude toward Jews until he reached talk number four or five, somewhere around June 20th. There would be ample time before July 1st, and of course, when he met the German the following evening he would go to work on him himself. For example, he might invite him to come backstage at the theatre. Perhaps Coco Marquisada would give him a dose of clap. She would do it for him, as a favor. If he really were the grand Prussian officer who flaunted his honor at every turn he certainly wouldn’t think of marrying a wonderful girl such as Paule and passing on the clap. Or Olivier Jerrau would be happy to play cards with him. Officers were very sticky about gambling debts because they knew they could be reported, the slimy sons-of-bitches.

  Bernhehn stopped the car in front of a small house in the rue La Pérouse and hit his horn lightly. There had never been a deluded movement in Germany that the Germans had not rushed to join. None of them seemed to have even the slightest understanding of a single element of politics. The divisive leaders spoke only to each German individually, and that German did not seem able to comprehend that the politician was interested in massed Germans only to gain power. They must feel about dying the way I feel about loving, Bernheim thought, and he shuddered. Since they were unable to retain the memory of the many possible ways to die, they had had to invent that relentless pecking order so that they would not only be able to get permission to die before their time—and, if they were lucky, have the chance to destroy something first or to take a few Auslaender with them—but they could die under orders so that no one would be able to blame them for having died in the first place.

  A short woman with hands like a bear’s paws and each hand covered with diamonds, came out of the small house. Bernheim opened the door to the front seat beside him. The woman had very large eyes, deeply ringed, and a mouth like the slit on a mailbox. “Take off the diamonds,” he said as she slammed the door.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not very bright to take two hands filled with diamonds on a partouse with a lot of strangers.”

  “Don’t worry. If they want these diamonds they’ll need to take my fingers off. I had them made good and tight. It’s better than insurance.”

  The car turned into the Avenue Kléber from the Avenue des Portugais, then moved purposefully toward the Etoile. “Such tight rings must hurt your fingers,” Bernheim said absent-mindedly, thinking of Paule.

  “Well, yes. But nobody can get my diamonds.”

  In a short time their car swung out of the Porte Maillot into the Bois de Boulogne. Bernheim drove sedately along the Allée de Longchamp. One hundred and fifty yards ahead a car was parked in the darkness with its lights on. As they came up Bernheim dipped his headlights twice. The other car repeated the signal. The woman beside Bernheim bit her lip tightly as they came abreast; each car turned on their interior lights separately. A stout man with a mouth which ran diagonally under his button nose sat next to a seamy woman in seedy clothes and with hair like steel wool. Bernheim’s thoughts were on his daughter, but his companion stared eagerly into the other car. The fat man stared back at her without expression while the other woman stared wearily ahead.

  “Keep going,” the woman said to Bernheim. He moved the car smoothly along the road. “We had him two weeks ago,” the woman said. “He should be kept out of partouses. He never brings his own woman. He picks up whores at the Porte Maillot and everybody else runs the risk of picking up the peste.”

  “Shocking,” Bernheim said. Around a turn another illuminated car, a Hotchkiss, was parked, and he pulled in beside them. The interior lights went on and all four occupants stared at each other. “My God,” the woman in the other car said, “that’s Paul Bernheim, the actor.”

  Bernheim’s passenger wet her lips as she looked at the other driver. “I like him,” she said, and then addressed the other driver with roguish impatience. “Well?”

  “Take her, take her,” the other woman said. “Ai! Paul-Alain Bernheim! No one will believe me.”

  Both women opened their car doors at the same time. The blond woman walked around the front of the parked car and Paul’s passenger walked around its rear. Each sat down in the other’s car and closed the door. The woman with the diamond-covered hands said, “Are you nervous, baby? Don’t be nervous.” Bernheim leaned across to ask if it was to be a three- or four-car partouse. The other man still could not speak, but both women repeated the word four several times.

  Bernheim sent his car forward and the other car followed him, its driver breathing shallowly because his trousers were covered with short fingers and large diamonds. The procession turned right into the Route de Neuilly. “I am crazy about you on the stage, Monsieur Bernheim,” the blond woman said.

  “Ah, there we are,” Bernheim answered. A large Renault Reina Stella, its lights on, was parked near the Route de Madrid in cozy solitude. Bernheim pulled up alongside and leaned across the blond woman, both of them straining to look into the lighted car. The driver, a blue-skinned Senegalese wearing a floppy straw hat and a light-gray suit, was either extremely tall or prodigiously long-waisted. The white woman beside him was inordinately handsome, one of the most beautifully decadent, dissipated women Bernheim had ever seen. The Hotchkiss moved ahead and stopped, but neither occupant got out.

  “Three cars?” the Negro asked.

  “There was talk of trying for four,” Bernheim said.

  “God, look at him,” the woman next to Bernheim said intensely. “What a piece of man.” Her hand, as though on an independent mission of its own, dug its fingers into Bernheim’s upper thigh. The Senegalese and the wonderfully destroyed woman talked to each other in what seemed to be a dialect, and then the Negro said, “Four would be fine but three is fine, too, and we have three. It’s late. My lady says we make it with three cars.”

  “Oh, Jesus, yes,” the blond woman said. Bernheim tapped his horn lightly and the nervous man in the car ahead leaned out and looked back at them. “We have a vote to keep it to three cars,” Bernheim called out to him. The head ducked in for a conference: the head of the other woman could not be se
en. The blond woman next to Bernheim said, “Oh, honey, let me ride with this black one. I’ll make it up to you later. Let me ride with that one.” The man ahead of them leaned out again and said in a loud quavering voice, “Three will be fine.”

  “You want to change cars?” the Senegalese called over to the excited blond.

  “I want to change, darling,” she said. “This one wants to change.” Bernheim wanted to thank her; he could not stop staring at the ravaged-looking woman in the other car.

  “We will change cars,” the crumbling beauty said in a heavy Hungarian accent. She bit the Negro’s earlobe, then got out of the car on the far side. As the women changed cars, Bernheim gave the address of the small house in the rue La Pérouse. When the women were seated, Bernheim hit the horn lightly again. The Hotchkiss took the lead, the Reina Stella was in second place, and Bernheim’s car completed the little unit. “I know you,” the Hungarian woman said to Paul. “More than six women have told me all about you.” She laughed in her throat with appreciative lust.

  The procession had doubled back through the Bois. Ahead of them the other two cars had just turned for the exit to the Avenue Foch when there was a loud sound and the Delage listed, then limped. “Merde!” Bernheim said softly. “A flat tire!”

  The Hungarian woman became indignant. “A flat tire? What are you going to do?”

  “I like you,” Bernheim said magnanimously. “My suggestion is that we get a taxi and go to my apartment on the Avenue Gabriel.”

  “No. I could not. I like you too, but with me it must be group sex. It is the only way for me—I am a stone without it. Four years ago we were snowbound in a train in a pass in the Haute Savoie. Seventeen women, twenty-nine men. I was a different woman then. I was married to a Prince and—”

  “Which Prince?” Bernheim was as conscious as anyone else of status symbols.

  “Passet-Grimetski.”

  “Oh, yes. He paints on dinner plates?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “I knew him in the war. That is, just after the war when I was waiting to get home. I had made it as far as Brindisi.”

  “Plon-Plon was in Brindisi?”

  “Oh, yes. And very active, too.”

  “How strange that he never mentioned it. He knows that my great-aunt was from Brindisi.”

  Bernheim opened the car door slowly, saying, “Well, I’d better start to find us a cab and help you along with some of this group therapy.” He smiled at her warmly and, still thinking hard about his series of talks with Paule, he got out of the car in the darkness of the park and was hit by a large Citroën driven by James Cardinal Moran of Ludlow, England, and, according to the subsequent coroner’s report, was knocked forty-five feet.

  When the English Cardinal and the Hungarian Princess reached Bernheim, he was nearly gone. Cardinal Moran knelt beside him and began to murmur the last rites, knowing it could do the man no harm.

  “Franz! Set to!” Bernheim cried loudly and distinctly, and then he died. It was two minutes after twelve in the morning of June 14, 1932.

  Four

  KILLED BY ENGLISH CARDINAL

  ACTOR DIES BLESSING FRANCE

  AS PRINCESS WEEPS

  IN BOIS DE BOULOGNE:

  GREAT ACTOR DIES

  IN ARMS OF

  PRIMATE & PRINCESS

  FINAL WORDS

  “France is Everything!”

  The understandable mistake of an English Cardinal and a Hungarian Princess of the words “Franz! Set to!” to mean “La France, c’est tout!” silenced all of Bernheim’s enemies at his death, for to minimize a man who had spoken such last words in the presence of two witnesses of such integrity would have provoked a lynching by an emotional populace. Though his lawyer was soon to hand over to his daughter bank cipher numbers and securities from funds and investments held entirely outside France, the national press, on the morning of the death of Paul-Alain Bernheim and for days thereafter, sternly proclaimed him to be “a true Frenchman” and “a great patriot who died as he lived.” The Chamber of Deputies grieved that the nation’s greatest artist had been struck down and urged all of France into mourning.

  The police reached Cours Albert I with the tragic news at seven-twenty the following morning; they had felt that the daughter might as well be allowed to sleep while she could. At seven twenty-five, Lieutenant-Colonel von Rhode’s copy of the morning newspaper arrived as he was putting finishing touches on the study he had written the night before. He was absorbed in his text, and the orderly put the newspaper on the table beside him.

  The employment of mobile and armored forces in battle will usually mark a decisive phase, and the tanks allotted should therefore be designed to insure or confirm the success of the main attack. Tank brigades or other mechanized forces are not suited for attacking strongly fortified localities and should generally be used to attack the enemy’s weakness rather than his strength. Suitable uses may be to strike the enemy on the flank, to attack enemy reserves in movement in order to prevent their intervention in battle, or to attack gun positions, headquarters, or other valuable points in the rear, when results gained are calculated to have decisive influence on the main attack.

  A housefly caused von Rhode’s glance to fall on the photograph on the front page of the newspaper. It ran on four columns. He took the paper up slowly, unfolding it to read the story which ran below the fold, then read the eulogy heavily bordered in black and boxed on two columns.

  One of the most intensely human citizens of the most endearingly human nation on this earth, our France, is gone. Paul-Alain Bernheim lived for the sake of living, not to live “correctly.” With human genius for blending Humanity’s whims and self-indulgences with Humanity’s aspirations, he cared less about making a mistake or an enemy then he did that one day he would be done with a life in which he had made all of the mistakes and all of the enemies humanly possible.

  Paul-Alain Bernheim is dead, blessed with humanism. His life was a vivid explosion which assured all who would seek to curb him that there was little enough time given us for living. In that measure of humanism and expanding life, he was France.

  Von Rhode grabbed his cap and, yelling for a car, rushed out of the building.

  Paule, in a negligee, took the news from the police numbly. Yes, she would identify the body. Yes. Yes. Yes to anything. When they left she turned away blindly from Clotilde and Mme. Citron and walked slowly along the corridor to her father’s study, touching the wall for support. She closed the door behind her and stood where all the minutes of her father’s life had been crowded into the leather-bound books. Wherever he had gone this time, perhaps to haunt the rooms in the Hôtel Meurice, to which he had consigned all of his loving wives, a part of him was here and she would stay here with it. He had never sent her away with the others, and this room was as far as she could follow him. How could she ever leave this room? How could she step on the cracks in the pavement of time if he were not ahead of her to set the jaunty pace? She took down the first leather-bound book, as if she wanted to read over the minutes of his life again to try to understand what he had left unsaid to her.

  In her grief she had left the front door open. Veelee entered and dropped his cap on a chair. Hearing the sobbing, he moved along the corridor and opened the door to the study. He stood behind Paule’s chair and put his hands on her shoulders to let his strength flow into her, and as she turned to look up, he lifted her into his arms, touching her hair, murmuring softly. He had the wit to speak in French. She had leaned hard on the protection of only one man all of her life. Now she saw that one man had been replaced with another, and she was able to cut the tie which bound her to her father.

  The funeral was a spectacular of grief, and many flash guns. Three independent musical ensembles, totaling forty-six instruments, were commissioned by three anonymous mourners who evidently had the same idea that he would have wanted it that way. Seven ballerinas of an amazing spectrum of ages were at graveside. Actresses of films, opera
, music halls, the theatre, radio, carnivals, circuses, pantomimes, and lewd exhibitions mourned in the front line. There were also society leaders, lady scientists, women politicians, mannequins, couturières, Salvation Army lassies, all but one of his wives, a lady wrestler, a lady matador, twenty-three lady painters, four lady sculptors, a car-wash attendant, shopgirls, shoplifters, shoppers, and the shopped; a zoo assistant, two choir girls, a Métro attendant from the terminal at the Bois de Vincennes, four beauty-contest winners, a chambermaid; the mothers of children, the mothers of men, the grandmothers of children and the grandmothers of men; and the general less specialized, female public-at-large which had come from eleven European countries, women perhaps whom he had only pinched or kissed absent-mindedly while passing through his busy life. They attended twenty-eight hundred and seventy strong, plus eleven male friends of the deceased.

  The counsel for the departed, Maître Gitlin, read a short service over the coffin at the cemetery.

  As required by German Army regulations, Lieutenant-Colonel von Rhode, on applying for permission to marry a foreigner, had no trouble whatsoever in securing approval from the Reichsministerium through his superior officer, General Klarnet, even though the woman was a Jew. This was a tribute to his family’s ancient traditions in the military service of his fatherland.

  Five

  The law office of Maître Gitlin was in his large apartment, as was the custom, on the ground floor of a building on the Boulevard Malesherbes above the Place St. Augustin. It opened onto a glass-roofed garden containing exotic plants and flowers. The office itself had lawyers’ reassurances of leather and mahogany, with tiers of brightly oiled books in rich colors. One glass wall, which was illuminated during the day by sunshine and by floodlights at night to comfort Maître Gitlin, contained eleven gorgeous tropical birds: a hoopoe, a lilac-breasted roller, an emerald cuckoo, an orange dove, and others—all poised in flight or perched alertly, all frozen by taxidermy as brilliant, as unfeeling, and as lacking in significance as the history of lawyers on earth. Maître Gitlin had a gramophone record, activated by a foot pedal beneath his desk, which simulated the yawping and twittering of the stuffed birds.