The Sixth Lamentation

Chapter Ten

1

Anselm’s presence during that harrowing confrontation in the woods had established an understanding between him and Salomon Lachaise such that future relations could never be characterised by mere acquaintance. They had stood on the same burning ground. A few days later, just before his flight to Rome, Anselm knocked unannounced at the door of ‘The Grange’, a small B&B with a name plaque of heavy iron. He’d planned a walk deep within the monastic enclosure to The Hermitage, a shack by a stream where no one ever went except with the Prior’s permission — which he had obtained. Salomon Lachaise emerged, smiling and expectant, and Anselm led him back to the Priory to a locked oak door in a high wall of Saxon flint.

The bent key was ancient and large and required both of Anselm’s hands in the turning. The door swung open and they stepped through into the hungry silence of the fields. As with many hidden places in the grounds of a monastery, the fact that it was cut off produced in those who entered a surprising sensation of having been freed, set loose from a captivity they had barely recognised. With a light step they set off for The Hermitage in the distance.

‘How long will you stay?’

‘Until he goes.

Anselm said, with feeling, ‘It was most unfortunate that you should meet him in the way you did … without warning … or preparation.’

‘I could never have prepared myself.’ His relaxed face scanned the rolling fields, sunlight flashing upon his heavy glasses. ‘Anyway, I always look for something to be grateful for.’

Anselm flinched at the notion of thanks. But Salomon Lachaise said, ‘I am glad my mother was not there, to see him and to see me before him. It would have been…’The sentence vanished, not through emotion but because the right word did not exist.

Anselm asked, ‘Does she know that you are here?’

‘She died before he was exposed,’ he replied evenly ‘I am also grateful for that.’

‘Tell me about her,’ said Anselm, tugging, he suspected, at the one significant thread of a seamless garment.

‘In many ways I am here on her behalf. Her story will never be told. And neither will mine.’

Anselm understood that to be an imposing refusal, but Salomon Lachaise continued as though it had been a preface:

‘Like so many others, the war told her who she was and who she wasn’t. She thought she was a young Frenchwoman, a Parisian, with a sister, two brothers and the usual clutch of uncles and aunts … and, out of mind, a couple of estranged German grandparents she’d never known. There’s always someone that everybody else isn’t speaking to. Then France fell and the occupier told her she was Jewish — on account of the grandparents. She’d never seen a synagogue in her life.’

Anselm slowed, for Salomon Lachaise was keeping slightly back; but the small man maintained his position, almost out of sight, close to the shoulder of his guide. His deep voice came on the air, while Anselm could only see the empty fields, the wild abundance of the grass.

‘My mother and I escaped to Switzerland with the help of a smuggling ring known as The Round Table. Then the border closed. The rest of the family were taken…’

Anselm said, to the breeze, ‘Did she know anyone, where she settled?’

‘No. Like all the others she lived waiting, waiting, waiting … during the war… after the war … until she died … in some sense always waiting. But no one else survived.’

The bare grass ran to a long line of trees, their tops hazy where the phosphorescence of the sky fell upon them. Diffuse sunlight picked out against the vague green a sloping wall of The Hermitage.

‘Hitler, she liked to say, had been responsible for her conversion. Confronted with such evil, she said, there had to be a God. She crossed the border a believing Jew There were many like her … alone, cut off, yet free … and there was help. She opened a kosher shop beneath a bridge … in a sort of cavern … the shelves were packed with mysteries last seem by Solomon. And yet … paradise? Not quite. The shop became a meeting place for those who’d got out, and all of them were looking for someone, hoping by a wild chance that they might turn up. My mother did what she could to help, refusing payment, wiping the slate clean, but most of all she simply listened. She never mentioned her own loss. Ever since, hope, for me, has not been about anticipation … but endurance. Like the food taken at Passover, from a very early age I was introduced to the bitter and the sweet.’

They reached The Hermitage. Salomon Lachaise stared at the parched silver timbers with wonder, as though they were part of the Holy City. Through age and want of repair the whole shack sloped to one side. A covered veranda fronted a stream that chattered between low banks towards a copse. Anselm said:

‘We’re allowed to come here for a few days at a time. There’s tap water, a stove, a couple of chairs and a bed … little else.’

They sat in the shade of the veranda, and Anselm asked, ‘Did you ever find out anything about your family … those you lost?’

‘We only ever talked of them once,’ said Salomon Lachaise. ‘I asked, late one night when I was in bed. She said, “Get up and put your coat on.” I did. Back we went to the shop. She pulled out a cardboard box of photographs and a menorah … and there, by the dim light of eight candles, she gave me through tears the names for the faces … then she put them back under the counter. That was as far as she could go.’

‘She kept them in the shop?’

As if explaining what should not be uttered, he replied, ‘She spent her waking life there, in that cavern.

Anselm held in his mind the image of a woman, alone, the till counted, ready for home. She locks herself in, comes back, lights the candles and reaches for the box, that lid. Ah, thought Anselm … that’s why she turned the key … to let her tears free. He said, ‘So you never learned anything about them?’

‘No. At first, I constructed lives for them. Later, I took refuge in learning. It was a most remarkable sensation that only left me as I got older, but I would read through the night as if those strangers of my blood were there in the room, inhabiting the shadows. That is how I reclaimed them for myself. And, with their help, I did well at school. It was said I had considerable promise.

‘That must have been a joy for your mother.’

‘It was. But there was very little money around. I was expected to work in the shop, but then … my life changed.’

‘What happened?’ asked Anselm.

‘Something extraordinary. At the beginning of the term I was due to leave school I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Sitting in his chair was a wiry fellow with a stiff, self-important manner — a lawyer, it turned out — who had come on his client’s behalf to see me. His message was simple enough. He had received funds from “a survivor” to secure me a university education.’

Anselm, marvelling, said, ‘Some would call that a blessing.’

‘Indeed,’ replied Salomon Lachaise with a numinous, inquisitive smile. ‘So you would. My mother did the same. She spent the remainder of her days trawling over the names of all those she had helped, wondering who it might have been so she might thank them. She saw a door open before me, and in due course I passed through to a whole life, a whole universe I would never have otherwise known.’

‘And your patron’s identity remained a secret?’

‘Yes.’

Salomon Lachaise explained that the lawyer had entrusted administration of the finances to a local solicitor of his choosing — insisting on separate representation in case a conflict of interest arose between his client and the young Lachaise.

‘And that is how I met a wonderful man, Josef Bremer, who became something of a father to me. All my life he has been a source of advice and encouragement.’

‘Incredible,’ said Anselm. ‘Whoever it was probably knew your mother, knew you, and just did it, forsaking recognition or repayment. It is the sort of thing that makes life worth living.’

‘And worth the dying.’

Anselm had the strange sensation of something hot having passed him by A trace was left behind, slightly acrid, like exhaust from an engine, but then it was gone, quickly dispersed by a breath of air. Salomon Lachaise said:

‘I found my home in the art of the Middle Ages. It has brought me great joy … and pain … always the bitter and the sweet.’

Not entirely sure the true meaning of the words had reached him, Anselm thought of the rivalry of academics, known to surpass even that of children. Consolingly he said, ‘Like all homes .’

‘And, no doubt, like all monasteries,’ said Lachaise.

‘Verily’ Automatically, insensitively, Anselm said, ‘You remained alone?’

‘Yes… although I nearly got married once …

‘What happened?’

After a thoughtful pause, Salomon Lachaise said, ‘She ran off with the maths teacher.’

‘Oh dear.’

They both looked at each other and burst into ringing laughter.

2

Evening light came with a faint chill. Together they retraced their steps through the fields, away from The Hermitage crouching by the stream. When they had gone a fair distance Salomon Lachaise stopped and turned, as though taking a mental snapshot of a place to hide.

Anselm said, ‘I meant to say sorry for the fact that … he is here at all.’

‘Thank you. I have to say your Prior must be singularly unconcerned about appearances.’

‘He is, actually But it wasn’t his decision.’

‘I see.’

Tact and a sudden disquiet prevented Anselm from disclosing that it had been the Vatican’s proposal. He simply said, ‘I know it looks bad.’

‘Perhaps it is bad,’ said Salomon Lachaise. ‘For someone like me it could so easily belong with all the other springs of lamentation which, I am afraid, are not simple misunderstandings. ‘

‘What do you mean?’ asked Anselm apprehensively Immediately he wished he’d let the matter pass.

‘There are too many to mention … they run wildly one into the other, from the first charge of deicide … to the expulsions of the Middle Ages … through to the complicated time of anguish, silence and diplomacy In my own way I, too, have known these.’

It was the old agonising problem for Anselm. He was forever confronting the face of a church to which he belonged, many of whose features he did not wholly recognise. He said, ‘I hope Larkwood offers you something different, another kind of spring.’

Salomon Lachaise, glancing over his shoulder, said, ‘I have already discovered one, in a place I least expected to find it.’

They walked on, the light swiftly thinning, the mad swooping of distant birds suddenly ended, leaving the sky bare, unscored. The high monastery wall grew larger, a dam between great banks of trees.

Salomon Lachaise said, ‘Do you know which great romance of literature emerges beside the pogroms of the Middle Ages as they erupted across Britain, France and the Rhineland?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It is the poetry of the mystic king … Arthur, The Round Table and the Grail.’

‘How strange. ‘

‘It’s as though the attacks upon the Jews and medieval chivalry belonged to the same cultural flowering. And then, fifty years ago, some genius set up a Round Table to save the Jews, to redeem its association with ancient hostility.’

Anselm, intrigued, glanced at his companion. Lachaise’s head was lowered, his face dark as he said, ‘Isn’t it all the more tragic, then, that the person who broke it apart was—’

Anselm finished the complaint, to demonstrate his understanding, his profound regret, ‘—able to find refuge in the arms of the Church.’

Salomon Lachaise seemed not to have heard. They had reached the oak door in the wall. Anselm forced in the key and turned it heavily They parted, promising to meet again, and Anselm felt the slow, piercing influx of shame: he had quite deliberately said nothing about his planned trip to Rome, which had imperceptibly come to present itself as something disagreeable. Unable to shake off the discomfort, he hurried back to the Priory. Climbing the spiral stone stairs to his room, it dawned on him that Salomon Lachaise had told him everything, and yet, with calculation, with regret, he had told him nothing.