The Sixth Lamentation

Chapter Fifty

The old butler led Anselm across the Boulevard de Courcelles towards a side entrance to Parc Monceau. They walked along a path until they reached one corner, near a monument to Chopin. Beside it was a play area with climbing frames and a sandpit, reserved for the under-threes. Stray fallen leaves skipped with each flick of the wind.

‘That is where Madame Klein used to live,’ said Mr Snyman, pointing to an elegant apartment building directly overlooking the grounds. Defined in those terms, the place appeared instantly hollow, its walls damp. ‘That is where Agnes learned the piano … it is where I first met her.’

They sat down on a bench near a flourishing lime tree. The grounds were deserted, as if the usual strollers had been carted off. Within the hour, at lunchtime, it would fill up again and then the noisy play would rattle over the ornate fencing and fight with the rumble of the traffic.

‘She’s dead?’ asked Mr Snyman.

‘Yes.’

‘Peacefully?’ There was almost a prayer in his voice.

‘Very much so.

Eventually Agnes had been taken to hospital. The final stages of life could not be handled very well so an ambulance was called. Death popped by while Agnes was lying on a trolley in a corridor, her hand held reassuringly by a nurse. Lucy had run to a pay phone to tell her father. When she’d got back Agnes had gone. The nurse had said she’d smiled. A few days later, Anselm had buried Agnes beneath sleet and rain in the presence of her family.

‘I would dearly have liked to have been there,’ said the old butler.

‘I remembered you.’

‘That is something.’ After a subdued pause he asked, ‘How did you find out about me?’

‘It came as I was falling asleep,’ Anselm replied. ‘But there are reasons. I just didn’t join them together properly. It was you who needed to escape, not your family. And yet they fled without you. There were other marks in the sand, like not coming back to Paris until no one could recognise you, and prodding Pascal to find Victor. And more. I didn’t understand them until I’d already guessed what they meant:

Anselm regarded the broken man with compassion. He would be a servant to the past until the day he died. It was his only home, and he was not welcome there.

The old butler stared deep into memory. ‘I got back to the house after Victor had gone,’ he said. ‘My father showed me the record of betrayal. I sometimes think he must have slapped me across the face. But he didn’t. I had condemned them all to death. But he understood. He knew I didn’t mean to be so weak.’ He paused. ‘Please, can we walk? My limbs stiffen up unless I move. I may as well tell you what I’ve kept to myself since Agnes was taken away from me, with my only son.

They walked side by side as Jacques Fougères spoke. Anselm listened, appalled.

‘There were only three passes. We had minutes to decide what to do. “Go!” shouted Snyman, “use my papers.” They’d been forged by some friends of Father Rochet, making him a Fougères, my brother. “When they come, I’ll say I’m you. At least it will buy time. For God’s sake, go now! I’ve nothing to live for but you have a son, you have Agnes.”‘

Jacques’ voice grew strong. ‘I said it wouldn’t work, because our identity cards had a photograph. He shouted again, “Go! Forget the detail … take all my other papers … if you have to, produce my birth certificate … but take the chance, go, now!” I have thought of Franz … that was his first name … every night since … sitting in our house, alone, waiting for them to come, knowing that he would die and I would live.’

And Anselm thought of Mr Snyman at Mauthausen, defending Father Rochet from the brutality of the guards, another honour that had devolved on to Jacques Fougères, the Resistance hero.

‘We rushed out of Paris. At one point a Gestapo official checked my father’s papers, then my mother’s, and when it came to me a distraction occurred and he waved us on. I didn’t care about my luck, I just hoped that Agnes would be safe, that Schwermann would keep to his side of the bargain.’

Dense clouds over Anselm’s mind began to lift, pushed by a quiet breeze. ‘Bargain?’

‘Yes. I trusted him. I had to, once he put forward his proposal.’

‘What proposal?’

‘It all happened on the day I was arrested for wearing the Star. I walked up and down Avenue Foch, wanting to goad Victor. If they picked me up I expected a few days’ detention, nothing more. They dragged me in after fifteen minutes and threw me into a room with no windows. The walls were stained with blood that had hit the plaster and dried in thick clumps, with long streams running to the ground. There were bits of skin and hair trapped in the mess. It stank. I couldn’t stop myself shaking, my arms, my legs, the lot. I started to cry. Then Schwermann came in with two others. They took down my trousers and tied me to a chair. The other two left and it was just him and me. There were screams echoing down the corridor.’

Jacques pulled air through his nose in slow heaves, as though labouring up a great slope. They turned past a kiosk selling fresh ground coffee, the aroma warm on the air. In front of them stood a delicate colonnade skirting a small lake. Its grace stung Anselm’s eyes.

‘Schwermann took out his pistol and forced open my mouth, resting the end of the barrel on my front teeth. I was so scared I wet myself and started blabbing nonsense about The Round Table, as if the disclosure of anything would save me. He put his gun away and listened with wide, hard eyes. I calmed, spilling everything out … even Robert’s existence. He asked lots of questions, telling me not to worry. He was elated. Then he left the room for about half an hour. When he came back he had a proposal.

‘Schwermann told me he wanted to smuggle a mother and child out of France. If I helped him, he would spare Agnes and me and Robert. The others would be arrested, of course, but they’d only get hard labour. So I agreed. But I told him I could only guarantee the child, because I didn’t have false papers for the mother, but that if she could get to Les Moineaux the monks would sort everything out.’

Through the corner of his eye, Anselm caught sight of a grotto, and flowerbeds, immaculately kept. He turned away to Jacques and asked, ‘Did Father Rochet help?’

‘I couldn’t involve him because he’d ask too many questions’ — he cleared his throat — ‘so I thought Agnes could be the courier, using her own papers for the child.’

‘Why her?’

He spoke the scalding words: ‘Because she was the only one who wouldn’t ask me why.’

They paused at the water’s edge. The sound of children at play floated high on a light wind.

Jacques said, simply ‘Looking back, he was planning how to save the mother. It was obvious and I never guessed … and I set the run up … just for the child.’

Their footsteps crunched on the tiny stones underfoot as they jointly meditated on the simple anatomy of betrayal. And Anselm reflected once more upon his capacity to misunderstand. Schwermann, when speaking to the cameras, had not been talking about Robert Fougères and his blackmail of Victor. There had been someone else.

‘He’d fallen for a French girl and had had a child,’ said Jacques dryly. ‘Only she turned out to be Jewish when the regulations were looked at more closely. He knew that in time she and her son would be finished. And then, by chance, I cropped up with an unexpected lifeline. So he saved them, leaving the remainder of her family to rot. The rest, Father, I think you know He did not keep his word.’

‘What happened to the boy’s mother?’ asked Anselm gravely.

‘I thought you knew That was part of the proposal Schwermann kept to himself. When Agnes was arrested he took her papers, all of them. That enabled his girlfriend to obtain a new identity card in Agnes’ name. How do I know? On leaving Paris we went to my brother Claude’s home near the Swiss border. He still had links with the Resistance around Fernay Voltaire and Gex because he’d been part of The Round Table network — although he concealed it by vocal support for Vichy So, my parents assumed a new role, finding placements for Jewish refugees and helping them to cross over. One day a woman claiming to be Agnes Aubret arrived. She’d made it to Les Moineaux, where the monks had arranged her journey to Gex. She stayed with us for three days. I made an excuse and stayed away until she was gone — it was unbearable. As far as I know, she was reunited with her child. I’d like to go home now

Bringing together what he had learned from Victor and Jacques, Anselm now finally understood what had happened in 1942.

Schwermann had fallen in love and had a child; a child that would be caught by the net — a net he would throw Then, by chance, he learned about The Round Table … and the existence of another mother and child — Agnes and Robert. That was in June 1942. By July Schwermann had planned with pitiless calculation the resolution of his dilemma: he forced Jacques to arrange the smuggling of his own child to safety, through Agnes, and only then was The Round Table broken. He arrested Agnes himself — having planned all along to take her identification papers so that the mother of his child could also escape. But that left Robert abandoned … so Schwermann allowed Victor to keep the child on the condition he incriminated himself to such an extent that he was trapped, and if the need ever arose for Schwermann himself to avoid capture he could compel Victor to use his connections at Les Moineaux. And then Anselm remembered: when the Gestapo came to Les Moineaux only Prior Morel was shot. There had been no search of the convent, where Schwermann’s child lay concealed. The infrastructure of escape had been left intact for the woman he loved.

Anselm and Jacques turned and retraced their steps back to the Fougères residence. Jacques explained how the Resistance in Paris, mindful of his parents’ service to the cause, concealed suspicions of Jacques’ treachery when Father Chambray came asking too many questions. They were content to point the finger at Father Rochet since they’d despised him as a drunkard communist. Jacques’ identity as Mr Snyman became a form of exile, which his father, to his dying day eased with compassion. Thereafter it was a secret, binding those in the family who had to know After the death of his father he lived with Claude, and when Claude died he joined Etienne — shortly before Pascal was born.

The myth of Jacques’ death at Mauthausen had bountiful consequences for the public reputation of his descendants. Keeping the story going led to accidental and conscious elaboration. By the early seventies, when Pascal was asking questions, Jacques had become the founder of The Round Table. Father Rochet, Madame Klein and all the others became bit-players in someone else’s drama.

‘You know, I think Mr Snyman … Franz … secretly loved Agnes.’ and he saved me for her sake. They played a lot of duets together, her at the piano and him with a cello.’ He paused, as if slipping back to that candle-lit drawing room, the darkness hard upon the windows. ‘You had to be there to know what it was like, listening to them in a room full of people who were all hunted and homeless. The melodies have got louder as I have got older, all of them now a single, crushing lamentation.’

They reached the great black door and Jacques inserted his key. ‘There’s often not much forgiveness in this life, you know, Father.’

‘Yes, I know’

With his rounded back to Anselm, the old man said, ‘Robert has a family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Children?’

‘Yes, and grandchildren.’

Jacques Fougères did not turn; he laid his head upon the door. Anselm said, ‘I’m sure I could arrange a meeting …

The quiet voice said in reply ‘No, Father, leave them in peace. To them I’m a dead man. It’s better that way.’

Anselm drew out the school notebook from his plastic bag and handed it to Jacques. ‘Agnes wanted Mr Snyman to have this. She gave it to me after I’d read out your poem. I’m deeply sorry it’s not for you.’

The old butler pushed at the door as though it were made of lead.

‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter why’ said Anselm desperately, ‘but you still helped save a boy Schwermann’s son.

Alert with melancholy the butler said, ‘I’ve often thought of him … growing into a man … while I believed Robert had been thrown away.

Anselm prickled with apprehension. He pictured a small man with haunted, penetrating eyes … the centre of a trinity … on his left, Lucy the adopted granddaughter of the woman who saved him; to the right, Max, his own blood. ‘Do you remember his name?’

‘Oh yes … Lachaise … Salomon Lachaise.’

The butler stepped inside, extending his hand. Anselm grasped it and said, ‘Jacques, that boy grew to be the man who avenged you.

The butler smiled a farewell and the door snipped into its lock.

Beneath a pale sun without heat, Anselm wandered back into Parc Monceau, back to the quiet spot opposite the former home of Madame Klein, and sat on a bench just beneath what was once her window

He thought of Salomon Lachaise: had he known that Schwermann was his father? His mother hadn’t told him. It was a secret too painful to disclose. Involuntarily Anselm suddenly recalled their first meeting, when he’d seen the small dark figure by the lake, cut out against the sky Salomon Lachaise had said, ‘I’ve come to look upon the father of my grief,’ and then, moments later, he’d fallen on his knees before a man, a first meeting with a stranger, exclaiming, ‘I am the son of the Sixth Lamentation.’ Then Anselm remembered his friend’s description of his mother, poring over the photographs of their lost family by candlelight with never a passing reference to the father he’d never known … the man whose name he’d never once mentioned in Anselm’s presence. She had kept her secret, somehow, but Salomon Lachaise had eventually divined its shape… perhaps when she, struck with terror, had begged her son to leave the past alone after he’d announced his intention to help track down the man whom she knew to be his father. Yes … for sure … Salomon Lachaise had known… and he’d waited until the final moment before issuing a condemnation that only he could give.

Anselm looked around, ready to cry The calm of Parc Monceau had been chased away by children; irrepressible, joyful, not yet hating school. Two or three darted past him, trails of sand falling from cupped fingers. His eye picked out the approach of a young woman aged about twenty-three or four. She glanced at her watch and lifted high a small bell, the kind Anselm had once seen round the necks of goats in Provence. She rang it vigorously releasing a thin tinkling heard more by its pitch than its volume. At the signal, other teachers casually appeared and ushered their urchins into a line of twos. Each child held the tail of the coat in front, forming a train. When the counting was over they were led off, singing a song that vanished on the wind.

After they had gone, Anselm rose and walked slowly after them, out through the ornamental gates and into the empty street.