The Sixth Lamentation fa-1 Page 34

  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 Fougeres 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 Fougeres 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.

  Epilogue

  ‘I saw the Sibyl at Cumae’

  (One said) ‘with mine own eye.

  She hung in a cage, and read her rune

  To all the passers-by

  Said the boys, “What wouldst thou, Sibyl?”

  She answered, “I would die.”’

  (Petronius: ‘Satyricon’, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

  The second notebook of Agnes Embleton.

  Written out by Miss Wilma Harbottle.

  Dear Jacques

  ‘Night and day I have lived among the tombs, cutting myself on stones.’

  Do you remember that? Father Rochet said it, laughing, and he added, ‘No, I’m not afraid of dying.’

  It was the day we were all called together to set The Round Table in motion. Father Rochet said if anyone was caught they were to blame him. I was worried on his account, about what they might do, and he just laughed. And afterwards you said he was the sort of chap who would cave in under pressure. Do you remember?

  Now that I’m dying, I can see lots of things far more clearly than I ever did before. When all the faces of my youth started coming back, I looked far yours. You didn’t come. That’s what first set me thinking. And something tells me you’re still alive.

  I have spent over half my life revisiting July 1942, always believing you and I, and our oldest friends, were betrayed by Victor. But, as I’ve said, I started seeing things differently. It wasn’t Father Rochet who caved in, was it? It was you.

  Did it happen when you were picked up for wearing that Star of David? I never sensed the lin
k before, between your arrest that June and the breaking of The Table in July. But as this note is being written, they’re preparing to put Schwermann on trial. Everything I hear moves from your arrest to the betrayal a month later as if they were unconnected, yet it’s obvious to me now that they were. I’ve looked back again. As usual, you organised the run. All the others were picked up in the afternoon, except for you. When I got out of Ravensbruck I was told you stayed at home after your family had gone. Why? Not for me. I was already in La Sante prison. Did you hang around so the Germans could find you easily? I don’t think so. No, something went badly wrong on that terrible day and it has something to do with that last run. So, Jacques, if anyone waited patiently for the knock upon the door that night it wasn’t you. Surely it wasn’t Franz… Mr Snyman?

  You had a hand in my dying, and our little Robert’s. You didn’t mean to, or want to. And if you have lived, as I believe you have, it has been no life. If 1 could see you again I’d kiss you and tell you what you must desperately want to hear. Instead, I raise these old hands of mine: may God protect you, always; and forgive you, as I do now.

  Agnes

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