Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

“Shut him up,” ordered the younger Gabriel, but Gabriel was struggling for breath.

“I have lost everything and everyone but I still have a name,” said his uncle. “I have a name to protect and defend. There is always the trace of a marriage certificate somewhere. Even when the registry office was bombed. Even when the papers had to be left behind. How old were you the last time you saw them?”

“Eight,” said Gabriel, now in control.

“Were they together?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did they have time to say goodbye?”

“They left me with a neighbor. The neighbor said they’d be back.”

“Where was this?”

“Marseilles. We were supposed to be from Alsace, but their French sounded wrong. People noticed I wasn’t going to school. Someone reported them.”

“Sounded wrong!” said his uncle. “Everything must have sounded wrong from the minute he left the university. It is a terrible story,” he said, after a moment. “No worse than most, but terrible all the same. Why, why did he wait until the last minute? And once he had got to Marseilles what prevented him from getting on a boat?”

“He was a man of action,” said Gabriel.

If his uncle wanted another Baum, he did not want a frivolous one. He said, “He was much younger than I was. I never saw him after nineteen-thirty. He went his own way. After the war I had the family traced. Everybody was dead — camps, suicide, old age. In his case, no one knew what had happened. He disappeared. Of course, it took place in a foreign country. Only the Germans kept accurate records. I wish you knew something about the marriage. I know that my late father would not have wanted a bastard in the family.”

Uncle August visited Nice, Lugano, and Venice, which he found greatly changed, then he returned to South America. He sent long letters to Gabriel several times a year, undeterred by the fact that he seldom received an answer. He urged his nephew to take a strong, positive line with his life and above all to get out of Paris, which had never amounted to more than an émigré way station. Its moral climate invited apathy and rot.

Gabriel read his uncle’s letters in La Méduse, a bar-tabac close to the old Montparnasse railway station. Actors and extras for television were often recruited there; no one remembered how or why this arrangement had come about. Gabriel usually sat with his back to the window, at a table to the right of the door facing the bar. He drank draught beer or coffee and looked at magazines other customers had left behind. Glancing up from one of his uncle’s letters, he saw the misted window in the mirror behind the bar. In a polluted winter fog neon glowed warmly — the lights of home.

His uncle wrote that he had liquidated his holdings at a loss and was thinking of settling in South Africa. He must have changed his mind, for a subsequent letter described him retired and living near a golf course, looked after by the housekeeper he had often told Gabriel about — his first mention of any such person. A heart attack made it tiring for him to write. The housekeeper sent news. Gabriel, who did not know Spanish, tried to get the drift. She signed “Anna Meléndes,” then “Anna Baum.”

Gabriel was playing a Brecht season in a suburban cultural center when word came that his uncle had died. The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother Courage alternated for an audience of schoolchildren and factory workers brought in by the busload, apparently against their will. Gabriel thought of Uncle August, his obstinacy and his pride, and truly mourned him. His uncle had left him an envelope he did not bother to open, being fairly certain it did not contain a check.

No Baum memorial existed, and so he invented one. Upon its marble surface he inscribed:

Various Baums:

Gone

Father:

1909–1943 (probably)

Mother:

1912–1943 (probably)

Uncle:

1899–1977

Gabriel B.:

1935 — ()

Beneath the last name he drew a line, meaning to say this was the end. He saw, however, that the line, far from ending the Baum question, created a new difficulty: it left the onlooker feeling that these dates and names were factors awaiting a solution. He needed to add the dead to the living, or subtract the living from the dead — to come to some conclusion.

He thought of writing a zero, but the various Baums plus four others did not add up to nothing. His uncle by dying had not diminished the total number of Baums but had somehow increased it. Gabriel, with his feet on the finish line and with uncounted Baums behind him, was a variable quantity: for some years he had been the last of the Baums, then there had been two of them. Now he was unique again.

Someone else would have to work it out, he decided — someone unknown to him, perhaps unborn. In the meantime he had the memorial in his head, where it could not be lost or stolen.

Gabriel’s Liselotte

Soon after Gabriel’s uncle’s visit, a generation of extremely pretty German girls suddenly blossomed in Paris. There would be just that one flowering — that one bright growth. They came because their fathers were dead or exiled under unremarkable names. Some of them were attracted to Gabriel — Gabriel as he was, with the dark locks, the serene brow — and he was drawn in turn, as to a blurred reflection, a face half-recalled.

Gabriel at that time still imagined that everyone’s life must be about the same, something like a half-worked crossword puzzle. He was always on the lookout for definitions and new solutions. When he moved close to other people, however, he saw that their lives were not puzzles but problems set in code, no two of which ever matched.

The pretty girls went home, finally, whistled back by solemn young men with solemn jobs. They had two children apiece, were probably rinsing the gray out of their hair now. (Gabriel cut his own as short as possible as it grew scarce.) He remembered Freya, who had thrown herself in the Seine over a married man, but who could swim, and Barbara, whose abortion two or three of them had felt bound to pay for, and Marie, who had gone to Alsace and had nearly been crowned Miss Upper Rhine before they found out she was a foreigner. Gabriel’s memory dodging behind one name after the other brought him face-to-face with his Liselotte. Daughter of a dead man and a whore of a mother (which seemed to be a standard biography then), embarked on the au-pair adventure, pursuing spiritual cleanness through culture, she could be seen afternoons in Pare Monceau reading books of verse whose close print and shoddy bindings seemed to assure a cultural warranty. There was something meek about the curve of her neck. She had heard once that if one were arrested and held without trial it was an aid to sanity to have an anthology of poems in one’s head. Poor Liselotte, whose aid to sanity never got beyond “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, Si bleu, si calme!” held the book flat on her knees, following the words with her finger.

“Who would want to arrest you?” Gabriel asked.

“You never know.”

Well, that was true. Thinking there might be a better career for her he gave her lines to try. She practiced, “Is it tonight that you DIE?” “IS it TONIGHT that YOU die?” Gabriel counted six, seven, eight shades of green around the place in Pare Monceau, where she sat asking this. He used to take the No. 84 bus to see her — he who never went out of Montparnasse unless he had to, who had never bothered to learn about bus routes or the names of streets. For the sake of Liselotte he crossed the Seine with prim, gloved women, with old men wearing slivers of ribbon to mark this or that war. Liselotte, now seeking improvement by way of love, made him speak French to her. She heard, memorized, and recited back to him without flaw his life’s story. He had promised the child-Gabriel he would never marry a German, but it was not that simple; in an odd way she did not seem German enough .