GROWING UP IN SUNLIGHT

Light. The light. It began with the light. He reflected on the idea of light. The memory of it scintillated inside his head. He recalled the sunrays coming through the slats in the shutters of his room, those stripes of light revealing so many particles in the air. He remembered how he could see the air. He had held up his arm and felt the warmth on his skin. The whole of the wall was covered in parallel lines of light, and in the air the smell of the pines came flooding in along with the sun. All that was not so very long ago. Here he was now, in the shadows, but he had come to it from what he considered to be a revelation. It was the first time he had actually followed up on something. Without knowing he was beginning to learn for himself. He was not sure what he’d hope to find, but he knew it would be there, in the shadows. He was eager to find the light.

He had come into the city with his family. Most every Thursday and Sunday his parents would bring them into the city. His brothers and he usually went to a cinema or theatre matinee, whilst his parents went to visit with friends, mostly Hungarian Jews, refugees from the war. They had come to Paris from concentration camps and resettlement centres all over continental Europe and some, with trades, had started up again, hoping to make a life for themselves. The tailors, carpenters and tradesmen very soon found a niche for themselves. His parent’s great friends were the Weiss’s. Tibor Weiss was a furrier who lived with his wife Magda and their daughter Yvonne in a flat on the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, in the 9^eme Arrondissment. He had his studio workshop, around the corner, in the Rue des Petites Ecuries. Much of the area was devoted to tailors and furriers. He loved going to the workshop. All the ladies there made a fuss and spoiled him. The ladies actually made a fuss of his brothers as well, and commiserated with the parents. “C’est domage qu’ils sont né pendant la guerre”.

He loved watching them cut and assemble the furs, but mostly it was the smell and feel of the materials. It was a wondrous labyrinth of racks and hangers dripping with furs of all sorts and colours: beaver, mink, sable, chinchilla, ermine, rabbit and fox together with leather coats and jackets. He loved running through the aisles letting the fur caress his face. There was a box full of off cuts of hides and furs he loved to play in. He had latched onto a silver fox tail, which Tibor said he would one day make into a hat for him. But that was later. He also loved going to their flat. Yvonne was beautiful. She was sixteen years old. She had smooth as silk olive skin, long straight black hair, and looked like Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe. She had all the latest music and the current popular hit was Doris Day singing Once I had a Secret Love and Yvonne was certainly that for him. He would find any excuse to sit or be near her, although she treated him like the twelve year old he was. He had no real idea of what he was feeling, just that he was all discombobulated whenever he was around her. It was happiness, confusion and anxiety all blended together. It was a pleasant sensation, and it felt good. Still, he was twelve and didn’t understand or dwell on how or why he felt as he did, he just enjoyed being there.

On this Thursday, he had gone to the cinema with his brothers to see Hamlet at a theatre on the Champs-Elysées. It was one of the few places that showed films in the original language using subtitles. It was quite a convenient cinema as it was more or less opposite the Maison du Café, where his parents could spend hours with the Weiss’s having coffees and cakes and chatting, meeting with and listening to a load of assorted expatriates complaining about not getting entry visas to the United States. Just around the corner was the American Library where he could spend hours looking for books to read. Mostly the books his father thought he should be reading by now. His father always thought he should be reading something or other by now. Usually it was Moby Dick or Don Quixote or something by Hemingway.

At the cinema he had been fascinated and completely drawn into the tale and in particular drawn into the light and the shadows. When the King roared, “Give me some light, away”, the screen was filled with shadows and figures shouting out “Lights! Lights! Lights!” and it was electrifying. The scene had stayed with him, it was as if all had been or was about to be revealed. Quite apart from that, there was the magic, the ghost, the sword fights, the intrigue, the whole thing had made an indelible impression. He needed to read it for himself and he knew where he had to go. And so, here he was, burrowed in the shadows of the library stacks, looking for Shakespeare, searching out the light.

The complete Shakespeare was huge, in volume as well as weight, and it was not quite the read he had anticipated. He found it all somewhat perplexing. The written play was different from the film. The words, although the same, were not the same. There were a lot more of them and the order in which things happened had been juggled around, not a great deal, but enough to give him pause.  And the light, where was the light, he thought there would be more description in the text, but there was nothing more than descriptions of entrances and exeunts; although, the words did, in part, refer to darkness, shadows and the sun. The images he had just seen fit the words he was reading very well, and filled his mind as he read. It was confusing, but then so much was confusing for him at this time. He began to read, slowly, struggling with the text, whispering the words aloud to himself, to make more sense, beginning with the night “When yond star that’s westward from the pole, had made his course to illume that part off heaven where it now burns, Marcellus and myself, the bell then beating one…-- Enter Ghost”. There it was, the ghost appearing in starlight. He carried on through the text, discovering the illuminations as he went along “It was about to speak when the cock crew” “The cock that is the trumpet to the morn, doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat awake the god of day” The ghost leaving with the coming of daylight “it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons” This was exhilarating and fired up his imagination, but he was interrupted, being rushed by his brothers. They were pressing to leave, as it was time to join the parents over the road. He had to leave the Shakespeare, as it was too heavy to carry; but, he would certainly get back to it somehow. On the way out, as his brothers were checking out their chosen books, he noticed the special Hemingway display by the loan counter. He quickly picked out The Old Man and the Sea to please his father. He was later very glad he had.

The Maison du Café was in an arcade just off the Champs-Elysées. It was an open plan café that ran the length, down the middle, of the arcade, on one side of which was the entrance to the Lido de Paris. When they got there, his parents were still deep in conversation with what seemed like a gang of Gypsies. Several tables had been drawn together and were covered in remnants and fresh pieces of cakes, tea in tall glasses, lemons, coffee cups, bowls of sugar cubes, ashtrays full of cigars and cigarettes. Above this landscape, as if conducting the babble, were men waving pipes, and women gesticulating, hardly pausing for breath other than to acknowledge that the children were back. They had pastries shoved at them from all directions and were told not to interrupt, even though they had said nothing. Hungarian hovered in the smoke over the Café with the odd mixture of German, Polish, Rumanian and Russian - Middle Europe in all its glory. The French got a bit of a look in now and then. In the various groups the world was being set to rights, governments overthrown, points of view entrenched, discarded and ridiculed, positions in life lamented and lauded, complaints emphasised and lots bemoaned. So it went on with no real end in sight. With their arrival the gaggle seemed to gather force. He had been here before. He could reckon on another couple of hours before his father would eventually have the last word or give up trying.

Still elated from his discoveries, he left the arcade, munching on a piece of almond cake, and wandered out onto the gloriously wide pavement to watch the comings and goings of the late afternoon crowd. He sat on one of the double brown benches that used to dot the length of the avenue. At first he sat musing, and then began observing the traffic and picking out his favourite cars. His father had a Citroên, an ‘onze normal’. He liked it, but he preferred the ‘Quinze’. It was slightly bigger with a larger boot at the back, and generally seemed longer and sleeker, and the black, shinier. The traffic was mostly a mixture of small cars and taxis with only the odd vintage sports car to perk up his or any public interest. He turned round on the bench, with his back to the traffic, arms resting on the top bar of the bench, legs in the middle, focusing his interest on the passers by. Some were window-shopping, others intent on their destination, still others just wandering along, all moving up and down. It was well after five o’clock, just beginning to get dark and the city was lighting up. Many of the office workers were beginning to make their way home. There were more people emerging from the buildings than going in, save for the arcade, where more people seemed to go in. His eye was attracted to a pretty dark haired woman wearing a long light raincoat, a beret tilted to the side, high heels and a simple gold necklace. She looked astonishingly like Yvonne, but was much older. She was walking slowly with her hands in her pockets. She did not seem to have any handbag. She approached several men with briefcases and spoke to them briefly. They shook their heads and walked quickly on. Some did not even stop, just kept moving. She moved slowly on down the pavement in the direction la Concorde, pausing and chatting as she went. She stopped after a while and went to stand in a shop doorway on the corner of the Rue Washington. She had no expression at all, except she smiled politely when she spoke to the men. She waited and looked in the window for a while. He sat watching, but nothing more happened so his gaze scanned round at other folk meandering, chatting, moving on. After a while he saw her again. She had come out of the doorway and was now walking back up the pavement, pausing and talking to men with briefcases. Once again they either shook their heads and carried on walking or just stepped round her and moved on. He was intrigued by this behaviour and wondered what on earth was going on. The woman got to the corner of the Rue Balzac and again stood at the side and waited. After a while the same performance would be repeated until she got to the other corner.

It must have been some twenty or thirty minutes before a man finally stopped short and spoke to her. They chatted for a short while and then walked off together round the corner into the Rue Washington. He quickly got off the bench, and with a swift glance towards the Café, where there appeared to be no movement, he followed the pair round the corner. They walked along and turned into the alleyway of the Cité Odiot. He followed through the buildings and into a courtyard dotted with trees. They went into a stairwell and started up the stairs. He stood in the courtyard looking up at the flats. After a short while a light came on in one of the windows on the very top floor. He waited, watching the light. He wasn’t sure why, he just kept staring up at the light. After a while he started to fell a bit anxious. The Hungarian conclave could well be over by now and his parents would wonder where he was, but still he waited. He kept looking up at the light. Some while later, he wasn’t sure how long, the man with the brief case came out of the stairwell and moved swiftly off back out into the street and disappeared. He was not sure what to do. He waited, but the light stayed on. He went into the stairwell and pressed the light switch. Cautiously and very quietly, he climbed up the spiral staircase, hugging the wall. Half way up the lights went out and he fumbled blindly for the switch. He got to the top, the stairs had narrowed and the top landing was long and tight with several doorways leading off it. He tried to work out which side of the building was which, coming up the winding staircase he had lost his sense of direction. He had to look over the side down the steep stairwell to orientate himself. He felt slightly dizzy. He was unsure why or what he was doing. The lights went out again and he stood in the dark. His eyes adjusted, he noticed a strip of light at the bottom of a doorway. He went up and knocked, he had no idea why or what he would say.  The woman opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe and holding a cup of something. ‘Oui? Que voulez vous?’. He gawped at her, speechless. She looked at him questioning with eyes and gesture, the light from the room illuminating him in the hallway. He stood still and stared, not knowing what else to do. He dared not speak. She gestured again and then he ran, ran down the stairs in the dark, spinning out into the courtyard, ran down the alleyway into the street, ran along the Rue Washington and back to the Champs-Elysées, by now fully lit, and ran up to the Maison du Café.

His parents were standing out front of the Café, with his brothers, saying goodbye. All the gypsies were wandering off in different directions, the world having been set to rights for the time being. “There he is!” shouted his brother. The adults acknowledge his presence with a sort of  ‘what can you do?’ resignation. “Where have you been?” “Nowhere”. “Nowhere? Its always nowhere”. They all went for supper at the Ruc Restaurant, at the end of the Manége Duphot just around the corner from Les Trois Quartiers. The omelettes fines herbs with French fries and petit pois were very good and just right for a late supper, and there was school the next day. It had been a long day and he was tired, he slept most of the way back in the car. It was only twenty-two kilometres from the Bastille to home, and at that time of the evening it did not take long to get there.

He slept and dreamed about the lady and wondered if he would ever see her again. They would be back in the city next Thursday, he would see about it then. Some friends of his parents, Arcadi and his wife Alice, were visiting from America and he had been put forward as a guide to take them round the Louvre. His history class at the Lycée was all about Roman and Greek Mythology and the Latin Class was going through Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Much of the work in the gallery reflected the myths. He had impressed many a foreign visitor with his knowledge of the subject.

The following Thursday the family set out early to meet up with Arcadi and his wife at the Hotel Edouard VII in the Avenue de L’Opéra. The family had stayed at the hotel several years ago when they first arrived in Paris from New York, and despite various bits of naughtiness on the part of his brothers and himself, friends of the family were always welcome. It was also within easy walking distance of the museum. Arcadi was a writer, a published author. He was from New York, an old friend of his father’s of some twenty odd years. When Arcadi was a young teaching assistant at the City College of New York he used to frequent the boy’s father’s shop for coffee and discussion, never just a chat. He now taught English and American Literature at Columbia. Acardi wore a corduroy jacket, brown slacks, classic brown brogues, with a pale blue checked shirt, a V-neck sweater with a red and brown chequered pattern, and no tie. He had straight short dark brown hair combed back with a side parting, horn-rimmed glasses with thick-ish lenses and smoked a straight-stemmed briar pipe. He was every inch the American college intellectual. The boy could vaguely remember Arcadi from New York days, but in his short life that was some time ago; nevertheless, he was drawn in by the easy casual smile and the obvious regard Arcadi showed towards his parents, especially his father. Both men hugged and puffed away on their pipes. Arcadi introduced his wife, Alice, to the family. They had recently married. She was a fellow professor’s widow and they had known each other for some time. It seemed only natural that they would end up together. Alice was a very attractive and very American professor’s wife. She was much better at languages than Arcadi, and though she spoke French with a strong accent, she spoke it clearly and very correctly. She had a kind face and smiled at him warmly when they shook hands. He liked them both. After coffee, croissants, tartine au beurre and a lot of research du temps perdue they set off for the museum.

The entrance to the Louvre Museum was through the gallery on the south side of the main courtyard, in the wing next to the Seine. The foyer of the main entrance and exit was then at the bottom of the staircase of the winged Victory of Samothrace. The view up the staircase was intensely impressive, with rays of light coming through the domes in the ceiling. It happened to be a very fine day and the sunlight created a particularly spectacular effect. The Arcadi’s wanted to see the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. He felt slightly disappointed. Everybody wanted to see the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. He didn’t have very much to say about them, there was no real story, and besides he wanted to go up the staircase, but that would have to wait for the Mona Lisa. One went down bellow the staircase to the left to go through the antiquities and sculptures to see the Venus de Milo. Along the way there were a few busts of Alexander the Great and a man holding a discus. He led them round as swiftly as he could, as he wanted to get on to the paintings when, at last, he thought he could show off a bit. Eventually he took them up the staircase and they stood in front of the Mona Lisa. They spent a bit of time over her and the usual comment about how much smaller it was then they’d imagined, still they got a good view. This was 1954 and there were very few tourists around this late in the year. Next, he took them on to the Poussin room. Here at last he could do his party piece.

He showed them the painting entitled Echo and Narcissus, depicting Cupid, Echo and Narcissus. He told them the story of Echo falling in love with Narcissus, but he rejects her and as a result she dies. Aphrodite is angry and as a punishment, Narcissus is condemned to fall in love with his own reflection. He is drowned admiring himself in a pool of water. Next was L’enlèvement des Sabines and he told them the story of the Sabine women. He also took them to see David’s version, which was three times the size of the Poussin. 

The following piece was a painting by Claude Gellée entitled Perseus and the origin of Coral. This was a rather complicated tale of Perseus and Andromeda. Perseus, having slain the Medusa - one of the three Gorgons, whose gaze turned all who saw her to stone - sees the birth of a winged white horse called Pegasus, who springs up from the Medusa’s blood. Perseus then gets on Pegasus and, with Medusa’s head in a sack, he flies over the island where Andromeda is chained to a cliff and threatened by a sea monster. Why and how she gets there, is a whole other story, but at this point, Perseus slays the monster, frees Andromeda, and as he is washing his hands in the seawater, he puts the Medusa’s head on some seaweed at the waters edge. The Medusa’s blood then turns the seaweed into a red stone – coral. Delighted with the effect, the nymphs soak more seaweed in the blood to make more coral. Phew. All were very impressed with his fusing of the Perseus/Andromeda tales and his knowledge of Ovid. He beamed with pleasure.

And so they wandered through the myths and around the galleries until they were exhausted and certainly ready for a nice lunch. As they returned to the staircase of the Winged Victory the sight that confronted him overwhelmed him. There, enveloped in sunlight streaming down in golden rays through the ceiling, stood the woman. She was wearing the same coat and beret, but the coat was open revealing a simple white blouse and skirt with a wide black belt, very à la mode. She was standing with a handbag over her shoulder, staring up at the winged victory, elbow bent out, hand on her hip. It was indeed a striking image. Everyone noticed her as they headed down the stairs to the exit. After his initial bewilderment he looked away, embarrassed, and frightened that she might notice and recognise him. He couldn’t wait to get away, and as he started his flight down the staircase, he noticed that Arcadi was looking at him and had clearly taken in his anxious demeanour. Now, even more embarrassed, he shot down the staircase and out into the courtyard heading towards the Tuillerie Gardens. Once outside he composed himself. He couldn’t just leave and hide away, not after his brilliant display, and he wanted to ask Arcadi about Hamlet and the light over lunch. They had arranged and booked a table at the Rally Restaurant on the Boulevard des Capucines at the corner of the Rue Daunou, opposite the Rue Scribe. They often went there for lunch, but on this occasion it was for the Lobster, a dish of which he was particularly fond. There was no way out but to see the thing through and just pretend Arcadi hadn’t noticed a thing.

He waited for them all to emerge, and avoiding any significant exchange with Arcadi, he led the procession back up the Avenue de l’Opéra, along the Rue Daunou to the restaurant. The table by the window was all laid out waiting for them, they were an odd number, and his father sat at the end of the table between Arcadi and Alice. He sat between his mother and Alice, on the bench, their backs to the window facing into the room. His brothers sat beside Arcadi, the eldest being nearest, looking out the window and onto the Boulevard below. His father, as usual, did the ordering in his stilted French, and with his usual authority, particularly as to the wine. He did like his wine and on this occasion his father discussed, with the sommelier, wines from the Graves region of the Bordeaux. They settled on a bottle of the Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte. The boy giggled along with his brothers at his father’s clumsy grammar and pronunciation. None of them could understand why someone who spoke English, Hungarian, German, Polish and some Russian with such fluency, could have such difficulty with French; but, it never seemed to matter, he was always understood by one and all, and no one, except his eldest son, ever tried to correct him. He spoke with such composure and authority that, somehow, people just naturally reacted accordingly and did whatever he wanted.

The lunch was wonderful. Between the soup and the lobster, the boy, partly for his father’s sake, mentioned to Arcadi that he had been reading The Old Man and The Sea. Arcadi told him it was a very good book for him to be reading at his age, and did he realize that Hemingway had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Old Man and The Sea was probably his best work. Arcadi started to warm to his theme about the old fisherman, Santiago, and his relationship with the young lad, Manolin. His father interrupted Arcadi asking him not to spoil the boy’s enjoyment as he had only just started to read the book. In fact he had already finished it. It was only a short novel, but nonetheless he was glad his father had interrupted, there were a couple of words in the story he did not quite understand. He hadn’t found one of them in the old dictionary at home and he wanted to ask his father about it later. He didn’t want to appear foolish in front of Arcadi, so he said nothing. The rest of the meal arrived, the lobster, the mayonnaise, the mashed potatoes, the petit pois, and more of the wonderful wine.

His elder brother mentioned the Hamlet to Arcadi, and he managed to get his little piece in about the light in the movie and how different it seemed from the text. It was now Arcadi’s turn to show off and he went into professor mode on Shakespeare, a bit carried away by the effects of Graves, he was even so bold as to criticise Olivier’s adaptation of the play, but nonetheless he felt the film was brilliant, and he agreed about the lighting and the shadows. He went on about a film called Ivan the Terrible which was, in his view, a masterpiece of light and shadows, he thought Olivier could well have seen it as it came out a couple of years before he made Hamlet. And so the conversation turned to Russia and the party, and what was going on in America, and the expatriates hovering in Paris, waiting to get to the land of the free. His mother held forth on this topic and the boy worried that it would turn into another Maison du Café event. Alice went a bit quiet. She clearly felt a bit out of her depth and to lighten things up she turned to him, and with a slightly teasing voice, asked what he thought of the girl standing by the winged Victory in the Louvre. Oh God, she had noticed his reaction as well. He turned instantly pink and they all laughed. He was mortified. Arcadi, expanding, and a bit chauvinistically, pronounced that he didn’t think ‘les poules’ spent much time in the Louvre. Alice, seeing the boy’s confusion, and feeling awful about having caused such embarrassment, was sure that the girl was nothing of the sort. She seemed a perfectly decent and attractive person, nothing like a ‘poule’, and Arcadi should be ashamed of himself for even mentioning it after such a nice lunch. Arcadi apologised profusely, still coping with the effects of the wonderful wine. His father paid the bill, with a bit of a protest from Arcadi, but he soon graciously accepted and one and all trouped out of the restaurant. Alice, realising that Arcadi was probably not in the best state for any further walking around the streets, said perhaps it would be best if they went back to their hotel to recover. They would come out to the house on the Sunday for a home cooked lunch. Alice said she had heard so much about his mother’s Hungarian cooking and was very much looking forward to it. Arcadi said not to worry and he would bring the wines. Arcadi and Alice were escorted back to the Hotel and “See you Sunday” and farewells were said. Arcadi’s last request was for either Goulash or Chicken Paprika.

They walked back to the Tuillerie Gardens and on to the pond, further up, by the Place de la Concorde where the boys got model sail boats to sail on the water. There weren’t too many people and the man who hired out the little boats said it would be his last week in the park until next spring. It had been a reasonable summer for him, but he had stayed far too long, the last week in October was always a difficult one. As the boy pushed his boat out in the pond, the wind picked up a little and the surface of the water began to ripple. The little boat picked up speed but was bobbing up and down more than usual. He watched it making its way across the pond, the water sparkling in the sun. As he started to walk round to the other side, his thoughts turned to the old man, Santiago, in his fishing boat and his struggle with the big fish. He shuddered at the thought of the sharks tearing at the fish in the dark, the old man exhausted and powerless in the well of the boat, all his tools and weapons lost. And then he remembered how the old man had been teased in the bar about his inability to catch any fish and other taunts. And there was something about a whore. That was the word, he could not find it in the dictionary at home. He would have to ask his father about it. And so he did “Pops, what’s a whore”. The question had just popped into his head, and he may have spoken a bit too loudly, and it made his parents laugh. He was puzzled by this, and wasn’t sure if he had pronounced the word correctly. His father pronounced it with a U sound, as in tour instead of an o, as in tor. His father explain quietly, in simple terms what the word meant. It was a simple explanation, and although he still didn’t quite understand about sex, the word was something to be disapproved of, at least, that was the impression he formed. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t in the dictionary?

It was late afternoon and they started to walk back towards the car in the Place du Palais Royal, where his father had managed to find a parking space. His mother wanted to stop at the Café Angelina, just to pick up a few chocolates, which they could have for after lunch on Sunday. They came out of the park and walked along the Rivoli under the Arches. It was getting towards dusk, but this last day in October was still full of sunlight, now low and bright illuminating the Arches and casting long shadows. Coming towards them with an easy walk, looking into the shop windows, was the woman. The sunlight danced across her as she walked past each archway, in the light, in the shade, in the light. He looked closely now and saw the lipstick a bit too red, the face a bit too made up, the hair a bit too dark, the skirt a bit too tight, the blouse a bit too décolleté, the heels a bit too high. He looked back at his father as she passed by, and he nodded back with a sad resigned look. He watched her as she walked on through the sun stripes until she turned round the corner and all that was left was the light at the end of the arcade.

© Edward Klein