The Prague Cemetery Read online

  "Cocaine, as I always say to my beloved Martha, is excellent for someone like me, who doesn't consider himself particularly attractive, who in his youth had never been young and now at thirty is unable to grow up. There was a time when I was full of ambition and desperate to learn, and day after day I felt discouraged by the fact that Mother Nature had not, in one of her moments of compassion, stamped me with that mark of genius which she grants to people every now and then."

  All of a sudden he stopped, with the air of one who realizes he has laid bare his soul. Whining little Jew, I thought. And I decided to embarrass him.

  "Is cocaine not said to be an aphrodisiac as well?" I asked.

  Froïde blushed. "It also has that virtue, so I understand . . . But I have no experience in that respect. As a man, I am not inclined to such itches. And as a doctor, sex is not a matter that much interests me. Although sex is beginning to be much discussed at the Salpêtrière. Charcot discovered that one of his patients, a certain Augustine, during an advanced phase of her hysterical manifestations, revealed that her earliest trauma had been sexual violence inflicted in early childhood. Naturally I don't deny that among the traumas provoking hysteria there may also be phenomena linked to sex, that is quite clear. But I think it is simply too much to reduce everything to sex. Perhaps, though, it is my bourgeois prudery that distances me from these problems."

  No, I thought, it isn't your prudery; it's because like all the circumcised men of your race you're obsessed by sex but try to forget it. I'd just like to see, when you put your smutty hands on that Martha of yours, if you don't produce a long line of little Jews and don't make her consumptive from the exertion.

  Froïde meanwhile continued: "My problem, unfortunately, is another. I have finished my supply of cocaine and am plunging into melancholy. Doctors in ancient times would have said that I have an excess of black bile. I used to be able to find the compound at Merck & Gehe, but they have had to stop making it, as they can find only poorquality raw material now. The fresh leaves can be processed only in America, and the best producer is Parke & Davis of Detroit, a more soluble variety, pure white in color and with an aromatic odor. I had a modest supply, but here in Paris I don't know whom to ask."

  Music to the ears of one who is well informed on all the secrets of place Maubert and its neighborhood. I knew certain people to whom it was enough to mention not just cocaine, but a diamond, a stuffed lion or a carboy of vitriol, and the following day they would deliver it to you, so long as you didn't ask where they'd found it. For me cocaine is a poison, and I thought, I don't mind contributing to the poisoning of a Jew. So I told Doctor Froïde that within a few days I would obtain a good supply of his alkaloid. Froïde, of course, didn't imagine my ways were anything less than irreproachable. "You know," I told him, "we antiquarians get to meet all kinds of people."

  * * *

  "In cases of serious tooth decay, insert a wad of

  cotton soaked in a four percent solution into the

  cavity and the pain subsides immediately."

  * * *

  All of this has nothing to do with my problem, but helps to explain how, in the end, we became acquainted and spoke about all manner of things. Froïde was eloquent and witty. Perhaps I'd been mistaken — maybe he wasn't Jewish. It was easier to talk to him than to Bourru and Burot, and our conversation turned to the experiments of those two, and from there I mentioned Du Maurier's patient.

  "Do you believe," I asked him, "a woman that sick could be cured with Bourru and Burot's magnets?"

  "My dear friend," replied Froïde, "in many of the cases we examine, too much importance is placed upon physical aspects, forgetting that if sickness develops, its origin is most probably psychic. And if the origin is psychic, it is the mind that has to be treated, not the body. In a traumatic neurosis, the true cause of the illness is not the lesion, which in itself is generally modest, but the original psychic trauma. Do people not faint when they experience a powerful emotion? And therefore, for those concerned with nervous illnesses, the problem is not how they lose their senses, but what emotion caused it."

  "But how can you know what this emotion was?"

  "You see, my friend, when the symptoms are clearly hysterical, as in the case of Du Maurier's patient, hypnosis can artificially reproduce those same symptoms, and it is indeed possible to go back to the initial trauma. But other patients have had an experience so unbearable that they have sought to erase it — it is as if they had hidden it in some inaccessible part of their mind, so remote that you could not reach it even under hypnosis. Then again, why under hypnosis ought we to have greater psychic capacities than when we are awake?"

  "And therefore we will never know . . ."

  "Don't ask me for a clear and definitive answer. I'm expressing ideas not yet fully formed. Sometimes I am tempted to think we reach that deep area only when we dream. The ancients understood just how revealing dreams can be. My sense is that if a sick person could speak, and speak for a long period, for days on end, with someone who knew how to listen, perhaps by simply describing what he had dreamt, the original trauma might suddenly emerge and become clear. In English you might use the expression 'talking cures.' You will have noticed when talking to someone about distant events, that while describing them you remember details you had forgotten, or rather, thought you had forgotten, but which in fact your brain was storing in some secret recess. I believe the more detailed this reconstruction is, the more likely it is for an episode to reemerge. This, I would say, includes even an insignificant fact, a subtle detail that has had such an unbearably disturbing effect as to provoke a . . . how do you say, an Abtrennung, a Beseitigung . . . I cannot find the right word. In English I would say removal. What do you say in French when an organ is cut out . . . une ablation? Yes, perhaps the correct term in German would be Entfernung."

  Here is the Jew emerging, I thought. At that time I was, I think, already interested in the various Jewish plots and that race's ambitions for their sons to become doctors and pharmacists in order to control Christian bodies as well as minds. If I were ill, would you want me to hand myself over to you, telling you things even I don't know about myself, so that you could become master of my soul? Worse than the Jesuit father confessor, because at least, talking to him, I would be protected by a grille and wouldn't tell him what I really thought but rather the things that everyone does, so everything is described in the same almost technical terms— I have stolen, I have fornicated, I have not honored my father and mother. Your very language betrays you. You talk of removal as if you wish to circumcise my brain . . .

  Meanwhile, Froïde had begun to laugh and ordered yet another beer.

  "But do not regard my pronouncements as fact. They are the imaginings of a dreamer. When I return to Austria I will marry, and then, to look after my family, I'll have to set up in medical practice. And I'll use hypnosis wisely, as Charcot has taught me, and will not go prying into my patients' dreams. I'm no oracle. I wonder whether Du Maurier's patient might not benefit from taking a little cocaine."

  That was how the conversation ended. At the time it left little impression upon me, but now it all comes back to mind, perhaps because I'm in the situation, not of someone like Diana, but of an almost normal person who has lost part of his memory. Apart from the fact that I have no idea where Froïde has ended up, nothing in the world would persuade me to retell my life story even to a good Christian, let alone to a Jew. With the work I do (whatever it is) I have to talk about other people's business, for payment, but must refrain at all costs from talking about my own. But perhaps I can retell my own story to myself. I remember now how Bourru (or Burot) told me that holy men used to hypnotize themselves by staring at their navel.

  That is why I have decided, with some reluctance, to keep this diary, writing down my past as I gradually bring it back to mind, including the most insignificant details, until (what did Froïde say?) the traumatizing element reemerges. But I will do it by myself. And I want to recover
by myself, not end up in the hands of doctors who treat lunatics.

  Before beginning (though, in reality, I did so yesterday), I would have enjoyed a visit to Chez Philippe in rue Montorgueil to put myself in the appropriate frame of mind for this form of self-hypnosis. I would have sat down quietly, taken my time in studying the menu —the one served from six p.m. to midnight — and ordered potage à la Crécy, turbot with caper sauce, fillet of beef and langue de veau au jus, finishing with a maraschino sorbet and petits fours, washed down with two bottles of vintage Burgundy.

  By then, midnight would have passed and I would have had a look at the night menu. I would have allowed myself a turtle soup (a delicious one comes to mind, made by Dumas — so did I know Dumas?), salmon with spring onions and artichokes with Javanese pepper, with a rum sorbet and English spiced cakes to follow. Further into the night I would have treated myself to some delicacy from the morning menu, perhaps the soupe aux oignons, which the porters at Les Halles would also be tucking into at that moment, happy to demean myself with their company. Then, to prepare myself for a busy morning, a very strong coffee and a pousse-café of cognac and kirsch.

  To tell the truth, I would have felt a little heavy, but my mind would have been rested.

  Alas, I could not permit myself such sweet license. You have no memory, I told myself. If you were to meet someone at the restaurant who recognizes you, you may not recognize him. What would you do?

  I also wondered what I would do if someone were to come and see me at the shop. It went well with the fellow who came about the Bonnefoy will, and the old woman selling hosts, but it could have gone worse. So I've put a notice outside saying The Owner Will Be Away for a Month, without any indication as to when the month starts or ends. And now I realize something else. I'll have to shut myself in here, going out only occasionally to buy food. Perhaps the abstinence will do me good — who's to say that what has happened is not the result of overindulgence. But when? The infamous evening of the 21st?

  Then again, perhaps I ought to begin reexamining my past by contemplating my navel, as Burot (or Bourru?) described; and on a full stomach, since I'm now as heavy as my age demands, I'd have to start offby looking at myself in the mirror.

  Instead, I began yesterday, seated at this desk, writing without a pause, without distraction, confining myself to nibbling something every now and then, and drinking — yes, drinking without restraint. What's best about this house is its fine cellar.

  4

  IN MY GRANDFATHER'S DAY

  26th March 1897

  My childhood. Turin . . . A hillside on the other bank of the Po, me on a balcony with my mother. Then she was gone, and my father was crying, sitting on the balcony overlooking the hills at dusk. My grandfather said it was God's will.

  With my mother I spoke French, like every well-bred Piedmontese (when I speak it here in Paris, it sounds as if I've learned it in Grenoble, where the purest French is spoken, not like the Parisian babil). Since I was a boy I've felt more French than Italian, as everyone in Piedmont does. That's why I find the French unbearable.

  Childhood for me was my grandfather, more than my father and mother. I hated my mother who had gone without telling me, I hated my father who had done nothing to stop her, I hated God because he had willed such a thing to happen, and I hated my grandfather because he thought it normal for God to will such things. My father was always somewhere else—"making Italy," he used to say. Then Italy unmade him.

  My grandfather. Giovanni Battista Simonini, former officer in the Savoy army— I think he left it at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, enlisting under the Bourbons in Florence and then, when Tuscany had also come under the control of a Bonaparte, he returned to Turin, a retired captain, nursing his disappointments.

  A warty nose — when he held me close, all I could see was his nose. And I used to feel his saliva spluttering my face. He was what the French called ci-devant, one who looked back nostalgically on the ancien régime, who had not forgiven the crimes of the Revolution. He hadn't stopped wearing culottes — he still had fine calves — fastened with a gold buckle beneath the knee, and the buckles on his patentleather shoes were of gold. His waistcoat, jacket and black cravat gave him a priestly air. The rules of a bygone style also suggested the wearing of a powdered wig, but he refused to do so because, he said, ogres like Robespierre had dressed themselves up in powdered wigs.

  I never knew whether he was rich, but he didn't stint when it came to good food. Of my grandfather and my childhood I remember above all the bagna caöda: a terracotta pot of boiling oil, flavored with anchovies, garlic and butter, is kept hot on a charcoal burner, and into it are dipped cardoons (which have been left to soak in cold water and lemon juice — or some said milk, but not my grandfather), raw or grilled peppers, white leaves of Savoy cabbage, Jerusalem artichokes and tender cauliflower — or boiled vegetables: onions, beetroot, potatoes or carrots (but as my grandfather used to say, this was stuff for paupers). I liked eating, and my grandfather enjoyed seeing me fatten up like a little piglet (as he used to say affectionately).

  Spraying me with saliva, my grandfather would instruct me on his principles: "The Revolution, my boy, has made us the slaves of a godless state, more unequal than before and fraternal enemies, each a Cain to the other. It's no good being too free, nor is it good to have all we need. Our fathers were poorer and happier because they remained in touch with nature. The modern world has given us steam, which poisons the countryside, and mechanical looms, which have taken work from so many wretched souls and don't produce fabrics as they once did. Man, left to himself, is too wicked to be free. What little freedom we need must be guaranteed by a sovereign."

  His favorite theme was Abbé Barruel. Thinking back to my child- hood, I can almost see Abbé Barruel, who seemed to inhabit our house, though he must have been dead for quite some time.

  "You see, my boy," I can hear my grandfather saying, "once the madness of the Revolution had shaken every European nation, word began to spread that the Revolution was none other than the last or latest chapter in a universal conspiracy led by the Templars against the throne and the altar. In other words, against kings — in particular the kings of France — and our most holy Mother Church . . . This was the opinion of Abbé Barruel, who, toward the end of the last century, had written his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme."

  "But Grandpapa," I then asked, "what had the Templars to do with it?" I already knew the story by heart but wanted to allow my grandfather to return to his favorite subject.

  "The Templars, my boy, were an extremely powerful order of knights whom the king of France destroyed so as to seize their property, sending most of them to the stake. But the survivors set up a secret order to take revenge on the kings of France. And, sure enough, when King Louis was beheaded on the guillotine, a stranger climbed onto the block and held up that poor head, shouting, 'Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!' Molay had been the Grand Master of the Templars whom the king had had burnt at the stake on the farthest point of the Île de la Cité in Paris."

  "When was this Molay burned?"

  "In 1314."

  "Let me work it out, Grandpapa . . . That was almost five hundred years before the Revolution. How did the Templars manage to stay hidden for five hundred years?"

  "They infiltrated the guilds of the ancient cathedral builders, and from those guilds English Freemasonry was born, called by that name because its members considered themselves free masons."

  "And why did the Masons have to start the Revolution?"

  "Barruel had understood that the original Templars and the Freemasons had been taken over and corrupted by the Illuminati of Bavaria! This was a dreadful sect, founded by a certain Weishaupt, and every member knew only his immediate superior and nothing about those higher up and their plans; its purpose was not only to destroy the throne and the altar, but also to create a society without laws and without morality, where personal belongings and even women were to be held in comm
on— God forgive me if I say such things to a child, but Satan's designs must be exposed. And in league with the Bavarian Illuminati were those deniers of every faith who had brought the infamous Encyclopédie into being, by which I mean Voltaire, d'Alembert, Diderot and all that evil breed, who, copying the Illuminati, spoke in France of the Siècle des Lumières and in Germany of Aufklärung, or Enlightenment, and who, meeting secretly to plot the downfall of the monarchy, set up the club known as the Jacobins, named after Jacques de Molay himself. These are the very people who plotted the French Revolution!"

  * * *

  I can almost see Abbé Barruel, who seemed to inhabit our house, though he must have been dead for quite some time.

  * * *

  "Barruel had understood everything."

  "He hadn't understood how a group of Christian knights could grow into a sect hostile to Christ. It is like yeast in dough — without flour and water it doesn't grow, the dough doesn't rise, and you cannot make bread. And what was the yeast that someone, or fate, or the devil introduced into the still healthy body of the secret societies of the Templars and Freemasons to make them the most diabolical sect of all time?"

  Here my grandfather stopped, placed his hands together as if to focus his mind, gave a wily smile and revealed with calculated and triumphant modesty: "The person who had the courage first to say it, my dear boy, was your grandfather. As soon as I was able to read Barruel's book, I wrote to him. Go down there, my boy, and fetch that casket."

  I followed his instructions. My grandfather opened the small casket with a gold key that hung from his neck and took out a sheet of paper, which had yellowed after forty years. "This is the original letter from which I made a fair copy to send to Barruel."