Strawberries

In the days before the wedding, as caterers and florists and seamstresses and bakers and even sommeliers and fromagers and charcutiers made appearances at the Maison ClosDennis, there were two of us who were irrelevant to the preparation of the proceedings. One of them, and this anyone could have predicted, was me, the boyfriend of Lily-Anne, younger sister of Anna-Marie, the bride. The other redundancy to the planning process—physically and mentally unnecessary, I should say, but financially integral—was Matheus, or Matti, as he had asked me to call him, the father of the bride.

For a while, we passed the time in the vast living room of Maison ClosDennis, a chamber that was roughly octagonal with a large, colonnaded fireplace the size of a minivan, the mantle taller than me.
The ceiling was supported by beams of a type I had never seen before, made of solid brown stone, and just a half-meter below those beams were immense dormer windows, the upper halves of which were stained glass and appeared to have been looted from some even more ancient structure, a Frankish cathedral perhaps. The windows faced north, overlooking a steep, wooded slope descending to the Meuse River, or the Maas, as German Matti called it. The living room, on the first floor, to the left as you entered the house, past the chapel—the house had a chapel—was a strategically astute spot to plant ourselves. It was far, far away from the kitchen and south-facing balconies and so required a dedicated, determined trip to come and visit. We spent the first day watching a golf tournament, I believe it was the Ryder Cup, and then the next day, there was an F-1 race, similarly dull. We drank wine from Matti’s cellar and snacked on these local versions of Japanese rice crackers of which Matti was fond.

The wedding was to be held one week hence, in another château not far from here, on a hill that I understood to be, from Matti’s gesturing, to the Northeast. Four hundred guests were expected at the ceremony, two hundred at a dinner, and then five hundred were to convene for the reception and party. There were also various rehearsal dinners, bridesmaids’ events, bachelor parties, and so forth, each of which had to be planned and organized and, of course, paid for. Every half-hour or so, one of the women—Matti’s wife, Baumy, or one of his daughters, Lily-Anne or Anna-Marie, or his daughter-in-law, either Petra or Monique—would enter, holding a brochure or a photograph or a laptop computer on which would be a representation of a last-minute detail not yet attended to. They were checking with him, usually regarding price.

He would slide on a pair of wire-frame reading glasses, pretend to study the matter at hand, and then say, in German, “naturlicht.”

After the woman left, he would turn to me and say, in English, which he spoke waveringly, “David, I care not so much about these small items.” And he would shake another Gauloises Red from the pack and light up and watch Colin Montgomery make his approach on seventeen.

At one point, we were watching the F-1 race at Nürburgring on German television when there was a crash, a driver for Jaguar hitting the rail and one of his tires bouncing back onto the track and causing a driver for Honda to spin into hay bales on the inside of the turn. The German announcers were shouting excitedly, and the camera panned to the pit crews watching the accident on their closed circuit screens. When the Jaguar driver—it was Eddie Irvine—emerged from his car, he was stamping his feet, furious.

“David,” said Matti, “This driver is very angry. The racing host, he says the Jaguar motor was sabotaged in the night before by the Ferrari team. It’s a big problem.”

Periodically, one of Matti’s sons would arrive, both of whom now worked in the company that Matti had founded and then sold. Both sons, of course, knew to keep as far as possible from the preliminary to the wedding, and so their appearances would be brief, one cigarette, a quick beer, and they would be back in their high-performance Teutonic sedans and gone, leaving me and Matti to our drinking and television-watching until our inactivity finally roused the anger of the womenfolk. Over lunch one afternoon, led by Baumy, a formidable German woman of Swabian descent who, among other credentials, was a licensed pilot who had survived the crashing of her own plane, they lashed out. Frustrated at Matti’s indifference to the proceedings, the mounting preparations, the imminent arrival of guests, many of whom would be quartered here in the château and would require feeding, bathing, etc. Baumy began to nag him in German to do something, anything, which Matti stoically didn’t respond to, eating his Moutaschen dumplings, which were excellent, and sipping his Alsatian white.

His daughters joined in, Lily-Anne heaping her approbation on me.

“What am I supposed to be doing?” I asked.

She actually suggested cleaning. There was a staff who did that, I pointed out, but there was no logical response; it was our inactivity that had roused their ire, and nothing but mindless activity would assuage them.

Matti suggested we drive to Luik to look for strawberries.

*

 

I had first met Matti three years ago, when I turned up at his summerhouse in Mallorca as the new paramour to his younger daughter. Lily-Anne and I had met in New York, where we still lived. Neither of us were the type to spend much time considering our relationship or wondering where it was going. We were both, in that way, superficial, pleased enough to be with someone we found attractive and in no way objectionable.

And when on occasion I did try to figure out Lily-Anne, I didn’t make much progress. She was unfathomable to me, beautiful, tall, with unsteady, accented English. She could be surprisingly sweet, but on those occasions when she became angry, she became a sullen, sucking force, creating gravity that could consume all the happiness around her. What did she think about when she was neither sweet nor angry? I had no idea. But as I watched her, I realized she was perhaps thinking nothing at all.

Her prosperous German family provided her what mysterious depth she had.

I was the first American boyfriend, also the first one of Jewish descent; still, Matti had no reason to be anything more than civil with me. How many previous boyfriends had his daughters brought home over the years? They were both pretty girls, taking after Baumy, and it must have been a steady procession. Yet he was gracious, friendly, and for some reason seemed to take a liking to me, which I reciprocated. He had grown up in the Alsace, during the war when the region was German, and then after the war when it was occupied by France. He understood a half-dozen languages, but was barely fluent at speaking any of them save German. He had been an exceedingly handsome man, tall, narrow-faced with a cowboy squint, mustache, strong chin, looking a little like James Coburn in his prime, and relied on his stolidity and stern expression to bluff through business meetings. And he had demonstrated enough aptitude in mathematics to earn an engineering degree and then a job at AGFA. He stayed there for three years, and then he invented his machine.

I had seen the machine a half-dozen times, when he took me to visit his factories. There were several such plants, spread all over the Benelux region. The machine was vast, the size of two cargo
containers, and took a half-dozen men to operate. It involved a steel frame, hanging from which was an engine of some kind, and this engine drove several massive spindles and bobbins that pulled some sort of fiber in long, thick belts up and through a furnace or oven and then through a spraying apparatus, until the fiber was recollected on other bobbins, presumably then different in some way from when it had gone in. Matti had tried numerous times to explain to me what this machine did, but I never quite understood. I know it is vast, and very loud, and that he built his factories around these machines, and he sold these machines, to other men who built factories, all over the world. And if you bought a machine from Matti, then you also bought a many-year service contract from his company. These contracts, and the factories and the company he had built and sold, allowed Matti to retire at fifty and live in a château.

Matti loved cars, and each of the two times a year that I saw him, among his first questions would be, “David, what is your favorite car?” I’m not sure anyone had asked me that question since the third grade, yet Matti took the question seriously.

The first time he asked me, shortly after our introduction, I answered, Audi A6; he shook his head, disappointed. “David, that is a good car, sure, but it shouldn’t be your favorite car.” He pointed out that a favorite car had to be, say, an Aston Martin, he had one of those, or an Austin-Healey, he had two, or a Rolls-Royce Corniche, he had one, or a Jensen, or Jaguar, and so forth. Your favorite car, in other words, had to be something expensive and difficult to maintain, exotic, preferably English, but certainly not a production sedan like the Audi A6.

Matti currently had two favorite cars, for example, a Morgan 4/4 and an Austin-Healey 3000, and he pored over collectors’ magazines looking for pristine examples of them. He kept his car collection in a warehouse in one of his former factories in Belgium, the terms of the sale of his company allowing him to keep his cars stored there until his passing.

So now, before going to Europe with Lily-ann, I always went online and did a quick search to find a new favorite car—Matti would be very disappointed if I had the same favorite car as last time we met—and so when he asked, I was always prepared.

“1958 Jaguar XK150S Roadster.”

He would nod, pleased by my choice.

For our trip to Luik, he said we would take his Aston Martin db5, the famous James Bond roadster, which was “roughly 18 kilometers per hour faster than the Jaguar XK.” But, he warned, “She is thirsty, like all Aston Martins.”

I asked if he had heard anything more about the F-1 scandal, the Ferrari sabotaging of the Jaguar car.

He laughed. “David, I was fooling with you. No such incident occurred.”

“You made that up? The whole thing?”

“For amusement!”

He deftly began manipulating the ball-handled gearshift, and soon we were making noisy progress along the highway that followed the Meuse to Luik, or Liège as the Francophone Belgians would call it.

 

*

Straddling the Meuse, which breaks into two branches as it passes through the city, Liège was a depressed, former industrial city that had fallen on hard times in the 1960s and never recovered. Its heyday had been the mid-nineteenth century, the city’s grand architecture dates from that period, neoclassical municipal buildings, Gothic cathedral, and scaled-down versions of Haussmann-like apartment buildings, such as you would find in Paris. It had once been a prosperous place, when the local textile and mining industries were still globally competitive. But now, driving through the city’s narrow streets, one felt as if a residue of dust had settled onto the place, lending the grand buildings and bourgeois apartments the air of fancy garments left too long in an attic, forgotten finery.

It had a thriving red-light district, a reputation as a way station for human traffickers moving their product from east to west or south to north, and, apparently, a burgeoning fresh-fruit market where one could buy truck farm strawberries.

Matti pointed out to me the Liège post office, a neobaroque palace with numerous towers, gables, porticos, and at least three weathervanes and a four-sided clock, each side of which told a
different time. The whole structure, occupying a city block and including accompanying parking lot, had been on sale, for the last five years, for one million euros.

He parked next to the post office, and we wandered in a light drizzle down cobblestoned streets toward, I assumed, the market where we could collect those strawberries. Instead, Matti stopped at a café with two abandoned sidewalk tables with mismatched chairs, and pointed inside a dark, sour-smelling doorway from which emitted a noisy, boisterous singing. He suggested we have a drink.

We stepped into the wood-paneled café. In the back corner opposite the door, past a lectern-high, heavy oak bar, was the source of the song: an elderly man in cowboy boots, jeans, large antler belt buckle, Pendleton shirt, and structurally unsound pompadour—it was tall but seemed to lack sufficient follicles to keep standing, this old man having built the coif from just a few strands and, presumably,
a vast amount of hair spray and gel. Despite his Old West–themed outfit, he was singing a droning French song, about, if I am correct, a man waiting for his love at a carousel? Or somewhere that had a name that sounded like “carousel”? His voice was a low, steady growl, and he took frequent drags from his cigarette, and when the waiter brought him another demi of beer, he took a sip of that. Behind him, a bespectacled piano player plinked steadily on an old upright in accompaniment, and on a bench alongside the singer, three old ladies and one man periodically wavered to the unsteady beat, or quietly joined in for a verse or two, before returning to sorting through sheet music piled on the table in front of them.

There was wood paneling halfway up the walls, and above that were tacked hundreds of black-and-white photographs. I couldn’t tell if these were famous people—other countries’ celebrities always being the most confusing category of fame for me—or if they were locally renowned, or if these were photographs of these very same people in the bar right now, only younger.

Matti ordered us each a demi. He laid his pack of Gauloises Red on the table, and we smoked and listened to the man’s song. Seated at another table were two chubby little boys, one of whom was preoccupied with a handheld game device, and the other was drinking bright red soda from a glass. Their faces struck me as familiar; they looked almost porcine with pinkish flesh, puffy lips, thick noses, round eyes, large foreheads, scant hair. I realized I had seen their like in the paintings of Pieter Brueghel. In fact, the sizable pompadour on the singer aside, everyone in here looked as if they had stepped out of one of his canvases.

I drank my beer, and immediately Matti secured for us two more. And then two more.

There was more singing, this by an elderly woman in Burgundy skirt and tan top. She had the lowest hanging breasts I had ever seen, large teardrop-shaped sacks descending over the belt of her skirt. Her song, from what I could gather, was a lament about lost love. Other patrons, Matti included, lustily joined in for the refrain: “oooooooh, j’ai pleuré.”

While she was singing, I noticed the chubby boys staring at me and whispering to each other. I didn’t look like anyone else there, but I’m not sure why my appearance should have elicited any notice. I have never been described as looking particularly stereotypically Semitic, if there is such a look. I don’t know if my appearance was what the children were reacting to, but over the high notes of the piano,
I thought I heard one of the boys muttering “juif.” Or was I imagining that? After the beer, and amid all the racket, I couldn’t tell. But the next time I caught the boys staring at me, I gave them a sudden glare back, and then made a quick, seated lunge, nothing more than an elaborate flinch, really, but it was enough to cause the one drinking red soda to leap up and start crying. I felt immediately guilty for my reaction; he couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

Matti had ordered for us two more demis, and I tried to refocus on the singing, but I noticed the crying boy now being comforted by the old man with the pompadour, who I now guessed was his grandfather. I wondered, should I apologize?

There was a pause in the singing as the piano player stopped to drink a demi in one long draught, and then the singing began in earnest again. The man with the pompadour stood up to sing. The
children joined in, singing with gusto, though when the chorus came, I noticed that half the room seemed confused and sang different words than the singer had belted out. The song continued in this manner, and gradually people stopped until nobody in the bar was singing along, while the singer kept on going, his voice rising, and he swung his microphone toward his mouth as he came to each
chorus. The mood in the room changed, and I noticed there was some murmuring at some tables, as if this song was unexpected, or this version of the song was abnormal.

We’d had a lot of beer very quickly, and I was disoriented and it took a few moments for me to posit what was happening. I had been watching the singer, and then I turned toward Matti and saw that he was standing, shouting something in broken French at the singer. The singer continued his song and—was he pointing at me?—nodded his head.

At Matti’s continued protest, the piano player stopped and the room became silent.

I could tell that the focus in the room had shifted, from the singer to us, and I was embarrassed and confused. Matti now was shouting in German, which sounded to me harsh and strident after the rolling
syllables of the French songs. He was a tall man, impressive in appearance and, I now discovered, frightening when he was angry.

“Monsieur,” said the waiter who had been bringing us our beer. “S’il vous plaît, ce n’est pas approprié.”

I reached across the table and took Matti’s shoulder. He shook my hand away and then began lecturing the waiter, also in German. I could sense that whatever initiative we might have had in this dispute, Matti had lost it by reverting to German, the language, historically, of the aggressor.

“This song, this is a song that is very against Jewish people,” Matti said to me. “It is a bad song.”

And he turned and in German began pointing toward the singer, who was smiling broadly.

I don’t know why, but my response to the singer’s pleased expression was to grin back. I didn’t understand what had just transpired. I pulled at Matti’s shoulder and told him we should go. What were we going to do, take on a room full of Belgian singers? On his way out, Matti knocked over his beer coming around our table, unintentionally pushing the table into me so that it made a noisy scrape and sent a sharp pain through my hip.

 

*

We emerged into the dazzling daylight, and I felt the weight of how buzzed I was. Instead of sobering me up, the confrontation had left me more befogged, so that as I chased after Matti, who was stalking down the narrow road ahead of me, I was still piecing together recent events. The escalation had been so sudden, the wind down equally rapid, that the whole affair, from Matti standing up and shouting to our exiting the bar, had only taken, perhaps, fifteen seconds.

“Wait, wait,” I was telling Matti, who was walking ahead of me.

The streets were paved with cobblestones rubbed to a shine by centuries of footfalls. There were small dog turds on the street, little black cylinders the size of my fingers that had been covered with chicken feathers. Standing on both sides of the street, in the shadow of stingy lintels, were tired-looking women in long leather boots, short skirts, and sweaters. Black leather purses, old-fashioned, with a twist-snap at the top, hung from their shoulders. From the way they stood, their enduring glances at me as I walked, I gathered they were prostitutes. Liège’s red-light district, I had previously thought, was
similar to Amsterdam’s in that prostitutes stood behind glass with red fluorescent tubes around them, but there were still some traditional street walkers here, I now saw, older women, perhaps aged out of the windows. I was distracted from catching up with Matti, who waited for me at the corner.

He shook his head, “David, I’m sorry. They are stupid.”

I nodded. “It’s OK. No, I mean it’s not OK that they were like that, but it’s OK that they—no, I mean, it is what it is.”

Matti didn’t understand me.

He shook his head. “David, are you hungry?”

I was, actually. My first encounter with overt anti-Semitism seeming to provoke in me a fierce appetite.

The restaurant Matti guided us to was down another narrow street and then halfway up a massive concrete staircase that climbed past little townhouses whose doorways opened onto narrow landings.
We sat down at a round table in a corner of a close room with thick-paned, hand-blown glass windows and stone walls. We ordered oysters, terrine de chef, and suckling pig with red currant sauce—it was only after we had put in our orders that I noticed we had just requested perhaps the least kosher meal possible. Matti ordered for us a bottle of rosé from the Rhône Valley, which we quickly polished off before ordering another. The food was superb, among the best French meals I had ever had, and Matti regained his good spirits, talking to me, as he did when he was in a good mood, about automobiles. He told me he preferred the old Porsches, before 1995, because their engines were air-cooled, the simplicity of that appealed to the engineer in him, and he regretted having only one pre-1995 Porsche, and this a cabriolet, which he felt was too effeminate for a man to drive.

We were by now heavily intoxicated, the wine, the food, the low-ceilinged room all giving me a cloying sense of surfeit—I had ingested too much, the room was too small, the walls too close, the air too thick with smoke. The features on the faces of the local people were too pronounced. Matti had a capacious appetite, and because of his heavy accent when he spoke English, I couldn’t tell if he was so drunk he was slurring his words or my own hearing was distorting what he was saying.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The man in the bar. What did he sing?”

Matti said his English wasn’t good enough to give me a thorough explanation, but that it was a very old song, from before the Second World War. He recalled it from his childhood. There were two versions, the first version was about Jewish women being promiscuous, and how you can have sex with them because their Jewish husbands are always working at money lending. That was the mild version. The more extreme version, which became popular during the war, which the singer had switched to after one verse, suggested that when you ran out of cobblestones, you could pave the streets with Jewish skulls.

This part of Belgium was very primitive, Matti told me, these are primitive people. Luik was a dirty city, full of primitive, dirty people. They were the only kinds of people who would sing a song like this. We ordered Bas-Armagnacs.

In my drunkenness, I kept telling him it was all right, it was all right.

 

*

I had no idea what time it was when we finally left the restaurant. We’d each had a coffee and then another brandy and more cigarettes and more brandy, and so the walk back down the steep stairs was
precarious, each of us taking a breath at each landing, not because we were winded but to steady ourselves for the descent down the slippery steps. It had to have been late afternoon, but it seemed like evening. Thick, low-hanging clouds had drifted in, the gray, gaseous canopy so oppressive I felt I could leap up and touch the bottom of the sky.

Matti was walking ahead of me again, now humming something to himself as he walked, leaning over and steadying himself on the wall for an instant and turning to look at me and smiling.

How was he going to drive home?

I was also in no condition to drive.

We were on a curving road past a vast church with twin steeples. Over the entry to the gallery was an eye inside a pyramid, a symbol similar to the persiflage on the American dollar. There was a four-sided fountain with water streaming from the mouths of stone sculptures of male lions’ heads, the tops of which had been rubbed so many times over the years the manes were worn down almost flat on top. They looked like they were afflicted by some sort of feline-pattern baldness. Matti stopped and began sloshing water onto his face and then cupping his hands and drinking from the tap. Above him was a sign: L’eau Non Potable. He was already standing when I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the sign. His face was shining in a street lamp’s dull light, the gray-brown hair on the sides and forehead of his face matted against his pinkish skin. He smiled and shook a cigarette from his pack.

He seemed indestructible to me.

I vomited near the fountain, rushing into an alley between a restaurant and what I recall as a furniture showroom. I remember being acutely embarrassed, both in front of Matti and at those
strangers walking by who must have seen me, leaning with my head against the stone wall of the restaurant.

“Better?” Matti asked.

I shook my head. I straightened up but immediately reached for the wall to brace myself. I was no longer nauseous, but still I felt terrible. My head ached and I had that awful spinning sensation. I took care to move a few meters uphill from my own puke, sat down, and then closed my eyes for an instant but opened them again to fight off the spinning.

Matti was standing ramrod straight across the alley. He shook another cigarette from his pack and lit it with a match he struck across the stone wall. He inhaled, looked down at me, and nodded, as if my current state confirmed some opinion of me he had formed.

He walked away down the alley.

I was terribly thirsty and felt an urge to lie down on the cobblestones, when I heard shouting. Where the alley emptied into a more brightly lit square I saw two figures silhouetted. I rose unsteadily and went toward them.

Matti and the pompadoured fellow were squaring off against the base of a statue of a soldier in a kiwi-shaped, plumed helmet loading a musket—a monument, if I was reading the inscription correctly,
to soldiers who had died in the Congo Free State in the service of King Leopold. They were shouting at each other, Matti in German and the pompadour in French. During a lull in their hollering, Matti stepped forward and launched a short right hand to other man’s chest and they began scuffling. Their fight seemed slow and to lack energy, at least compared with the slugfests I was used to from popular entertainment. A few spectators had stopped to watch, and there were children hooting—the kids from the bar, I realized. I stepped through them and into the brawl, trying to separate Matti and the pompadoured man, who caught me with a shot to my forehead that caused him to howl and grab his own hand.

Red flashing lights presaged the arrival of a police Peugeot, and suddenly there were two cops, one of them a short woman, and they pulled Matti and the pompadoured anti-Semite apart and then, to my surprise, placed only Matti in the police car.

“Why not him? I asked in French.

The policewoman turned and looked at the pompadoured anti-Semite. “Why?”

I wanted to tell her that he was singing anti-Semitic songs, but I couldn’t find the words in French. “Where are you taking him?”

She gave me a card with a Liège address.

*

 

My clothes were stained and badly creased and my forehead bruised; I waited in the Jaguar as Lily-Anne walked up the proscenium-style stairway into the old, gray building to see about her father. She was gone nearly an hour. I tried to nap in the backseat but was kept awake by a dull headache. Finally, she emerged, pulling her jacket tight around her while her father, looking surprisingly dapper for a man who had been in a tussle and then the klink, trotted down the stairs after her, even managing a slight grin at me.

“David,” he said as he climbed into the passenger seat, “we forgot the strawberries.”

 

*

The wedding was an elaborate affair; the château was built atop the ruins of an old castle at the summit of a small-forested hill with a rolling lawn extending around the broken old walls to where the inner ward of the castle might have been. The couple’s luck held, as the sky above us was eggshell blue, and as the guests strolled the lawn with their Pimm’s cocktails and genièvre tonics, they did so in warm sunlight. Anna-Marie looked lovely, and I was keenly aware that compared with her husband, a dark-haired German with an Italian-sounding last name, I would make an unlikely in-law of Matti and Baumy.

Since our outing to Liège, I’d spent very little time with Matti, as the wedding preparations soon consumed even him. Lily-Anne was also busy, ferrying family members from the airport and train stations in Maastricht and Aachen to the various châteaus and hotels where they would be staying. Maison ClosDennis was full with family all the way to the rafters of the finished attic, and an additional chef was hired to cook for the forty-eight people staying in the house in the days preceding the wedding. The family’s china sets were fully deployed, requiring the bringing up from the cellar of old and mismatched plates, bowls, and serving dishes. Keenly aware that I was lacking any clear role in this whole affair—the boyfriend of the sister of the bride is always a strange position; from seating to family pictures to wedding gift, my exact role and placement was complicated—I decided to help out one morning by bringing up these reinforcement dishes from the cellar. I had just set down my third tray full of dishes when I turned over a serving bowl with lions’ heads for handles—I don’t know why I turned it over, I’m not particularly interested in earthenware or china makes—and I saw something that surprised me: above the word and year Altrohlau 1939 was a black line rendering of a modernist Imperial eagle clutching in its talons a wreath, inside of which was a big, fat Swastika. I began turning over other dishes and plates and saw more of this same marking. It was the first time I had ever seen swastikas in a nonhistoric or noncinematic setting, and at first, after I turned the dishes back over, I thought to myself that this was logical; I supposed that a German family would have a set of dishes from that period. They weren’t the family’s everyday settings, nor were they the fancy china. This stuff in the cellar was the third or fourth string crockery, seldom used or even looked at.

That night, the wedding’s eve, in bed, I told Lily-Anne about the dishes, about the swastikas.

“They were my grandmother’s,” she said. “My father’s mother.”

“Was she a Nazi?” I asked.

Lily-Anne didn’t say yes. What she said was, “I never liked her. She was a strange woman. She didn’t speak to us very much. I loved my other grandmother, my mother’s mother.”

I said that I guess it all made a kind of sense, her father’s strong reaction to the pompadoured singer, considering that he was also making up for his family history.

Lily-Anne put down her book and looked at me strangely. “What are you talking about?”

I told her about the singer, the anti-Semitic song, and her father’s angry protest. Lily-Anne began laughing. “Is that what he told you? An anti-Semitic song?”

I nodded.

She shook her head and explained that he had bought an old sports car from that pompadoured man, a Lotus Elan Plus 2, which had turned out to be badly refurbished with mail-order kit parts. Matti had been fuming for a while about the situation, and finally, that day, after a few drinks, could contain his anger no longer. What I had seen was the rage of a cheated car buyer.

“There wasn’t any anti-Semitic song?”

She shook her head again. “Of course not. Who sings anti-Semitic songs anymore?”

It was a rhetorical question, but I wanted to answer by asking her, “anymore?”

 

*

At the wedding, I followed Lily-Anne around as she greeted her cousins and the offspring of her father’s various business associates. Matti and Baumy were each one of many siblings, and so the afternoon consisted of vast reunions of German cousins. Lily-Anne wore a silk harlequin dress over a tan slip and had had her coif done by the hairdresser in an extravagant up-do with some locks hanging down. Her sister had chosen the style for herself and her bridesmaids and it was fetching on Lily-Anne, accentuating her long neck and delicate ears. I admired her stately progress through her relatives, the ease with which she greeted family and friends. I took some pleasure in watching her among her family; they were such fine physical specimens. Yet when the sisters, brothers, Baumy, Matti, and assorted cousins and uncles congregated on the lawn next to the château, greeting each other with kisses on both cheeks, holding champagne flutes, smoking cigarettes, I would also feel a great distance from them. I was just a few feet from their blond hair, symmetrical features, and tall carriages, but still I felt very far away, from the family, but also from Lily-Anne.

But there was something else. As I watched Lily-Anne, she stopped seeming beautiful to me and more like, well, just another member of her tribe. I could barely tell her apart from her mother, her sister, even her father.

I soon fell back, as I again felt irrelevant to the proceedings.

The ceremony was a civil service in the great hall of the rented château, a vast columned room that opened out onto a balcony. A notary had come from their German ancestral village, and he read from a tall, thin, bound book as the groom and bride sat before him on high-backed chairs, holding hands. Before the ceremony, as the families were gathered, I had intentionally stayed out of sight behind a column, at the back of the hall, behind the rows of gathered relatives and friends, among those more distant associates who would not necessarily know who I was. Lily-Anne looked for me as the various siblings and their spouses were gathered and offered seats behind the betrothed. When he noticed the empty seat, Matti also began looking around for me. Then the time came for the ceremony. They turned toward the bride, and nobody noticed when I slipped out of the château and began my walk down the hill away from this family.