of little interest except for a sign in the downstairs office window: “Room for Rent.” I went in, was shown a small, pleasant room with a balcony. I rented it.
The walls in the whole building were painted stark white, the tiled floors kept bare. It looked like a hospital. But it offered a vast gymnasium on the first floor where the known athletes of the day trained, I was told, a swimming pool, a sauna, and terraces on the seventh floor for sunbathing.
Abel, age twelve
There was also an artists’ studio, where, I discovered the very day I moved in, the handsome Russian lived. By chance we met in the hall in the afternoon. “Bonjour,” we said, both smiling, both ignoring that we had not seen each other in a year. We walked out of the building. He held the door for me.
“We could have supper together tonight, could not we?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
We walked to the Dôme for the traditional aperitif before dinner.
Abel was not a Russian, he was a German. Not a very good one, he joked; his father had been born in a part of the former Austria-Hungary called Slovakia. He did not like Germany, he surely did not want to live there, he said.
III
Abel rarely spoke about his youth, but when he did, it was in an incredulous, self-mocking tone as if he did not quite believe he had been such a child or adolescent.
“My mother always boasted that I could draw pictures before I could walk,” he would say. And so, on his fourteenth birthday—the family had, by then, moved to Stuttgart—she took her son to a miracle man who owned a factory and begged him to turn Abel’s wondrous talents into bread-winning ones. He did . . . after three years of apprenticeship in the man’s office and Abel became a draftsman with a diploma and a job. After some time, though, he decided that he would rather be a pianist. He had taught himself to play on some rickety piano in a café. Sounded pretty good, he thought. “First, I had a cutaway made to order. That’s what pianists wear don’t they?”
One day, in his smart outfit, his cardboard suitcase in hand, he took the train for Dresden, was accepted into the best music school in the world, and got a job in a factory as a draftsman. Real engineers were scarce in Germany in 1919. He played the piano six hours a day—his landlords loved music—and, for some eight hours, designed melting ovens. Mostly melting ovens. “My landlady delivered a giant pot of soup daily, meat on Sunday,” he said. “After only a few months, the school gave me a scholarship for musical composition, and the factory entrusted me with bigger projects. A glorious life! Lasted about two years—until the day a brave bishop, in order to bless a factory I had designed, climbed on its smart, rounded roof, and ominous smoke rose from under his robes . . . the bishop’s shoes were catching fire. . . .
Abel’s dance band, ca. 1923
“But by then, I had become a pianist!” Abel played to accompany silent movies, eventually returned to Stuttgart, and with three friends, formed a combo that played in nightclubs. “When I got tired of never seeing the light of day, I presented myself as an artist at the best advertising agency in town. I had only a dozen or so pocket-sized cartoons to show for myself, but I was hired.” He switched to drawing and painting, even had a one-man show in a good gallery. He sold nothing, but one painting was stolen, which he found most gratifying.
Eventually, Abel got tired of advertising and one day left for Italy “in search of real art and real sun,” he said. When he returned, after nearly two years, the Nazi movement, which he had predicted would go away like an ugly boil, had instead grown alarmingly. Abel had little interest in or understanding of politics, but he had strong feelings about it. He hated what was happening in Germany and saw only one solution: to run away. And so in the fall of 1928, he went to Paris to study art.
Abel had been thirteen when the First World War started, seventeen when his country lost it. He was the fifth child in a family of six. The father had died. And he had seen his mother embroidering by the light of the moon.
About the time Abel took the train for the music school of Dresden, Germans needed a bucket of banknotes to buy a stamp.
Why did he omit that somber, dramatic backdrop from the story of his youth? I wondered as I sat at the terrace of the Dôme with Abel and his friends. And indeed, he sat there every afternoon, went to a restaurant for a leisurely supper and frequently to a party. He swam, danced, camped. He painted too. On Sundays mostly, he said.
When I met him, Abel was putting the last touches to the large portrait of a woman in a romantic long black dress. Oh, how I wished he would paint me in a long black dress! Instead, he asked me to put on some Oriental blouse richly embroidered in gold, plunked an enormous hat on my head, and told me to stand still.
He painted slowly, smoked, did not talk.
I have forgotten how long it took to complete the painting, but I have not forgotten how unhappy I was with it. I disliked the artificial forest in the background, the silly white apron I gathered in one hand, the egg I held in the other . . . . This was a fancy country girl, not me! Well, the face, the hair, the hands were mine.
Woman in Black Dress, ca. 1935 (oil)
“Her arm is too long,” I said.
“True,” Abel said. “Can’t you see, there will never be enough of that beautiful blouse.”
I have, at times, turned this painting against the wall. Rolled up and unprotected, it gathered dust in my parents’ attic for over twenty years after we left France for the last time. And yet a day came when we clung to it as one clings to a last token saved from a shipwreck, this last image of the long-gone, happy days.
At the time it was painted I wondered whether painting was not just another luxurious hobby for Abel, like music and dance. His impromptu dancing at artistic shows made the newspapers more often than his paintings. He had once carried offstage the popular singer Marie Dubas and replaced her performance with his own extravagant dance.
Handsome, built like a ballet dancer, chic in pants on which he wiped his paintbrushes, witty, generous, and very popular, he gave the impression of not being serious about anything.
But there was a secret Abel, well organized, hardworking, responsible. His mother regularly received payments for the whimsical illustrated articles he contributed to a sports magazine published in Berlin.
His own “daily bread,” as he called it, was assured by work he did for a Parisian advertising agency with which he had a long-standing gentleman’s agreement—not quite legal: foreigners were permitted to do freelance work only. He was paid a regular salary and given generous vacations in exchange for whatever work fitting his talent the agency required. A boon for Abel, who usually executed a week’s work in two days.
IV
When I was a child, my great-grandfather, after a long absence, returned home one Mardi Gras night wearing two similar masks, one on his face, the other on the back of his head,
