HERBERT GOLD
639
in Poland, ofcourse, were gone before we met him.
***
In 1949, when I arrived as a student in Paris, everything was magic,
and the magic was all mixed up: the ancient rusted bicycle I bought with the
shrewd idea that it needed no lock because no one would bother to steal it;
my wife hiding under an umbrella in a corner of our room because I was
trying to give myself a shower by splashing water from the sink; the thrills
of rationing and the black market, so that we could trade our American
clothes for the luxuries of theater tickets; my French tutor who first called
me "mon vieu" and caused a blush of pride, a heat I can still feel in memory;
reading Sartre's essay on how to treat the German occcupant in various hy–
pothetical situations (give him a light for his cigarette ifhe asks, because he's
a human being and it would be degrading not to; talk to him when he asks a
direction, because he's the enemy and he is performing as the occupant); the
birds twittering in the courtyard of the little Hotel de l'Univers on the rue
Notre Dame de Lorette and the smell of the breath of the hotel manager,
which I thought was tooth rot but finally learned was only garlic, a substance
I had not grown up with in Ohio.
And my fellow students who invited me to dinner at their apartment
and then pulled out their yellow stars.
And the woman who sold us cheese at the corner shop with the
numbers tattooed on her wrist.
And then the jovial French tutor, who fondly said "mon vieux" told me
he had been a member of the Petainist Blue Shirt youth brigade. He invited
me to hear a recording, in secret, up a stairway of the rue Mouffetard, along
with his fellow veterans, with candles burning in front of each of us, of a
screeching speech by the revered Marechal.
The events of the war were still the day's news and the day's life.
They were not yet history, and perhaps, if one attends closely to the world,
they are not merely history now, either.
In my twenties, I was still immortal as far as I was concerned. Any
other solution besides eternal life didn't fit into my plans. Death was a rumor
that didn't apply. Yet it gradually came to dawn on me that the same wasn't
the case for others.
In Paris in 1949, I met a man with an odd disease. He looked like one
of those freak wrestlers, Man Mountain Moise, with a granite jaw, protruding
nose, stone ears; all the cartilage was growing and solidifying. He had no
hair, eyebrows, or lashes. His tongue was enormous. It impaired his speech
