163 West 83rd Street, 66 Boulevard Saint-Michel… There were fourteen of them altogether, and one afternoon when I was alone in the house I copied them into my notebook.
PARANOID THAT something might happen to his children, Weisz was strict about what they were allowed to do, where they were allowed to go, and with whom. Their lives were monitored by a series of humorless nannies with a firm grasp that accompanied them everywhere, long after they were old enough to be allowed a certain freedom of movement. After their tennis, piano, clarinet, ballet, or karate lessons they were chaperoned directly home by these muscular women in thick stockings and health clogs. Any change or amendment to their daily schedule had to be first run past their father. Once, when Yoav meekly pointed out that other children did not have to live by the same rules, Weisz snapped back that perhaps such children were not so loved as his sister and he. If there was any protest at all about life under their father’s rule, it came, in a muted form, from Yoav. Weisz crushed these protests with disproportionate power. As if to ensure that Yoav would never grow confident enough to stand up to him, he found ways to constantly belittle him. As for Leah, she had always done what her father asked because she lived with the special burden of knowing that she was her father’s favorite, and that to stand up to him, or God-forbid disobey him, would be a betrayal of the highest order, akin to a physical assault.
When Yoav turned sixteen and Leah fifteen, their father decided to send them to board at the International School in Geneva. By then the nannies had been replaced by a driver who shadowed them everywhere just as the women had done, only from the leather-upholstered interior of a Mercedes-Benz. But Weisz could no longer ignore how ingrown his children had become. They spoke in a pidgin of Hebrew, French, and English that only they understood, and, despite their worldliness, naturally accepted and even sought a position of isolation among others their age. He recognized that they couldn’t be kept on such a tight leash for much longer. It’s not impossible that he sensed, as even the most blind and misguided parents can sometimes do, that the way he had chosen to raise his children might hurt or even cripple them in the end, in ways he couldn’t yet imagine.
He called the headmaster, Monsieur Boulier, and had a long conversation with him about the school, how his children would be cared for, and what he expected them to find there. Experience had taught him that people behave in your favor when they feel bound to you in some way, if only through a handshake or friendly conversation. Even better if they think there is something you can do for them in return, and so by the end of the phone call Weisz had assured Boulier that he would find him a match for his Ming vase, the other of which had fallen and shattered some years ago during a dinner party thrown by his wife. Weisz didn’t believe it had broken during a dinner party, but it was enough for him to know that it had broken under circumstances that still disturbed Boulier, and only a perfect replacement of the vase would allow the memory of the incident to recede.
Weisz himself did not drive—whenever possible he walked, and otherwise he took the metro like everybody else—but he insisted on accompanying Yoav and Leah in the chauffeured car from Paris to Geneva. They stopped for lunch in Dijon, and after the meal in a dark tavern on a narrow medieval street named after a seventeenth-century theologian, Weisz left Yoav and Leah to browse in a bookshop under the driver’s watch while he went to see someone about some business. There was nowhere Weisz went where he did not have business of some kind; where he had none, he invented some. There was a gesture his father always made, raking his fingers across his closed eyes as if trying to wipe something from his eyelids, that was so particular to him that it seemed to Yoav a kind of identifying mark. When Yoav was young, he used to believe that at those moments his father was listening to something outside the range of human hearing, like a dog.
When they arrived in Geneva, Weisz brought his children directly to the house of the