season’s bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world.
CHAPTER SIX
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
PARIS, SPRING 1941
THE FRENCH COUSINS LIVED IN a tall stucco house that had been in the family for three generations. There were two yellow brick chimneys, a wrought-iron fence, green shutters on every window, and an enormous garden, now in ruins. No one had time to take care of a garden, for there was no help and no money to pay the gardener, a fellow named Edgar, who had worked for the family for over a decade. France had declared war on Germany in September 1939, and by June 1940, the Germans had entered Paris. By that time two million Parisians had fled, and those who stayed saw the city grow dark and silent, with food shortages. Of the 150,000 Jews in Paris, a third were foreign refugees, but soon enough that number dropped by two thirds. Many people fled or were arrested. For those who remained, there was no fuel or coffee or soap or shoes, and the increasing fear and hatred of the Nazis was expressed behind closed shutters.
This past winter the Lévis had been forced to cut down the lime trees to burn in the fireplace. There was no coal, and bundles of wood were no longer sold on the streets. Even in spring the world was surrounded by gloom. Markets were closed, people didn’t venture outside, parks were empty.
The Lévis had not been among the hordes of people who left the city when a radio announcement was made by the government that accepted France’s collusion with Germany. The local politicians knew Professor André Lévi and made an allowance, permitting him to keep his house and go on with his work, which might be useful to the military. Many residents went west and south, many to Toulouse, where the archbishop, Monsignor Jules-Gérard Saliège, was one of the first Catholic priests to speak out against the treatment of foreign-born Jews. The government itself had moved to the center of France in the city of Vichy, which they promised would remain an unoccupied area. Yet people wondered what that freedom meant. Free to do as they were told? Newspapers were censored, a curfew was put down, and residents were lifted off the street and never seen again.
For three generations, the Lévis had never thought of themselves as anything but French. Their tall house had a fish pond and, until they had recently been cut down, the oldest lime trees in Paris, and was hidden away on a tiny street on the Left Bank. The third Monsieur Lévi, André, was a mathematician who had been a child prodigy in the field of rational numbers and algebraic geometry and for two decades had been an eminent professor at the École Polytechnique, until Jews were asked to leave. He thought the next few years under the Germans must be navigated as a maze would be, and at this he was expert. There was a small maze of hedges in the garden, and it was here the professor first taught his son Julien about spatial analysis. He had often brought him to the garden at the Château de Villandry, where a Renaissance maze signified the progression of life. He would blindfold Julien so that the boy could feel the geography and learn to visualize spatial relationships. In time Julien became astoundingly good at running the maze without stumbling over the hedges, excellent practice for a mathematician who must be willing to believe there is a logic to all things.
In his everyday life, André Lévi continued to think of number theory, the study of whole numbers that traced back to the Babylonians. His special professional interest was the speed with which the universe was expanding, in part by refining the use of Cepheid stars as yardsticks. For him the world was divided, and because of this he often didn’t see human beings, not even those he knew intimately, whether they were his wife or his two sons, Julien and Victor, or the young housemaid, Marianne. Professor Lévi had managed to keep the house by paying off a local magistrate. Each week more of their belongings were sold in order to do so, first the paintings off the walls, then silverware from the table, then the cameos in Madame Claire’s mirrored jewelry box.
The professor did his best to continue with his life’s work, published in several groundbreaking papers in France and Germany,