Mistral's Daughter (58 page)

"And
I thought you were really interested."

"I
was, I was incredibly fascinated.
 
Roman
water systems have a mysterious allure all their own," Fauve drawled
provokingly.

"I
think you need to be kissed," Eric said sternly.
 

"Oh,
no, I don't!" Fauve cried, alarmed.

"Oh,
yes, you do."
 
Eric turned the car
into a little side road and stopped the motor.
 
He reached across the seat and pulled Fauve toward him easily in spite
of her attempts at resistance, but once she was securely pinned in his arms he
didn't try to raise the chin that she held firmly tucked into her neck but
instead he kissed the, warm, silky top of her head.
 
Slowly she relaxed and they sat pressed
together listening to the sound of their breathing and communicating a wordless
secret of which they each possessed a half.
 
Long, sweet dreaming minutes went by and finally Fauve said, in a small,
shy voice with her chin still lowered,
 
"You may kiss me if that's what you want."

"Isn't
it what you want?" Eric asked, smiling at her youth.

"If
you have to ask..."
 
Fauve raised
her head and drew a finger across the indented twin pillows of his lower
lip.
 
With a groan he pressed his lips on
hers, feeling a jolt in his soul as he received the innocence of her
full-hearted kiss.
 
"Oh!" she
whispered in incandescent surprise. "Oh,
how nice
!"
 
She opened her arms wide and laced them
tightly around his neck.
 
They clung
together kissing each other over and over, each kiss complete in itself, not
leading to anything except another kiss, each kiss a miniature cosmos in which
they lost all sense of the existence of any other world. Utterly captured by
the moment as she was, Fauve was aware that deep in her chest a new pulse had
announced itself, beating for the first time, as if it were a drum heralding
the birth of something that had been waiting within her, waiting for this
particular man to kiss her.
 
Suddenly the
little car began to rock from side to side.
 
Fauve and Eric stiffened in alarm and looked around them.
 
The windows of the car were blocked halfway
up by fat, dusty gray shapes, a noisy, indifferent succession of strong,
mindless bodies that buffeted the Renault as if it were an inconvenient bush.

"I
didn't even hear the sheep coming," Fauve said in amazement.

"Neither
did I...
 
oh, Fauve...
 
my darling Fauve...
 
oh, damn, here come the shepherds
—
look in the rear-view mirror."
 
Eric
moved away from her to a respectable distance.

"Shepherds?"
Fauve scoffed breathlessly, taking refuge from her new emotion in teasing.
"They're used to nature in all its manifestations.
 
Come back here at once!"
 

Cavaillon,
some fifteen kilometers southwest of Félice, in the direction of Avignon, is a
calm prosperous market town of eighteen thousand inhabitants.
 
Fauve and Eric sat outside the café in which
they'd had lunch, holding hands silently, looking on to a drowsy, unimportant
square.
 
Finally Eric said, "I truly
don't care that there's nothing to see in Cavaillon, though I do still wonder
what we're doing here."

"We're
waiting for the guide to show up."

"The
guide?
 
There's nothing here to merit a
guided tour
—
just us and the waiter
—
even the shops are closed
till four."

"Wait,"
Fauve said in a superior voice.

"Whatever
you say, shepherd's delight."

"We
did rather make their day, don't you agree?"

"I
didn't think to ask, but possibly they've seen people kissing before."

"Oh,
come on, Eric, I see him!"
 
Fauve
jumped up and started to cross the square toward a flight of steps in front of
an unremarkable three-story building where a young man in his shirt sleeves had
just stationed himself.
 
Eric followed
her, shaking his head in bewilderment.

As
they approached the young man, people seemed to spring out around the corner of
every street leading to the square, popping from parked automobiles and pouring
from doorways, almost out of the very ground itself.
 
By the time they had reached the base of the
staircase they were part of a group of some twenty-five people, all of whom, to
Eric's amazed eyes, seemed to know perfectly well where they were heading.
 
He tried to keep as close to Fauve as
possible but it was difficult since everyone was eagerly trying to climb the
narrow staircase at the same time. At the top there was a balcony and a tall
pair of handsomely carved, closed wooden doors set into a massive stone
archway.

"What...
?" Eric began, but Fauve motioned him to be silent.
 
The crowd finally arranged itself in place
around the guide and waited in an expectant silence.
 
The young man flung open the doors with a
certain grave ceremony.

"Welcome
to the Synagogue of Cavaillon," he said.

"I
don't believe it!" Eric muttered to her.

"I
figured you wouldn't
—
yesterday when you got the Talmud mixed up with
the Bible," Fauve said, delighted with her surprise.
 
"I discovered this when I was reading
the green Michelin guide to Provence last winter, they've got it listed under
'Other Curiosities' in Cavaillon along with the old cathedral and the
archeological museum.
 
I’d planned to
come here when I got back."

"Well,
what are we supposed to do now?" Eric asked.

"Visit
it, of course.
 
Don't you want to?"

"Well,
sure...
 
I guess...
 
why not?"

"You
amaze me, you really do.
 
I mean, you
are
Jewish, aren't you?"

"Naturally
—
my parents are, so I am
—
but what does that have to do with
it?
 
They aren't religious at all,
neither of them, and I've never even been to a service
—
oh, wait, once
a cousin got married, when I was a little kid, and they took me to the wedding
in Paris, but I hardly remember it.
 
To
me being Jewish doesn't have a connection with going to synagogue unless you
feel like it, and I've never had the urge.
 
Anyway, why are you so interested?
 
Is it some kind of hobby?"

"Yesterday,
your father was talking about my grandmother, Magali, remember?
 
She's Jewish, born in France, and her
daughter, my mother, was half-Jewish and half-Irish Catholic. My father is
French Catholic so that makes me one-quarter Jewish
—
more than enough
to fascinate me because it's part of my history, my personal history, and it's
the only part I have any information about.
 
My father doesn't know a thing about his grandparents
—
he
frankly doesn't care and he's not even sure if they're originally from Provence
in spite of his name.
 
All I know about
the other side of the family is that my mother's father was an American named
Kilkullen
—
that and two dollars will buy you a shot of Irish whiskey on
St. Patrick's Day.
 
I'm curious enough to
want to visit the synagogue, got it?"

"Anything
you say, little nut.
 
I just can't
believe all these tourists
—
they've got to be speaking fifteen foreign
languages
—
where did they all come from?"

"Fifteen
foreign countries.
 
This is a place of
pilgrimage, Eric.
 
What's more, it's even
got a water system inside somewhere according to the Michelin, even if it's
not a Roman aqueduct."

"What
is it?"

"A
ritual bath," Fauve pronounced, her eyes dancing with mischief.

"Oh,
no!
 
That's where I draw the line."

"It's
only for women, you ignorant idiot, and anyway this synagogue is a monument, it
isn't used for anything anymore.
 
Look,
the guide has a book for sale.
 
Let's buy
one so we can look around by ourselves without following this crowd.
 
I hate being trapped in a herd."

Eric
bought the entrance tickets and paid for a thin book by André Dumoulin,
conservator of the museums and monuments of Cavaillon.
 
It contained a short history of the Jewish
community of Cavaillon, as well as photographs and descriptions of the synagogue.

Fauve
and Eric left the group of tourists all listening intently to the guide, and
wandered alone into the central part of the temple.
 
Neither of them had any idea of what to
expect and they stopped abruptly after they crossed the threshold, taken
utterly by surprise.
 
They found
themselves in an almost empty room that nevertheless gave an immediate
impression of the most gracious harmony of spirit.
 
It could have been a perfect small salon from
some abandoned palace built in the style and at the time of Versailles.
 
The synagogue had been constructed in 1774,
on the site of an older temple that dated back to 1499, and the architect and
craftsmen of Cavaillon who had worked on its interior had been trained in the
unsurpassably delicate formality of Louis XV.

The
walls of the tall, balconied room were painted a soft white and entirely
paneled.
 
Each panel was adorned with
wood that had been carved and gilded in motifs of roses, garlands of palm
leaves, baskets of flowers, seashells and musical instruments
—
all the
fantasies and fancies so dear to the taste of the Marquise de Pompadour.
 
A number of chandeliers hung from the high
ceiling, some of them dripping fragile pendants of old rock crystal, while
others, more solid, were made of well-polished copper, all carrying gay clusters
of tall yellow candles. A pale golden, muted light drifted in from high
windows.

Both
Fauve and Eric found themselves irresistibly drawn forward to stand before a
railing, some four feet tall, made of intricately detailed wrought iron.
 
It stood protectively around a pair of
superbly carved and decorated doors that were the unquestioned focus of the
entire temple. The doors, which looked as if they must open into a noble space,
were flanked by tall Corinthian columns, supporting an elaborate series of
pediments crowned by a basket from which burst a profusion of sprays of roses.

Fauve,
searching in the guidebook, realized that they were the doors behind which the
scrolls of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, had been kept when the temple had still
functioned as a house of worship.
 
She
stood in awe, trying to imagine what she would see if she were to be allowed to
penetrate the enclosure, to open the closed doors of the tabernacle, but she
failed.
 
It was beyond her.

Eric
heard her sigh wistfully and pulled her gently away, leading her to the
opposite side of the gemlike temple where they climbed one of the two
semicircular staircases to the paneled, garlanded balcony that stretched the
entire width of the room.

Fauve
leaned carefully on the balustrade, as delicately fashioned as lace, and
thought that from this vantage point the temple looked like a ballroom in which
she could imagine ladies in powdered hair and men in brocaded vests
dancing.
 
But the guidebook, again consulted,
informed her that she was standing on what had been the rostrum of whoever
conducted the service.
 
Her vision of
dancers faded as she looked down and tried to imagine the sumptuous little
temple filled with benches, and the benches crowded by people dressed as they
used to be dressed throughout Provence, in costumes that were now only worn by
folksingers performing for festivals.

The
past seemed close, as if it were lying just behind a curtain of light; so
powerful, so palpable was the atmosphere of the lovely deserted place that it
was as impossible to realize that it was empty as it was to know what it had
truly been like when it had been in use.
 
Like all abandoned holy places, in, which once the human soul has poured
out its deepest emotions, it hummed with a complex energy and silenced the
visitor.

As
the horde of other visitors started to enter the main part of the synagogue,
Fauve and Eric hastily descended the staircase and penetrated to the basement
of the building, where, in the former bakery of the Jewish community, the city
of Cavaillon and the Beaux-Arts had installed a small museum.

There,
again alone, they found themselves in a long, low-ceilinged room with a stone
floor. Two glass cases, full of photographs and documents, filled the center
of the room and on both walls stood illuminated cabinets that contained all
manner of ceremonial objects used in the performance of the service.
 
It even contained the tabernacle doors of
the temple of 1499, Renaissance in style, adorned with a bas-relief of vases,
holding branches of fruit and flowers and painted with the Hebrew letters of
the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.
 
Fauve was contemplating these doors that had been new almost five
hundred years before, trying to pierce the veil of time, when Eric pulled her
away to another of the cabinets.