The Cloister Read online

  She took her father’s yarmulke out of her pocket and placed it on the book, then closed the suitcase. Pressing down, she forced away the question: how had this happened?

  Saul Vedette had been a senior directeur de recherche at the Institut Médiéval—a key figure in the modern recovery of medieval manuscripts that had been cast aside in the anti-Catholic frenzy that shook all of France after the Revolution. In addition to the great biblical and theological texts of Christendom, the major monasteries had preserved Jewish and Islamic works, too, and the work of the institute was to reclaim them. Beginning as a young Hebraist, Vedette had done his life’s work there, at first a decidedly Jewish project of cataloging fragments of the foundational Talmudic and Kabbalistic documents that had been spirited away by monks. But Saul Vedette had become one of the most revered professors at the institute—revered, so Rachel had thought, by everyone. Her mistake.

  One last glance around. What else? His glasses! There, on the floor. She crossed, picked the spectacles up, and put them in the pocket of her dress.

  Still looking, she asked herself again: what else? She was certain there was something, but could not think what. Then she knew. She returned to her father’s closet, reached in between the hanging items of apparel, and from the breast of his overcoat ripped off the yellow star, stamped Juif, that she had sewn there herself the year before. He had never once gone outside wearing it. In the kitchen, she found a pin, and with it attached the badge to her dress, at her breast. That was all.

  As she went past Madame Boudreau’s door, she again noted that it was firmly shut. Also firmly shut was Rachel’s heart against the woman. Only moments later, Rachel presented herself at the Deux Garçons, the corner café. Three out of the seven tables were occupied. At one of those, before a pair of dark-suited men, Monsieur Beguin was placing first one demitasse, then the other. When the café proprietor saw Rachel standing in the doorway, he stood motionless, staring. The yellow star on her breast had registered. At first he seemed only perplexed, but then his face softened. Still, he did not move. Rachel entered the café, crossed to the zinc-topped coffee bar, put the suitcase down, and stood ready to place an order. Monsieur Beguin came to her, but on his side of his counter.

  “Whom else did they take?” she asked abruptly. She was thinking, for starters, of the Lévys, a family living two doors down from the café, and of the Brissards, an elderly couple whose flat was above the patisserie in the nearby square.

  “They came only for your father, it seems,” the man replied. “No one else on our street was arrested. They went right to your place, direct. They took him, and they left. In and out.” Monsieur Beguin looked down, ashamed. “There was nothing to be done.”

  “How did they know?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “The ‘denaturalization’ rolls?”

  “My father never registered.”

  “Still, they knew.” He held her eyes with his. “As I say, they went direct. Only for your father. They took him.”

  “French police. Not Germans.”

  “I know,” he said. And his face reddened with further shame.

  Rachel withdrew a cigarette pack from her pocket. By the time she’d placed a cigarette between her lips, the proprietor was ready with a match. She took the flame, exhaled. “You might as well serve me coffee while I wait,” Rachel said.

  “Wait for what?” Beguin asked.

  “The police. I want you to call them. Tell them you’ve captured a Jew of your own.”

  He shook his head no—never. When he lowered his eyes, they snagged on her yellow star. Rachel knew it was unfair to unload this spite on her cowardly neighbor, but she did not care. She said, with a calm that sounded eerie even to her, “Call the police, monsieur. Then, if you please, serve me a coffee.”

  She went to the small table by the window, to wait. Soon enough, Monsieur Beguin placed a demitasse in front of her. By then, though, she was lost in the pool of her own eyes, reflected in the window. But instead of her own face, what she saw was her father’s.

  It was the year before, when Saul Vedette found himself barred from even entering the archive room at the Musée de Cluny, that Rachel, weighing in, had made her first great mistake. She understood that he’d come to live for his new project, and she saw how this final banishment shook him. She insisted that he continue. It was unthinkable to her that his friends on the faculty would not welcome the work once it was completed—and she said as much. She volunteered to exploit her own minor étudiante status at the Sorbonne to become her father’s discreet research assistant. Enrolled in the standard history course, she would be free to roam the archive. “Only point me to the texts you need,” she said, “and I will reproduce them for you.”

  Vedette was in his chair, pipe in hand. She was standing before him. He smiled sadly. “And bring the occupiers down on you?”

  She shrugged. “I am a Jew—but like Mama was.”

  Vedette smiled. “Modern.”

  “If I am Jewish, my teachers and fellow students care nothing for it. No one at the institute knows me. As for the Germans, what are the dusty folders of Cluny to them?”

  “The dusty folders hold texts cluttered with insular Latin script—difficult to read.”

  “Which I can readily master. Why else,” she said, grinning, “did you send me to the lycée classique? As you know, Latin was my best course.” She laughed, because such a claim was so unlike her. And she sensed that he was seeing the way forward—her way. Except on matters of his diet and the disciplines of insulin injection, Rachel had rarely pushed back against her father’s will, yet it was all at once apparent that he had raised her for this moment.

  She said, “The only question, Papa, is—are you right in what you propose about Peter Abelard, or are you wrong?”

  “I am right.”

  “And your findings could help our people?”

  “They could. They could, if somehow my voice was heard in France.”

  “Your voice,” Rachel said with the absolute certitude of a worshipful daughter, “will be heard.”

  His eyes brimmed when he said, “As yours is now.”

  Abélard et Israël was to have been the book’s title, a direct elucidation of the medieval philosopher’s radically ecumenical attitude toward Jews—an attitude that had been lost to history. Saul Vedette meant to offer a new interpretation of Peter Abelard’s known work, and an argument that heretofore anonymous texts unusual in their Jew-friendliness belonged in the Abelard canon.

  Less a pedant’s dry treatise than a robust narrative, the work aimed to lift up Abelard as an alternative model of French esprit for the widest possible readership. Vedette’s igniting hope was that, with the imprimatur of the Institut Médiéval, his book would be published—anonymously, of course—and presented at a Sorbonne symposium, all under the noses of the Nazis, to whom arcane Gallic medievalism would be angels dancing on a pinhead. But once it was published, the angels would fly, for Peter Abelard was a beloved progenitor of the nation.

  Across a thousand years, Abelard’s fame had competed with his infamy: a heretic—or a wise philosopher; a hero of modern humanism—but also the bête noire of anti-modern Catholicism, which only endeared him more to the anti-clerics of the French Enlightenment. Always, of course, he was celebrated—or reviled—as the inventor, with Héloïse, of modern love. They were the Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere of la France. But what concerned Vedette—and, centrally, the story he told—was the all-but-ignored question of Abelard’s attitude toward Jews.

  The improbable Jewish scholar had begun, in 1940, by isolating the anonymous texts and transcriptions likely to have come from the sacked libraries of the two Benedictine foundations that had, through all fluctuations, continued to preserve some association with Abelard—the monastery he’d founded for Héloïse, the Paraclete, and Cluny itself. Through the same methods of close analysis that had shaped his Talmudic study, Vedette identified rubrics, word choices, an
d original constructions peculiar to Abelard. Once Vedette was barred from the archive in 1941, and reconciled to his insistent daughter’s collaboration, he instructed her in what to look for in the transcriptions—Abelard’s invented words, characteristic phrases, and always the word “Judaeus.” When those or a dozen other particular constructions leapt out at her, she painstakingly copied the entire text, to bring home yet another essential clue to the literary detective work that had come to define the life of her father, the housebound Jew.

  Vedette’s foray into the deep past, viewed through the lens of Jewish jeopardy, made him more attuned to the true meaning of the present, perhaps, than anyone in Paris. That was what his daughter saw, and what she insisted on advancing. It was as if, even in his isolation, her brilliant father had been lifted, eagle-like, to a great altitude, from which he looked down with rare clarity on the full moral scale of the Nazi occupation, and the Vichy surrender.

  Rachel saw the thing clearly. This deadly turn in the French story did not have to be. It could have gone another way, and the pivot point, ages ago, was the place of Jews. Saul Vedette was an archaeologist of the national soul, quickening history to change the way people thought in their own astonishing time. Rachel was exhilarated to be helping him: Saul Vedette was bringing the past into the present to save lives. Of course she urged him on!

  But then, only weeks ago, had come the Sorbonne verdict. Her father’s mistake, in handing his preliminary draft over, was to trust a man he thought a friend—Jean-Marie Laurent, the eminent Catholic philosopher, expert on Thomas Aquinas, and chair of the Institut Médiéval. Instead of giving Vedette the informal manuscript reading he sought, Laurent convened an official academic committee to review Abélard et Israël, as if Professor Saul Vedette were a junior scholar up for promotion. Laurent sent word that he would be coming to the Vedette apartment, but made no mention of the committee. No sooner had the three professors arrived than Rachel sensed, from their uniformly sour expressions, that she herself had made the more grievous miscalculation—just in encouraging her father in the project, enabling it. The committee had come to make its finding official. Its procedural formality was made ludicrous, of course, by the fact that the donnish verdict could not be presented, as ritual required, in the ornate seminar hall at the Musée de Cluny, since the petitioning author was a banished Jew.

  As Rachel arranged chairs for the three stoic professors in the cramped living room—after they declined her offer of tea—her grasp of their dark mood made her wonder why they hadn’t just sent a negative letter. What was Monsieur Laurent up to?

  Rachel withdrew to her sleeping alcove and sat on her cot to watch. Her view was half obscured by the alcove curtain, which she half used to hide behind. Soon enough, the thing was clear. The three professors, formally dressed in dark suits and ties, sat like the judges of an appellate court, lacking only white linen tabs at their collars. Saul Vedette was in his armchair, dressed in his best suit and tie. If he shared his daughter’s foreboding, he did not show it. He had received his former confrères with genuine warmth, and now calmly awaited their response to his work.

  Laurent took the lead. Elegantly tailored, he wore bushy but well-trimmed gray hair and a full mustache. He made a show of composing himself, adopting a neutral countenance, and stiffening his posture, the small of his back firmly against the chair. The faces of his colleagues were stony. One of them was striking in his bony leanness, and the other for the sheen on his bald pate. A mournful expression crossed Laurent’s face as he reached into his valise and pulled out the typescript of Abélard et Israël. Its pages, Rachel saw, were vivid with pasted-on place markers of yellow and red. He put the stack of pages on the low table, which, for Rachel, suddenly took on the character of a judicial bench.

  “You make a large argument, monsieur—” Laurent began.

  Vedette interrupted him. “ ‘Monsieur,’ Jean-Marie? How long has it been since you so addressed me?” Vedette’s tone was friendly, but Rachel heard a challenge in her father’s maintaining the familiar form “tu.”

  Laurent ignored the interruption to continue with what Rachel now heard as a rehearsed statement. “—but it is deeply flawed, and insulting to the deposit of Catholic faith.” Faltering momentarily, Laurent withdrew a page from the inside pocket of his suit coat and, following notes, announced what he called the definitive conclusion of the review committee. Rachel leaned forward to hear.

  With clipped efficiency, speaking as to a self-deceived doctoral candidate, Laurent told one of the great living medievalists, first, that his interpretations of Abelard’s known works were unsupported by any objective reading. Especially egregious was the failure to reckon satisfactorily with Peter Abelard’s Commentary on Romans, in which, Laurent said, “The philosopher’s orthodoxy on the Jewish question is clear.”

  Vedette cut in, still calmly. “ ‘The Jewish question,’ Jean-Marie? Is that phrase Peter Abelard’s? Or is it Saint Paul’s?”

  Laurent blushed. “The question of Israel’s replacement.”

  “ ‘I say then,’ ” Vedette recited, “ ‘hath God cast away his people? By no means!…God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew.’ As I show, Abelard features that verse from Romans, chapter eleven.”

  “He wrestles with the verse, that’s true,” Laurent replied, and then added, “but not ‘features.’ In no way ‘features.’ ” Laurent conveyed a sudden disdain, and Rachel sensed how her father had offended him—a Jew presuming to offer instruction on the Epistles of Paul? Laurent continued firmly, “Abelard’s Commentary is clear on the matter. Orthodox. Israel is superseded. The Church replaced the synagogue in God’s affection. A sad thing for Jews, but the truth. And from that truth, all the Jews’ problems follow.”

  Vedette shrugged with apparent equanimity, but Rachel sensed his iron will—and his refusal to be baited. He said, “And as I demonstrate, Jean-Marie, the Commentary came early in Abelard’s work. The philosopher’s first conclusions might also have been superseded in his later writing.”

  “Not demonstrated,” a second professor interjected, the bald one. “His conclusions were othodox,” the man insisted.

  Laurent glanced at his colleague sharply, conveying that he, as chair, was the one to speak.

  But again Saul Vedette intervened, looking directly at the second professor. “You emphasize Abelard’s orthodoxy, monsieur. Yet surely you know that he was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Sens. For being unorthodox.”

  “That was for his muddled teaching on the Trinity.”

  “Not for that alone, monsieur. The anathema was pronounced for his quite unmuddled refusal to say the Jews had sinned.” Rachel marveled at her father’s poise. “You will find the council’s declaration in Denzinger. Shall I give you the reference?”

  Laurent raised his hand. “This is not a disputation. This is a presentation of the committee’s conclusions.” With another silencing glance at his colleague, Laurent went on quickly with the summary: that the case for the textual parallels and stylistic echoes between settled Abelard writings and anonymous manuscripts was unreliable; simply ridiculous was the central assumption of Vedette’s argument that Abelard manifested otherwise unheard-of pro-Jewish sentiments because he had intimate exchange with Jewish counterparts, even depending on texts written by a contemporary Spanish Jew.

  But when Saul Vedette now raised his hand, Rachel was alarmed to see an unprecedented tremor in its fingers. For the first time, she sensed his vulnerability. He was too old for this. He was exposed, vulnerable. Perhaps his sugar level had dropped. The rush of rejection was swamping him, and there was a new uncertain note in his voice as he said, “The physician and philosopher Judah Halevi. I show clearly—”

  The third professor, the lean one, blurted, “Impossible! Peter Abelard never met Judah Halevi.”

  “I do not say ‘met,’ monsieur. I say ‘read.’ Abelard’s Dialogue with the Jew repeats—”

  “Without evidence!” the m
an said.

  “With plausibility, monsieur,” Saul countered, reclaiming authority. He knew this. “The two thinkers were exact contemporaries. Abelard had correspondence with Toledo. It would be surprising if he and Halevi were not aware of each other. Our standard of measure across nine hundred years cannot be certitude. I assert what is plausible.”

  “Fantasy,” said the second professor, the bald one. Laurent, having lost control, was discomfited. The bald professor went on: “A Jew’s fantasy. As if Peter Abelard needed a tutorial from a Jew.”

  “Why not?” Saul asked quietly. “I myself offered tutorials for a quarter-century as a member of the greatest Catholic faculty in France.”

  “Not in sacred theology,” Laurent said, hinting at an unexpected remorse.

  Rachel saw that she had wholly underestimated the danger of what her father had taken on. The insult of a Jew’s trespass had infuriated even his old friend, who now had neither the ability nor the wish to defend Saul Vedette further.

  “Moses?” Vedette asked. “Not sacred?”