She placed a frail hand on the cover of the book she had brought with her to the bed, and momentarily closed her eyes.
I knew the meaning of my mother’s words. Old books contain a history that transcends the words inscribed within their pages. The paper, the ink, even the spacing of the words. They possess an ancient soul.
“My father taught me to read Hebrew when I was much younger than you are now...”
She smiled and lifted her hand off the page to reach for mine. I could feel the birdlike bones of her fingers, and her grasp was weaker than it had been just the day before.
“I should have taught you, too,” she said as her voice began to crack. “I didn’t resist your father when he wanted you to be Catholic. He never went to church, and I told myself that if dipping mydaughter briefly in holy water could shield her from experiencing bigotry and hate, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Let me... ,” she said, but her voice began to tremble.
She took my finger and pointed to one of the Hebrew letters that to me looked almost like a musical note. “That’s the lettershin,” she began. And with great effort, her lungs taking shallow and frequent breaths, she began to decode what was written on the page, guiding me through a text that had been handed down over the centuries. After her death, I read those sentences, over and over in my mind. I did not understand what the words meant. But to me, it was the language of my mother’s last breaths.
5.
Marthe
Paris 1892
Instead of bringing flowers or boxes of chocolates as small gifts of appreciation, Charles now started giving Marthe books about the history of art and other subjects he thought might inspire her. It bemused him that she wanted to educate herself beyond her toilette of expensive face creams and perfumes, closets of silk dresses, and drawers of delicate lingerie.
“You might find this of interest,” he would tell her as he left her a book on the history of English furniture or one on the evolution of French landscape painting. She admitted freely to him that she had many blank pages in her education, and it delighted him to help fill them.
One afternoon, he arrived particularly pleased. He handed her a dark leather volume with gilded edges.
“What’s this, my love?” she asked coyly.
She took the book in her hand, looking at the cover embossed with the title:Fablesby Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian.
“Ah, the name.” She smiled and reached over to his cheek and kissed him. “Might I claim him as a relative?”
“It is not only the similarity of the name, my dove. Although it might add to your glamour to say you descended from an eighteenth-century writer...”
“Indeed.” She ran her fingers again over the cover, smiling at Charles’s most recent gift.
“What I found most remarkable was the last line of Florian’s eighth fable.”
She sat down on the sofa and began leafing through the pages until she found the one of which he spoke. It was entitled“True Happiness.”
“I believe you will find yourself captured within the lines.” He reached for his pipe and struck a match. Blue plumes of smoke filled the air.
“A poor little cricket,” she began, “observes a butterfly fluttering in the meadow...”
The fable continued to describe how the butterfly is chased by a group of children who race to catch the fragile insect. The butterfly tries in vain to escape them as they eventually seize the butterfly and tear off a wing from its fragile body, then its head.
The cricket seeing the cruelty of the world remarks:
“It costs too dear to shine in this world.
How much I am going to love my deep retreat!
To live happily, remain hidden.”
She paused as if unsure she truly understood the words.
“Don’t you see, little dove... I saw you at that dance hall, where all the unsavories threatened to tear at your lovely wings. But I have enabled you to live quietly and safely in your own elegant retreat.”
He took the book from her hands.
