I became a foreigner, a sojourner in my hometown, pitching an old army tent on the other side of the campground, disguising myself as a tourist with camera and sunglasses, not so much to conceal myself from Oppen but against chance encounters with my own acquaintances. Dislodged from the groove of routine, how abruptly one vanishes….
—
I’d affected the camera merely as a component of my disguise, but then it occurred to me that I could use it to take pictures. Soon each click of the shutter afforded me an instant of relief, a flash of hope that an explanation would be disclosed, a pattern revealed. This hope grew. As for David Oppen, he leant each night against the railing of the bridge, appeared daily at the shop where he bought his liquor, nodded on park benches like a derelict, but mostly walked and walked and walked.
I might have understood that his grief was a cousin of my grief. I might have understood that he had lost a Miriam all his own. I might have, but I did not. For me there was one fact and one fact only: he was alive and Miriam was dead. Click went my camera, and the lens snapped up image after image, as though it had been starved. Knowledge or understanding could not satisfy this hunger. Only justice could: justice, I knew, was the sustenance of the gods.
When I saw him outside the pharmacy, leaning over that drugged-out Gypsy girl in the bushes, helping her to her feet—when I saw that the girl was pregnant, that he was helping her home, I saw no Good Samaritan. No: what I saw was an opportunity, an opening. I neither knew nor understood what I saw, feeling only the first inkling of a conviction: justice had chosen me and would show me the way. If I held fast, in time I would be rewarded. What I was owed would be delivered into my hands.
Hanging a block behind them, I followed them on their slow progress through the streets. I watched them disappear behind the plywood sheet propped over the entrance to an abandoned construction site out on the rue Saint-Saturnin. I returned to the campground to wait.
I did not have to wait for long. That night, a young man appeared on a motorbike at the campground where David Oppen had rented a tent site, the campground in whose opposite corner I had pitched my own moth-eaten army tent. The young man was shouting: Where was he, the American doctor? For God’s sake, where was he?
The American doctor? I said, emerging. You’ll find him in his campsite down by the water.
After they had left the campground on the young man’s motorbike, I followed without haste, out to the unbuilt building on the rue Saint-Saturnin. In the shadows of the rue Saint-Saturnin, I waited.
Abruptly, the boy on his motorbike burst from the mouth of the garage, skidding to a stop on the street, frozen in indecision. For a moment he rested his forehead on his handlebars. Then he lifted his head, and looking straight at me or through me, he planted his heel on the pavement, wrenched his bike around, and sped away in the direction of the ring-road and the autoroute.
Nothing happened. The sky stayed black. I waited. The plywood board hung open on its hinge as though inviting me to pass through. I passed through.
From the edge of the ramp I could peer down into the garage. They lay in the weak light of a candle or lantern. They did not move, neither the girl nor David Oppen, nor the little shape between them, or the dog at their feet. It was as though they had been carved on the lid of a tomb. I had to rest the camera on the railing: the shutter hung open for what seemed like seconds, soaking the film with that darkness. The shutter closed and the dog jerked. I fought back the urge to retreat from my post. I waited until I was satisfied I had escaped notice then slipped back out to the street.
Shortly after daybreak he emerged, torso bare in the cold morning, in his arms a bundle wrapped in a bloody shirt. He veered out into the street, bellowing for help. Then police cars bumped up onto the curbs, their strobes reeling. At last the strobes faded, and I was just another of the gathered passersby, the frowning, shrugging citizens of Nevers.
All day, from a chair in a waiting room in the Hôpital Colbert, I watched the nurses as they came and went. At last I approached one and explained how I happened to have been walking past when the man, the American, appeared in the street with the baby he had saved. Could she reassure me that the little one would be all right? No, no, I said, I did not need to visit! If she could just reassure me. Oh yes, she was happy to assure me how lucky the girl had been, how lucky that the American doctor had appeared, that she had been rescued from that basement from those filthy Gypsy kids. And had I heard? Why, the American doctor had arranged for the baby’s transfer to Paris, to the Necker Pediatric Hospital, at his own expense. Was that so? Yes, it was so, and to the Hôpital Necker, no less!
In Paris, I took a room in a veterans’ pension and joined the cadre of Necker volunteers. I assisted parents in their distress, accompanied them in their vigils, sat with them in their grief, all
