At the end of the summer of 1970, three years after the Six-Day War, Rodolphe Immerman was nearing his twenty-fifth anniversary as a noted piano teacher in Paris.
Once a year Immerman would show up at the consulate in the avenue Franklin Roosevelt to prove he was still alive.
“Still here, Monsieur Immerman?” the woman at the desk in recent years would say each time. “Still with us?” He guessed that she had grown up after it was all over. Maybe she was just performing her insensitive idea of chitchat. He didn’t feel that she was malevolent, although she liked to break out of German to belabor her tasteless banter with the note of irony in her “Monsieur”. Her provocation seemed to him the condescension, mitigated by a version of friendliness, that the young sometimes assume with the elderly. Something not remote from the outrageous teasing that nurses practice to cheer seriously ill patients. She was there to administer to him, even if the closest she would get to the laying on of hands would be to ensure that his check came without a hitch for another year.
Or it might just have been that she resented him because he was handsome and she, with her choppy features, was unquestionably ugly. He was handsome in a delicate, elderly man’s way. He had never cared for his receding chin. But his hair, still as thick as Mahler’s, gave him the distinction of his calling: artist. Maybe she didn’t dislike him after all. Immerman, in any case,...
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