An Infinity of Mirrors Read Free

That Severus was a very dirty fighter. He burned everything we had and he murdered every noncombatant in his path. They won. They didn’t win fairly, but they won. They were the biggest empire in the world and we were so small we couldn’t have filled the opera house, but they offered us citizenship and—never forget this, Paule—we turned it down.”
    Or he would say, “The origins of anti-Semitism are forgotten now, darling girl, but after we gave Saul of Tarsus the basic material from the life of one of our rabbis, Christianity spread across the world. As a matter of fact, by the twelfth century the Jews were the only non-Christians left in the known world and the Church was taking very good care of us because it had wistful hopes about converting us. And it was extremely important to them. After all, they would have a harder time proclaiming Christ’s divinity if his own people disclaimed him, wouldn’t they? But naturally we wouldn’t convert, so to prevent us from infecting the faithful we were excluded from the feudal system until, in a brash decree in 1215, Pope Innocent II instituted the yellow badge. It was then the great sprint toward ritual murder began.”
    More vividly than her own mother, Paule remembered her father’s second wife, Evelyn Weissman, one of the great stars of the French theatre. Her presence was so electric that Paule’s father had had to dismiss her as a wife, although he kept her as a mistress for three and a half years after the divorce; he was obsessed with the idea that she was more interested in her own electricity than in home-making. Paule was nine at the time of the second divorce. She was a lovely child, tall for her age, and even the caustic realism of her birthday portrait by Felix Valloton, the Swiss, could not conceal the fact that she was exquisitely female with long plaited hair and huge purple eyes which savored the viewer from a long, finely boned face.
    All of Bernheim’s wives had been kind and loving to her, although some not as convincingly as others. Dame Maria van Slyke, the film star and her father’s fourth wife, had been Paule’s favorite. Marichu Senegale, the third wife, an Algerian opera star, had been the least sympathetic. She had wept endlessly and in such a strange key after she had gained ninety-one pounds, causing Bernheim to come home less and less frequently. The one thing all wives brought to Paule was information about her father’s mistresses, in the hope that Paule would trade information or even come to sympathize more with them than with her father. A man as intensely artistic as Paul-Alain Bernheim had to have mistresses while he had wives; it was a matter of station, nationality, profession, and health. He kept a small apartment on the Avenue Gabriel but he always made it a practice to begin new liaisons at the Hôtel de la Gouache, at Versailles, always in the same three-room apartment. One bedchamber was for the candidate, the other for himself. The furniture in the large room which separated the bedchambers was removed, except for one table which held a gramophone.
    Bernheim’s custom was to make love from nine in the morning until noon; to lunch from one o’clock until three; to sleep until six in the evening; then to alternate from the lady’s bed to his for love-making until ten o’clock in the evening, at which time a light snack and a magnum of champagne was served in the lady’s room. After that they would tango to the gramophone records from eleven until three o’clock in the morning. This regimen required his greatest concentration, and he would be unmindful of complaints from other clients of the hotel. At three o’clock they would retire to their separate rooms to sleep until nine the next morning, when the happy schedule would begin all over again until the lady tired. Twice, despite the enormous sums he had spent at the Hôtel de la Gouache, the