Winter Journal by Paul Auster

A blind man showed up the next day (you have rarely met a piano tuner who is not blind), a corpulent person of around fifty with a dough-white face and eyes rolling upward in their sockets. A strange presence, you found, but not just because of the eyes. It was the skin, the blanched, puffball skin, which looked spongy and malleable, as if he lived underground somewhere and never let the light touch his face. With him was a young man of eighteen or twenty, who held on to his arm as he guided the tuner through the front door and on toward the instrument in the back room. The young man never said a word during thevisit, so you failed to learn if he was a son, a nephew, a cousin, or a hired companion, but the tuner was a talkative fellow, and after he had completed his work, he paused for a while to chat with you. “This street,” he said, “rue Jacques Mawas in the fifteenth arrondissement. It’s a very small street, isn’t it? Just a few buildings, if I’m not mistaken.” You told him he wasn’t mistaken, it was indeed a very small street. “It’s funny,” he continued, “but it turns out that I lived here during the war. It was a good place to find apartments back then.” You asked him why. “Because,” he said, “many Israelites used to live in this neighborhood, but then the war started and they went away.” At first, you couldn’t register what he was trying to tell you—or didn’t want to believe what he was telling you. The word Israelite might have knocked you off balance a little, but your French was good enough for you to know that it was not an uncommon synonym for the word juif (Jew), at least for people of the war generation, although in your experience it had always carried a pejorative edge to it, not an outright declaration of anti-Semitism so much as a way of distancing the Jews from the French, of turning them into something foreign and exotic, that curious, ancient people from the desert with their funny customs and vengeful, primitive God. That was bad enough, but the next part of the sentence reeked of such ignorance, or such willful denial, that you weren’t sure if you were talking to the world’s biggest simpleton or a former Vichy collaborator. They went away . No doubt on a deluxe world cruise, an uninterrupted five-year holiday spent basking in the Mediterranean sun, playingtennis in the Florida Keys, and dancing on the beaches of Australia. You wanted the blind man gone, to remove him from your sight as quickly as possible, but as you were handing him his money, you couldn’t resist asking one last question. “Oh,” you said, “and where did they go when they went away?” The piano tuner paused, as if searching for an answer, and when no answer came, he grinned at you apologetically. “I have no idea,” he said, “but most of them didn’t come back.” That was the first of several lessons that were hammered home to you in that building about the ways of the French—the next one being the War of the Pipes, which began a couple of weeks later. The plumbing equipment in your apartment was not new, and the chain-pull toilet with the overhead water tank was not in proper working order. Each time you flushed, the water would run for a considerable length of time and make a considerable amount of noise. You paid no attention to it, the running toilet was no more than a minor inconvenience to you, but it seemed that it created a great turbulence in the apartment below yours, the thunderous sound of a bath being drawn at full throttle. You were unaware of this until a letter was slipped under your door one day. It was from your downstairs neighbor, a certain Madame Rubinstein (how shocked the piano tuner would have been to learn that his wartime address still harbored some undead Israelites), an indignant letter complaining about the unbearable ruckus of midnight baths, informing you that she had written to the landlord in Arras about your carryings-on, and if he didn’t begin