Lion of Judah

by Summer Brenner

 

1


Valerie found the lion in an antique shop in Geneva, transported it across the Alps to Lake Como, and finally to Malpensa where she climbed aboard a jet to begin her journey west to California. Thirty-five thousand feet above water and land, she cradled the object until slowly she became aware that it, the lion, was somewhat vaguely emblematic of herself: not the sort of thing people cared about anymore; a little fussy and overdone (almost kitsch); and a replica that bore no resemblance to its original inspiration, the lord of beasts.

Two weeks before she had traveled (business class) in the opposite direction from San Francisco to Milan. "Dutifully," she bristled. She went because it was clear that her son, Andrew, was not going to visit her. In fact, he had denounced, renounced, announced (all of the above) that he would not be returning to the United States. He was giving up citizenship.

In June, he had moved from Rome with his wife, Monica, and small son, Leonardo, to a temporary residence on Lake Como. It was ostensibly a vacation, but Andrew was mostly at work in his study. As for Valerie, after five days of approving the view, the food, the child, she prescribed a brief respite for herself and purchased a train ticket to Geneva. She reserved three nights in the Montreux Palace Hotel where (she noted) Vladimir and Vera Nabokov lived for nearly the last twenty years of his life after the great (commercial) success of Lolita.

"I always wanted to stay there," Valerie said.

"You're not comfortable here?" Monica stammered apologetically.

True, Valerie had complained about the heat, but everyone was complaining. It was unbearably hot. Dips in the lake offered no relief, and only the air-conditioned coffee bars were inhabitable by day. Each afternoon, they watched expectantly as voluminous clouds collected over the mountains, but so far there had been no precipitation and no break in the pressing humidity.

"Your mother," Monica started.

"You must call me something besides Andrew's mother."

"Si, si."

"Call me Valerie."

"No, mother," Andrew interjected. "It's not intimate."

"Call me nonna like little Leo does."

"That makes you too old," Monica countered.

"It doesn't sound old to me," Valerie assured her.



Monica tried saying nonna but found it awkward. It conflicted with chronology. She already had two nonnas. One of them almost ninety, a tiny, weathered, terrifying woman. The other nonna's health so completely broken down, she no longer recognized anyone.

"Nonna is no good," Monica concluded. Valerie would have to do for now. "Valerie," she ventured tentatively, "do you so much love Nabokov that you must visit his home?" Later, she asked Andrew what she had done wrong.

"Nothing," he told her, cupping her chin in his palm.

But Monica remained confused by Andrew's mother. First of all, she was unusually blunt. Andrew said it was money that made her so. From his own childhood, he remembered her reticent and soft. Then, there was her mild indifference towards her grandson. She never asked to hold or feed or bathe him. And now, this unexpected (and blunt) decision to leave them for a few days. Despite Andrew's reassurances, Monica was certain she had failed.

Three years earlier she and Andrew had met at an international relief organization in Gaza. Soon after, he reported to his mother that he'd found the woman he hoped to marry. When Valerie asked what he liked about her most, he said, "Her courage."

It was a pointed remark made to remind Valerie of the exact day (more than a decade ago) when she announced her intention of marrying Bernard Selig, a prominent San Francisco real-estate developer.

Andrew's first reaction had been to call her "cowardly," which she dismissed as the distress signal of a protective son. However, as if on assignment, he proceeded to gather an exhaustive amount of information on the opprobrious activities of Selig Associates: his properties in the public record, his questionable links to City Hall, his charities and board memberships, and his two former wives. He presented his mother with the "evidence" in a manilla file folder.

"And?" She said coolly.

"He's corrupt," Andrew sputtered.

"He's a loving man," Valerie retorted.

When Andrew failed to persuade her to the contrary, he stormed the front door and fled their apartment, charging past the one-storey stucco houses of the Sunset district and marching off to the Pacific. "The end of the world," he liked to say, having used its surface all his life as a slate to scribble out his frustrations.

He stared into the breakers as if they were listening and advising wisely. Eventually, the ocean (often veiled in fog), its whistles and winds, its horizon dotted with ships and birds, its mesmerizing tableau could be counted on to swallow his anger and confusion. When he returned home, he was calm and appeasing, and in this instance resigned to his mother doing whatever she chose.

He entered quietly. Valerie had already eaten dinner without him.

"Shall I heat something up?" She asked softly. They were both solicitous as Andrew hugged her and wished her happiness. She savored the contact, his strong young arms, the smell of salt air in his hair. There had been only the two of them for so long. She refrained from telling him that sometimes choice was driven by necessity. (Let him find out for himself.)

Bernie's attention and then a few months later, the unexpected suggestion that they marry presented new and thrilling possibilities. Valerie pinched herself with disbelief, and the following December a small group of family and friends gathered at The Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki. Dressed in an ecru lace suit, satin pumps, a double strand of Mikimoto pearls (an engagement present), her dyed blond hair piled like meringue on her head, and holding a bouquet of long-stemmed, creamy tulips, Valerie, glowing with the last vestiges of Nordic beauty, strolled on her son's arm to the linen canopy erected on the beach to become the third Mrs. Bernard Selig. Although her conversion to Judaism was not yet complete, the blessings for their union and happy future were bestowed by a rabbi.

Against his mother's wishes Andrew brought along his college girlfriend. The pair holed up in his room nearly the entire visit. Fucking, Valerie presumed, resentful of their wasting the expense of a luxury hotel when a Days Inn by an airport would have served them just as well. She found it offensive, but Bernie didn't complain. In fact, Bernie believed children, his own and others, only increased his riches. Andrew was welcomed into his fold.

The young man now rarely returned home. He wasn't comfortable with his mother's new life: the spacious Nob Hill apartment, the cottage on the lagoon at Stinson Beach, the new BMW. There were plenty of excuses with his school and jobs. He insisted on paying his own expenses and exhibited qualities of independence and resourcefulness that Valerie could be proud of.

On the contrary, they nagged at her. She felt those qualities, so admired by others, were a form of punishment. She had struck a bargain and traded her son's respect for financial security.

At their first Seder, communication broke down entirely once the conversation turned to Israel. Andrew called Bernie a "Zionist slum lord" and he responded with "Jew hater." Passover, the holiday that honors freedom above all other human aspirations, had been ruined.

Afterwards, Andrew met his mother on neutral ground. In Boston while in graduate school, and once he moved abroad, in London where he worked for Amnesty International. When the invitation to his wedding arrived, Bernie suggested Valerie attend without him. He sent along a set of crystal goblets and a hand-written toast, suggesting that if loved ones couldn't work to get along, what did they expect from the world? Valerie found it extremely thoughtful, but it drew no reaction from Andrew. It was as if Bernie Selig didn't exist.

This trip to Italy was the first time she had seen Andrew since his wedding. The first time she had met her young grandson.

"But you are coming here to be with us?" Monica persisted, shaking her short red hair.

"I haven't been to Switzerland in years," Valerie enthused. "Since I was practically a girl."

Although Andrew and Monica admitted that Lake Geneva was very pretty, in their estimation Como and the Italian Alps were far prettier. Their lake, their mountain peaks, their stucco villas, and gardens lovelier.

"Maybe it is my obsession with Russian writers," Valerie said, unable to confess she simply needed a few nights alone.

However, it was not entirely a lie. Nabokov had once meant a great deal to her. Or rather his Lolita, synonymous in Valerie's youth with the forbidden mysteries of sex. It was the first suggestive film (doubly illicit for she had to violate her parents' interdiction) she ever saw, a testimony that girls could actually cause men to behave in chaotic, unpredictable, even criminal ways.

A beautiful, pubescent Valerie briefly tried it herself. It wasn't difficult. On the contrary, it wasn't difficult enough. She flirted with her father's friends, her violin teacher, her gym coach, strangers on the bus. And as soon as they flirted back, she skipped off like a naughty child.

Later in college, when a professor suggested that great writers describe what their readers feel but cannot articulate themselves, she was instantly reminded of the insipid girl who brought Humbert to his knees. At thirteen, she had brought Robert Waller, her father's duplicate bridge partner, to his knees. He asked Valerie if he might kiss the arch of her foot and a week later, committed suicide.

2

Over winter break, Valerie and Anne, a friend from the Conservatoire de Musique, registered at a hitchhiking service in the fifth arrondissement. Neither had ever hitchhiked but a service to do so struck them as a ludicrous formality, counter to their notion that the highways were friendly, open, and calling.

Their form stated: 2 US girls, destination SWIT, one way, pay gas. The service cost them nothing, and the next morning Anne received a call. Johnnie (pronounced with a heavy French accent) said he could pick them up in front of Metro Odeon at three o'clock the next Sunday.

As a name, Johnnie didn't sound trustworthy. There was, of course, the French rocker Johnnie Halliday, who imitated danger and daring in his music. But Johnnie wasn't a real French name, and they debated if his name were Claude, would it make a difference. A short-lived discussion, for more to the point, Johnnie offered a cheap and direct route away from the gray drizzle of Paris and to mountains covered with snow.

Unapologetic, Johnnie was an hour late. He began to weave the small car (Renault) around the traffic circles, honking, smoking, cursing, gesticulating before he halted at the entrance of an offensively plain apartment house close to Gare Montparnasse. He told them to wait as he leapt out of the car, ran through the door, and quickly returned with a man carrying a duffle.

"Ari," Johnnie said, making a rudimentary introduction. "Girls."

Ari looked younger than Johnnie with a dark prophetic face and long black hair tied in a ponytail. One arm hung in a sling. He appeared Arab although neither girl had ever met an actual Arab. They were, however, familiar with the shadow figures on Boulevard St. Michel, wandering the sidewalks, mumbling English phrases like "free love" and "kiss me" as foreign girls passed by. Ari didn't strike them as that sort of Arab, but his presence made them uncomfortable.

The second stop was the gas station. It was already dark. Paris was a rainy blur. Johnnie looked over his shoulder. "You pay," he reminded them.

Valerie fished out the francs from a zipper compartment in her purse. As a precaution, most of her money was stuffed in her bra along with her passport. She and Anne had discussed at length how to keep out of harm's way, fueled by rumors of white slaving and recent INTERPOL news of a pair of Danish girls drugged in a Champs d'Elysee lingerie shop, then bound, gagged, and nearly shipped away.

They sped off. Ari and Johnnie spoke a rapid French argo that exceeded the girls' abilities. Occasionally, one of them would attempt a friendly question or comment, prompting a terse reply from the girls who had fallen into a sullen mood. They were cramped and hungry, traveling with two indifferent young men, along roads lost to view in the night. In addition, they had occasional pangs of alarm as the directional signs suggested they were heading due south to Marseille (the putative capital of the white slave trade) rather than southeast to the Alps.

"Pourquoi Marseille?" Valerie asked.

They only laughed. "Non Marseille," they repeated although the signs suggested otherwise.

"We have to keep awake," Valerie whispered.

Anne nodded sleepily.

The hours ticked by. The rain ceased. They stopped for coffee and stale rolls. The rain started again and turned to sleet. At a fork Johnnie turned left, according to the signs for Switzerland. They were not being kidnapped after all.

An optimal trip might have taken only a few hours, but the car was slow and the weather rotten. Consequently, they arrived at the border crossing after midnight. As the car stopped for inspection, the girls awoke, startled and disoriented. Johnnie was waved into a waiting area, and they were ordered out of the car while the trunk was searched (not once but several times), the glove compartment, the spare tire, the hood, their suitcases, and particularly Ari's duffle where they pulled everything out and dumped it on the pavement.

"Venez avec moi," one of them commanded.

Valerie and Anne followed Johnnie, Ari, and the inspector into an overheated office that smelled like tar. The girls' passports were taken along with the French identity cards of the young men who already looked guilty.

Within a few minutes, a female officer arrived to lead the girls away, into an unheated, dusty room with a medical examination table and sink. They were told they were to be physically inspected.

"For what?" Anne asked but received no reply.

"S'il vous plait," the uniformed woman said, patting them down. She lifted their sweaters, felt their breasts, inside the pockets of their pants, asked them to open their mouths, and left telling them, further examination would be required.

"Orifice," the woman uttered in French, her meaning obvious.

The girls were terrified. "I'm going to call the embassy," Anne announced, impressed by her own boldness.

The woman returned with a typed form and a box of thick black rubber gloves. She began to interrogate them.

"How long have you known Johnnie George and Ari Amram?"

"We don't know them," Anne responded.

Valerie began to giggle nervously.

"I mean we just met them a few hours ago," Anne explained. "Hitchhiking."

"Hitchhiking from where?" The woman asked briskly.

"From Paris?"

"You just stand in Paris with your thumb up and these two particular boys come from nowhere to drive you to Switzerland." The woman was incredulous.

"No, we made an arrangement," Anne said.

"So then, you knew them?" The woman's lips parted so the girls could see her yellow vulpine teeth. Then she turned abruptly and left the room.

"Do you think we're really in trouble?" Valerie bit her nails.

Anne shrugged. She thought if she mentioned the ambassador enough times, it would keep trouble away.

An hour passed. It was extremely cold. They had taken their coats off in the car and used them as blankets. The coats, however, were now under inspection. They huddled next to each other, shivering. Periodically, Anne shouted out, "I'm going to call the embassy."

When an officer next appeared, it was the man who had dropped Ari's belongings on the ground. He held a tray with two cups of cocoa. "Welcome to Switzerland," he said, handing the hot drinks to the girls. When their coats were returned, the lining of Valerie's Army surplus pea jacket had been split along the seams and safety-pinned back together.

After the hot drinks, the girls were led back to the car and reunited with Johnnie and Ari. They smiled at one another with embarrassment and watched as a Swiss guard carefully and politely packed the trunk of the car with their suitcases and Ari's duffle and waved them on their way. Then they drove across the border.

"I'm going to call the embassy," Anne informed them.

"No trouble yourself," Johnnie said.

"But what happened back there?" Valerie wondered, peering out the cold window at the diamond patterns of starlight that hung over the Alps. "Why would they do that?"

Ari's black eyes, framed with thick lashes, shifted from the girls to the road to the mountaintops. The relief of freedom made his face shine.

"They don't like me," he grinned maliciously. "They don't like North African peoples."

Anne protested. "But you are French."

Ari had heard Americans were naive. He groped for an elementary way to explain. "You know nigger?" he asked them.

"We don't like that word," Valerie reacted quickly.

"We are niggers here encore," Ari smiled harshly.

"You mustn't say that word," Valerie repeated. "It's mechant."

Ari shrugged. "They suspect me."

It was only after she arrived in France that Valerie heard about Algeria's recent war for independence, the massacres, the torture by the French Army, the riots in France. She had seen "The Battle of Algiers." However, her specialty was music, not politics, if her classmates chanced to mention Vietnam. As for the North African men on the streets of Paris, she considered them a nuisance or worse. Once at a café she had witnessed one of them masturbating in a phone booth.

"Hashish, you like hashish?" Ari asked, hunching his shoulder forward and removing his arm from the sling.

Both girls fiercely shook their heads.

He reached under his cast and retrieved a tiny ball of aluminum foil. "If you smoke it, you will like it," he said knowingly.

"You are a criminal," Valerie stuttered furiously. "If they had arrested us, it would have been your fault."

It was dawn in Geneva, the snow rosy and gold on the mountains, the streets washed, the sidewalks empty and swept. The calm blue crystal lake drowned their eyes. It was a beautiful picture, so beautiful they doubted it was real.

When Johnnie parked the car on Ancienne Route, the girls got out. They took their suitcases from the trunk and walked towards an open café.

3

The room at the YWCA was sparse: two narrow beds, a stingy dresser, the bath and toilet shared with other residents on the floor. The front door was locked at eight every evening so they were given a large antique key. The fine for its loss was double the price of a room.

That first day they walked around and in the evening accompanied a band of Swiss youth to a party on a mountainside. Mulled wine, bread, hunks of cheese, and accordions and clarinets played traditional songs out of another century. Many of the guests wore folk costumes, and the dancing was two-step or waltz. Anne and Valerie danced themselves into states of breathlessness. After the ride down to town, they crept up to the old door and slipped quietly to their cloistered room.

The following day the director of hostel services noted their late hour and the disturbance it caused. "You would do well to return here early where you are safe." She cautioned. "There are many strangers in Geneva. Russians, Indians, Japanese, they come from all over. Even Arabs come."

Valerie briefly wondered what business had brought Ari to Geneva. His aloofness frightened her. Any sign of life beyond Europe frightened her. The foreigners she knew were German, Italian, Irish, and a few French students she met in Paris. She had even slept with some. But Ari and Johnnie had not paid the slightest attention to her or Anne.

"Do you think they're homos?" she asked her friend.

"Who?" Anne was taken aback.

"The boys."

Anne puzzled over the question. "Maybe they were homos."

On their second day, they went by bus to Lausanne and lunched by the lake. The sun's reflection off the water and snow warmed their faces and turned their skin pink. When they returned at dusk, they could see countless tiny lights sparkling around the lake, in the city's buildings, up and down the mountainsides.

They would have liked to ski or travel farther into the mountains, but they had no extra cash. There was only enough for their stay at the YWCA, a few meals, and train tickets back to Paris. Nonetheless, they were satiated by their short journey. They had slept and eaten in another country, inhaled the wonder of the Alps, filled their eyes with beauty, and survived a humiliating ordeal at the border.

The next morning Valerie left the hostel alone, walking towards the Cour Saint-Pierre, passing old apartment houses built in the familiar European style, similar to buildings in Paris but cleaner and lighter. She peeked into the small properly appointed shops. She watched the clerks as they mopped the sidewalks, raised the grates, lifted off the shutters, and carried out the bins of produce. Steam and the smell of delectable hot liquids, coffee and cocoa, drifted through the doorways. Overhead balconies jutted out from the facades of the handsome buildings, and their rows of dormer windows gleamed in the sunshine.

It was delicious being on her own, Valerie thought, taking the first fifty of the switchback steps up the Cathedrale Saint-Pierre's tower at a hearty pace. But halfway through the climb, she began to tire. By step 90, she was winded.

"Twelfth century," the YWCA director had informed them. The day before she had tried to persuade Anne to climb up (less than half the steps of Notre Dame), but she refused. Anne was scared of heights.

From the top, Valerie watched the cars crawl towards the bridges and cross the Rhone, the Mouettes slipping through the water, the tops of people's heads and hats bobbing among the maze of sidewalks. She liked the aerial perspective. As a child, she had wanted to be a pilot but was told she wasn't good enough in math. Then, she took up the violin and was told she was gifted. Music was a form of flying too.

Usually, the white mountains hovered close to the city, but today they floated, their tops visible above a girdle of clouds. In the far distance, whipped gray masses were moving towards them. Valerie had heard that a snowstorm was expected by afternoon. She was looking forward to it. She hoped it snowed the city in, forced everything to stop. She wanted to hibernate in the Alps and not return to Paris until spring.

"Valerie," she heard an unfamiliar voice call out across Rue de la Confederation.

She turned. It was Ari, bundled in a bright blue ski jacket and watchmen's cap, his left arm held loosely in a sling. Seeing him again was like greeting an old friend in an unexpected place.

"Ari," she said, grinning, pulling off her mitten to extend her hand which he promptly kissed. "You're still here?"

"I actually live here," he said.

"I didn't know," she replied shyly, letting his black eyes occupy her face.

"What are you doing right this minute?" he asked, his English crisp and clear.

"I'm not sure," she mumbled.

"Then come with me," he said, entwining his free arm around her elbow and guiding her along the street.

Valerie frowned. "I'm very angry with you," she reminded him.

"I don't think so." He winked.

"I am, I am," she insisted unconvincingly.

"You're extremely beautiful when you're angry so I don't think I shall mind."

"But you know how to speak English quite well," she said.

"Apparently."

"You didn't speak so well a couple of days ago."

"A couple of days ago, I was talking to Johnnie. I had business with Johnnie, but today I'm all yours," he offered gallantly.

Valerie blushed at his bravura. "Is Johnnie here, too?"

"Johnnie left."

"You're lucky to live in Geneva. It's much nicer than Paris."

Ari half-smiled. "Believe it or not, one tires of scenery."

Valerie's eyes swept the lake, the terraces of clouds, the billowing mountains. "I don't think I would."

Ari interrupted by pressing his cold face and warm lips against hers. A tiny pleasurable shock traveled through her. Melting against his chest, she returned the kiss.

"Let's go," he grabbed her mittened hand. "I'll take you to see the lion, my -," he fumbled for a word. "My mascot."

"Are you king of the jungle?" she laughed, swept up by his light-hearted boldness.

"My name means 'lion.'"

"In Arabic?" She asked.

"In Hebrew."

"Then you're Jewish?" She was surprised, relieved. Jews, she knew. Jews, she went to school with.

"Jewish, Algerian, pied-noir, nearly all the undesirables folded into a single human being." He smiled slyly.

"I'm sorry," she said, feeling her ignorance insert itself between them.

"Don't apologize to me. It's the Arabs who deserve an apology."

Now she was thoroughly confused.

Affectionately, he kissed the top of her head. "You know nothing, do you?"

"Almost nothing," Valerie modified, thinking of the film she had seen in Paris. The theater had been filled with rowdy French and North Africans making a deafening racket with their bird-like cries, flapping their tongues in unison. As soon as one started, the entire audience joined in. She and a friend left before the film ended in case there was a riot. He told her the verb in French was ululer. She couldn't pronounce it.

"My father's family came from Spain to Oran in the sixteenth century. During the Inquisition Jews came to Oran because it was the closest African port. They spoke both Spanish and Arabic so they were very useful." He added edgily, "We were granted full French citizenship in 1870. It only took four hundred years and then the Nazis," he drew his finger, curved like a hook, across his neck. "Then the war for independence," he placed two fingers to his temple.

Valerie was at a loss. Except for the history of music which played itself through her fingers, she avoided the subject. She clung to the illusion that the complicated forces which fabricated history had nothing to do with her.

"Do I scare you?" he asked.

She felt his mouth on her ear and laughed nervously.

"I do scare you," he declared victoriously.

By the Brunswick Monument (built for Charles d'Este-Guelph who at his death in 1873 bequeathed the city his fortune in exchange for a public resting place) was the statue of a stone lion with an insolent face.

"See the resemblance?" Ari growled exuberantly, careening towards the base. When he reached the pedestal, he stood on his tiptoes and clawed the stone. "C'est moi."

Valerie smiled indulgently as if she already loved him. "I don't want to flatter you," she said.

"Flatter me," he urged.

"You're better looking."

He careened back in her direction, lifted her off the sidewalk, and swung part of her around until dizzy, they both fell onto the soggy ground.

"You're crazy," she complained.

"An Algerian Jewish lunatic, mistaken for Arab."

"They probably thought you were an Arab at the border," she surmised.

"Of course, they did. The Swiss treat Jews better than that."

"But what about your -?" She patted the sling.

"It's nothing," he said, rubbing the skin around his wrist.

"You're crazy."

"The state of my mind has been established. Now shouldn't we go to my place and make love?"

Valerie looked immediately into the sky as if the answer were there. Ari followed her gaze. "You don't believe in making love before noon? I too have diurnal limits. No cigarettes, no soda drinks, no sour pickles before noon."

She laughed in spite of herself. She had never met such a brash young man.

"But love-making, I can do at any hour. In fact, love-making has no hour. The poets tell us it is quite beyond time." He pretended to consult a watch. "However, it will take a while to get to Carouge. If we go slowly, crawl like the tortoise instead of hop like the hare, we shall arrive just at dark." His voice faltered with sincerity, "I'd be so happy if you would come with me."

Valerie regarded Ari's inkwell eyes. At the moment, she could think of no reason to refuse.

4

After his mother left for Geneva, Andrew struggled with his feelings. For months, he had looked forward to Valerie's visit. Visions of her playing with Leo or conversing with Monica had given him immense pleasure. But the extremely hot weather had put everyone out of sorts. No one wanted to cook or eat; walking was laborious, sleeping next to impossible.

Once Leo was in bed, Andrew and Valerie amused themselves with Hell and talking idly as they fought over the piles of cards. Unfortunately, news of their scattered family and Andrew's old friends was quickly dispatched, leaving a monumental weight between them. Not even the competitive spirit of gaming (which they shared) proved distracting.

He was not an anti-Semite, he told her, first sternly and then in a clumsy attempt at humor. He also insisted he was not anti-Israel. As proof, he showed her the articles he'd recently published in Haaretz. He described his welcome in the homes of the most prominent Israeli doves. But whatever he said, there was no way to diminish the obvious: he advocated on behalf of Palestinians while his stepfather made hefty contributions to AIPAC, donations to settlements, and support to Congressional campaigns to defeat candidates who criticized Israel. Honest discussion was a taboo as well (he suspected) a source of shame for his mother.

A couple of days passed before he broached the subject again. He asked if he could show her photos of the checkpoints, the bandaged babies and young amputees. He hoped she'd take an open-minded interest.

Valerie felt assaulted. She tried to counter with her outrage over the suicide bombers. "They're Moslem fanatics," she cried and then retreated. This convoluted history intimidated her. If she could find peace within herself, she could bring peace to others. That was the foundation of her beliefs, discovered after her father's friend, Mr. Waller, killed himself. For years she (the nubile temptress) believed she was to blame and only later learned he'd had an inoperable brain tumor.

"I know what I know," she declared.

Andrew argued impatiently, flipping the pages of his notebook. It was plain language, fact-driven. Most important, the problem wasn't tactical like a football match, one side against the other. "They live together," he said, "a few yards apart, and no matter what anyone wants us to believe, their futures are linked."

Then, there was the night Valerie went to bed whimpering that he wanted the world to forget the Holocaust. That truly pained him, her tears as well as the accusation. He followed her into the guest room, offering her comfort and reiterating his profound sympathy for the Jews.

"The dead don't have to blind us to the present," he said.

"You dare speak ill of the dead?" Valerie shrilled.

Andrew couldn't make her understand. No amount of reasoning could make her understand. She had learned Hebrew. She attended synagogue. She traveled with Bernie to Israel. Above all, she was convinced that her husband was correct: the memories of the slaughtered millions had to be preserved in the deserts of Palestine to the exclusion of every other right.

"You're disappointed?" Monica asked him as they walked along the lake.

It was nearly dark, and Leo lay drooling, asleep in the stroller. In view was the motion of a train and the lights on the altostrati that went to Lugano. The temperature had dropped to something tolerable, and a breeze ruffled the water.

"You're even more disappointed," he reminded her.

"But was she always so -?" Monica searched for the word.

"Innocent?" Andrew supplied.

"Si, si, innocent. I can't reach her." She sighed, "I thought Leo would do it for me, but he's too young."

"The innocence that throws boys into the cannon."

Monica shuddered, the thought that someone could throw her precious son into a cannon.

"She used to be more aware," Andrew reflected. "Perhaps too shy to speak up but she had outbursts from time to time. It's the rich," he sneered. "They can hide from anything."

Monica drew his fingers into hers. "But when you were young?"

He recalled their meager dinners of frozen fish sticks and frozen peas. "Sometimes in the evening she played the violin, and I lay on the rug listening. She was good," he hesitated to make sure he meant it. "She was a good mother."

"I overheard her teaching Leo a song."

"Excellent," Andrew said, relieved and regretful. Relieved she had taken off on her own, regretting that things had been so difficult.

A few days later, Valerie was back.

"Refreshed," she announced.

The weight had dissipated. The family vacation on Lake Como recommenced. Everyone was glad to be in the company of the other. A truce hung over the house.

Valerie brought gifts from Geneva. A child's violin for Leo. A pair of amethyst earrings for Monica. For Andrew, a photo book of the dispossessed by Salgado. She showed them her new treasure too. Spotted in a window on rue de l'Hotel de Ville, it was a small, shapely ceramic lion fired with a crackled blue glaze. It sprawled on four legs, its head held high, haughty and amused. Understandably, not to their taste.

"There's a large statue of a lion in town," she said. "At the Brunswick Monument." Had they seen it? she wondered.

Neither of them spent time in Geneva except for UN business on the rive droite.

"I was there once in college, and a young man introduced me to that lion just before a huge storm snowed the city in. I was marooned for days and couldn't get back to Paris." She breathed deeply. Those had been the most passionate moments of her life.

Despite the enticements of the hotel in Montreux, everyday Valerie abandoned its luxury to wander around Geneva, pausing by cafés that looked familiar, parks in full bloom, the cathedral of Saint-Pierre. Naturally, the city was bigger, more crowded, jammed with tourists. It was summer and the tall jet of water from the lake rocketed constantly in a glittering shower.

On her last day, she took a taxi to Carouge. She recognized Ali's building. It stood unchanged. Foolishly, she knocked and asked the concierge about a Monsieur Amram. She saw him only once after she returned to Paris. It was an awkward meeting. They couldn't find the ease that had made them so happy only a few months before. Ari was in France to say farewell to friends and family before he left on a "delivery mission" (he cryptically called it) to Jakarta.

Valerie didn't know where Jakarta was, but the next time she heard it mentioned was in the context of violence and repression. For many years, she wrote an annual note to Ari's family to inquire about him, and they wrote back that they had received no letter or call. The earth had swallowed him, and after so much time, they believed he was dead.

"Mother studied violin for a year in Paris at the conservatory," Andrew clarified. "During the uprisings of soixante-huit."

"I didn't mix myself up with that," Valerie hastily added.

However, the topic of 1968 or any political moment, past or present, was not revisited. There was reading aloud, card games, walks in the hills, concerts in Como by a string quartet. Andrew swam with his mother in the lake. Valerie was relaxed, playful, and keenly interested in the pleasures of their life. She referred to her grandson as "my little lion," born in late July and ginger-haired.

The little lion himself now demanded to be fed and walked only by his nonna.

"Nonna!" He commanded in his high voice, Leonardo's only one, for Monica's mother had died when she was eleven.

The day before Valerie returned to California, Andrew drove Leo into town for a doctor's appointment. The two women stayed behind, planning to eat in Bellagio. Monica was apprehensive of several hours alone in the company of Valerie without the child to draw them together. At the last minute, she offered to take Leo herself to his appointment.

"I don't bite," Valerie said.

At lunch, she prodded. She wanted to know more about Monica's family. The mother was dead, yes. And the father oversaw an olive-oil export business. There was some wealth scattered among the relatives. Most lived in Turin or Rome.

"Next time you come," Monica promised, "we shall organize a reunion. They would all like to see you."

They waited, silent for a moment. The meal was pleasant, outdoors with a view across the well-groomed lawn and beds of flowering annuals that bordered the lake. They ate slowly, touching on the subject of scenery, food, music, the delight Valerie took in her box seats at the opera, symphony, and ballet. An introductory sort of conversation.

"So tragic that your mother never met Leonardo," she proclaimed loudly.

The young woman's eyelids fluttered. She never spoke about her mother who died of a kidney disease before the age of forty.

"And other family members, have they died so young?" Valerie asked, wondering what genes the Sonnino lineage had bequeathed to little Leo.

"Only in the Holocaust," Monica muttered. Another painful subject. Two of her great grandparents had been killed along with a dozen cousins. Her own mother (a toddler) survived with her parents in hiding.

"But the Italians were with the Germans." Valerie, at least, knew that.

"But for Jewish families," Monica explained.

"Jewish?" Valerie was astonished.

The plight of Italian Jews had never registered (Bernie's family were Poles and Hungarians). Nor had she noticed any signs in her daughter-in-law's presence of a Jewish tradition. At their wedding, Andrew and Monica wrote their own vows. They read love poems by Pablo Neruda. They praised justice and free union. That sort of wedding.

"You're Jewish?" she was next to speechless.

Puzzled, Monica slowly nodded. It was her turn for astonishment. She assumed Andrew had mentioned it. She assumed it was something his mother would have wanted to know.

"Sonnino, Useglio, Luzzatti, Grassini, these are our family names," she said. "Jewish names." She did not mention that the Nazis had thrown her great-grandfather, Leonardo Guido Sonnino, from a moving train.

The lines of confusion unraveled in Valerie's face. Her hazel eyes lightened as she seized Monica's hand. "Our little lion is a Jew."

5

Beside the hospice bed in the living room on Nob Hill, Bernie sat on one side of Valerie and Andrew on the other, each holding her hand as she lay like a gulf between them.

Now and then, her husband and son exchanged a few words but mostly they were silent, lost in their own thoughts. Or concentrating on the Bach concertos for two violins played by Igor and David Oistrakh. The musical selection had been one of Valerie's last requests, made the day before when she was still speaking. Since then, speaking had ceased. The Bach, however, played on. Once when the CD stopped, Bernie asked if they should leave it off. Instead of answering, Andrew rose to restart the machine. Like his mother, he realized he could never tire of it.

On the previous Tuesday, Andrew had received a message from Bernie Selig's secretary that he should come to San Francisco immediately. She reached him in the Tel Aviv airport where he was about to return to Italy after a grueling month on the West Bank: investigating Modi'in Illit (a settlement), Matrix (the software company) and its role in the settlement, and the local Palestinian farmers cut off from their land by the "separation fence."

He changed his flight and called Monica to book passage for herself and Leo to California. This would be her first meeting with Bernie, but Leo already knew him from the trip he took on his tenth birthday. He had traveled alone from Rome to San Francisco and returned with favorable reports of everything American, including pops.

The hospice nurse was also on hand, too cheerful, too voluble. Bernie requested she make herself at home in the den. They would call on her, if necessary.

Nearby was the Selig's cook, Sue, an African-American, third-generation resident of Hunters Point. She stayed in the kitchen, crying as she prepared casseroles for the days ahead. When anyone was dying, even on television (she admonished herself), she cried for her sister, drowned at eighteen in the Bay.

Both men held and rubbed Valerie's hands, occasionally whispering something tender in her ear. Off and on, one of them would retire to a bed and try to sleep. Or Sue would appear with a plate of food that went untouched.

"You need your strength," she reprimanded, insisting they come to the dining table. Like children, they rose obediently and followed her, sitting and turning their food over with a fork while Sue took their place.

"Miss Val," she whispered.

Valerie's head wobbled on the pillow.

Sue wrapped her arms around the limp, heavy, nearly lifeless body. "Two grown men acting like they don't even belong to you."

Valerie's chin turned towards the speaker. Her sunken eyes opened, and staring into Sue's face, she said distinctly, "I couldn't make them love."

Shortly after, she died.

Bernie ran out the door. He didn't go far, only to a bench on the Embarcadero where he and Valerie often sat. Until she got sick, their daily habit was to walk down the steep hill to the Bay and take the cable car back up.

Andrew leaned over the Steinway, stumbling and crying through the chords of songs his mother had taught him. Leo and Monica arrived that night. The boy had never seen his father cry and only managed to stop himself by squeezing the web of skin between his forefinger and thumb.

Monica recognized the severe little expression that froze on Leo's face as her own. She too had been determined to behave like an adult at her mother's funeral. When she tried to grab Leo for a hug, he pulled away. He told her he was busy helping Sue.

Leo stayed glued to Sue. During his solo visit to California, she had been his constant companion. While his grandmother was very happy to see him, she didn't take him to baseball games. Or Golden Gate Park. Or Alcatraz Island. It was Sue who took Leo everywhere. She even arranged for him to play baseball with her nephew, the highlight of the entire month.

If Valerie and Bernie went out at night, Leo stayed at Sue's apartment in Hunters Point. When he asked Sue about the bars on the windows, she reassured him. "Nobody's coming in here."

When he asked his grandmother why Sue's house had bars, Valerie said it was too complicated to explain. Leo already understood (from his father) that things that were too complicated were generally things that were wrong.

Sue, at least, tried. "Sometimes people have problems," she said. "If they want to take their problems out on somebody, we make sure they can't get in."

"Nonna doesn't have bars."

Sue laughed. "Nonna has a security guard, a security door with a code, and security cameras."

Leo asked his grandmother if she was afraid of mean people. "Of course," she replied.

The boy's eyes brightened as he raised his fists the way he'd seen boxers do.

"I hope you grow up to be a man of peace," Valerie said.

"Like daddy?" Leo asked.

"Not exactly," she muttered under her breath.

Andrew and his family's flight back to Italy was the night of the funeral. As he readied himself for the departure, Andrew informed Bernie there was nothing he wanted. However, sadness and the remorse of parting overwhelmed him. He asked for his mother's violin. He rifled through her closet and found a few childhood mementos: a writing journal, a photo album of her and his father, and the well-worn sheet music of Beethoven and Bach.

When the moment came to say good-bye, Leo cried for the first time. He could not tear himself away from Sue. She promised he could come back and stay with her the next summer. She promised he could play baseball again. But the boy would not be consoled. He wept until he fell asleep on the plane.

Weeks later, when the leaden factuality of Valerie's death settled into the apartment, Bernie and Sue began cleaning out her things. He asked Sue to choose a few personal remembrances for herself.

A few days later, he asked again.

"I'd like to have the peace lion," she said."The blue lion Miss Val loved."

The large apartment was filled with figurines. Almost all of them had sentimental value for Bernie (bought on trips they had taken together). The lion, however, had been carted back years ago on a trip Valerie took alone. She had put it on her bedside table presumably to view it last at night and first thing in the morning. In Bernie's mind, it substituted for Andrew, and whenever he happened to notice, it irritated him immensely. He would be glad to see it go.

Sue wrapped the lion in newspaper and stuck it in the Saks Fifth Avenue bag she used to carry her things back and forth to Nob Hill. When she arrived home, she kicked off her shoes and warmed a cup of milk. She unwrapped the lion and sat with it on her lap. It was a beautiful thing, coated in a bright vibrant blue. It was Miss Val's most treasured object.

"My little lion," she said aloud, thinking of the young, sorrowing boy. She would save it for him. She would have it waiting when he someday came to claim it.