Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor Read Free Book Online

quiet dining room.
    Chef Quartey said: “It is good Claude has only two friends left.” But he smiled. Jeremy distinctly saw him smile.
    Week five, Monday, Chef Quartey took Jeremy and three of the Great Danes into the covered market in Dijon early in the morning to pick out meat, cheese and produce. He asked Jeremy’s opinion on something, a signal compliment.
    “Name your favourite,” Chef Quartey said, waving a hand over the seventy or eighty cheeses on display under the counter. They were standing behind the display case with the owner, who also addressed Quartey as ‘Chef.’
    “J’aime beaucoup le Reblochon, Chef,” said Jeremy, naming a cheese from the Haute Savoie near the Swiss border.
    “Excellent. I love Burgundy, but one cannot be fanatical about these things.”
    Sunday of week seven, on the one day the restaurant was supposed to be closed, Jeremy walked from the little hillside house he was renting down into St. Seine l’Abbaye to buy cigarettes at the gas station. “Gitanes, s’il vous plaît.”
    He walked through town, enjoying the almost entirely random way that streets began and ended. There were intersections of three streets, corners impossibly tight. He made his way over to the abbey. Inside, it was cold and gloomy, the altar feebly lit. He approached tentatively and stood, offering silence. Turning, his view was dominated by a twenty-foot-high crucifix, which hung on the wall above the abbey’s main door. Staring into the nave from the back of the church, this Christ had an unusual companion: A skull and crossbones, like the pirate emblem, hung on the wall beneath his feet.
    The dead. The dying. A family winnowed to two. But from what?
    Papier
. Jeremy let the name unscroll in his head—staring unblinking at the crucifix, at the skull—a name whose history lay in its own grave. His grandfather’s first name had been Felix; Jeremy knew that much. Felix, who emigrated from Poland sometime in the 1920s, alone. Who had chosen a new surname on arrival. A truncated, Anglicized Hebrew surname, no less, although no Jewish lineage was ever subsequently acknowledged. For the few years the Professor remembered Felix on the scene, the Papiers had been Lutherans. After the disappearance, the divorce, the telegram relating news of his death, the story went with him.
    “But we might be Jewish,” a twelve-year-old Jeremy protested to his father. There had been a youthful period of genealogical interest, during which time Jeremy turned up evidence of Polish families with names like Papierbuch and Papierczyk. Papierovitch and Papierin. Jews all. Jeremy had been hopeful.
    “Indeed. We might be. We might have this history. We are, for starters, both circumcized.”
    The Professor never spoke down to children.
    “But that we cannot know our history for certain would be your grandfather’s point, I imagine. He chose a surname. He chose this name with an intent, by a method, that is lost to us. You might think of it as the punchline to a joke Felix can no longer explain.”
    A hard concept to understand, then. The appeal of a given history—with the set of answers and instructions that Jeremy presumed came with such a legacy—had been so clear. Appealing still.
    Outside the church in St. Seine l’Abbaye, Jeremy crossed the narrow highway that ran through the town, walking along the shoulder a short distance, smoking and inhaling deeply, squinting into the wistful, rose light of sunset. Contemplatingpersonal history had made him lonely, only the second time since arriving in France. The first had been just before school began. He had gone to Lyon by train, again questing back through time. Seeking without any plan beyond wanting to find the building where his mother and father had met, where her extended family had lived. He didn’t expect to find relatives; he understood they had long drifted away into the newly traversable landscapes of the European Union. But the idea of the building had appealed to