rarely spoke about his youth, but when he did, it was in an incredulous, self-mocking tone as if he did not quite believe he had been such a child or adolescent.
“My mother always boasted that I could draw pictures before I could walk,” he would say. And so, on his fourteenth birthday—the family had, by then, moved to Stuttgart—she took her son to a miracle man who owned a factory and begged him to turn Abel’s wondrous talents into bread-winning ones. He did . . . after three years of apprenticeship in the man’s office and Abel became a draftsman with a diploma and a job. After some time, though, he decided that he would rather be a pianist. He had taught himself to play on some rickety piano in a café. Sounded pretty good, he thought. “First, I had a cutaway made to order. That’s what pianists wear don’t they?”
One day, in his smart outfit, his cardboard suitcase in hand, he took the train for Dresden, was accepted into the best music school in the world, and got a job in a factory as a draftsman. Real engineers were scarce in Germany in 1919. He played the piano six hours a day—his landlords loved music—and, for some eight hours, designed melting ovens. Mostly melting ovens. “My landlady delivered a giant pot of soup daily, meat on Sunday,” he said. “After only a few months, the school gave me a scholarship for musical composition, and the factory entrusted me with bigger projects. A glorious life! Lasted about two years—until the day a brave bishop, in order to bless a factory I had designed, climbed on its smart, rounded roof, and ominous smoke rose from under his robes . . . the bishop’s shoes were catching fire. . . .
Abel’s dance band, ca. 1923
“But by then, I had become a pianist!” Abel played to accompany silent movies, eventually returned to Stuttgart, and with three friends, formed a combo that played in nightclubs. “When I got tired of never seeing the light of day, I presented myself as an artist at the best advertising agency in town. I had only a dozen or so pocket-sized cartoons to show for myself, but I was hired.” He switched to drawing and painting, even had a one-man show in a good gallery. He sold nothing, but one painting was stolen, which he found most gratifying.
Eventually, Abel got tired of advertising and one day left for Italy “in search of real art and real sun,” he said. When he returned, after nearly two years, the Nazi movement, which he had predicted would go away like an ugly boil, had instead grown alarmingly. Abel had little interest in or understanding of politics, but he had strong feelings about it. He hated what was happening in Germany and saw only one solution: to run away. And so in the fall of 1928, he went to Paris to study art.
Abel had been thirteen when the First World War started, seventeen when his country lost it. He was the fifth child in a family of six. The father had died. And he had seen his mother embroidering by the light of the moon.
About the time Abel took the train for the music school of Dresden, Germans needed a bucket of banknotes to buy a stamp.
Why did he omit that somber, dramatic backdrop from the story of his youth? I wondered as I sat at the terrace of the Dôme with Abel and his friends. And indeed, he sat there every afternoon, went to a restaurant for a leisurely supper and frequently to a party. He swam, danced, camped. He painted too. On Sundays mostly, he said.
When I met him, Abel was putting the last touches to the large portrait of a woman in a romantic long black dress. Oh, how I wished he would paint me in a long black dress! Instead, he asked me to put on some Oriental blouse richly embroidered in gold, plunked an enormous hat on my head, and told me to stand still.
He painted slowly, smoked, did not talk.
I have forgotten how long it took to complete the painting, but I have not forgotten how unhappy I was with it. I disliked the artificial forest in the background, the silly white apron I gathered in one hand, the egg I held in the other . . . . This was a fancy country girl, not me! Well, the face, the hair, the hands were mine.
Woman in Black Dress, ca. 1935 (oil)
“Her arm is too long,” I said.
“True,” Abel said. “Can’t you see, there will never be enough of that beautiful blouse.”
I have, at times, turned this painting against the wall. Rolled up and unprotected, it gathered dust in my parents’ attic for over twenty years after we left France for the last time. And yet a day came when we clung to it as one clings to a last token saved from a shipwreck, this last image of the long-gone, happy days.
At the time it was painted I wondered whether painting was not just another luxurious hobby for Abel, like music and dance. His impromptu dancing at artistic shows made the newspapers more often than his paintings. He had once carried offstage the popular singer Marie Dubas and replaced her performance with his own extravagant dance.
Handsome, built like a ballet dancer, chic in pants on which he wiped his paintbrushes, witty, generous, and very popular, he gave the impression of not being serious about anything.
But there was a secret Abel, well organized, hardworking, responsible. His mother regularly received payments for the whimsical illustrated articles he contributed to a sports magazine published in Berlin.
His own “daily bread,” as he called it, was assured by work he did for a Parisian advertising agency with which he had a long-standing gentleman’s agreement—not quite legal: foreigners were permitted to do freelance work only. He was paid a regular salary and given generous vacations in exchange for whatever work fitting his talent the agency required. A boon for Abel, who usually executed a week’s work in two days.
IV
When I was a child, my great-grandfather, after a long absence, returned home one Mardi Gras night wearing two similar masks, one on his face, the other on the back of his head, his wooden clogs pointing in both directions, forward and backward. Abel was just that improbable and intriguing. I was, at twenty-five, as fascinated by him as I had been by my mysterious ancestor when I was ten.
Both were men who had refused to submit to their lot but dared to follow a dream. So unlike the timorous, tedious men I had grown up with, uncles, cousins, schoolmates—even my beloved father—tied, all of them, to a job or a place even when they were made miserable by it.
Abel had all their qualities, besides his exotic charm, dazzling talents and the ability to turn everyday life into a disinterested adventure.
Our backgrounds and interests were so far apart that Abel and I had almost nothing to talk about. But he was the partner who could turn me into a good dancer. We danced . . . we danced.
Abel was a doer, not a talker. Had always been, he said. “In school, I covered the blackboard with drawings: raging dragons, charging soldiers, erupting volcanoes . . . whatever came to my mind. Stopped the snickering my speech defect caused among my schoolmates.”
Abel’s love letters, slipped under my door almost daily, consisted of spirited sketches and cartoons and sparse, tender, witty comments. The quasi-mute messages filled me with wonder, delight, and pride.
I didn’t have much in common with his friends. They were the Bohemians, poor and free. I was the bourgeois holding a job and studying semantics. My seven-year-old pupils saved me by turning out Chagalls, Monets, and Picassos that the Parisian artists snatched away. Some were avid collectors of children’s paintings.
I easily abandoned the group of tormented young poets I had joined for the uninhibited artists. Forgotten, the endless discussions that had led nowhere and the wistful hours spent listening to the ancient paragon Alcanter de Brahms reading his well-constructed alexandrines out of a book bound in red Moroccan leather.
“Write a sonnet!” he had admonished when I had presented my best “poeme en prose.”
In March, Hitler, undisturbed, occupied the Rhineland.
“When