“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 3

        In Marseilles he got a job working as a translator for a British import/export company whose director let him borrow books from a small library he kept in rooms above their waterfront offices. In that strangely shaped attic apartment with a view of the Mediterranean Lenny read voraciously. Here he discovered the works of George Orwell who remained one of his lifelong favorites. This was his university and books provided companionship, but he did not remain isolated for long. Lenny discovered the people of Marseilles, though not particularly friendly to the Jewish population left in its midst after Petain shook hands with Hitler, was not as quick to identify Lenny as Jewish as the crew of the S. S. Roosevelt had been. Amazed, Lenny discovered that for the first time in his life, he could pass as a gentile. He tried it out.
        Sometime in 1962 he found himself sitting in a cafe next to two women arguing. He eavesdropped, intrigued by one of them in particular. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, she had a blonde noblesse oblige, Lenny explained to me, a thin no-nonsense hawk nose, and blue eyes that glowed with a sense of entitlement and assurance. He butt in on their discussion about an Ophuls movie that was getting a lot of attention. The blonde was outraged that it should. This ought to have been a warning to him, he said, but on the other hand meeting this woman would change his life. Relying on some sixth sense he introduced himself as Henri Delacroix. The blonde said her name was Claudine Barbie, and the seeds of What You See were planted.
        At first it was she who avoided being alone with him. He met her friends and with each foray into Claudine's circle he pushed a little farther, but it was several weeks before Lenny learned who Claudine was.
        "Mon Oncle Claus was not Santa. Claus Barbie was the butcher of Lyons. I was so naive. Claudine often spoken admiringly of this uncle in Paraguay, I think it was where he was holed up at the time. I didn't make the connection immediately until I was looking at some books in her house and came across a box of iron crosses stashed between Celine and Pound. Then it hit me.
        "As Henri Delacroix, Hank of the Cross, that wasn't all I found. I met men and women who kept uniforms in their closets, who monitored American nuclear testing in the Pacific and the war in Korea. Such people you wouldn't even meet under ground. It was all somehow connected in a web that would have astonished my father. For Claudine and her circle, the war never ended, it was just in abeyance until the troops could be rallied, and the battles could recommence where they had ignominiously ended. The next time their side would win, of this they had no doubt. Theirs was a terrifying confidence, and I was a gullible coward, but I couldn't stop going to see Claudine. What was I addicted to? In the book I would later write all I did was throw words at this episode, yet it terrifies to give a name to my obsession. I'd like to say that from the outset I was intent on unmasking them, but also I was fascinated; I was that Bozo moth drawn to the flame."
        Claudine was a close friend of Cocteau's, and they visited the artist together. What didn't impress Lenny so much as Cocteau's own house was a villa all three of them visited on the Cote d'Azur. It was full of paintings and sculpture, spilling out into a garden that overlooked the Mediterranean.
        "The house was as crenellated as a wedding cake and just as white. You felt if you poked at it a hunk of sugary stucco would fall into your hand, but that house was no fairy tale. The place was full to the brim with paintings: Ingres, Manet, Courbet, you name it. I even spotted a few Italian Renaissance pictures too valuable to even consider real, but they were real alright." Lenny sputtered when remembering the scene. "There were so many paintings they were stacked one on top of another. Even artists whose work the Nazis had considered decadent such as Kandinsky and Grosz, even they were in the stacks somewhere. Cocteau was drooling, especially over the haul from the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) I can tell you, but I asked myself, where did all this come from?"
        "What was Cocteau like?" I asked.
        "An alter kahker with a taste for boys," Lenny would tell me. "You know the famous Cocteau quote `When the Germans arrived, Paris was finally a pleasant place.'" Alter kahker, pronounced alter cockah, was one of Lenny's favorite phrases, meaning old man, but the expression implies not just age but attitude: old cock, old shit.
        Meanwhile Lenny admitted to me he felt a combination of attraction and revulsion for Claudine. He couldn't sleep with her. No way. To do so was to risk his life. Once she saw he was circumcised the game was, of course, up.
        "Deep down I think she knew I was the unclean enemy. I pretended to be a prude, religious prig, which was very hard for someone from Flatbush. I had to act like Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. `Well, sink me, this whole revolution of yours is monstrous intolerable.'"
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