The Time of the Uprooted Read Online Free Page A

It was Bolek again—Bolek knew everything about everybody—who said to him one day, “You’re broke, and don’t try to deny it. I can see it just looking at you. Well, I’m broke also, so that makes two of us. But I have an idea for you.” He burst out laughing. “You remember the story of the loyal wife who goes in tears to the rabbi because, she says, her husband doesn’t know how to play cards? ‘So what’s the problem?’ the rabbi asks, and she says, ‘The problem is, he doesn’t know how to play, but he keeps on playing.’ ” Gamaliel laughed, then said, “I don’t see the connection.” Now Bolek was serious: “I know a playboy who’s got it in his head that he wants to be a famous writer.” “So? Does he have a problem?” asked Gamaliel. “He doesn’t have a publisher?” “No, it’s not that he needs a publisher. What he needs is talent.”
    Gamaliel was still single, as was his friend, and they were both penniless. Bolek was right: Why not try to earn a little money? Gamaliel was introduced to Georges Lebrun the next day at a Left Bank café popular with young artists and intellectuals; the two men took an immediate dislike to each other. Svelte and well built, Lebrun looked like a model or a ballroom dancer. He was vain and he smelled of money.
    “It’s very simple,” Lebrun said, gulping his scotch. “I need recognition and you need money. Number one: I’m the author. Number two: If I don’t like a particular page or a particular character, either you change it to suit me or you get rid of it. And then, and never forget this: silence from now on. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, you’ll be back on the street before you know it. Understand?”
    Gamaliel started to get up and leave without bothering to answer, but Bolek stopped him, then whispered in his ear, “Pay no attention; he’s always like that.”
    “How does he dare talk to me as if I were his servant?”
    “He’s trying to impress you.”
    “I’ll never write for someone who’s such an imbecile, and a bad-mannered one besides.”
    “He’ll pay you well, and that’s all that matters. Just do your writing and you’ll never have to see him again. Give me the manuscript and I’ll deliver it. So for a few months at least, we won’t have to worry about paying the rent.”
    Bolek was always the practical one. You had to admire that in him. And he was right. But now he put forward a different argument: “Suppose by accident you were to write a good book. You don’t know anyone in Paris, so you wouldn’t be able to find a publisher. Then either no one reads your masterpiece, in which case it doesn’t exist, or else it’s published, not under your name, but it exists.”
    “Suppose it’s not good enough as literature?”
    “In that case, you should be glad your name’s not on it. That said, I know you well enough to be sure you can’t help putting some good work into it. Would it be right to deprive readers of that?”
    With nothing to lose but his self-respect, Gamaliel wrote a draft, taking his time about it, and handed it to Bolek. In Gamaliel’s opinion, his manuscript lacked everything that a good novel requires. It was kitsch. A tearjerker. You want cheap emotions, here they are. What was worse, he had made errors in syntax and spelling that made him blush. After all, his first teacher, Ilonka’s friend or customer in Budapest, was no magician: He would have needed more time to help Gamaliel master French. Don’t worry, Bolek reassured him; he knew a teacher at the lycée who was proud of his grammar. He would ask the teacher to correct the manuscript in return for a share of the money. Six months later, Lebrun was being hailed by
le tout
Paris as the most promising writer of the postwar years. Women adored him; their husbands despised him but did not dare show it. Gamaliel was amused by this hubbub in society, one that would surely echo in literary circles. He waited patiently for Lebrun, once