“Except that bastard … where was he from?”
“I don’t remember, and I don’t remember his name. He was huge, and he whacked her until she folded up into a fetal position. You ignored all the rules, jumped in, and even though it wasn’t a match but real fighting, you beat him down until he begged you to stop. And you didn’t. We had to pull you off. Had they been real sabres, you would have killed him twenty times over. What’s up now? Why motorcyclists? You loved Steve McQueen. You wanted a BMW.”
“Steve McQueen’s jacket was brown, not black. No helmet, you could see his face, and the motorcycle was to get to a safe and beautiful place away from the Nazis, not to try to be like them. Not to oppress and terrify everyone else. That’s what it is. The motorcyclists these days, most of them, seem like Nazis: the arrogance, the distance, the assertion of power, the wish to intimidate and the enjoyment when they do. I hate them.”
François hesitated for a moment, took in a breath, and said, “I know.”
“And I guess I’m upset. I don’t know what to do.”
“Me either, and I’ve been that way for seventy years.”
“Yes, but I’m in love.”
“Oh no,” said François. “That’s ridiculous. Please, not that. You’ll sing like a loon until you finish the soup. Then you’ll slowly become a miserable turkey in a tragicomic farce. Upon starting the salad, Jacqueline will return. By the time the plates are cleared you’ll be staring at the last quarter of your second beer, speaking to me but begging her for forgiveness. You’ll go on to explain to me, indirectly of course, that the life I myself have chosen lacks integrity and maturity, that your present suffering and denial will amount to less than mine at the end. You’ll say, ‘I love this young woman but it’s impossible and inappropriate, so I’ll let her go.’ But Jules, she’s probably no more aware of you than of the location of the nearest fire hydrant ….”
“Oh, but she is!”
“She tracks fire hydrants? I don’t think so. And it’s likely she thinks of you as a kind of walking Egyptian mummy, and that you just ginned her up in your imagination. You don’t have false teeth or a big belly, but unless she’s seen you naked or done a dental workup she’s got to assume that you do. When she arises in the morning she doesn’t look like a punching bag, does she. But you do. Her breath is sweet, her skin tight, her eyes have sparkle. Give it up.”
“I don’t understand. What about you?”
“Me? I’m in worse shape than you. I smoke for Christ’s sake. What an idiot, I know. My teeth are wine-stained. I can’t run ten kilometers. You could probably run a hundred.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“I know. So why do you think I, the male equivalent of a decayed strumpet – if my hair gets any whiter I’ll look like Colette – wake up every morning next to a fresh, nubile, fertile, charming, young woman?”
“Because you’re famous … you have ….”
“You don’t have to be famous. It helps to be rich, which, because of alimony and child support, I’m not. The difference is that I’m not, as you are, the caretaker of another soul. Jacqueline is always with you. She hasn’t quite died, has she?”
“No.”
“You can still love her even if you love someone else, but not if you remain the way you are. You’re more devoted than a priest, Jules. You have only one life, at the end of which there may be nothing. Why must you be so faithful? What is it about you?”
“I try, no matter how vainly, to keep them alive.”
“Who’s them?”
“All of them.”
AFTER FRANÇOIS RETURNED to the domesticity for which Jules, rather than he, had been born, Jules walked through the Quartier latin as it started to rain. At almost eleven he crossed the Champs de Mars, which were deserted because of the hour and the weather. His intention was to tire himself so that when he reached home sleep would outcompete worry. If he could, he would go all the way to Passy, where he had grown up, and depart from there for home after touching the façade of the house his parents had lived in before they were forced to hide in Reims. The Jews fled either south to try to cross the Pyrenees, or southeast to Switzerland, but the Famille Lacour went instead to Reims, where the ordinariness and lack of importance, as well as the fewer Jews than in Paris, might have afforded them a contrarian chance. Many of their friends, diamonds sewn into the seams of their clothes, had been captured or turned back at Annecy or Pau. Jules had no idea who lived in the house now, and had never wanted to know. But every once in a while, especially when he was troubled, he would go there and touch the wall.
He walked through a downpour that had started after the Champs de Mars, and headed for the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Bir-Hakeim was where the free French, by holding against Rommel, had begun to turn the tide and restore the dignity of France. It was the symbol of springing back from defeat, and though the bridge named in its honor was a fairly hideous structure, it was his favorite, because it was where he turned around after struggling hard against the current. Ugly and ungainly, the Pont de Bir-Hakeim was a symbol of redemption, which made sense, as redemption seldom comes without suffering.
Hardly used even during the day, the walkways were now slick and deserted. He walked in the center, between columns that supported train tracks on the upper level, as here was some protection from the rain. Almost at the midpoint, where a staircase led down to the long and narrow Île aux Cygnes mid-channel in the Seine, he heard a commotion of angry voices echoing amid the columns and fading when an occasional car went by and the wash of its tires on the wet roadway muffled all sound.
The closer he came, the more he knew that something was terribly wrong and dangerous. He didn’t run to it, but his pace quickened. It was like being in the forest in Algeria at night and in bad weather. He was unseen, perfectly safe, with surprise and the lack of fear to his great advantage. Though he had no weapon, he had these and he had experience. By the time he saw what was going on near a buttress at the midpoint, he had partially returned to a soldier’s state of mind.
Three young men, one of whom had a knife, were beating and kicking another one, who was rolling this way and that on the ground in trying to protect himself. Jules hadn’t been afraid, but he was now – because they were three, they were young, he was old, and he was one.
Surprise itself could deliver him the first. His experience and strength might give him the second. But what of the third when Jules would be winded? So he held back. If this were between them and they were all the same, why intervene? Maybe the police would come, but now they were nowhere in sight. What could he do but watch, ashamed to retreat but unable to take action.
They kicked and pummeled the figure on the ground until it could move only agonizingly, rising into a low hump, collapsing, trying to sidle away but stopped by the buttress. Then they stopped, drew back, and the tallest one, who had a knife, approached the body on the ground, staring at it while drawing the hand that held the knife back past his shoulder.
Jules was by this time so torn between two imperatives that he trembled, though not out of fear. Then what he saw stopped his trembling. The young man on the ground, now risen to his knees and covered in blood, was wearing a yarmulke. Though he didn’t speak, his eyes were begging. What he didn’t know and surely could not have imagined, and what his tormentors did not know and surely could not have imagined, was that watching from the shadows was Jules, a man who was thrown back seventy years as if no time had passed, whose whole life had been a compressed spring in wait for just the trigger they had pulled. He knew not himself of what he was capable.
Although it was true, he wasn’t aware that here was a chance to kill in just the way as all his life he had wanted to kill, and to die in just the way as all his life he had wanted to die. They hadn’t noticed him, until, running at full speed, he burst from behind. He knew they would freeze momentarily, and they did, all of them. Before they moved, Jules was on the tall one with the knife and had opened his hand to grasp the
assailant’s head and hold it as tremendous forward momentum pushed him against the stones of the bridge. Guiding the head against a sharp edge of masonry just above a more rounded course, Jules used the buttress as a weapon, killing the first one instantly.
The other two attacked even before the first one hit the pavement, windmilling their fists, because they didn’t know how to fight. In the split second in which Jules determined how to deal with this, he also managed to wonder what a Hasidic Jew was doing on the bridge at night, alone. Perhaps he was just walking, or they had dragged him there. He limped off toward the Left Bank as Jules shielded himself as best he could from the blows and struggled toward the stairs. Punches were coming fast and hard from every direction. He couldn’t keep up with them, but instead of boxing – he was no boxer, even if they weren’t either – he waited for an opening and, with a scream, seized one of them by the neck, turned his whole body, and as if diving into a pool pushed off hard into the abyss, out from the stairs, riding the one he had seized down the twenty-one steps as if on a toboggan. When they stopped, the stunned young man pushed limply against Jules, trying to get up. From above and behind came the footsteps of the other one, who now had the knife and was closing. Aching and winded, Jules understood that he could no longer deal with two, or perhaps one, so he waited until the boy struggling beneath him was in a completely unguarded position as he tried to rise, and punched him in the throat, which he knew would – and did – kill him.
At this point, the boy with the knife lost his courage. Not knowing this, Jules looked at him, expecting either to die or perhaps to kill again in what seemed like a dream and what for an instant he thought must be a dream. Then the boy threw the knife into the Seine.
Exiting the trees on the Allée des Cygnes were a man and a woman walking beneath an umbrella. They froze. The boy who had thrown away the knife inexplicably picked up and pocketed a piece of paper – as if at this point he was fastidiously concerned with litter. Then he began to scream in a high-pitched, threatened voice. “He killed my friends! He killed my friends! Raciste! Raciste!”
The woman pulled out a phone, but she was shaking too much to use it, so the man grabbed it from her as the umbrella he dropped began to roll around in the breeze. The Hasidic Jew was by this time long gone, and the two witnesses had seen only that Jules was standing over a body as a frightened boy cried for help.
Jules knew that even if his explanation were accepted or somehow proved, which it might well not have been, and even if they could locate the Hasidic Jew, they would never find the knife, and Jules would be condemned for overreaction. How he was supposed to have fought three, one of whom had a weapon, didn’t matter. Well protected citizens, who would not themselves have intervened and would have allowed the unknown Jew on the bridge to die, eschewed violence so passionately as to close their eyes and wish to be done with it all equally and without the labor and risk of judgment. Prosecutors would prosecute him with single-minded professionalism. If the assailants were Muslims, and it was likely they were (“Raciste!”), pressure from one side and the desire to appease it from the other would almost certainly send him to prison, and never could he have afforded to go to prison, most especially now.
The sound of sirens came from the Right Bank as a chain of cars with flashing blue lights began to ascend from the west onto the ramp leading up to the bridge.
Rather than run and thereby telegraph guilt, Jules began to walk west at a pace that suggested he hadn’t been aware of the events that had just occurred. Though his manner comported perfectly with his shock, to the witnesses it looked like indifference. He glanced back at the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, at the center of which dozens of lights flashed hysterically in blue. Police were running down the stairs.
Which meant that Jules had to run, too. He ran every day that he didn’t row, sprinting intermittently, and now he sprinted much faster than usual. As the police following him saw him pulling away they received the clear impression that he was a young man. They couldn’t catch him, but what would he do when he reached the end of the Allée des Cygnes at the foot of the Pont de Grenelle? It was late, and raining. The streets were empty and would be saturated with police.
The running and his desperation felt much like war. He had no fear, because, as in war, the feeling that he was already dead freed him. It had been like that in Algeria, a kind of joy at writing himself off, which left him free to act in a way that by stunning and confounding his enemies might have saved his life.
Ahead, the Pont de Grenelle was lit in a garland of flashing blue lights. Closed in, there was only one thing he could do. He had always loved to walk or run through the Allée des Cygnes, but now he would have to leave it. He went to the fence, put one foot on the bottom rail, and vaulted over the rest. Then he slid down the steep masonry, taking care not to sprain an ankle, and without the slightest hesitation or making much of a splash, launched himself feet first into the river.
Everything continued to happen fast and numbly. Still, he was able to realize that he was tasting the spattered blood of the first man he killed when he had smashed him against the wall. But going into the river washed away both the blood and its taste, which was like a piece of raw iron that has not rusted but, somehow, rotted. The river took him as he knew it would. It was painfully cold, but not enough to confuse him. In less than a minute he grew used to it, and by that time he was level with the ramp and stairs leading from the Pont de Grenelle to the Allée des Cygnes, down which police were running, the straight beams of their flashlights sweeping jerkily from one side to the other as they moved. Some of the police were keen enough on the chase to skim their lights over the river on both sides of the Allée. Swept downstream on the north side, Jules submerged himself.
He had rowed here for sixty years, and knew the river’s every trick. Although he had to check visually, he could fix the stern of his boat on a landmark and row without looking back for many strokes, and then turn the point of the stern to another landmark to round a curve or avoid a bridge pier. Just where he had now gone into the water was the point of greatest danger when rowing, and he probably knew this particular patch of river as well as anyone in the world. The wakes of the bateaux mouches, although miraculously less than that of a powerful outboard, often filled the cockpit of his shell, and it took some skill not to capsize as they passed. On very windy days, one couldn’t row safely on the Seine, which was a muscular river that had always refused to be completely conquered, even by the great mass of Paris. The bateaux mouches made their astounding turns here, pivoting at their centers, whirling like blades. This made the biggest waves. To be caught in them was extremely difficult. To be hit by an immense, twirling bateau was death. West of Bir-Hakeim it was quieter, the main threat being commercial barges. But now there were no barges or bateaux mouches, and had he been in his light boat he almost could have run the whole river blind. After he counted slowly to twenty he knew the current had swept him beyond the westernmost point of the Allée des Cygnes, and he surfaced with a gasp.
Flashing police lights on the bridges at either end of the Allée lit them more brightly than Christmas trees. Carried by the Seine into a new life dictated by chance, he felt electrically alive and excited, even as or perhaps because he thought that everything was headed to the kind of cataclysms and death he had been spared all his life – of the Jews, his parents, the Mignons, the soldiers and civilians in Algeria, Jacqueline, and now Luc, and himself. But the river carried him west, death still at bay.
He knew the current veered south, hit the left bank, and ricocheted north, which would carry him to the dock. He had observed this every day, traced by detritus on the surface. Letting the current carry him, he felt it move south, bounce off the south bank, and head north. It slammed him against the north end of the dock as if he had been shot out of a circus cannon.
He climbed into the much warmer air. It was completely quiet – no sirens and no lights. He couldn’t be seen from the street, no one ever came to the boathou
se at night, and he had the key. After a moment’s rest, he went in, stripped off his clothes, and threw them into the washer to rid them of all traces of blood and the Seine. Wrapped in towels, he sat on the edge of the cot where he had slept not long before, and, as the washer agitated, he rocked slightly in the dark.
His mind racing, he stayed awake until the washer finished. Then he threw the clothes into the dryer. The tumbling sound and light escaping from inside were soporific. He lay back, noting to himself again and again that he must get up in the morning before others came early to row. He didn’t know who came then or exactly when they did or even if they did, for he rowed much later, but he had to arise before the light so as to be dressed and waiting. He would leave only when Paris was busy, the streets were full of early risers, and the cameras would be sucking up the imagery of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people making their ways, blurring, moving, innocent or not, an indistinct mass of men and women pressing hard upon the pedals of their ever-disappearing lives.
AWAKENED BY FIRST LIGHT reflecting off the gray river, he tried to go back to sleep. There were two worlds now, as perhaps there had always been: one of sleep without dreams, where anxiety did not exist; and the wakeful world in which fear came in paralyzing surges. Because it was impossible to sleep, he faced what had become of his life.
This was just before six, when someone might come to row, though it was unlikely, as the river flowed faster than it had the day before, and local rains had scattered garbage and tree limbs, sometimes whole trees, across the surface of the water. The weather was cold, dark, and foggy. Still, someone might come, so Jules rushed to prepare. He knew that later he would have to think very carefully about what to do, but what he had to do within the boathouse itself was obvious, and he moved fast. He threw the towels he had slept on and used as blankets into the hamper, and laid down a fresh covering, just as he had done the day before. Next, he went to the sink and cupped his hands to carry a little bit of water to sprinkle on his boat to make it look as if it had just been used. He turned on the shower and poured a little shampoo on the floor so that it would appear that after going out on the river he had bathed. The scent wafted through the rows of boats. Then he rushed to fix a light to the bow of his boat. He never rowed in the dark, so he fumbled with the unfamiliar attachment, but soon fastened it.