This recalled for Élodi the deaths of her parents, and the nausea and terror it had brought. Now whatever she had felt for him, confused as it was, was intensified.
“I have an insurance policy that covers disability, and they tell me that I’m now disabled. I’m not, but if I do any kind of work it voids the policy. I can’t have that, because I need it for the people I’ll leave behind. So I can’t write or teach, even privately, even without compensation. Bureaucracy, public or private, is both stupid and monstrous.”
“If you can’t teach, why am I here?” she asked, thinking that although she herself had flirted with it, now it was he who was being what people of his age – unlike many of her contemporaries, she knew the expression and understood its context – called being ‘too forward’. She both wanted him to be forward enough to make love to her, and not to be forward at all, which was exactly the way he felt. When they were thinking the same way, with a bias to attraction and risk, it made heat as if by induction: they could actually feel it between them. But when thinking the same way, with a bias toward caution and regret, they felt an internal, physical coldness. And when, as often happened as things changed between them in rapid oscillation, one was hot and the other cold, it made for a turbulence they could not master. But one kiss, one embrace, would have clarified everything.
“I’m not allowed to work, it’s true. However, nothing prevents you from trying out my cello with the prospect of buying it,” he said. “That’s not work, but the sale of personal effects.”
“And you can give me tips on how it should be played.”
“Absolutely. The older the instrument, the more idiosyncratic.”
“But you know,” Élodi told him, losing her footing and out of character, “I can’t afford it.”
“Oh? I haven’t set a price. How do you know? You haven’t made an offer. And most instruments like these are passed down, with never a price.”
“But you have a family.”
“A daughter who doesn’t play – and it must be played. That’s why it exists.”
“How much would it be worth if you did sell it?”
“I have no idea, but it’s not one of those things to which a high monetary value is attached. If it were, I would have sold it to help my grandchild, who’s sick.”
“Is that what the insurance is for?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Jules?” It was extremely pleasurable when she addressed him that way for the first time. It changed things and relaxed her. It also made him seem very old, so she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have done it. “I’m interested, perhaps, in purchasing your cello, as you cannot work ….”
“Ah,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Yes. May I try it? And will you guide me in playing it, because things that are aged are so often idiosyncratic?”
“Very much so,” he answered, meaning, also, yes.
She leaned forward and asked, not in a whisper but quietly and skeptically, “Are they watching you? Would anyone care?”
“They questioned me. They were here just recently. As unlikely as it seems, I wouldn’t rule it out. But don’t worry.” He gestured toward the cello.
She took hold of it. “What would you like me to play?”
“Play what you brought.”
“The Bach.”
IN WHAT FOLLOWED, they passed the cello back and forth, and in so doing, touched lightly. Although this might have made them less comfortable with one another, it made them more comfortable, particularly because after each touch came the Bach. Sometimes he had to cross the gap and sit next to her, and when he did she reddened and her perfume rose. She was life.
He wanted so much to stay with her that when she had to leave he saw her to the gate and beyond. As soon as they stepped into the street he saw the spectre of Damien Nerval catercorner in a car and pointing a large telephoto lens in their direction. Undoubtedly the camera had a motor drive, and the interior of the car now sounded like the inside of a cuckoo clock just before the cuckoo pops out.
Jules placed his hand against Élodi’s left side, pivoted so his back was to Nerval, and said, “Don’t look. They are watching. We should talk a while.” He had been right about what he would feel – the silk, taut musculature, lovely breathing.
“They can find out that I’m enrolled, that I chose you as …” she began.
“I know. But if we talk …” he said.
“So what?”
“Perhaps,” he dared, “we should pretend to kiss? That might put them off.”
She thought it was funny that, suddenly, he was as awkward as a preadolescent. As seductive as she had ever been, with intense physical pleasure coursing through her as she spoke, she asked, “What level of verisimilitude do you have in mind?”
“I suppose it would have to be unambiguous.”
“I think that’s right.”
He had never intended to kiss or embrace her, and was afraid to do so. “I’d be afraid of joining my imperfection to your perfection. Afraid that I would be like someone who’s just gotten up in the morning.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, “but I get up in the morning, too. So let’s by my perfection find your imperfection out.”
And they kissed – holding close – and it lasted for almost ten minutes.
FLOATING AND IN LOVE, Jules went inside to work on his homage to Bach’s Sei Lob, and found that he couldn’t. All he could do was vibrate with pleasure and love as he replayed the kiss again and again and again. Although he knew it would never happen, Jules wanted to return with Élodi to her tiny apartment and forget everything that had kept him from her. He felt and imagined this so strongly it was as if he were with her in a new life that other than in dreams was impossible. And on the train, numb all the way home, hardly turning her head, Élodi would feel intense pleasure echoing through her entire body, with sadness following insistently in its wake.
But on the street outside the Shymanski compound, reality was still in command. After Élodi turned the corner on her way to the station, Arnaud and Duvalier simultaneously and explosively opened the doors of their car. Arnaud spoke for both of them as he alighted onto the pavement. “Who the hell is that?” For as Jules and Élodi had embraced and kissed, Nerval, in his nondescript Peugeot, was using the motor drive on his camera, and the two detectives had watched him, unable to move until Jules and Élodi had left.
As if it were a person to be interrogated, Arnaud approached the Peugeot at an investigative forty-five-degree angle. He was massive enough that it seemed as if he could have actually blocked the car had it tried to drive away. Duvalier rapped on the driver’s window. Nerval calmly turned his head and sneered. Duvalier rapped again. Nothing.
“Open the window,” Duvalier ordered.
Nerval stared at him without moving, “Why?” He asked so quietly that Duvalier knew what he said only because he read his lips.
Duvalier yanked open the door. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded to know.
“I am,” came the answer, royally, “Damien Nerval, investigateur. Who are you?” He was still sneering, not because he wanted to, but because his face was constructed that way.
Duvalier held up his identification. “I am,” he said, echoing and mocking Nerval’s tone, “Duvalier Saidi-Sief, flic. If you don’t want to be arrested, you’ll tell me what you’re doing.”
“Arrested for what?” Nerval asked, and actually laughed.
“For obstructing an investigation. You’re ten seconds away.”
“Me? You’re investigating him, too?”
“Who?”
“Lacour,” Nerval answered. “What are you investigating him for?”
“That’s not your business,” Duvalier told him. “What are you investigating?”
“I asked first.”
“Get out of the car.”
“All right, all right, irregularities in the purchase of an insurance contract.”
“Really,” Duvalier
said. “That’s fascinating, but we take precedence. You’ll leave now and if I see you here again you’ll be lucky to be arrested, understand?”
“No no no,” said Nerval. “You don’t get it. My employer is … well, I won’t say anything. Believe me, you can’t step all over our investigation.”
“No no no no no,” Duvalier echoed, wagging his finger. “My employers are … well, I will say that they don’t have to bribe, trade, or ask for favors, because they’re the people of France. Get it? Remember the Bastille? Yes? Good. Fuck off.”
“We’ll see,” Nerval said, starting his engine. “We’ll see what the minister says. I believe he’s your employer, although at such a high level he could not possibly have heard of you.”
“He can fuck off, too,” Arnaud said.
Nerval tried to close the door, but Duvalier blocked it, pulled him out of his seat, pushed him up against the side of his car, and hit him in the face – not half as hard as he could have. “Give the minister that message for me. And if I see you here again, I’ll shoot you.” He pushed the finally ruffled Nerval back into his car.
After the Peugeot sputtered up the street, an amazed Arnaud asked Duvalier, who was still shaking with anger, “Is that how you do it in Marseilles?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve heard.”
“We have to.”
IT WAS DARK, almost time for dinner, everyone was hungry, his visitors had pulled Jules from the music he was writing, and he had to receive them in his quarters rather than Shymanski’s study. But he didn’t care, because kissing Élodi was still with him.
They thought he had a saintly nature, because at this rare moment he was as beatific as a Tibetan monk. He offered them food and drink. They refused politely. He told him that the apartment was a study he had built as a private retreat. Would they like to go upstairs? No, they said, not necessary. They had a feeling that something was off, because he fit the profile and because he didn’t. They had already eliminated almost everyone else in the rowing club. Of course this alone had elevated their suspicion, although logically it should not have.
“We’re investigating an incident,” Arnaud said. “We’d like to ask a few questions.”
“Certainly. What incident?”
“We’ll get to that later.”
“That’s strange.”
“We’re roundabout,” Duvalier stated.
Jules countered, “I’m roundabout too, and I have all evening. I have all day. Whatever you’d like. We can have dinner. We can go bowling.” He was elated.
“You seem quite happy.”
Jules just laughed.
“The girl?”
“You saw?”
“Yes. She’s young for you.”
“Far too young,” Jules agreed. “Impossible. I don’t understand. This kind of thing is happening to me now, when life should be quieting down.”
“You’re not taking it further?” Duvalier asked. “I saw her. I would.”
“I would, too, but she’s half a century younger than I am. That’s insane. I do love her, but I don’t know if she feels anything for me other than curiosity and, perhaps, respect, or, who knows, pity.”
“People carry such things further every day.”
“You mean, like the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old man who married a young woman of twenty? I’m not that stupid.”
“Well, in your case it’s only fifty years. What have you got to lose?” Duvalier asked. Everyone was amused, certainly Jules, who understood the humor better than did his guests.
“Listen, there are two ways of meeting death.”
“Death?” Duvalier asked. This alone was enough to wake up a policeman.
“I collapsed on the RER and lay there half dead for as many stops as it took for someone to suspect that I might not have been a drunk. It was at the Gare de Lyon, very convenient to the hospital. Had I gone to the end of the line I’d be dead. I have what’s called a basilar aneurysm, and could go at any moment. The guy on the street with the camera? Suddenly I attract scrutiny, because I bought an insurance policy just before it happened.”
“He’s not there anymore.”
“You met him?”
“We did. We told him to get lost.”
“Oh.”
“So, the girl. You’ll keep yourself from her?”
“Yes. It’s crazy that I love her, but I do. Still, I know that to meet death, and for me death is near, you either strip all things of their value so as not to regret too much, or you learn distance.”
“What do you mean, ‘learn distance’?”
“With distance, as things recede, you need not reject or devalue them to protect yourself. If you achieve distance, that which you might otherwise betray for fear of losing it still seems benevolent, loving – but gently dimming, going silent. Life recedes gradually until all that was bright and startling is like a city seen from afar, the noise of wind and traffic a barely audible hiss. You glide away without pain, and you love it still. She’s in the bright world that I have to leave.”
Duvalier and Arnaud hardly knew what to say, but they had a mental list and they went through it. “You served in Algeria,” Arnaud said. He could not help but think of Duvalier.
“You’ve been looking into me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We may get to that later. But you don’t seem especially surprised.”
“What should surprise me? An idiot from the insurance company is taking pictures of me as I kiss a young woman I love but cannot have. I collapsed on the train. I have to deal with a detestable man whose name is Rich Panda. My grandson has leukemia. Classical music is as popular as hoopskirts. Two policemen show up at my door. Look, I wouldn’t be surprised if aliens came down and chopped me up for cat food. What did you say?”
“Algeria.”
“What about it?”
“What do you think about Arabs?”
“I don’t.”
“What do you mean, you ‘don’t’?” Duvalier asked.
“I don’t think about Arabs, per se.”
“What is your opinion of them?”
“I’m a Jew,” Jules told him. “My parents were murdered by the Germans because they were Jews. The gravest, most persistent sin of mankind lies in not treating everyone as an individual. So, in short, I take Arabs as they come, just like everyone else.”
“But as a group?”
“As a group? They have a very high incidence of killing innocents with whom they disagree. It’s part of the culture, part of Islam, part of their nomadic origins. But no individual is merely a reflection of a group. That’s the injustice that ruins the world. So, my answer is that for me an Arab is the same as a Jew, a Frenchman, a Norwegian, anything you’d like. If I were to judge people by their identity, I’d be like the people who killed my parents. Those were called Nazis. Do you think I could ever be one?”
“Did you have the same opinion in Algeria when you were at war with Arabs?”
“In Algeria, officers – before you were born – I had very little contact with Arabs. I was surrounded by French soldiers or alone in the forest. Even had I been prone to developing prejudices, I had very little material with which to work.”
“But now,” Duvalier pressed, “do you think they’re ruining the country?”
“Yes,” Jules answered, “along with everyone else. If you must speak collectively, they don’t get a pass. Some people burn cars, sell drugs, and rob passersby. Others buy drugs, live off the state, or, in airy offices at the top of skyscrapers, allocate capital, as they say, which is playing Chemin de Fer with other people’s money. Non-Arab politichiens take bribes and thrust their grossly inferior selves into positions they’re not competent to fill. And, may I add, pretentious, dissolute, beatnik philosophers sleep with the wives of their best friends.”
“I’m not going to let you get off that easy,” Duvalier announced. “What you say is anodyne. But I want to know what you think of
the Arabs in France, one in ten of the population – as a whole, a community, a culture, a polity. Good for France? Bad? Indifferent?”
“Why would you want to know that? You’re not an opinion survey, you’re a policeman.”
“It bears upon the incident we’re investigating.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“No. We have no suspects at the moment.”
“I don’t understand, but I’ll be happy to offer my opinion. It was wrong for France to try to make Algeria a little France, to construct a replica of itself there and in other countries. We became a foreign master that destroyed the rhythms and tranquility of those places – both their qualities that were good and their qualities that were not. And it’s just as wrong – because we did not by and large assimilate in the Arab lands, and the Arabs do not by and large assimilate here – to have a little North Africa in France. Those who are here already should be made more welcome than they have been, but they must become French.”
Duvalier, because he agreed, played the devil’s advocate: “Why?” He expected a long essay. François would have supplied one, in impassioned, bear-like tones, with Italianate gestures.
But Jules replied, “They must become French, because this is France.”
“You enjoy this,” said Arnaud, who had been quietly observing, ready to be either the good cop or the bad cop.
“Sometimes I enjoy everything, but what do you mean by ‘this’?”
“The questioning.”
“Certainly,” Jules told him. He couldn’t resist adding, in English, “I’m having a whale time.”
Arnaud, whose English was only elementary, thought that whatever the reference to a whale, it was very sophisticated. “The people we interview usually hate it. They get jumpy, tortured. Why are you having fun like a whale?”
“A lot of it,” Jules said, “is left over from what you saw on the street, but it’s not just that. My wife is dead, my only child long married, I have no more students, and my oldest friend is a quisling and a liar to whom I will not speak ever again. I can go a whole day saying only five or ten words to a human being – a waiter, the man who sells newspapers, the guard at the swimming pool. Now you show up, two cops, and you’re asking me interesting questions purely out of left field – what do I think about Arabs, am I going to make love to the girl you saw me with at the gate. And, then, maybe, we’ll get to why you’re here. Of course it’s fun. Stay all night. Have you had dinner? We don’t have to go out. I can fix you something. I have a big American steak, enough for three, even him,” Jules said, meaning Arnaud. “I can barbecue it ….”