“Not at all,” he told her. “I’m happy to retire. At seventy-five,” he added as reassurance and confession.
“I suppose that in twelve years or sooner, I will be too,” she said, graciously informing him of her age – with, he thought, unmistakable flirtation. Why not? Maybe she was as crazy as he was. It was the last thing he wanted, needed, or expected. She went even further.
“The distance between us is not that great.” This may have been just charity.
The distance between them was in fact not that great. She was marvelously attractive, enough that he was distressed to discover that his plans now had competition. He hoped that she was married. “What faculty?” he asked, businesslike but observably rattled.
“History.”
“You’ll be near enough to the libraries. The Bibliothèque Nationale is nearby.”
“Of course.” She smiled forgivingly.
He felt foolish. Obviously she knew where it was. “My wife,” he said, as if to put Amina off, “made good use of the libraries. I’m in music, so not so much.”
“Is she retired, too?”
“No. She never retired. She died.”
“I’m sorry,” Amina said, and it was clear that she really was. “I’m very sorry. My husband is gone, but he’s still alive, so to speak, and stupid.” She couldn’t help but laugh.
“Why did you marry someone who was stupid?”
“He wasn’t stupid to begin with. I think he started taking stupid pills. There’s no other explanation.”
“Oh,” Jules said. Slightly scared by her declaration, though it was delivered with only traces of bitterness, Jules then took her around the little office the way a bellboy gives hotel guests a tour of their room. “You have to turn this thing here,” he said, pointing to a valve at the side of the radiator, “to regulate the heat. But steam escapes, so you must do it with a rag. They haven’t fixed it since de Gaulle.
“Monsieur Gimpel, the custodian, is a communist, which he will let you know every time you speak with him. If you ask him to attend to something he’ll tell you he can’t, but then he does. Except the radiator. That’s for the engineers, he says, as if there’s a picket line around it.
“To open the window, you have to bang the top of the frame with the heels of your hands because it swells shut, but that always works. In winter, I move the desk a meter to the left, or otherwise by mid-afternoon the sun shines in your eyes. There’s not much else.” He paused. “Sandwiche Miche is popular for emporter if you want to eat at your desk, but if you go left from it and down the first alley, there’s a bistro that hasn’t changed since before the war. It’s quiet, simple, and the food is good. What’s your specialty?”
“France and its wars of the twentieth-century. The little ones in Africa that continue to this day, the Great War, the Second World War, Vietnam, Algeria, the Cold War. Although people generally and even historians tend not to think of it this way, France suffered through, and its history was shaped by, more than a hundred years of war.”
“Do you know Vietnamese?”
“No. German, Italian, and Arabic. And English. I lived in America for fifteen years.”
“Where?”
“California.”
“I was in California, recently. It’s like taking drugs,” he said, “although how do I know? I’ve never taken drugs.”
“You’re exactly right. It’s because its past is as thin as ether. The dream that surrounds you there is from hypoxia. It kills brain cells, fairly slowly, but by the end even the nonagenarians carry around skateboards.”
“Well,” Jules said, pulling himself away, though he wanted to talk to her forever, “I have to go. I hope you have a productive time here. It’s a good place to work.” He paused. “I’ve been here most of my life.”
All the way home, he pictured her face and remembered her perfume, her hands, the cloth of her suit, and the way she moved.
WHILE JULES HAD BEEN cleaning out his office and had met Amina, Arnaud and Duvalier had arrived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Jules had just left and the gatekeeper wasn’t there either, having cut the lawns and begun a five-day vacation. For the first time in many years, the great house was empty, except for Jules, who slept on the floor of his bare apartment. In the main residence most of the hundreds-of-millions worth of paintings and other valuables had been removed, but everything was still alarmed to the hilt.
They waited. With nothing to do at home, and because he was so unsettled after he met Amina, Jules wandered around Paris and arrived home in the dark long after Arnaud and Duvalier had given up for the day.
“He’ll show. He’s not going anywhere,” Duvalier had said. “We’ll come back tomorrow, early.”
“I can’t,” Arnaud said.
“What do you mean, you can’t? We have our case, maybe. An arrest hardly means a conviction, and he may even be innocent. But it looks good.”
“I have to go to the dentist to get an implant.”
“What’s the matter with you? This thing is like neurosurgery.”
“A tooth is not so easy,” Arnaud said, pulling back his left cheek to expose a prominent gap among the rear molars. They’re going to put a titanium plug into my jaw. It’s almost general anesthesia. I can’t drive or carry a weapon for two days, and if I still have to take hydrocodone, I’m off for as long as I do.”
“We need you for this even though he’s an old man. He’s seventy-five but capable of taking down three much younger men with knives, and I don’t want to call in anyone else, because it’s our case. I don’t know the cops in Yvelines and what they might do. It’s a murder case so they might send in a SWAT team, which would be ridiculous and demeaning. Okay, it’s not in our jurisdiction, but we can bring him in for questioning – we have the order – and when we cross the line into Paris ….”
“I know.”
“Promise me that no matter how much it hurts you won’t take any pills after day two. We’ll get him then.”
“All right.”
“Meanwhile, let’s go home. We didn’t have to rush up to Honfleur, but that’s the way it is. Sometimes I wish I worked in a bank.”
THE WEATHER TURNED COOL for a day or two as the heat wave broke. Paris was to have a short respite before the virtual sirocco that had been blowing across it returned, but now it was remarkably like Denmark, Sweden, or Scotland in August – high, bright sun; cool air; and sparkling, dappled light. Newly cut lawns were cold to the touch. At night in the chill, people dressed as if for the excitement and relief of autumn. Paris awoke.
And so did Jules, his mind and memory working with concentration and illumination. He knew he was irrational and in love with a woman with whom he had spent all of fifteen minutes. He was as much in love as he had been with Élodi, but this was different because it was possible, because Amina knew what he knew, because separately they had come to the same place in their lives. He said to himself that he was just crazy, that she could not have possibly fallen in love with him as he had with her. It was a lesson he had learned many times over, in many infatuations. And yet he could not help but continue to believe that she had.
As he concluded his affairs – the forwarding address at the Post Office, the last bills to be paid, the final items removed from the apartment so that now everything he possessed would fit in a small rucksack – a strange thing happened.
The music he was able to summon in full fidelity took on a life of its own, contrary to his will. He had structured much of the past, and especially these last days, on the Sei Lob. As it had been for seventy-one years, it was still his magical and forgiving path into another existence, God’s voice lifting away heartbreak. It would be the accompaniment to that which would close the circle and make the past once more the good and beautiful world that a child remembers for a time after he has emerged from it with inchoate knowledge of the perfection from which he has been separated (or, sometimes, ripped), a memory that fades in the crib and for which there are no words.
/> Now a new music, not what he had intended, arose in apposition. Sometimes they played at the same time and he could hear them both, but then one would overcome the other. Opposed to the Sei Lob that would take him from life was a Couperin piece he had always loved. It was music he had associated with Paris as time motionlessly passed through it: Les Barricades Mystérieuses, and indeed they were. It was supposedly a play on virginity, but the power of the music elevated it far beyond such things.
The harpsichord is a very strange instrument. It plucks and stops, attacking its sonorousness at each note by refusing to let the note sustain and fade. In that sense, it refuses death – by jumping, as if from one ice floe to another, to a new note and a new life. It can sometimes be stilted, but if done right the chain of sound becomes as beautiful as the sparkling of stars. The Couperin exceeded this in that it was like a continuous waterfall of golden light so promising and overwhelmingly bright that it could startle even someone about to die. As it and the Bach closely contended within him, Jules had a compressed, comprehensive, detached, but nonetheless deeply emotional view of all his days.
HE WAS SURE HE would never see Amina again, and that she had been only a test of his willingness to exit. He was old enough and experienced enough to conclude that he had exaggerated her qualities, that, because he was now separated from reality, this was his affair alone, and that the salvation he saw in her and hoped was mutual was merely something he had manufactured to keep himself alive. Luc was failing, and had one more, slight chance. Jules had to try to save Cathérine as well. Perhaps France would not go the way it had once gone. But though his intellectual appraisal told him it wouldn’t, it had happened before, it had happened in history, and it had happened to him. The insurance, dearly purchased, was to give Cathérine and Luc what he had been unable to give his mother and father. Amina was life’s last emissary, but he would have to leave her behind. He didn’t know her, and would never see her again. He hoped she would simply fade away.
The day after they met was the last day of cool weather, and in the morning, in a gentle and insistent shower of cold, thin raindrops, Jules had gone to the pool to see if swimming five kilometers might kill him. He thought that giving up the ghost as waters swirled around his strokes and his attention was taken up in the rhythm and exhaustion of the swim would be easier than running in the heat until he died. But several hours after entering the water he emerged feeling, if a lot more tired, as healthy and powerful as a young man. As Jules left, his nemesis the guard said, “Are you training to swim La Manche?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“The lifeguards were talking about you. They almost got to the point where they were taking bets as to when you would get out.”
“Actually,” Jules said, “I’m going to swim to Peru, but it won’t be that far, because instead of going around the Horn I’m going to take the Panama Canal. Or maybe the Suez. I haven’t yet made up my mind.”
In Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a tiny alley, unknown to almost everyone, that right-angles from another tiny alley off a narrow cul-de-sac that as it proceeds becomes entirely residential, and because of this has little foot traffic. To get to it you would have to veer off a fairly quiet commercial Street into a narrow way, walk past a travel agency, an estate agent, and a lawyer’s office, continue on past the blank walls of the back of a school, make a right down another narrow street, with only the featureless school walls on either side, until at the end, half hidden, is the covered Passage Livry. If you dared follow it – because it looked like it would lead only to a back courtyard full of refuse bins – you would discover that it opened to a little garden with a fountain, teak benches, pebble paths, and a small bar and tabac run stubbornly and un-economically by a very old man who kept at it even after the municipality built a garage that closed off his little square from a busy street that had then been quick to forget that he remained.
There are many hidden courtyards in France. It might be said that the whole country and its culture is a form of architecture that protects private life. Almost all of its large buildings surround an interior garden as delicate as the stone walls around it are strong. Jules had discovered this one only after being present late one night when the proprietor of the bar, having had too much to drink, fell down on the street and bloodied his nose. Jules took him home, at first unbelieving that he was being guided correctly. Then, for thirty years, he had returned fairly regularly, often with Jacqueline, and Cathérine, who would play alone at the edge of the fountain.
And after they were gone he would go there to sit in the garden, read the newspaper, and enjoy a complet. Now he did so again, and due to the great swim he felt perfectly fine about having two brioches, two croissants, and a cup of scalding chocolate with whipped cream floating on top like Mont Blanc. It was the last time he would enjoy such things, for the next day the sun would be blazing and the temperature was predicted to surpass 35°C. That day, he would run until, in the battle he had always sought, he would bend time and loop back to the unfinished business of 1944.
But at present it was cold, and despite the steaming chocolate he was beginning to get a chill as he ate and tried to read a story about drilling for gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Jews had found gas and oil offshore. The Turks would try to take it from them. The Syrians would try to take it from them. The Lebanese would go to court. Hizb’Allah would attempt to blow it up. Such a nice windfall, and a fight to the death to keep it.
In the fading periphery of his vision, he saw something over the top of his newspaper, and lowered it to see directly. A woman was walking around the perimeter of the square, checking the few house numbers, looking for something. She walked like someone who is irritated, stopping and starting, unsatisfied. Jules took in a breath, and thrust his head slightly forward as stupidly as a pigeon, because it was Amina.
He jumped up suddenly and ran to her, thinking on the way that soon he would have to apologize to a stranger. In his early life and sometimes even of late he had often rushed toward people when he thought that they were his father, his mother, or Jacqueline. But he had always managed to catch himself. He would look at his watch, snap his fingers, and turn around. Still, the breathless shock of thinking he had caught sight of them, none of whom had aged, was something that would take half an hour to dissipate. Rushing toward this woman, he didn’t have to snap his fingers, feign looking at his watch, or turn, because it really was Amina.
After she had joined him at his table, doubling the old man’s customers at a stroke, she saw that Jules seemed suspicious. “I didn’t track you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she told him. This amused her.
“Of course not. I didn’t think that.”
“It is extremely unlikely that in all of Paris and environs we would end up in this little place at the same time, but I was at the estate agent around …” she twirled her left hand and index finger as if stirring something “… the corner. And he said there was a listing in, or, rather, off, the Passage Livry.”
“You’re moving here?”
“I am. I hope to. Do you live here?”
“For most of my life – that is, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Tomorrow I’m leaving.”
“Where?”
Instead of answering, he took a sip of his chocolate, and softened his non-reply with the kind of expression – a concentration, a quarter smile, a slight narrowing of the eyes – that compliments the person upon whom it is focused.
“I think I told you that I’ve just returned from America,” she said. “I want to live here because of the gardens, the forest, the quiet, the amenities. I can feel my blood pressure drop when I get off the train. I want to find a quiet place that I can make beautiful, preferably one with a view. I suppose the estate agent sent me here because if there is in fact anything available in this little square it would have a view onto it, and it is quiet. But I’d rather see out toward Paris. My experience has been, in real estate and other things, that if you look hard you can eventual
ly come up with something good.”
“The change is unexpected?”
“Yes. Six months ago my husband and I were at Stanford. We were somewhat isolated, but we had friends, and we were always busy. In retrospect, I suppose that was not good, but at least I thought I was happy for the first fourteen years, even though it was like living in what they call virtual reality. They use the word incorrectly. Virtual means it’s real but doesn’t seem so, but they apply it to what isn’t real and does seem so.”
“Then what?”
“My husband, who, unlike you, has lost most of his hair and is quite fat … decided to write a book. With one of his graduate students.”
“In what?”
“Sociology. I’m a historian. There’s a conflict right there. Purely by happenstance, his graduate student is six feet tall, the top of her legs are at about my shoulder height, she has blazing, naturally blond hair, balloonsized breasts that – like a paint shaker in a hardware store – jiggle before her at high speed as she walks, and ridiculously white teeth.”
“Your teeth are white.”
“Of course. I’ve been in California for fifteen years. But not like hers. When she opens her mouth the beam picks you up and slams you against a wall. She’s a human lighthouse.”
“Is she a Muslim?” Jules asked.
“From North Dakota? I should go there to get my teeth whitened and my breasts jiggled.”
“Is your husband a Muslim?”
“Oh yes, especially now that he’s discovered his polygamous side.”
“So you’re separated.”
“Divorced. In Nevada, just across the line, it takes a minute and a half.”
“Children?”
“He was infertile. I stuck with him. Now, of course, I’m too old.”
“I have a daughter, and a grandchild,” Jules said. “They’re probably going to leave France.”
“Why?”
“We’re Jews. That’s one thing.”
“I understand. We left France, too.”