Eventually the war drove them out and to Paris. Now, in Saint-Germainen-Laye, Amina felt the heat almost like the driving heat of North Africa. Eyes closed, she saw the sea surging in dark blue. She could see into the distance and along the bleached strand undulating in rising heat and disappearing in a confusion of vision before it reached the horizon, white glare over the blue, the colors of innocence and love. She had them still, as richly saturated in heat and light as when she had first seen them.
“DO YOU KNOW Jules Lacour?” Arnaud asked the guard at the pool.
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s been coming here since the beginning of time.”
“Is he here now?”
“No.”
“Was he here?”
“Yesterday he swam five kilometers. He says he’s going to swim to Peru. He’s a liar.”
After a pause to take this in, Arnaud asked, “Do you vote?”
“In elections?”
“That would be a good place to start.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when there is an election, do you vote in it?”
“Of course I do.”
As they left the pool they both knew where they were going and didn’t need to speak. Nonetheless, Duvalier voiced what they were thinking. “If he runs in the forest, he’ll come out in the park, but maybe he just runs on the Terrace. If we don’t see him, we’ll wait in front of the house.”
“In this heat?”
“We can park in the shade.”
FROM THE POOL, Arnaud, Duvalier, and from centre-ville, Amina, came onto the Allée Louis XIV, Amina a hundred meters or so behind the two policemen. A great formal garden gives a certain elevation to the soul if the paths and plantings are laid out according to proportions known since classical times and as inexplicable and ineffable in their effect as the measures of intervals and tones in music. All the more so if the garden is on a height overlooking a distant prospect of varied colors beneath a dome of clear sky. The two men and Amina walked slowly in the heat. A breeze crested over the hill, as Amina had thought it would, and continued evenly down the straight Allée.
Arnaud and Duvalier came to the bench where Jules had been sitting. Jules had gone into the park to find a spigot, where he would feel water for the last time, holding it in his cupped hands again and again and bringing it to his face. He knelt at the gray pipe, not caring that he wet his clothes as he brought double handfuls up to his face. The water was clear, cool, and pure, its sound beautiful even as it issued from a spigot to which gardeners, without thinking much about it, attached their hoses.
Arnaud and Duvalier straightened themselves so as to rise slightly higher in the hope of seeing a little farther down the glimmering white path disappearing northward along the Terrace as straight as a rule. They shielded their eyes almost in salute, and saw just an empty road. Independently, each felt that he had glimpsed something on the long white prospect that said Jules was gone, and that, somehow justly, he was out of their grasp.
When they turned to go back to their car and find a place to park in the shade, they were relieved. They looked forward to going home that evening and relaxing, they hoped, as if just after a graduation. If they had him or if, as they expected, he was gone, the case would either be closed or tabled, and they would be free until assigned to the next. They sensed that it was over.
As Arnaud and Duvalier left the park, Amina arrived at the bench on the circle between the Allée Henri IV and the Long Terrace. She was entirely alone, and hadn’t come in search of Jules. In fact, she had more or less given up. She looked toward Paris as the cooling breeze lifted her hair, ruffled her blouse, and made her skirt luff at her legs.
As Jules emerged from the lawn at the edge of which he had knelt at the spigot, he saw the trim form of a woman standing next to the bench. At first he appreciated her for the firmness of the way she stood and her colors in the sun. He kept walking slowly toward her. Then he recognized her, and stopped. Staring at her, it was as if everything in his life rose and burst within him. The contention of equally balanced forces was unlike anything he had ever experienced. The weight of loyalty, obligation, and faithful love fought against the promise of life and love anew.
If she walked away – when she walked away – what would he do? If she turned toward him to get to the RER, he would have no choice. If she went left toward the Long Terrace, where he had been just about to begin his last run, the plan would be shattered at least for that day. Or perhaps forever, because, although he didn’t know it, Arnaud and Duvalier were waiting for him.
As the breeze died down she was ready once again to start her search for a place to live. Without having seen him, she turned right, to the town, and went up the stairs at the southeast corner of the circle, rising toward the five great ornamental urns flanking the steps. The scene seemed to Jules like something on as unreasonably grand a scale as in a dream – that she would go, and he would let her go as she branched off from his life, closing his course, in such a monumental way. And yet her diminutiveness, her self-containment, and grace made even the grandeur of the exit close and warm. Had he been next to her, and touched her, it would have changed everything.
But he just watched her as she disappeared among the ordered ranks of closely cropped trees and the long banks of flowers in the August sun. She was gone. Everything was silent except the wind rising from the east and curling over the battlement-like retaining wall of the Grand Terrace. Wood smoke came from beyond the vineyard. A little girl with blond hair raced ahead of her parents, crossing the circle of grass. They followed, the father holding an infant who squinted in the sun, before this family disappeared as well.
A distant church bell rang, and when it did, as if right before his eyes, he saw its whitish-gray metal. Things don’t vanish, he thought. If they exist once, they exist forever. Nothing is lost. It’s all somewhere, permanently engraved on the black walls of time. He took a few breaths, and as his much needed courage began to return, he set off to find them.
ALTHOUGH THERE WAS not even a single cloud, it seemed to him as if there had been a stroke of lightning in the sun and a clap of thunder in the clear. Suddenly, and as if from nowhere but the past, he felt utter fearlessness and resolution. As a soldier, he had come to know the courage that comes on the heels of anxiety. Always anxious before a patrol, when he took his first step into the darkness he accepted death, and from that point forward he left all fear behind and experienced a lightness and joy as if he were invulnerable.
Morning heat had driven everyone from the long path, and he was alone as he watched the trees shimmer in the sun. From memory and as if to match his excitement came the allegro of the Third Brandenburg. As it twinned with the heat and light, he began to run. He would run faster than a man of his age could run on a hot day and remain alive. He would force it upon himself as if he were fighting for life. At first, things came wonderfully clear. The years of the fifties and sixties became images that, like the petals of peonies, fell suddenly and easily and almost at once, still white and unmarred but now littered on the grass.
Although he had not bidden it, he was grateful for this music as a perfection of art and a summation beyond the power of reason. Music had been the oxygen that had kept him alive. He hadn’t become a great musician or a great composer, either of which would have diverted him from the essential task of his life. But he remembered, he never flagged, and he had lived for more souls than his own. As he ran, the music gathered everything he knew and had known in his life, and everything seemed to turn in a massive whirlwind of red and silver light.
Then the red and silver, which seemed to him like a lion of fire, the sun’s leaping corona, or a city burning but not consumed, turned to gold, and, somehow, this was France in all its history, rising like a sun. As in massive forest fires after which come years of young and tranquil green, the golden air and light that floated above the combustion were a promise of the silence and peace to follow.
The running beca
me more and more difficult. Though he tried not to slow, he was forced to, and, as he slowed the music changed, as he had always expected, to the Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren. Now his mother and father were close, Cathérine would have a chance, and Luc might be healed. It had been Jules’ duty and obligation to stay with his mother and his father, Philippe and Cathérine Lacour – when he said their names it brought them close – not because of sense, law, or logic, but to follow the illogic of love. Now at last he would go where he was always supposed to have been.
As he ran, the red and the black crept forward from the periphery of his vision until it enveloped him and he was blinded. He lost touch with his body. His senses were almost gone when he heard himself crash against the white stones on the path and felt them, for a moment, cutting into his left cheek. He lay there, knowing that at the last he might have, as he had been told, thirty seconds more, thirty seconds when all threads were braided, all feeling risen, all memories recollected not in detail but in sum, in a miraculous density, in a song too great to be heard by the living.
Events that would not be suppressed rose from the dark and broke the surface to pull Jules Lacour back to the place he had never really left. Here, in balance with all he had seen since, was what he had always longed for. Wanting in equal measure both life and death, he would cross over easily and unafraid from one to the other, finally at peace as he had not been since the first and last time he had heard his father play the Sei Lob and, as riddle and solution, it had been impressed upon his heart, waiting for his life to come.
As it had for Amina, a cool breeze arose. It traveled up the hillside, over the vineyards, and across the path where Jules lay. When it got to the forest it gently raised the canopy of leaves, and then relaxed. The last thing he heard, when supposedly there was silence, was the distant music of Paris – the sum of footfalls, the sound of engines, of horses and bells, of voices, laughter, water flowing, the movement of traffic, the wind in the trees. Sound lifted from the streets, from the procession of the Seine and the roll of the hills. Sound that was filtered and shaped by the form of little things such as a rail or a cornice, sound that was made by the wind sweeping down a wide avenue. These ever-present and underlying sounds, of which he had been aware from his earliest infancy, these forgiving sounds that now were strong and overpowering and came from the interweaving paths of the living and the dead, were music as beautiful and compelling as the masterpiece of life itself.
And so it was, that day, when a detail of history finally came to rest in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the music of Paris bathed the city in a rain of gold. Jules was free and gone, but the music remained – sonatas, symphonies, and songs present even in silence, waiting to be heard by those who might stop long enough to listen on their way.
MARK HELPRIN is the acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works. His novels are translated into more than twenty languages and read around the world. He lives in Virginia.
Printed in the United States of America Copyright © 2017 The Overlook Press
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Jacket image by Yvon (Pierre Yves-Petit) courtesy of La Carterie SAS
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
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Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense
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