by Russ Rymer
Though it turned out that what I was looking at, the picture perched on Ralanou’s mantel, was not even the fully realized study. It was a fully realized imitation of the fully realized study. Sahran (on a later occasion, over a full dinner on Île Saint-Louis, not here amid the sugar wafers) explained the setup. It seemed the painting’s previous owners had had a twinship of portraits, two paintings by the same artist largely identical, and before selling off the one that eventually made its way to the museum, they’d given the other, in service of a debt, or perhaps in extravagant friendship, to Sahran’s parents, in whose home it had hung throughout his childhood, on a living-room wall.
Recently, no longer wishing to carry the insurance and worried about the security required by such a treasure, Sahran had sold it to the museum for an “amusing” sum of money, on the museum’s obvious condition that the work survive appraisal, and on his condition that the museum commission a faithful copy from a reputable portraitist to replace the original that had lived two generations on the Sahran family’s wall, though Emil did not intend it for his living room or for any other room in the old house, which he was in the process of selling as well, part of a general and drastic divestment. His commission from the museum he’d donated to the Islamic girls’ school, and he was giving its headmistress the copy of the painting as an eternal reminder of whence the school’s endowment had derived: from a piece of blasphemous human representation.
And, there, I did finally learn something about Emil Sahran, that he preferred for even his profoundest generosities to contain a touch of devilment.
“Tamathil!” Ralanou declared, squinting at the painting and then, again, harder, at her benefactor. “The angels will not enter.”
“But Ralu, Ralu, this isn’t such an image, look at it, she is entirely symbolic. Have you ever seen a tree like that, or such a woman? She’s a pattern, an allegory. We were just talking about this, weren’t we, Dr. Anselm?” He gave me an actual wink. “At any rate, she now belongs to you, so you’ll have to learn to live with her.” Ralanou’s look was skeptical and glad, glad, I imagined, that someone cared to so insistently overrule her skepticism. Somebody handed me a cup of red juice, which I immediately set down, because I saw that Odile had entered the room and that Sahran had scurried over to steer her through the assembly. As the chair came to a stop before me, the woman lifted her face in my direction with a happy, vague expectancy and lifted a hand an inch off the chair arm, inviting. I was aware of the crowd swiveling its attentions to encircle us, and over the cordon of shoulders, at just that moment, I noticed something about the portrait of the woman in black. Otherwise so faithful to the sibling we’d viewed in the museum, it lacked a central detail. No deranged cat lurked in the garden; no ball of yarn had been dangled across the path.
“Odile, this is Matilde Anselm,” Sahran said. “She’s a physician, from America.” I took the offered hand, which gathered to my touch and curled itself softly around my fingers. “Tilde,” Sahran said, “allow me to introduce you to my sister.”
“Enchantée,” I told her. Gently I squeezed the hand.
X
DO YOU REMEMBER. . . actually, let me rephrase that. I know that you cannot possibly have forgotten the night we were brave enough to rescue that woman by Washington Square. It may even have happened on that same trip, I think, of course it did, on our way from Penn Station in the snow. Dark so early—winter, after all—but still, it was late enough that there wasn’t anyone out in the cold, no one about on Fourth Street except the two of us. The parked car, when we passed it, looked like it had been there for days—snow on the door handles and on the windshield, a little cap of snow on the parking meter—and if the car hadn’t moved or made a noise (I can’t remember what it was exactly that drew our attention), we might not even have noticed. We were talking, our heads down, picking our way through the icy patches, and I remember we got a few yards beyond the car and stopped. You looked at me and I looked at you, and we both said, “Did you see that?” And then, the unexpressed What are we going to do about it?
For what we’d just glimpsed was one of those things you hope you never see. Through the misty side window, in the dark, their not being under a streetlight: a man beating a woman into the floorboards, holding her hair with one hand and punching her as hard as he was able. We crept back to the side of the car—it was rocking with the struggle—and even as we approached, the fist lifted and landed and landed again, the woman fallen out of her seat onto the floor, her foot in the air. You handed me your violin solemnly with both hands, like it was a Torah or an infant, and looked around and took a breath—I was so proud of you; I knew what that deep breath held—and then you banged on the window. Are you recalling this yet? How you banged so hard on the car window, and the commotion froze, and then a face came boiling up close and pink behind the glass and the window cranked down. “What’s going on?” you said, funny you, your voice a baritone I’d never heard. But the face in the window was the woman’s face; the man had crumpled.
“What!” she demanded. “What do you want?”
“Are you okay?”
“What do you want!” Shrieking.
“Is everything . . .”
“Mind your own business!” She furious; the man contorting into a tighter and tighter ball, hands covering his eyes. She shoved him aside, irritated—he’s in the way—and half crawled over him to get her head out of the window.
“Mind your own fucking business!”
“Okay, okay!”
“Fucker!”
“Sorry! Just checking.”
“Fuck off!”
Didn’t we have a laugh about that, walking on down Fourth Street! Laughing with relief that the assault had been only shadowboxing, an S & M play date, relief we hadn’t had to do any fighting ourselves. Laughing with pent-up agitation at the fear we still couldn’t shake, our emotions kicked loose by adrenaline. Laughing at the absurdness of absurdity. Permit me, sir, to carry your violin; Madam, may I help you off the curb? Fuck off, fucker. New York! You just never knew, not in New York City. Couldn’t we have laughed for years about it, about New York, and how you never knew in New York City if you were saving a life or breaking up the party. Laughed for years, if we’d had them. But instead, for years, the story has turned more worrisome, because as it turns out I have become a helper, Daniel. I’ve trained myself to be alert to signs, but it’s still not always clear to me, judging from the signs, who needs help and who doesn’t. Why couldn’t I just have told him, when I was so warmed by his interest, that I was glad to help out but not to love, told him on the long ride to l’École Islamique de Jeunes Filles of my strongest fear—not fear, conviction, persisting after all these years—that whatever I love I will cause to be slaughtered? I thought she needed saving, the girl in the car, and you thought so too until we heard her screeching that she didn’t. But I didn’t hear your silence . . . Was it actually the same night, Daniel? The very same? It was, and I didn’t know the signs. That’s all. You were silent, and I didn’t hear your call.
I left the Islamic girls’ school soon after my introduction to Odile. She was weary and wished to retire, and Sahran wheeled her back to her quarters, a neat, dorm-ish room at the far end of the first floor, ascetically furnished with a narrow bed and a dresser, a table and a lamp and a large mirror in a heavy wooden frame. (“My guests complained that I had no window,” Odile explained to me of the last item. “So now I do!”) Sahran stayed at the school to discuss necessary things with Ralu. He assigned Drôlet to drop me off, a simple parcel delivery, wherever I desired, and since I desired to not lead him back to my already violated neighborhood, I named a restaurant I liked in the Marais.
I dismissed Drôlet with honest gratitude. I was embarrassed that I’d ranted at him in Portbou; he’d been doing only what he’d been told to do, drive there, wait here. Bistro l’Urquidi was open. The maître d’ recognized me and seated me at a quiet corner table in deference to (I’m surmising here) my evident w
eariness—he was, after all, the experienced pit boss of an established Parisian bistro and could tell a rattled woman when he saw one—and I threw myself on the mercy of the kitchen and left, two hours, a steak frites and cognac later, consolidated if not entirely restored.
At least my foolhardiness had been fortified. At some point after the oysters, I pulled out the envelope that Passim had handed me that morning and reread its contents, and the arrival of the plat du soir found me staring at the words Église d’Hiver and the announcement of the evening anti-war protest at the Winter Church. I felt a mounting resolve: I must find her. It was late and I was tired, and I wasn’t sure what I might discover or even quite what I was looking for, what possible trait might differentiate this person from among the crowd of demonstrators. But it was a chance, at least, and I couldn’t think of another.
D’Hiver was something foreign to my experience, even including my limited quota of society weddings and political funerals—an overflowing church. I found it by the overflow. The crooked, one-lane street was blocked by an angry moil, faces blanched white by the glare of the pole lights set up next to the television vans. The building at the center of it all was one of those medieval pocket cathedrals that infest French back alleys, its statuary eroded away by car exhaust, its Gothic portico opening not onto a magnificent square but directly onto the street via a stubby flight of stairs. The demonstrators chanted and handed out leaflets, pumped out protest through amplified megaphones. Giant stilt puppets danced above the crowd, titans above the mortals. I pushed through resolutely, eyeballing the multitude for a glimpse of lavender sweater and wishing I’d pressed Passim harder for a better description of my quarry. Meaning: any description at all. At last, I squeezed in through the Moorish doors and succeeded—by dint of a tactical elbow and sheer boneless fluidity of form—in getting myself into the nave, all the while cursing my handbag, whose size and square corners made it surely the only item of its fashionable description anywhere in the hall and which presented a logistical nightmare.
My entrance was more glacial than grand, and by the time I found a workable vantage on the proceedings—pressed against the ancient stones at the rear of the church—the services were well under way. I have no idea what I was standing on or whom, but it was enough to loft me barely above the crowd, and I could see, when the hands and placards lowered, a distant raised presbytery as overrun as the pews, people reposing on the altar and lounging against the organ. Among them, cordoned off, was a cluster of individuals who were clearly official. They exuded the entitlement of visiting clergy. Several, the protest organizers, I supposed, were middle-aged and smartly groomed and decked out in purposeful suits, and the others were more rabbleaisian, in the official rent garment and unshorn cheek of street revolt.
One of the latter group fulminated into an intermittently working microphone to intermittent cheers—he seemed alarmingly more roused than the people he was rousing—until, with some hideous shrieks and crackles, the microphone gave up the ghost entirely. A priest raced up—of unsure denomination; he wore a western leather fringe jacket over his vestments—and there ensued a lot of fidgeting and consulting under and behind the pulpit and many incantations of Un, deux, trois, and finally the priest gave a raised-fist victory salute that was greeted with a loud and general cheer. Right had triumphed, if only over the PA system. He introduced the next speaker, and another young revolutionary stepped forward to commence his reiteration. His chosen nom de anti-guerre was Che.
I don’t know what contributed so to my reverie at this point. I can say there’s no lullaby on earth more lulling than a good antiwar rally; the form is even more comfortingly formatted than the liturgies this chapel was built for, and the breviary more orthodox. I’d attended more than my share—they became quite the rage, you know, in the years after you left to go to war—and they’d done no good, for if they’d done any good, why were we here yet again? Oh, the rallies achieved what we’d wanted them to, and stopped an evil war, I suppose, eventually, in good time. But not in time to do any good for me, or especially you, and maybe that’s where my thoughts went. They also went insistently to the opposite of all this shouting, to an intimate moment amid another (if smaller) gathering: Emil bending over the wheelchair handles to confide to his sister (as though offering her something delicious), “Another classics major.”
I’d smiled and nodded affirmingly, there among the cookies and the punch, though how my nod could possibly affirm anything to a blind woman, I didn’t know, and I was left wondering two things simultaneously: Why am I acting like an idiot? and How did he know that?
“Emil tells me you like the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont,” Odile had said, with a quick in-catch of breath that revealed how shy she was about making the opening conversational gambit.
“I’ve been,” I conceded. Evidently, she had also.
“To the island?” she asked, to which her brother conjectured, in all silliness, “Yes, to the sibyl’s temple, to receive her oracle from the virgin.”
“Emil! Don’t interrupt!” Odile reproved him. “Anyway,” she said, “sibyls aren’t virgins.” As she delivered this corrective, she reached down and caught his knee in a painful pinch, and I could see where she’d make an effective educator.
“No?” he said.
“No! Emil, that would be a Pythian temple. A Pythia is a virgin. You always want to pretend to know everything, so you need to get that right.” Then, to me, with energy: “Right?”
I can tell you with precision the state of my knowledge of Pythias, which was absolute zero, goose egg. But I know all about girl bonding and understood what was required. “Right!” I declared, with energy. And then Odile expounded, for her brother’s edification (and to flirt with me), on the essential difference between a Pythia and a sibyl. The Pythia, it seems, was the oracle of Delphi. She was always young (at least in Delphi’s early years) and never spoke for herself during her trances but channeled the voice of the god she served. A sibyl was an older prophetesses subserving no deity. Her divinations flowed straight from the well of her bitter experience and out of her own pain and madness.
“Sounds like an important distinction,” Emil admitted, but his humility was dubious and Odile laughed and would have pinched his leg again if he hadn’t yanked it away. I noticed that his jacket was open, and his tie gone altogether. I told Odile that unfortunately I hadn’t made it to the temple yet.
“Oh, you must go!” she said. “I always leave a coin when we visit. Not because it’s a tradition or anything. I just like to.”
Che wrapped up and relinquished the mike to Karl, and by the time Karl approached his peroration, I’d had my fill and couldn’t bear much more and couldn’t remember what profit I’d imagined from attending this enterprise in the first place. A myriad of humans mashed together, marinated in murk and packed in stone—what had I been thinking? I was grasping at straws in a haystack. As I began calculating the slim odds of an easy exit, the fringe priest’s voice returned to thank Karl and introduce the next speaker, an American, he said, here from “le Middle West” to express the outrage of the American people at American capitalist aggression, and he turned the hall over to “Alba.”
The placards were in full flurry so I couldn’t see the pulpit, but the name rang like a steeple bell and as soon as I heard it, I began to strategize in a different and opposite direction. Alba! With difficulty, I descended to the floor and headed east. It was ten times farther to the front of the church than to the exit, and at some point during that distance, the crowd underwent a change of state, transmuting from flood to solid, a single massive ingot of infragrant flesh. Movement was impossible, breath barely. “This will not stand!” the loudspeakers blared. “No, it will not . . .” and the words drew me on in an almost effervescent excitement—could this be her?—undimmed by the slimness of the evidence. “We offer our lives to this struggle!” the voice said. I was going on only a name, after all.
“. . . if a matter of their lives, their d
eaths, then no less for us!” The exhortations billowed like a sheet in the wind, but between the windy cheers (she had the crowd at full froth) and over my pushing and shoving (as though sound could be drowned out by exertion, but it can) I heard her harangue. “We’re not afraid, if that’s what is required of us. No, this shall not stand!”
The declarations poured direly forth, but as I powered my dreadnought purse through the impossible sea, my mind was consumed with nothing more radical than a delicate question of comportment. What would I say to her, if this was indeed her? I didn’t know. I would know when we met, maybe. Even a good first look at her would give me some clue about how best to proceed. Sitting at l’Urquidi, I’d pondered the central question: If I found her, should I tell her about Saxe’s demise? Despite all my guilt-tripping of Passim, I’d decided definitely not. Wouldn’t that halt the letters, shut down our communication right from the start? Which was the opposite of what I desired. As I pushed my way toward her, I rehearsed my concocted alternative. I would tell her that Saxe had sent me, that I was his emissary, here to convey his greetings, that he wished us to meet and to confer.