The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  Ahead, very near the exit, he spotted someone more formally attired than the tourists in their shorts, T-shirts and flopping sandals. The man wore clothes that seemed from another period, yet he bore a contemporary flippancy: small shoes, a white tie, white gloves and strange pants. The word breeches jumped to David’s mind. Though no camera hung round the man’s neck, he committed a worse cemetery faux pas. He whistled. David could make out the melody of Eleanor Rigby before the man’s features came into discernible view. He appeared about forty, with thick brown hair parted down one side and hanging below his ears. His clean-shaven face was pale and mostly nondescript, except for an aquiline nose that hung above his pursed lips. He seemed unperturbed, despite being surrounded by so much death. David took him for an eccentric professor who’d succeeded in losing his charge of undergraduates taking a European study tour. The students were probably at the entrance, wondering where to buy maps or beer.

  “Eleanor Rigby,” David said, as the man passed.

  The man stopped and looked him in the eye. David was so startled, he lost his footing and dropped backwards into a hedge. The man extended his gloved hand and pulled David upright. David felt a quick pulse of elation far stronger than when he’d regained sight of his own body. Having another person finally acknowledge his presence was priceless. This was the first direct gaze into the pupil of another person since Bombay’s wide irises, that evening on the boat. There’d been instances in the street, but those contacts had been coincidental, his face just happening to be in the trajectory of people’s distant stares.

  “Beatles,” the man said, standing half a foot shorter than David.

  “Beatles,” David echoed, not knowing quite what to say, overcome with the purest kind of joy. He felt as though he were no longer in a strange land, but had here before him, a stranger in his, a man to whom he could ask questions. Who are you? Where are you from? Someone with Baptiste’s ear but who could see him as well. David’s throat choked on vowels, his mouth so overstuffed that all that came out was a kind of pinioned squawk.

  “Anglais?” the man asked.

  David nodded.

  “As I thought. Englishman have a fondness for hedges.”

  David coughed. “No, sorry. American.”

  “Ah. Lawns then, so I’ve been told. I never made it to America, though I once considered playing a few concerts there when I was low on money.”

  David hadn’t yet let go of the man’s hand. He shook it. “David. David Ferriswheel.”

  “Really? Such a waste of time. Around and around. I would have changed my name.”

  “And you?” David asked, sorry when they disengaged their handshake.

  “Never. I have no time for such amusements. I prefer walking. And taking carriages.” The voice carried a thick French accent that wasn’t quite French.

  “I mean your name.” David heard footsteps behind them and watched the group who had been making a rubbing of a name pass by. They held a piece of paper in front of them with the faint image of a word ghostlike in the cloud of black graphite.

  “There goes another one,” the man said.

  “Chopin,” David said, reading the name.

  “Yes.”

  He turned back to the man and recognized him for the first time. “You’re Fryderyk Chopin.”

  “Yes.”

  Again, David felt overwhelmed. Here was the man he’d studied and played for years. The pianist, the composer. But Chopin was dead. Dead for over a hundred and fifty years. David felt himself half-falling toward the hedge.

  “Careful,” Chopin said, straightening him again.

  “But that means,” David began.

  “I quote,” Chopin said, “‘I did not die—I was not living either! Try to imagine, if you can imagine, me there, deprived of life and death at once.’ Dante said it best.” Chopin turned his head from the direction of the four tourists and met David’s eyes. “You know my heart’s not in it.”

  “In what?”

  “My body,” Chopin said, beginning to walk again. David followed him back to the composer’s grave. “My sister took it with her.”

  “I know,” David said. “Your heart is in Warsaw.”

  Chopin sighed. “You, too? Everyone knows. I have no stories to tell.”

  “Not everyone knows,” David said, trying to gauge whether Chopin’s exasperation was real. “When I was here earlier, a guide told us your heart was here. Not your body.”

  “That’s what the other half believes,” he said, stopping in front of the grave marker. “To leave one’s heart in Paris. It carries romance.” He turned to the side. “Look.”

  David followed his stare toward the slow movement of tourists, cameras hung around their necks. Amulets against thinking of death as anything other than a historical attraction.

  “No. Look at me,” Chopin said. “Examine this profile.” Chopin ran a finger down his forehead, tracing the shape of his nose, lips and chin. Then he pointed at the block of marble with the carved silhouette of his head. “Does that resemble me? Tell me, do I have a nose like a beak or do I have the slimmed down proboscis of the carving?”

  “Yours is bigger,” David said.

  “Yes. But that’s not the truth anymore. The truth is in stone. Or, like my heart, buried here for the sake of a better story.” Chopin straightened and looked down at his profile and at the flowers of almost artificial hues. “Little is as it appears, and what is shouldn’t always be known. I am supposed to be everything from homosexual to a ladies’ man, an introvert to one at play in social dalliance. I, a séducteur! Imagine.”

  “And you are?”

  “Like you. A man whose flesh has passed its stay.”

  “But you said we are also living. You quoted Dante.”

  “I said ‘not living.’ To quote is to always fall slightly off the mark of one’s intended meaning. Come. A walk,” Fryderyk said. He turned around and headed the way he’d entered, moving toward the exit at a fast clip.

  “Where were you going?” David asked.

  “To smell the flowers,” he said. “Out there it’s sweet but not quite right.”

  David sensed a change in the city as they reentered it. Though the streets appeared narrower, they seemed somehow more vacuous. He noticed the absence of cars. Then, with his feet, he noticed the mud. The streets were a slick landscape of water-filled depressions, puddles joined here and there by the straight lines of thin tracks. He could see no trash, no scraps of paper. In places, the mud rose to his ankles. He heard the whinny of horses and soon saw a pair emerge from around a corner, harnessed to a carriage. The horses were the color of the mud and had black leather blinds covering their eyes. Their nostrils were like cupped hands from which something had fallen. The air smelled of manure and its source lay in the street. David side-stepped what he could, watching water gather into the newly made tracks of the passing carriage.

  “Where are we?” David asked. His gait grazed a pile of manure whose heat he sensed through his feet.

  “Paris. Warsaw. Whichever you believe.” Chopin cocked his head toward an alley, then paused. “Hear it? Boots,” he said.

  David listened intently. He could the snap of a whip and in the distance, the churning hawk of a distant sale, laughter, a baby crying. But no boots.

  Chopin slapped his pants in rhythm. “Tramping. It’s the soldiers.”

  “What soldiers?”

  “Russians.” A slight cast of consternation came over Chopin’s face.

  “You see Russian soldiers? Do they chase you?”

  “No. They remain in the distance.”

  “I’ve had Vikings after me. Why do you see Russians?”

  “Oh, you don’t know this one? In 1863, long after I’d died, Russian soldiers, while burning the Zamoyski Palace in Poland, in which my sister had an apartment, destroyed my first piano and a portrait. But most importantly, the fire consumed my letters to my parents. Gone forever.” Chopin snapped his fingers.

  David imagine
d the years of letter writing—the careful shape of Chopin’s thoughts—falling from Chopin’s gloved hand like ash. When they reached a clean-swept street, Chopin paused to scrape the mud from his shoes. The mud had already begun to dry in a light gray ring around David’s ankles.

  “I knew those letters were destroyed,” David said. “I read that while researching a book on your travels. I read all the other letters that remained, though.”

  Chopin started walking again and David followed him, glad to leave the shade of the alleyway and return to streets through which his feet could feel a little warmth. He noticed, though, that the streets were all narrow, despite his expectation to come upon a broader avenue. The area around Père Lachaise seemed more labyrinthine than he remembered. They passed people now, dressed in such a way that David felt he was in one of the photographs of Paris in the first half of the 1800s, pictures he’d stared at for long hours when he was too tired to write anything about Chopin. Boys with caps too large for their heads patrolled the streets shouting the titles of chapbooks, L’art de faire les amants! Et de les conserver ensuite! Les amours de prêtres! David smiled at Chopin.

  “The love affairs of priests,” Chopin said. “The art of having lovers and keeping them. I once bought the latter, then burned it. Invaluable. Distasteful.” Chopin paused a moment and again listened intently.

  “But those Russians,” David said. “They weren’t explicitly after your letters. You still haven’t explained why they’re here.”

  “They are reminders of all that was lost, the words, the phrases that could have changed how I am remembered. You may think the soldiers are nothing to be afraid of, but they are my nightmare. A symbol of all that lessens me. My music, that continues. But I lessen,” Chopin said. He’d begun to trace his silhouette again, but stopped at the tip of his nose and pressed it slightly flat. The look in his eyes was one of being far away. “In the end, I fear being claimed.”

  “So the Vikings I see, like your Russians, destroyed something, changed something about the way I’m remembered?”

  As quickly as Chopin seemed to go into deep reflection, he shrugged indifferently. “Perhaps,” he said.

  They came to an intersection where Chopin pointed a hand in a new direction. Down one street, a crowd was being broken up by gendarmes on horseback. Women hurled potatoes from a parked cart at the police.

  “But this doesn’t make sense,” David said. “My being here with you, in Paris past. And why Vikings? I have Irish blood, a little French, a fraction of Jew. There’s no northern blood in my line. There’ve been no Scandinavian antagonists in my life.” Then he remembered that Bombay was Danish.

  “As long as they do not destroy more of the memories of you, you needn’t be worried. They can do no harm.”

  “Are you sure?” David asked. “They seem adamant about capturing me, killing me. Though,” he almost laughed, “I suppose that isn’t a real worry.”

  Chopin glanced briefly up at David. “You needn’t be too worried, yet.”

  He didn’t know how much confidence to place in Chopin’s assurances. “Would what was destroyed have changed how people view you now?” David asked.

  Chopin looked forward again. “They might have changed the stories you chose to tell in your book. I wish I could tell you what I wrote in those letters, but I am bound by the same illiteracy, though I have my suspicions. What can one say to one’s parents and sisters: love and kisses and praise and lies of better health to ease their worry. Not the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  “What’s ashes. The ink that isn’t in the ashes. The ink that is only black in one’s mind and stays there, unwritten.”

  “Like?”

  “Like lying in bed, the embers low and collapsing in dry raspy falls. The clomp, clomp, clomp of a passing horse, like nails into dry wood.” Chopin ran his hand along the stone facade as they continued down the street. “The way the bedroom walls felt in the dark on my fingers—the wood painted brightly, thank God—the years gone so quietly by, like your lover’s lover past your open doorway, where you lie. Alone.” Chopin’s hand swept through the air of an archway before continuing along the wall on the other side of the opening. “The thickness of blood on your tongue, the thickness of despair, the indolence of one’s mind during the day when, at night, it races. Hurry, hurry, hurry, it implores. A need to act which the rising sun puts out, the same way it silences countryside insects at dawn.” Chopin sighed. “And then there were the wars, the newspapers making my mind run from one position to another. Should I return to Poland and fight. Should I stay? My eyes read story after story in the papers, hoping to learn of a better position and improved news. And, of course, the passing of so many friends and their words, before my own. The finality, the loneliness, the inability to supplant the awareness of one’s impending end with anything lasting. Better to die not knowing one is captured, then—like the giraffe that died while I was out at Nohant one year—die with ruminant memories of a sky full of leaves. All that.”

  They had reached the Seine. The two of them paused before the slate flatness that rode down the center of Paris, more like a long park than a waterway. The sun felt high, noonish, and the traffic on the river was light. What vessels moved on the water were strange and bulky, steam-powered ships with ornate decorations, smaller skiffs moving quickly with men in black hats at the oars. They headed across the bridge.

  “And then,” Chopin said, turning to smile slightly at David, “the sudden cough of one’s manservant beyond the next wall, the short dry common cough that cannot be uttered by one in despair, which is a clearing of the throat and nothing more. It can be like an enrapturer’s fingers snapping a victim back into consciousness, where things cannot be as bad as they had just seemed. No, not if men can cough so insignificantly in the darkest hour of night.

  “All these things,” Chopin continued, “cannot be held in ink. They pass from the mind with a manservant’s cough. They are unutterable. What keeps us silent is not just burned words, but the unsaid ones, not wanting to bring fear into others. All we really want is for our family and friends to be happy and distracted by happiness, so that they in turn might distract us.”

  As they neared the middle of the bridge, David felt it was now his turn to say something. “You think of that all the time, now?”

  “No,” Chopin said, breathing in the breeze. “That ended around the same time melody no longer held out as the dominant volume in a song. Or perhaps earlier, when those I knew also passed on. I meet them still, here and there: Liszt, Delacroix, Sand—though I try to avoid her—and others, but it is not the same. My true friends come but rarely, they are only remembered in relation to me and are nearly mute. We speak like puppets; our relationships, once private, are fed back to us clean and unequivocal from a repository in public knowledge. We are no longer the guardians of our tongues.”

  “So we are puppets.”

  “Graceful puppets,” Chopin said, then began coughing. He put a hand on David’s shoulder as he went through an attack. David noticed drops of blood on the ground. He glanced at Chopin.

  “No, don’t worry,” Fryderyk said. “It’s what’s remembered. The tuberculosis. Funny, I survived so many people younger and stronger than I, that I believed I was immortal.” He swallowed and smiled. “You did mention the tuberculosis, didn’t you? In your book?”

  “Yes,” David admitted. He’d felt hard-pressed to find much in what he’d written that hadn’t previously been said of the composer.

  “Unfair to have never smoked and yet had my lungs fall to this. It could be worse. I could have had nothing but tics and twitches in life. I could be besmirched like others, Kafka a bug, Bonaparte with his hand forever on his gut, Van Gogh’s severed ear resting on a bed of cotton. Or worse, completely and irrecoverably forgotten. Better an ear on a bed of cotton.”

  David felt that the remembrance of who he was rested on unstable ground. He felt he had let too much go unsaid while he had been alive, too
much undone. What had he left to be remembered by?

  Chopin removed a handkerchief from a pocket and coughed into it, then folded it in diagonals and returned it to his pocket. “There is, I believe, a kind of storehouse,” he said, as they began walking again. “Music is there, and the other arts, too. And mathematics and war, I suppose. All I wrote was based upon years of learning and listening, all taken from items in the storehouse that others left, and into which I, too, left a share. This deposit keeps my name buoyant on the sea of forgetting. Those who take from the storehouse, but do not leave anything, depart more quickly. They perhaps rise anew in removed memories based on the flimsy knowledge of books or photographs. But this is only false surfacing before they disappear completely, before becoming the stoic participants in photographs which yellow and grow brittle. Those who do not even open the door to the storehouse are like birds who die in flight over the night’s ocean, their splash no louder than the collapse of whitecaps in a callous wind.”

  “You’re not helping anybody,” David said.

  “There was a cholera epidemic here in 1832,” Chopin said. “A thousand men, women and children were lost each day. And what is remembered of them? Nothing. What’s remembered is that I had to sell the ring I’d received as a boy from Czar Alexander I, the one I’d been given for playing for him. That I had to sell it in order to offset the drop in income from a good portion of my students fleeing Paris.”