— I see two dogs fighting in the street, and after a moment it makes me think of not being. I think of the tragedy of their fight, then wider, the peacefulness of this tree-lined—or is it Vespa-lined?—street, then wider still, the violence of this world, then the calm of the planet seen from afar, then the violence of these boiling galaxies. I step backward on that gangplank and begin to put down my foot, but let it hover as long as I can, unsure what lies behind what is. Remember me awhile longer.
— This is the scooping out. This is the emptying. This is the vanishing act without the return. This is the thought we are adept at not holding, that is pointless to think, though it is home. This is the thought that bears the fruit named distraction, distraction being almost all we come to know of life. I see now that all attainments are rich distractions. Love or complacency, malice or the feel of wet grass.
— Every hour, the sun bleaches me, knocks out the wind from a form of wind. What keeps this vagabond of words is merely the words themselves. I am reduced to this. I feel memories loosen and rise away. I feel the sun closing in. I feel myself to be at the periphery of a dream in the waking mind of a Hindu god. Upon awakening, what world will rush in to flood me out?
— Did I not love you? Did you not love me?
— We are headed across a bridge, though it seems too short for this river. Chopin looks at me. He says, “How dismal it must be to die anywhere else except where one has lived!” But you know his words. They aren’t to me; they’re from one of his letters you’ve read amid my notes. His words and my feelings blend now so that what he proceeds to say, I say, too. He says: “I can’t write what I want to say, only a thousand futile things.” And, “I can’t see anymore. It is snowing, and getting dark.” I see the snow, now. Huge white flakes with the texture of words. Then ash.
— One moment I am content to fall away, the next I want so badly to survive. I wish you would remember me every time you see a ferris wheel, every time you see a bridge from afar, and especially when you cross one. That if nothing else, my name will come to mind, vaguely at first, not even as a person but more like a sense that there is something lying behind the visual perception of a bridge, some memory, some thought which may then open enough to let me in and masquerade my presence for a few brief seconds of life.
— Where is the paper upon which to write, and what am I to put there? Again, I am at the periphery of a dream in the waking mind of some Hindu god. What world will rush in to flood me out?
— This is how it happens. First one eye will open. Then the other. This universe does not remember its dreams.
— You loved me. I loved you.
Pop pop pop.
“What’s that?” Jade asked.
Bianca looked toward the amphitheater. The world was wet, glassy. “Waking,” she said, feeling then one of the stabs that had kept her following the mystery of David’s death these weeks. Here, in Baptiste’s hand, were not her husband’s words, but her own. I loved you. Her greatest fear was that he had perhaps died not knowing just how much.
She understood now that David’s voice remained because she had loved him, because he had loved her too, because she carried so much of him in her heart that it was too hard to let him go all at once, and because there were others who felt love, friendship, guilt. She perhaps loved him more now than at any time when he’d been alive, when she at times questioned the reciprocity of her love for him. Her love survived even into this present world of fear, pain, accident, and death. Love had made roots here among these base emotions. But it was so hard to continue loving him, now, though there was a permanent place in her heart for him. Keeping David in her thoughts made her feel so weak. The stars flickered.
“Let’s go inside,” she said to Jade. “Let’s get out from under this sky.”
A week later, in the city of Avignon, south of Orange, Bianca read the French portions of Baptiste’s journal, detailing how he was coping with the voice, what explanations he had come up with, seeming convinced he was being punished for past wrongs. She hadn’t had the stomach to read it since Gaudin and Regi had been killed. Tomorrow she and Jade would leave France. There was little left to do.
She spent the day with Jade, Chase, and his friend Luc, drinking coffee and walking around the gardens of the papal palace, speaking of blossoms as though they were as important as gems. They left her on a bench as they went off to find bread for the swans. She opened her bag. Inside, she carried the last page of Baptiste’s letter, though it wasn’t in Baptiste’s voice. Nor David’s. She read it slowly, the French burdening her and making her take even the lightest words with great weight.
— If you will permit me, Monsieur, I would be indebted on behalf of another. And as it is you, Baptiste, who are writing this down, I need not use only the words I know how to spell. Where were you one-hundred and fifty years ago?
— David and I walked about Avignon at night, when you slept, when the world sleeps. He grew so faint he needed my hand to stumble forward. With the sun, he returned, but simplified. Even his appearance seemed to change, to be reduced to features which, at a glance, could be memorized in an instant. His skin smoother, his hair of a more uniform color; and his mannerisms exaggerated. He seems simplified.
— The Vikings had sailed up from the Mediterranean and called to him from the Rhône. They laughed, cajoled each other. David said he was unafraid. And that it was snowing.
— We walked together to the end of the half-bridge, the Pont Saint-Bénézet, where I took his hand. “You are lived and felt by others,” I said. “Therefore you are unhappily happy. I understand you. I enter your mood. Let us embrace each other for there is nothing more to say.” He held me a moment before climbing to the edge of this bridge that ends in the middle of the Rhône. He removed his clothes and stood with his back to the opposite shore. His face bore a resigned smile, the contentment of having nothing. As the Vikings pulled closer, their oars held straight into the air, David turned to face the opposite shore. And at the last cutwater, where the Rhône sloshes by like a lazy waltz, he jumped, entered the water, and did not rise. The Vikings plumbed the water until dark, then sailed toward the sea.
“Are we near the bridge?” Bianca asked, when Luc returned. Behind him she could see Jade pushing Chase’s wheelchair, his bandaged leg and arm as bright as daisies in the sun.
“Promise you’ll come soon?” she heard Jade ask.
“Next month,” Chase replied.
“Can we visit the bridge from here?” Bianca asked again.
“It’s five minutes away,” Luc said. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yes.”
When they reached the Saint-Bénézet bridge, Bianca walked more slowly. She’d been shifting the bag from shoulder to shoulder all day and it felt heavier now than ever. The air was fragrant and humid. She could see the shore at the opposite edge of the Rhône, and the bridge making its way there, but failing to span the river completely. When she and Luc reached the end of the bridge, she leaned over the edge at the opaque mid-river water. It was slow, thick and warm-looking. Fish darted near the surface, feeding. A group of youths was sunbathing on the near bank.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Bianca asked.
“I don’t think I should,” Luc said. “Doesn’t look good on my c.v.”
Bianca thought she knew what he meant. Since David’s death, she’d been clinging to any word that sounded like his. But the pages she carried in her purse, scribbled in Baptiste’s hand, were not how she wanted to remember him. They were a ghost of grief and longing. They had begun to metastasize her vulnerable memories of him. What had gone unsaid with David wasn’t important anymore. The true things were what he had whispered in her ears at night, the smile on his face, the words he had written down with his own hand when he was alive.
She reached into her bag and took out her copies of Baptiste’s journal—even the napkin with the line they’d found on David’s body—and dropped them from the end of the half-bridge. She watch
ed them fall to the water in slow semi-circles, like carrion birds. Then, from her bag, she pulled out the cardboard box marked ferrisheel, and opened the plastic bag within. She let the white ashes fall, shook the bag clean. She smelled perfume, then nothing. Someone took the bag and box from her hands.
When she looked up, she saw the opposite bank, the copse of trees reaching roots down to the water’s edge. There, thick river grass grew that could hide a man. She wanted so much to reach that shore, but knew she would never get closer than she was at this moment. Not now, and not ever.
“Okay?” Luc asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
That evening, at a cafe around the corner from their hotel, she laughed for the first time in many weeks. Luc was passing around a newspaper. Chase looked at the photo and passed it around.
“So, between us, Baptiste finds out about his niece, leaves the clinic, steals a van, breaks into Wrest’s farmhouse, ties him up and puts him in the back of a rented van.”
“No,” Jade said, incredulously.
“Yes,” Luc said.
“I get this call around three in the morning to go to the Pont Alexandre bridge.” Luc stroked his chin.
“And?” Bianca asked.
“He’s great with the pauses,” Chase said.
“And,” Luc continued, “I get dressed and take my car out to the bridge. Nothing. A couple of other cars driving across, but I don’t see Baptiste anywhere.”
“Is this where the photo was taken?” Jade asked, holding the newspaper up to the candlelight.
Luc nodded. “I’m walking across the bridge and I see something off to the side. I stop the car and get out because there’s Wrest, dressed in nothing but his shorts, tied to a lamp post.”
Bianca held the photo. Wrest wore a handkerchief in his mouth, his feet and hands bound together.
“What did you do?” Bianca asked.
“I did what anyone would do,” Luc said. “I called the police. And the paper. And a certain photographer.”
Chase smiled.
“It’s too obscene,” Jade said.
“Isn’t it?” Chase said, laughing.
For Bianca, seeing Wrest this way was delicious.
“Can I keep this,” she asked.
“Of course. I’ve got dozens of photos, too,” Chase said.
“I’ll bring it when I come up,” Jade said.
Bianca squeezed Jade’s shoulder. “Okay. I’m going to do some packing,” she said, rising. She said goodnight and entered the hotel. Through the window of her room she could hear Jade. “Start over from when you first got the phone call,” Jade said.
Bianca turned on the lights to her room. Across the street, someone was patiently learning a Chopin Nocturne. She set out what she’d wear tomorrow, then folded the remaining clothes and placed them in the open suitcase. She debated where to pack David’s notes and began paging through them briefly, spotting quotes here and there from Chopin’s letters. Some of the quotes she recognized from the pages of Baptiste’s writing she had thrown in the Rhône. In the margin of a wine-stained page from early in their trip David had written I love you. Beneath it he recognized her own hand. I love you, too. Bianca gathered up the notes and, with the exception of David’s book on Chopin, put all his writing into her suitcase.
The thought struck her that, after tonight, her next bed would be the one at home. She took off her shoes, placed them aside and climbed into the bed. It was huge. She could stretch her legs in any direction. The tidied room felt equally large, the sky outside the window so open one could mistake spaciousness for emptiness. And yet be equally right. She reached to the nightstand and turned to the final pages of David’s book to read her husband’s account of Chopin’s last journey.
Ludwika Jedrzejewicz tried to keep herself steady in the jostling of the carriage. She had already traveled five days from Paris and would be back in Poland before too many more. In her lap she cradled a glass jar filled with alcohol which she kept wrapped in a long scarf. Delacroix had given it to her after he had helped bear the casket. In the alcohol floated the heart of her brother, Fryderyk Chopin.
The evening before, when the carriage and its passengers had stopped to spend the night at an inn, Ludwika had entered the solitude of her room and carefully unwrapped the scarf from around the glass jar. The bumping of the day’s journey had clouded the alcohol, making Fryderyk’s heart difficult to discern. When she held a candle behind the jar, almost no light passed through, the rays instead sneaking into the skin of the glass and moving around the column of alcohol, like water around a stone.
Ludwika undressed, then took a sponge bath, massaging the soreness of travel from her thighs. She dressed for bed imagining her husband in Poland, who she hadn’t held for the longest time. Under the covers, she intertwined her fingers. Praying was skeletal and quick now, without the need to spend time interceding for her brother’s health.
She rose in the morning to discover that the contents of the clouded jar had settled. The alcohol was only a faint color, like jasmine tea. The temperature had done it, perhaps, or a night of relief from the horses’ gait. The solitude. The thousands of mourners who had been at the Madeleine weren’t here. The air was still, no orchestra playing her brother’s own funeral march. Only herself, her brother’s heart, and a large fly sunning on the window. Holding the jar tightly between her legs, she unsealed the top with both hands. She held her breath, reached down, and delicately touched her younger brother’s heart with a single finger. The heart sank, touched the bottom of the jar, rocked slightly and stayed there. She stared at the damp tip of her finger and watched the alcohol evaporate until it was but a patch on her fingertip, which she kissed. She felt the leaving there, on her lips, and was devastated anew.
Because of his fear of being buried alive, Fryderyk had stipulated in his will that his body be opened when he died. The body, without his heart, had been buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris earlier that week. Ludwika had visited the cemetery once before when she’d accompanied her brother to lay flowers on the grave of their friend Jás. To think of her brother there now, no longer a visitor but a resident, made her feel old. The years in which Fryderyk had lived seemed as brief as a cold spring. It seemed right, though, to take his heart back to his homeland. His friends in Poland had given Fryderyk a goblet of Polish earth when he left for France at the age of twenty-two. Now, his friends in Paris were returning her with equal weight. Dead, yet how fertile those thirty-nine years had been, she reminded herself.
During the next few days of journeying, Mozart’s Requiem played over and over in her mind. Fryderyk loved the piece so much, he sometimes carried a pocket edition of the score in his coat. Before passing away, he had requested the Requiem be played at his ceremony. Eventually—away from the illustrious crowd of mourners, alone and headed back to Poland—the Requiem was replaced in her mind by her brother’s own compositions. She pulled one of his Mazurkas from beside her, a hand-written score he had sent her before it was published, and which, like his Mozart’s Requiem, she brought with her on long travels. It was as essential a travel item as a pocket mirror or a clean pair of gloves.
With the Mazurka playing in her head, she remembered the piano duets they’d played when they were both young. Scenes came to her with the freshness of a day-old incident, though decades had passed. The manner in which Fryderyk sat and swung one leg. The brightness in his face when they executed a piece with perfection. She remembered one particular summer when they visited a friend in the country. The adults carried a piano outside and young Fryderyk improvised for them under an ancient tree with leaves so thick only the most aggressive beams of sunlight filtered through to the ground. Everyone sat in chairs that had been brought from the house. They ate cakes with cream filling and refilled their tea cups from a samovar propped level with stones. And they listened. (Years later, the snippets Fryderyk played would fall heavy with fruition into music engravers’ hands.) Ludwika remembered watc
hing her brother at dusk from inside their friend’s house. He had remained outside, alone under the enormous tree that now sheltered him from the cold flicker of stars. Her ears heard small runs of melody that he played with the pedal pressed, holding off the felt dampers from the strings. She watched him place his ear to the piano and listen to the sound, listening, listening, long after the notes had lost the strength to reach her and had dived silently into the grass. Fryderyk seemed to be letting the night sounds vibrate in the strings: the breeze, the crickets, the swooping bats. She remembered carrying a lamp out to him and how happy he seemed, even before seeing her, how full of life he was, as though what the fortune teller would tell him years later at a Parisian séance would be true: “You will live a long life.”
When Ludwika reached Poland days later, a group of Russian soldiers stopped the carriage just inside the border. Were it not for the occupying soldiers, she wouldn’t have known she had returned to Poland. The same trees grew on both sides of the border. The soldiers peered into the carriage, their breaths creating meaty-smelling vapor in the cold carriage. They checked Ludwika’s papers and the papers of the carriage’s other travelers. The doctor who had sat beside her since Germany had to show the soldiers his case of medical equipment. One of the soldiers picked up a scalpel, ran his finger safely across it, and whistled. The soldier lifted his shirt enough to show a poorly healed scar. The doctor reached out his hand to touch it, but the soldier only laughed and shoved back the medical case. The young lawyer and his new wife who sat across from Ludwika stared grimly out the window as their papers were examined. Ludwika pressed herself into the shadows of the carriage to hide her age, clutching the jar against her breast like a swaddled infant. Even when the carriage moved again and there were no soldiers apparent to remind her Poland wasn’t free, even when the light flickered low between the trees, she held the jar with her brother’s heart against her own heart, like a suckling newborn not yet near sleep, against a breast never too old to dry up.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 30