The Paris Key

by Juliet Blackwell

  After a long moment he lifts his head, sniffs loudly.

  “So, you see, I should be dead, too. Where I am from, if you cheat death, you are in between life and death. A ghost.”

  “But . . . they wouldn’t have killed you, too, would they? They targeted your brother because he had worked against them, right?”

  He throws up a hand, angry. “Who knows what goes on in the heads of murderers? For years I told my brother, I convinced him: Violence was not the way. But then . . . what is the result? He is defenseless when they come after him. We were living and working in another country, and still I held his bleeding body in my arms . . . and as I did, that was when I understand. That moment, I came to understand what he had been trying to tell me: There is no such thing as a bloodless revolution. Sometimes violence is the thing left to us. It is self-defense.”

  “That isn’t true, Xabi. Violence is never the way. Surely there’s—”

  “That is the American in you speaking,” he says, cutting her off. “You have no idea what it is to live this way. Try to imagine you may not speak your language, you must adhere to another’s beliefs. To have the state kidnap and kill its citizens, to do whatever it wants with your lives. No way to react, no power at all to respond. Can you understand what it is to live like that? Like animals.”

  “But . . . hasn’t the ETA kidnapped and killed, too?”

  “That is their only defense, to use the methods of the rulers against them. I used to agree with you. I wanted only to be permitted to live my life in peace. That ended on the day they crossed the border, they came to France to kill my family. It ended on that day.”

  Angela tries to wrap her mind around all of this. How would she have felt if it had been Dave, mortally wounded and bleeding in her arms? Something like that must change a person.

  “And Thibeaux?” Angela asks. “Was he angry over something to do with all of this?”

  “Thibeaux’s story is even worse than mine. He smiles a lot, but he is just . . . He gets nervous around foreigners.”

  “I thought you were the one who didn’t like Americans.”

  “Lately I find myself changing my mind.” He gives her a gentle, sad smile.

  She looks up at him. Caresses his face, wipes the tears from his cheeks.

  “So now what? You remain exiled in Paris and make your paintings and . . . hate the Spanish government? And then what?”

  He shrugs. “For now, that is all there is.”

  Chapter Forty

  Once again, Genevieve was awakened by the shop buzzer.

  Dammit. She was making a sign and putting it up. Today.

  On the other hand . . . she supposed she could just ignore it. For now, Genevieve took a moment to splash water on her face, but the buzzer rang again. Repeatedly. She gave up and stumbled to the door.

  It was Sylviane, wearing form-fitting jeans, little brown boots, and a tiny jacket, with a floral scarf tied at her neck. She carried a huge bouquet of flowers in fall colors: orange and yellow and green.

  “Today is my free day! I go to the cemetery, bring flowers to my grandfather’s grave. Would you like to come? Americans like cemeteries, I think?”

  “Um . . . What time is it?”

  “Early. I know. Is because I am a baker, I get up very early. Is too early? Are you okay? Not sick?”

  Her gray eyes swept over Genevieve, widening ever so slightly in alarm.

  Probably Parisian women roll out of bed looking ready for a photo shoot.

  “I, um . . . I’d love to go. Come on in and just give me a few minutes to get dressed. Could we get coffee on the way?”

  “Of course. We go to Montparnasse Cemetery. You will love it, I know. This is marvelous! ‘Girls’ day out’ you say in English, right? Girls’ day out in the cemetery!”

  • • •

  The graves were raised slabs sitting above the earth, as Genevieve had once seen at a cemetery in New Orleans. Mounted on many of the marble and granite headstones were oval pictures of the deceased, along with their names and dates of birth and death, and quotes from the Bible. Most were strewn with flowers, from the fresh to old, dried stalks, along with other remembrances: framed family photos and small bottles of eau-de-vie and handmade cards covered in childish scrawl.

  Two old black-clad women hunched over interments, tending to rosemary and lavender bushes; one young man sat beside a slab, absolutely still, his hand resting on the shiny pink granite.

  “Why there are no rom-coms filmed in cemeteries?” Sylviane asked as Genevieve inspected the ornate scrollwork on an ancient crypt lock.

  “Rom-com in a cemetery?” Genevieve laughed. “I’m not sure the average American audience has such a relaxed view of death and dying.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “We don’t associate cemeteries with romance. Not normally, anyway.”

  Genevieve thought of one rare occasion when she had convinced Jason to walk with her in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery. Designed by the same man who developed New York’s Central Park, Mountain View was located on a lovely rolling hillside with some of the best views of the Bay Area, and as Jason pointed out, it seemed particularly Oakland of the locals to use a cemetery in lieu of a public park. Catching their breath after climbing a hill, they stumbled upon a couple hidden behind a monument engaged in a particularly intimate act. Both were well dressed, attractive, and grown-ups, in their thirties, at least, apparently overcome by the moment. Jason had been appalled, but there was something about the scene that appealed to Genevieve: It seemed somehow fitting that death be balanced out by life, by love. What could be more fitting? Eros and Thanatos.

  Jason had laughed and responded: “More like John and Ho.”

  Genevieve loved walking through that cemetery and noting the old-fashioned names and a few famous ones, like architect Julia Morgan, the Ghirardelli family of chocolate fame, or the famous Black Dahlia. But Mountain View didn’t hold a candle to Montparnasse, which boasted headstones that read “Baudelaire,” “Julio Cortázar,” “Porfirio Díaz,” “Samuel Beckett.”

  Sylviane said a prayer over her grandfather’s grave and placed the flowers in a little vase attached to the headstone, filling it with water from a nearby spigot. Afterward, she and Genevieve strolled the grounds, taking in the somber beauty of the graves, the poignant evidence of lost loves and lamented parents, of mourned children and missed opportunities. Ever since her mother died, Genevieve had yearned for something like this: a place to come, a physical location to go to ponder her mother’s existence. When she was young Genevieve would kneel under the sycamore tree, but somehow it wasn’t the same; it was just another corner of the farm, the air stinking slightly of manure, Genevieve’s melancholy interrupted by the ridiculous gobbling of the nearby turkeys or one exigency or another of the vegetable patch.

  Angela’s last wishes, to have no memorial but to be scattered under that sycamore tree, had to be honored, of course. But like everything else associated with death, Genevieve realized, gravesites were so much more about the living than the dead. What had Philippe said? “We carry the ghosts around with us.”

  Their boots crunched as they walked on the gravel paths between the stones. Most of the monuments were fairly plain, but a few family crypts were decorated with stained glass and Corinthian columns and graceful statuary. Sylviane showed Genevieve one of her favorite sculptures: a distraught woman sitting upon a low wall, holding her head in one hand, her hair falling down to obscure her face.

  “That looks like what grief feels like,” said Genevieve.

  “I agree,” Sylviane said, tilting her head and studying the sculpture for a long, silent moment. “But come, I show you one that looks like love.”

  It was a nude woman, sculpted of pure white marble, draped on her back over a mound.

  “Julio Ruelas was a Mexican artist who died here in Paris, too
young. Only in his thirties. He loved the music of the gypsies who camped right outside the cemetery walls, and he asked that he be buried here so he could always hear the music.”

  “Do they still play?”

  “Oh, not nearby, not anymore. They get chased away.”

  “And what’s the story of the sculpture?”

  “That?” she pushed out her chin and gave a Gallic shrug. “I think it’s a young man’s fantasy, probably. A beautiful naked woman adorning his grave? Oh! I know another one I want to show you—maybe this is the woman’s fantasy, I think.”

  Gold gilt mosaic tiles spelled out FAMILLE CHARLES PIGEON on a memorial stone; in front of this was a larger-than-life sculpture of a woman lying in bed, a man sitting at her side with an open book in his hand.

  “You see?” Sylviane said with a laugh. “A woman’s fantasy: a man reading to her while she is happy in bed! Okay, come, we have some more famous people to visit.”

  A short while later they came upon a simple cream-colored slab littered with little slips of paper and a few bright red lipstick kiss marks on the stone. Two names were inscribed on the headstone: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  “Very famous romance,” said Sylviane. “I think you must know these two?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of them. You mentioned de Beauvoir the other day. They never married, right? But were together their whole lives?”

  “Exactly. Very romantique, and I say that word in French on purpose. I think maybe it means something else in your language. They had a long relationship in writing.”

  “Through their letters? An epistolary romance, I think they call it in English.”

  “Not just letters, also through their philosophy, I think, and their scholarly writings. I don’t really know; I have never been this, a philosopher.”

  “Me neither. I mean, everyone read a little Sartre in college, but I wouldn’t know enough to speak about him. Do you know Philippe D’Artavel from the neighborhood? He mentioned he actually knew him.”

  “Really? That is not too surprising—I think Philippe must have been involved in the intellectual circles of his time.”

  “What are these little papers?”

  “Train tickets. It is tradition. Sartre supported the workers, you know, during those times. The government, she raises the rates on the Métro. This is very hard for the workers who use the train to get to work; they don’t have cars. So Sartre opposes this; he says it is unfair to the working peoples. He and a group of people, they print up . . . how do you say, faux?”

  “Faux . . . you mean fake? False?”

  “Yes, fake tickets to give out to the poor people.”

  “They printed counterfeit train tickets?”

  “Counterfeit! Yes, this is the word. So now people leave the tickets, like a tribute. We French like to strike, to shut things down. We are very dramatic.”

  “My cousin was just talking about the play called Huis Clos, by Sartre. Do you know it?”

  “A little, but I am no expert. Mostly what I know of Sartre, he says that people are condemned to be free. This is their tragedy. They are free to choose.”

  “Do you believe that? You don’t think people are forced sometimes, pushed by circumstances beyond their control?”

  “I think it came in part from his experiences in the war,” Sylviane said with a shrug. “After all, if everyone, together, had refused to cooperate, the atrocities wouldn’t have happened. We were free to be collaborateurs with the Nazis. And some were. Many, actually.”

  Genevieve didn’t know what to say. Wondering, as she had when she was with Philippe, how brave she would have been in the same situation. She steered the conversation back to safer terrain. “So you’re a fan of Simone de Beauvoir?”

  “Mais oui, of course. She was very amazing for her time, I think. Very early, smart feminist. She said that women define themselves through their men, because it is easier than to embrace their freedom and enter the world. They are born a person, but become a woman, in relation to a man.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  “For her time, maybe it was revolutionary thought. I think things have changed. I hope they have changed,” Sylviane said, running her hand along a little filigreed iron fence encircling a slab decorated with a weeping angel. “Still, it was a great love affair she had with Jean-Paul. Very famous . . . She said their love was essential, not contingent. But I think maybe what that means was they could have other lovers. What do you think of this? I like it better in the movies. I could never let a man I love be with someone else, could you?”

  Genevieve reflected on the moment she found out about Jason and Quiana. It was completely unintentional; she had known things weren’t perfect in their marriage, but frankly she had been too wrapped up in her own mind to think about it. She had been working a lot, logging plenty of hours; as a freelancer she had to take the work when it came. She’d also been putting in time with her volunteer organization, culminating in a big work weekend. And Jason had been busy with a new account down in San Jose. So if they hadn’t been particularly close, she put it down to being busy, to the day-in, day-out running around that constituted modern life.

  One night Genevieve sat down to Jason’s computer, since it was powered up and sitting on the kitchen table, meaning to log in to her e-mail account. But his was already open.

  There were messages—dozens of messages—from the same woman. A woman she vaguely remembered meeting at one of the interminable, several-course dinners they’d hosted with a circle of “friends” who were so much more Jason’s than hers. As she noted the unusual name she remembered: thin, blond, stylish; that lean-and-hungry look. While pouring before-dinner cocktails she remembered thinking: They look good together, Jason and Quiana.

  She’d actually thought that.

  Genevieve didn’t read the text of the messages. At least she had spared herself that indignity. But the subjects were clear enough: re re re last night. Your hands. The heat of your lips on mine.

  Shock washed over her: cold, then hot.

  Really? Was this it? Were she and Jason just one more statistic now? One of nearly half the marriages that don’t work out? Was it that simple?

  They had first met while working as volunteers at the food bank—trying to fill mesh bags with carrots was no mean feat, and they had laughed while they attempted different techniques. He was in graduate school at the time, and she found him grounded and passionate, upbeat and fun, even while talking about things like bringing social justice to the computer world. But over the years the spark in his eyes faded (it seemed to Genevieve) in direct proportion to the money he made. Weekends spent volunteering at the food bank ceded to dining in the hot new foodie restaurants, collecting expensive California wines, being seen in the newest locales.

  In contrast to Jason’s, Genevieve’s income was steady but didn’t grow much. She had fallen into copyediting while wondering whether to go to graduate school to “learn a useful skill” or try to come up with something else. As a self-employed person, she received no bonuses or even paid vacation days; it wasn’t as if there was a corporate ladder to climb. The advantage to working for herself, of course, was the freedom to set her own schedule: she volunteered a little, but mostly she used her time to wander through Oakland’s Chinatown or walk around Lake Merritt or hike through the redwoods. Nosing through thrift stores and salvage yards for old locks and keys. Passing time.

  Jason started to harass her—in that teasing, husbandly way that made it hard to pin down—saying that all those hours she spent on volunteering and walking could have been put to better use. But when she wasn’t working or walking or fixing locks, her life took on a dreamy, watercolor nature.

  Among so many other things, she didn’t want to think about why she refused to talk with Jason (or even herself) about having children. The thing was, Genevieve realized
as she took in the significance of the e-mails, she did want children. She always had, in a nebulous, maybe later kind of way. But the moment the knowledge of Jason’s infidelity washed over her, Genevieve made an even deeper realization: She didn’t want Jason’s children. She didn’t want Jason at all.

  She felt shocked, a sick sensation deep in her stomach; she had sucked in great gulps of air and blew out several hard breaths to slow her pounding heart, her fluttering belly. But ultimately, she had to admit the truth: The knowledge of Jason’s infidelity didn’t make her want to fight for him; instead, it made her think of flight. Of freedom. Suddenly she wanted to escape from the trap of their marriage with the fervor of an animal willing to chew off her own limbs.

  She had wanted out.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Sylviane handed Genevieve her phone to take her picture and mounted the steps of an ornate crypt to pose. Then she beckoned for Genevieve to come up and join her.

  “Come, we take a selfie, you call it, is that right? Of both of us! Beautiful women in cemetery!”

  They laughed and took a few more shots before ambling back toward the entry gates of the cemetery.

  “Thank you for bringing me here, Sylviane.”

  “You are welcome. This is a good cemetery. The other really good one is Père-Lachaise. That one has Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. And the one in Montmartre has Degas.”

  “Your cemeteries are like a list of who’s who.”

  They walked past a large memorial to the airmen of World War II.

  “Could I ask you something?” Genevieve asked. “Have you ever heard anything about Philippe D’Artavel’s involvement in the Algerian War?”

  “I think he did not support the war. It was very controversial. Many of the people of his generation, they see this sort of thing as a treason. But me, my age, it is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “The great war, you know, with the Nazis, it is still very real to the ones who lived through it. Of course, this is natural. They were here, some of them starved, they were abused, their neighbors were taken away. Have you seen the signs, about the deported people?”