Marchais went out onto the terrace and waved them over.
“Venez, venez, there will be enough cake for everyone. Excuse me, but I must sit down. I’m still a bit shaky on my legs. I’m sure Rosalie has told you about my unlucky accident.” With a sigh of relief, Marchais sat down in one of the wicker chairs, propping his crutches against the table.
Hesitantly, they followed him. Robert looked challengingly at Rosalie, but she just shrugged her shoulders and hissed something at him that was probably meant to be “soon!”
“So: you’re Robert. Are you American?” asked Marchais guilelessly after he and Rosalie had also sat down. He looked toward Robert, who was sitting opposite him, and Robert had to admit that the tall bearded man—though at the moment looking a little helpless—had at first glance something about him that encouraged you to trust him.
Uncertain, he looked quickly over at Rosalie, who was sitting between him and Marchais and wasn’t saying anything. It looked as if he was going to have to do the talking after all.
“Yes, that’s right,” he answered firmly. “I’m Robert. Robert Sherman.” Good grief, he sounded like some kind of imitation James Bond. He watched Marchais attentively: his face showed no visible reaction. “I think Rosalie has already mentioned me to you.” From the corner of his eye he saw Rosalie, who had just picked up the silver coffeepot to pour the coffee for them all, involuntarily freeze.
“Sherman?” The old man shook his head. He obviously didn’t remember. He took his cup and raised it to his lips. And then he suddenly put it down, as if he’d choked. “Sherman—you are Sherman?” he repeated, and a deep furrow of anger appeared between his silver-gray eyebrows. “You are the impertinent American who accuses me of plagiarism and wants to sue me?” He sat up in his wicker chair and looked at Rosalie in annoyance. “I don’t understand.… What does this mean, Rosalie? Why have you brought this madman to my house? Are you trying to insult me?”
“Hold on a moment! No one here is mad, Monsieur Marchais. I certainly am not,” interrupted Robert. “We just have a couple of questions for you. And anyway, I have the original manus—ouch!” With a pained expression Robert reached for his left shin, which had just been given a violent kick under the table.
Marchais looked in confusion from one to the other as Robert rubbed his sore leg and Rosalie turned fiery red.
“I can explain everything,” she said.
Marchais stared at her incredulously. “Are you going to tell me that you’ve taken up with this guy?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“No … yes.” The color of Rosalie’s face changed astonishingly quickly. “It’s not what it looks like,” she said cryptically.
“So what is it then?” asked Marchais.
As if to gather strength for the long explanation that was to follow, Rosalie hastily took a large gulp of her café crème. Then she put her pretty cup with its fine flowered pattern firmly down on her saucer.
“Monsieur Sherman’s manner may occasionally be a bit presumptuous—but he is definitely not mad,” she began. “He’s simply looking for the truth, because the story of the blue tiger connects with him in a very … well … personal way.” She cleared her throat. “And as far as this whole story is concerned, we have come across some … um … more than puzzling factors.”
“We? Are you now in cahoots with this ignorant American to collect evidence against me?” Outraged, Max Marchais took a deep breath, looking contemptuously at Robert.
This guy Marchais can be really arrogant, thought Robert. Typical Frenchman. They always think they’re better than everyone else. God knows why. He found it hard not to intervene, but Rosalie gave him a pleading look.
“So do you also now doubt that I wrote the story?” Marchais laughed in disappointment.
She shook her head. “Not at all. I am even absolutely certain that you wrote it.” She nodded in the direction of the library. “On the old Remington that’s there on the cabinet, wasn’t it?”
Marchais narrowed his eyes and frowned. You could see the whole business working on him. Finally he looked at Rosalie with a displeased expression.
“So that was you! You typed that text on my machine? I don’t understand what this is all about. What sort of stupid game are you playing with me? I’d like an explanation. At once!” He slammed the table with the flat of his hand.
They’d thought of everything as they so hurriedly left Marchais’s house, fleeing Madame Bonnier—but they’d forgotten that sheet of paper, thought Robert. Marchais must have been quite surprised to find it.
“I have to confess something to you, Max,” said Rosalie. “That day when I brought you your things in hospital I came back here later, because I’d found something that I had to show to Robert. We were in your house, Max. We got in through the terrace door.”
And then she told him—not in strictly chronological order—about the events of the past three weeks.
How Robert, after his first appearance in her store, had come back once again. How he had told her about his mother and the fact that she had told him the story of the blue tiger every night when he was a child. About the typewritten manuscript he had in his possession. About the box that had fallen off the wardrobe, and how she’d found the carbon copy. How she’d suddenly realized that the dedication could not have been for her, Rosalie (at this point Marchais blushed a little); how she’d called Robert and they had later compared the two manuscripts in the library. That they were completely identical, and that they’d then had the idea about the typewriter. “And that’s how we established that the story had been written on the old Remington.”
Rosalie nodded to Robert, and he took the two manuscripts out of his bag and put them beside each other on the table. Then they both looked at Marchais, who was sitting intently in his wicker chair and had grown ever more silent.
“Why didn’t you say that this story had been written many years ago? Why did you let me believe that the dedication was for me, Max? It took a while, but when Robert finally told me his mother’s name, I understood at last whom the story was actually meant for.”
Marchais stared fixedly at the two manuscripts without answering. Then he turned to Robert.
“And what is your mother’s name, may I ask?” His voice sounded fragile.
“Ruth,” he replied. “My mother’s name was Ruth. Ruth Sherman, née Trudeau. And I found the original manuscript among the papers she left me.”
“Among the papers … she left you?” The old man was clearly taken aback. “Does that mean she’s no longer alive?”
Robert nodded, once more feeling the tightness of the throat that still affected him when he talked about his mother’s death. “She died earlier this year. At the beginning of May. A few days after my thirty-eighth birthday. She had cancer. It all happened so quickly.” He gulped and smiled sadly. “As things do in life. She’d always wanted to come back to Paris with me. To the Eiffel Tower. I was there with her once, you know, as a little boy. And then all of a sudden it was too late.”
Marchais turned pale. He was silent for a while and his gaze went blank. His eyes, which in the sunlight suddenly seemed almost glassy, were focused on a point that seemed to lie far off in the depths of the garden. Beyond the hydrangea bushes, beyond the old stone wall, beyond the little town of Le Vésinet, and perhaps even farther away. Infinitely far away.
“Ruth,” he repeated then. “Ruth Trudeau.”
He held his bent index finger to his lips and nodded several times.
Robert felt his heart beginning to beat faster.
“So you knew her?” Rosalie asked cautiously. “We’ve been wondering the whole time how it could be that Robert’s mother never mentioned you, and yet the story of the blue tiger was so important to her. How did she come to have the story? What happened back then, Max?”
Marchais didn’t answer.
For a few minutes they sat round the circular table without speaking—the golden-yellow tarte tatin remained untouched.
It was as if time had stood still.
When Max Marchais cleared his throat, they looked up.
“They say,” he began, “that every episode of our lives, no matter how small, contains everything—what we have left behind us and what lies before us. So if you ask me what happened back then, I can tell you: Everything. And … nothing.”
He looked into Robert’s eyes, which began to waver. “Yes, I knew your mother. Loved her, even. But it was only later that I realized how much.” He reached for his coffee cup, his big liver-spotted hand shaking unmistakably. “I had a bad feeling straight away when I brought the blue tiger back to life. But please believe me when I say that the story means a great deal to me as well. It could be that it was a big mistake to let it out of its old box. But perhaps it was the best idea of my life. Because otherwise you two wouldn’t be sitting here, would you?”
Marchais seemed to have regained control of himself. He looked warmly at Rosalie, and then fixed his gaze on Robert.
“Ruth’s son,” he said with a shake of the head. “I never thought I’d ever hear anything about Ruth Trudeau again. And now I’m meeting her son, who found The Blue Tiger in Paris purely by chance and is insisting on his rights to it.” He smiled. “In one respect you are actually right, Robert: it is not in fact my story.”
Robert and Rosalie looked at each other in astonishment.
“To be precise, I should never have published it. Back then in Paris, I gave it to a young woman as a gift—to your mother. That was a long time ago, and yet sometimes it seems to me as if it were only yesterday.”
Twenty-seven
That afternoon Max Marchais took a trip through time. It led him back to Paris in the seventies. To a young man who hung around in the cafés, smoked too many cigarettes, and earned his living as a freelance editor for a daily paper. And to a young American woman with blond hair and sparkling green eyes who had been sent to Paris for the summer vacation by her parents and who had a hopeless sense of direction.
Max himself was surprised by the onslaught of images that flooded his retinas. He was so caught up in his own story that he hardly noticed the looks of the two young people, who were listening to him spellbound.
“I got to know Ruth because she’d gotten lost,” he said. “I was sitting in a café not far from the rue Augereau, where I was living at the time in a two-room apartment on the fourth floor. It was really quite small compared with this splendid villa”—he raised his hand and indicated the house behind him with a smile—“but my goodness, what parties we had there. I often had friends there, and sometimes a girl, and when you woke up in the morning and looked out of the window, the first thing you saw was the Eiffel Tower looming in the sky a couple of streets away. That’s something I never had later on—that magnificent view.” He leaned back, lost in thought. “Sorry, I’m getting carried away—if you start to conjure up the past, all these memories flood back.…”
“You were just about to tell us how you met my mother, Monsieur Marchais,” said Robert.
“That’s right.” Once more he could see Ruth as she walked along the street so charmingly in her red dress. “It was on a hot summer day that I first saw your mother. She was wearing a red dress with little white polka dots. She had a guidebook in her hand, stopped every few steps, turned the map in the book in every possible direction, and was looking out for street signs. When she passed the café for the third time, I got up and asked her if I could help in any way. She sighed with relief and looked at me with her green eyes, which were slightly aslant like those of a cat, and gave her delicate, heart-shaped face something really special. ‘I think I’m totally lost,’ she said and laughed. Her laugh was … wonderful. So optimistic and full of life that it conquered me immediately. ‘I want to see the Eiffel Tower—it’s somewhere in this direction, isn’t it?’
“She looked at the guidebook once more, then pointed in completely the wrong direction. ‘No, mademoiselle, you need to go the other way. It’s really not far from here,’ I replied. Then I clapped my book shut. ‘Do you know what? I’ll show you the way, otherwise you may never get there at all.’”
Max smiled. “That’s how it all began. Over the next four weeks I accompanied Ruth on her walks through the streets of Paris whenever I could. I showed her the city, and all the art museums.” He shook his head with a smile. “Mon Dieu, I don’t remember ever meeting anyone who was so obsessed with museums. By the end I’d seen museums that I didn’t even know existed in my own city. Ruth loved pictures. Most of all she was taken by the Impressionists. Monet, Manet, Bonnard, Cézanne. We often went to the Jeu de Paume, where all those pictures were in those days. She could sit for hours in front of a painting, looking at it without saying a word. Then she’d turn her head and look at you with a smile. ‘Absolutely beautiful, isn’t it?’ she would say. ‘What a joy it must be to create something like that!’ And I would nod, and think how happy it made me just to sit beside her, and occasionally stroke her arm or take her hand as if by accident, and breathe in the smell of her.” He turned to Robert and Rosalie. “I don’t know if it was a particular perfume, but she always smelled of mirabelles. Can you imagine it? Like mirabelle jelly. It was indescribable, kind of bewitching. After that I never met another girl who smelled of mirabelles.” He sighed. “Tempi passati. So many things are irretrievable. That’s why memories are so precious.” He felt his throat becoming dry, and coughed. “It was a tender little romance that resulted in a couple of kisses, and yet it was all so much more intense than many things I experienced later. What great joy I felt as I looked into her lovely face or walked hand in hand with her on the weekend through the parc de Bagatelle, which she preferred to all the other parks in Paris.”
Rosalie cast a meaningful glance at Robert, and the question of what the relationship was between these two young people passed fleetingly through his mind.
“You may find it difficult to believe nowadays, but it even made me happy to sit in a café just waiting for her.” Then he suddenly noticed the untouched plates in front of them. “But please take a piece of the apple tart. I’m a very bad host.”
Rosalie divided up the tarte tatin and served it on the plates. They tried the tart, with its slices of caramelized apple sitting smooth and gleaming on the puff pastry, while Max himself cut up his piece with a silver fork and then put it distractedly aside without eating any of it.
“Isn’t it strange that you can sometimes experience such great happiness even when you know that the thing has no future?” he said thoughtfully. He looked over at Robert, who was excitedly shoving the last piece of his cake into his mouth. “Yes, no future. Because the love between your mother and me was an impossible love. It was limited to a few weeks, and we both knew it. From the very beginning. Even on that first day when I went to the Eiffel Tower with Ruth and afterward asked her if she’d drink a glass of wine with me, she told me that she had a fiancé waiting for her in America. Clearly a really nice man, likable, from a good family, a successful lawyer who would do anything for her. And that they were going to be married at the end of the summer. ‘I’m afraid I’m already taken,’ she said with a laugh. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’ ‘But now you’re here in Paris,’ I said, thrusting the thought of some fiancé on the other side of the Atlantic as far from my consciousness as possible. We knew that it would have to end sometime. And in spite of that I still held her hand, and still said, ‘Give me a kiss,’ as we took an evening trip in a bateau mouche along the Seine, with the Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky, so close you felt you could put your arms around it.” He sighed happily. “And in spite of all that she did kiss me and we fell in love and enjoyed the moment as if it would never end.”
“But then it did end,” said Robert.
Max fell silent, remembering how Ruth had traveled to the airport by taxi in the pouring rain. She hadn’t wanted him to go with her.
“I’ve always said that I have to come back,” she had said on the morning she left, standing in
front of him, her face pale.
“I know.” His heart had clenched as if it had had icy water poured over it.
She chewed her lower lip, hardly able to bear his silence.
“We could write to each other now and again,” she said, looking him beseechingly in the eye. Don’t make it so hard for us was what her expression seemed to say.
“Yes, of course, okay,” he’d answered, and they’d forced themselves to smile—though they both knew there would be no letters.
It was an infinitely sad moment. In the end she had stroked his cheek tenderly and looked at him for the last time. “I’ll never forget you, mon petit tigre,” she said. “I promise.” And then she left, closing the door quietly after her.
Max smiled wistfully, and then noticed that Robert was looking at him because he still hadn’t answered.
“Yes, the moment ended,” he said simply. “Ruth vanished from my life just as she had entered it—with enchanting ease, and I was left with the two saddest words I’ve ever known: never again. I let her go, because I was not aware of the magnitude of what I was losing. Because I imagined that nothing could be changed. I was still young back then, I didn’t know much. I thought it was hopeless. Perhaps I should have fought for her. Of course I should. It’s only when something is irretrievably lost that you come to realize what it meant to you.”
Robert nodded and then said, “Then she married Paul, my father. And she never contacted you again?”
Max shook his head. “I never had any news of her again. Until today,” he said. “But when I think back to that summer today, I know they were the best weeks of my life. It’s impossible to describe how carefree those days were.” He smiled. “They were the paint spots in my life. At least I did realize that even then.”
A long silence followed. The sun balanced like a big red ball on the silhouette of the old stone wall at the bottom of the garden. Max felt his hip starting to hurt, but he ignored it. He kept looking at the young man who had silently joined his hands in front of his face and was staring out through the triangle formed by his fingers. You could see that Robert was trying to make some sense of what he had just heard.
Paris Is Always a Good Idea Page 20