So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  “This is better. This is so good. Paris in the summer, it always stank like a rotting dog and howled like a dying one. I could take you to my house from here. I will not because I would much prefer to be unaware if it has gone missing.”

  He was brave about that—all the missing landmarks. For hours at a time he could follow a thread between sidestreets only to find—for example—that his parents’ house had vanished somewhere in the vicinity of an underground shopping mall and the greasy hulk of the Pompidou Centre.

  “Eh! Probably they did not expect I would come back to check.”

  I don’t think he minded about buildings—his return offered him compensations. I heard about them on the morning of the 21st. He had let me sleep on after our first night ever in a double bed and, never mind the heat, we were so glad to see each other there we barely needed to touch, although naturally we did. Naturally we did.

  “I am still here.” He was out of breath, fully dressed, kissing me in a room it took me seconds to recognise. “I’m still here.”

  “Mm? That’s good.”

  “Good? This is worth anything . . . I could never have expected . . . this is. Oh, I can show you how this is good.”

  I remember the silly discomfort of his buttons against my skin and that his hair smelt of morning.

  “You’re still feeling better, then.”

  “And here.”

  “I’d swear to it—you’re definitely here.”

  “But so you will see how much . . .”

  I think it was a writer kind of thing, maybe a macho kind of thing, too—it doesn’t matter now—which meant that I woke under a giggling, insistent, triumphant author.

  He’d woken without me, you see, and visited the bookshop at the corner of the street. It must have been barely open. Savinien explained that he was looking for any trace of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac.

  “The real man? Not the play? We don’t sell plays.”

  “The real man.”

  And there he was, apparently, referred to respectfully in alchemical reference books and volumes of the work available if he wished to order them. He’d known le Bret would see to it, he’d known he would be published, but now to be alive and see it. After all these years. Still here.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Nice! This is a word with completely no meaning. This is almost as large a miracle as I am.”

  “I suppose it is. I always thought you would have been a good writer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s no bother to say so.”

  “I wish they were here to see this, also.”

  “Who?”

  “My friends—Henri le Bret, his brother, Roy de Prades, even d’Assoucy, the bastard. They were the best. And Pierre, Pierre Gassendi, the finest teacher and wisest philosopher in France— never mind Descartes locking himself up in his own intestines and reinventing the universe like one enormous fart—Pierre’s dead like all the rest of them. If he were here I could have told him he was right. ‘There are Spaces, immense, without borne, without end in which God has created and placed this world.’ I’ve seen the spaces, I’ve been in them for centuries and now I have proved there is something beyond matter. No, he would correct me there. I have not myself proved—I am, in myself, proof that there is something beyond matter. There is a soul. He was sure there was a soul. And here, he must have convinced me so much that I had to have one for myself. I have an immortal soul.

  “God, I miss them all.”

  “It’s only to be expected, coming back to where you knew them. So they still have your books, that’s wonderful. I’m proud of you.”

  “I am quite proud of myself.”

  We cooried in so as not to let any more sadness creep in about us and I thought of an addition for the morning’s good news. “Savinien?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have the dream last night?”

  “Ah well, no, I did not. You?”

  “No sign of it.”

  “We were right to come here. This will make me well. I can live for the rest of my hundred years.”

  “I hope so.”

  “But you have to live the hundred with me. I wouldn’t wish to do it alone. They were the best friends, but you are my best love.”

  He had a way with compliments—the best phrase to offer at the right, snug time.

  And the dream stayed gone. For three days we ate and drank and walked as if we had both come home. If I was, at first, tired quickly by the strangeness of the city and apt to be sunstruck, this only meant that we could make our way in the afternoons to the tip of the Île Saint-Louis where Savinien had mastered the trick of looking above automobile height and fooling time. I would slip up on a bench and lean against him to sleep a little while the hotels he knew as hotels waited behind their summer shutters for their owners and their new or the old money to return from their country homes. Just the way it had always been. He would rest his arms against me and the Seine would roll to meet itself beyond the prow of the whole narrow island and the trees and the shade would slowly push round the sun.

  Sleep was our friend, we could dip into it anywhere, knowing we would each be there when we surfaced again, still running with the impossible, shaking it out of our heads like tepid water.

  I have tried to discover if we did something wrong, if I missed a sign. But all that really changed was the moon—it began that commonplace monthly journey from a fat, bright eye to a shadowed space. It waned. I never had cause before to consider the meaning of that word—to wane, to dwindle, to black out.

  “I watch. I was a legionnaire and we are taught. Watch, never be seen.”

  The hotelier, M. Sablons, had taken to greeting us with little speeches on themes from his former life.

  “I see the enemy but they never see me.”

  “Good, that’s the idea, I suppose.”

  Savinien smiled benignly and nodded to our key, but there was no way we were going to get it yet.

  “She thinks I am not knowing what she does, but without a doubt I do.”

  In her absence M. Sablons constantly maligned Mme. Sablons, a small grey lady who seemed, to be honest, far too bad-tempered to be easily embroiled in torrid liaisons. Although she did seem constantly tired. One never knew, of course.

  “Well, one never knows, of course.”

  “I do know. It is categorical.”

  “Might we have our key?”

  “Yes, do you think we could have our key? We’d like to go upstairs.”

  M. Sablons nodded. “So would I, so would I.”

  We didn’t quite understand what he meant by this, but it directly preceded his rising, adjusting his stomach and belt and then hooking down our key. He smiled at us badly. Whatever we were going to do, he knew it would pall.

  “God, I could do without this performance every night.” We started the dim climb to the second floor—brown flock wallpaper and then blue.

  “Mm.”

  “Do you think there’s any way we could distract him? Maybe if we set fire to one of his legs.”

  “Mm.”

  “What do you think?”

  Savinien, a few steps ahead of me, stumbled back and leaned against the wall.

  “Hey, careful. I don’t want anything of that broken.” He continued to lean. “Are you all right? That bloody idiot kept us standing too long.”

  “Yes. I would rather not stand.”

  “Well, do you want to rest here, or we’re almost at the room.”

  “The room.”

  He revived quickly—a bottle of minibar Coke, a shower, a chance to lie out on the bed and the colour pulled back in his face.

  “How are you now?”

  “Perfect.”

  “I can see that. How do you feel?”

  “Perfect—perfectly fine and brave.”

  “You had me scared for a while.”

  “It may be a greater drain on my forces, aligning myself to this city, than I supposed. Tomorrow, we mi
ght be slower.”

  “Of course. We could be slow now, too.”

  “Oh, good. I like slow.”

  “I like slow, too.”

  And maybe that was it—maybe we were simply too slow and the end of our story caught us up. The instant before I turned fully away into sleep, I could taste our future, I could smell its nondescript streets, every one of them leading to the sharp, hanging shadows under the memorial trees. Trees and sky, trees and sky, trees and sky. By the time we could escape into morning, we had dreamed every moment of cloudless blue and every leaf.

  “BASTARD. Oh the bastard.”

  “Sssh.”

  “Henri, you do this to me, after everything we were to each other. This. Hnah, hnah.” Savinien was searching his vocabulary for anything adequate. I persuaded him to move away with me while he wrung and unwrung invisible necks ahead of him. Once we were downstairs among the cool and relatively soundproof book stacks, I could risk calming him.

  “What is the matter?”

  “Ouff, nothing much at all. A tiny point of nothing. Only my best friend has, yes, published my work. I thank him for it, but he has . . . his fear of what is correct, what is not correct, who I will offend. He changed it. He changed it.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought it would be good to come here.”

  Because it had seemed a sensible idea. If we could get ourselves into the Bibliothèque Nationale—his very own national library— and find his work there, this could only please him. I could think of nothing better to rally his spirits. Half an hour’s queueing and bargaining, explanations and queueing finally won us two readers’ tickets and we’d then loitered in a corridor like petitioners to the court—his metaphor—before we could get into the Grande Salle.

  We were both a little nervous, sitting in what appeared to be a mammoth gilded ballroom with added shelves and waiting for our requested volumes to appear. I also worried that this might conceivably be the one place in France where Savinien would be recognised. I couldn’t have explained him to anyone.

  Savinien muttered the minutes away darkly—he hadn’t liked the edge of amusement that greeted any mention of his work.

  “Must we stay here? It’s like a writers’ mass grave. Gold and marble and busts of the deceased.”

  “It won’t be long, I’m sure.”

  “Like a tomb.”

  A tall, bronzed body wearing a very unacademic cut of dress swayed past.

  “She’s not exactly in mourning.”

  “Black dress.”

  “But not exactly funereal.”

  “Black, black is funereal. And her legs are in mourning, one can tell.” His smile drained suddenly. “God, I don’t want to find out, I don’t want to see. Can’t we just go?”

  “After all this?”

  And then the little, battered volumes came. For several moments, neither of us could touch them.

  “Go on, then.”

  “I can’t.”

  “They’re yours.”

  “Dear God, I know. Dear, dear God I know. My words, my books.” Every opened page sent up the harsh, cold scent of pure time. “My books.”

  But it didn’t take long for him to find the first alteration. His joy sank without trace into one constant hiss.

  “Listen. I am here in this story, falling hundreds of miles to earth, or rather to the earth of the moon, and all that saves me is a lucky collision with the Tree of Life. I have fallen into Paradise, my soul leaves my body and is then almost instantly recalled. That lunatic has me say . . . what, what . . . I can’t even think of it. Ah yes, that the next thing I remember I am under a tree. Any tree, nothing especial, no explanation of why I am not utterly dead, no imagination . . . not even a good sentence. What was he thinking of?”

  “I’m sure he did it for the best.”

  “If they have my manuscripts. They said they did, didn’t they say that?”

  “I don’t know. I can understand one word in twenty.”

  “They would read my manuscripts, they would know this wasn’t me.”

  “Yes.”

  “They would know.”

  “That’s right. Come on, now.”

  “No, I can’t face it.”

  “Come on. Even if we’re only leaving, we have to go out that way.”

  “Bastard. Bastards. Who made him? Who made him do that?”

  But he did go back and did eventually settle on another piece of le Bret’s writing.

  “My God.”

  “Please, we’ll be put out.”

  “He has written my life, almost all of it. He . . .”

  And he read the short account of his own life and death. I held his hand while he smiled and nodded and closed his eyes and in the end sat very gently, staring at something which I could not see. “God keep him, God keep him. He was a gentleman of excellent spirit. A very loving friend. May we go now, I think I must.”

  He walked round and round the small courtyard at the back of the library while I sat. There was nothing I could do. We should never have gone there, should never have crossed into France, and yet we could do nothing else. I stared at the sparrows and the yellow gravel and the yellow dust and I may have attempted to pray, but I know I could think of nothing to ask for. He came to sit by me and touched my arm.

  “Hello. How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know, Jennifer, I don’t know. Today Henri reminded me I am dead and last night I saw what you saw and I understand it. You also understand.”

  I lied. “No.”

  “I have to go there.”

  He said “I,” not “we.” “I want to come with you.”

  “I would love you to. I’m sure we’ll go there together and all of this will be finished, we’ll be able to go on.”

  He was lying, too.

  We held each other under the afternoon sun and we lied. I smiled at him and he smiled at me and we tried to discuss a future we didn’t have and then held on even tighter so we wouldn’t have to see our faces when we cried. We sobbed and were nothing but hopeless and hurt.

  I think that we felt what we felt as deeply as we could and yet it had no effect. When the worst of the spasm was past, we were both still there, still alive, as though we had simply subjected ourselves to a senseless joke. The truth was that we would have to go on until we were finished and no short cuts.

  The next days were peaceful, we spoke a great deal, oddly enough a great deal about childhood. Savinien couldn’t walk far in the end, the slightest incline made him breathless and dizzy, so we enjoyed the small sections of the city we could still reach in some depth—we had time to really see them. His weakness did not cloud his mind in any way, although his voice became faint and his articulation careful.

  I want now to tell you everything ever we did, in Scotland or in France, everything about everything, right to the start again, to hold it all back. He wouldn’t want that, though. He was much braver than me.

  I only hope that if I’ve managed nothing else properly, I put this down right.

  In the night of the 27th, Savinien woke me and we made love simply and quietly, with a terrible gentleness I didn’t recognise.

  “Jennifer.” He said my name more carefully than anyone else did—I loved that.

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow—”

  “No.”

  “Do please listen, tomorrow I have to go somewhere. I hope you could come with me because I think I will be afraid.”

  “But we still have time, there are five more days before we have to—”

  “It has to be tomorrow. Will you come with me?”

  “I can’t not. But let me come back with you, too.”

  “Don’t make me say a promise I can’t keep. You know I have to do what you ask.”

  “Let me ask you not to go.”

  “Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer.” More carefully than anyone else, ever.

  On Thursday the 28th of July, 1994, Savinien de Cyrano enquired at the railway station and then caught the tr
ain to a town near Argenteuil called Sannois.

  THE JOURNEY TOOK half an hour passing comfortable suburbs and little villas, a cats’ and dogs’ home. The humidity plastered our clothes against us unpleasantly and left us mopping our faces every few minutes. Although for much of the time we had a carriage to ourselves, we could think of little to say. Words slipped out in nervous rushes, stopped for no reason.

  “You know, here in my time they had a priest, a Mr. Pig. An atheist attacked him once during the monstrance of the host— wanted to be struck down by God, that way he’d have no doubt. Instead the King struck him down very slowly in Paris and Cochon the priest continued his masses, but behind an iron grill. Cochon—Pig, he was very kind. Such a bad atheist, me, but he was only kind . . .”

  When Savinien reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, he noticed his hands had begun to shake and gave a small laugh.

  The station was clearly signposted, pale and neat. Just before the carriage doors opened I panicked and reached for him. He squeezed my shoulder and whispered, “I know.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know it.” The doors slipped apart and let in a raw burst of heat. “I do love you, also.” Another shuttered laugh, “God, I would rather not be here,” and we stepped down.

  He knew the way. But he walked like a man who expected a tripwire at every step.

  The main street was quiet, not unattractive. We turned north, working through a series of pleasant lanes until we reached an area of blank modern apartment blocks. Savinien began to run.

  He came to a halt in front of a low, grey slab of flats and began to giggle between uneven breaths. He heard me rushing to close the distance and turned to shout.

  “It’s all right, it’s not here. It’s all right. Jennifer, we are safe.”

  “What do you mean? I mean, that’s wonderful. What do you mean, though?”

  “The house, number five. Oh, I love this ugly building, this is the most wonderful piece of grotesquery in the world.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I died here. Number five, rue du Puits Mi-ville, but I didn’t die here because there is nothing of here left. I dreamed Sannois as it was and it is different and I am different. I am safe. I can breathe again, listen, I can breathe again. See? Do you see? You are a beautiful woman. Did I ever tell you this?”