Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  I had followed up on every official document, every hazy recollection, every rumor and whisper, but all avenues of inquiry led only to cul-de-sacs of silence. Once I went to an address in Belleville, where I had heard of a couple who forged papers to smuggle dozens of children out of the city. Scarcely daring to hope, I went up the birdcage elevator in search of Arnaud and Martine Boniface. But no one answered when I knocked. I refused to leave. I stood there knocking like a madman. Finally the concierge came up the stairs and asked if I was looking for Monsieur Durand. I shook my head. Monsieur Boniface, I said. She raised her elbow and cocked her finger to mimic a machine gun. “Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta,” she said, “fusillé.” Seeing my face, she added, “Your friends died like heroes, they didn’t try to hide when the Boche came but went to meet them with their heads held high. Then, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.”

  For me, the trail had ended with the rat-a-tat of a German machine gun.

  But then I had come across the magazine a patient had left behind in my office. Flipping through its pages, I had been struck, as Sylvie was, by that haunting photograph. Like her, I thought Ari Wolkowsky might know something more. But before I could see him, I had received the summons which no power on earth can evade and found myself in a hospital room which I would never leave again to stretch out in my own bed with the love of my life lying beside me.

  At the very end, I had tried to tell Sylvie: Belleville. She could not make out the word. “Oui, la vie est belle,” she responded.

  But then she picked up the thread that connected her to me and followed it patiently, persistently, the way she worked through knotty passages of music, not by technical skill alone but by a great leap of emotional intelligence, of imaginative empathy. And now it is over, that triumphant search, a great recital performed for no other audience but myself. Brava, chérie, brava!

  And then I realize those loud wingbeats, that graceful soaring, is not music at all but the sound of storks as they circle the sky above Hunawihr, gathering their strength for their long journey back home.

  For the first time since Julien’s death, Sylvie feels ready to leave the city. The seashore, advises Ana Carvalho, but Sylvie shakes her head. Julien and she had always gone together to the coast in Brittany, where he was as carefree as she had ever seen him, talking to fishermen returning with their day’s catch, or listening to tales of Breton magic, about the washerwoman of the night who tricks unwary travelers into wringing their own shrouds. His memories found no purchase in this soil and their burden lifted when he was there, literally at the end of the earth, in Finistère.

  Impossible to go there without him. A vision rises before her eyes of a clear lake, of reposeful mountains, but she has left it too late, it is almost August and all the hotels are sure to be full.

  She walks restlessly around the apartment. She feels the urge to tell Julien all about Lilou, but she can never tell him anything again. Never again. The words begin their relentless ostinato, but she shakes her head. She knows where that leads, a dead end. Well, the children will come in September and she can unburden herself of Clara’s tragic tale. She could ring them up, or write to them, but no, better face-to-face. If only they were here now!

  Sylvie leafs through her music and comes across the late sonatas of Beethoven. Had she been ambitious enough at one time to attempt them? She places the music on the stand, but when her fingers touch the keys, she feels a strange resistance to the piece—not now, not yet—and plays instead the reverberating bass note that begins the barcarolle. She thinks of how Chopin created from undulating rhythms and singing melodies a beauty beyond beauty, an impression of light shimmering on water, of unplumbable depths of yearning. Then in the passage marked dolce sfogato, she hears the water’s tranquil murmur, it is right, it is natural, that after so long a parting the dead should cease to answer, and the living should cease to weep, and she closes her eyes and stops thinking about anything at all as she becomes one with the music, transparent as the water, and when the theme returns, the water overflows its banks, as boundless and mysterious as the invisible swells of the sea.

  She sees Julien clearly before her, lured back to this world by the music that was a prelude to their love, and is now its elegy. Speak to me, she entreats him, speak to me, my darling, but when she lifts her hands and opens her eyes, that wraith has vanished. It will take more than music to summon him, it will take a miracle.

  Then something happens, so strange, so unexpected that it might well be called miraculous. A key turns in the lock, and Coco scampers to the door with a whine of happiness. The hair rises slowly along Sylvie’s arms as the door swings open and a beloved face smiles at her, a beloved voice calls her name.

  Will sees the door shut on a stranger’s back, and the old curiosity flares up in him for an instant. He has made Sylvie his business, but what does it really have to do with him? The amazing story she has told them, that is her story about her city; he will never inhabit Paris, nor will it ever inhabit him and the threshold he’s so eager to cross in an unfamiliar city is only a displacement of his own transition from one stage of life to another back home.

  Already the city is beginning to empty out; people are taking advantage of the last weekend in July to start their August vacation early, before the autoroutes are clogged. Will and Alice see several shopfronts already shuttered on their way to dinner, and so many restaurants are closed that tourists have found their way even to their neighborhood bistro. “Their” table is occupied by a Japanese couple, and Will and Alice have to squeeze past them to grab the last empty seats.

  After dinner, they stroll around the island before returning to the apartment. Alice turns to say something to Will, but he is preoccupied with his own thoughts. She slips her hand through his arm; what she has to tell him can wait till they are home. And even as she thinks that she realizes she is seeing everything before her, the wrought-iron peacocks, the cobblestone courtyard, Sylvie’s lighted window, as if preserved in a photograph or etched in memory; her thoughts have already made the turn for America. Home.

  Up in the apartment, Sylvie is comforted by Alexandra’s unexpected arrival, as if she had somehow sensed she was needed. And she’s glad Alexandra has brought Lucas as well, though he seems strangely withdrawn. He’s always been quieter than his cousins, but something is definitely wrong now, she can tell more from Alexandra’s manner than from her son’s, she’s been tense and watchful all evening. Well, Alexandra will confide in her if she wants her to know. And she has so much to tell Alexandra as well, but that story has waited so long, it can wait just a little longer.

  Alexandra roots around in the refrigerator, alarmed at how meagerly Sylvie seems to eat, and Sylvie doesn’t dare tell her the pork loin is for Ana Carvalho tomorrow. Alexandra cooks it for dinner, and says her brother doesn’t eat red meat anymore, he’s turned into an old woman, worried about everything, germs, noise, crowds, no one would believe he was once young, let alone a firebrand.

  Sylvie laughs at Alexandra’s exaggerations, it’s not a bad thing Charles is more staid than his sister, he is a banker after all, despite his hot-headed youth, his anarchist friends, especially that red-haired Daniel whom the newspapers dubbed Dany le rouge. But she shudders remembering the student protests, the police brutality of those days. Sylvie had worried about his joining the manifestations, but Julien said people had a moral obligation to act, and when Charles went to the barricades, Julien stood right there beside him.

  All this must seem like ancient history to Luc, the events of 1968 as remote from him as the Revolution. He looks worn out, and doesn’t protest when Alexandra packs him off to bed. She calls her husband from the telephone in the hallway, then comes into Sylvie’s bedroom and curls up beside her. “If you’re wondering why we’ve come, it’s because of Lucas. He’s running with the wrong crowd and his father is furious, he wants to send him to military school. But I’ve persuaded him to let Luc study art. It’s what he�
�s always wanted, and in Paris at least there’s someone to keep an eye on him.”

  Sylvie knows how effective Alexandra’s persuasions can be; she is an irresistible force, and perhaps she is right, Isabelle will surely take the boy well in hand. But isn’t Isabelle still at Vandenesse for the summer? And then she grasps what Alexandra is saying, and is so overcome with emotion that she can hardly speak. It is to her that Alexandra has turned, her to whom she entrusts her son.

  “You don’t mind if he stays, do you?”

  Mind? She is overjoyed. But won’t it be dull for Luc?

  “Hardly. When I was his age, I used to wait all week to come here.”

  Sylvie hides a smile, glad that’s how memory’s clouded lens allows Alexandra to see the past, their skirmishes forgotten.

  “Do you remember how we drove Papa mad with that song we used to sing?”

  Yes, she does, the steaming mugs of cocoa, Julien returning from the boulangerie with a brioche, begging them to stop, he wouldn’t be able to get that song out of his head for the rest of the week, but you could tell from the way he was smiling that he didn’t mind at all.

  Alexandra hums, on prend le café au lait au lit, then bursts into a fit of giggles and can’t stop. Woken by the sound, Luc comes into the room. Seeing his mother’s face, his own expression lightens and he sprawls at the foot of the bed.

  “So how are you getting along with your Americans, Sylvie? Luc is crazy about America these days.”

  As if she hadn’t been the same at his age! She and Charles used to beg Sylvie to take them for hamburgers at Le Drugstore, with deafening music bouncing off all that chrome, and later of course the place was bombed, thank God they had stopped going by then.

  “I’ve been meaning to have them over, but it seems strange to do it now when they’re getting ready to leave.”

  “Nonsense,” says Alexandra, “it will be amusing for Luc. I’ll go across tomorrow.”

  Sylvie smiles at her. “No,” she says, “I’ll ask them myself.”

  When Sylvie knocks on their door the next day, she remembers how reluctant she had been to divide the apartment and how Alexandra had insisted. A will of iron, that girl. But she was right, after all, having the Americans there has been such a comfort, and after they leave, it’s all set up for Luc.

  Will opens the door and smiles, delighted to see Sylvie in such good spirits. He cannot get out of his mind the last time she knocked at their door, holding out a piece of paper and looking utterly bereft. “Come in, come in, Alice is in the shower, but she’ll be out in a jiffy. Some coffee?”

  Sylvie nods absently. She looks around, imagining Luc in the space. A good idea, isn’t it, mon amour? Apart from the clanging pipes, there is only silence. She wonders if she’ll ever get used to it. As she leans out to look at the river, Will shouts a warning but it is too late, the iron railing comes loose from the window frame and sails down into the courtyard. Sylvie braces herself against the wall, but her hands slip and she feels herself falling.

  Quicker than he has ever moved, Will springs forward and pulls Sylvie back to safety. She holds on to him, trembling with shock. How often she had dreamed of making that leap, but when fate offered her the chance, she had recoiled, had clung to life. Her heart beating wildly, she buries her face in Will’s shirt. He feels the shudders ripple through her and his own breaths come raggedly as he stares over Sylvie’s shoulder at the terrifying vision of the sharp iron spikes angled to deter burglars, but from up here their only purpose seems impalement. Just then Alice enters the room and stares at the sight of them clinging to each other like survivors on a raft.

  For a moment we remain frozen, an unlikely quartet brought together by the vagaries of chance. The word “quartet” carries me back to the house on rue de Bièvre, the night it all began. And now, at the end, Sylvie has chosen to go on with life. I cannot mask my sudden emotion when she turns her face from me and draws Alice into their embrace. As the three of them grip each other, I am returned to my proper place, outside the circle of the living, once again an observer incapable of harm.

  Sylvie says she must leave, they’re waiting for her at home; and this time she knows it’s true. At the door she turns to look back and sees her life with Julien distinctly again, not obscured by the doubts of the past few months, and it’s clear as clear can be why he chose her, why she chose him: for nothing more and nothing less than love. Schumann in his madness had a lucid vision: two rings preserved in the river’s silt; Sylvie, too, perceives it clearly now, that love does not end when life ends, but endures beyond reason, beyond breath.

  Dazed, Will thinks he could never forgive himself if anything had happened, it was his fault, the rotted frame had slipped his mind. He latches the kitchen window shut and jams a chair under it until the railing can be replaced. “It could have been you,” he says to Alice. His knees tremble and he sits down abruptly, feeling as if he has aged in a matter of minutes, has turned into an old man.

  Still in shock, thinks Alice. She kneels beside him and murmurs soothingly till the blankness leaves his eyes and his hands stop shaking. He clasps her hand but doesn’t say another word.

  In a deliberately down-to-earth tone she says, “What did Sylvie want, by the way?”

  “She’s asked us over.”

  “You must be thrilled.”

  He shrugs. His ardent desire to enter a different world seems so remote. Now that his ardor has dimmed and his attention is elsewhere, the invitation has finally come. But it no longer matters.

  Will looks at Alice’s dear face and kisses her. For him, Sylvie was part of the fantasy that in Paris he would be transported somehow into a different life, but it took those iron spikes protruding from the wall to remind him that the life you have is the one that matters.

  Ana Carvalho slips on a cotton glove and runs her hand along the banister, dusting it on her way up to Sylvie’s. She used to think nothing of going up and down a dozen times a day, but now she spares her painful bunions by combining several errands into one. Might as well take leave of the Americans while she is upstairs, they will be gone by the time she returns from Hossegor.

  Her suitcase is packed, the gaily patterned bathing suit ready for its annual outing, and her cousin Antonio is waiting downstairs to take her to the station, saving her the expense of a taxi, daylight robbery, that’s what it is now. A reliable fellow, Antonio, he knows how to take care of her little dears. As for her other charges, August is a quiet time with only a few residents staying on, Madame Sylvie and the Cheroiseys, the judge always takes his holidays in winter, flying to Île Maurice or the Seychelles or somewhere “snob” like that. And of course that unfortunate man on the second floor, who is back from the hospital but will never leave the apartment again, unless by ambulance or by hearse.

  Ana Carvalho pauses to catch her breath and swipe at a spiderweb on the railing. It’s been almost a year since Monsieur Julien died, where does time go? But at least she needn’t worry about Madame Sylvie, it’s unlikely there’ll be a recurrence of the old madness now that the first extravagance of grief is spent. Thankfully, young Luc will remain with Sylvie while she’s away, clever of Alexandra to arrange it so neatly, she’s always been clever, even as a child.

  Wiping her hands on her apron, she knocks on the door. “I’ve come to take my leave,” she says to Alice, who ignores her proffered hand and gives her a hug. Over her shoulder, Ana Carvalho sees Will riffling through papers, looking for something. Voilà! He’s found it.

  “One of your charges flew up to visit,” he says, showing her the orange bird hopping around on his papers.

  The concierge squints at the photograph and to Will’s astonishment she says she’s never seen him before, but adorable little fellow, isn’t he? Will smiles and thinks, not all signs and wonders can be explained, it’s fitting that some remain a mystery.

  He hands her an envelope, a
nd gratified by the thickness of the tip, Ana Carvalho tucks it into her pocket. “Alors, bonne chance, enjoy the rest of your vacation. Once the baby comes, you can kiss all that goodbye.”

  Will stares after her as she leaves and then turns wordlessly to Alice. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “How on earth did she know? I wasn’t sure myself until a few days ago.”

  “You didn’t tell me!”

  “I was waiting till we were home.”

  Will is silent, so unlike him that she feels the first prickle of doubt. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  He looks at her. Happy? He is ecstatic. How can she think otherwise? She puts her arms around him and he rests his cheek against her hair, silent with awe at how the future stretches far beyond his imagining.

  On the other side of the wall, they speak of the long shadow of the past. Alexandra listens in silence as Sylvie tells the story of rue Elzévir, relating what she has discovered step by step, from the envelope that fell out of Julien’s desk until the heartbreaking scene with Lilou at the graveyard. Alexandra stares off into the distance, it is some time before she can say a word. “When we were children, Charles and I knew Papa’s sister had died at Auschwitz, but no details, not how they were picked up, not how they suffered. All our questions were met with vague answers, with warnings not to rake up the tragedy. It loomed so large in our imagination, but we could never speak of it to my father, we felt compelled to join the conspiracy of silence.”