The elevator to the third and final floor is cramped. Levi and I get wedged behind a mother holding the hand of a little boy, maybe three or four years old. While the mom talks to her friend in French, the little boy sneaks an Eiffel Tower keychain into his mouth. His mom gasps and pulls it out.
“What did I tell you?” she scolds him in French.
“On ne met pas le Tour Eiffel dans la bouche,” he recites miserably.
I cover my mouth to keep from laughing. We don’t put the Eiffel Tower in our mouths, recited in perfectly accented French by a tiny child voice.
“Why are you laughing?” Levi asks.
I point to the boy and whisper, “His little French accent is so perfect.”
“Hilarious,” Levi deadpans.
The elevator lurches into motion.
I clutch Levi’s hand tightly.
We.
Are.
So.
High.
They never really say it when they talk about the Eiffel Tower. Oh, it’s beautiful, it’s a symbol of the great nation of France, it’s a marvel of engineering, blah, blah, blah. What you’ll never hear them say is “holy fucking shit, those clouds look awfully close.”
The top floor is just an observation deck. It’s completely fenced in, absolutely no risk of falling or jumping—although part of me is a little disappointed there’s no ledge you could teeter across. Only because I once read a (horribly researched, I now realize) novel where the eccentric love interest cart-wheeled along the edge of the Eiffel Tower’s top floor. That romantic, death-defying image is wiped away forever.
But forget the fantasy—the real top of the Eiffel Tower is magnificent.
You can see for literal miles in all directions. The hill of Montmartre, with the beautiful white edifice of Sacré Coeur perched at the top. L’Arc de Triomphe, in the middle of a distant roundabout. The Louvre, the dome of the Pantheon, the glass of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s all here. And, so distant it looks two-dimensional, like a painting, I can see Notre Dame. Waiting for me.
Forget Versailles. The Eiffel Tower and this view are where it’s at.
I stand at the handrail and stare out at the city for a long, long time. The wind whips my hair all over; anyone standing within a meter is in danger of getting a mouthful. Levi looks at the inside of the observation deck rather than at the view. He grabs the cage surrounding us and tries to shake it. Of course, it doesn’t move.
“Sturdy,” he says. “Good.”
“If it wasn’t, the wind would blow us back to Seattle,” I laugh.
“Look.” Levi points behind us into a foggy glass window. There’s a little room with a creepy mannequin set up at a big old-fashioned radio set in a military uniform.
“It was radio outpost in early part of the war.”
I turn when Nico speaks. He peers into the little room, too, smiling mildly at the mannequin.
“It’d be crazy to be stationed up here,” I say. “So lonely.”
“Yes, my grandfather said it was lonely. Only the radio for company.”
“Your grandfather? He worked the radio here?”
He nods. “In the beginning. Before Occupation.”
“That’s so cool,” I say. “Do you come here a lot? Did he ever bring you here?”
He just shakes his head and starts to wander away. I don’t know if he meant no to one question or both. Levi wanders away, too, examining the floor with his arms tucked up to his stomach.
I find Margot tracing an oval fingernail over the many initials and graffitied messages in the handrail.
“Nico just told me your grandfather worked in that little room as a radio operator,” I say.
She nods, smiling her friendly smile. “Il vivait une vie incroyable,” she says. He lived an incredible life.
Margot is quiet for a long time. I watch Levi a few feet away as he looks out at the city, hands in his hoodie pockets. I hope he isn’t too cold.
“I told you my grandpère had the bakery in our building now,” she says.
I nod.
“That was before the war. He shut down to work for French Resistance. He hid Jewish neighbors in the bakery.” She squints, looking out at the view, but there’s unrest behind her eyes as she sweeps them over the horizon, as her grandfather must have done.
“Wow,” I breathe. “That’s … pretty amazing. Did they … were they …?”
“Sent to a camp, oui. Grandpère, too.”
I shiver, but not from the cold wind. “He survived, right?”
She dabs at her nose with a tissue from her pocket. She folds it up many times before nodding slowly. “He was never the same,” she says. “Well, of course, I did not know him before. But Grandmère, she told me the stories of how he used to be.”
“The building, was it passed down through your family? The bakery?”
She shakes her head. “It fell into disrepair during the rest of the Occupation and eventually the building sells. Nico and I, we bought it back. We start our bakery, to honor Grandpère.”
My heart melts.
“But …” Margot’s hand flutters over her mouth and she closes her eyes. “J’ai peur qu’on ne va pas réussir.”
“What?” She’s afraid they won’t … I don’t recognize the last word. “What do you mean?”
“The business is new, but we struggle.” Her voice wobbles. “No one needs another pâtisserie. But baking, it is our passion, we could not do anything else. The people, they walk past our shop and look, only looking, no buying, no visiting. I want to tell them about my grandfather and the Jews who lived in our kitchen in secret. Maybe it will make them buy. But I cannot. It would be too … taking advantage of …” She waves her hand and looks at me, pleading for me to understand.
“Too … exploitative?” I try. She looks perplexed. “Like you’re exploiting the tragedy to make money?”
“Yes, yes, c’est ça. I could not. I could never.”
I disappoint myself by falling silent. Offering no words of encouragement, no words of comfort. No helpful, practical suggestions, even, because I’m just a kid, and what do I really know about running a business? Margot and Nico’s baking would sell itself, in a perfect world, and make them millionaires. But our world is far, far from perfect. Ours is a world where a man tries to save his neighbors and is sent to prison and has his livelihood sold off and the rest of his years ruined.
Worry settles into a pit in my stomach. This is my vacation and I don’t have to worry about any of this, but I can’t help it. They’re such sweet people, and their family story deserves to be told. They deserve to have that bald guy walk into their shop and buy his daily croissant from them instead of passing by.
Nico and Levi stand together now. Nico points out Les Invalides to Levi. I see his mouth form the words “We went there.” My stomach flutters; he’s talking to another living person.
“Your brother, il est différent,” Margot says. He’s different. She doesn’t ask. She knows.
I nod. “He’s sick. Or so they think.”
“You are not sure?”
“I just think there’s more than that,” I admit. “His whole personality can’t come from something that can be killed with medicine. He isn’t just a walking disease.”
“Keira,” she says, touching my arm. “He can be himself and still be sick. My grandpère was a quiet man, he would never be a loud man, but things he saw in the war, in the camps … they made him sick.”
I watch Levi mutter a few more words in answer to Nico.
“Maybe,” I say.
A huge gust of wind rockets through the observation deck, making everyone close their eyes. I start laughing, the way you do when you’re scared shitless. The hysterical laugh of a terrified person.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Would you like to go to Notre Dame?” Margot asks when we’re back on the ground. “I would like to light a candle for Grandpère.”
I can’t pass it up.
The metro ride i
s calm and soothing, as is the walk over a bridge to the Isle de la Cité, the “island of the city.” Margot and I talk about the Hunchback of Notre Dame Disney movie, which she likes, and the Victor Hugo novel it was based on, which she loves. I admit to her that I’ve always wanted to read it, in the original French, but was too intimidated.
She nods thoughtfully. “I feel the same about many English novels. Translation is not the same.”
Exactly.
Looking at pictures of Notre Dame and standing under the towering spectacle of it are worlds, galaxies, universes apart. The city began with Notre Dame at its heart, spreading outward from here. I can feel the weight of all those years. I can feel the thousands of souls who have been here before humming inside me. There’s history everywhere, whether or not there are surviving buildings, but there’s something different about a place full of structures that have stood for hundreds of years, approaching a millennium. Knowing that millions of eyes, windows to millions of souls, have gazed where I gaze makes this place feel more solid. More real. More electric.
Being dwarfed by the two huge bell towers, I feel that here more than anywhere. I imagine a Medieval congregation filing through the mammoth wooden doors into their cathedral, the place where they communed with their God. Chills run up and down my spine as we go through those very doors.
Margot and Nico go to sit in pews to pray, and Levi stomps off to look at some relics advertised at the front door, so I wander the cathedral on my own. The interior is curious. Dark and quiet, but also bright and loud. Those who want to marvel at the sheer vastness of the place, somehow contained between walls, a floor, and a roof, can walk the nave, look up, and exclaim. Those who want to think, pace, and dream can wander along the outside aisles, past the little chapels and confessionals and statues, and light candles at altars.
I light one candle for Margot and Nico’s grandfather. One for the Jewish people he tried so desperately to save. One for Levi. One for me. I give more Euros than I should to the donation tin.
I sit in a pew. Levi sits next to me. Probably only to rest his feet, but it’s still nice.
“Do you think the inside is like the Disney movie?” he asks.
“Sort of,” I reply.
“What did they get right?” he asks.
“Well … it is big.”
“No, really, I didn’t notice.”
I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean. They got the size and proportion of the place right in the movie.”
“But they got the environs totally wrong.”
“What?”
“The environs,” he says, gesturing awkwardly with his hand, like a penguin waving a fin. “They show steps out front of Notre Dame in the movie. There are no steps in real life. Also there’s a big statue of Charlemagne outside. They don’t show that.”
“I don’t know if the Charlemagne statue was there back when the movie takes place,” I tell him.
“Even if it wasn’t, they should have included it for visual interest.”
“We’ll have to go look at it again when we go outside.”
“Yeah.”
Just then, the entire cathedral fills up in the blink of an eye. People sit down in the pew on either side of us, and before we know it, we’re part of a massive crowd. A spotlight shines down on a guy standing up at the front altar. Everybody stands.
I’ve never been a girl who talks to God. Despite the posters in my room of Notre Dame’s towers against a stormy sky, despite the way my heart fluttered when a news story came out about hidden murals being revealed during renovations of Westminster Abbey, despite the book on monastery libraries I got for Christmas, my interest is always scholarly, never spiritual.
But the choir begins to sing. Their voices, some ethereal and high, some full-bodied and low enough to buzz in my throat, fill the entire cathedral all the way up to the magnificent ceiling. Every inch of this enormous space is filled by their voices. They sing a heavenly version of “Ave Maria.” I close my eyes and let the music fill me up. In rational, cold daylight, I would tell you that Christian mythology is just that: mythology. In the warm, eternal stone embrace of Notre Dame, I start to cry from the sheer beauty.
I open my eyes and look at Levi, to see if he’s slumped over and rolling his eyes like usual. But no—his eyes are closed, he sits up straight, his head tilted slightly backward. His lower lip puckers. My heart melts and fills with a golden, glowing feeling. The music is calming him. Does he feel the same as I do right now? Rested, loved, filled up and rejuvenated? If I wasn’t in the middle of a church service, I would get out my camera and take a picture of him. This is the most serene he’s ever looked.
While I’m staring at him, his head slowly, slowly falls forward. He nods violently, eyes snapping open, then drifting shut. I have to shove my fist into my mouth to stifle a burst of laughter.
He isn’t rejuvenated and calmed by the music. He’s falling asleep.
I laugh so hard and so silently that even more tears fall down my face and the pressure from keeping in the laughter makes my eyeballs feel like they’re going to explode. When the service finally ends and Levi wakes, he’s automatically in a horrible, horrible mood. I don’t get to wander around the outside of the cathedral, admiring it for as long as I’d like to, but it’s okay. It was worth it, seeing Levi at his most vulnerable.
Levi does still want to inspect the Charlemagne statue outside, though. It’s made of aged copper, turned blue from oxidization and raised high on a stone platform. Levi walks around it, hands in his pockets, frowning up at it. Margot and Nico are still in the church, so I’m all by myself, watching Levi—until I become aware of a pair of boys a few yards away from me, obviously talking about me.
“Stop it, James,” one hisses in a very thick Scottish accent. “Just ask her! Don’t take secret pictures like a fucking creep!”
“It’s okay, Gable,” James says. “It’s fine.”
I sneak a glance at them. One, a blond in what looks like a private school uniform, has his camera pointed in my general direction, eyes fixed on the display. The other, a tall black boy rocking dreadlocks tied back with a green plaid bandana, paces behind him, looking irritated beyond words. He wears the same school jacket as his friend, but paired with tight jeans that show off powerful-looking thighs, and chunky combat boots.
They both see me looking. Blondie almost drops his camera and Dreadlocked Rocker’s eyes go very, very round.
I stare them down. The silence is the most awkward thing I’ve ever experienced. “Are you taking pictures of me?” I finally ask.
“No,” Dreadlocked Rocker says, while the blond boy says, “Yes.”
“Well, which is it?”
Dreadlocked Rocker opens his mouth to speak, but Blondie holds up his hand.
“Sorry,” he says. “We’re taking pictures for a poster for our band, and you looked just about perfect, standing there in this bloody gorgeous sunshine, staring thoughtfully into the distance … y’know, very deep.”
He has a strong British accent that I can’t help but smile at.
“He should’ve asked your permission first,” Dreadlocked Rocker says, in that rough, burred Scottish accent. “James is sorry, isn’t he?”
He jabs James in the back, and James winces.
“Ouch! Yes, yes, I’m sorry.” He sticks out his hand. “I’m James, by the way. My mate here’s Gable.”
I shake his hand. “I’m Keira.”
Gable’s eyes are fixed on the ground. When he ventures a glance up at me, I smile at him. His lip hitches upward.
Gable. What an adorable name.
“So, err,” James says. “Can I take your picture?”
“Um, sure.” My hands automatically fly to my tangled hair. “What do you want me to do?”
“Sit there.” He points to a nearby bench. “And, like, gaze contemplatively at the cathedral. Or, no, better idea! Lean against that lamp post and gaze contemplatively at the cathedral.”
We go with t
he lamp post. I’m not sure what to do, so I just lean against it, my hand wrapped loosely around the pole, and stand there. James shoots from behind me, and when he shows me his shots a few minutes later, I’m shocked at how awesome they look. Anonymous girl, old iron lamp post, cathedral, all bathed in sun and shadow. I even like the way my hair looks, and the word that comes to mind when I see my arm wrapping around the cast-iron post is soft, not fat or flabby.
“This’ll look great,” James says. “We could even use this for the album cover, couldn’t we, Gable?”
Gable nods before returning his gaze to the ground. He bites his bottom lip. I can’t take my eyes off him.
“So, Keira,” James says, flashing his pearly whites. “Where you from? The old U. S. of A.?”
“Yeah. Seattle.”
That reminds me: Levi. I scan for him and find him still wandering near the Charlemagne statue, a flock of pigeons following him. He squints in my direction, obviously pissed off. Sudden sadness pricks me, seeing him standing alone so far away.
But I don’t want to stop talking to James—Gable, even less.
“Seattle, that’s so cool,” James says. “Kurt Cobain, yeah?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I’m from Manchester,” he says. “Go to school in Edinburgh, though. That’s where Gable’s from, if you hadn’t picked up on his glorrrrrrious Sco’ish ahccent.”
He elbows Gable, who sways with it. I grin.
“So what are you guys doing in Paris?”
I kind of direct the question to Gable, but James answers again.
“Playing a few shows with our band. That’s why we’re designing the poster—left it a bit late.” He winks. “You should come, Keira. The first show is tomorrow, at this bistro not too far from here. It’s going to be sweet.”
“Um, yeah, maybe.”
Levi is all-out glaring at me now. I reach out my hand and gesture “one minute.” He rolls his eyes.
“D’you use TextAnywhere? I can text you all the info.”
I give it to him, somewhat hurriedly.
Maybe in Paris Page 12