Allan had brought some of his books, and Mike was still game for adventure, but mostly Allan did what he'd done with the group the previous year, only now alone: he swam, lay about on the terrace, took the same walks into the hills, and waited for summer to end. In August, with only a few weeks left before school, news began to circulate around Europe, the import of which was reflected in Mike's letters back to Gertrude.
August 8, 1914: "My dear girls,
"How are you and where are you? We are here and shall remain for the present as the train service to Paris is irregular and difficult, 48 hours at least. I have not heard from you or Leo. Please answer. Mike."
August 21, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,
"Just got yours of the 15th. Strange you did not hear from me, I wrote twice. We are very comfortable here. I have not heard from Leo or Claribel, have you? I guess the only way is to draft postals frequently, as the mails are so irregular. Love from all, Mike."
September 8, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,
"In the NY Herald of the 4th there was an announcement from U.S. Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, 5 rue de Chaillot, asking all Americans having apartments or houses in Paris to register their residence, whether occupied by them or not, with view to issuance by the embassy of proper certificates to safeguard their property. I notified him of our apartments and you might want to do the same. With love from Mike."
War broke out in Europe, and Mike Stein felt his family had no choice but to stay on at the small hotel in Agay.
December 23, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,
"Enclosed you will find a check for 1,000 ff. When you cash it, will you please ask them how much more I am entitled to according to the terms of the moratorium, and I will then send you another check when you let me know what answer they give you. We are thinking some of coming to Paris after the New Year.
"I'm rather glad to get to see for myself what it is like here in the winter, as I had often thought of breaking the winter with a trip down here. The nights are cool but the days are sunny and we take long walks and bicycle rides. I see the sunrise every morning from my bed, and the cloud effect at sunset surpasses anything I have ever seen. We practically own the hotel. Someone drifts in for a while and then another, but we are practically alone and the landlady caters for us en famille. Her son is at the front and her husband is in barracks at Antibes. The troop trains all stop here as do the Red Cross trains, as the engines all have to take water from the rivière d'Agay.
"We sent to Paris for the books for Allan's school, so he has been able to keep at his studies. I guess that's all. Affectionately, Mike."
Mike's attempts to get back to Paris, or to get his family out of Europe altogether, were halfhearted and unsuccessful. The family remained in limbo, always poised to leave Agay but never leaving.
January 4, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,
"We expect to arrive in Paris Saturday the 9th at 4:15 A.M. We are having lots of rain here at present but had a homey Christmas and New Year with a wreck thrown in. A little schooner was thrown on the rocks, and the men came here drenched and chattering and we fixed them up. Claribel is still in Munich. Chilly mornings and evenings. We had a log fire in our room. Affectionately, Mike."
January 5, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,
"No we are not coming this week. After staying through all the storms, now that radiant sunshine has come, I could not pull myself away and decided to see for myself what the wonderful January was like on the Riviera. Enclosed please find a check for 1,000 ff. Love from all, Mike."
Mike, Sarah, and Allan settled in for a long stay. Allan pursued his schoolwork alone in the deserted hotel. In Paris, Gertrude tried to put things in order, though she was deeply reliant on Mike for advice and finances. Eventually she left with Alice Toklas to Spain.
February 12, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,
"Enclosed you will find a draft for 2,000—will send you the other 2,000 in the early part of March. For the present the pictures had better remain at your place, as it's covered by your policy. Should you want to leave earlier, let me know and I'll send the second draft to you in Spain. Do you plan to leave your Cezannes in your studio when you leave? If not, put the Femme au Chapeau with them. Yours affectionately, Mike."
March 23, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,
"Here is your sheet to fill out for income tax. I got a couple of sheets at the Mairie at Cannes and am enclosing a sample filled out for you to copy onto the real sheet, which M. Dursonoy sent me from Paris. Then you want to mail it at once registered mail to: M. le Controleur des Contributions directes à la Mairie du 6ième arrondissement, Paris, France. The joint is that should by any chance the sheet not reach them, you can prove by your register tag that you had sent it within the prescribed time. We're now having the equinoctial showers here and it has rained more or less for a month, but it is not cold. The traveling to America seems to be getting worse instead of better, but it may change soon, let us hope so. My love to Alice, Mickey."
Another year passed, and the war got worse.
May 17, 1916: "My dear Gertrude,
"We shall surely be here until Allan's exams are over, the last part of July; then it will depend on the conditions of ocean travel. I have written for your insurance bill. I guess that's all, Mike."
June 17, 1916: "My dear Gertrude,
"So you are back again. Well, Allan's exams take until the middle of July, and then we may come up and begin packing. Here all is quiet and one day is like another. Au revoir, Mike."
July 24, 1916: "My dear Alice,
"The magazines came. Thanks. Allan came back from Aix with his degree after a very serious cram. With love, Mike."
Allan had passed his exams, a year late and hundreds of miles away from his classmates. He went on to Paris and joined the U.S. Army, adrift now in the world. Somewhere in this last prolonged stay in the hotel at Agay, Allan Stein's only real life drifted away. His boyhood disappeared and he emerged as an inconsequential man, a man whose family preferred their amusing stories about his childhood to the stubborn, dissolute adult he had become, a man who would be eclipsed by famous paintings made of the boy he had once been. The track forward from his youth disappeared in Agay, and by the time his adulthood spun out of control in Paris he was a lost, untraceable soul. The final thirty years were little more than the working out of a failed equation. Alice Toklas said, "He was the natural reaction of an exaggeratedly cultivated home—quite an abnormal atmosphere for a child who had no proper childhood."
I went with Stéphane to see Nostalgia. The movie theater was in a deceptively small-looking café with enough black walls and mirrors to make its real size inestimable. Stéphane and I sat at a glorified picnic table, somewhere midcenter, by a mirrored wall that had cracked across the middle so that a line went through him when I watched him there. I could see a half-dozen views of Stéphane , because of the mirrors, and these occupied me for a while. He flipped through a newspaper. Rain pestered the windows, reminding me of home and Shackles.
The simplicity was starting to wear me down. The boy. My desire. The gap between us. Our knees touched beneath the table. "What is the film about?" I asked, but he was taken with something in the paper. I went to the bar and got a mint soda, bright green, plus a Coke for the boy. At least Shackles had decor, even if it was fake. The ticket girl sat near the front, smoking, reading a dog-eared play. There was nothing on the walls, I guessed so they could clean by just hosing the place down. The air was blue with cigarette smoke. Tiny spotlights clamped to metal tracks on the ceiling made pools of light on the tables, and my soda shone green as a Christmas lamp when I set it down there.
"What's the film about?" I asked again. The boy returned his knee to mine beneath the table, though it probably meant nothing to him. His hair was wet from the rain and he'd slicked it back, which made him look about twelve and very handsome.
"Serge said it's very beautiful. I think it is a man and a woman in Italy. They're looking at paintings."
I pushed my leg
forward a little. "Would you go somewhere with me?"
"The movie starts soon, in a few minutes."
"No, on a trip."
The boy stared. "Why?"
"I don't know. I need to see Agay, the Côte d'Azur." A crowd poured into the room from downstairs; the movie had let out.
"What is there?"
"Oh, it's hot as Spain, I'm told. You know, beaches." He smiled like a boy with a Coca-Cola. "My French is so poor, I need someone. You know."
"I would miss school."
"Of course you would miss school."
"I could do that." Here he stared again, as if adding up figures. "If you want to."
If I want to. The phrase echoed somewhere in me. The boy got in line for the tickets, and I finished his Coke and my soda. It was never clear what he knew. Making him talk about sex was out of the question, more absurd than actually having sex with him. The boy got the tickets and beckoned for me to follow him, and we filed downstairs into the theater, where we settled with our wet coats piled on the seats beside us; then the room became dark.
There was a valley with a path leading down it past trees and a pole and a horse. The people who walked away into the valley kept turning to look at us, which was disturbing. The film made shadows over Stéphane's wrist and the bend of his arm on the chair beside mine. His arm was bare and I stared for a moment, but, strangely, the film was more beautiful. I put my arm across Stéphane's shoulders and he let me.
The film moved slowly, laterally or sometimes away. I couldn't tell if the valley was real or the construction of a set designer. The woman and the man drove across an empty pasture in a Volkswagen. When the woman's face appeared in close-up, Stéphane sighed and shifted his body. Did he find her beautiful? She looked like the women in the paintings of Botticelli. The picture had the hollowness of a painting. Stéphane fell asleep when the veiled women entered a shrine bearing a statue of the Virgin on a bier of wood. His head was on my shoulder. They knelt before the Virgin and prayed while candles filled the wall behind her. The candles flickered, and I saw them reflected on Stéphane's mouth, which had opened while he slept. One woman bent forward and parted the gowns of the Virgin. Birds, hundreds of tiny birds, poured from the gash in her dress and filled the air above the praying women. Their noise was tremendous. My heart raced, probably from fright at the birds. Stéphane stayed sleeping and his hand dropped to his belly. The light and sound of the birds filled both rooms, both the vault of the shrine and the darkened room of seats, of folded coats, and people hiding from the afternoon rain, where I sat with the boy.
How could he keep sleeping? Noise and shadow cascaded over him. I watched his face and arms in the dim light. The light was beautiful, and I brushed my fingers across his cheek to feel it. He was soft, like water. I slipped lower into my chair and let my head rest against his. I turned my face toward him so I could smell his hair, and he slept beside me like that. I reached again but did not touch him. The film was empty and beguiling, like a series of paintings inside of which photographs moved.
There was a pleasant scene of rain in bottles. The poet was deserted by his translator. He drank vodka in a ruined church filled with water from a fresh spring and trees in which birds nested. He told stories in Russian to a little girl who looked like the woman painted on the wall. In the end the man fell asleep by the fire, and the book he'd been reading caught flame and burned. Stéphane turned closer to me and let his hand lie against mine on my lap. He might have been sleeping. His hair smelled like rain. Nothing startled me after the birds, except a terrible event at the close of the film when a madman made a speech and then burned to death.
This is what he said:
"Our heart's path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless. Into brains full of long sewage pipes, of school walls, tarmac, and welfare papers, the buzzing of insects must enter. We must all fill our eyes and ears with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we'll build the pyramids. It doesn't matter if we don't. We must fuel that dream. We must stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet. Where am I when I'm not in the real world or in my imagination? What kind of a world is this if a madman has to tell you to be ashamed?" And then he called for music. The "Ode to Joy" began to play through a broken speaker. It faltered, surged, then faltered again. He poured gasoline on himself and lit it. The music became overwhelming. Then it stopped and all we heard was his screaming.
When the lights came up the theater filled with voices. I was silent for a while because the movie upset me, but Stéphane said he liked it, although he'd seen very little. We walked up the stairs, emerging from underground, and the crowd waiting for the next show parted to let us through. It was night and the street was busy. A bakery had just opened and people spilled out its doorway. Two men shouted in a Laundromat, which was ugly and too bright. I saw them shoving, and one threw wet clothes that thudded against the heavy glass window. In the cold wet air we walked toward the metro. I asked if he thought the woman was very beautiful, and he nodded but didn't speak. I said too bad she was insane, but he had missed the scene where she lost her mind and grew impatient when I recounted it.
His mouth when he frowned was Miriam's. The pouting lower lip turned down at the corners, with its firm ridged upper lip, elegant and clean as the wing of some early modernist duplex, all long lines and weightless, perfect in its geometry. He parted these lips, wet them with his pink tongue, which circled to taste the skin, to take the evening air, then closed them firmly and grunted his objections. The boy kept bumping his shoulder against mine so that oncoming walkers had to part like water as we passed. I worried the small ticket stub between thumb and fingers, hidden in my pocket, until it was lint. "You'll be sleepy tonight?" I tried. The boy frowned once more and squinched his brow. We made our way home, silent and verging. The evening air, public clock, metro station, then home again through the park.
I was relieved to hear Miriam's laughter rattling down from the top floor when we got home. It drew me to her like a stone to earth. I squeezed Stéphane's shoulder bye-bye and bounded up the stairs. Pink Floyd, top volume, burst from the boy's room a moment later. Per lay across the cushions in the alcove, reading out loud to Miriam and Denis.
" 'Completely enclosed by its seventeenth-century walls, this curious little fortified town makes an unusual holiday resort.' " Denis made room for me on the bench; the spy had come in from the cold. I was absent, fundamentally, still caught in the labyrinth of my own espionage, but it was nice to sit on these fat cushions with friends (Herbert's friends). " 'The name Colmars comes from a temple to the god Mars, on a hill. The Fort de Savoie, which lies to the north on the hillock of Saint-Martin, makes a pair with the Fort de France to the south and recalls the time when this market town guarded the Provençal frontier, the Duc de Savoie having annexed the Barcelonnette Valley and Allos at the end of the fourteenth century.' "
"Colmars," Miriam whispered to me. "Per has an uncle there."
"Yes, he told me."
"I mean that Per has an uncle who is buried there." The music from below diminished, becoming all dull thuds and rumbles, which blended nicely with the pot of boiling eggs on the stove. The boy was tired, that much was clear. He might have been asleep. I liked to think the day had been obliterated from his mind already. There were quite a few evenings he stayed in his room, studying, while we ate dinner without him. He had a refrigerator full of yogurt and snacks in a vestigial kitchen (mini-fridge, cold-water sink, a shelf of bowls and glasses) directly below the one where we sat talking.
" 'The visitor will enjoy strolling through the narrow little streets, which come out on minute squares bright with fountains, realizing that he has reached the south from the atmosphere all around.' "
The book had a map, which Per spread on the table between us. It was marked with pale red checks and arrows, the residue of a waxy pencil used a half century ago. "How did you get there?"
"Train. But then we rode the l
ast ten kilometers in a cart along the river to Colmars." Denis strained a bundle of eggs from the pot on the stove and put a fresh dozen into the boiling water. "We scaled a cliff to get from the road into town. I remember climbing with our bags and feeling very weak."
"Are we having eggs for dinner?" Denis brought the cooked eggs to the table in a bowl of cold water and began peeling them. I took a pair from the water and rolled them under my palms.
"No," Denis answered simply. "I need them peeled." What a benign mystery. Denis was like a hot spring, an unending supply of warmth, of easy sensuality, with no apparent source or end in sight.
"Armand, my uncle, was lame, but he made a wooden cart the right size for a dog and his dog pulled it. At the top of this cliff we had scrambled up, at the Porte de Savoie, he met us, and the dog pulled our bags in the cart from there. He had a radio with a battery, in the cart, and kept it on very loud because he was deaf also, and this way we paraded across the Place Gireud to his house."
"You were teenagers."
"We were boys, so this was very exciting." Steam from the eggs fogged the windows, and Miriam opened one a crack to clear the air. "Armand had dozens of these radios with their Edison batteries stacked in the room of Serge and me, all packed in wood boxes, which he meant to sell to all the houses of Colmars. He was an evangelist of this battery radio. He wanted to broadcast to them."
"Serge said you went as far as Allos with Armand and these radios, trying to sell them."
Allan Stein Page 20