by Alex George
The day after the ceremony the newlyweds boarded a train to Paris. Camille sat next to her husband and watched the countryside outside the carriage window. So many miles between her past and her future.
The train pulled into Gare de Lyon early the following morning. Camille had not slept well, her restless night not helped by Olivier’s beatific snoring in the bunk above her own. Her mother had made her a new hat for the trip. Camille held it firmly on her head as she stepped off the train. The fumes on the platform were so strong that she could taste them, sharp and bitter, at the back of her throat. A white cloud of steam hissed from the engine on the neighboring track. There was a shrill whistle blown by an invisible guard, then a lusty shout. She turned in panic to look for Olivier. He was standing right behind her, a suitcase in each hand.
“Welcome to Paris, Madame Clermont,” he said with a smile.
She glanced up at the roof of the railway station, a giant lattice of iron and glass that soared over their heads. She reached for her husband. He put down the suitcases and wrapped an arm tightly around her shoulder. She felt a little braver under his touch. Passengers swarmed around them.
“Everyone is in such a hurry,” she said.
Olivier laughed. “Ah, yes. Wherever you’re going, there’s no time to lose.”
“Where are we going? How far away is Levallois from here?”
“It’s out to the northwest. You’ll get a little tour of the city on the way. Come on.” They walked out into the cold Parisian morning. Dark clouds hung low in the sky. Camille shivered, already missing the southern sun.
They found a taxi. Olivier pointed out famous landmarks as they trundled down the city’s wide boulevards. When they arrived at the apartment, Olivier bounded up the stairs, carrying the suitcases with him, leaving his new bride to follow in his steps. In the parlor Camille took off her new hat. Then she put her head in her hands and burst into tears.
* * *
The first weeks were not easy.
Camille did not know how to do anything. She had been spoiled by her mother, spared from even the simplest household chores. She could not cook, she did not know how to light a fire. She did not know how to be a wife. Her sister-in-law showed her how things were done. She learned how to select the ripest melons at the market, how to tell when the poulet rôti was ready to bring to the table. Her husband was patient and kind. He watched as she tried to marshal their apartment into some semblance of order, never reprimanding or rebuking her. He wrapped her in his bear-like arms whenever she became discouraged, and whispered in her ear that she was doing beautifully, that she would get used to everything soon enough. For weeks he stayed with her in the apartment because she was nervous about being left alone, but finally he told her that he needed to return to work. The rent, he said gently, was not going to pay itself.
“Let’s go out for a little while,” he said.
“Where to?”
“Boulevard Haussmann. One of my clients lives there. I want to pay him a visit to let him know that he can call on me at any time, now that I’m back at work.” He paused. “He’s a writer. He’ll be pleased to meet you.”
“Will I be pleased to meet him, do you think?”
“Oh yes.”
“And why is that?”
He patted her cheek. “Because he’s one of my best clients.”
At 102 Boulevard Haussmann, the young couple climbed the service stairs to the second floor. The door was opened by a smartly dressed man.
“Clermont!” he barked in pleasure. “You’re back!” He shook Olivier’s hand warmly and then turned to Camille. “And this is the beautiful bride that you’ve brought back from the Lozère?” he said, looking her up and down with approval. “How delightful.”
She blushed and performed a curtsy, just as she had practiced. Both men burst out laughing. “What excellent manners they have down south!” exclaimed the man.
“Camille, this is Nicolas Cottin,” said Olivier. “He’s the valet.”
She looked between the two men in confusion, her cheeks hot with embarrassment. “The valet?” she stammered.
Cottin looked at her kindly. “Yes, I’m just the hired help, I’m afraid,” he said with a grin. “My wife, too. She’s the chambermaid.” He clapped Olivier on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you! I’ll go and let him know that you’re here. Come, follow me.” He led them down a corridor to the kitchen. “Give me a moment, if you will,” he said, and disappeared.
Camille looked around the kitchen. The fireplace had been swept spotless and was filled with a fresh stack of kindling. Every work surface was pristine and uncluttered. Shining nests of copper saucepans were arranged neatly on shelves in order of size, each handle set at the same precise angle. The stovetop gleamed as if it had been installed that day. She turned toward her husband. “Does anybody actually cook in here?” she asked.
Before Olivier could reply, the door swung open.
The man who walked into the kitchen was wearing a beautiful smoking jacket with velvet lapels, and a white shirt so freshly laundered that the creases from the smoothing iron were still visible. He was not wearing a collar or a tie. A single curl of hair fell across his forehead, and in the middle of his moon-like face was a dark and luxuriant mustache. His eyes were calm and limpid. He carried himself with hesitant reserve. Every gesture was cautiously restrained, as if he were reluctant to engage too completely with the world in which he found himself. He was a man of half steps.
He greeted Olivier, and then he held out his hand toward Camille. “Madame,” he said. “May I introduce Marcel Proust, in disarray, uncombed, and beardless!”
Now that it was the correct time for her to curtsy, Camille could manage no more than a self-conscious half-bow. Marcel Proust looked her up and down with a disarming lucidity. His smile was a curious contortion of lips and teeth, but it did not reach up as far as his eyes. “You know your husband is invaluable to me, don’t you, Madame Clermont?” he said. “He is the only driver I trust. Nobody else will do, nobody.” He turned to Olivier. “I hope you’ve come to tell me that you’re ready to start work again.”
“Whenever you need me, monsieur.” Olivier produced a piece of paper from his pocket. “This is the number of my sister’s restaurant,” he said. “You can call me there whenever you need me.”
“Excellent,” said Proust, taking the paper and folding it neatly in half. “I shall be calling you soon, have no doubt.”
Olivier inclined his head. “However I can be of service, monsieur.”
“Thank you, Olivier. I have been quite lost without you.” The writer turned back to Camille. “On that subject, Madame Clermont, I have something of the utmost importance to tell you.”
She nodded, suddenly apprehensive.
“It is critical,” said Marcel Proust, “that your husband is not too happy at home.”
There was a long pause.
“Not too happy?” repeated Camille.
Proust nodded. “He needs to be available for me whenever I need him, you see. I don’t want him lounging about at home with his pretty young wife! If you look after him too well, he’ll never want to drive me anywhere, do you see? I want him standing by the telephone, ready and waiting for my call!”
A joke. She smiled weakly.
“In fact, perhaps I should give you a job here,” he mused. “That would make Olivier more willing than ever to come to Boulevard Haussmann!”
“What an excellent idea!” exclaimed Olivier. “You’ll never find a better employer than Monsieur Proust, Camille.”
She shook her head. “You don’t want me working in your home, monsieur. I can’t even boil an egg.”
Marcel Proust was looking at her closely through his hooded, reptilian eyes.
“I don’t like eggs,” he said.
13
Sons and Brothers
AFTER ARIELLE AND HER MOTHER have left, thanking him for the cheese and promising to see him in the Jardin du Luxembourg that after
noon, Souren Balakian stares out of the window. He lives for Arielle’s visits each morning. She is a tiny sun, filling him with warmth and light.
He smiles at Arielle’s excitement about the puppet show. Souren stretches his arms high above his head and thinks about the pianist from downstairs. Not just a pianist, he reminds himself. A composer—although one who no longer writes anything new. The man has been caught in a melancholy trap, stilled by the beauty of his own music. Perhaps he is scared that he’ll never write anything as perfect again. Tomorrow, thinks Souren, he will knock on the door of the ground floor studio. He will tell Maurice Ravel that he has a devoted audience who waits for him to play each morning. Perhaps that will be enough to set the music within him free.
Humming, Souren begins to fill his suitcase.
Every evening he hangs each puppet on its designated hook on the wall, and every morning he reverses the process. He always takes his time with this daily packing and unpacking, relishing this private act of communion with his puppets before the public spectacle that is to come. His audiences watch from a distance, but his own relationship with the puppets is visceral, immersive, wholly tactile. This is what he knows, what he loves: the smoothness of the tiny garments; the weight of those burnished wooden heads; the faint smell of lacquer and old paint. His hands inhabit these creatures. His fingers twitch and snap beneath their skins and bring them to life. Not once has he left them in the suitcase overnight. He could not fall asleep staring at a wall of empty hooks. His puppets keep him company when the dreams crowd in.
After he has arranged his strange workfellows in tight, well-regimented rows, Souren lowers the lid of the suitcase and pushes the brass clasps shut. The other suitcase, the one containing his theater, waits by the front door. He picks up both and makes his way out onto the street.
It is a beautiful morning. Souren walks through the streets of Montmartre, enjoying the warmth of the sun. On Rue des Martyrs, the shops are busy. Housewives wait in line outside their preferred fishmonger, butcher, and grocer. As always, Souren steps inside the fromagerie to admire the fragrant abundance of cheese on display. From behind the counter Augustin greets him with a cheerful wave.
“How did mademoiselle like the Saint-Nectaire?” he asks.
“She approved,” replies Souren. “We both did.”
“Excellent!” Augustin grins. “I have something special for you this evening. A lovely Chaumes.” He pinches the tip of his nose between his fat fingers. “It’s good and pungent. We’ll see what your little friend makes of that one.”
Souren grins. “I’ll look forward to it.”
“Alors, à ce soir,” says the cheesemonger.
With a wave, Souren steps back out onto the street. At the bakery next door, children press their noses up against the window, hungrily staring at the cakes, the tartes aux pommes, and the perfect pyramids of chocolate-glazed éclairs. A boy bends down to feed the crumbs of his croissant to a stray dog.
Souren heads south down the hill. He stops in front of Younis’s grocery and pushes open the door. Inside, he puts down his suitcases and inhales deeply. Most of the stalls on Rue des Martyrs smell of fresh fruit and vegetables, but here a heavy aroma of spice lingers in the air, delicious and foreign. Rather than the usual bountiful displays of food for customers to admire, the day’s produce sits in battered cardboard boxes on the floor. A dark-skinned old lady with a bright scarf wrapped around her head bends down stiffly to examine a heap of gnarled yams. There are no lines of well-turned-out French ladies here, politely waiting their turn to be served; the shop is a chaotic, tumbling circus of marauding children. They run back and forth, laughing and shouting. There are at least twenty adults in the shop, too, although nobody seems interested in buying anything; they are all too busy talking. Souren can hear several different conversations, all being conducted at considerable volume. He can understand none of them.
Next to the cash register at the far end of the room stands a tall man with his hands on his hips, deep in conversation with two other men. He has a handsome brown face. He looks up when the door opens, and, seeing Souren, excuses himself. As he crosses the shop, his smile is one of unqualified joy, as if he has been waiting all morning for Souren to walk through the door. The two men clasp hands firmly. Apart from little Arielle, Younis is the only friend Souren has made in ten years of living in Paris. (His relationships with Augustin and Thérèse, while warm enough, are strictly transactional.)
“Younis,” says Souren. “Tout va bien?”
“Of course, of course,” replies the man. His French is as awkward and as thickly accented as Souren’s own. Their friendship has been built, at least in part, on the perilous leap they take every time they open their mouths to speak the language of their adopted country: each knows that the other will never judge him for how he talks. And that is not nothing, when everyone else is ready to brand you as different.
Younis gestures around him, still smiling. “It’s business as usual here, which means that everyone is too busy gossiping to buy anything. But it makes my father happy, so who am I to argue?” He gestures to the far corner of the shop, where an old man sits on a wooden chair, one hand placed on each knee, silently surveying the busy scene before him. Younis’s father, Bechir, is wearing a tunic buttoned up to his weathered neck. His small, dark eyes are set deep into his face, but Souren doesn’t suppose they miss too much. A plume of thick white hair sprouts from the old man’s chin, which always reminds Souren of the goats that he used to herd on the grassy slopes of Anatolia. Souren raises a friendly hand toward the old man. Bechir smiles in response, showing off three or four teeth that poke up at improbable angles around the periphery of his gums.
Just then, a small boy clatters into one of Souren’s suitcases, knocking it over and sending himself sprawling across the floor. Younis bends down and pulls the child to his feet, speaking to him softly in Arabic. The boy is dismissed with a gentle pat on the behind.
“Sorry,” says Younis.
“Don’t be,” says Souren.
“He’s a good boy. Just a bit careless, that’s all.”
“You’re very kind to him.”
Younis shrugs. “He’s my little brother,” he says, as if this explains everything.
When Souren first visited the shop he assumed that all of the children who played (and sometimes, grudgingly, worked) there were Younis’s sons and daughters, but in fact they are his siblings. Bechir may be as old as the hills, but according to Younis he is still a randy old goat, and improbably fecund with it. He is presently married to his fourth wife, a supremely fertile specimen herself, who is pregnant with what will be his seventeenth child. Younis—the eldest of the tribe—complains that he is too busy running the shop and looking after his brothers and sisters to find himself one wife, let alone four. Meanwhile, his ancient father spends his days watching the fruits of his prodigious loins run amok across the shop floor, and his nights copulating with his poor, exhausted wife. Souren thinks that this is why Bechir always remains so still as he watches his swarming progeny: he is preserving his energy for later.
Younis has told Souren his family’s story many times. His father was a successful cloth merchant in Tunis before the turn of the century. He ran a lucrative business out of the largest souk in the city, until one day he saw a photograph of the Eiffel Tower that had recently been built for the 1889 World’s Fair. Bechir stared for hours at the tower’s gorgeously curving parabolas, stretching high above the city’s skyline. Hardheaded businessman though he was, he discovered a hitherto undetected romantic streak within him. He understood instinctively that he needed to live in a country that could build such a beautiful, useless, and flagrantly priapic monument on such an enormous scale. He stared at the massive wrought-iron erection thrusting unambiguously into the sky and thought: that’s the place for me. A few months later he had sold all his business interests and was making his way to Paris with his four eldest children and bemused wife in search of a different life.
>
Of course, in the end things were not so different in France. Bechir had commerce in his blood, and could no more stop trading than he could stop breathing. He purchased the grocery on Rue des Martyrs, and has been there ever since, working and procreating with equal degrees of success—although Younis runs the business now, leaving his father free to focus his efforts exclusively on the latter. The photograph of the Eiffel Tower is still tacked onto the wall behind the register. Souren once asked Younis whether his father has ever actually visited the famous monument. His friend shook his head. He doesn’t need to, he explained. What’s important is that he knows it’s there.
Younis picks up the suitcases and moves them closer to the door, out of danger. He smiles at Souren. “Two apples?” he says.
Souren inclines his head. Every day he buys the same thing. An apple for lunch, another one to eat later.
“Take your pick,” invites Younis, gesturing toward to the cardboard boxes along the floor of the shop. Souren peers into each box. The goods on offer vary from day to day, depending on what Younis finds at market, and sometimes there is a fruit or vegetable that Souren has never seen before. He enjoys these exotic new discoveries, warmed by the strange otherness of it all. Like him, Bechir and Younis are refugees from elsewhere, and so he feels kinship with these men. The only difference, thinks Souren as he bends down to inspect today’s offerings, is that they are surrounded by family, and he is not.
Younis follows Souren as he walks along the line of boxes, talking in his halting French about his younger brother, a tall, handsome fellow who sometimes works in the shop. Souren has seen him occasionally, sullenly slumped against the register.
“He’s always getting into fights,” complains Younis. “He cannot walk away from an argument, that’s his problem. He doesn’t need to go looking for trouble. Trouble will find him easily enough, you know?”