by Alex George
* * *
Guillaume turns and walks toward the river, furious with himself for taking so long to run after her. Only once he has crossed the Île de la Cité does he slow his pace a little. At Châtelet he passes beneath a signpost for Les Halles, and an old memory returns, of his first weeks in Paris, back when he explored the whole city on foot, sketchbook in hand. Guillaume used to wander the corridors of the food market for hours. He loved the fare on display at the fishmongers’ stalls, a silvery rainbow of glistening promise—sea bass, snapper, monkfish—but it was the people who captivated him most: the housewives, the merchants bellowing encouragement to shoppers, and the beggars who lingered in the shadows. He drew them all.
A sharp pang of nostalgia. The market is not far away from where he is standing. Minutes later he is making his way into the huge pavilions of iron and glass. His stomach growls as he walks through the meat hall, past the marbled steaks and fat chains of glistening sausage, and the golden rotisserie chickens crackling on their slow-turning spits. Next come the vegetables, stacked high in vast pyramids of color. The vivid orange of freshly harvested carrots. A violet wall of eggplant, shining darkly beneath the soaring skylights. Baskets of yellow onions. A forest of bright green lettuce, a white hill of cauliflower. Rainbows of precariously stacked peppers. The angry purple blush of radishes.
All this food has made him unbearably hungry, and he realizes that he has eaten nothing all day. He reaches into his pocket and finds a coin. At the next boulangerie he buys a fresh baguette. The bread is still warm from the oven. He tears off a piece and begins to chew. It is delicious, but his last meal in Paris is hardly the one he would have chosen for himself. He reluctantly leaves the market and starts to walk back to Montmartre. He finishes the baguette as he goes, but he can no longer taste it. He does not want to return to his studio, but he cannot afford to leave Gertrude Stein’s money underneath the mattress.
Guillaume turns the corner onto his street. To his relief, the sidewalk outside his building is empty. He steps quickly through the front door. The hallway is deserted. Madame Cuillasse is nowhere to be seen. Guillaume is glad. The old concierge has never shown him the slightest bit of affection, but he’ll miss her cantankerous ways, and the last thing he needs now is to be assailed by more regret. He climbs the stairs. Perhaps La Rochelle won’t be so bad, he thinks. A change of scene might even do him some good. By the time he reaches the final flight of stairs, he has almost convinced himself that he will be happy to see his parents again.
There is nobody waiting for him in the corridor. He is whistling as he reaches into his pocket for his key. That is when he sees that the door is slightly ajar.
The tune dies on his lips.
27
The Jardin du Luxembourg
JEAN-PAUL STEPS OUT of the bookshop and limps down Rue de l’Odéon. A few minutes later he walks through the gates of the Jardin du Luxembourg and makes his way to the large octagonal pond in the middle of the park.
He liked Sylvia Beach hugely. She was funny, modest, and kind. She told him many stories about some of the city’s famous expatriates. He asked her about Hemingway and Josephine Baker. I’m sure I don’t know anything about that, she said. But Ernest often comes in and stays for hours. He’s always looking for things to distract him from his writing. And I imagine, she said archly, that Miss Baker would be quite a distraction.
The pond is quite still, undisturbed but for two small ducks that bob nearby, emitting plaintive quacks at each other. Their gently rocking bellies send ripples across the surface of the water. They remind Jean-Paul of a pair of regal swans that used to live on the river that ran through his grandparents’ pear orchard in Péchabou. When he was nine years old, his grandfather caught him lobbing pebbles at the beautiful birds. He still remembers the sting of the old man’s belt that afternoon. Why would you ever hurt a swan? his grandfather demanded, again and again, as the leather strap swung. But Jean-Paul wasn’t trying to hurt the swans. He loved them fiercely. They were so elegant, so perfect, so not of his world: he had just wanted them to notice him, to respond in some small way to his existence. What hurt more than the beating itself was the quickness of his grandfather’s disappointment, his readiness to assume the worst. It was only after Elodie was born that Jean-Paul understood that it was the ferocity of the old man’s love for him that had prompted such severe retribution. Love like that raises the stakes.
One of the ducks takes off in a typhoon of splashing water, leaving its companion sitting alone on the pond. As Jean-Paul limps along the pristine pathways toward the turreted, fairy-tale splendor of the Palais du Luxembourg, a swell of laughter floats by on the faint afternoon breeze. Curious, he turns in the direction of the noise. In the shade of the chestnut trees, close to Rue de Vaugirard, he sees a crowd of young children and their parents clustered around a tall, narrow tent with a striped awning and proscenium arch that has been painted gold.
A puppet show.
Most of the children are sitting cross-legged on the grass, their heads tilted up at the stage like sunflowers leaning toward the sun. Jean-Paul watches as the puppets chase each other back and forth, a frenetic whirlwind of motion. He tries to follow the story, but cannot work out what is going on. He walks a little closer, and realizes that the puppets are not talking in French. He listens, intrigued. Perhaps, he thinks, it is not a language at all, but some improvised argot, a deliberately nonsensical canvas of sound onto which the children can paint whatever story they choose. The puppets’ words have a strange poetry, incanted spells whose opaque mystery is its own kind of beauty. Jean-Paul watches the faces of the young audience. One thing seems clear: the children know exactly what is going on. They are laughing in delight one minute, yelling worried warnings the next.
On the stage, a princess in a pink satin dress is confronting a fierce-looking knight, who is waving a long sword threateningly at her. The princess is clasping her tiny wooden hands together. She appears to be begging the knight for something—mercy, Jean-Paul guesses, or perhaps his heart. The knight responds gruffly, each time moving a little closer toward the princess, until the two figures are almost touching. The nearer the knight gets, the more the children cry out. The princess is oblivious to their yells. She continues to plead with him. Jean-Paul waits for the knight to put down his sword and sweep the princess into his arms.
The children know better.
As the audience’s cries reach a crescendo, the knight plunges his sword deep into the princess’s chest, driving the blade clean through her body and out the other side. Suddenly there is complete silence. All eyes are on the princess and the sword that gruesomely skewers her. The puppet staggers backward and lets out a terrible moan. The knight watches her impassively.
Every child is agog.
The princess takes some time to die. She mutters and gasps, her little hands flapping helplessly at the handle of the sword that is now sticking out of her chest. She turns this way and that, but nothing will save her. Finally, she stops moving and begins to sing a slow, lilting song in that strange language. She completes two verses before finally dropping dead. The puppet falls forward dramatically, her wooden head hitting the frame of the proscenium with a doleful thump.
There is a moment’s silence, then enthusiastic applause.
The puppets are quickly pulled back out of sight, and a moment later a young man appears from behind the tent. He has a thick black beard and wears a hat, which he removes as he bows awkwardly to the crowd. He does not smile, does not say a word. He hands his hat to a little girl sitting in the front row. The puppeteer stares at his shoes as the hat is passed among the audience. Jean-Paul likes his quiet dignity. Once the hat is returned to him, he bows in thanks and disappears again behind the striped awning. Children reluctantly allow themselves to be pulled away by their parents, and new arrivals take their place.
Jean-Paul checks his watch. He has time to watch one more play.
28
Paris, 1919: The First
Betrayal
TO THE LEFT OF MONSIEUR Proust’s bedroom door there was a small Oriental cabinet, upon which were arranged old photographs of the author and his brother when they were children. Next to the cabinet there was a large rosewood chest. Stacked in a neat pile on top of the chest were thirty-two notebooks.
These thirty-two books contained the kernel of Marcel Proust’s masterwork. Between their covers he had already constructed the framework of the narrative. The heart of his fictional world was already beating within those pages; now he was fleshing out the body and creating the spirit of the thing. He was slowly bringing his story to life.
Proust knew the contents of every notebook by heart, but he liked to keep them close while he worked. Sometimes he asked Camille to fetch a particular book so that he could check a detail. He would flick to the page he needed, review the text, and then hand it back to her. Camille was comforted by the notebooks on top of the rosewood chest. If Monsieur Proust’s fears about dying before he finished the book were realized, at least they would remain.
So it was a profound shock when one evening her employer summoned her to the bedroom and issued a most unexpected request. He lay, as usual, propped up in his bed, surrounded by pillows and paper. A small gaslight was flickering by his side, which barely illuminated his face.
“Ah, Camille,” he said, smiling at her through the half-light. “There’s something I need you to do for me. It’s of the utmost importance.”
“Of course, monsieur,” she said. Everything he asked her to do was described in similar terms, no matter how trivial.
“I want you to burn my notebooks.”
Camille stood quite still, unsure she had heard correctly. “Pardon?” she said.
“The notebooks.” He pointed at the rosewood chest. “I want you to burn them.”
Camille stood there, stunned. “Are you quite sure?” she asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Proust.
“But why do you want to burn them, monsieur?”
“It’s not your place to question such things, Camille.”
“It’s just that you are always worrying about what will happen if you die before you finish the book!”
He looked at her through those limpid eyes. “And?”
“Well, if you do die, without the notebooks nobody will know how the story ends!”
“But that’s exactly the point. I’ve had some new ideas, you see.” Proust sighed. “The war has changed everything, and now the notebooks are out-of-date. That’s why I need you to burn them. I know every single one of them inside and out, anyway.”
“But, monsieur—”
“Camille, please.”
The words hung in the air between them. She remained uncertainly by the door.
“I have no wish to discuss this further,” he said after a moment, as softly as ever. “Please burn the books in the kitchen grate, and then kindly come back and tell me when it is done.”
* * *
An hour later, Camille knelt down in front of the kitchen hearth and set a fire. The notebooks were stacked in piles on the floor. She watched as the thin yellow tongues of flame flickered up and down the stack of kindling.
It was wrong to burn the notebooks. It was wrong to reduce all those years of work to ashes. But it was Monsieur Proust’s wish. The notebooks belonged to him, and nobody else. Camille knew that nothing she could say would change his mind. She took the top notebook off the stack and opened it. She gazed at the familiar handwriting. Her eyes drifted down those well-ordered lines. Such clarity of thought, such unerring precision! She would be the last person ever to see these words.
The flames were growing higher. Camille put the notebook into the grate. For a moment the fire was trapped beneath its heft, but then the flames crept around its edges. The black leather curled into crescents, and smoke began to escape from between the pages as they browned and warped in the heat. She watched as the words were swallowed by the fire, reduced to ashes.
She reached for another notebook.
After that she began to work more quickly, throwing books onto the flames in twos and threes, numbly watching the growing conflagration. With every incinerated volume came the sensation of unbearable loss. Each time her fingers released another notebook into the fire’s embrace, it was one more senseless eradication, terrible in its irreversibility.
In the end, her betrayal was an act of self-defense.
Just as Camille threw the final notebook onto the fire, she knew—as surely as she had ever known anything—that she could not let it burn. Instinctively she reached back into the flames. The black leather was already hot to the touch. She forced her fingers to close around the spine of the notebook, and pulled it out of the fire. She let go of it at once, her fingers scalded. The notebook landed on the flagstones. She had been quick. The edges of the paper had not even been singed.
Camille stared down at the rescued book, stupefied by what she had done. Not once had she disobeyed Monsieur Proust in even the smallest way.
She ran a finger across the cover, a thin straight line through the soft ash.
* * *
After she had cleaned the kitchen grate, Camille hid the rescued notebook in her handbag. She was stunned by her own betrayal. All those years of faithful service, undone in a stroke.
She knocked on the bedroom door.
“Ah, Camille.” Marcel Proust looked up at her. As usual, he lay in his bed, surrounded by paper. “I smelled the burning from down the corridor. You did as I asked?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“All the notebooks are destroyed?”
She looked down. “Oui, monsieur.”
“Thank you.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
She closed the door and walked back to the kitchen.
* * *
Camille went home and hid the rescued notebook at the bottom of an old trunk, beneath piles of neatly folded clothes and linens, where Olivier would never find it. In the weeks and months that followed, she did her best to act as if nothing had happened. She tried to pretend that the notebook was not there. There was no furtive rummaging to retrieve it when she was alone in the apartment. To read the words that Monsieur Proust had wanted to be burned would have compounded her guilt still further. The notebook lay at the bottom of her trunk, unseen and unread. Camille was appalled by what she had done, but she was unable to bring herself to destroy what she had stolen. The notebook was hers, now, hers alone, and she was determined not to give it up for anything: she would always have it to remember him by.
She didn’t tell Olivier, fearful that her husband would make her confess everything. Brick by careful brick, she hid her crime behind walls of ashamed silence. But too late, she saw that it was not just the stolen notebook that lay hidden within the catacomb that she had built. Camille herself was trapped in there, along with her secret. There was to be no escaping what she had done.
29
Performance
IN FRONT OF HIM, the puppets dance.
Souren watches the stories unfold at the ends of his arms. His hands move swiftly to the left and right, dropping out of sight as he swaps one puppet for another. He gives each of them a different voice, from the booming bass of the corpulent king to the shrill falsetto of the young dairymaid. One by one, his family comes to life beneath his fingers. Now all those sightless eyes can see.
The crowd is a good one. Families stop and watch the show, grateful for a moment’s stillness in the afternoon’s humidity. A faint breeze rustles the leaves of the chestnut trees above him, but inside the tent it is hotter than an oven. Soon his shirt is soaked through with perspiration and clings to his back like a second skin. At the end of each play, he steps into the sunshine to accept the audience’s applause, and silently passes his hat around the spectators. He never watches to see who contributes and who does not. When the hat is returned to him, it is always full.
Souren thinks about the pianist downstairs, playing the same song again an
d again, those beautiful notes offering charmed protection against some greater ill. These puppets and stories are Souren’s own armor. His hands weave back and forth, his lips murmur incantations. He is casting a spell.
When Souren performs, he speaks only in Armenian.
He thinks of Amandine Nouvel, his first audience, and wonders what stories the children are telling themselves as they watch the puppets skitter across the stage. Most of them sit in haphazard rows in front of the tent, as close as possible to the puppets. But there are always some who stand on the edge of the crowd, clutching a parent’s hand and ready to make a quick escape if the story doesn’t turn out the way it should.
How do they know? Souren wonders when he sees the faces of these anxious children.
He performs folk tales and fairy tales for his audience—familiar stories for the most part, centuries old. But fairy tales are empty comforts to be whispered into the ears of children as they drift toward their dreams. Souren, though, needs to tell the truth, and so:
The wolf eats the woodcutter.
The evil witch has the last laugh.
The princess does not wake up.
The story never turns out the way it should.
Yes, on occasion he is confronted by an angry parent—always accompanied by a loudly sobbing child. But for the most part the cries of the audience betray not fear, but excitement. There are no happy endings to be had for Souren’s puppets, and this is precisely why the children cannot look away.