I stood by the grave for a few minutes and carried on a mute conversation with my beautiful angel, while Arthur chased after a colourful butterfly.
‘Look, Papa, isn’t it pretty?’ he called, but I didn’t heed his words.
To my shame, I must admit that I was paying absolutely no attention to my son, and when I turned around after a short while, ready to leave, he was nowhere in sight.
‘Arthur?’ I hurried a short way down the narrow path, scanning everywhere for his blue jacket. ‘Arthur?’
I peered between the shrubs, ran past a few graves, and decided to check the wooden compost enclosure in the hope of finding him there. It was all for nothing though, since everywhere I looked, the cemetery was empty. I couldn’t help thinking about Arthur’s dream about losing me here, and fear clenched its tight fingers around my heart.
It was a large cemetery, and Arthur was only a little boy.
‘This can’t be happening,’ I muttered as I raced back and forth between the graves. ‘Arthur,’ I cried again, and again even more loudly: ‘Arthur!’
Was he hiding somewhere, playing a trick on me? Maybe he would jump out from behind a gravestone any moment with a giggle.
‘Arthur, it’s not funny. Where are you?’
I could hear my voice growing hysterical. I tried to be systematic about the paths I ran down, checking both sides, but the small figure in his blue jacket was nowhere to be seen.
A cloud skittered across the sun, and suddenly the cemetery took on the appearance of a spooky, shadowy realm in which the stone figures might come to life at any moment. I quickened my pace, rushing past statues whose blind eyes seemed to be watching me, past the dead resting here for eternity, desperate to find my son whom I’d lost due to my own gross negligence.
And then I saw him.
He was standing a short distance off at the foot of a large linden tree. His head was tilted back, and he seemed to be talking to the tree.
What was he doing here? I paused, bewildered, and then drew closer, relieved to have finally found him. Then I heard sudden silvery laughter that seemed to float down from the tree itself.
I stepped nearer, scanning the branches overhead, and heard Arthur say: ‘But Maman’s angel is the prettiest one here.’
A hearty chuckle rippled down from the branches.
Who was he talking to? Was that a woman up there?
‘Arthur! What are you doing here? You can’t just run away like that. You scared me horribly,’ I admonished, gently gripping his shoulder.
He spun around with a smile.
‘This is Sophie, Papa!’ he replied, glancing back up.
I followed his gaze, which is when I caught sight of her.
Concealed by the branches, a young woman was sitting astride the wall. She was as delicate as a pixie, and was wearing dark overalls, her black hair carelessly stuffed underneath a small cap. I would have thought she was a boy if it hadn’t been for the huge dark eyes that studied me curiously.
‘Hello?’ I said, moving a step closer.
The heart-shaped face brightened into a smile.
‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Is this your son?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded a little reproachfully. ‘I’ve been searching for him everywhere.’
‘Sorry about that,’ she replied. ‘I saw him wandering around the cemetery alone, so I called him over here and we ended up chatting.’
She shifted her position on the wall.
‘What are you doing up there?’ I asked in amazement.
‘She fixes angels, Papa,’ Arthur explained to me. ‘I already told her ours doesn’t need any help yet.’
I chuckled awkwardly. ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘In any case, thank you for taking care of Arthur. Who knows where he might have ended up otherwise? The cemetery isn’t exactly small.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I work here.’
She pulled her leg across the wall and swung them both over my head as if she were on a swing.
‘Are you a sculptor or something?’ I asked. My neck was starting to grow stiff from looking up.
‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll climb down.’
She disappeared behind the tree’s boughs, and climbed down a ladder that was leaning against the wall. She decided to skip the last three rungs and simply leaped down to the ground, nimble as a cat.
‘Sophie Claudel,’ she said.
Studying me from under her dark and now slightly skew-whiff cap, which suited her animated face, she extended her hand. Her grip was astonishingly firm for someone so small.
‘So, you’re a sculptor after all,’ I declared with a smile.
‘Oh no,’ she shot back. ‘I’m no great artist like my namesake Camille. I’m not related to her, either, in case that was your next question.’
‘What are you then?’
‘A stone worker,’ she said. ‘I restore statues, funerary monuments, pretty much anything made out of stone.’ She gestured around the cemetery. ‘The Cimetière Montmartre is one of our bigger clients. Some of the statues urgently need new noses, arms, wings . . . ’ She grinned and propped her hands on her hips. ‘Even stone takes a beating over time, and marble won’t last for ever.’
‘What is made to last for ever?’ I asked.
‘No idea. Lovely words, maybe? Your son told me that you write books. Is it true that you’re a famous author, Monsieur?’ Again that curious look.
My God, what had Arthur told this cheerful stranger?
‘Well . . . more of an author of light fiction,’ I corrected. ‘I’m not exactly Paul Claudel.’
‘So who are you?’
‘Oh, excuse me. Julien. Julien Azoulay. But it’s no big deal if you’ve never heard of me.’
‘Do you always hide your light under a bushel?’
‘Where else should I keep it?’
‘Papa, could we show her our angel?’ Arthur begged, obviously bored. ‘Come on, Sophie!’
He tugged at her hand.
‘Sure,’ said the pixie good-naturedly, and I led the way.
A few minutes later, Mademoiselle Claudel was running her fingers across the bronze head and nodding admiringly.
‘Lovely work,’ she said, walking around the gravestone to give it a craftsman’s appraisal. ‘This is good-quality marble, and you’ll enjoy it for many years.’
All three of us were standing around Hélène’s grave, glowing as it was in the setting sun. Sophie’s eyes skimmed the golden inscription, and she reached up to fiddle with a strand of hair that had escaped from her cap, evidently embarrassed.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she finally said. ‘I didn’t know that . . . I mean it wasn’t so long ago . . . ’
‘Yes,’ I cut in quickly.
She shook her head sadly. ‘An accident?’
‘No. My wife had cancer.’
‘Oh.’
‘It all happened very quickly.’
She didn’t reply.
‘And that . . . poem?’ she finally asked. ‘My love, be mine again, like once in May – it almost sounds like . . . ’
‘Like what?’
‘A death wish?’
‘What’s wrong with wanting to be with her?’ I exclaimed bitterly. ‘My life is practically over.’
‘You shouldn’t even think like that, Monsieur!’ Her eyes reflected her shock, but her gaze then turned stern. ‘You have a little boy.’
‘I know.’
‘Self-pity is not a solution.’
‘I know.’ I pressed my lips together, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes for a moment.
When I opened them again, I discovered that a peculiar smile had spread across Sophie Claudel’s face.
‘I need to gather up my tools, and then we can go and eat at my favourite bistro,’ she declared. ‘I would like to tell you something, Monsieur Azoulay, about the living and the dead.’
Looking back, I think that if it hadn’t been for Arthur’s hopeful face, I would have turned down S
ophie’s invitation, despite the insistent tone in her voice. As it was, we followed the stone worker across the cemetery. I couldn’t begin to describe the relief I felt that Arthur had turned up unharmed. Better still if he’d made a new friend. She kept pausing as we walked along, pointing out graves here and there, some of which needed work, others which had particularly lovely features. She explained certain pieces of plasterwork or relief carvings, and finally took us to an especially impressive nineteenth-century bronze statue that was called La Douleur. To reach it, we had to walk up a winding staircase that led to the upper part of the cemetery.
The life-sized figure depicted a mournful young woman with slightly parted lips and loosened hair, which flowed down her back and blended into her floor-length garment. Over the many decades and changing seasons, the figure had assumed a greenish-blue patina. The woman was reclining against a giant gravestone, and her pain looked so real that I found myself rooted to the spot.
‘This figure is one of my favourites,’ Sophie explained.
‘Who is it?’ I asked. ‘Someone famous?’
She shook her head. ‘It was commissioned a long time ago by a mother who was mourning her son’s death.’
We resumed our walk and eventually reached a small shed close to the gates, where she dropped off her tool bag.
A few minutes later, we were sitting in L’Artiste, a tiny bistro with a red wooden façade, situated about halfway down Montmartre. Tucked away on Rue Gabrielle, it was a cosy restaurant about the size of a living room. It contained tables covered with red tablecloths and walls plastered with vibrant posters and postcards from the belle époque. Hanging above a battered leather bench, a gigantic picture of cats in sunglasses with wine glasses sitting around long tables in a park, as in a Renoir painting, decorated the back wall. Arthur laughed out loud at the sight of it.
Sophie was greeted at once by a bearded man behind the bar, who kissed her on both cheeks.
We sat down at one of the wooden tables at the window. Arthur seemed delighted that something had finally happened. We hardly ever went out to eat. He swung his legs and looked all around the crowded bistro. When it came time to order, he wanted to try the lasagne à la Bolognaise, while Sophie ordered a cuisse de poulet and I chose the house boeuf bourguignon in red wine sauce.
Sophie called out something to the bearded man behind the bar, and after a few minutes, he appeared with a carafe of water and two glasses of red wine.
‘How’s Gustave doing?’ he asked as he set our drinks down and gave Sophie a wink. ‘Is everything going well?’
She laughed and rolled her eyes. ‘He’s made a fuss since catching that cold,’ she said. ‘I took good care of him, but now he’s starting to talk back and boss me around.’
The man grinned. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone out there who can tell you what to do,’ he declared before moving on.
I couldn’t help a little smirk. Obviously, Gustave was the pixie’s boyfriend, but I had to admit that I couldn’t imagine anyone bossing her around, either.
Sophie lifted her glass, her sparkling eyes large and dark.
‘To life!’ she said. And when I didn’t react: ‘Well?!’
We clinked our glasses, and somehow I felt both good and surreal as I listened to her explain to Arthur how to use a mallet and how to reconstruct a statue’s broken nose with an internal rod to help strengthen it. And then Sophie turned back to me. She was interested and unselfconscious. She ate ravenously and asked me a thousand questions, jabbing her fork in my direction whenever she wanted to make a particular point.
Without a doubt, this was one of the strangest evenings I’d experienced in a long time. And what was even odder was the fact that I actually shared my innermost feelings with this stranger with the reckless smile. I never would have thought it possible, but I ended up telling her about Hélène, my loneliness, and the hard time I was having focusing on my work.
We sat there, as if suspended in a bubble, and it was as if all the cards were reshuffled. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about things with a stranger than with people you know well and who know everything about you – or think they do.
In any case, I knew nothing about this dark-haired girl who fixed angels, and possibly broken hearts as well, except that she pursued a very unusual craft – the kind you had to learn these days at an academy – and was older than I’d first assumed. I had guessed her age at about eighteen when I’d seen her sitting on top of the wall. In fact, she was twenty-nine.
‘And what about you?’ I asked as the waiter cleared away our dishes. ‘Isn’t it extremely depressing to work in a cemetery? How can you stay so cheerful, considering your profession? All of that – I mean being around that all the time – it must get gloomy.’
Sophie shook her head. ‘No, it’s the very opposite. I value each day I wake up alive, maybe because I’m so aware of how very limited our time is here. We’re just in transit, Monsieur Azoulay. Each day might be our last, which is why’ – her eyes bored into mine – ‘you need to make the most of the day. Make the most of every day.’
I waved this off. ‘As in that old saying, carpe diem.’
She nodded. ‘Exactly. Age doesn’t lessen its value.’
‘I’m not scared of my last day.’
‘But you should be, Monsieur Azoulay. Someday you will be old and grey. Your brittle bones will ache, and reading will be a challenge. You’ll only understand about half of what anyone says to you. You will shuffle through your neighbourhood, hunched over and always chilly, and you’ll feel constantly exhausted by all the living you’ve done. At that point, you can go ahead and die, as far as I’m concerned, and join your wife in that grave. But not now.’
She looked at Arthur, who was now eating strawberry ice cream and colouring his placemat with a pen.
‘That’s a lot to look forward to,’ I quipped.
‘Not really.’
Her eyes took on the same stern look they’d had back in the cemetery. We had probably now reached the time for the promised talk about the living and the dead.
‘Listen, Julien! After such a terrible thing, it makes perfect sense if you are down for a while. That is completely normal. But at some point, you have to stop mourning your dead wife. Mourning is a form of love that only creates more unhappiness. Didn’t you know that?’
I stared at her in silence.
‘Yes. Do you want to be unhappy?’ she asked impatiently.
‘It’s not like you go looking for something like that,’ I retorted.
‘Sure you can!’
‘What do you know about this?’ I suddenly visualised Hélène’s dear face, and shoved my knife and fork together on my plate, a hopeless gesture.
‘More than you’d think.’ Sophie studied me closely. ‘For example, I know that you were just thinking about your wife.’
I lowered my head.
‘It’s just the way it is, Julien,’ she said gently. ‘The dead should always have a room in our memory, somewhere we can visit them. But it is important that we leave them in this room and that we shut the door behind us when we go.’ As we said goodbye outside the bistro, she wished me all the best. ‘I’m sure we’ll see each other around the cemetery. I’ll be there all summer. And don’t forget what I said.’ She turned toward Arthur, who was drowsily hanging on my hand. ‘Take care, little one. And have lots of fun with your grand-mère! Au revoir!’
She walked down the street in her dark overalls and soft sneakers, waving to us one last time before turning down one of the small alley-ways that led up Montmartre.
‘She’s nice,’ Arthur said with a yawn. ‘Almost as nice as Cathérine.’
I smiled. ‘Goodness, someone’s sleepy.’
‘Not me,’ he protested weakly.
I gripped his little hand more tightly and decided that we would take a taxi back home. It was late already.
I looked up into the sky over Montmartre, where the moon drifted forlornly. It was a half-moon, and I wondered
if the old man up there missed his other half as much as I did.
8
All kinds of weather
Like everywhere else, April in Paris is a fickle time of year. And my mood shifted just as frequently as the weather over the next two weeks.
After I saw Arthur and Maman off on the train to the Atlantic coast that Friday, I found myself alone for the first time since Hélène’s death. I mean, truly alone. I unlocked the apartment that was as empty as empty can be, picked up a few of Arthur’s Playmobil figures that were strewn across the living-room floor, and suddenly didn’t know what I was supposed to feel: relieved to be left in peace to fill my time as I wanted, or abandoned and robbed of the last remaining meaningful structure in my life. For a moment I felt panic-stricken and considered calling Maman to tell her that I would join them at the beach after all. But then the doorbell rang.
This time it wasn’t my publisher wondering about the book’s progress. It was Cathérine out in the hall, wanting to know if I might like to go with her to Au 35 for a bite to eat. I must confess that I was almost relieved to see her standing there. My refrigerator was empty, and I had no desire to go to the grocery store. To both her and my own surprise, I immediately agreed to go as I pulled my jacket back on.
Au 35 is a small vegetarian restaurant located conveniently on Rue Jacob, number 35, only a short walk from our building. I had been there several times before. The menu was small, and the food good if you liked vegetarian cuisine. Cathérine had given up meat some time ago, since it appeased her conscience.
I wasn’t particularly picky that day, and while she ate her sesame quinoa balls and I my salade au chèvre chaud, she wanted to know if Arthur’s vacation had got off to a good start.
‘I’m leaving the day after tomorrow to visit my parents for a few days in Le Havre,’ she told me.
It occurred to me that obviously everyone in the building was going to be gone the week after Easter, with the possible exception of Madame Grenouille, who lived on her own in a two-room apartment across the hall from Cathérine. Hélène and I had called her the ‘child hater’ because she was constantly complaining that Arthur didn’t park his little scooter properly in the downstairs entry area. Her eyes gleaming with disapproval, she had never failed to inform us that he was a badly behaved little boy who sang in the stairwell, made too much noise, and bounced his ball too often.
Love Letters from Montmartre Page 7