I paused, searching for words to describe the strangeness of the memory, until now so long obscured. Madeleine’s gaze was fixed on me unwaveringly. ‘And then?’ she whispered, almost reverentially.
‘I was, for some moments, completely mystified about everything – who I was, where I was, how I had come to be there. My surroundings had not changed. Rather, it was inside me that everything had changed. What is my name? I wondered, and my name suddenly appeared to me. Where am I? I wondered, and the word Paris rose to the surface of my mind. Where am I from? Suddenly Berlin appeared. Who was this woman splayed on a chair before me? A book peddler who’d offered to read my fortune. And so on, a gush of memories surfacing one after the other, all in the space of a moment.
‘A policeman arrived in his képi and black cloak. The waiter launched into a complaint about the book peddler, how something ought to be done, that it was bad for business, just look at the state of this young German fellow, and all for what? In a display of anger, the waiter kicked the woman’s cart, tipping it over on its side so that books were spilled across the pavement and passers-by had to step around them. One of the onlookers said the woman was a necromancer, and that I had been mesmerised. The policeman asked me if, indeed, this is what had happened. In my stupefied state, I could barely manage a nod, but when he asked if I wished to file a complaint, I shook my head. Did I wish to be taken to the hospital? “No,” I said, “I’ll be fine.” I stood awkwardly and fell back again into my chair, raising a gasp among the onlookers. I was suddenly convinced I was in some kind of unknown danger, that I must distance myself from the scene. I took a coin from my pocket and pressed it into the waiter’s hand. “Please,” I said, looking to the policeman and the onlookers, “go about your business, everything is as it should be.” The small crowd dispersed, and I turned to the woman before me, helping her to stand. She swayed uncertainly on her feet a little. I held her hand until she steadied, then picked up her cart and began gathering the fallen books. With one arm clasped around her waist to help her walk and the other pushing her cart, I made my way from the café towards a nearby bench. I lowered her gently. Her eyes were open but she seemed barely aware of her surroundings. I had no money to call for a doctor or ambulance. In my confused state, I was powerless to help her any further. I left her there, on the bench, beside her cart of books, her mouth opening and closing mutely, as if wishing to ask a question but not sure of what question to ask.
‘I can’t remember how, but I made my way back to my hotel room and went to sleep. I slept almost a full day, only waking the following afternoon. When I went down to the hotel lobby, the concierge asked me if I was feeling better. Apparently I had screamed so loudly in my sleep that the staff had knocked several times at my door, and had even resorted to entering the room at one point. I had told them, when they had woken me, that there was nothing the matter, that they needn’t worry. I had no recollection of this middle-of-the-night interruption. I suppose this must have been the beginning of the nightmares. They’ve continued just about every night ever since.’
My story had a curious effect on Madeleine. When it ended, she looked down at the empty space in front of her for some time, plunged in thought. I studied her face, lit by the glow of the bedside lamp.
‘We’ve met before,’ she said.
‘Where?’
She flashed a sad little smile. ‘You won’t remember.’
‘A long time ago? In another life, perhaps?’
‘It was.’
‘Was it in Berlin? Were we at university together? I think I’d remember. There weren’t many women students back then.’
‘No, it was in Paris.’ She lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. ‘Other places too. But there’s no point talking about it.’
‘No, no, now that you’ve brought it up I must solve the mystery. It seems you can remember the occasion, and I cannot. But perhaps if you give me a clue . . .’
She was leaning back on the mattress, looking down at one hand, which skimmed back and forth across the duvet. ‘Can I tell you a story instead?’
‘Will it answer my question?’
‘Perhaps.’ And she began telling me the tale of the albatross.
Until only two or three generations ago, there existed, in Paris as throughout the world, people who earned a living of sorts as storytellers. In taverns and coffee houses, around banquet tables and campfires, people gathered to listen to their tales, tales the storytellers recited with great skill, perfected and elaborated over years and decades. Sometimes their stories rhymed or were sung. Sometimes they lasted several days, weeks or months. Each night, people would crowd around the storyteller, eagerly awaiting the next instalment. Mechanical printing ended the era of the storyteller, just as radio or cinema or some other wonder yet to be invented may one day end the era of printing. But to hear Madeleine tell her story was to be magically transported back to that era. Everything about the way she told it was mesmerising. Her diction was low and precise, obliging me to lean in to capture every word, but her voice dipped and soared according to its own music. She kept her facial expressions and physical gestures to a minimum at first, but as her story progressed so were its twists and turns enacted by her body. As for the story itself, it was breathtaking. The tale of the albatross was the myth of two young lovers, a young woman called Alula and a young man – a mere boy, really – called Koahu, who lived on a faraway island, and of their exile. I have since committed it to paper, writing everything of it I can remember – but mine is a pale imitation. There are a great many details I cannot recall, for one thing, and for another I cannot tell the story the way it was told to me. I can scarcely reconstruct the circumstances of its telling – the nocturnal silence of the city outside, the soft light of the bedside lamp, the curlicues of blue smoke rising from the glowing end of a cigarette, the scent of sandalwood.
Sometimes now, when I can’t sleep for worry or boredom or both, I like to play a game with myself. I try to pin down the exact moment I fell in love with Madeleine. I am quite certain that when she began her story, I was not in love with her, or at least I hadn’t realised I was in love with her. I hadn’t fallen in love for years. I considered myself inoculated against it. But by the time she had told me her story – which was only her first story, the first of many – something had changed inside me: I was unexpectedly, involuntarily, wholly in love, not just any love but a consuming love, an unwanted love, an inconvenient love, the kind of love that a man wants to be cured of, that makes a man feel ashamed of himself, only the more he denies it the more entangled he becomes, like one of those nautical knots that tightens with every pull. It felt like an infection, a sudden illness, in which everything is at once the same as it was before and yet transformed. Being in love is a kind of hypnosis and, as any hypnotist will tell you, to be hypnotised one must secretly want to be hypnotised, so secretly that one doesn’t even know it. Falling in love is an act of involuntary will.
Perhaps it was Madeleine’s story I fell in love with, more than Madeleine herself. Perhaps the spectrum of love is broader than we think, and it is possible to fall in love with a story, or a song, or a film or painting, the way one falls in love with another person, only one assumes it is the storyteller one is in love with, the singer, the actor or artist, because the thought hasn’t occurred to us that it is possible to fall in love with a thing. I knew her story was a fiction, but I believed it all the same. Our passions seem unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. But as much as I was enchanted by her story, I never considered it anything other than a story – a marvellous story, granted, perhaps one of the most marvellous stories I’d ever heard, but just a story. Madeleine, on the other hand, seemed wholly convinced that the story she was telling was not only true, but that it had happened to her, and by implication also to me. She believed these stories the way others believe in the signs of the zodiac. This was completely new to me. I had never before fallen in love with someone who held beliefs so different f
rom my own. But there are a great many beliefs in common currency that are less credible than Madeleine’s were, and the mysteries of love do not require the complete alignment of convictions. I was drawn to her despite these differences, and I couldn’t understand why. That is a riddle I am still trying to solve.
When her story, or at least what would turn out to be its first instalment, was done, I blinked as if waking from a dream. Through the cracks in the shutters, I could see the first blush of sunrise. Madeleine was already half-asleep. ‘We have to go.’
We walked towards the river in silence. The streets were an especially delicate, limpid blue, and their stillness was enlivened only by the occasional errand boy or delivery man, here a staggering drunk, there a woman of the night returning home at the end of her work. The bakeries were open, as were the workers’ cafés, their windows crossed with brown adhesive tape in case of bombardment, but the rest of the shops were shuttered, some with the ever more common sign: Closed until further notice. Pedestrians walked about carrying their boxed gas masks. By the time we got to the river, the sun had just risen above the rooftops. We walked along Quai Voltaire. Diamonds of light sparkled through the leaves of the riverside trees. We passed the green bookstalls of the bouquinistes, their tin lids fastened overnight with great iron locks.
As we walked, we heard a rumble disrupt the morning stillness from further upriver. As we neared the Place Saint-Michel, we saw the Pont Saint-Michel was clogged with cars, lorries, tractors, horses and oxen, each piled high with furniture and mattresses. Evacuees, haggard and exhausted, escaping the German advance for southern safety. Some were on bicycle, others pushed carts, wheelbarrows and prams. Their vehicles had northern and Belgian licence-plate numbers. The mattresses that crowned their vehicles were intended to protect them in case of strafing by Stukas. Street urchins nipped at their heels, selling newspapers, water, choucroûte and hot chicory. Along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the crowds in the cafés and restaurants spilled over into the streets. These signs of imminent invasion did nothing to dull the glow of intense happiness I felt walking arm in arm with Madeleine. They had the opposite effect: they burnished it. They gave it a counterpoint and a purpose.
I felt Madeleine squeeze my arm. ‘We must go back to the cemetery.’
‘Why?’
‘My gun.’
At the Pont Neuf we turned right into the Rue Dauphine, where calm was restored. Away from the tumult of the southbound boulevards, the streets were empty. We turned into the Boulevard Mazarine, crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain and continued onto the Rue de l’Odéon. The echo of our footfalls bounced off the surrounding walls, plastered here and there with posters demanding Silence! The enemy is listening. We stopped to look in the window at Shakespeare and Co. The shop was closed, but a cat was reclining on a shelf, blinking contentedly among the books on display, its ginger tail twitching. Adrienne and Sylvia were stirring upstairs, I imagined, among those who refused to leave Paris. In a couple of hours they would open the store as usual. The store of the antiquarian bookseller Jacquenet was a little further up the street. We stopped to look there too. My attention was taken by an advertisement pasted on the window. It was a notice of an auction that was to take place the following week at the Hôtel Drouot.
‘What is it?’ asked Madeleine. She craned her neck forward and mouthed the words as she read them, before stopping and looking at me with eyes wide.
‘It can’t be,’ she said, leaning against the glass, her hands shielding the sides of her face as she scanned the interior of the store. ‘And yet . . .’ She gasped, drawing back and putting her hands to her mouth. ‘There,’ she said, pointing to a table on the other side of the window, upon which were a number of volumes on display stands. ‘There on the right, the small volume. Do you see it?’
‘Yes.’ It looked innocuous enough – a slim volume bound in dark red leather. I studied it at length. The title and author’s name were embossed on the cover for all to see: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Madeleine, but when I asked her what she couldn’t believe, she didn’t reply. Instead, she fell into a silence that continued until we reached the cemetery.
The previous afternoon, as the air raid sirens wailed, I had flung the derringer over the cemetery wall into the back section of the cemetery, which, like the older Israelite section on the other side, is reserved for Jews. Here, the family crypts are covered in stones and engraved with names like Cahn and Meyerbeer. This was where we now headed, scouring the weeds between the plots until I found the gun lying atop a grave. I opened the bullet chamber. It was empty. I was standing there, gun in hand, when Madeleine suddenly approached, wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me languidly on the mouth. ‘Drop the gun into my pocket,’ she whispered into my ear. I folded my arms around her waist and, kissing her, did as she asked. At that moment, an old groundskeeper holding a rake and a shovel sauntered by, whistling tunelessly. When he saw us, he changed direction and wandered off. Madeleine pulled her head back and looked at me as if trying to memorise my face. Her dark eyes were so near mine I could see my reflection.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, pulling away and blushing. ‘I forgot myself.’ My heart beating wildly, I pulled her back and kissed her again.
We set off, hand in hand, towards the exit we’d passed through the previous evening, which already seemed a distant age. On Rue Froidevaux, Madeleine stopped before a Morris column to read a government ordinance:
EXPATRIATE GERMANS LIVING IN FRANCE
You must report immediately to the nearest police station.
Bring no more than one bag containing your daily essentials.
Disobedience of this order will incur the maximum penalty.
By order of the Ministry of the Interior, 18 May 1940.
‘You must leave,’ she said. ‘You can’t turn yourself in.’
‘I know, but where would I go? My papers aren’t in order. I can’t leave France. I don’t have an exit visa. I don’t have money.’
‘How does one get an exit visa?’
‘You apply at the Ministry of the Interior. But my application would be denied. I don’t have a release certificate from the internment camp. They let us go without them so that we wouldn’t be granted exit visas. That way we can’t leave.’ I gave Madeleine a fatalistic smile. ‘I’m like you. I have nowhere to go.’
She curled her arms around my neck, closed her eyes and kissed me again. Even if at that moment I had been magically wired the money I had been waiting for and granted every piece of paper I needed – a release certificate, an exit visa, a real passport (not the Schengen substitute that served only to mark me out as a dubious exile), a ship’s boarding pass, a Portuguese transit visa, an American entrance visa – I doubt I would have gone anywhere.
{1}
The Auction House
MADELEINE AND I NEVER discussed how long she would stay. She just did. To me, every moment we were together was a gift, a stay of execution. Ambushed by love, I succumbed to it without thought to my survival. It was a love devoted entirely to the present, without a thought for tomorrow, and thus was entirely of its time. I should have been at the railway station with my black suitcase, camping out on the platforms with the crowds, waiting for a place on a train headed south. Only I didn’t want to go.
The writers, artists, publishers, intellectuals and other natural enemies of the Nazis, in those last few weeks of the Third Republic, adhered to two opposing schools of thought about how best to survive: there were those who opted to leave and those who preferred to stay. To leave – provided one had the money and the papers – was to abandon an entire life, to embrace exile, to choose to be cut off from everything that was familiar, to risk destitution. And yet to stay was to risk, once the Germans arrived, internment, interrogation, torture, even death. Every time I saw someone I knew, when I bumped into Arthur or Fritz on the stairwell, for instance, or a friend in the street, or if I came across t
he postman or my landlady, we discussed the matter: stay or go? Go or stay? I was in the remain camp. I felt I was faced with two different kinds of suicide, and in the face of this choice, my decision felt arbitrary and therefore inconsequential. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my adopted city. I was too old to adopt another. And, in any case, if worst came to worst, I had sixty-four capsules of morphine, enough to kill a horse. They’d accompanied me everywhere since I’d left Germany seven years ago. Death would be easy. Painless. Blissful, even.
But now, having met Madeleine, I found my thoughts on the matter changing. I was still in favour of staying, only now it was because I wanted to, not out of despondency and torpor. Over the following week, we spent most of our time in the apartment, or walking the streets of Paris like tourists, living on cheap red wine from Languedoc, Salomé cigarettes and rationed bread, in a state of profound contentment. The little world we spontaneously created between us felt more real than the outside world, which at any rate was falling apart. The greatest of our pleasures, in that time, was to tell each other stories. Madeleine overcame my natural reserve by peppering me with questions about my childhood, travels, the people I’d known, the books I’d read and, above all, my dreams. Madeleine’s stories were of an altogether different nature: she continued recounting the tale of the albatross, a story that spanned generations and continents. Her stories never lasted more than an hour or two, with occasional questions from me to illuminate some obscurity or clarify some uncertainty, before her energies withered and she began to apologise, saying she could go no further, she was spent. She would curl up, lay her head on my shoulder or my chest, and fall asleep. She was like a cat that way, asleep more often than she was awake. While she slept I would take out my grey notebook and write down everything I’d just heard. I didn’t want to forget a single detail, and yet, even so soon after the telling, there were so many I could already not recall.
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