Along the Infinite Sea (20 page)

Von Kleist filled his own glass and said, “I hope you are comfortable, Mademoiselle.”

“Quite comfortable. This is a lovely room.”

“Thank you. I have leased the apartment for some time, since I first came to Paris.” He sat down and lifted his glass. The sunlight entered his eyes. “I am very glad to see you are well, Mademoiselle.”

I touched my glass to his. “It's Annabelle. And I'm glad to see you're well, too.”

When we had finished lunch, the sun had tipped over the roof and
the room had turned blue and almost dusky. Herr von Kleist asked if I would like to see the other principal chambers of the apartment and I said I would. He stood and helped me from my chair, and his hand was dry and large in contrast to mine. When I stood, dizzy with champagne, he seemed enormous.

“How tall are you, really?” I asked.

“A hundred and ninety-six centimeters.”

“It's very intimidating.”

“Is it? I hope not.”

“Yes, it is. You have almost thirty-two centimeters over me. More than a foot.” I didn't know why I was saying these things. I had had too much champagne. I stared at the buttons of von Kleist's uniform, holding the field gray forcibly closed over his warlike chest, and I thought it was impossible that someone so big could covet someone so little.

“But why should that frighten you?” he said. “It is the natural duty of the large to protect the small.”

I had to tilt back my head to see his face, which was shadowed and quizzical in the absence of the sun. “I'd like to see the library first,” I said.

11.

We made a circuit, and ended in the library again, where the housekeeper had laid out coffee. It was now two o'clock. “I'm afraid I've kept you from your work,” I said.

“Not at all. What do you think of the place?” He accepted a cup and saucer. Men poured wine, women poured coffee and tea. There was something in there, an important reflection, but I was still a little too dull from the champagne to capture it.

“It's magnificent and beautiful and terribly orderly,” I said.

He laughed for the first time, and it was richer than I imagined. “You were perhaps expecting chaos from me?”

“No.” I laughed, too. “But it's very different from my father's apartment. Of course, they'd cleaned it all up for the concert, but you must have noticed the dilapidation.”

He shrugged politely. “I like the peace, you see. If there is disorder, it is hard for the spirit to be peaceful.”

I nodded to the silver-framed photographs clustered on the round table by my side. “Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

I set down my cup and lifted one of them, of a blond woman who held a giggling flaxen-haired child in her arms. They were outdoors, in a field of some kind, with a tree in the background to the left. The woman was smiling hugely. “She looks happy. And quite young.”

“She was. She was seventeen when we married. We knew each other as children. When I returned home from the front on convalescent leave, I discovered she had grown rather abruptly into a young lady, as girls do. I fell in love with her at once. By the end of summer we were engaged, and the wedding took place in October, before I left for the front again. I had just turned twenty.”

“Then you had many happy years together.”

“Yes. We were very happy. She is holding our second child in that photograph. Marthe. She was four then; she is now fourteen and at school.”

“And the others?”

He was sitting in the armchair, several feet away. The coffee cup rested in his lap, and a single index finger curled around the handle. He looked not at the photograph, but at me. “Frederick, our oldest. He is fifteen. Then after Marthe came Klaus, who will be thirteen next month. And Frieda.” He paused. “My wife's name was Frieda. We had not yet christened the baby when she died.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“Yes,” he said. “So was I. At the time, I thought I had accepted her death as God's will, but looking back, I see how bitter I was, and how melancholy.”

“Of course you were. You loved her very much.”

His gaze shifted at last to the photograph. “It is impossible to describe how much.”

The room was protected from the sunlight, as libraries are, and the glow that came from the half-shaded windows fell softly on his face. I had thought last summer that thirty-eight was a vast age, but as I looked at him now I thought thirty-eight was terribly young.

I rose from my seat and went to the corner of the sofa, next to the chair in which he was sitting. His knee nearly touched my dress. It was massive and thick next to mine, the knee of a giant. I couldn't quite comprehend his size; it was so out of scale to what I was used to. He was still wearing his boots and riding breeches. He had apologized earlier for not changing. I laid my hand on his knee, and the patella alone was so huge, my palm couldn't quite cover it.

“You must have been very lonely,” I said.

He didn't move, but his eyes met mine, quite steady. “No. It is impossible to be lonely when there are children about.”

“Is that why Frieda still has her governess?”

He removed the cup and saucer from his lap and set them down on the rug next to the chair, which seemed to me a reckless act of disorder. “You are very perceptive, Mademoiselle,” he said.

“Please, it's Annabelle. And it doesn't take much perception to see that you're lonely.”

“If I am to call you Annabelle, then you must call me Johann.”

I smiled. “I can't. It's far too casual a name to be flinging about in front of that uniform.”

“We are at an impasse, then, Mademoiselle.”

“So it would seem.”

He lifted my hand from his knee and kissed the ends of my fingers. “My intentions are not dishonorable, you know.”

“I didn't think they were.”

“Yes, you did, or you would not have taken so long to reply to my note.”

I smiled. “All right. I did.”

“Then why did you accept my offer?”

His expression was grave and impermeable before me, as if he had staked his all on my reply. His hand still enclosed my fingers. “I suppose I was grateful for the flowers,” I said. “And I need the work.”

“If you are short of money, Mademoiselle—”

“No, no. I have exactly what I need. I will gladly accept payment for today's lesson, however.”

“Of course. But I am afraid I have forgotten to ask the fee.”

“A hundred francs an hour. I hope you can afford it.”

He studied me without speaking. His thumb moved slightly, sliding against the knuckle of my index finger. I thought, Here it is, this is the moment. Time to make good. But my limbs were like molasses, too thick to move. I imagined him kissing me, pushing me back on the sofa, pulling up my dress. I imagined his bristling hair under my fingers, his weight on my limbs, and the bristling hair turned dark and curling, and the body moving on mine belonged to Stefan.

I said boldly, seeking out his gaze, “Lady Alice thinks you want me to be your mistress.”

“Lady Alice should know that I don't keep mistresses.”

“And I don't allow myself to be kept.” I lifted his hand and drew the warm fingers against the side of my breast, atop the sky-blue silk that Lady Alice had chosen for me. His bones were heavy and stiff. “But I don't want to be lonely, either.”

“Annabelle,” he said, without moving his hand, “this is not necessary.”

“I think it is.”

He looked utterly unmoved. But my thumb, pressed against his wrist, detected a bounding radial pulse, and his pupils were like drops of oil inside his pale irises. I thought, when his lips parted, that he would lean forward and kiss me, but instead he said gently, “Why, Annabelle? So that you can become a mosquito, like the others?”

“A mosquito?”

“Don't you remember what you said to me on your garden wall, last summer? You could study the bugs without becoming a mosquito.”

I couldn't breathe. Before I even realized that my eyes had blurred, a tear dropped onto von Kleist's hand, sliding between the knuckles, and then another. And I had never cried once since August; I had prided myself that I hadn't shed a single tear.

His hand moved from my breast to my chin, and his thumb wiped my cheek. “You don't need to be a mosquito for me, Annabelle. I would rather prefer that you were not.”

“I'm sorry. I've made a fool of myself, haven't I?”

“No.” He drew out a handkerchief from his pocket and put it in my hand. “Annabelle, if you want me to make love to you, I will make love to you. I don't think I can resist you if you ask me. But let it not be because you are wishing I was another man.”

“No.” I folded the handkerchief and gave it back to him. “You are far better than that.”

“No, keep it. A souvenir of this first meeting.” He sat back in his chair and lowered his hand to retrieve his coffee cup, while I wrestled with my composure. “Do you ride, Mademoiselle?”

“I used to, before we moved back to America.”

“I ride every morning in the Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps you will allow me to mount you there, from time to time.” He finished the coffee in a final gulp, rose to his feet, and held out his hand to me. “But come. You must go now, Annabelle. I will drive you home myself.”

12.

When I burst through the doorway of my father's apartment half an hour later, my hair was full of wind and sunshine and my arms were full of cello. I dropped the instrument in its place next to the sofa and looked about for Lady Alice.

She wasn't there, but the afternoon post lay on the table, a few notes
only. One of them was postmarked in Paris and addressed to me. I opened it and read that Nick Greenwald had something important to communicate to me about a mutual friend, and would I meet him at my earliest convenience?

I tore the notecard into small pieces and threw it in the wastebasket.

13.

Two days later, I went riding in the Bois de Boulogne with Johann von Kleist.

We met at six o'clock outside my apartment, where Johann was waiting in his rumbling black Mercedes roadster. My eyes were hooded and sleepy, my hair bound back in a clumsy chignon. I had unearthed a set of my mother's old riding clothes in a back closet of the apartment, but Mummy had been tall and they were too large. Yesterday in the market, I had found a pair of secondhand boots that nearly fit.

“I will take those to my valet afterward,” said Johann, as we drove through the chill morning air, “and he will polish them properly for you.”

Already my nerves were coming alive. Maybe it was the vibration of that enormous engine, the energy in the car's swooping curves. I glanced at Johann, who sat rigidly in his seat, polished bright, as if he'd been up for hours. He wore his officer's cap over his blond hair, and his eyes were fixed on the half-dark streets ahead. I had no idea how he packed those legs under the dash. He was so tall, he looked over the rim of the windshield rather than through it.

We were met at the avenue Foch by Johann's groom, who held two gleaming horses by the reins, one a large bay and the other a smaller chestnut mare with a wide and irregular white blaze down the length of her head. Around the rim of the trees ahead, the sky was a pale and expectant blue. The entire city of Paris lay between us and the sunrise.
The groom stepped aside and Johann helped me mount. “Just like old times,” I said, gathering up the reins.

“Like the bicycle, isn't it?” said Johann, and when I looked down I saw that the sunrise was touching the top of his cap, and he was smiling.

He was right about bicycles. My muscles remembered how to ride, though my legs didn't appreciate the activity. We entered through the empty Porte Dauphine and angled left to the lakes, and Johann asked me how I felt and if I thought I should like to go faster. I said I would. When I nudged her, the chestnut moved willingly into a gentle trot, and I found the rhythm at once, the slight and steady up-down that still lingered in my bones, like a waltz I had danced long ago. Around us, the grass and trees were wet with dew, and a yellow-pink haze floated in the air. “It's easier than I thought,” I said to Johann. “And the park is beautiful at this hour.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me.

He wasn't smiling, but his face was softer. He rode like a centaur, like he had come into the world on top of a horse. In the primeval mist, he might have been a thousand years old, dressed in leather and blue paint, riding across the steppes with an army of barbarians, except that he was manifestly not a barbarian. You could not imagine Johann von Kleist without his pressed uniform and his polished boots.

We went off the gravel path and into a meadow, damp and fragrant with new grass, and as the ground opened up I realized how perfectly alone we were, how obviously he was courting me. He didn't want to have an affair; he wanted more from me, and the possibility was too huge, the length and breadth of the opportunity too impossible to imagine. For an instant, I pictured myself a baroness at twenty, with a rich estate in Prussia and four stepchildren, with an apartment in Paris and a fine upstanding husband who would keep me in silks and jewels and never, ever stray.

“You love riding, don't you?” I said stupidly, because I had to say something.

“Yes.”

I thought of his expression a moment ago. I said in French, “You seem different somehow. A little softer, perhaps?”

He chuckled, a relaxed sound. “Maybe so. It is the rhythm, I believe, and maybe the freedom, too. And the horse, naturally. The horse has none of the vices of humanity.” He reached down and patted the bay's neck.

“I see what you mean. You can be yourself with a horse, can't you? You don't have to pretend anything, like with people.” I had switched back to English.

“Yes, exactly. And then one dismounts and goes home and to work, and puts the mask back on. So it goes.”