Paris Twilight (24 page)

I said I understood, and I held up my palm to take the oath forsaking all competing complications, but he wasn't going to treat the matter blithely. “Swear to me,” he insisted.

I heard his earnestness, and without even thinking
But what of the letters we're translating, what of our talks on rue Nin?
I lowered my hand to his arm and squeezed it, a firm, steady grip, sincerity's talons. “I promise.”

That relaxed him, and he cheered up a little. “You know that we're twins,” he told me, and I said, “No!”—shocked. Close in age, I had guessed, but I hadn't guessed this, and I confessed that I'd thought Odile was somewhat younger. “Sorry,” I said, and that got another laugh, this one rueful.

“By twenty minutes,” he allowed. They were minutes separating good luck and bad, between making it to the curb and getting caught in traffic, safe or in harm's way. “She got the palsy, and so the blindness and the paralysis,” and somehow, as if that weren't enough, the afflicted heart. Odile had had a whole life of health emergencies, he told me. She was handed all the curse in that way—such was her reward for letting him go first—while he received only blessing.

“Like your cancer, for instance,” I ventured.

That paused him. “So you know about that.” It was his turn to say it. I shrugged: of course. “Willem mentioned it.”

“The lymphoma,” Emil asserted, to be sure.

I said, “Right.” And he said that if you were going to get cancer, “get that one,” non-Hodgkin's, hundred percent recovery if you catch it in time, “and they did.” He considered it a bullet dodged, and that was blessing enough. His good luck had deepened his debt.

Early in life, he told me, he'd made it one of his blessings to see Odile through her trials. And did so, until this one, when necessity was intervening, and it bothered him that, the way things stood, he couldn't be around to help her navigate this ultimate peril, and it wasn't a matter he would ever leave solely to Willem.

“You two are opposites, that's why,” I offered. “Willem's a cutter and you're a diplomat, you prefer the talking cure.”

His head shook. “We're not that different,” he said. “In that regard. He stabs. I manipulate. We're both in the business of performing an evil to do the world some good. We're like the general: we have to believe that the ends will absolve the means.”

“Then maybe you should have more faith in him,” I offered.

“Oh, well!” Emil exclaimed. “Hasn't he enough in himself!” He enumerated: Willem's faith in medicine, in his practice, in progress, in his ability to do good, “and to be good, as a consequence.” He had the secular man's full faith in reason: rationality was Willem's innocence. Which was exactly why Emil had hired him, he said, “because in the service of those delusions he's made himself into someone who can help me. You see, I can be sure that he'll help me, because you can get a rational man to do anything,” there being an excellent and reasonable argument to justify any particular act. It was something else all good diplomats understood, “that there's no such thing as rational morality,” and I wish I'd thought to ask him, right there, what all this philosophy had to do with Odile's surgery.

But I didn't, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway, for Emil's graveness had lifted and, with a quaff from the tulip glass, he launched into another of his “toots,” about how morality defended on reasoned grounds always came down to self-interest—we should be good to others so they'll be good to us in turn
—
but that self-interest was at best amoral. “At best. And that's the catch.” You can't base morality on amorality, he said. “The formula doesn't add up.”

At any rate, for the surgery, he wanted someone who could slough off doubt, someone impervious to hesitation, and that was Willem. But when it came to putting his sister under and observing her journey and escorting her back and welcoming her home, he wanted someone else, an individual who knew the full consequence when something awful happened. Not abstractly and reasonably, but viscerally, and with a searing intimacy. “Someone fallen,” he said. “I don't want anyone who has never faced the penalty. I want someone who has, and who's taken it to heart.”

One time, after one of her girlhood surgeries, he told me, Odile had hit a snag coming back to consciousness. It wasn't even a big procedure, though major enough to require general anesthesia, and she'd come through all of it fine until the end, when she seemed to be headed for a fate like Mrs. Singleton's. For seven hours after she was wheeled into the recovery room, Odile had lain in a coma, on the bottom of the deep end of the pool, family and doctors huddled around her gurney like pallbearers, her vital signs steady but dire, and Emil only a kid himself, of course, but he thought he would go insane standing there small amid the helpless grownups, knowing his small sister was right beside him but that he couldn't get to her to pull her back out of the dark. And then, mysteriously, the lines on the displays had budged a bit, and the beep of the monitor quickened, and deep inside her, Odile began her ascent.

No wonder the man was terrified. I listened to him describe all this, standing there at the wool-smelling bar in the Chemin Vert on a rainy night in Reims, and the look on his face brought to my mind a patient I'd once had who as he drifted off into his narcosis was overwhelmed by an event from earlier in his life (this so frequently happens), a day when he'd thought he'd lost his teenage son to a canoeing mishap on—what river was it?—the Broad. Canoeing on the French Broad River. The man's expression as he relived those minutes, his son missing beneath the Broad's brown current, was as spooked and stunned as Emil's was now.

That was one thing that occurred to me. And the other—oh, Daniel, may I tell you this?—the other thing I realized, as I took in Emil's tale and held his arm and witnessed his living torment and felt I was inside his skin, his mortal, his survivor's skin, was that for the first time since I loved you, I was falling for someone, for someone else. That I might have a chance with Emil. The clamor of the bar had abated entirely, lifted like a ground fog, and the crowd had fled away and the air was silent as a séance and even his voice, Emil's voice, was far, far away, the air full of light. My little swoon caught me so suddenly that I had to struggle back onto the path, had to swim back into the subject and the moment and get the room to resume again.

“I know what you're saying, though, about Willem,” Emil was telling me when I'd made my way there. “He's reliable. He'll do what I tell him or tell me why not. He'll do what he's paid for and do what's professional. And do it very well. And if Odile died, he'd review his procedures and make his improvements, and continue on his way a better doctor. He'd be demanding of himself. But he wouldn't die with her. He's too blameless.”

“Blameless?” I asked, but I was really just announcing my return and arrival, using my voice to assure myself I had one.

Emil repeated the word. “Look, Willem thinks that pain is an error to be fixed and that evil is an anomaly, a glitch in the great march of progress, and not something alive inside you that you can touch and feel, and fear. That's not something you know unless you're fallen, unless you've touched it.”

“And you have,” I challenged him, to hear myself.

His rejoinder was sharp in its swiftness. “You have too.”

It was exactly then that the wiry imbecile appeared so close in front of me, stepped between me and Emil, his face peering directly into mine with those lidless, urgent, whistler's eyes, and he reached over with a spastic finger and tapped me on the hand.

 

 

 

 

B
LOOD AND SNOW
.

Push, pull. Blood and snow.

Push, pull. Again, I'm writing you—or maybe I should say: Boo, Daniel! A letter, my love, can you believe?—from Portbou, and if I've been silent these last couple of days, the
incomunicado
is all self-imposed, for I had written, of a sudden, all that I could bear to write, and had to stand at the window awhile to collect my wits and catch my breath.

I'm like the painter of Emil's old painting, or at least I'm the way Emil described him: he'd get so overwhelmed by the extreme photographic
presentness
of the lions and tigers he was drawing that midcomposition and midbrushstroke he would flee from the canvas in terror and throw open the studio windows to gasp and wheeze until the menace had escaped into the atmosphere and his heart could quiet down. Never mind that to everyone else, his fanged menagerie was as toothless-pretty as a string of paper dolls, as my words must seem to you. With every pen stroke in my effort to depict these events for you and, through their depiction, to prepare to ask my question, behind each of these words lies a world of detail that I sometimes fear I've only imagined and whose imagining I fear I cannot begin to depict.

The more I try to straighten matters out and arrange them plainly for you to see, the more things tumble together in my mind, and my conversation with Sahran gets butchered into bits—Emil saying, “She sounds like a brat,” Emil saying, “The only way to make love last a lifetime is to cut the lifetime short,” Emil saying, “
Haraam
also indicates blood”
—
and then those bits get enmeshed with all this stray extraneous flotsam, some canoe trip a patient took with his son on the French Broad River, for Pete's sake, and the relative, or was he, who bequeathed you a clarinet. The French Broad, you know, is in North Carolina, but that's what I mean, the walls cave in.
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees
. I've never been to North Carolina. My thoughts lie in rubble, and I find I need you more and more. The great orderly comprehension of things I so wish to present to you is something I think I'll gain only on the day you reveal it back to me.

With all the things Emil and I said to each other and all that we did on our trip that day, with all the happiness it gave my heart, why is it that when I think of it now, the phrase that comes quickest to mind is
blood and snow
? Because that's how the evening ended? It was well into tomorrow when our little excursion got back home to Paris. Our return trip was slowed by another turn in the weather, which hit us before we made it out of Reims, hit us, in fact, before we could even get into the car.

It was pouring when we burst from the door of Le Chemin Vert. We huddled resolutely under our umbrella and raced down the street as though evading a fusillade of rifle fire, Emil's urging arm around my shoulder, the rain pounding mercilessly. And then, halfway down the block, silence, complete and instantaneous. The last raindrop thrummed into the pavement with a snare-drum finality as though someone had twisted the tap and throttled the storm.

The air around us stood erect and glistening and mysterious and empty: anticipating. The wet, washed façades of the square's old buildings, the washed giant ribs of the cathedral, the scrubbed glass domes of the streetlamps dripping slowly onto the wet curbs.
Regardez!
they instructed, and when we looked up—Emil had dipped his umbrella in his astonishment and was scowling at it accusingly—we saw it coming, a high, lace counterpane of snowflakes drifting down so, so slowly, billowing so motionlessly it seemed to suspend in the air forever before the first flakes reached our faces and mobbed us at last with their embrace.

I've never known as exact, or as thorough, or as instant a benediction as that snow. A mere degree had shifted, the sky had slipped a fraction of a Celsius degree and thrown the world from yin to yang, and every threat, dread, inclemency, and darkness was dispelled by the gentlest, most cold and weightless white. We headed back to Paris down a country highway brighter by far than the same one we'd traveled at noon.

The next morning, the snow was my evidence that the night before had happened, and I sped to the window of Emil's bedroom and pulled the drape aside as though the miracle in my imagining could be made real only if corroborated by the other on the ground. How relieved I was to see its accumulation! And how frigid it would be an hour and a half later when we stepped out to make our way through it.

I wouldn't have stepped at all, would have remained quite contentedly beside the red embers in Emil's fireplace, if I weren't drawn by a mission, sparked by the thing that Emil had been meaning to tell me. We were almost done with a late-morning breakfast of day-old croissants and marmalade and espresso set out not in the Sahran family dining room by the Sahran family housekeeper, who was off on account of the weather, but prepared by our helpless selves and consumed beside our self-assembled fire. Emil jumped up and ran off somewhere and I thought he was after more tinder. He came back with a large manila envelope that he dropped into my lap. “I keep forgetting to give you this. I ran down a couple things,” he said. “About your Saxe and Landers chaps.”

I sprang the metal tabs and extracted the contents, which weren't much, some pages from a dot-matrix computer printer—Bureau of Vital Statistics stuff—and photocopies of several newspaper clippings, evidently, from the tatters and the typeface, very old ones. I went for the obvious first, that being the one with a photograph. It was an article from the paper
Ce Soir
. “Gala to Celebrate Election Victories in Spain,” the headline stated, and after a dateline in March of 1936, the story commenced about a “dance and dinner reception to be held by the Iberian Daughters of Marianne and Communards d'Espagne” to commemorate Spain's newly elected government “hosted by the distinguished Carlos Perigord Landers, temporary honorary Spanish consul to the Élysée Palace, at Landers's gracious home in the Seventh Arrond.” The consul, it was explained, was a dual citizen of France and Spain, son of an Aranese nobleman and a French heiress who had returned to Madrid last month to confer with members of the incoming administration. “Spain is unified in joy behind the prospect of a new era,” he told
Ce Soir
, “when workers and peasants will at last lead their beloved country into the front rank of modern democracies.”