Paris Twilight (42 page)

The thing that came to view I took to be a miniature Chinese birdhouse, a square-cornered cube with two round holes in its façade and a little squat cupola on top. Then I saw that the holes were lenses, covered with a pince-nez of painted tin, and that the box was an ancient camera, differentiated from any of its type that I'd ever seen by its ornate cloisonné skin, for it was clad entirely, top and sides, in a herringbone of nickel and black enamel. I pictured it immediately on its sly tours of occupied Paris, dangling on a harness-leather strap from the shoulder of a fine Spanish suit. Beneath it was a stack of envelopes, and inside the envelopes were sheaf after sheaf of square photographic negatives encased in numbered plastic sleeves.

“Oops,” I said to Corie as I opened the first. She was busy pulling envelopes out of the box and froze midmotion, and I told her to be careful. “Just don't lose their order,” I said, and (to placate me) she continued doing exactly what she had been only slower.

I held a couple of the plastic sleeves up to the window light, careful to obey my own instruction. I opened another envelope and looked through its array, and then another, witnessing through the acetate the lost world of a Franconia-born Jew during the era when he, Byron Manifort Saxe, was traveling around the south of Europe with his friends Carlos Perigord and Alba Solano Landers, and then the era to follow, without the friends, as his world spun from happiness to tragedy. The photographs were hard to make out in any detail, being in negative and given the cloud-spersed light, but I could see that some were cityscapes, and others portraits, and I kept up a stream of exclamations to Corie as I spotted anything interesting and she gratified me with a grunt or an “Oh, amazing,” once in a while, and once or twice stepped over to squint through the film. And then I came on a heavier envelope that disgorged a sheaf of not film but paper, a thick ream held together by a spring clip. The jaw of the clip had rusted into the top of the first page, branding a brown signature across the title, ילש הבושתה. “What in the world,” I exclaimed, and instructed, “Look,” and asked, “How's your Hebrew?” but I was talking only to myself.

I had been for a while, I realized, for Corie had disappeared. Except that she was still right there, actually, standing in the window with her face buried in a leaf of blue paper. “What have—” I started to ask her,
What have
you
found?
, but she waved me to silence with a slow open hand and edged herself blindly onto the bed. The paper was obviously a letter, on aerogram onionskin, and she clearly was determined to read it through before saying a word about it. “From . . .” I started as she finished the first page and shuffled it behind a second, but I didn't bother to conclude the sentence.

So I plunked down beside her, and watched her face, and waited. At one point she glanced over at me, as hard as though I were a stranger, then went back to reading. When she got to the end she didn't move, and I had to speak to free her.

“It's from Alba,” I said, and she nodded and shuffled the pages again and began with the salutation. “‘My dearest C.,'” she read.

 

How afraid I am for you. Things are becoming worse here & I'm sure there is worse to follow, but I'm not afraid for myself but for you, when you know what I must tell you, & terribly for our Alena. Wednesday I am to be baptized into the church. Voluntarily, they say, or, in the event I compel them to compel me, voluntarily by force. For them, this has become imperative. They'd hoped I would serve as a role model. Now that's what they fear. I have become for them a living repudiation, and they are done putting up with it. This I sense. I cannot know exactly their plans, but I fear my immunity—my prominence—now only adds to my indictment, and will harshen my sentence, for they will devise a penalty to match their shame. I no longer think my conversion will spare me. My Eucharist may be meant as my last rites, a last humiliation to repay me for humiliating them. I have made my preparations & you must attend to this carefully. First of all, C., if anything does befall me you must find your way to your daughter. Not here, though. Get to Madrid. She will be on the mainland within a week. It's how the system works. The mothers here have pieced together much of it, by now, & I have set down what I know on this separate sheet for you, which ferries are usually used & their arrival ports, & the orphanages where she is likely to be sent. They'll keep her for a while, because there is such a glut of children and of course the customers prefer the newborns. But do not wait long. She is lovely & someone will want her. And my poor C., you do not even have a photo, but she will have my barrette & I have also to tell you that she bears a mark, a wound on her hand that is fresh and should be visible, it is as large as I was able to make it, may God and our daughter forgive me. That is what I have to tell you, to look at these details & make yourself a plan, my desperate hope is that you can find a way. Also, I must tell you, because you know everything about me & do not know this, that I do not ask God's forgiveness mockingly, but in the most fervent way. They will not succeed this Wednesday in converting me to their faith but they do not know why. Because Maria Xavier won't let me, true. I cannot betray her by accepting the thing they killed her for refusing. That's one reason, but there's another, simpler. I cannot convert because I've already converted. I have accepted their God, & it wasn't they who led me to him; it was Maria Xavier herself, she is my saint as you are my confessor. For I saw what they did to her, & it was an evil of great consequence. I insist, with every ounce of hatred I can muster for what they've done, that their sin will not be meaningless. But this is where logic has led me, that whether the human race lives on infinitely or dies out entirely, & one or the other must occur, there is no alternative, in either case she will not mean anything, her life, her death, mine, Alena's beauty, the things we fought for—our lives' significance means nothing without a presence outside our puny human sphere, a mind outside of time. I see this now. Our only worth, the meaning of any moral or immoral act, cannot exist solely within us. To exist at all we must be witnessed from beyond us. They tell me prisoners who have experienced torture learn to doubt God, and perhaps they do. For me it has meant the opposite. What I saw, God witnessed, that's the only truth. Otherwise the importance of all I've seen was a passing joke, & all that I have done. And, oh, my C., the thing that I have done. I planned for it & saved up my cigarettes & didn't give them away & when Sister Serafina offered me a light last week I came upstairs and used the first to light the others. I know the ceremony. In this I have experience. How not to douse them & what the burning smells like, & what sort of sore it will leave. When I had three going I clasped her to me with my gentlest arm around her neck and committed on my perfect girl the thing they'd done to me, & made it as bad as I possibly could and could stand to with her screaming. Was that all for a joke, my C., what this mother has done to her child? Something time will forget or diminish, so who cares? I say not. I choose the alternative; I demand to accept my consequence. And into my hell I will drag all these righteous. Only their God can avenge us on the proselytizers. Only a living & attentive God can attest to the weight of my hatred.

 

 

 

 

D
ANIEL, NOW YOU HAVE ALL
that I'm able to tell you, though I can't tell you at all what it means, or even exactly what's happened, what I've been through, for I've been to a place that I'm helpless to describe. At the moment, I'm seated in my study at the partners' desk. I've just come from Portbou. Passim says the forecast is for snow tonight, and I am glad, as though somehow that might make it easier, though it won't. It will cover the grave, there's my solace, but where the grave is I can't know, and who will I share my solace with? Corie left this morning and I am afraid of not having her around to protect me against my mind, which dwells on Emil and cannot leave him alone, and I cannot decide what part is enormous sadness and what even larger part rage. She was so excited to go, my Little One. I saw her off at Charles de Gaulle with the flowered hijab draped around her neck and her russet hair held back by the tortoiseshell barrette that was the one thing Alba ever gave me. I consider it a fair trade: Corie gave me Alba. Anyway, I've kept the brown bandanna. Drôlet drove me home; he assures me I'm still on the tab. I wonder what he knows, but he knows enough not to tell me.

So at last I'm alone in the great house, alone with Saxe and Alba and Carlos, without the garlic of Corie's presence to protect against the ghosts, and now the din of the echoes grows too loud. The wind blows through, and it's no use pretending I can flee again into Saxe's hideaway, whose air would be empty of music. I thought of returning to the Clairière, or finding some nearer hotel. Instead, I think I will open up my parents' bedroom and pull out the linen from the closet and make my home there in whatever way a home can be made, for the little time it's bound to last. Tomorrow the man from Century 21 arrives to give the joint an estimate. Céleste will hate me, but it is for the best.

And then I can begin my preparations for my return to New York. I'm postponing a while longer, to see Odile through her convalescence, and so she can see me through mine. She does not know my injury, but she does know me, whoever I may be, me, unchanged at last into the woman I always was. For I am Magdalena, born and marked and abducted and rescued, and I am her twin, Matilde, who had no idea what past lay in her future, who was raised by friends and summoned by a stranger, to whom it was restored what she had lost, and who lost what she was given,
for whatever I love I will cause to be slaughtered
, as I did you, Daniel, you remember. I've instructed Odile to move in here with me for several weeks, until she's stronger. She can care for me better that way.

And I think to myself, Isn't it funny how we get through the world? At some point in our wanderings, we stumble on a home. And then, in our wanderings, we are never again to leave it. And somehow what has happened here has brought me back to an older place, though not to the place you'd suspect. I see now the chamber I've occupied all this time, the scant few moments that expanded to envelop my life, from which I'll never depart, for all of my departing. For I have burst out of my smallness and entered the whole grand immensity of it.

This you will remember: that afternoon. We'd gone up to New Haven for the day; I had an appointment and we'd thought we'd stay for a meal and race home in time for you to get to work, but then the snow started. It drifted down so light at first, white out of the white-gray, then heavier, and we recognized its determination, knew this was a gathering siege, and we thought of phoning your students and canceling their lessons and getting a room for the night but decided instead to catch the early train back into the city, while we could.

What with the blizzard, the day got dark so early, and Connecticut through the train window was a pen-and-ink Connecticut, a charcoal wash through a gauze of falling snow, the land stunned senseless by multitude, and every sign of life, the headlights at the grade crossings, the smoke trails lashing from chimney pipes, bundled against the mobbing. The forest flew by fast in its nearness, I couldn't begin to grasp it, and the fields ran blue with twilight. You slept. I caressed your head and watched the still world pass.

Then it seemed that we were the ones who were stationary, and the world was the thing in motion, whirring past my watchfulness. I felt your love around me like a kingdom. All was peaceful, not a peace of quietness, but of perfect equilibrium, and my peace took everything into account, understood how it—it itself—would come to an end and dissolve again into the ordinary mess and noise of life, but that's just the thing: its comprehension of its own destruction only compounded my peace. I thought how I loved you, and how someday I would lose you, and I kept you close and perfect inside me through Darien and Stamford and Greenwich and down into the Bronx, the night solidifying outside, and then kept it with me as you roused and gathered and we walked through the clamor of Penn Station—such ominous thunder; above us, the wrecking ball was demolishing the old terminal—and took the local downtown and got off earlier than we had to because, after all, we had the time, and the city was ours entirely, and the snow was falling that would powder every step with confectioner's dust. Every step of every adventure, even a crazy couple assaulting each other in a rocking automobile, even a sonata through a recital-hall window—absurd, sublime—and in between them that other time, incalculable.

We cut through the park after our little curbside intervention, laughing at the joke of it, laughing in relief that it hadn't been what we took it for. Nervous. Laughing in sheer silly nervousness over all that was impending, of just what happiness could be. And then you stopped laughing. We were nearly out of the park. You stopped beneath the giant elm there at the corner of Waverly Place, the enormous branches umbrella'd high above us, and you gathered me to you. I was shocked that your face seemed so serious and sad, as though shaded by that bare-limbed elm. You set your violin down right in the snow and asked me if I would marry you.

Of course I would, Daniel. Of course I would marry you. If I hadn't just wished to dwell a while longer in anticipation of the thing I most wished for, if the suspension wasn't such a bliss that I wanted just to relish it for a day or two, a week or month, before I said, “I will, I do.” And if only you hadn't been so pure about it all. You could have—no, I have waited all the years to make you hear this, so you must hear it—you
should
have told me what was going on; keeping such a secret from me all the way until your induction wasn't the least bit right, now you know, don't you? Of course you do, you found out worse than I did, though quicker, at least, so who's to say what worst is. You said (later, in your uniform, and damn you for being so proud of it) that you didn't want to contaminate my decision by telling me what depended on it, a deferment, your future, your life, as it turns out. That you would want me to marry you only for love and not to save you from something as drab as the draft, but only out of love, and for that, my love, I have hated you all these years. Hated the memory of every step we took that dear night, you with your secret, me with my hesitation, how it could all have been different, and the cramped room that I have lived in could have been our palace all this time. But I didn't hear your need. I stroked your face and said you were lovely and that you must ask me some other time, soon, since for some things I wasn't ready. Wasn't ready.