Quartet for the End of Time (50 page)

Everyone wanted a ride. They held up baskets of clothes or dishes, or sometimes, rarely, fistfuls of damp banknotes in offering.

Américain!
they shouted. It was always a mystery to them how the French always knew, but they did. Even at thirty miles an hour, or perhaps because of it, they knew:
S'il vous plait!
they cried. But they didn't stop, and once they left the city limits they made good progress—arriving at Chartres just before dusk.

—

A
NYONE WHO HAS EVER APPROACHED THAT CITY WILL REMEMBER THE
two spires of the Notre-Dame; the way they rise up from the surrounding fields, as if from the very center of the earth. Everything else seems to spread from those two points in the landscape, flat and empty. It's strange how that is: how the eye, when it fixes on something—just as it fixes on it, and indeed
in order
to do so—causes everything else to fall away. That the central point toward which the eye is drawn, whatever it is, in this way both creates and eliminates the landscape. Alden was thinking about that. About how, if he ever wrote a poem again, something he had not done in a long time, he would try to write something that expressed that idea in some way.

How would it be possible to re-create it, he thought: the authority with which, in a single breath, the landscape absolved itself of mystery and assembled itself around the soaring spires of the Notre-Dame?

A brief, unsettling lull between air strikes overhead only added to the effect. For a few moments, as they drew near the city, there was just the hum of the car and the low strain of the vehicles in front and behind them as they rolled, in a long train, through the ancient gates.

Yes, how would it ever be possible to describe it? In a way that would not, that is, be just a transfusion of images, which (in accordance with the dimming of memory) could only ever, at best, be representative of— therefore, auxiliary to—the thing that it was? As Alden contemplated this, turning it about in his brain—the way that one might move finally
past
representation in a poem, if such a thing were possible, or if it could only be a matter of something like
active intent
? … of, that is, the
desire
to achieve such a thing, while the actual image or object was forced to remain forever absent from the page—another low rumble erupted from somewhere in the vicinity of the city center, as they continued their slow approach. This time the noise came as though from below them, rather than above—as though the earth had begun to crack open; as though in another moment, if they had looked down, they would have seen the ground open and yawning below them, and would have had no choice but to plunge below.

O
NLY THEN DID THEY
realize that the city was on fire. They smelled it first, but then, as they parked the car and made their way along the river toward the cathedral, where Alden was sincerely hoping to find the Canon Delaporte, with whom he had a casual acquaintance, they saw it, too. A dull red glow across the line of the horizon.

Alden knew the canon because of Emmett. It had been just before he'd left for Spain that the two of them had gone to Chartres to meet him—the leading authority on the cathedral's stained glass. They had gone to view the pieces and hear what was known of their history. They spent hours in the church together, sketching the windows so they would remember them. Alden still had those sketches somewhere in his notebooks. He had an idea of someday starting a great poem cycle that would be somehow based on their meticulous structure: part music, part story, part science, part light. Now he thought about those notebooks in his abandoned Paris flat—he had not thought to take them with him—and
wondered whether he would ever see them again. He found himself curiously ambivalent to the thought that he might not. It seemed an appropriate sacrifice. In fact, he hoped desperately in that moment that they might be destroyed utterly, in order that he himself might be spared. If—he pledged—he was indeed spared, he would start all over again; something truly beautiful this time. And though he felt a little doubtful and guilty about what, in the scheme of things, seemed a very cheap bargain, he did not know what else to ask for, or to offer in return, and by that time they were very near the church anyway, so he put the thing out of his mind and began to worry instead that the canon would have already fled the city, or that he might not recognize him—or care to help, even if he did—and any number of other small doubts and apprehensions also passed through his mind.

When at last they reached them, they found the cathedral doors open but no one inside. The great arch of the ceiling as they entered struck Alden as far higher and the inside vaster and emptier than he remembered. This, he soon realized, could be attributed to the fact that where the stained glass had once been, only air now blew through the tall arched frames. On one of the gaping ledges a bird nested. The pews were still set up toward the back, but the labyrinth in the center of the cathedral had been cleared, and their footsteps echoed as they crossed it, resounding louder than they otherwise might have because of how empty the church—with the removal of the stained glass—had become.

It was their luck that, just before they reached the back stairs, which led down to the crypt, they met the Canon Delaporte himself. He did not seem particularly surprised to see them, but neither did Alden detect any flicker of recognition—even when he introduced himself, reminding him of their acquaintance. In any case, the canon nodded solemnly when Alden spoke, and invited them to follow.

In the crypt, thirty or so other refugees—including four postmen, who, like Jack, were intent on joining the French forces outside the city—had already gathered. The space was indeed, as the canon had warned, cramped, owing not only to the large number of refugees, but to the nearly one thousand packing boxes in which, as they soon learned,
the great cathedral windows had been packed away for safekeeping— just as they had been during the aerial bombardments of 1918. Canon Delaporte had supervised the removal of the glass himself on that occasion, and for a second time had, he told them, preemptively ordered the removal of the glass in early 1939. Not one piece had been damaged in the process and the canon fully expected them to survive another war.

D
USK HAD LONG SINCE
settled, but down in the crypt everything was timeless and strange. Soon after they arrived, Jack departed in the company of three of the postmen in order to help collect food from the center —as well as to find out what he could about the location of the French troops, which he and the postmen intended to join the next day. Most of the shops in the city had been abandoned by then, their windows and doors blasted, so that finding provisions to bring back to the crypt was a simple matter of locating a vendor whose stocks had not been picked over too thoroughly by everyone else. But, only minutes after Jack and the postmen had left the crypt, the sirens again began to wail. Paige gave out a startled cry when she heard them, to which Alden responded by pressing his hand into hers.

He'll be all right, he said—too quickly. It would have been better if he'd paused a moment as if he'd really thought about it, he realized, too late.

J
ACK DID NOT RETURN
until many hours later. When he did, the postmen were not with him, and when he was asked about their whereabouts Jack only shook his head. He was pale as a ghost and clutched his arm tightly to his chest, not speaking. A full minute must have passed before finally he said: I'm hit. Then he just stood there, as before, staring around. There did not seem to be any blood.

Let's take a look.

He held stubbornly on to his arm and wouldn't let anyone touch it. That night, because there didn't seem to be anything else to do, they left him alone. But by morning his eyes were rolling up in his head when he tried to look at anything straight, and finally he let the canon near. When the canon touched him on the arm, Jack screamed. It seemed improbable
that a person could make so much noise. Especially down there in the crypt, where the air had become so rarefied and thin, his voice boomed out around them like it was ten or twelve men screaming instead of just one.

Hush, said the canon. Get some iodine.

We have none.

Some rum.

There's none.

Jack continued to scream. Finally, the canon managed to pry out the object that had been lodged in Jack's arm, cleaned the wound as best he could, then wrapped it up in a piece of clean white cloth. He held up the object for Jack to examine.

La coupable.
It was a twisted piece of metal, no bigger than his thumb. Jack held out his workable hand and the canon handed the object to him.

Later in the evening, with the help of some wine—the one thing of which they had plenty—Jack was feeling better and he told them of the confusion he had witnessed above. The two hotels, he said, were packed to overflowing. There must have been hundreds of people in the streets—camped out at the door to the Hôtel de France because there was no more room inside—shouting for those they had lost. Cows, pigs, and horses grazed aimlessly through the streets. There was still fierce competition for the loot that had not yet gone bad in the shops—and for some of it that had. One had to be quick, as it was all being snatched up by semi-organized gangs in order either to be distributed or sold. One man, posing as the manager of the Hôtel de France (the actual manager had abandoned the city some days before), was busy selling the entire contents of the wine cellar at twenty francs per bottle.

War, said Jack, when he reported this, is the great equalizer. For twenty francs, one might have enjoyed everything from the finest cognac to the most undrinkable table wine tonight.

A
MONG THOSE WHO, IN
the chaos, had fled the city was the bishop himself. The prefect, Moulin, showed up at the cathedral to share the news with the canon shortly after Jack's return.

The coward, he said. The rogue. Everyone is abandoning the city. Imagine. The senior doctor leaps into his car yesterday saying, Every man for himself. The bishop does not surprise me—but the doctor? With the hospitals the way they are, he said, full to overflowing? It is unforgivable.

—

T
HE NEXT MORNING
J
ACK LEFT WITH THE REMAINING POSTMAN TO
join the French troops directly south of the city. Alden went along.

It was nightfall before they found any sign of them: a ratty, disorganized unit of something less than fifty men. If they had not insisted upon it, no one would have believed they were still at war.

A day later—the twelfth of June—the air sirens stopped working and there was no warning except the bombs themselves as they rained down on the city. For two days, then, with orders neither to advance nor to retreat, they watched from a distance as the city burned. Finally, the dark clouds, which had threatened for as many days—indistinguishable, above them, from the billowing clouds of smoke that rose from the burning city—broke, and a thunder and lightning storm drenched the fields.

It was not until the sixteenth of June—the Germans just on the horizon—that they finally fled. For days there had been talk among the men of heading south, toward Spain (indeed, many French soldiers had already departed in that direction), but that was the direction from which the German troops were also arriving—it seemed like walking into a trap. It was Gilles Dupuis, from Bourgogne, a small man with a closely trimmed mustache and a nervous tic, which made his eye flutter when he spoke, who proposed heading west instead. Crossing over into Switzerland at Lebetain—a border area he said he knew well. Jack was too weak to go along. He held his side, which was beginning to stink under the bandage he refused to change, and said to Alden, You'll do fine without me. I bet the Germans ain't half as bad as hoofing it to Switzerland or Spain. So Alden went. Traveling west with Gilles and
three other French soldiers, camping in the open air, and listening to the rattle of artillery fire in the distance as the Germans, behind them, slowly closed in.

I
T WASN
'
T UNTIL LATER
, after he had returned to Paris, that he learned what had happened in Chartres. About how the prefect had stood alone, in full uniform, in the courtyard of his private residence when the German general drove up to the yard. How the general had asked him to approach, and how the prefect had refused. He would agree to the terms of surrender, he said, only from within his official residence. The general turned abruptly to his companion, said something in German, and drove on.

The prefect changed quickly, then, into civilian clothes and walked the short distance into the city. There were Germans everywhere. The chief occupation of most seemed to be employing the labor of French refugees in collecting whatever was left from inside the abandoned shops.

The first person the prefect recognized was a French baker, whom he had long suspected as a German spy, arm in arm with a German soldier. The prefect greeted the two, giving the baker a cold stare.

Hello, Prefect, the baker said. This German officer is most eager to see the great cathedral of which he has heard so much.

The two continued on.

Toward noon, the prefect returned to his residence, where he was told that two German officers requested an immediate audience. He dressed quickly and invited them into his office. There, he was asked to follow the officers to their headquarters at the Hôtel de France, which had recently been commandeered from the opportunists and refugees. Having no choice, the prefect accompanied the officers to the hotel, where he was kept waiting under armed guard for the general. But the general never appeared. After several hours passed, the same two officers who had invited him to the hotel arrived again to inform the prefect that retreating French soldiers had raped and massacred French women and children just outside the city.

Impossible, said the prefect.