Before the club in Paris, and before the Frenchman, I was a woman in a fortress.
Or, more precisely, I lived with my husband and two children in La Commanderie, a medieval fortification at the center of the French village of Aubais, pronounced “obey,” as in “love, honor and . . . Aubais.” Built by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century, the fortress stood high on a hilltop and could withstand attack from every angle. There were arrow slits in the walls and a perch from which to spy the enemy coming. The foundation was sunk deep into the rock of the village, rock that millions of years before had formed the Mediterranean seabed. Occasionally, when I examined the rock, I would find imprints of fossilized shells, ancient swirls of disintegrated calcium that created the bedrock of the entire region. The fortress rose from this long-gone sea like a stone Leviathan, strong and unsinkable. It was a defensive place, a place of barriers, one meant to resist catapults and battering rams. A place in which we could shut everything out, even the truth.
An ancient granite wall surrounded the fortress. Outside the wall the sun scorched the streets to a sizzle. Inside, a deep shadow fell over a courtyard, where my family ate lunch at a weathered wooden table. I picture us now, as we were then: My two children, Alex and Nico, our pug Fly Me to the Moon (Fly for short), and our three cats: Napoleon, Josephine, and ChouChou. I see me, a thirty-six-year-old woman in an oversize sundress and sunglasses, walking barefoot over hot flagstones, slipping between slats of sun and shade as I make my way past the cats, to my husband, Nikolai. Tall and dark and handsome, he wears a black top hat perched on his head. He bought the top hat in a junk store and wore it as a joke, but the joke became a habit and the habit an eccentricity, and so the hat stayed, giving him the air of a dark magician, one who could—with a flick of his wrist—coax a dove from the depths of nothingness.
Under our feet, deep below the hot flagstones, was a treasure-filled tunnel, or so we liked to imagine. According to legend, the Knights Templar had constructed a system of tunnels between La Commanderie and the fortified city of Aigues-Mortes, where St. Louis launched the Crusades. These passages allowed the Knights to move in stealth to defend the king, to hide valuables, and to transport goods for their voyages to the Holy Land, but anyone looking at a map would have serious doubts that such a tunnel actually existed. The swampy port of Aigues-Mortes is more than ten miles from Aubais, the terrain rocky. Even so, I liked to believe that there was some truth to the story and that deep below the fortress, carved into the compacted limestone, was a hidden space, a tunnel guarding Templar treasure.
La Commanderie was eight hundred years old and had many owners after the Knights Templar. One built an olive press on the property. Another created an Italianate courtyard with flagstones and a window-lined salon to border it. One used the garden as an arena for bullfights—or les courses camarguaises, as they say in the Languedoc—and I liked to imagine the matador and the bull moving around each other in the courtyard, attacking and hiding, one beast pursuing the other. When the Nazis requisitioned the property in the forties, they used it as the center of their operations in the region, a legacy that older villagers remembered. The fortress had seen olive oil and bullshit and swastikas. And then we arrived.
We hadn’t been in the market for a dark, drafty, thirteenth-century fortress, but we walked through the door, took one look, and knew that La Commanderie had been waiting for us. The realities of buying and living in a historic compound in a tiny village in a foreign country didn’t strike us as daunting. The fact that we were thousands of miles away from family and friends didn’t dissuade us. The problems with the house itself—the oil-sucking monstrosity of a heater, the leaky roof, the mold-infested bathroom, the broken sewage pipe—seemed manageable. It was precisely the scale of the fortress—so outsize, so unrealistic—that made it ours.
The day we moved in, we pushed open the gate together. Over ten feet tall, the blue ironwork speckled with rust, it was so heavy that it took the two of us with our combined weight to move it. It swung open, creaking on old hinges, and suddenly we were not a couple on the verge of divorce. We were the owners of La Commanderie, a structure more powerful than us, a place so solid that it would—it must—be strong enough to save us. I remember looking at the thick walls of the fortress, at Alex and Nico in the courtyard, and thinking, This is it. This is where we will finally be happy.
THE FIRST TIME I saw Aubais was from behind a dusty windshield. Our car climbed a narrow, winding road, twisting and turning, and then suddenly it appeared: a medieval stronghold lifting into a perfect blue sky. One of my guidebooks claimed that the sun shone an average of three hundred days per year in the Midi, and it seemed to me then that this luxurious abundance of light had melted the edges of the village clear away—they declined softly from the center, leaving only the village château, its windows shuttered, at the top. Village houses crowded the streets below the château, yellowed and uneven as teeth in an ancient mouth. And at the very bottom of the hill roamed a herd of bulls, their horns long and sharp as daggers.
We found the village by looking online. I’d typed the words “South of France rentals” into a search engine and clicked on links, Web sites, and message boards. Also punched into the search engine were the words “beaches, mountains, vineyards, paradise.” I’d strung these words together in a more or less random sequence, composing a surreal love poem to my fantasy home, and then thrown them out into the digital universe, asking the powers-that-be to send something special back. They sent me the village of Aubais.
As the car climbed up into the village center, I looked down at the surrounding countryside. Knotty black stumps of Syrah vines grew below, clipped back after the previous harvest. Now it was spring, and their leaves were beginning to sprout and twist, each new tendril spiraling up, seeking sun. A stream wrapped around the village, feeding water to a laverie, where villagers had once washed their clothes by hand. There was a boulangerie with fresh bread in the window, a tabac selling newspapers and cigarettes, and an épicerie filled with vegetables and spices. And through it all there floated a pervasive, almost eerie, sense of calm. When I rolled down the car window, I heard nothing but the hum of the engine. No sirens or screeching tires or garbage trucks or train clatter. Nothing. I grew up in rural Wisconsin, where the only sound (aside from the shouts of my sister and brother and me) was nature: birds singing in the trees, crickets chirping in the bushes, insects buzzing, bullfrogs croaking. I felt that I was home again.
As we parked, my eyes adjusted to take it all in: the angular sweep of clay roof tiles, the blue wooden shutters, the flinty peak of the church steeple. The village château was run-down, and while the romantic in me (which was about 90 percent of me at that juncture) liked to imagine a king and queen sitting on ramshackle thrones, in reality the building had been cut up into apartments owned by summer people. One day I would gaze through a window at the top of the château and see clear to the Mediterranean. In this vista there were white Camargue horses and, beyond this, the jagged rise of Pic Saint-Loup, craggy wine country known for its strong, delicious reds. Garrigues fields filled with lavender and rosemary and olive trees spread for as far as I could see. Beyond this, far from sight, were the remnants of Roman roads, limestone conduits grooved by the weight of ancient wheels that had once carried wine and soldiers to and from Rome. Two thousand years later, the tracks were overgrown with honeysuckle, blackberry bushes, buttercups. Olives, grapes, and flowers—such things thrived outside the village.
But in the village itself, all greenery died. The fields and streams were replaced by cool, lifeless limestone. A labyrinth of ancient passageways cut through the village——rue du Roc, rue Droite, rue de la Commanderie—forming a series of transits past the old marketplace, the statue honoring the dead of the First World War, a stone bridge overlooking the bulls. There were both a Catholic church and a Protestant church, and it was said that the village tolerated both religions, although Huguenots had not been allowed to bury their dead in the cemetery. Instead families dug into their cellars and gardens, leaving corpses in unblessed ground, causing all variety of ghosts and unquiet spirits to move through the old houses, through the winding streets, through the branches of the olive trees. We were a little like those ghosts: displaced outsiders searching for sacred ground.
For the first time in our marriage, we had the luxury to try. I’d just had a big professional success: My first novel was bought by a publisher in New York; then the movie rights sold. Offers for my second novel—which I hadn’t even begun to write yet—were pouring in. At thirty-five years old, I had found success doing something I loved and, for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t have to struggle to pay my bills. And yet when success arrived, it cracked the atmosphere of my life like a sonic boom, knocking me off balance. I didn’t understand how to react. Struggle I understood. Scraping by, I knew what that felt like. But successful? That was a whole new game for a girl who had worked her way through college and was still paying off student loans. It’s hard to imagine that the very thing I’d dreamed of could be so strange, so unmooring, but it was. I was wary of this success. I was fearful of it. I was worried that the same magic that had created good fortune would take it all away again. And then there was my marriage. Nikolai and I had been married eight years when we moved to France, and I doubted we would make nine. I blamed our rift on the endless hours we’d been working, the strain of being parents, and the lack of money. I blamed it on the fact that we hadn’t taken time out for us and for our marriage. And so I proposed to use our windfall to move far away from everything—far from successes and troubles—to a beautiful, unreal place where we could protect our fragile love.
IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing fragile about us. We met at a potluck in the fall of 2001, when I was a fiction-writing student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Nikolai was part of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a three-month stint that had brought him to the United States from his native Sofia, Bulgaria.
“Let me help with that,” he said, taking a platter of maki sushi from my hands so I could pick up Alex, my one-year-old son, who was tugging on my jeans. I swung Alex up onto my hip, balancing him as I set out wasabi and soy sauce with my free hand.
“You rolled these yourself?” Nikolai asked, impressed.
“I lived in Japan for three years,” I said, giving Alex a piece of cucumber maki to chew on. “Sushi is easier than sandwiches.”
“Japan?” he said. He had a soft accent and a way of speaking that was both definitive and careful. His hair was black and clipped short, his eyes large and green, his lips full and his skin olive. He was looking at me inquisitively, carefully, as if I were some exotic butterfly blown down from the sky. “Why Japan?”
I met his gaze and smiled. “Why not Japan?”
That was who I was then, a young woman ready to go anywhere and do anything, so long as it was new and exciting and far from home. I was trying life out, seeing what felt right, and my relationships with men weren’t much different.
We met again at a party at my place a few weeks later. We stood at the stereo and chose music together—a mix of the Smiths and Depeche Mode and the Cure and Joy Division, bands we’d both listened to obsessively in high school. Over the course of the night, we talked and talked, telling stories about our lives, all the things we’d done before we knew each other.
I was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer, mother of Alex, and maker of maki sushi. My parents had divorced when I was twelve, and I’d moved between my mother and father until I was eighteen. My grades were bad in high school, but I took classes at a local college to make up for it and was eventually accepted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I double-majored in history and literature and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation I started traveling. I studied in London, spent time in France, and lived for nearly three years in Japan with my first husband, Sam, a man I’d met at a bar at age twenty-three and married before I knew what hit me. Alex was born in Japan, and I was accepted to Iowa’s M.F.A. program the same month. Now, as the program was coming to an end, I found myself adrift, waiting for the next big thing to happen.
Nikolai grew up in Communist Sofia, where his childhood had been marked by food shortages and relatives in concentration camps. His parents encouraged him to play the piano as a means of escape, believing that a musician could travel beyond the Iron Curtain to perform all over the world, and so he played twelve hours a day from the age of five. Because he was talented and persistent, he won his first international competition at age nine. At eighteen, he left his music conservatory and moved to the United States, where he studied jazz composition. Three years later he packed his things and moved to India, where he became a Buddhist monk, studying at the Dalai Lama’s Institute for Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. After leaving the monkhood, he went back to Bulgaria, where he married, had a daughter, and wrote books about India. Now, at twenty-eight, he had left his wife and was listening to eighties New Wave bands in Iowa City with me.
I realized as we talked that we had a lot in common. Both of us had had unfulfilling first marriages. Both of us had one-year-old children we adored. We’d both lived in Asia—he in India, I in Japan. We both were interested in Buddhism, although his interest was far more serious than mine. And, of course, we were both writers, although he was more successful, having published two bestselling novels in Bulgaria. We were both extraordinary and wrecked, naïve and experienced, brilliant and stupid, our exceptional parts snapping together as seamlessly as the damaged ones.
When he put on the Cure’s “Disintegration,” I said, “I love this song. Although no one’s going to dance. Too dark. Too slow.”
“Come on, writers don’t dance,” he said, glancing at the apartment full of writing students. He was right—no one was dancing, not even a foot tap or a hip wiggle.
“I do,” I said. “I love to dance.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”
He smiled a mysterious smile. Maybe yes, maybe no. “I’d rather play music than dance to it.”
“Then you play and I’ll dance.”
“Deal,” he said, sorting through the music and playing Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.”
But I didn’t dance. I stayed by his side all night, unable to step away. There was something hypnotic about him, and I found myself gazing at him, transfixed. A scar jagged across his chin, a slash that appeared—in the dim light—to be an uneven cleft. I ran my finger over it, feeling the smoothness of the damaged skin. Later he would say that I’d chosen his weakest spot to touch him for the first time. But it wasn’t weakness that I saw then. I saw a man with an aura of invincibility about him, a confidence in the way he spoke about seemingly impossible things, as if nothing could stand in his way. I saw a man who could help me leave behind the burden of an unhappy childhood, a weight I carried everywhere—into every room I walked and into every relationship I began.
He saw the same possibility in me. When we ran into each other at the university library some days later, he told me that the day we’d met was the most important day of his life. “I will measure everything from that point in time,” he said. “From the time before I met you and the time after. I loved you from the first second I saw you.”
If I had been another woman, I might have been skeptical. He was visiting the United States for a short time and getting divorced, and so it was only natural that he would want to have a fling before going back home. But I wasn’t another woman. I was a woman ready to be swept away. I was a woman ready for her story to begin. For me, as a writer, story was all that mattered. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. I believed I was the author of my life, that I controlled the narrative. But deep down I must have known it wasn’t possible. Deep down I must have understood that my story had already been written.
Once upon a time, a woman met a sorcerer in the woods. High on horseback, he promised to take her far away, to a castle in the distance. Grasping his hand, she climbed onto his horse, and they rode into the tangled forest. She could feel her past fade as they went: the voice of her father, the face of her mother, the comfort of her friends. Her old life became as distant and diaphanous as a dream. Finally they arrived in a strange land where the trees were pillars of salt and the seas were black as oil. A castle stood high on a hill. The castle, he said, had magic rooms, each one filled with treasure. Go, he said. It’s my gift to you. But when she opened a door, dust clouded her sight. The rooms were dark and the magic thick. And yet she didn’t turn back. She walked into the castle, opening the doors to every room, searching. Soon she had wandered too far to retrace her steps. When she opened a window, the real world glimmered on the horizon like a mirage.
“I’ve been looking for you my whole life,” he said.
“You shouldn’t say such pretty things if you don’t mean them.” I wanted him to know I was susceptible to fairy tales, that I was vulnerable to poetry and promises.
He picked up my hand and kissed it. “Everything is going to be okay now. I’ve found you. It’s karma. It isn’t even our choice. We’ve been waiting many lifetimes for this chance. We can’t lose it.”
If I’d had any resistance, it vanished at that moment. He squeezed my hand and led me through the library, past the endless stacks until we found a dark and deserted corner in the European history section. There were books about Catherine the Great, the Hapsburgs, the Napoleonic Wars, all the stories of treacherous kings and powerful queens I loved. I couldn’t have known at the time that there, among the romances of history, my own story was beginning.
Nikolai pulled me close. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, strong-armed, smelling of expensive cologne. I held him tight, as if eliminating the space between us would create a singular being. Like two unstable atoms flung from opposite ends of the universe, we collided to form a new, whole, white-hot structure: us.