Three weeks later, Juliette moved into her new home. Daylight only entered the two rooms, both former workshops, from the gallery and a narrow skylight; until nightfall they were bathed in a uniform pale light which Juliette soon came to find restful. In one of the stockrooms, Soliman had unearthed some huge pots of daffodil-yellow paint, brushes so stiff that they had to be soaked for two whole days, and tarpaulins, which they spread on the floor before setting to work. Very soon, the stripped walls were covered with broad swathes of yellow, applied as they moved around, to the rhythm of their rambling conversations. Zaide crouched in the corner nearest the door, armed with the brush from her watercolor set and a palette where little blobs of gouache overlapped, ran into each other, and blended. She was painting flowers on the skirting—dark blue roses with red stems, green daisies with purple centers, black tulips “like the one Rosa grew in her room for poor Cornelius, the prisoner.”
“She’s engrossed in Alexandre Dumas, a real bookworm,” Soliman explained with pride.
“No questions,” recalled Juliette, who was dying to ask some. So they talked about colors, flowers, tulip fever, oriental gardens divided into four sections to reflect paradise. “Paradise,” in fact, came from a Persian word, pairidaeza, explained Soliman, which meant “garden enclosure.”
“I’d prefer a garden without walls,” said Juliette, noticing that the old denim dungarees she’d put on that morning were as spattered with yellow as an entire field of buttercups.
“I like walls,” stated Zaide without looking up. “They protect you.”
“No one wants to hurt you, ziba,” said Soliman softly.
“You have no idea, you don’t. You have no idea what’s on the other side of the wall because you never go out.”
“But I had to get in, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” crooned Zaide, “you had to, you had to…”
They stopped there. Juliette would have loved to know how the father and daughter had landed here, what their journey had been, where they’d come from, from what garden or what war, perhaps. She couldn’t help telling herself stories about them, and their floating, truncated, uncertain destinies added further to the charm surrounding them and this place that resembled a ship washed up on a beach, given over to a certain neglect and yet so alive.
They talked about books and more books, about the gothic novels of Horace Walpole and Joyce’s Dubliners, about Italo Calvino’s fantastic tales, and the short, enigmatic prose of Robert Walser, or Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, García Lorca’s poetry, and that of the twelfth-century Persian poets. Soliman abandoned his paintbrush to recite lines by Nizami:
On lofty Beysitoun the lingering sun
Looks down on ceaseless labors, long begun;
The mountain trembles to the echoing sound
Of falling rocks that from her sides rebound.
The hands of Peris might have wrought those stems
Where dewdrops hang their fragile diadems
“Alas! Shireen!” at every stroke he cries;
At every stroke fresh miracles arise:
“For thee these glories and these wonders all,
For thee I triumph or for thee I fall;
For thee my life one ceaseless toil has been,
Inspire my soul anew—Alas! Shireen!”
And Juliette pressed her nose to the wall, churned up by those words, but why churned up, she wondered as she smoothed the contour of a doorframe. I’m not in love with him and yet he’s going away like Shireen, and all this, the depot, these rooms, his office, will seem empty, despite Zaide’s voice, her singing, her games, and her toys, which I’ll pick up from the steps of the fire escape, despite the passeurs and the books, despite—
“Don’t you like poetry?”
What an idiot. He’d completely misunderstood. And so had she, for that matter. It must be part of the inescapable human condition—each person ultimately deaf, impervious to other people’s emotions, incapable of deciphering gestures, looks, or silences, all condemned to give painful explanations with words that are never the right ones.
“Yes … yes, I do like poetry. But the smell of paint is giving me a bit of a headache.”
The lie was blatant, but he was completely taken in, offering her a chair, water, an aspirin, and finally suggesting she go and get some fresh air, which Juliette gratefully agreed to do. She went out into the gallery and walked up and down, watching the courtyard, the buildings framing it on three sides, which mostly showed only their windowless facades. No one could spy on what was happening there; it was a perfect refuge in the center of Paris—a refuge or an isolated, protected lair. And again, the old insidious suspicion surfaced. Had Soliman told her the truth? Were his self-imposed reclusiveness and seemingly harmless obsessions a cover for something else? Juliette didn’t dare think what that “something else” might be, but despite her efforts to stifle them, images assailed her—bloody, atrocious images, which all the television channels had broadcast nonstop, and also those cordoned-off doorways with the doors smashed in, behind which you could glimpse a gutted interior, weapons—they’d found weapons and also lists, names, places. Neighbors were questioned. “He was so polite,” said an old lady. “He’d hold the elevator door open for me and carry my shopping…”
Juliette wiped both hands over her face before realizing that her fingers were paint-stained—I’m going to look like a dandelion—and she laughed nervously in an attempt to banish the terrifying images, the fear, everything that was going to make her life impossible if she wasn’t careful. Come on, Juliette, terrorists don’t recite poetry: they hate poetry, music, and everything that speaks of love. It was another cliché, but she tried to cling to it. When you’re drowning you don’t choose your lifeline.
“Here, this will do you good.” He was behind her, holding out a smoked-glass tumbler from which a thin wisp of steam rose. “It’s spiced tea.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
Ashamed, she plunged her nose into the fragrant mist, closed her eyes, and imagined herself far away, very far, at one of those Middle Eastern markets which the bombs had reduced to rubble in one of those gardens that no longer exist except in fairy tales. She took a sip.
“It’s good,” she said.
Soliman was leaning on the rusty iron rail, looking up at the sky, which was slowly turning mauve.
“Soon there won’t be enough light to paint.”
“We can always turn the lamps on,” replied Juliette in a voice that sounded strangely hoarse.
He shook his head. “No. You need daylight. You need daylight,” he repeated, throwing his head back as if he were expecting a shower of light.
“Soliman…”
“You know,” he said, reading her thoughts, “there are still gardens. They exist here.”
He had placed a hand on his forehead, which he moved down to his torso, over his heart.
“How did you know…?”
“The tea. I can’t drink it without thinking of them.”
Juliette drank some more. She experienced a strange inner calm, which spread as the scalding liquid trickled down her throat. She felt curiously at home here. That didn’t mean that all her questions had been answered—how could those simple words “they exist here” have such power? She no longer lived in fairy tales or, like him, in books. Not quite.
But maybe she could learn to live with her questions.