ROWING ON THE SEINE is difficult and can sometimes be dangerous. The current is strong, especially after heavy rains when the water is high and the river can run so fast a good oarsman fighting the flow as best he can stays in place or finds himself moving backward. Barges that are anything but nimble, bateaux-mouches, motorboats driven too fast by men who have had too much wine, and semi–submerged tree-trunks, pallets, or winter ice threaten the narrow and delicate single shells. Add to that the whirlpools, bends, abutments, and unforgiving walls past which the water is inflexibly channeled, and it isn’t a rower’s paradise, especially if you’re old.
But having rowed on the Seine for the sixty years since he was fourteen, Jules hadn’t lost his touch. Long experience gave him an almost perfect knowledge of the eddies, ricochets, and fast water of the course as it wound past bridges and islands, and barges tied to the embankments. Nonetheless, he was a little afraid each time he went out, because although everyone flipped over now and then, his balance was uncanny, and never once having gone in the water he didn’t want to mar a perfect record of more than half a century. But more than that, he felt stalked by probabilities. If he did lose his balance, without having done so ever in his life, would he know what to do? That he was an excellent swimmer was irrelevant. He might panic if the water were cold, his heart might stop, he might be crushed by a speeding barge.
Not this day in August, a few months before he knew he was going to go to New York, when he glided in on the current to a perfect landing at the dock. Had anyone seen him on the river, glistening with sweat in the August heat, he could have been mistaken for a muscular athlete in his late forties or early fifties. It took work, a lifetime of discipline, showing up when miserably cold and rowing or running through snow and sleet, never eating quite as he might like, and losing precious hours he might have spent in furthering his career. But Jules had resolved from early on, even before he knew it, that until the day he died he would be strong enough so as never to be unable to defend himself.
The shower in the rickety boathouse, a barge illegally moored to the embankment, had a floor of eucalyptus planks so saturated with fragrant oil that it neither rotted nor grew slippery. Though the stream of water was thin and the austerity of the boathouse difficult to exaggerate, he didn’t need luxury. He wanted neither an elegant locker room nor a stand piled with thick newly washed towels, nor a Mercedes waiting for him outside, but only to know that, refreshed and clean, he could sprint up the stone stairs to the street and be not even slightly out of breath.
After Jacqueline died he had clung to routine: rising; breakfast; the walk to the RER A; transfer at Châtelet Les Halles (rough and dangerous); the RER B to Luxembourg/Boul-Miche; passing through the portals of the old Sorbonne and noting with appreciation their ancient form; then, later, in the hideous new facilities at Clignancourt in the northeast of Paris; the start of class; music in the presence of young people animated by energy, vigor, and struggle; lessons and critiques in which he was carried away by the mystical reach of sound; then punishing exercise on the river; wonderful relief as he walked through the city; the train back; shopping; dinner; reading; practice; reflection; memory; prayer; and sleep.
Taken together, these were the metronome of his life, and he was comforted by their steady procession, like the ticking of a clock, that eventually without fail would bring him to the woman he had loved for most of his life. But today would be different. Because the rhythm of the days that would see him along and bring him to her was imperfect, marred by his weakness and his will to live, today he would arrive later than usual in Saint-Germain-en-Laye because he was going to seek solace not in music or in memory or in a synagogue or church, but in something quite different. He was going to do the impossible. He was going to see a psychiatrist, in Paris, in August.
THERE WAS ONE left, anyway, in the Villa Mozart, three flights up in a building so quiet that to walk into it was like becoming deaf. His waiting room had sea green walls and Empire furniture of mahogany and cherry. Jules had hardly had time to sit down when the doctor appeared. A short, bearded man with glasses – the fashion after Freud – he stood at the soundproofed door to his office and looked at his prospective patient, who was older than he was, though not by much. Despite the fact that he was one of the few psychiatrists present in the city in August, Dunaif’s prestige in the profession was legendary. Ignorant of that, Jules had found him in the telephone book, his fourteenth call.
Dunaif stood in silence, studying Jules as one might study a painting. People see so many other people that they look at faces without seeing them. But so much is written in the face – of the past, of truth, hope, pain, love, and potential – that each man or woman deserves a Raphael, Rembrandt, or Vermeer to see and express it.
What did Dunaif see? He supposed that the man standing before him, like so many – but here it was carved to an unusual depth – carried within him and would not abandon the life of the past, his love of those who had come before, a store of vivid memories, and, not least, the wounds of history. A smart, brave, and defeated old man sitting in front of the doctor, reticent as he might be, was more interesting than listening to the sexual travails or career disappointments of a twenty-eight-year-old.
After a few minutes, Jules asked, “Do I come in there and speak, or do you just stand in the doorway and stare at me?”
Gesturing with his right hand sweeping toward the interior, Dunaif invited him in. Two portes-fenêtres facing the street were open, their white gauze curtains moving patiently in breaths of summer air. Three times the size of the waiting room, the office was full of books – on three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, stacked on tables and his desk – but still spacious and open. Before the building had been divided into smaller apartments at the end of the war, this had once been a family’s main reception room.
“Do you live here?” Jules asked.
“Upstairs,” Dunaif said, settling into his chair. He interlocked his fingers and tilted his head a little, keeping his eyes leveled upon Jules as if to say, what have you to tell me?
Not quite ready to open up, just as in music the first movement is often quiet and tentative, Jules proceeded gradually. He said, “You seem to be the only psychiatrist now working in Paris. What kind of psychiatrist, no, what kind of Frenchman, would be in Paris in August?”
“I don’t like the beach,” Dunaif said. “That is, when everyone is on it. And this is what I do. In August the city is quiet and beautiful in its desertion. Although the young residents stay on duty in the hospitals, someone senior has to be on call to guide them.”
“Why is there no one waiting? Your secretary? I saw a receptionist’s desk.”
“She and they are all somewhere else. Paris shrinks as they take with them everything they think they’re leaving behind. On the Côte d’Azur the men play tennis as if their lives depend upon it, and the women look at each other’s handbags. It’s just like Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Everyone’s at the beach but me and you. What about you?”
“I STOPPED GOING to the beach when my wife died. We used to go to what were then, anyway, the empty Atlantic beaches north of the Gironde. Unlike the rest of France, I’m not afraid to swim in the surf. Helicopters would hover and demand through their loudspeakers that I return to shore. One landed once, and the police tried to give me a ticket. I protested that swimming in the ocean could not be a crime, but evidently it can be. They demanded my papers, which I didn’t have of course, because I was in my bathing suit. They asked my name so they could write the summons. When I said Aristide Poisson, the cop almost hit me. They looked toward the helicopter, but the pilot moved his head from side to side to say, no, they were already fully loaded. Then they flew away. It was like a dream.”
“Yes,” said Dunaif. “I had a patient yesterday who had exactly the same dream.”
“A common phobia,” Jules answered in the same spirit, “helicopters catching you in the sea.”
“Go on.”
“About the beach?”
“About anything.”
“About anything,” Jules repeated, looking down.
“Anything that occurs to you.”
“All right. It’s a shock, and I don’t like it, that when I pay monthly, quarterly, or even annual bills, and when I wind the clock each week, I’m absolutely sure that I’ve done it the day before, not seven, or thirty, or a hundred and twenty days before, but yesterday, as if no time had passed. When writing the year 2014 on a check – do young people even write checks anymore, go to the post office, or read newspapers? It doesn’t look like it – I feel like I’m in a science-fiction novel. Sometimes I date my checks ‘nineteen fifty-eight,’ or ‘nineteen seventy-five,’ and then cross it out, amazed to write the present date, staring at it like an African tribesman or an American Indian brought as a curiosity to the London or Paris of the seventeenth century. Such a creature, kidnaped from his home, would, no matter what its difficulties, long for his tranquil past. And in the Old World, new to him, his touch would be forever numb, his hearing muted, his sight betrayed and blurred. Whatever the beauties around him, only home – lost over a seemingly infinite sea – would be really beautiful.”
“I understand,” Dunaif said. “So let me ask what it is that keeps you in the past and prevents you from living fully in the present?”
“Guilt.”
“I’ve heard of that.” The psychiatrist was a Jew, and knew that Jules was as well. “This is France, after all. Devout, well practiced Catholics come here to confess. Those who are lapsed come to confess that they haven’t confessed – quite a confession. Jews, who have no confessors, are the champions of self-revelation, but telling me your sins, real or imagined, won’t wash them away. My job is not absolution but understanding.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t think you, or anyone for that matter, can help me.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Dunaif leaned forward compassionately – if this is possible, and it was. “Tell me.”
“Rationally or not, I feel responsible for the deaths of many people and even animals. When someone close to me dies, I think that because I couldn’t save him I’ve killed him. It’s not logical, but it doesn’t go away.”
“This started when?” Dunaif asked.
“With my parents. During the war. I didn’t save them.”
“How old were you?”
“Four and a half.”
“I have my job because the life of a man or a woman is forged in the wounds of infancy and childhood. You think, that was then and I can’t go back and fix things, and of course you can’t. But look at it another way. Now you, a grown man – I dare say, if I may, an old man – are blaming a four-year-old, who happens to have been you, for the inability single-handedly to defeat the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Vichy police, the collaborators …. Would you blame a four-year-old who was not you?”
“Of course not, but you’re wrong. Love is absolute. It can’t be measured, or contained, or truly analyzed. It’s the one thing that you hold onto as you fall into the abyss. When you love, you experience a power close to that of the divine. And, like music, it enables you so far to transcend your bounds that you can’t even begin to understand it. So when you love, as a child loves his parents or a parent his child, you suffer the illusion that the limitless power you sense can save them. It can’t. I know, but my soul doesn’t, and it makes me want to die so I can share their fate.”
“Hamlet jumped into Ophelia’s grave. But then he jumped out.”
“And so do I, figuratively, each time. But let me go on. It hardly ended there. Louis Mignon and his wife, Marie, saved us, for a time. I stayed with them in Reims until I was seven. Then I went to live with cousins in Paris. At the station, Louis and Marie embraced me. They cried. I cried. And Louis tried to press a coin into my hand, ‘Pour chocolat,’ he said. But I refused to take it. I was a little kid, a very confused little kid, and I thought that by refusing the gift I was expressing my gratitude. He was deeply hurt, and two weeks later he died. I know I didn’t kill him, but you see?
“The next was a dog, my dog, Jeudi. After I was sent to Paris I was bullied a lot in school – no parents, a Jew who stuttered in the accent of Reims, a child whose unhappiness brought forth a thousand blows and a lot of blood, literally. One day when I was coming home after taking a beating, she ran to greet me. She loved me, and I loved her. Because I had no parents, she was everything to me. But that day, for no reason, I hit her. I’ll never forget the sound when she cried out. Sometimes I dream it. Why did I hit her? I know now but so what? Normally I would have taken her in my arms. Her tail was wagging, she was just excited to see me, but I hit her, hard. She’s long dead. At times, when I think of that, I come to tears.
“It doesn’t end there. I had a cousin, twenty years older than I was, a hero who had served with the Free French. He was tall, he had a beautiful girlfriend, and they would take me to amusements and on long walks. Young people in love sometimes have a kind of practice child. That was important to me, because I wanted to be exactly like him. I was always unhappy when he left, because, frankly, the relatives who took me in Paris didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I don’t blame them. I was a difficult child. But he saw through that. They had a little garden in which there was a hose for watering the plants and the grass. I played there, or brooded. One day in late September he had to leave, and a taxi was waiting to take him to the station. He came downstairs and into the garden to say goodbye to me. He was wearing a beautifully tailored suit. What did I do? Because I didn’t want him to go, I sprayed him with the hose. He got soaking wet and cold, but he had no time to change because he had to catch the train. I was scolded like a murderer, but he intervened and said it was all right. The way he looked at me told me that he understood and still loved me. Two months later he was dead from melanoma. What did I know? I thought he had become sick because of the chill. I thought for years that I had killed him. I know of course that I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.
“There were so many other occasions of that nature – pets that I had to put down, animals that I accidentally ran over, even a dove that I stepped on as I was coming out of my barracks before dawn. But there are two that loom very large. The time is passing, so I’ll tell you those quickly.”
“Don’t worry about the time. You can come back.”
“I don’t think I will.”
“If it’s a matter of economy …” Dunaif began. For him, the ability of a patient to pay was not paramount.
“It’s not that.” Jules paused for a moment before he went on. “I said two more, but it’s possibly three. That’s the problem.
“The first was in Algeria in fifty-eight, on the northern sector of the Morice Line. I was a draftee of eighteen. I had good luck, because I served in the mountains, far from the cities. Our job was to prevent infiltration from Tunisia, of which there was a great deal. That was more straightforward and less morally difficult than most everything else in the war. We were soldiers fighting soldiers who came from abroad to participate in the civil war for which we had come from abroad as well. So, in a sense, we were even.
“I had hoped to be a musician in the army, playing at the Élysée or in parades, but there was no place open for the cello, in marching bands the piano translates to the glockenspiel, and the glockenspiel positions were filled as well. So I ended up on Djebel Chélia, in a pine forest at two thousand meters. It was beautiful there in the middle of nowhere, with snow in the winter; views, from high outcroppings, of hundreds of kilometers; wild horses on the plains below; and heavy, steeply sloped forests.
“Our base was surrounded by mines and wire, and we would patrol the few roads in armored vehicles, which, though rarely, were sometimes attacked. It was a quiet sector, because infiltrators preferred to travel away from the mountain itself, and other units would come into contact with them before they got to us – mostly.
“I loved being in such a place – or would have had it not been for the war – which made me long for home in the same way that one can long for a woman: the deep desire that can be felt, physically, throughout every part of the body. Evidently a lot of people don’t experience that, which is too bad.
“Though I had determined to die before I killed an innocent, it was not from idealism. I hate idealism. It was because I couldn’t possibly do to anyone what had been done to my mother and father, as simple as that. But there were no civilians anywhere near us in those mountains, where the green of the pines was as deep as the blue of the sky, and I thought I’d escaped that kind of test, which is more common in war than most people imagine.
“I was much stronger than I am now ….”
“You seem fit for your age,” Dunaif said.
“Maybe, but when I was young I had volcanic energy in surplus and overflowing. So I volunteered. For what? I was already there. But we were vulnerable. During the day, you could hear our vehicles from a kilometer away, and at night you could not only hear them but see their arc-light on top, probably from a hundred kilometers distant. Their ineffectiveness wasn’t a danger just because the enemy might have hidden and subsequently passed through, but because he might have massed to wipe out our small post. Not for any strategic reason, really, but just to kill us, take our weapons, enjoy a small victory.
“I went to my commander and laid this out for him. He was one of those people who at the expense of everything else will take any route to his own success. At the end of my strategic essay – I was a young private – he said, ‘What do you recommend, patrolling without armor?’
“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Two or three men at a time, going out lightly armed, silently, waiting in ambush.’
“‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do exactly that, according to your design. Arm yourself as you wish, go when and where you want, hunt in the forest.’
“‘But I thought you would put me under a sergeant,’ I told him.
“‘Oh no no no!’ he said. ‘You’re in command.’
“‘Me?’
“‘You.’
“‘Of how many men?’
“‘One. You.’
“‘I can’t take anyone else?’
“‘No. It’s possibly a good idea, but I won’t risk others. I relieve you of all duties except what you propose. You’ll do that and only that from now forward. Twelve hours in the forest every day, whether in the light or in the dark is up to you. Take the armament you need. Obviously, for what you propose, because we don’t have the new ones, one of our radios would be too heavy. So be sure to include a flare or two in case you make contact and need help. You’ve come up with a good idea. Let’s try it.’
“I’d spend twelve hours on my patrols – in daylight, at night, or in combination, setting out, for example, at zero three hundred and returning at fifteen hundred, armed with a submachine gun, six magazines of ammunition, two grenades, a pistol, and a bayonet. Depending upon the season, I carried a water bottle or two, chocolate, and bread. It was most difficult in the snow, sometimes impossible, but the snows were rare and would melt fast. And because the enemy knew less of snow than we did, it suppressed his movement better than if we had had two armies rather than just one.
“Nothing happened, until it did. I was patrolling around the mountain in daylight. This was so long ago – fifty-six years now – that although I remember the smallest pertinent details, I don’t remember the season. But it must’ve been either late fall, winter, or early spring, because I know I was wearing a sweater. I’m certain of that, because I have a memory of the images. Our uniforms were brown, as for most of the country that was the best camouflage, but up on the mountain the one good thing our commander did was get us green fatigues. I could stand in the trees, and if I were still, because the boughs in many places were so dense, you would never see me.
“Although at that point I hadn’t run into any infiltrators, I was always alert, especially when I moved, which is when one is most vulnerable. Waiting for someone to pass offers an inestimable advantage. When you move, you announce your presence in sight and sound. I moved cautiously and intermittently. It was a beautiful day, under a blue sky, with a breeze. The ground was quite dry. I had my customary armament, the submachine gun in my hands not quite ready to fire (in case I fell). I was unhappy that day probably because of some argument with other soldiers or officers. There was a lot of resentment and frustration.
“I would move, then stop to look and listen. A few meters, then a few minutes of motionless silence. During one of these pauses I thought I heard whispered conversation. It was hard to be sure that it was not the wind. As I readied the gun, my pulse raced and for a moment it was deafening as blood pounded through my arteries. But I let myself calm down, and moved forward a step or two at a time. Straight ahead, I saw through a mass of pine boughs the shape of two people, their clothing illuminated brightly in the sun. That was stupid. In the woods you have to avoid pools of light. They were talking in low whispers.
“I scanned all around. The last thing I wanted was to be shot or knifed by others whom I hadn’t seen while my attention was focused elsewhere. After a while, I was satisfied that the two who were talking were the only ones present. I don’t know how long it took, but I moved toward them very slowly, making no sound, until I was on one side of a thick pine and they on the other. One of them was an old Arab, armed with a pistol holstered on a Sam Browne belt. The other was a girl of about twenty, French, at least European, with blue eyes and blond hair. She was wearing a black-and-white checkered kaffiyah draped around her neck, the way so many young people in Paris do now. The image will never leave me. I was eighteen. The moment I saw her I not only desired her, I actually fell in love, and it knocked all the fear out of me. How crazy can you be at that age? I don’t know, because I think I could do it now.”
“Falling in love?”
“Yes, even with someone who wants to kill me. The Arab was sketching a map, the girl drawing a picture of our base. Both would point up at the fortifications, comment, and make adjustments to their work. This was in a military area that was clearly off-limits. I knew they were the enemy, but I couldn’t see her as that. I can still feel my attraction to her.
“They were so absorbed in what they were doing that they didn’t see me until I was right in front of them. I didn’t do anything special, I just walked to where they were. Then, when they saw a French soldier, his submachine gun pointed at them, two meters away, their shock and fear bled into sadness and despair. But the old man was clever and experienced, and his despair vanished when he saw how I was looking at the girl.
“At the same moment that I commanded them, in Arabic and then French, to put their hands in the air, he rose, pulling her up and ahead of him. Though she was still shocked and scared she held tightly onto her pad and pencils. This all happened quickly. He drew his pistol, slowly raised it, and pointed it not quite at me. I took aim at him as best I could, but she covered most of his body. They began to walk backward, occasionally almost tripping.
“Though she was distressed, she was not a hostage. I followed, my finger on the trigger, as it had to be. I was afraid that if I tripped I would kill both of them, and I couldn’t see where I was walking, because I couldn’t take my eyes off them for even a second. Again and again, I commanded them to stop, but they wouldn’t. I wanted to shoot him. He was armed, a spy, disobeying my order. But they were moving, all I had was a fairly inaccurate submachine gun, and the only target was a portion of his head.
“Not only had I resolved to die myself rather than kill an innocent, but although she was hardly an innocent I loved her. I was as unhappy that I wouldn’t get to speak to her as I was unhappy that they were getting away. I followed for a while, but then I let them go. To have shot them would have been horrible. I knew what it would be like to see her dying on the ground. Even him. I couldn’t kill them.
“You can imagine how distressed I was as I walked back to the post, not at all cautiously, debating whether or not to report it. I did report it and was punished: two months in military prison. Prison was rather difficult, to say the least. But that was nothing compared to what followed, and what has stayed with me ever since.
“While I was imprisoned, the outpost was attacked in force. They came by routes through the forest that had been carefully mapped, undoubtedly by the old man and the girl. Who she was I never knew. French? A colon? A German, Swede? I was uneasy from the start about what I had done or not done, but in the attack five soldiers were killed. Some had been my friends, my age or close to it. Their lives stopped in nineteen fifty-eight, or early fifty-nine, I’m not exactly sure. It was much warmer there, and as I’ve said, my memory of the seasons is confused. Am I not responsible for their deaths? Perhaps they would have died in the attack anyway, even had there been no intelligence, but I can’t say that I’m not to blame.
“Sometimes I think that this tendency I have, my sense of causation and feeling of responsibility, is as absurd as when a musician I knew banned me from his car because the right, rear tire blew while I was sitting in the right, rear seat.”
“Especially when absurd,” Dunaif said, “emotions point the way. To get to the burial chambers in the pyramids you have to follow the most twisted, illogical paths. Nothing you’ve told me is illogical in context, and what you’re telling me obviously needs to be told.”
“It weighs upon me and always will. Before I sleep and when I wake are the worst. And there are others, but I don’t want any of them not to weigh upon me. It would make the sin worse.”
“The sin?” Dunaif asked.
“If not sin, failure. Terrible failure.”
“I’m struck,” said the doctor, “by how strongly each of these reinforces the others.”
“I should have died a long time ago, but I’ve kept on living.”
“The year in which you believe you were obligated to die was …?”
“Nineteen forty-four.”
“That has almost surely lent its power to the others, and why you haven’t described it – perhaps you can’t – except to summarize it, as if it happened not to you but to someone else.”
Whatever reaction this solicited was not visible to the psychiatrist. It puzzled him. Jules just went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I’ve told you, or you can deduce from what I’ve told you, how strongly and quickly I fall in love. Whether it’s a fault or not I don’t know, but I have friends who’ve never fallen in love, and I wouldn’t want to be them. When I met my wife, I fell so hard I thought I’d gone insane. She died four years ago.
“She was sixty-six, in excellent health, and looked at least fifteen years younger than she was. Though perhaps it was vanity or illusion, both of us felt as if we were in our thirties. When we were young, we could walk fifty kilometers a day in the mountains. Even the summer she died, we crossed the Pyrenees, we swam in freezing-cold streams. My God, if you had seen her in the nude you would think she was thirty. Men of my age – I suppose I’m too old now, so I’d have to say men not quite as old as I am – have mistresses and affairs. They want life. That they seek a younger woman is a biological compulsion even if they don’t know it, something which, by the way, does not detract from their just appreciation.
“I would never have done that, but also I had no need to. She was beautiful and lithe until the end. The illness struck without warning, just as if it had struck a younger woman. We were old enough to be prepared in the abstract, and had thought about and talked about one of us dying before the other, but even at sixty-six and seventy it seemed remote. That must happen a lot these days, when old people, sometimes as fit as soldiers, are then, like soldiers, surprised by death.
“We were on the terrace and about to eat. Everything seemed perfectly fine and normal. Suddenly she doubled over with pain in her abdomen. Something like that happens sometimes, if rarely, so she said just to let her lie down. But after half an hour it was so bad I had to carry her to the car. When she got in, she wept. I’m sure she was thinking that she would never come back to the house. That’s when I felt a terror I hadn’t felt since I was a small child. A terror like that of falling. The first time I jumped from a plane, in the seconds before the static line opened my chute, it was that kind of all-possessing fear.
“It was late enough in the evening so that I tore across Paris all the way from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where we live, to La Pitié-Salpêtrière. I knew it was serious. I didn’t want to waste time and referrals, and our doctor practiced there, as Jacqueline and I were both at Paris-Sorbonne and had lived in the Quartier latin. Now the hospital … what can I say? It’s for the poor and suffering. You feel it. But our doctor was there. He’s unsurpassed. The physicians at La Pitié-Salpêtrière have a constant stream of hard cases, so they’re truly expert. But I’ve always thought that I should have taken her to Switzerland, to some gleaming, quiet, expensive place – unhurried, modern, where the walls are clean even on the outside, which at La Pitié they certainly are not. But at La Pitié it’s like battlefield medicine. You get the feeling that anything you bring them they’ve seen the day before and the day before that.
“And they have, but she never did come back to the house, she never rode in a car again. Everything – her walk to the gurney in front of the emergency entrance, the last time she was under the sky, the last breath of outside air – was the last. She tried hard to get me to go home, but I stayed up with her all night. By noon the next day, the diagnosis came in. They said it was cancer of the pancreas.” Here, Jules paused to compose himself. “And they recommended that she go to a hospice.
“We said, no, treat it aggressively, experimentally. Fight. They’d heard this so many times before, and I hated their expressions as they tried to explain to us that it was hopeless. How did they know? They aren’t God. They acquiesced: which they will if you press hard enough. And in the next few days I pulled every string I could. Granted, I don’t have many strings to pull. I’m just an adjunct in music. Whatever powers I have are not practical. Still, we did have the best doctors and they were as aggressive as we had begged them to be. Not so much Jacqueline. She was half gone, resigned. She was by then frighteningly ethereal, tranquil, unburdened, and of a beauty far more delicate than I had ever seen, perhaps because she was vanishing. It was almost like evaporation. I felt her substance fleeing from her, literally rising, as if she were half in another world or had sworn allegiance to a comforting power of which I knew nothing and could not see. I felt her moving toward it and abandoning me, like transpiration, like snow sublimating in the sun. And I couldn’t stop it.
“They operated on her for eight hours. They’d told me that it would be at least four, likely six, and that I shouldn’t just sit in the waiting room. Too hard, they said, distract yourself. So I walked. There’s the little park there, and miles of corridors. You know the name of the park?”
“I’ve walked through it many times, but I don’t.”
“Parc de la Hauteur.
“A psychologist must have told them that yellow, creme, and beige promote health and equanimity. Yellow like sunshine. It’s everywhere there. The awnings, shades, and panels of Oncologie Médicale, Division Jacquart are yellow. I went to the Seine. Every time I heard a train whistle in the rail yards of the Gare d’Austerlitz between the hospital and the river, I took it as a sign and a prayer.
“And in quiet, hidden places, I did pray. My style of prayer is my own. The Mignons were Catholics, so I sink to my knees, bow my head, and hold my hands like Jeanne d’Arc – like someone, it occurs to me now, about to be executed. And because I’m a Jew I daven. That’s how I prayed. I prayed for my wife, whom I loved like no one else. Against a wall of the rail yards I prayed so hard I trembled. A garbage-truck driver saw me. An African. He stopped the truck because he thought I needed help. Then he saw that I was crying, and he put his arms around me and said, ‘No no, everything will come right, everything will come right.’ I wouldn’t have done that to a stranger near a rail yard. Who’s the better man?
“I returned to the hospital, in the dark. The operation was to have started in the morning but there had been emergencies and it was delayed. At nine they came to me. There wasn’t much left of me by then. Two of them burst through the doors, their operating gowns open and trailing in the breeze of their forward momentum, their masks dangling.
“They were smiling. A miracle. ‘We made the most thorough exploration we could,’ one of them said, ‘and did quite a few biopsies on the spot. We’ll have to wait a few days for absolute confirmation, but we’ve found nothing. It seems that Madame Lacour has pancreatitis, from which there is no reason that she will not recover.’
“Everything changed as I imagined her recovery. I would do the cooking. It would still be warm enough in September to eat on the terrace. By Christmas we would be swimming in a tropical sea. I thought of Polynesia and determined to spend the money. You know, in that hospital city there are banana trees flanking some of the streets on the eastern side. Right out of Africa or South America, what do they do in the snow? Perhaps the point is that they survive when everyone would think that they would not. Probably that’s too subtle, but I got it anyway, and all I could think of was bringing Jacqueline to some warm, breezy, sweet-smelling place with blue-green water. I’m not good at vacations. It’s hard to pry me away from Paris, my work, and my routine. I had deprived her of a lifetime of vacations because I was always worried about money and the things I had to do. I’m one of those people, you see, who have perfect attendance records and precise schedules. I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten an appointment or not completed an assignment. What good is that now?
“For two weeks, she recovered in the hospital, but she was never herself. The operation had caused major trauma and damage, and she couldn’t eat. Then she began taking liquid meals, and strengthened. I set up everything at home so as to care for her. My prayers had been answered. I would keep her close from then on. We would go to the South Seas, we would sit on the terrace, and she would wear her straw hat, because she didn’t like the sun on her face – an aversion that made her skin seem like that of a much younger woman. I, on the other hand, well, look at me.
“The evening before she was to be discharged I ate the dinner she couldn’t eat, while she had her dinner through a straw. The doctor had said that when home she could start on rice cereal and gradually proceed back to normal. Having been in the hospital for so long, she was weak but no longer confused. In the days after the operation she had imagined that a wall of her room was a vertical front of agitated green seawater with whitecaps and swells, and that dolphins were leaping from it and falling back – horizontally, as if gravity went sideways rather than up and down. This pleased her. I tried to disabuse her of it, hoping to bring her back and keep her. I didn’t want her floating away from me again even if on an exquisite vision. That was a mistake. I should have let her go to the ocean, and I should have been pleased to go with her as far as I was able.
“I had rowed that day. It was my only break. I wanted to keep up my strength, because I felt that we were as much under attack as if we were soldiers in a besieged outpost or sailors in a storm. So I worked hard to keep things going at home and stay healthy. What if I had gotten sick as well? In early September the temperature was perfect, and the water, although not still, had been smooth. When the water is smooth and dark and the current is fast you feel as if you’re floating through the air. Especially if the breeze is right and things are quiet, with at best only distant traffic sounds, it’s as if you’re in another world. I was elated that she was coming home.
“At about eight-thirty in the evening I got up from the chair by her bed in the hospital and began to gather my things. I wanted to get home to finish preparations for her return. Our bedroom had always been austere. We only slept there, rather than, as some do, using it as a retreat. But Jacqueline would be spending a lot of time in it, so to surprise her and make it comfortable I bought a Persian carpet (because she had always disliked the coldness of the parquet), a comfortable chair with an ottoman, an adjustable reading lamp, and one of those big flat televisions. I hadn’t yet mounted the television and was somewhat anxious about it because it weighed about forty kilos, so I would have to make sure the bracket was screwed to the studs, and I’ve never been good at locating them in the wall.
“I was going to pick her up and drive her home the next day, but she was seeing the ocean again, and was distant, which I attributed to exhaustion. I kissed her lightly, straightened, and said almost triumphantly that I would be back in the morning to take her home.
“‘I’m going to die,’ she said. I heard it, but it was as if she hadn’t said it. I was very well aware of what had happened, but I continued on as if it had not.
“‘It’ll be wonderful at home,’ I told her. ‘I fixed it up. You’ll see. The fall will be beautiful, and in late December we’ll go to the Pacific.’
“‘Jules,’ she said, in a whisper, looking straight ahead, ‘I’m going to die.’
“Operating on a completely different plane, I smiled, kissed her once again, and said ‘See you in the morning.’ Then I left, happily. Never in my life had I been aware of something and yet totally unable to assimilate it. And never since. I drove across Paris that evening, listening to the radio, dancing in my seat. It was as if I were two different people, each in his own world. I suppressed my terror and grief to live in the illusion of the joy I had expected.
“Seldom have I been so euphoric, and yet all the while I knew. It was like Macbeth, only the opposite, as if a dagger were before me but I couldn’t see it. At nine-thirty I was in the middle of putting in the bracket for the television, when the phone rang. They made sure it was me, and then they – a nurse, someone whose voice I did not recognize – said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your wife has passed away.’
“I was holding a drill in my hand – a drill. The shock was no less than if I had been shot at close range. And yet I managed to call a taxi – I could not have driven – I managed to melt into the back seat, to tell the driver the address, to state to him that I didn’t wish to speak. I gave him fifty Euros and didn’t even turn around when he left his cab and pursued me to hand over the change.
“They allowed me to stay in the room with her for a while.” For a long moment, Jules was again unable to speak, but then he went on. “They had crossed her hands in front of her and tied them together with gauze so her arms wouldn’t fall to the side. And they used the same type of gauze to prevent her jaw from dropping. It was tied on her head so that she looked like the way people with a toothache used to be characterized when I was young. The nurses and the residents were not old enough to have seen that, unless they read old magazines. The knot was at the top of her head with two wings of white gauze sticking out into the air. It made her look like a rabbit. There should be a better way, when someone dies, to do what they did. They shouldn’t have done that to her. She wouldn’t have liked it.
“I kissed her, and, of course, she stayed still. Just as I had known and not known, I was split then, as I have been ever since, between wanting to follow her wherever that might be, and wanting to fight for life so that she would continue to live in my memory. I suppose the balance in the struggle between the two is what brought me here, because the state that it leaves me in is difficult to bear. But the fact remains – and although not a day goes by when I don’t dwell on it, not a second goes by when one way or another it does not run my life from an impregnable fortress within me – the fact remains that my wife, whom I love above all, told me she was dying, saw me walk away, and died alone. How can I ever make up for that? I can’t.”
“I understand,” Dunaif said, “why you might be set on punishing yourself for the rest of your life, and I’m sure that even if you don’t know it you’ve found many ingenious and imaginative ways of doing so.”
“I’d have to punish myself for eternity, and still that would be insufficient. They put a sheet over her and wheeled her away. They wouldn’t let me get into the elevator. Yet the doctor was kind, and said he’d stay with me as long as I needed him.
“When I left, it had started to rain. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wandered around La Pitié-Salpêtrière for hours – as you know, it’s like a small city – until in the middle of the night, without any plan whatsoever, I found myself on the Rue Bruant, leaning against the hideous, rough stone wall of the mortuary. It’s made of slag. The edges are sharp. I stayed there, in the rain, until morning, my hands pressed against the wall until they bled, because she was on the other side and I didn’t want to leave her. How can I have done what I did?”
AFTER A LONG pause, Dunaif asked, “Have you thought of suicide?”
“Is that a suggestion?”
Dunaif could not help but laugh, however sadly. “No, just the logical question.”
“I can’t count the times – whenever I look down at a river from a bridge. But I’m too strong a swimmer. I’d have to shoot myself before falling in, and having spent several years with the keen objective of not being shot, that’s something I’d never do. I detest drugs. I’m too neat and orderly to slit my wrists. You’ve seen what happens to the bathtub and the floor? It’s horrible.”
“I haven’t seen.”
“In the cinema.”
“Yes, in films. But is it just the method that deters you?”
“No. I’m immune. I tried it once, when I was seven. I thought I’d find my parents, and I was unhappy. In the house in Paris the attic was unfinished: my cousins dried their clothes up there. I took some clothesline, made it into my notion of a hangman’s noose, threw the line over a huge beam, slipped the noose over my neck, mounted a chair, and, with hardly any hesitation, jumped off. But it was always so moist in the attic that the line had rotted and it broke. When I hit the floor, that was the last of my suicide attempts. They’re out of the question, period. If I haven’t done anything of that nature by now, believe me, I’m not about to start.”
“It’s off the table?”
“Entirely.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. No suicide, just loyalty. To them all. Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it’s also the quality that gives life purpose. I don’t mean to speak in epigrams, but I’m French: I can’t help it.”
It wasn’t so much from what Jules said as in his expression that Dunaif knew his not-quite-patient was not in fact suicidal.
“Besides, I can’t leave now. My grandson, a baby ….”
Dunaif was used to newly divorced or unemployed patients who then made the discovery that they were depressed; to wives and husbands who had fallen in love with an outsider and could not decide what to do; and to intellectuals who had thought themselves into dark and narrow caves. This was different.
As if to stall or avoid, Jules looked around and read the room.
“Another death?” Dunaif asked.
“I hope not.”
“But?”
“It’s not up to me, not up to my prayers, not up to anyone except an immense tangle of facts, events, processes, mysteries – from the behavior of individual cells, compounds, molecules, and atoms, to the embrace of a mother or a nurse, to the scudding of clouds above a hospital where the life of a child hangs in the balance.
“If you think it either a matter of pure science, or of prayer, you’re wrong. It isn’t just that a treatment will be applied, like fixing the brakes of an automobile, or just that God will decide, like a judge or a king, or just a matter of chance. It’s all these things, and many that are hidden. It’s the operation of the whole, in more dimensions than we know, that must flow together in perfect harmony and with perfect rhythm. On occasion, perfection like that is apparent. It overflows in Bach and Mozart and it’s what’s in miracles, epiphanies, and great events. It’s what made Jeanne d’Arc sink to her knees. It’s what made Dante see light so bright it was all-consuming. The same visions possessed the prophets. The age we live in would call it madness.”
“I don’t think it is,” Dunaif said. “It’s just that so few are touched by it that others have no choice but to call it so. It would be madness, however, and you would be mad, if what you’ve just told me were simply free-floating, and had no object.”
“It has an object,” Jules told him. “My daughter’s only child, a boy two years old, has leukemia. At first, he would scream and cry and try to wiggle away when they approached the hospital. Then whenever he was taken to the car. They had to tranquilize him. As things progressed, his struggle to get away would quickly tire him and he would sleep. Now, he no longer protests. I’ve prayed that I would die so that he can live, but it doesn’t work that way. I know, because I received that instruction when my wife died. But, if I could, do you know how easy it would be to give my life for his?”
“How far along is it?”
“Not that far, but the prognosis is not good. They soften it for the mother. Still, she knows. When he got sick, she had to leave nursing school. She knew the implications.”
“I’m in good health. I’m seventy-four, but I want so much to join my wife. If what she knows – or doesn’t know – is oblivion, I’d like to know it, too. Why must I have the strength of a twenty-four-year-old, and this child be affected so? To see him with the tubes coming out of his tiny body …. He’s had so many blood draws he’s not afraid of them anymore, and he’s two years old. His mother and father …. His mother is my child. They’ll be destroyed. What can I do?”
“Perhaps nothing.”
“Yet again?”
“Yet again.”
“I blame myself because I have very little money. Were I rich, I could bring him to the United States, to Texas to the MD Anderson Center; or to Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic; or the Mayo Clinic; or Harvard; or Johns Hopkins. They’re the best. Kings, sheiks, and presidents go there. America has almost a lock on Nobel Prizes in medicine. When I was younger I just didn’t think that I should work to get money so that if something like this were to happen I’d have the means.”
“We have excellent medicine here. You shouldn’t hold it against yourself that the child is in France.”
“Not like there. And in a hard case it’s the margin that can make the difference. The fraction of effort, the new treatment, the inspired physician might be the saving grace. In medicine, I suppose, there’s also, as in music, a straining for perfection as if to call down the presence of God, or, if you have another nomenclature, beauty, mercy, and grace.
“But no, I was lost in music. It was enough for me. I never fought for position or cared about money, I didn’t even complete my doctoral degree. All I cared for was the music itself.”
“What, exactly, do you do?”
“I teach in the faculty of music, Sorbonne. Cello, piano. A Maître, not a professor. I know theory but I teach to the sound and the emotion, which places me very low on the academic ladder. Not only that, but unless someone moves to adjourn, the committee meetings last until a bunch of skeletons are sitting around a table. I’m the one who always breaks first, and though everyone else is grateful that I do, it makes me the blackest of the black sheep. I can’t stand the bureaucracy and the politics, but I help my students become masters of their instruments and love the music. I’m paid poorly, and always have been. I compose, but my music isn’t modern and isn’t in demand – to say the least. The flock of birds all bent so easily and at once both this way and that. But I kept on straight, and now I’m quite alone. A failure is how I would put it.
“If I’d had the discipline to be even a professor – not a tycoon – I might now have enough to help the child. His name is Luc. I’ve thought of robbing a bank: I was once, and in some ways am forever, a soldier. I’ll bet I could do it. But what if someone were hurt or killed? And, soldier or not, I’m old.”
“Please don’t rob a bank,” Dunaif said. “It seldom works out well.”
“You needn’t worry. But this is my last chance. I really would do something like that. I would. He’s home now, but he was in the hospital for two weeks, and I couldn’t visit him, because of bone marrow transplants, and infection ….”
Dunaif nodded.
“The next time I was allowed to visit, a nurse brought him to us. His hair was gone, his face swollen, the cheeks very red. She held him aloft in her arms, and as she walked toward us he saw his parents and me, and he squealed in delight. Pure pleasure, joy, as if nothing were wrong.