IN THE FORTRESS in Algeria and the forests around it, the young soldiers had learned that everything was at risk every hour of every day. As it had been for most of mankind since the beginning, and continued to be so in regions of pestilence, famine, and war, life was tenuous and unprotected. For Jules, this was not a revelation, and yet throughout his life the dangers had been primarily episodic – in infancy and early childhood during the war, during the late forties and early fifties in severe illnesses just before the dawn of truly modern medicine, then in Algeria, in France when the Algerian war was brought home, and, in a minor way, during the crisis of ’68.
In regard to even the most protected and stable lives in the protected and stable West, a car crash, cancer, or a child gone missing, to name just a few of many catastrophes, gave lie to the general assumption of safety. Jules lived, nonetheless, like everyone else, in the illusion of security that modernity affords to advanced nations. He understood the absurdity of his minor complaints, and yet despite what he knew and had experienced he could not put them in their place: clothes at the cleaners not ready; the Métro hot and crowded; a cold rain soaking him as he rowed; receiving a wildly inaccurate and impudently demanding bill; the sink leaking; a dog wailing all night.
Irritations like these would vanish in the face of illness and death – when Jacqueline died, when Luc became ill. And it was happening slowly (true, he had a special sensitivity) as French Jews felt the fear and darkness of the thirties rolling in, differently this time, but in some respects a close copy of its early phases. He fought as best he could, but the more he planned the more he realized he was not in control. Had he not gone to the George V and been engaged purely by luck? And had he not discovered only in the rhythm of swimming the song that might help to pull his family through?
All this was so, but the day after the theme had come to him on the air over the water, the stakes were raised, and whatever remained of the illusion of control was completely shattered. For in the morning of the day he would record the song, send it off, and row happily on the Seine, he would (entirely against his wishes) begin to fall in love. And by nightfall, violence would change what was left of his old age.
THE TEACHING OF music was spread all over the city. Because Jacqueline had always been based in the Quartier latin and Jules had started there, he had made a tremendous effort to stay in place after his faculty was moved to Clignancourt. Long before that, when the Conservatoire National was moved to the Cité de la Musique, he stuck like a limpet to his tiny office in a quiet building in the Sorbonne. But to teach he had to fly almost from one extreme of the city to another, in traffic, dodging trucks, speeding by endless litter and explosions of graffiti in the weed-choked allées that paralleled the busy highways.
To record his thirty-two bars, he had to go to the Conservatoire in the Cité de la Musique on the eastern side of Paris. Arriving in mid-morning, he was able to round up half a dozen violinists, two violists, and a student to act as engineer. It would take only half an hour. But he was in need of another cellist, and none was about. As he handed out the music to his little improvised orchestra, half of whom had been or would eventually be his students, he said, “We need another cello. Is anyone around? We really shouldn’t go ahead without it.”
“Élodi,” said Delphine.
“Who?”
“Élodi. She’s not yet in the program,” meaning the joint program with Paris-Sorbonne in which all of Jules’ students were enrolled. “She just came up from Lyon. I saw her a minute ago and she has her cello. She’s a little strange.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say, and it’s hard to express, but she’s tense yet disconnected. You’d think that she’d grown up in an old house, all by herself, with just books.”
Wanting to defuse this, Jules said, “Maybe she did. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve heard her play?”
Delphine nodded. “You can’t help but be jealous.”
“Then go get her.” He expected an odd-looking, awkward, and unattractive girl, and decided, charitably, to protect her from the others.
They set up. The drafted engineer, who wore distinctive rectangular black glasses he’d bought in New York, went through his checks. The students studied the music and tuned their instruments. Jules loved the promising, not-quite random sounds that come before a concert, like animal sounds in the jungle, which startle you and then disappear.
“It looks nice,” one of the violists said, “very nice, simple, and hypnotic.”
“Telephone hold music,” Jules stated. “A job. And thank you for your help, all of you.”
They waited. Some studied their parts, some actually played them briefly, ending abruptly so as not to trespass on the prerogative of the composer to decide how the piece would be conducted. Jules wanted to get started and had begun impatiently to tap his left foot. Then Élodi walked in. His expectations had been wrong. She was extraordinarily attractive, captivating, and graceful. One could tell that despite her striking and unorthodox beauty she was, and might always be, alone. Only part of it may have been that she was so radiant as to be unapproachable.
Here was not only great complexity, but mystery. Jules felt that she had no interest in making a connection with anyone beyond what was minimally necessary, perhaps, to make a living – if indeed she had to, given that she possessed the air of someone who does not. Not a few women are so wounded that they seem similarly ethereal and detached, but she seemed not at all wounded. In fact, she radiated confidence bordering on contempt, but without demonstration of either. She was tall and slim, with a long, straight back and an almost military posture. A mane of sandy blonde hair combed back from her high forehead fell in a wave below her shoulders. Her features were even, her cheekbones high, her nose fine and assertive: that is, like her posture, there was an exciting thrust to it. Most distinctive were her eyes, which to Jules seemed illuminated by the kind of storm light that slips in under a tight layer of cloud. This may have occurred to him because, steady and guarded, her expression was almost like that of a sailor peering into the wind.
She was wearing a navy suit jacket with simple white trim, a plunging but narrow neckline, no blouse beneath, and heels that made her tower over everyone else, to whom she gave not even a glance. Her perfume was fresh. Although she seemed unhappy, it was impossible to tell if either happiness or unhappiness were pertinent to her. She found a seat, un-cased her cello, took the music handed to her by another student, and looked at it intently, seeming to take it in both deftly and expertly.
“Do you have to tune your instrument?” Jules asked after she failed to do so.
With a slight smile of either conceit or otherworldly detachment, she said, “I was playing it moments ago.”
She didn’t deign to glance at him. Everyone else looked to him for direction, but she stared down or ahead as if no one but she were in the room. He understood – Jules knew himself – how, suddenly, he could desire her as strongly as he had desired or loved any woman at first glance. And yet he felt no sexual attraction. Perhaps after its absence or secret containment it would surface explosively, but not now. Now all he wanted was proximity. The greatest pleasure he could imagine would be to face her a hand’s breadth away, merely to be close, actually to look in her eyes or, even if not, to look at them, to watch her, the pulses in her neck, her blink, her smile. He would have been content with just that. To kiss her would either have broken the spell or been unimaginably transcendent. He tried not to stare or give himself away, but he was breathing more deeply than he should have been.
How could he have fallen in love so quickly, beyond his control, and stupidly? Although she looked much older, she was probably twenty-five, certainly no older than thirty. It was impossible and undesirable. Even were it possible it would have been impossible. He had had, of course, like any man frequently in the presence of young women, many temporary infatuations, but never like this. Had he touched her, just shaken hands, he would have been gone forever. But he had always put an end to such things and come back to Jacqueline, his infatuations calmed.
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you for your time. This is what the Americans call a demo. It’s a theme to be used in commercials and for telephone hold music.” Because he was smiling when he said it, they laughed. Élodi looked at him sharply, as if she understood that something, perhaps his dignity, or more than his dignity, was in play. “I’ve recently dealt with some very rich, strange, crazy, and perhaps dangerous people. They commissioned this and I agreed to it. They probably won’t be happy, but let’s get on with it.”
Everyone positioned themselves. That is, everyone but Élodi, who didn’t move a centimeter. When they were settled in, the engineer gave a thumbs up, Jules nodded out the count to three, and all the bows began to move simultaneously. Very quickly, the students were taken up by the music, lifted out of themselves and into the better world that was the reason they had become or were becoming musicians, a world into which they were given entry with just a few strokes of a bow. It was so easy and yet so wonderful that it left them as if among angels. When after a day at work they would go home, they would float above the sidewalk, the sky would come alight, everything that moved would dance, and the faces of people in the Métro would be like the faces in Renaissance paintings.
Now they were gliding along the rhythmic ascending and descending waves, locked in the repetitions, and moved by the violins’ commentary – a loving but sad validation – upon the more active cellos and violas. The entire cycle lasted only a minute, and they went through it four times, five times, six, and seven. The engineer kept on giving the cut signal, but they were entranced. Their expressions were elevated and alive with optimism. They were happy, but with the regretful underlayment that makes happiness real.
Glancing at them, Jules recognized the beatific expression musicians sometimes have when they play the allegro of the Third Brandenburg and do not want to stop. He had never heard his own piece played, never seen how it could affect others. He thought that, as in all good music of every kind, he had been privileged to allow the escape of – in this case – the tiniest sliver of an ever-present perfection that presses invisibly against the heart of all things. And he knew that were they to go through the cycle too many times, as they might, something would be lost. There was only so much of the gift of music that the soul could support until exhaustion. So he stopped it while they were still vibrating almost as much as their strings.
“Beautiful,” said a violinist as the instruments were cased.
“American telephones,” said another, “will now surpass ours. You’re a traitor.”
“It’s for our telephones, too.”
They liked it, but would the Americans? After all, it had no “Bop bop, sheh bop!” Or anything like that. America was a giant country that seemed always to be racing ahead and bouncing up and down. Very violent Europeans had clashed with very crazy savages in a place where geysers popped out of the ground, and what you got was “Bop bop, sheh bop!” At least that was the view of the French. His piece would have to pass muster in Los Angeles, which was sunny, pastel, green, and unreal. Jules didn’t even know how to send it there. “Can you make this into an MP9?” he asked the engineer.
“An MP3? Sure. Do you have an email address?”
Jules didn’t like having even a cell phone, but Cathérine was able to attach one to him by arranging a beautiful aria as its ring tone. Sometimes Jules would call himself on his landline so he could listen to it over and over. And often he missed calls because he listened rather than answer. He didn’t remember his cell number, and most of the time left the phone off. Of the engineer at his bank of equipment, he asked, “You can do it right here, now?”
The engineer, knowing that Jules was of several generations past, nodded tolerantly. “This is a computer,” he said.
“It records and it mails? It’s all prepared?”
“All prepared.” With some rapid keystrokes and mouse movements, he set it up. “What’s the address?”
It was jackcheatham@acornint.com.
“What would you like to say?”
“I would like to say, in English, ‘Dear Jack, here is the music you asked for. I hope it pleases you. Please let me know at your earliest convenience. Jules Lacour.’”
“That’s all?”
“What else?”
The engineer hit send. “It’s done.”
Jules thanked him. Things had gone wonderfully, and for the moment he was not thinking of Élodi, but when he turned she was right there, staring at him. She couldn’t have been either more forward or more inexplicable. He almost started. Now he could see directly into her eyes, and never had he beheld a more elegant and refined woman, not even Jacqueline. This pained him, but he couldn’t escape either the truth of it, the traction, or the feeling of euphoria as he stood by her.
She broke the silence. “Bonjour. I’m going to be your student,” she said matter-of-factly, extending her hand. He reciprocated, they shook hands, and when they stopped they failed to disengage – for perhaps five extraordinary seconds.
After a moment, he came out with, “I don’t think you’re on my list.” It was all he could manage to say.
“I’m not, but I will be,” she replied.
He was astounded. Among other reasons, this did not happen. But though placement was not up to the students, he had no doubt that in fact she would be on his list.
“I may have to go to America for a few weeks,” he said.
As if he were an idiot, she replied, instructionally, “You’ll be back, and I’ll be here.” Then, without looking at him, she lifted her cello, turned, and walked out. He might as well have been hit with a shovel.
AT THE BEGINNING of fall, cool nights at Saint-Seine-l’Abbaye (the source of the Seine, near Dijon), and in the Haute Marne and other regions descending from the lower parts of Switzerland into the Île-de-France had sped up the flow of the Seine and made it suddenly cold. At no preset date, but as September wears on, it is as if a switch is thrown to banish summer. The strength of the sun is equivalent to that of March, the leaves begin to turn, with many having fallen already in August, and the scent of burning brush, floating up the hill in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, hints at the wood fires that will arrive with winter.
Jules had put his boat in the water and begun to row upstream against the stiff current that just before he got in his shell had tried to rip it from the dock. For half an hour he would fight the flow, moving slowly, and then shoot back to the boathouse in less than ten minutes. The turn at the Bir-Hakeim Bridge would be tricky, for when the current was perpendicular to the boat, swinging the stern around required force greater than that which pushed against it from upstream. He had seen single shells swept downriver sideways, totally out of control, until they were either fortuitously turned in an eddy, thrown against the embankment, or capsized.
Unlike many who found themselves once every few years struggling in the water, Jules had never gone over. Not only was he anxious of maintaining his perfect record, but, for him, capsizing would be dangerous especially when the water was cold and fast flowing. So he tried to concentrate, but found that he couldn’t. Possessed by excitement, fear, and regret, his mind raced as he strained at the oars. Thinking of the young woman, Élodi, who had appeared and disappeared, leaving teasing words that echoed through him, he felt what he had felt half a century before when he had fallen in love with Jacqueline – a dizzying, euphoric, internal rocket launch.
But it was impossible and it was wrong. Though Jacqueline was dead and by the world’s standards far more than a decent interval had passed, she lived in his memory, and to replace her would be to silence her. He spoke to her many times a day. He brought back her image and could see her in color, moving and three-dimensional. He was able to feel her touch and retrieve the scent of her perfume just in imagination. Little was left of her except in the fidelity he dared not compromise.
Had Jacqueline never existed, falling in love with Élodi would anyway have been ill-advised. He was not François Ehrenshtamm, who could leave even a living woman he had once loved and start all over again with someone else young enough to be his daughter. Jules had always thought that this kind of desire for a much younger woman was a vain play against death – which, because it of all things could not be denied, would end the gambit in hellish suffering not in an afterworld but this one, when the aged man who had become a repulsive husk would despair upon the sight of a young woman who wanted and deserved others.
Élodi was young enough to be his granddaughter and probably had no interest in him at all. He hoped he had misinterpreted her tone and her words. He didn’t want, like François, to tilt against aging and death but rather only to spar with them, striking here and there, evading their blows as much as possible, but always aware that they would win. In that dance they would take the lead and he would accept it if only because courage was worth more than trying to hold on to youth.
Although at first his astounding infatuation had had no sexual component, now he felt such immense heat in imagining her that he quivered. He was possibly fit and capable enough to keep up with her for a while, but how long would that last? It simply could not be, so he tried just to concentrate upon the rhythm of his strokes as he strained at the oars. But straining at the oars was like making love to her, and in a parallel he didn’t particularly like, he couldn’t strain for as long as he wanted against the new volumes of water flowing inexhaustively from the foothills of the Alps.
Remembering the calming scent of smoke rising up from the slopes of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was not enough to distract him. Nor were the prospects of his song in America. All he could think of was this Élodi, in whose presence he had been for only twenty minutes, whom he had hardly touched, and with whom he had spoken only a few uncertain words. Then, at Bir-Hakeim, he made the difficult turn while he was distracted, and was almost swept sideways downriver. But because there had been so many turns over so many years and he was not quite ready to fail, he recovered and was soon speeding back to the dock, fast and straight, liberated for a moment from everything except his rapid progress on the water.
TEN YEARS BEFORE, after sprinting without pause for half an hour he would have been awakened as if by caffeine, but now after rowing or running he had to rest. A twenty-minute nap usually would suffice, or just sitting quietly on a bench. No one else was in the boathouse, as often was the case when he rowed. The few people left in the club almost always came only in the morning or on weekends. He paid ever-increasing dues keyed to the ever-declining membership, kept his boat and oars in good order, cleaned up the dock, and tidied the desk where the logbook rested. Though he was the most senior member of the club, if not the oldest, many of the newer ones, never having seen him, thought he was fictitious.
He took a long, hot shower, and dressed. A cot wedged between the boat bays was covered in a white towel. Someone may have used the towel to wipe down a boat, and it was filthy. He seized it, threw it into a hamper, took a freshly laundered terrycloth from the top of the dryer, and laid it out. Then he sat on the cot and looked over the dock and across the water.
Though the fast-flowing Seine was the color of gunmetal, the sky was Parisian blue and early autumn wind made trees across the water glitter in continuous palsy. Because of the wind, the velocity of the current, and the surge of barge traffic in mid-afternoon, no one would be rowing. Also, participation fell off at the end of summer, when people were busy once again, and who could blame them? Streets, gardens, and colors were at their most beautiful in the cool air, dimming light, and the shadow of a weakening sun. The club was neither incorporated nor allowed in Paris itself, but the barge had been moored against the Quai du Point du Jour since before the war, and during the war was used by the Resistance. Every mayor of Paris since had told them that if they kept quiet, didn’t expand, publicize, or make a fuss, they could stay.
Jules swung his feet onto the cot, lay back, and turned his head to see barges as they raced by. The wind coursing through the leaves sounded like a river running through a weir. He breathed deeply, intending to sleep for twenty minutes or so but no longer. As he thought of one thing after another, all took flight and he was released into sleep.
WHEN HE AWOKE it was dark except for lights on the opposite bank. He had slept so deeply he knew neither where he was nor when it was – not merely the time but the decade. After a few seconds, he got his bearings. The boathouse didn’t have a clock, his watch didn’t have a luminous dial, and because he was never there at night he didn’t remember where the light switch was.
As he sat up he felt the cell phone in his pocket, pulled it out, and flipped it open. It illuminated his face in such a deathly way that it was fortunate he didn’t see himself. Nonetheless he was shocked to see that it was after eight and he had slept for more than five hours. Then he remembered Élodi, and a wave of pleasure and pain coursed through his body. Without even thinking, he used the phone to call Ehrenshtamm.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Who?”
“What do you mean, who? Who else?”
“I’m about to go out. I gave a speech, got home late, and they had already eaten – with nothing left for me, thank you very much. I think that’s a message, but anyway I was going to go to Renée. Why? Where are you?”
“Rowing.”
“At night?”
“No. I slept. See you in half an hour.” Jules disconnected.
They still frequented the undistinguished Boul-Miche bistros in which they had practically lived when they were students, but now when François finished a speech in which he was adored by the audience – especially the attractive women – and pocketed a fat check, he liked to go to Chez Renée on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Not only was it excellent, it was the kind of place where if François were recognized he would be ignored, because many of its patrons were, or thought themselves, of equal or superior status. He was an intellectual, and they were intellectuals, but because he was famous and could be seen on television, they looked down on him as much as they deeply envied him. Also the restaurant served Purée Crécy, for which François had had a weakness since childhood. He had been going there for a long time, it was doing badly enough to suggest that it might close, and he wanted to help.
“You slept for five hours? Are you sick?”
“Tired.”
“Usually a good reason to sleep. Shouldn’t you have gone home first? You’re not a narcoleptic.”
“Perhaps not, but when I nap in the afternoon I find it hard to wake up. I’m still not fully awake. What was your speech like?”
“It went well, filled the hall, lots of beautiful women, especially one in the front row. I couldn’t stop looking at her.”
“What was the subject?”
“Accident and design.”
“I may not have the heart for controversies anymore. There have been too many, and I’m too old.”
“It was on a different level, apart from controversy. I observed that sometimes accident is so perfectly aligned with purpose that it seems impossible that there is no design, but I didn’t push for a conclusion. Hamlet tells Horatio that sometimes our indiscretions serve us well, and then concludes that it’s because a divinity shapes our ends – and I can’t believe that Shakespeare, of all people, was unaware of the rather broad pun. I left that to the audience and dwelt instead upon the many circumstances when that which either you never could have dreamed or that which you fight against surprisingly delivers you to your exact intended destination. You know those film clips, of explosions or natural catastrophes, that are run backwards?”
“Yes, the billion fragments of a vase that has fallen to the floor and been smashed, but all the pieces fly up and reconstitute themselves perfectly.”
“Exactly. That seems to me to be one characteristic of reality that we tend to ignore. In math and physics the three-body problem shows that it’s impossible to predict the behavior of, for example, the components of a fluid. Yet its uncountable, autonomous particles will always align properly and perfectly to flow through a restricted channel, and then break out into seeming anarchy in a bay. It happens over and over again, all the discrete parts of reality hewing to one another, eventually, to make a whole: eppur si muove. Put it this way: sometimes the things you want the least end up saving you, in a flow of time and events that’s impossible to predict and yet ends with all the disparate pieces making something perfect, beautiful, and just.”
At this moment, half a dozen motorcyclists roared past on the boulevard so loudly that Jules couldn’t answer, and both he and François turned to look. “The police don’t do that,” Jules said. “Their machines are just as powerful if not more so, but they’re much quieter. I hate barbaric motorcyclists. Ninety percent of their machines are black, as is their clothing. Their helmets completely hide their faces, making them look like space insects, erasing their humanity. They ride around like the Black Knight. I detest knights. Except when I played with lead ones, I’ve always detested knights.”
“Even Sir Launcelot?”
“Even Sir Launcelot.”
“I’d have thought a traditionalist like you would find them admirable.”
“Admirable? The agency that kept all of Europe in a system of slavery? I’d have been with the peasants who pulled them off their horses and killed them as they wiggled like turtles in their heavy armor.”
“What’s going on? Were you just hit by a motorcyclist?”
With a quick shake of his head Jules indicated that he had not been.
“Why then this volcanic eruption? It’s not like you.” François checked himself. “Actually, it is, if you remember Sophie.”
“Sophie who?”
“The little girl when we fenced.”
“Oh yes. I had forgotten her name. I remember, vaguely.”
“I’ll never forget. She was tiny, about twelve, maybe eleven. Whenever a man was paired against her, we went easy. It was the beginning of paternal love for us – perhaps a little early for university students, but we wanted to protect her.”
“Except that bastard … where was he from?”
“I don’t remember, and I don’t remember his name. He was huge, and he whacked her until she folded up into a fetal position. You ignored all the rules, jumped in, and even though it wasn’t a match but real fighting, you beat him down until he begged you to stop. And you didn’t. We had to pull you off. Had they been real sabres, you would have killed him twenty times over. What’s up now? Why motorcyclists? You loved Steve McQueen. You wanted a BMW.”
“Steve McQueen’s jacket was brown, not black. No helmet, you could see his face, and the motorcycle was to get to a safe and beautiful place away from the Nazis, not to try to be like them. Not to oppress and terrify everyone else. That’s what it is. The motorcyclists these days, most of them, seem like Nazis: the arrogance, the distance, the assertion of power, the wish to intimidate and the enjoyment when they do. I hate them.”
François hesitated for a moment, took in a breath, and said, “I know.”
“And I guess I’m upset. I don’t know what to do.”
“Me either, and I’ve been that way for seventy years.”
“Yes, but I’m in love.”
“Oh no,” said François. “That’s ridiculous. Please, not that. You’ll sing like a loon until you finish the soup. Then you’ll slowly become a miserable turkey in a tragicomic farce. Upon starting the salad, Jacqueline will return. By the time the plates are cleared you’ll be staring at the last quarter of your second beer, speaking to me but begging her for forgiveness. You’ll go on to explain to me, indirectly of course, that the life I myself have chosen lacks integrity and maturity, that your present suffering and denial will amount to less than mine at the end. You’ll say, ‘I love this young woman but it’s impossible and inappropriate, so I’ll let her go.’ But Jules, she’s probably no more aware of you than of the location of the nearest fire hydrant ….”
“Oh, but she is!”
“She tracks fire hydrants? I don’t think so. And it’s likely she thinks of you as a kind of walking Egyptian mummy, and that you just ginned her up in your imagination. You don’t have false teeth or a big belly, but unless she’s seen you naked or done a dental workup she’s got to assume that you do. When she arises in the morning she doesn’t look like a punching bag, does she. But you do. Her breath is sweet, her skin tight, her eyes have sparkle. Give it up.”
“I don’t understand. What about you?”
“Me? I’m in worse shape than you. I smoke for Christ’s sake. What an idiot, I know. My teeth are wine-stained. I can’t run ten kilometers. You could probably run a hundred.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“I know. So why do you think I, the male equivalent of a decayed strumpet – if my hair gets any whiter I’ll look like Colette – wake up every morning next to a fresh, nubile, fertile, charming, young woman?”
“Because you’re famous … you have ….”
“You don’t have to be famous. It helps to be rich, which, because of alimony and child support, I’m not. The difference is that I’m not, as you are, the caretaker of another soul. Jacqueline is always with you. She hasn’t quite died, has she?”
“No.”
“You can still love her even if you love someone else, but not if you remain the way you are. You’re more devoted than a priest, Jules. You have only one life, at the end of which there may be nothing. Why must you be so faithful? What is it about you?”
“I try, no matter how vainly, to keep them alive.”
“Who’s them?”
“All of them.”
AFTER FRANÇOIS RETURNED to the domesticity for which Jules, rather than he, had been born, Jules walked through the Quartier latin as it started to rain. At almost eleven he crossed the Champs de Mars, which were deserted because of the hour and the weather. His intention was to tire himself so that when he reached home sleep would outcompete worry. If he could, he would go all the way to Passy, where he had grown up, and depart from there for home after touching the façade of the house his parents had lived in before they were forced to hide in Reims. The Jews fled either south to try to cross the Pyrenees, or southeast to Switzerland, but the Famille Lacour went instead to Reims, where the ordinariness and lack of importance, as well as the fewer Jews than in Paris, might have afforded them a contrarian chance. Many of their friends, diamonds sewn into the seams of their clothes, had been captured or turned back at Annecy or Pau. Jules had no idea who lived in the house now, and had never wanted to know. But every once in a while, especially when he was troubled, he would go there and touch the wall.
He walked through a downpour that had started after the Champs de Mars, and headed for the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Bir-Hakeim was where the free French, by holding against Rommel, had begun to turn the tide and restore the dignity of France. It was the symbol of springing back from defeat, and though the bridge named in its honor was a fairly hideous structure, it was his favorite, because it was where he turned around after struggling hard against the current. Ugly and ungainly, the Pont de Bir-Hakeim was a symbol of redemption, which made sense, as redemption seldom comes without suffering.
Hardly used even during the day, the walkways were now slick and deserted. He walked in the center, between columns that supported train tracks on the upper level, as here was some protection from the rain. Almost at the midpoint, where a staircase led down to the long and narrow Île aux Cygnes mid-channel in the Seine, he heard a commotion of angry voices echoing amid the columns and fading when an occasional car went by and the wash of its tires on the wet roadway muffled all sound.
The closer he came, the more he knew that something was terribly wrong and dangerous. He didn’t run to it, but his pace quickened. It was like being in the forest in Algeria at night and in bad weather. He was unseen, perfectly safe, with surprise and the lack of fear to his great advantage. Though he had no weapon, he had these and he had experience. By the time he saw what was going on near a buttress at the midpoint, he had partially returned to a soldier’s state of mind.
Three young men, one of whom had a knife, were beating and kicking another one, who was rolling this way and that on the ground in trying to protect himself. Jules hadn’t been afraid, but he was now – because they were three, they were young, he was old, and he was one.
Surprise itself could deliver him the first. His experience and strength might give him the second. But what of the third when Jules would be winded? So he held back. If this were between them and they were all the same, why intervene? Maybe the police would come, but now they were nowhere in sight. What could he do but watch, ashamed to retreat but unable to take action.
They kicked and pummeled the figure on the ground until it could move only agonizingly, rising into a low hump, collapsing, trying to sidle away but stopped by the buttress. Then they stopped, drew back, and the tallest one, who had a knife, approached the body on the ground, staring at it while drawing the hand that held the knife back past his shoulder.
Jules was by this time so torn between two imperatives that he trembled, though not out of fear. Then what he saw stopped his trembling. The young man on the ground, now risen to his knees and covered in blood, was wearing a yarmulke. Though he didn’t speak, his eyes were begging. What he didn’t know and surely could not have imagined, and what his tormentors did not know and surely could not have imagined, was that watching from the shadows was Jules, a man who was thrown back seventy years as if no time had passed, whose whole life had been a compressed spring in wait for just the trigger they had pulled. He knew not himself of what he was capable.
Although it was true, he wasn’t aware that here was a chance to kill in just the way as all his life he had wanted to kill, and to die in just the way as all his life he had wanted to die. They hadn’t noticed him, until, running at full speed, he burst from behind. He knew they would freeze momentarily, and they did, all of them. Before they moved, Jules was on the tall one with the knife and had opened his hand to grasp the assailant’s head and hold it as tremendous forward momentum pushed him against the stones of the bridge. Guiding the head against a sharp edge of masonry just above a more rounded course, Jules used the buttress as a weapon, killing the first one instantly.
The other two attacked even before the first one hit the pavement, windmilling their fists, because they didn’t know how to fight. In the split second in which Jules determined how to deal with this, he also managed to wonder what a Hasidic Jew was doing on the bridge at night, alone. Perhaps he was just walking, or they had dragged him there. He limped off toward the Left Bank as Jules shielded himself as best he could from the blows and struggled toward the stairs. Punches were coming fast and hard from every direction. He couldn’t keep up with them, but instead of boxing – he was no boxer, even if they weren’t either – he waited for an opening and, with a scream, seized one of them by the neck, turned his whole body, and as if diving into a pool pushed off hard into the abyss, out from the stairs, riding the one he had seized down the twenty-one steps as if on a toboggan. When they stopped, the stunned young man pushed limply against Jules, trying to get up. From above and behind came the footsteps of the other one, who now had the knife and was closing. Aching and winded, Jules understood that he could no longer deal with two, or perhaps one, so he waited until the boy struggling beneath him was in a completely unguarded position as he tried to rise, and punched him in the throat, which he knew would – and did – kill him.
At this point, the boy with the knife lost his courage. Not knowing this, Jules looked at him, expecting either to die or perhaps to kill again in what seemed like a dream and what for an instant he thought must be a dream. Then the boy threw the knife into the Seine.
Exiting the trees on the Allée des Cygnes were a man and a woman walking beneath an umbrella. They froze. The boy who had thrown away the knife inexplicably picked up and pocketed a piece of paper – as if at this point he was fastidiously concerned with litter. Then he began to scream in a high-pitched, threatened voice. “He killed my friends! He killed my friends! Raciste! Raciste!”
The woman pulled out a phone, but she was shaking too much to use it, so the man grabbed it from her as the umbrella he dropped began to roll around in the breeze. The Hasidic Jew was by this time long gone, and the two witnesses had seen only that Jules was standing over a body as a frightened boy cried for help.
Jules knew that even if his explanation were accepted or somehow proved, which it might well not have been, and even if they could locate the Hasidic Jew, they would never find the knife, and Jules would be condemned for overreaction. How he was supposed to have fought three, one of whom had a weapon, didn’t matter. Well protected citizens, who would not themselves have intervened and would have allowed the unknown Jew on the bridge to die, eschewed violence so passionately as to close their eyes and wish to be done with it all equally and without the labor and risk of judgment. Prosecutors would prosecute him with single-minded professionalism. If the assailants were Muslims, and it was likely they were (“Raciste!”), pressure from one side and the desire to appease it from the other would almost certainly send him to prison, and never could he have afforded to go to prison, most especially now.
The sound of sirens came from the Right Bank as a chain of cars with flashing blue lights began to ascend from the west onto the ramp leading up to the bridge.
Rather than run and thereby telegraph guilt, Jules began to walk west at a pace that suggested he hadn’t been aware of the events that had just occurred. Though his manner comported perfectly with his shock, to the witnesses it looked like indifference. He glanced back at the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, at the center of which dozens of lights flashed hysterically in blue. Police were running down the stairs.
Which meant that Jules had to run, too. He ran every day that he didn’t row, sprinting intermittently, and now he sprinted much faster than usual. As the police following him saw him pulling away they received the clear impression that he was a young man. They couldn’t catch him, but what would he do when he reached the end of the Allée des Cygnes at the foot of the Pont de Grenelle? It was late, and raining. The streets were empty and would be saturated with police.
The running and his desperation felt much like war. He had no fear, because, as in war, the feeling that he was already dead freed him. It had been like that in Algeria, a kind of joy at writing himself off, which left him free to act in a way that by stunning and confounding his enemies might have saved his life.
Ahead, the Pont de Grenelle was lit in a garland of flashing blue lights. Closed in, there was only one thing he could do. He had always loved to walk or run through the Allée des Cygnes, but now he would have to leave it. He went to the fence, put one foot on the bottom rail, and vaulted over the rest. Then he slid down the steep masonry, taking care not to sprain an ankle, and without the slightest hesitation or making much of a splash, launched himself feet first into the river.
Everything continued to happen fast and numbly. Still, he was able to realize that he was tasting the spattered blood of the first man he killed when he had smashed him against the wall. But going into the river washed away both the blood and its taste, which was like a piece of raw iron that has not rusted but, somehow, rotted. The river took him as he knew it would. It was painfully cold, but not enough to confuse him. In less than a minute he grew used to it, and by that time he was level with the ramp and stairs leading from the Pont de Grenelle to the Allée des Cygnes, down which police were running, the straight beams of their flashlights sweeping jerkily from one side to the other as they moved. Some of the police were keen enough on the chase to skim their lights over the river on both sides of the Allée. Swept downstream on the north side, Jules submerged himself.
He had rowed here for sixty years, and knew the river’s every trick. Although he had to check visually, he could fix the stern of his boat on a landmark and row without looking back for many strokes, and then turn the point of the stern to another landmark to round a curve or avoid a bridge pier. Just where he had now gone into the water was the point of greatest danger when rowing, and he probably knew this particular patch of river as well as anyone in the world. The wakes of the bateaux mouches, although miraculously less than that of a powerful outboard, often filled the cockpit of his shell, and it took some skill not to capsize as they passed. On very windy days, one couldn’t row safely on the Seine, which was a muscular river that had always refused to be completely conquered, even by the great mass of Paris. The bateaux mouches made their astounding turns here, pivoting at their centers, whirling like blades. This made the biggest waves. To be caught in them was extremely difficult. To be hit by an immense, twirling bateau was death. West of Bir-Hakeim it was quieter, the main threat being commercial barges. But now there were no barges or bateaux mouches, and had he been in his light boat he almost could have run the whole river blind. After he counted slowly to twenty he knew the current had swept him beyond the westernmost point of the Allée des Cygnes, and he surfaced with a gasp.
Flashing police lights on the bridges at either end of the Allée lit them more brightly than Christmas trees. Carried by the Seine into a new life dictated by chance, he felt electrically alive and excited, even as or perhaps because he thought that everything was headed to the kind of cataclysms and death he had been spared all his life – of the Jews, his parents, the Mignons, the soldiers and civilians in Algeria, Jacqueline, and now Luc, and himself. But the river carried him west, death still at bay.
He knew the current veered south, hit the left bank, and ricocheted north, which would carry him to the dock. He had observed this every day, traced by detritus on the surface. Letting the current carry him, he felt it move south, bounce off the south bank, and head north. It slammed him against the north end of the dock as if he had been shot out of a circus cannon.
He climbed into the much warmer air. It was completely quiet – no sirens and no lights. He couldn’t be seen from the street, no one ever came to the boathouse at night, and he had the key. After a moment’s rest, he went in, stripped off his clothes, and threw them into the washer to rid them of all traces of blood and the Seine. Wrapped in towels, he sat on the edge of the cot where he had slept not long before, and, as the washer agitated, he rocked slightly in the dark.
His mind racing, he stayed awake until the washer finished. Then he threw the clothes into the dryer. The tumbling sound and light escaping from inside were soporific. He lay back, noting to himself again and again that he must get up in the morning before others came early to row. He didn’t know who came then or exactly when they did or even if they did, for he rowed much later, but he had to arise before the light so as to be dressed and waiting. He would leave only when Paris was busy, the streets were full of early risers, and the cameras would be sucking up the imagery of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people making their ways, blurring, moving, innocent or not, an indistinct mass of men and women pressing hard upon the pedals of their ever-disappearing lives.
AWAKENED BY FIRST LIGHT reflecting off the gray river, he tried to go back to sleep. There were two worlds now, as perhaps there had always been: one of sleep without dreams, where anxiety did not exist; and the wakeful world in which fear came in paralyzing surges. Because it was impossible to sleep, he faced what had become of his life.
This was just before six, when someone might come to row, though it was unlikely, as the river flowed faster than it had the day before, and local rains had scattered garbage and tree limbs, sometimes whole trees, across the surface of the water. The weather was cold, dark, and foggy. Still, someone might come, so Jules rushed to prepare. He knew that later he would have to think very carefully about what to do, but what he had to do within the boathouse itself was obvious, and he moved fast. He threw the towels he had slept on and used as blankets into the hamper, and laid down a fresh covering, just as he had done the day before. Next, he went to the sink and cupped his hands to carry a little bit of water to sprinkle on his boat to make it look as if it had just been used. He turned on the shower and poured a little shampoo on the floor so that it would appear that after going out on the river he had bathed. The scent wafted through the rows of boats. Then he rushed to fix a light to the bow of his boat. He never rowed in the dark, so he fumbled with the unfamiliar attachment, but soon fastened it.
Should someone arrive now, the evidence would point to Jules having been out on the water early. He wasn’t yet dressed, as someone who had just finished showering would not have been. Probably no one would show, but whoever might wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. The next step was to dress, and as he did he thought through one scenario after another.
His life had been saturated with and overwhelmed by ever-present guilt for the deaths of people he hadn’t killed, people he had loved, whom he would have done anything to save. Now, in regard to the two men, or boys, that he was fairly sure he had actually killed, he felt no guilt at all. The very fact of feeling no remorse made him feel remorse sufficient to set him in an argument with himself even as he desperately tried to strategize a way clear of capture.
Was what he had done a crime? Was it murder? There were three of them – and at least one was armed with a deadly weapon. Might he have been more measured? He was not a boxer or a street fighter but a seventy-four-year-old musician. Had he tried to moderate his response, they probably would have killed him, or at least they might have pushed him aside and killed the Hasidic Jew. Should he have abstained, as required of a good citizen, leaving the monopoly of violence to the state but allowing the murder of an innocent man? Years before, a woman had been raped and murdered in the park at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And not that long after, another woman, both with extreme brutality. The neighborhood was literally terrified. And the response of the good citizens had been to hand out orange plastic whistles.
At the neighborhood meeting, imagining a bunch of frightened, impotent people watching a crime unfold as they provided the musical accompaniment with their whistles, Jules had asked why they didn’t hand out revolvers instead. A hundred people summoning another hundred more would be of absolutely no avail if not a single one was willing actually to intervene. He stated this, perhaps somewhat un-diplomatically, by referring to “sheep whistles not for calling sheep but to be blown by them.” He was ostracized forever by everyone present, an indignant crowd bravely determined to be militantly helpless. His last words before he left were, “One must have the courage to save a life.” They thought he was crazy, and now he thought that perhaps they had been right. He was so shaken, unsure, and fearful that it grayed his vision, and things would fade in and out as he tried to think of what to do.
“Steady yourself,” he said out loud, “hold through.” It began to work. He would be all right even if someone came in, and no one did, giving him time to think. In the quiet fog of early morning everything was muted in gray, and the vigorously flowing river, powerful and unperturbed, was a model for his thought.
For whom would they be searching? The three witnesses would undoubtedly think he was taller and heavier than he was. Just as children imagine monsters, and seafarers once returned with exaggerated tales of gargantuan creatures, the witnesses would most likely endow Jules with strength and size appropriate to their fear of him. That he could outrun young police officers suggested that they would estimate his age to be lower than it was, given also that he had been able to take on three young men and quickly kill two of them. The heavy rain that night had soaked his hair, turning it dark and plastering it down. And he had been wearing a distinctive saffron/marigold-colored rain jacket over his blazer. He had bought this in Switzerland many years before. Its color was unforgettable. The company that made it was Japanese, and the Japanese vision of the spectrum was somehow different from the European. He had seldom worn it, but that day he had pulled it from his closet in response to the weather forecast.
The first action he took, therefore, was to wrap the jacket around one of the small cinder blocks used at the boathouse to prop open the doors on windy days, and tie it up with nylon boat twine, which would take years to rot. He then dressed, seized a broom, and went out to sweep the dock. At the edge, he inconspicuously dropped the weighted jacket into the water, which he knew to be about twenty meters deep beyond the dock, with a strong, scouring current. He carried the broom and swept in case there were distant traffic cameras across the river.
Instead of a taller, heavier, dark-haired man of between thirty and fifty, in a bright orange-yellow jacket, leaving the boathouse and exiting onto the street would be a man of lesser build in his middle seventies, with thick hair that was blonde and white. Leaving a place he had habituated for more than half a century, he would be dressed in a blue blazer. The blazer had come through for him in that it was made of a certain kind of fabric that simply would not wrinkle. The boast of the manufacturer was that you could stuff it into a thermos, if you could find one big enough, pour in hot water, leave it for a week, and it would come out as good as new and ready to wear. Why do this would be anyone’s guess, but the point was made, and despite the fact that it had been in the river the perfectly pressed blazer was an important element in disguising Jules as himself. Thus transformed, he would be anything but the man who had had the confrontation on the bridge, although of course he was.
Before he got dressed, he inspected himself. He had bruises on his arms and shoulders but his face was clear and he had no cuts or abrasions whatsoever, meaning he had left no blood. His hair had been matted by the rain tight against his head, so there was little chance that a hair had flown away as, when it is dry, it can. Nor had he left anything on the bridge or the Allée, for he still had everything he had had with him. At his age, the bruises would take two weeks to disappear, but none was visible as long as he was dressed. There were no cameras on the road near the boathouse. This he knew because he often parked longer than he should have, and in judging his chances of getting a ticket he had taken into account the lack of surveillance. Of course, there were cameras all over the place, and had someone actually dissected his comings and goings they might see that he had not returned home that night, and that his outerwear had changed while he was still out and about.
But there were millions of people in Paris, and the skein of their transit was a tangle of a billion threads. It would take an impossible brilliance or amazing luck to focus on his whereabouts specifically, especially given that he didn’t resemble the man the witnesses would describe. All he had to do now was walk calmly into Paris as if nothing had happened, buy a newspaper, sit in a café, read while having breakfast, and take the train home. The trick was not to shake and not to flutter, and, if he did, never to let anyone see.
WHEN HE GOT HOME he was tired because he had walked to l’Étoile to get the A line west. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had picked up something to eat, and now, with a sandwich and a bottle of beer, he sat on the terrace. The sun began to burn away first the clouds, and then the mist that had lingered over the Seine far below.
Not long before, it seemed, a young family of three had moved into these splendid quarters. The wife was vital, quick, statuesque, and erotic, but what was most wonderful was the way she loved her child. It would remain the most beautiful thing Jules had ever seen. Watching Jacqueline with Cathérine gave him a purpose and defined his life. He knew that educated people, who strove above all not to be commonplace, would mock his feeling that the child was an angel. Once, and only once, he had innocently and happily declared it. The robotic contempt that had ensued had spurred him to strike back. “You think it’s trite?” he asked. The unspoken answer was absolutely clear. “And that angels are only an embarrassing figment of the medieval imagination? Let’s stipulate, then” – the person he was addressing was a lawyer – “that there are no such things. But we do have evidence that for thousands of years people have believed in pure and blessèd intermediary beings close to God. So, what do you think fed their perfervid imaginations? Where did they get the idea? What were their models?
“Children, of course. And when a parent describes his infant as an angel, he’s referring to the source and inspiration of the word. The children came first, and the word, with all its connotations, is truly specific to them. It’s an accurate, exact, and original description with which one flatters the Pope’s angels by associating them with one’s child. And why must you react with such bile to such a lovely and wonderful thing even if it isn’t true?”
When Cathérine was an infant even Shymanski had been fairly young and his children not yet old enough to be horrible. Jules could run fifty kilometers then, and row twenty almost as fast as an Olympian. He was flush with his new academic appointment, and would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night to write down music that came to him in dreams. In summer they traveled throughout the Mediterranean, light and on the cheap, and they were sunburnt, well rested, always near the sea. When Cathérine was a little older, they went to the Atlantic beaches of the Gironde. Paris in the fall was the most glorious place in the world. Jacqueline had a gray Chanel suit that she had bought for her lecturing. To see her in it took her students’ breath away. And, famously, for her hour they hardly stirred in their seats.
At least as he now remembered it, life had been close to perfect, but then it began slowly to erode – imperceptibly at first and now almost gone, with a few years left of shortness of breath and difficulty sleeping as his body predictably and inevitably failed. But perhaps he could make one last reach, for Luc. That was his task, the last run, now more complicated than ever.
After the war, when he was still a child, Jules had no desire to live, and thought of death as his sole comfort. As he grew older, the will to survive was welded inextricably, in a slowly forming braid, to his love of beauty. Just the streets of Paris, the way they flowed pleasurably one into another, and the musical life of a city that was itself a musical composition seduced him at first modestly and then irreversibly.
For most of his youth, until his inherited talent and devoted work slowly led to greater ambition, he dreamed of living in a small, quiet place in a poor neighborhood, with a pretty wife, a cheap car, and perhaps a city job: clerk, sweeper, motorman, guard. He would be unheralded, undistinguished, and unambitious, but alive to every little thing, appreciative and observant of all the frictions of life, happy to live in the shadows, free to cultivate memory and devotion as busy people who grasp at the future seldom can. And now when he passed through the gray concrete cliffs of the banlieue, although he would never choose to leave his magnificent lodgings, he wondered what it would have been like, and was almost envious.
There would be nothing in that day’s papers of what had happened on the Île aux Cygnes, so he threw them away. No matter what was occurring in Africa, space, or the Middle East, not to mention all of France, there was only one story he would have the patience to read. Although in regard to Luc and his own health time was against him, in regard to the Île aux Cygnes it was salvation. No matter how devoted and programmatical were the police, time would dissolve evidence, passion, and motivation. Even in the relatively short term, after a month or two, he could not possibly be expected to come up with an account of his whereabouts or actions thirty or sixty days before. That clock had just begun to run.
On his terrace, far from the center of Paris, shielded by distance, riches, the trees, and the top of a fortress-like palisade, every slow breath marked the increasing seconds in which there was no knock at the door. But then the telephone rang. He started, and was frozen as it rang eight more times. Of course, the police would not have his telephone number, and wouldn’t have called him if they did. When finally he answered, the line was as clear as it would have been had someone been calling from next door, but the call was from New York. A woman’s voice asked in English if he was Jewels Lacour. “Please hold for Jack.”
“Hey Jewels! Hey!”
“Jack?”
“Jewels! We love it! Rich loves it! You didn’t get my email?”
“I haven’t looked. I don’t really like the email.”
“It’s all in there. We’re taking it. Isn’t that great?”
Jules hesitated. “Yes, yes, it’s great.” For some reason, he was fearful. He felt it in his stomach, but then he overruled it.
“Look, we want to use it for the Super Bowl, so we’ve got to get going. There’s gonna have to be a big change-over throughout the world. It’s a rush. We need you now in L.A. to orchestrate and record. Can you come right away?”
“Yes.”
“That’s perfect. It’s all in the email, a deal memo, which is a sort of contract. You know, emails, they never go away unless you’re Hillary Clinton. Get back to us, and we’ll see you soon. Any problems, call me.”
“Okay.”
“Great, Jewels. I won’t be in L.A. but I’ll see you in New York.”
“Okay, but ….” The line went dead as Jack had something else to attend to.
Jules didn’t bother with a few other emails but opened Jack’s directly. It read: “Acorn International Ltd., A subsidiary of Acorn Holding Company, London and The Hague, accepts the composition forwarded by M. Jules Lacour as of this date, and will pay Euro 500,000 upon completion of orchestration and recording in units of varying length to be used in different venues and media throughout the world for the purpose of promoting Acorn’s products, corporate image, and good name, without further payment or restriction.”
Already living far more dangerously than even a bank robber, Jules wrote back, “I cannot agree for less than one million Euros,” and hit send. He remained staring at the screen, not expecting anything. But then, in less than a minute, the answer appeared.
He opened it. “Agreed. One million Euros.” The phone rang. It was the secretary again.
“Hold for Jack.”
Jack came on the line, and without even making sure Jules was there, he said, “No problem, Jewels. We accept. When will you be in L.A.?”
“As soon as I can get a flight. Where in L.A.? Is there a person to contact?”
“Just go to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and get a room on a high floor, not on the entrance side. At night the bar gets really noisy, believe me, I know. Look east and over the back garden if you can. Better yet, south and over the pool. We’ll get in touch with you when we’ve got the personnel lined up. We’re working on it, but it may take a while to get an orchestra together, because the studios take precedence. Still, you should be there so that when they’re ready you’ll be available. Save your receipts and we’ll take care of everything at the end. Fly business class. We’re no longer allowed to deduct First, but don’t stint on anything else. In L.A. you’ll need to rent a nice car, so you’d better reserve it as soon as possible. They don’t always have them.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know, something nice. A Mercedes or a BMW. Try a convertible. It’s L.A.”
“But that would be so expensive,” Jules said.
“A business expense, Jewels. Go for it.” Jack hung up abruptly, as usual, as if Jules didn’t exist.
“Okay,” Jules said to the empty ether before he put down the phone.