V

One, Two, Three, Four Leaps into the Void

  1. ‘How long?’ Michelle says. I do not know what she means and neither does my father. ‘How long is a summer?’ Then I get it. She’s talking about the swallows nesting on the undersides of the roof outside her window. She wants to know how long the sky will be blue enough for those swallows. She wants to know when the tide of blue will recede taking the swallows with it.
  2. Summers, looking back, have sometimes stretched beyond horizons; sometimes they have passed in a blink. I do not have an answer for Michelle except that I wish this summer would hold its blue and not ever let it go.
  3. No, I don’t really wish that. But I shall be sorry when this summer is over and looking back it will not be one of those endless summers – not even though it is written down in a book and can be lived over and over. It will be a gone-in-a-blink summer and the blue of the sky will not look so blue as it does at this moment.
  4. Henri hears the bell of the shop ring. He brushes lint from the front of his waistcoat, adjusts his glasses and steps out from the back of the shop. It is Yves Klein returned – as swallows will return, as readers may return to these pages, again and again. Henri smiles, noticing the frayed cuffs of the blue jacket that had once been pieces of cloth laid out on his table in the shop.
  5. ‘It’s a lucky suit,’ declares Yves Klein. ‘I should like another just like it. The same blue and the same cut. And a red waistcoat the same and a second waistcoat that is the colour of the suit. And I need this new suit to be the same lucky as the first.’
  6. Henri ushers Yves Klein into the back of the shop. He must take new measurements, he says, for we all change through time and he can see that Yves Klein is a little heavier than before – though he does not say that. Luck in a blue suit can do that to a man.
  7. Yves Klein strips down to his underwear and emerges from behind the curtain of the changing area. He is taller, perhaps, or he holds himself with a greater assurance than he once did. He notices the newspaper clippings on the wall and he nods at his own blue-lit fame.
  8. ‘I have a plan for something even greater than all the rest. Not blue this time but beyond blue. A leap of the imagination and the spirit. A leap into the infinite.’
  9. Henri runs the tape measure up Yves Klein’s inside leg. He remembers his father on that night of the broken windows in the street of tailors. Remembers the blue-black bruises of his father’s eye afterwards and his father’s fingers curled into the claws of dead birds.
  10. ‘That’s why I need the new suit. Not that I don’t have other suits, but this suit must be especially lucky and blue, splendid and catching the eye the way that swallows catch the eye when they dip and dive to the level of the streets in Paris. Have you seen them?’
  11. It was around this time that the Russians were planning to send a man into space. They had sent Laika, the dog, a few years earlier. It did not survive the flight for they did not yet have the technology to bring the dog back successfully. I have a Romanian blue stamp with a picture of Laika on it, an unremarkable stray mongrel except remarkably it once orbited the Earth.
  12. I try to picture Michelle in a shapeless winter coat standing at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower selling her postcards and CDs and old books that she has unloaded from a Peugeot 4DA van, circa 1952, and arranged on three wooden trestle tables. I try but I cannot. Michelle belongs in blue and white summer dresses with her hair loose and on one side tucked behind her ear.
  13. The man at the next stall, I can picture him in gloves and hat and scarf. There is something more permanent about him. As though he has always been there and always will be. Like Yves Klein’s blue monochromes, which are just as blue today as they were when he painted them.
  14. The woman of the blue flowers claps her hands and she says it is good to see Henri so lit up again. She makes him stop for a break and offers him coffee and bread and prayers.
  15. Henri tells her about the night ‘they’ came for his family. It was expected and so they each had a packed suitcase of belongings – even his father whose fingers were claws. The order declared they were to wear yellow stars fixed to their coats – their stars were so well stitched that they could almost be worn with pride. Then, at the last minute, Henri was pushed into the blue-black dark of a concealed cupboard behind a bookcase in the shop and told to stay there quiet as the dead.
  16. ‘I do not think I even breathed or thought or was. And now it is as though I am brought back from the dead, but I have heard that the dead do not ever do that, do not ever really come back.’ The woman of the blue flowers nods and this day she does not eat her bread or drink her coffee.
  17. On 12 January 1960 Yves Klein performed his first Leap into the Void. The morning was cold and the sky held nothing of the blue that he once signed his name to. He leaped from the second storey of a house belonging to the gallery owner Colette Allendy. He was tremendously excited afterwards and breathless. He reported to everyone on the failure of gravity with his successful performance of levitation. Space was not something to be conquered by scientists and rockets and cosmonauts, he declared, but by artists.
  18. Yves Klein was not wearing his lucky blue suit for this first Leap into the Void. He suffered a sprained ankle and walked with a limp for several days following the feat.
  19. ‘There were no goodbyes, not from my mother or grandfather. Just the push of my father’s hand on my back and his hissed instructions thrown after me into the dark. I never saw them again, nor ever heard their voices coming to me from the next room. They simply disappeared, into the blue nothing of history. Maybe their names are written down somewhere in one of “their” books. Maybe.’
  20. Then she is speaking. ‘They say that if you catch a falling angel’s feather before it touches the ground, then you can make a wish – any wish at all – and the wish will be granted unto you.’ Henri looks at the woman of the blue flowers, not wearing his glasses but seeing her through a blurry and blue veil. ‘Remember I told you I once had such a feather that I found; well I have another in my pocket and I caught it one day, snatched it out of the air, and it still holds its wish for I never made one. Just maybe I can gift this feather with the wish to you.’
  21. The woman of the blue flowers dips her hand into the folds of her dress and produces from a hidden pocket a feather of the same blue and white she had once shown Henri – it looks exactly the same to Henri’s eyes, whether he is wearing his glasses or not.
  22. It was talked about, Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. Within his circle it was talked about. There were those who accepted it was true and those who doubted it. Yves Klein spoke of it in religious terms, as though it was a matter of faith and a trust in God. It was for him a leap into the blue, which is infinite and without boundary.
  23. The critic Pierre Restany urged him to perform the Leap a second time and for there to be witnesses who would testify afterwards that it was truth. It was at this time that Yves Klein returned to the tailor called Henri and ordered a new blue suit, a lucky suit with a blue Tekhelet thread stitched into the trousers, though he did not know about the thread.
  24. ‘The swallows are gathering,’ Michelle says. Outside her window, strung out on telephone wires reaching in zig-zag stitches between the buildings are hundreds of swallows chattering excitedly about blue skies and the sun of faraway places. It is a dream in their small heads then and a journey of thousands of miles is no obstacle to making that dream a reality. And the swallows are also gathered on the wall of Michelle’s bedroom, pictures of them, not a square inch of wallpaper showing, hundreds of swallows darting this way and that across her bedroom wall.
  25. She kisses me then and it is all the kisses I had as a boy rolled into one and there are no words to describe that kiss, for how can words do justice to something so elusive? I have tried to describe a kiss before and in words it loses something of what it was, just as blue pigment mixed with a binder loses something of its wonder in the transfer to canvas – at least before Yves Klein.
  26. Elusive because it belongs to memory, which is like something written on the surface of blue water and it never stays still; elusive because it belongs in imagination – in my imagination and in yours if you are reading this. Remember how kisses once were for you, how they are for you now? One day those kisses will lose all shape and definition. They will continue to exist, fixed in memory, but something in them will be lost, too.
  27. Henri takes the feather offered to him by the woman of the blue flowers. She lays it gentle in his hand, as though it is something so fragile that breath could break it, as though it is something sacred – as blue used to be sacred and reserved for angels and saints and the most holy. He does not close his hand but pulls the feather slowly towards him. He opens the pocket of his waistcoat, where once there might have been a watch, and he drops the feather into the pocket. He pats it softly and thinks on the wish he will make.
  28. He cuts the shape of Yves Klein out of pieces of blue wool cloth, holding his breath from the start of the cut until his scissors have reached the full length of it. He does all this in the near dark with the woman of blue flowers watching over him from the door. He moves quickly and easily round the table, pressing the cloth flat with the brush of his hand, careful not to wipe away the criss-cross marks of his tailor’s chalk. And the woman of the blue flowers holds her breath the same as Henri and lets it go again when he closes his scissors and looks at what he has done.
  29. ‘Can you close the windows?’ Michelle says. ‘It’s a little cooler today, I think.’ We are lying on the bed listening to the swallows bitching about sunnier days. We are not undressed as we were before, but are lying next to each other in our clothes. Still it feels cold. I get up to do as she asks and looking up I see the sky is losing its blue and, though I will miss the swallows when they go, I wish them gone to skies that deserve them.
  30. Yves Klein agreed to make the Leap again. This time he’d be wearing a new suit – made by a tailor whose suits are lucky, though Yves Klein did not tell anyone this. He would make the Leap again and it would be a quiet show but this time there’d be a record, proof that a man can hang in space without the help of science. It’d be a performance, one of the most important events of Yves Klein’s life and all the world would bear witness to it. He made a plan, walked the streets of Paris looking for the perfect location.
  31. Henri tacks the blue wool cloth to pieces of interface to stiffen the fabric and so it will hang right. This will be a suit to eclipse all other suits, he thinks. This will be the last word in suits. He holds a piece of cloth in the air, imagining what it will be with Yves Klein in it. He pins the pieces to the leather mannequin body and, as he did once before, he holds on to the end of the sleeve, looking into the mirror. It is as though he is holding the hand of Yves Klein, but in his head he is remembering how he once held the hand of his father just the same.
  32. ‘There were stories that came after they were gone. Stories too cruel to be true. Except that when the war was over what could not be true was proven to be true. So many men and women and children, all of them disappeared. Nothing of them to say prayers over, nothing but blue smoke adrift in the Heavens. Whole streets disappeared. Like the Street of Tailors here in Paris and it is gone now and this is the last shop where you can have a suit made in what was that street.’
  33. The woman of the blue flowers looks more and more like a girl. To Henri she does. Like the girl cradling his beaten father in the street on that night of broken windows in the rue des Tailleurs. And she came to the door to ask after his father and Henri was the only one who heard her knock and the only one who answered the door. And didn’t she wear a Tekhelet thread ring about her finger? He thinks she did but his memory fails him a little – even though he is not old.
  34. We count the age of a man in years, but maybe Henri is old in another way. Maybe a man can be old even if he does not have the weight of years pulling him down and down to earth. Maybe there is a force other than gravity that weighs heavy on his shoulders and carrying this grave weight can age a man even where there are not so many years. Maybe it is the same thing, this ‘blue gravity’, the same thing that Yves Klein talked of when it failed to let him fall and allowed him to levitate.
  35. ‘I hate the cold,’ says Michelle. ‘It feels more real than the warmth, more real than the sun and blue skies.’ I know what she means; my father nods to show he knows, too.
  36. ‘Cold is something hard,’ she says. ‘Like truth. They say that, don’t they? Cold hard truth. I am not sure that I like truth when it is like that. If it comes down to it I think I prefer lies – the white and the blue and black lies. There is some soft comfort in lies. We can be together in lies and together always.’ I do not wish to take issue with what she is saying. I do not want to contest her lies with my fiction, which is sometimes nearer to truth even when it is a lie.
  37. Michelle is like those swallows perched on the telephone wires outside her window. She is chattering and winnowing her wings and preparing for a journey of thousands of miles, sleeping on the wing and letting the air carry her off to those African skies where the blue is so sharp it hurts to look at it for too long.
  38. He found his street. It was located in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Standing in the rue Gentil-Bernard Yves Klein pictured the whole thing in his head. The street was quiet as an empty church and there was a stone ledge he could imagine throwing himself from and the sky above on the day he visited was blue and he reached up and put his signature to that sky, too.
  39. He used fingers to construct a frame, the shape of a photograph. He shifted it this way and that and filled that frame with Yves Klein leaping from the stone ledge and held in the air. Like the stories of the saints that his Aunt Rose, Tantine, told him when he was a boy. Stories of St Rita lifting off the ground and floating in the blue air – for when his aunt told the story they were in Nice and there the air is almost always blue.
  40. And Aunt Rose, Tantine, told Yves Klein of St Joseph of Cupertino who wore chains under his loose-fitting clothes, chains so heavy he could not float away. There is a painting of St Joseph by Ludovico Mazzanti and St Joseph is not wearing his chains in the painting for he is adrift in the air. And it looks like falling and like flying both at the same time. Just over St Joseph’s shoulder the clouds have broken open and the sky is the colour of International Klein Blue (IKB).
  41. In the finger frame that Yves Klein made and held up to the sky he could see himself, exactly like St Joseph in Ludovico Mazzanti’s painting. The same held moment of falling and flying and the same blue sky over his shoulder.
  42. Henri waits for Yves Klein to undress behind the curtain of his back room. He has told the woman of blue flowers that Yves Klein is coming for his fitting so she has not appeared this morning with her offering of coffee and bread. Henri has almost finished the suit – it is always a little easier when he is making a suit for someone whose shape he has become familiar with, even when that body has altered by small degrees.
  43. There are only a few minor adjustments to be made. He marks the cloth with his blue tailor’s chalk and he nods and smiles and says the suit is almost perfect. Yves Klein looks at his reflection in the mirror and he knows the suit is better even than the last one. ‘Even luckier,’ he says under his breath and it is a prayer and a wish both at the same time.
  44. The time between my visits to Michelle’s room and lying next to her on the bed looking at the still blue swallows on her wall and the restless blue swallows outside her window, well, there are spaces in that time, spaces that stretch and widen. Sometimes I do not see her for days. Not even at the foot of the Eiffel Tower selling postcards and old books and CDs beside the man at the next stall who is now wearing a scarf in the early mornings.
  45. On 19 October 1960 Yves Klein staged the first of two jumps from the stone ledge of 3 rue Gentil-Bernard. He had arranged for a photographer to capture the moment. He is pictured in full leap, his arms outstretched like the wings of a bird, his hair blown back from his forehead and he carries all the confidence of one who knows the air will not let him fall. He was wearing the blue suit that Henri had finished altering. He looks smart in his suit and tie and such smartness only adds to the sense of spectacle we witness in the photograph.
  46. He repeated the leap less than a week later on 25 October 1960. He was dressed the same in the photographs for this second leap – a hidden blue Tekhelet thread sewn into the waistband of his trousers. The street was empty except for a cyclist at the far end cycling away from the miracle of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. A train also passed the end of the leafy street – maybe someone on the train looked out and saw Yves Klein hanging in the air.
  47. He produced his own newspaper to mark the event. It was freely available from all Paris news kiosks. The front cover showed the black and white picture of Yves Klein in mid-leap – not unlike the Mazzanti painting of St Joseph with the blue sky breaking open over his shoulder.
  48. Inside the pages of his newspaper Yves Klein wrote with a fervour of the mystical role of the artist and how art, not science, would be the thing to conquer blue space. The picture was proof of what he wrote.
  49. The woman of the blue flowers holds Henri’s arm when they go out walking. He leans a little more on her each day. They walk by the river, sometimes as far as the Eiffel Tower with its single finger pointing up at the sky. ‘So high it almost touches Heaven,’ says Henri one day.
  50. The woman of the blue flowers slips feathers into all of his pockets and all of them are angel feathers. Maybe they all have wishes waiting to be granted, too.
  51. ‘I should like to one day stand at the top of the tower and reach one hand up towards where my father and mother and grandfather are,’ Henri says. She looks at him and the blue of her eyes is so deep that he wonders how he did not notice it before.
  52. ‘Have you seen Michelle?’ I ask the man at the next stall. He shakes his head and he makes his hands into a bird, his thumbs linked and his fingers like spread wings. He flaps his fingers lifting his two-handed bird into the blue sky and then he claps his hands suddenly and shows them empty as though the bird has magically disappeared.
  53. The picture of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void is a marvellous lie. Maybe the day was blue and maybe he believed that he floated on the air, even for the briefest of moments. Flying and falling can feel the same until the landing. But he knew for sure that the picture was a manufactured lie.
  54. Henri has Yves Klein’s newspaper pinned with the other pictures on the wall of his back room. He says it is a miracle and he says it is God’s doing. He speaks to the blue-black shadows behind boxes in his workshop and he says he is speaking with God again.
  55. The photographer of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void took two pictures. The first was of the near empty street with the train at the end and the cyclist with his back to the camera. The second was of Yves Klein throwing himself into the blue; but below Yves Klein were ten strong men holding on to a stretched tarpaulin ready to catch him. The published photograph is a clever montage of the two pictures.
  56. Nobody today, seeing the picture of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void believes he can levitate, that the air does not let him fall but holds him in a blue and tender embrace. We all know the photograph is a lie. Art is allowed to lie, it seems, just as writing is.
  57. Henri sweeps the floor of his shop, the front room and the back. He arranges the scissors and his measure and all his pins and needles. Lays them down as if for inventory. He folds away the bolt of blue cloth that he’d used for Yves Klein’s lucky suit, everything neat and tidy as though he is expecting visitors – as though his father might walk through the door and wish to inspect his son’s workplace.
  58. The woman of the blue flowers nods her head in approval of the shop in its new clothes and not a pin out of place. She holds Henri’s coat out for him to slip his arms into – she is surely taller, he thinks.
  59. ‘My name is not Henri,’ he tells the woman of the blue flowers. ‘My father said I should use that name so “they” would not know me for what I was and so “they” would not take me away as they did him. My name is Hayyim, which means “life”.’
  60. ‘It’s been a few days,’ I tell the man at the next stall. He shrugs. ‘What can I say?’ he says. He pretends to juggle cups or cards on the table in front of him, lifts one and declares, ‘She is never where you expect or want her to be.’ He reminds me in that moment of the man with the blue lapis stone in his tooth who sits at the bottom of the steps at Le Passage de la Sorcière in Montmartre taking money off the tourists.
  61. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin completed the first manned trip into space, flying more than 110 miles above the planet in its orbit. It was a moment of historic significance. His spacecraft, Vostok 1, successfully circled the Earth and returned. On seeing Earth from on high Yuri Gagarin declared: ‘Земля синяя, как это замечательно удивительно!’ (‘The Earth is blue… how wonderful, it is amazing!’)
  62. When Yves Klein read those words in the newspaper, he cried for joy and then took credit for what Yuri Gagarin had said. After all, it is what he’d been about with his art. And hadn’t he already painted a globe in International Klein Blue (IKB) and exhibited it in a gallery in Krefeld, Germany?
  63. Hayyim’s coat pockets are stuffed with feathers, his jacket pockets, too, and his trouser pockets. All feathers, white and somehow blue at the same time. Angels’ feathers. The woman of the blue flowers takes his hand and she asks him if he has decided on a wish.
  64. They walk along the side of the river until they reach the Eiffel Tower that seems today as though it is a giant bird with its neck stretched to the blue sky – and the sky is blue today.
  65. They take the lift to the third level, as high as clouds if there were clouds. As high as sky. Below them all the world looks lost in a blue haze. ‘Breathe,’ says the woman of the blue flowers and she presses his hand in hers. ‘Breathe,’ she says again, ‘you are not cutting cloth.’ Hayyim snatches for breath.
  66. Michelle does not answer her phone or buzz me into her stair when I call at her street door. I knock till the concierge of the building hears. He asks me where’s the fire and he chuckles to himself. I explain to him that Michelle is not answering her phone or her door and she has not been selling blue postcards or books or CDs at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for above a week. I tell him I am worried.
  67. Yves Klein married Rotraut Uecker on 21 January 1962. He had wanted to stage the event on 20 January, which was the feast day of St Sebastian, a symbolically charged day for Klein after he had been made a Knight of the Order of the Archers in 1957. But the Order had strict rules against holding a wedding on this sacred day and so it had to be on 21 January. The invitations, as you might expect, were printed in gold, blue and pink.
  68. Pageboys wore International Klein Blue (IKB) bow ties.
  69. His mother wore a dress in International Klein Blue (IKB).
  70. The bride and groom departed the church in a white Jaguar filled with blue and white flowers.
  71. It was such a blue spectacle, a work of performance art. Yves Klein was disappointed to discover the next day that his wedding did not get even a mention in any of the newspapers.
  72. The concierge shakes his keys in the air and he suggests we go check on her apartment. He is a small man. Neatly dressed with an orange cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. He walks with a pronounced limp, his left foot dragging a little. We take the lift to Michelle’s floor. He unlocks her front door – which is blue. Nothing inside looks amiss.
  73. Hayyim breathes and he says to the woman of the blue flowers that he has decided on a wish. He says it is everything and nothing and he laughs at the joke he has made, though maybe he is the only one who understands it.
  74. On 13 May 1962 the artist Franz Kline died. Joan Miró penned a note of condolence and sent it off to the artist’s wife, except he made a mistake and it was sent to Mrs Yves Klein – Rotraut Uecker – instead. The envelope was edged in a dark blue.
  75. Yves Klein laughed at Miró’s mistake and wrote to assure the artist that he was in rude good health. As fit as a fiddle. Blue-sky happy and looking forward to being a father very soon.
  76. Michelle’s flat is empty of her things. It is as though she never was. As though we’d never lain down together on the bed or sat drinking coffee at her kitchen table. All the swallows on the telephone wires outside her window are gone and the pictures of the swallows on the wall, too – all except that first Dalí picture with the blue splashed ink that is somehow also a swallow. That picture she has left and there is meaning in that.
  77. ‘Sorry,’ says the concierge with the orange cravat and he does exactly the same thing then with his hands that the man at the stall near the Eiffel Tower had done. He locks his thumbs together and flaps his fingers as though he has created a bird. Then that bird he has made flies away over his shoulder and, in the dropping of his hands, disappears. The sky behind him has lost its blue.
  78. Hayyim leans out over the edge, feels the press of the air against his chest. The woman of the blue flowers knows his wish without him having told her. She squeezes reassurance into his hand with hers and together they leap into the void.
  79. On 15 May 1962 Yves Klein fell sick. His doctors said he should rest but he said he had work to do. There were blue paintings to finish. He would be a father in one not faraway day and so there was work to be done. He shut himself in his studio and, his mind all in a fever, he busied himself with art.
  80. Of course Michelle has flown – she was only a summer-visiting swallow after all. An invention of my imagination. The one that never was, rewritten as a fiction so that an old man could love and be loved as he once wanted to be. And now she has gone and the sky is only a memory of blue, but it is no heartbreak, is nothing more than waking from a dream.
  81. The concierge shrugs and he ushers me from the room, his hands pushing the air against me like he is shooing away chickens or cats. He locks the blue door to Michelle’s apartment and we take the elevator back to the ground floor. He sees me to the front door and locks it behind me.
  82. The air seems to hold him and the woman of the blue flowers reminds him to breathe again and together they seem to be held by nothing at all – by God, her God and his God. ‘Everything and nothing,’ Hayyim says again.
  83. Yves Klein was at work on another triptych of sponge reliefs. He was using blue and pink and gold. He had a studio in the rue Campagne-Première. The studio was fairly rudimentary and without proper ventilation.
  84. The handling of the chemicals that kept the pigment true for all time was fairly toxic – see an International Klein Blue (IKB) painting today and it is just as blue as it was when it left Yves Klein’s studio. Not much was known about its toxicity then. Yves Klein, already sick, was breathing in dangerous amounts of these toxic chemicals.
  85. His name is printed in the next day’s newspapers, though in the papers Hayyim is again called Henri. It is a record of his death. The statements of bystanders were written down in the blue notebooks of the gendarmes. They said he did not look unhappy and his jumping from the Eiffel Tower was unexpected. He was talking to himself, they said and they said maybe he was joyously mad.
  86. It was 6 June 1962. The report said his pockets were filled with feathers that spilled out on to the ground when he fell. They said he was a tailor and they said he was a Jew. Round his finger was wound a twisted blue thread. They did not say what this was for; they did not, any one of them, know. Nor was there any mention of a woman who jumped with him.
  87. The next day there were blue flowers placed at Hayyim’s shop door. The same blue flowers that had been placed there when he was taking a holiday from tailoring and everyone thought him dead – only now, everyone knew that he was.
  88. You can lie in art and you can rewrite memory but truth is something that should be sacred and unchangeable like International Klein Blue (IKB). The dead swallow I held in the cup of my two hands and I breathed on its feathered cheeks, it did not come back to life as I told Michelle. I know that even though I remember it the way I told her. The truth is that the dead never come back like that.
  89. And in the end we are the voices of the dead, all the voices they have, we who live and love and laugh. We are the guardians of their truth and even in what we invent there should be truth. There was a blue postcard for sale at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and I did purchase it for only small money and it bore a blue stamp that was blank and franked 14 May 1957. And that is my birthday.
  90. But there was no girl who sold me that blue card.
  91. And, though there was a girl once and she did that thing with her hair and her eyes were blue flecked with honeycomb or gold, her name was not Michelle. And sitting here drinking tea from my Royal Copenhagen teacup with its handle too small for my fingers, and milk poured from a pink-and-blue-flowered Limoges pot à lait and sugar spooned from a blue willow pattern bowl with a chip in the rim, I remember that I once loved that girl and wished in vain that she loved me. So you see there is truth in there somewhere and lies there can be also.
  92. On 6 June 1962 Yves Klein called his doctor to say he was unwell. It was a Paris summer day and the sky was blue and without his signature that day.
  93. By the time the doctor arrived it was too late. Yves Klein suffered a heart attack and died – his lips at the end were blue. He was thirty-four years old, which was the same age as a man called Henri or Hayyim who leaped to his death from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
  94. Today we remember Yves Klein for the blue that he patented – or he did not patent. We remember the Leap into the Void and an empty room that he convinced people was art and blue monochrome paintings all the same size but for sale at different prices.
  95. We don’t remember Henri or Hayyim and his leap into the blue. And perhaps we should. History should not be rewritten but it should also not be forgotten. There is no lie in what happened to Hayyim’s father and mother and grandfather and we should remember that.
  96. Yves Klein is buried beside his mother, Marie Raymond, and his aunt Rose, Tantine, in a cemetery in La Colle-sur-Loup in southern France. There are always blue flowers placed on his grave.
  97. And Michelle – or the girl she once was, the blue-eyed girl who tucked her hair so beautifully behind one ear? She is old now, I think.
  98. I saw her picture once. I downloaded it from the internet. She was wearing a blue dress and her hair was the same as it is in memory – and on one side she had tucked it behind one ear – and maybe her eyes were the same, too.
  99. She was smiling in the picture, a little out of focus and softly blue, but smiling all the same, and so I think she must be happy. It is enough that she is and enough that I remember her in Michelle. My father nods and smiles and I feel the press of his hand on my back.
  100. And the man at the foot of the steps at Le Passage de la Sorcière in Montmartre – he is real, too. With his three chased silver egg cups and a wooden ball the size of a pea that he makes appear and disappear so you do not believe in truth but for a moment believe in lies – and you pay him for that. I can assure you that even the blue lapis stone in his tooth is real.