City of Ghosts
The Cemetery
SHE STOOD IN front of the poet’s grave, smoking a cigarette, lost in her thoughts, in the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a brilliant May afternoon in Paris—not today’s Paris, vanquished and humiliated, but the city as it once was, only a short time ago but already far distant and forever lost. She wore a black silk dress printed with blooms of red hibiscus. The skin of her bare arms was golden, her raven-black hair curled into a chignon. It was nearly closing time, I remember. I was walking past her along the cemetery alley, headed for my apartment. I glanced at her without slowing—although perhaps, if it is at all possible, there was a flicker of hesitation, a hint of desire, a fleeting urge to stop, to approach her, to ask why she was standing there in front of this particular grave, a grave I myself had stood before many times, on this sunny and too-warm weekday afternoon in May. The sky was a dazzling and pure azure. My tie was loosened and my jacket slung over my shoulder. The grave she was standing before was that of Charles Baudelaire, the poet to whom I had, in a way, devoted the best years of my life.
It was Monday, May 27, 1940—not even four months ago, and yet it might as well be many years, an age, an epoch. Seventeen days earlier, after keeping the world in suspense for nine months, the Germans had finally launched their invasion of Belgium and France, sending their tanks through the Ardennes forests, circumventing the famous Maginot Line, crossing the Meuse River before the French could destroy the bridges—or had the French defense been sabotaged by traitors, as many believed? In a little over two weeks, the Germans had pinned the armies of three nations back against the English Channel. Boulogne and Calais were cut off, and Dunkirk was next.
I had stopped reading and listening to the news. I should not have been there to begin with, in that graveyard. I should have already left Paris. I was a refugee, after all, a Jew, an ex-German. My papers were not in order. They were substitute papers. The nearer the Germans advanced, the more danger I was in. For several weeks, a black suitcase had stood upright behind the entrance door of my apartment, a reminder that I ought to go, to vanish. But one wearies of vanishing acts. I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I tried not to think about it. I was in a state of denial, preoccupied more with the past than the present. For years, I had been working on a book that remained unfinished. It gave me an excuse to stay, to keep wandering these streets I knew so well, forever dawdling, in secret communion with the phantoms of the past, ready to join their ranks, to become another spectral presence in this city of ghosts. If that was not enough, there was no shortage of other, more mundane excuses: the imminent arrival of a telegram, an application for a visa, a request for a letter of recommendation, the chaos at the railway stations. And at the very moment when there could be no more excuses, I was about to be granted another, in the form of this woman. She would, for a time, be my alibi, my reason to stay, to surrender to the city and be swallowed into it, once and for all.
After the declaration of war the previous September, the city’s libraries and museums were closed, their collections packed away in crates and sent to storehouses in the country, as were the artworks and artifacts in the museums, leaving the palaces of art and learning standing darkly empty, like, in certain ports, hulks that have been stripped of their fittings and are permanently moored. I’d spent the last several years burrowing into those libraries, writing a book about this city, a never-ending book in a constant state of expansion, a book that grew faster than it could be written. Now that the libraries were closed, I began to contemplate the possibility that my book would never be published.
And so, stripped of my work, I began to live a kind of floating life, setting out every day for long walks in my adopted city, the city I’d come to know and love more than the city of my birth, which I knew I would never see again. The war did not come straightaway, of course. By day, during those nine months, the gears of the great machine of Paris continued to grind as they always had. The signs of war were subtle: bread rations at bakeries and restaurants, blue shade-cloth covering the streetlights, dry fountains, sandbags piled around statues and buildings, posters on billboard hoardings with the latest ministerial diktats. Those who could returned to their villages or, in the affluent western neighborhoods, to their country estates. Those who stayed behind—those, that is, with nowhere else to go—seemed, after nightfall, infected by a fever of pleasure-seeking. The ten o’clock curfew was not enforced, and the indigo darkness served only to heighten the sense of the carnivalesque. Despite the dimness, rarely had the café terraces been so crowded, the brothel mattresses squeaked with such abandon, or the wooden floors of the bals-musettes trembled so lustfully with the thump of dancing heels.
I walked endlessly, in those nine months, all over the city, through neighborhoods new and old, opulent and threadbare, and even, occasionally, through the makeshift slums of the Zone, where the city walls had stood until only a generation ago, and out into the bedraggled suburbs. In the hush of early morning, the mist that laced the streets might have been mistaken for ghosts risen from the catacombs under my feet, piled floor to ceiling with the bones of millions of the city’s dearly departed.
My walks would lead me more often than not to the river, that quicksilver vein that curves across the city’s breast, with its twin islands—the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis—as its centerpieces. I liked to amble along, fossicking through the green bookstalls that have lined the Seine for centuries, manned by the bouquinistes, those riverside booksellers who tend doggedly to their modest treasures in sun and rain. If there was a glue that held together the sheafs of my existence during those months of the drôle de guerre, it was that cheap printer’s paste used in the manufacture of railway-station paperbacks, which dries and cracks prematurely, shedding the pages it binds as an animal sheds its winter fur. For when I was not walking the streets of the city, I read pulp novels bought several at a time from the bouquinistes. I raced through them in the evenings, lying on my bed in my little apartment, avoiding the propaganda on the radio and in the newspapers as much as I could. There was something consoling about these jigsaw-puzzle stories, steeped in melancholy, seesawing pleasantly between the familiar and the new, in which criminals and detectives faced off against one another in lurid intrigues of passion, revenge, and misanthropy. Each one was an expert inquiry into the byzantine machinations of the French police, the same machine I myself was so keen to avoid.
I was a fugitive at a time when there was an oversupply of fugitives. After the declaration of war, all Germans, even ex-Germans, had been required to hand themselves in to the police. We were dispatched to makeshift internment camps in the countryside. I’d spent most of the previous winter sleeping on a concrete floor in a school gymnasium in a desolate corner of Normandy, surrounded by Germans. All my adult life I’d suffered from night terrors, and so in the camp I slept during the day and stayed up at night, smoking and playing cards with the insomniacs, for fear of waking the entire dormitory with my screams. Finally, when it was clear there’d be no winter invasion, we were released. Now that the Wehrmacht had finally invaded, German expatriates were once again ordered to surrender themselves. But this time I was determined not to give myself up so easily.
The key to staying out of reach of the secret police was to go out walking at dawn. For some reason, the Sûreté Nationale conducted its round-ups before breakfast. I also resolved to avoid speaking to strangers for fear that my accent would betray me, thus depriving myself of one of life’s great pleasures. There is no hiding an accent. No amount of effort or care or practice can ever rid one of it. Outside my circle of friends, every sound that came from my mouth was a possible self-betrayal as a boche, a chleuh, a fridolin. Two friends lived in my building on Rue Dombasle: Arthur, a Hungarian journalist, and Fritz, a surgeon I knew from Berlin who now earned his living performing illegal abortions. For a price, the landlady was prepared to overlook certain discrepancies in our paperwork. We played poker together on Saturday nights. Sometimes I would have coffee in one of the cafés where German émigrés gathered to swap fragments of information. It was tempting to believe that, with enough of these scraps, one might weave a kind of protective blanket around oneself, but the information was unreliable, and these dens swarmed with spies and informants.
Often, at the end of my long walks, I would return to my apartment through the Montparnasse cemetery. It was an island of tranquility in an ocean of chaos. Here, I was beyond danger’s reach, as if I’d stepped out, for a moment, of the city’s hall of mirrors. I was a giant in a miniature city. The graves, grand or simple, tended or abandoned, depending on the fortunes of those buried inside them, were miniature buildings that lined its miniature avenues. From the main entrance on Boulevard Quinet, I’d turn right into the Avenue du Boulevard, past the old Israelite section (the cemetery’s ghetto), and turn left into the Avenue de l’Ouest, where, buried in the family crypt a little way up the incline between the mother he loved too much and the stepfather he loathed, lay Charles Baudelaire. There were always flowers on the tombstone left by the poet’s admirers, as well as little notes: a few lines from one of his poems, or an original poem imitating his style, opening a trapdoor into a secret universe of longing. I’d continue walking uphill along the Avenue de l’Ouest to the rear cemetery wall, re-entering the tumult of the city through a narrow gate in the corner.
As for the woman standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave, she was, for now at least, still a stranger. But it wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. The first time had been the previous winter, soon after my return from the camp, when she’d been wrapped up in a great double-breasted coat. The second time had been only weeks before, when the linden trees were budding. And now on this third occasion, standing motionless in exactly the same place, in exactly the same pose, at exactly the same time of day, puffs of blue-gray smoke drifting away in the golden light. Everything about her suggested a tightly wound, fiercely protected stillness. Deep within herself, she seemed unaware of the existence of anything except the grave before her—oblivious to passersby, oblivious to the twittering of birds and rumble of distant traffic, oblivious even to what loomed overhead, a steep bank of violet clouds crowned by an aureole of sunlight.
I passed near enough to detect a faint scent of sandalwood and continued up the incline without stopping. Other than the two of us, the cemetery was empty. There were no funeral processions, no bereaved family members paying their respects, no sightseers or pilgrims in search of resident illuminati, not even a gardener tending to the plants. The emptiness brought out the secret heartbreak that lurked in every direction. Love is fleeting, regret is eternal, read the inscription on one of the tombstones. Midway between the grave and the rear gate, I turned to see if she was still there. She hadn’t moved. When I reached the gate, I took another look over my shoulder. She was gone. I stopped and, after a flicker of hesitation, turned back, determined to follow her.
In between gravestones, I caught a glimpse of hibiscus: she dashed toward the center of the cemetery, down the Avenue Transversale. We must have made a strange sight, she slinking between gravestones, I trotting along the parallel path by the cemetery’s back wall further up the hill, stooping behind a crypt every now and then to peer through the marble forest between us. But the cemetery was otherwise deserted, and there were no witnesses to this curious dance.
I had to hurry to keep up with her. I kept my head down, catching another red and black flash of her from afar. She darted to the next crypt and looked about her as if checking to see if she’d been followed. Pursuing women in this manner was not something I had ever done before. Why now? Curiosity, of course. Perhaps also out of the anxious boredom of those days. But I remember realizing I was enjoying myself. She scurried across the circular clearing at the center of the cemetery, where an angel stands disconsolate on a plinth inscribed with the word Memory, and disappeared behind a thicket of headstones. I stopped and surveyed the scene. No sign of her. I approached the place I’d last seen her, where the Avenue de l’Est meets the Avenue Transversale. Still no sign of her. She’d disappeared. I scanned all around, my heart thudding in my chest, my eyes squinting in the sun’s glare. I hadn’t been to this part of the cemetery before. On my left stood a marker of mottled gray and pink marble. Engraved in gold leaf on the plinth were the words La Société Baudelaire, below which were the following names:
Édmonde Duchesne de Bressy, 1845–1900, founder and president
Lucien Roeg, 1866–1900, secretary
Hippolyte Balthazar, 1876–1917, secretary
Aristide Artopoulos, 1872–1923, president
I felt a presence behind me and heard the click of the catch of a gun being released. I turned and there she was, the woman I’d been following, pointing a small gun at my chest.
“Who are you?” we both asked in unison, then stood glowering at each other in silence. The hand that held the gun trembled slightly. The features of her face, the face of an elegant Asiatic woman in her forties, were unadorned and severe.
“Why are you following me?” she asked. “What do you want from me?” She, too, spoke with an accent. The music of her speech, the rhythms of it, were organized differently, but I could not say precisely how. Being a foreigner means not just speaking with a foreigner’s accent, but being unable to recognize the accents of others.
“I saw you standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave and…” She didn’t react. I felt as if I were dreaming the situation rather than living it. “I, too, admire him.” She appeared very fierce and very fragile at once. “I’ve seen you before, and I was curious…” Realizing I was not making much sense, I turned my attention to the weapon pointed at me—a Remington derringer, a popular choice for a certain kind of lady. Only my adversary did not appear to be that kind of lady. She did not seem accustomed to brandishing a weapon. She held it with both hands, its barrel wavering a little, and had she fired it she may have needed to shut her eyes to do so. “You look as if you’ve never shot a gun in your life.”
“Don’t tempt me. What is your name?”
“My name is—” But I stopped. Since the start of the war, I’d made it a rule not to give out my name unless it was strictly necessary. A Jewish name, combined with a German accent—at times like this, such things lead to trouble. “I’m a…” But this tack suddenly seemed just as hopeless. What was I, in fact? In the shadow of war, to be a writer seemed the most frivolous, absurd thing possible. But if I was not a writer, what was I? An ex-German, a Jew, an exile, a bachelor, a scholar, a flâneur, a drifter, a failure—all these were equally true and untrue. “I’m an admirer of Baudelaire. That’s why I was following you. I took you for a kindred spirit.”
“You couldn’t be further from the truth. I am most decidedly not a kindred spirit.”
We heard a whistle from a distance. Behind the woman, a groundskeeper turned into the alley further down the hill and walked in our direction. “Don’t turn around,” I said, “but there is a gardien approaching us.”
The woman tucked her firearm into a pocket in the side of her dress.
“Monsieur, madame,” said the gardien, “you heard the whistle. I’m afraid it’s closing time.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, mumbling to hide my accent. I pointed in the direction of the rear gate. “This way?”
“That’s right. I’m on the way there myself, to lock up. I’ll see you out.”
The woman took me by the arm and uttered the two words I least expected to hear: “Come, darling.” As we walked, she held her face against my shoulder, as if wishing to keep it out of the groundskeeper’s sight. So starved for affection was I that, despite the circumstances, I found myself enjoying this simulation of it.
We marched up the incline toward the rear gate when, from above to our left, we heard the rumble of rolling thunder in the clear blue sky. The woman kept her face averted. Seconds later, a wail of air raid sirens came from every direction for the first time since the start of the invasion.
“Oh là là!” said the groundskeeper. “Those boches always pick the worst moment!” He ushered us out of the gate, locking himself in, and wished us not the customary bonne soirée but bon courage, before trotting away. I seized the opportunity to reach into the woman’s pocket and took her derringer.
“Hey!” she said, slapping me on the cheek. “Give it back or I’ll scream.”
“I doubt anyone will be particularly interested,” I said, throwing the gun over the cemetery wall, “given the circumstances.” From behind us, another whistle. A policeman in a black cape was in the middle of the next intersection, waving his white gloves frantically to and fro. “He’s pointing us to the nearest shelter.”
I took the woman by the hand and we began to run, with sirens wailing around us. We came to a stop in the middle of the intersection, where the traffic policeman was directing us toward a corner bistro. Some ran in that direction, others stood about on the street or on balconies above it, looking skyward, staring at the heavens as if observing an astronomical phenomenon. Outside the bistro, a man in a white armband and a helmet from the previous war was urging people inside. We made our way in and through a throng of bodies and wicker chairs to a trapdoor behind the counter, out of which poked the top rungs of a stepladder. The atmosphere was congenial: some patrons, interrupted during their aperitif, were still holding their glasses, and one even tried to descend the ladder single-handed until the shelter warden lost his patience. He stood at the top of the ladder with a hand-rolled cigarette suspended between his lips, his helmet tilted at a rakish angle, holding glasses and purses and shoes while people disappeared into the cellar. “Come along,” he repeated, “there’s room for everyone.” And then, bending down into the void, he yelled, “Make room down there!”
The woman went first. When she let go of my hand I realized I’d been holding it since we began running. Once underground, we were jostled into a corner, pushed together ever closer by the arrival of each newcomer, the last of whom was the traffic policeman who had waved us in. Several more people were left outside, complaining loudly, while the warden urged them to seek another shelter. A sense of improvisation pervaded the entire scene: there were no chairs, so everyone had to stand, including a one-legged veteran of the last war. The walls were lined with shelves bearing wheels of cheese and racks loaded with dusty bottles of wines and spirits. Hams and sausages were suspended from above. The bistro owner stood on a box in the corner, hands on hips, eyeing the room for thieves.
The trapdoor was lowered, plunging us into a gloom barely relieved by a single naked bulb buzzing overhead. There must have been forty or fifty people squeezed together in that cellar. My companion was pressed up against me, her hair brushing the stubble of my chin. The sirens outside stopped their wailing and the room was engulfed by a heart-pounding silence as everyone listened for the sound of the destruction that was surely about to rain down from the heavens. I wondered if, by the time we emerged from our hiding place, the Paris we knew would still exist. But then, I thought, if the building above us was bombed we’d be buried alive.
I felt her body tremble like a captive bird and put my arms around her, not to embrace her but to push back against the weight of human bodies crushing us both. My nostrils were stinging with the smell of the sweat of the crowd and my shirt was sticky. My heart thumped wildly—there it was, that sharp stab of pain with every heartbeat, the premonition of my mortality. I had pills for this pain, pills I never took. Her cheek was pressed against my chest. I was frightened too, but I’d been frightened so long fear had become a part of me, twisting its way around and through me like a vine, sustained by the same sap that kept the rest of me alive.
There was a click of the lid of a cigarette lighter. Someone on the far side of the room said, “I really need to smoke. I’m claustrophobic.” I smelled burning tobacco. The trembling of the woman in my arms became more violent. Her whole body was shivering. Between the silence and the crush and the smells of meats, cheeses, sweat, and tobacco, I felt my own rising tide of panic: beads of sweat trickled down my neck and back. My heart was beating ever faster, my breathing was short, a migraine was building behind my eyes. With all my senses lunging upward and beyond the cellar for a sign of what was happening outside, of what was to be our fate, I lost all notion of time’s passage. I began to imagine that we would never emerge from this cellar, that we would all die in it under a mountain of debris. I thought of Rotterdam: it had taken only four days for the Nazis to reduce Europe’s greatest port to rubble. “I need to get out of here,” I whispered, more to myself than anyone else. I felt her arms tighten around my waist. Somehow, that modest sensation dislodged something inside me, and the panic that had threatened to drown me began to subside.
As the minutes dragged on, there was only silence from above. Paris, it seemed, had been granted a stay of execution. The sirens started up again, a sign that the raid was over and we were free to go. The warden climbed the ladder and the trapdoor swung open. Fresh air and cool evening light washed over us. More cigarettes were lit and the gathering burst into a dozen simultaneous conversations. People waited their turn to climb the ladder. Some of them remained to talk and drink in the bistro, others lingered outside on the street under a golden sky. They chatted, promised to meet again for a drink, shook hands, and wished each other good luck.
As we neared the stepladder the woman from the cemetery started climbing before me. I was about to follow her, but I ceded my place to an elderly gentleman waiting beside me. By the time I emerged above ground in the bistro, the woman was gone. I rushed out and caught a glimpse of red hibiscus on black silk on the other side of the street. She was already half a block away, running with her shoes in her hands. I set off after her. It felt good to run after our brief and anxious imprisonment. And I didn’t want to let her vanish. She’d helped me somehow, down there in the cellar, without even knowing it.
I caught up with her at the back gate of the cemetery, where she was gripping the grilles, shaking them as if they might miraculously open. But the lock would not be cajoled and the woman turned and collapsed against it, slumping to her haunches and burying her face in her hands. I approached her. “What’s the matter?” I asked, bending down onto one knee and touching her on the shoulder.
She looked at me as if for the first time, eyes sparkling with tears. “I have nowhere to go.”
The Apartment
I WOKE TO find two coal-black eyes looking back into mine. The woman from the cemetery. The back of her fingers were stroking my stubbled cheek and she was murmuring something reassuring.
“You had a nightmare,” she said.
“Was I screaming?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. You warned me.”
“I did?”
“You told me you have nightmares every night.”
“Yes, so I did.”
A full ashtray, two dirty glasses, and an empty bottle of calvados on the table. In the dull light of the bedside lamp, my one-room apartment was plunged into a deep, middle-of-the-night silence. I recalled inviting her to spend the night. I was in the armchair. She’d been sleeping in my bed in her black silk dress. I remembered the events that had brought her here—the cemetery, the raid, the shelter. I was surprised she’d accepted the offer. She’d told me her name: Madeleine.
She gave me a sidelong glance. “What were you dreaming about?”
“Oh, a jumble of things. I have a few recurring nightmares. They always seem to take place in the past. This one was on one of those old-fashioned three-masted sailing ships. I was the ship’s surgeon, and had to saw off a man’s arm with nothing more to numb the patient’s pain than alcohol and laudanum. That’s one I only get every now and then. There are others. In some, I’m on a tropical island. In others, I’m a woman raising a child during the Prussian siege, or Baudelaire, believe it or not, living an impoverished life with Jeanne Duval. The one element that seems to recur above all is…” I paused, somewhat embarrassed by what I was saying.
Madeleine, who had been about to light a cigarette, froze and looked at me with a curious expression, engrossed and terrified at once. The match’s flame lit her face in a soft orange glow. “What?” she asked.
“Eyes.”
She lit the cigarette and leaned forward. “What kind of eyes?”
“All kinds, in all colors, on all kinds of faces. All my dreams seem to end with me looking into the eyes of someone, and every time I get to that point I wake up screaming.”
“Why do you scream?”
“I have no idea.”
“And your accent,” she said. “Are you German?”
“Yes. I’m from Berlin.”
She bit her lower lip and looked away, holding the cigarette with trembling hands and puffing nervously. She was, for a moment, entirely alone, withdrawn into herself as if unaware of my presence.
After a minute or two she stood and sauntered over to my bookshelf, crammed with books. “What do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“I see you have a great many books about Baudelaire.” She picked up Les Fleurs du mal. She smiled, curling up one side of her mouth almost imperceptibly. “Which is your favorite poem of his?”
“That’s a hard question to answer. There are so many. Perhaps ‘To a Passerby.’”
With her forefinger running over the spines of the books, she recited, from memory, “Fugitive beauty, in whose gaze I was suddenly reborn…”
“Will I see you again only in eternity?”
She gave me a searching look from across the room, as if not knowing quite what to make of me. “Interesting choice.”
“And yours?” I asked.
“‘The Albatross.’”
“The Poet is the prince of clouds, the storm-clouds haunting and the archer mocking…”
“But exiled on earth amid the crowds, his great wings prevent him from walking.” She gave me that little smile again. “He stole that poem.”
“Stole it? From whom?”
“From me.” She turned back to the shelf and studied the books with her head tilted at an angle. “I gave him the idea. I told him the tale of the albatross, and he turned it into a poem.”
“You knew him?” The notion was absurd, of course, but it was a pleasure to indulge her fantasy.
“Yes. Not in this body, of course. In another.”
“Whose?”
“Jeanne’s.”
“I don’t quite follow,” I said, as it began to dawn on me that she was serious. “Do you mean Jeanne Duval? His mistress?”
Madeleine sauntered to the bed and lay back on the mattress. “I was his mistress,” she sighed. “His mistress, his slave, his torment—and, for a while at least, I was also his muse.” She snorted. “Muse—how I detest that word. Charles was a thief. He stole from everyone—money, poems, books, love, you name it. Of course, he had talent. But his greatest talent was for theft.”
Perhaps, at any other time, I would have reacted to these signs of delusion differently. I might have been more guarded. I might have gently shepherded Madeleine through the night and then out of my life. But, at that moment, her fancies seemed harmless compared to the great tide of madness consuming the outside world. “How is that possible?” I asked.
She shot me a piercing glance. “It is possible, that’s all that matters.” She sat up on one elbow and looked at me. Despite what she was saying, I found myself enjoying the sensation of her gaze. “When did they begin, these nightmares of yours?” she asked.
“When I was a young man, just before the last war. When I was maybe nineteen or twenty.”
“What caused them?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Surely something happened around that time. They couldn’t have just started by themselves, caused by nothing in particular. Were you sick? Did you have an accident? Maybe you were in the war?”
“No, it was before that. Only I can’t remember.”
“Think back carefully.”
“I’m trying, but I can’t…”
“Can I ask you a question that may seem a little strange?” she asked. I nodded. “Have you ever been hypnotized? Has anyone ever asked you to look them in their eyes? Not just a passing glance, but to really look, for several minutes?”
“Never.”
“Are you sure? No hypnotist, no magician, no woman you loved who asked you to look them in the eyes? Even just for fun? Try to remember.”
“Not that I can recall—although…” At that moment, a memory returned to me for the first time in many years. “When I was a young man, I visited Paris for two weeks in the summer of 1913, when Paris still dazzled. I had an encounter that seemed nothing more than an amusing anecdote, one of those stories that young people like to tell when they return home from their travels as a sign of the worldliness they have acquired. Paris back then was still a walled city. Cars were a curiosity. Horses and trolleys ruled the streets, and a pedestrian could still walk down the middle of a boulevard without being run over. I thought everything about the city was enchanting. I liked to browse the bouquinistes’ stalls and then find a café somewhere in the Latin Quarter where I could read and observe the passing crowd.
“One such afternoon, I noticed, among the men in frock coats and hats and the ladies in long white dresses, a stout elderly woman pushing a small cart on wheels, bent over almost at right angles, walking in my direction with a slow, waddling gait. I was drawn to her as soon as she appeared from a block away. I studied her approach, stopping at the café terraces and offering her wares to the patrons until she was shooed away by a waiter. When a customer took some semblance of an interest in what she was selling, as if in accordance with some unwritten code, the waiter would leave her to her commerce. She was an unforgettable sight. Her body was twisted forward with age, her fingers were gnarled and her face seemed no less wrinkled than a walnut shell. Even in the bright summer sunshine, her clothes were colorless rags. But her expression was cheerful. She was one of those old women whose demeanor has naturally withered into a permanent beam of light. As she drew closer, I noticed her lips were in constant motion, as if she were murmuring something intended only for herself, which is not an uncommon sight in any city. Finally she neared the terrace where I was sitting and caught my eye. ‘Would you like a book, sir?’ she asked. She had an accent, but I couldn’t pick it. Perhaps, I thought, she’s a foreigner like me. A waiter saw her from inside the café and rushed out, barking at her to leave the customers alone. I waved him away.
“She was a book peddler, a rare sight even in those days, although it had once been the noblest of street professions. By 1913, however, book peddlers had almost disappeared. I wanted to pay her my respects, to help her in some way, the kind of gesture tourists are fond of. I beckoned to her to bring her cart of secondhand books closer. As she did, I heard her reciting, in a lilting accent, like an incantation uttered so often it’s become a reflex: ‘Adventure stories, crime stories, ghost tales, tales of love and romance, books new and old from near and far, only two francs!’ She continued the recitative as she opened the cart’s cover to let me browse her selection. It was outdated and eccentric. Like her, the books were relics of a bygone era. At first glance, she had nothing I wished to read, but all the same I asked her for a recommendation. ‘They’re all good, monsieur, the finest of the age. Two francs each, or six for ten.’ She continued to recite her incantation in a low voice, as I cast another look over the sorry selection and picked up a book at random. ‘How’s this one?’ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she replied, ‘for to be perfectly honest with you, monsieur, I’m not much of a reader.’ She burst into a fit of wheezy laughter cut short by consumptive coughs, whose residue she expertly spat onto the pavement. ‘Not of books, at any rate,’ she added. ‘Time, monsieur,’ she continued, although I’d said nothing. ‘I read time. The future as well as the past. I am an expert in the ancient arts of remembering what has been and foretelling what is yet to be. And all for just two francs.’
“The waiter shot the woman a contemptuous glance. ‘How about it, sir? Who would not want to know what surprises fate has in store for us? Only two francs.’ I took two coins from my pocket and gave them to her, holding out my hand with palm turned skyward. ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ she said, ‘but I don’t read palms. I read eyes.’ I told her I’d never heard of such a thing. ‘Oh, it is a noble art that comes to us from ancient times. No doubt, sir, you will have heard the expression that the eyes are the window to the soul. I have mastered the technique.’ She drew closer. ‘May I look?’ I nodded. ‘I ask only that you look into my eyes, and stay still. Do not look away. Do not speak. Do not allow yourself to be distracted—by the crowd, by the waiter, by anyone. I need only look into your eyes for three or four minutes, and then all will be revealed.’
“I don’t know how or why, but I must have passed out. When I came to, I was surrounded by a circle of onlookers. One man was leaning over me, holding my hand, talking to me, although I could barely make out what he was saying. My head was heavy and foggy, as if it had just been struck or woken from a long, narcotic sleep. The book peddler was opposite me, slumped back in her chair, her eyes wide open in terror, her mouth opening and closing, like a fish just hooked from the sea. The waiter appeared, asking what had happened. Two of the onlookers began talking at once, describing what they’d just witnessed—that we’d been looking at each other in silence when we both began convulsing for a short time, and then fainted. The waiter leaned over the woman and began shaking her by the shoulders. She was awake but barely aware of her surroundings. ‘You’d better get out of here before the police arrive,’ he told her. ‘I’ve a good mind to have you arrested.’ He turned to me and began apologizing profusely.”
I paused, searching for words to describe the strangeness of the memory, until now so long obscured. Madeleine’s gaze was fixed on me unwaveringly. “And then?” she whispered, almost reverentially.
“I was, for some moments, completely mystified about everything—who I was, where I was, how I had come to be there. My surroundings had not changed. Rather, it was inside me that everything had changed. What is my name? I wondered, and my name suddenly appeared to me. Where am I? I wondered, and the word Paris rose to the surface of my mind. Where am I from? Suddenly Berlin appeared. Who was this woman splayed on a chair before me? A book peddler who’d offered to read my fortune. And so on, a gush of memories surfacing one after the other, all in the space of a moment.
“A policeman arrived in his képi and black cloak. The waiter launched into a complaint about the book peddler, how something ought to be done, that it was bad for business, just look at the state of this young German fellow, and all for what? In a display of anger, the waiter kicked the woman’s cart, tipping it over on its side so that books were spilled across the pavement and passersby had to step around them. One of the onlookers said the woman was a necromancer, and that I had been mesmerized. The policeman asked me if, indeed, this is what had happened. In my stupefied state, I could barely manage a nod, but when he asked if I wished to file a complaint, I shook my head. Did I wish to be taken to the hospital? ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll be fine.’ I stood awkwardly and fell back again into my chair, raising a gasp among the onlookers. I was suddenly convinced I was in some kind of unknown danger, that I must distance myself from the scene. I took a coin from my pocket and pressed it into the waiter’s hand. ‘Please,’ I said, looking to the policeman and the onlookers, ‘go about your business, everything is as it should be.’ The small crowd dispersed, and I turned to the woman before me, helping her to stand. She swayed uncertainly on her feet a little. I held her hand until she steadied, then picked up her cart and began gathering the fallen books. With one arm clasped around her waist to help her walk and the other pushing her cart, I made my way from the café toward a nearby bench. I lowered her gently. Her eyes were open but she seemed barely aware of her surroundings. I had no money to call for a doctor or ambulance. In my confused state, I was powerless to help her any further. I left her there, on the bench, beside her cart of books, her mouth opening and closing mutely, as if wishing to ask a question but not sure of what question to ask.
“I can’t remember how, but I made my way back to my hotel room and went to sleep. I slept almost a full day, only waking the following afternoon. When I went down to the hotel lobby, the concierge asked me if I was feeling better. Apparently I had screamed so loudly in my sleep that the staff had knocked several times at my door, and had even resorted to entering the room at one point. I had told them, when they had woken me, that there was nothing the matter, that they needn’t worry. I had no recollection of this middle-of-the-night interruption. I suppose this must have been the beginning of the nightmares. They’ve continued just about every night ever since.”
My story had a curious effect on Madeleine. When it ended, she looked down at the empty space in front of her for some time, plunged in thought. I studied her face, lit by the glow of the bedside lamp.
“We’ve met before,” she said.
“Where?”
She flashed a sad little smile. “You won’t remember.”
“A long time ago? In another life, perhaps?”
“It was.”
“Was it in Berlin? Were we at university together? I think I’d remember. There weren’t many women students back then.”
“No, it was in Paris.” She lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. “Other places too. But there’s no point talking about it.”
“No, no, now that you’ve brought it up I must solve the mystery. It seems you can remember the occasion, and I cannot. But perhaps if you give me a clue…”
She was leaning back on the mattress, looking down at one hand, which skimmed back and forth across the duvet. “Can I tell you a story instead?”
“Will it answer my question?”
“Perhaps.” And she began telling me the tale of the albatross.
Until only two or three generations ago, there existed, in Paris as throughout the world, people who earned a living of sorts as storytellers. In taverns and coffee houses, around banquet tables and campfires, people gathered to listen to their tales, tales the storytellers recited with great skill, perfected and elaborated over years and decades. Sometimes their stories rhymed or were sung. Sometimes they lasted several days, weeks, or months. Each night, people would crowd around the storyteller, eagerly awaiting the next installment. Mechanical printing ended the era of the storyteller, just as radio or cinema or some other wonder yet to be invented may one day end the era of printing. But to hear Madeleine tell her story was to be magically transported back to that era. Everything about the way she told it was mesmerizing. Her diction was low and precise, obliging me to lean in to capture every word, but her voice dipped and soared according to its own music. She kept her facial expressions and physical gestures to a minimum at first, but as her story progressed so were its twists and turns enacted by her body. As for the story itself, it was breathtaking. The tale of the albatross was the myth of two young lovers, a young woman called Alula and a young man—a mere boy, really—called Koahu, who lived on a faraway island, and of their exile. I have since committed it to paper, writing everything of it I can remember—but mine is a pale imitation. There are a great many details I cannot recall, for one thing, and for another I cannot tell the story the way it was told to me. I can scarcely reconstruct the circumstances of its telling—the nocturnal silence of the city outside, the soft light of the bedside lamp, the curlicues of blue smoke rising from the glowing end of a cigarette, the scent of sandalwood.
Sometimes now, when I can’t sleep for worry or boredom or both, I like to play a game with myself. I try to pin down the exact moment I fell in love with Madeleine. I am quite certain that when she began her story, I was not in love with her, or at least I hadn’t realized I was in love with her. I hadn’t fallen in love for years. I considered myself inoculated against it. But by the time she had told me her story—which was only her first story, the first of many—something had changed inside me: I was unexpectedly, reluctantly, wholly in love, not just any love but a consuming love, an unwanted love, an inconvenient love, the kind of love that a man wants to be cured of, that makes a man feel ashamed of himself, only the more he denies it the more entangled he becomes, like one of those nautical knots that tightens with every pull. It felt like an infection, a sudden illness, in which everything is at once the same as it was before and yet transformed. Being in love is a kind of hypnosis and, as any hypnotist will tell you, to be hypnotized one must secretly want to be hypnotized, so secretly that one doesn’t even know it. Falling in love is an act of involuntary will.
Perhaps it was Madeleine’s story I fell in love with, more than Madeleine herself. Perhaps the spectrum of love is broader than we think, and it is possible to fall in love with a story, or a song, or a film or painting, the way one falls in love with another person, only one assumes it is the storyteller one is in love with, the singer, the actor or artist, because the thought hasn’t occurred to us that it is possible to fall in love with a thing. I knew her story was a fiction, but I believed it all the same. Our passions seem unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. But as much as I was enchanted by her story, I never considered it anything other than a story—a marvelous story, granted, perhaps one of the most marvelous stories I’d ever heard, but just a story. Madeleine, on the other hand, seemed wholly convinced that the story she was telling was not only true, but that it had happened to her, and by implication also to me. She believed these stories the way others believe in the signs of the zodiac. This was completely new to me. I had never before fallen in love with someone who held beliefs so different from my own. But there are a great many beliefs in common currency that are less credible than Madeleine’s were, and the mysteries of love do not require the complete alignment of convictions. I was drawn to her despite these differences, and I couldn’t understand why. That is a riddle I am still trying to solve.
When her story, or at least what would turn out to be its first installment, was done, I blinked as if waking from a dream. Through the cracks in the shutters, I could see the first blush of sunrise. Madeleine was already half asleep. “We have to go.”
We walked toward the river in silence. The streets were an especially delicate, limpid blue, and their stillness was enlivened only by the occasional errand boy or delivery man, here a staggering drunk, there a woman of the night returning home at the end of her work. The bakeries were open, as were the workers’ cafés, their windows crossed with brown adhesive tape in case of bombardment, but the rest of the shops were shuttered, some with the ever more common sign: Closed until further notice. Pedestrians walked about carrying their boxed gas masks. By the time we got to the river, the sun had just risen above the rooftops. We walked along Quai Voltaire. Diamonds of light sparkled on the water and through the leaves of the riverside trees. We passed the green bookstalls of the bouquinistes, their tin lids fastened overnight with great iron locks.
As we walked, we heard a rumble disrupt the morning stillness from further upriver. As we neared the Place Saint-Michel, we saw the Pont Saint-Michel was clogged with cars, lorries, tractors, horses, and oxen, each piled high with furniture and mattresses. Evacuees, haggard and exhausted, escaping the German advance for southern safety. Some were on bicycles, others pushed carts, wheelbarrows, and prams. Their vehicles had northern and Belgian license-plate numbers. The mattresses that crowned their vehicles were intended to protect them in case of strafing by Stukas. Street urchins nipped at their heels, selling newspapers, water, choucroûte, and hot chicory. Along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the crowds in the cafés and restaurants spilled over into the streets. These signs of imminent invasion did nothing to dull the glow of intense happiness I felt walking arm in arm with Madeleine. They had the opposite effect: they burnished it. They gave it a counterpoint and a purpose.
I felt Madeleine squeeze my arm. “We must go back to the cemetery.”
“Why?”
“My gun.”
At the Pont Neuf we turned right into the Rue Dauphine, where calm was restored. Away from the tumult of the southbound boulevards, the streets were empty. We turned into the Boulevard Mazarine, crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and continued onto the Rue de l’Odéon. The echo of our footfalls bounced off the surrounding walls, plastered here and there with posters demanding Silence! The enemy is listening. We stopped to look in the window at Shakespeare and Co. The shop was closed, but a cat was reclining on a shelf, blinking contentedly among the books on display, its ginger tail twitching. Adrienne and Sylvia were stirring upstairs, I imagined, among those who refused to leave Paris. In a couple of hours they would open the store as usual. The store of the antiquarian bookseller Jacquenet was a little further up the street. We stopped to look there too. My attention was taken by an advertisement pasted on the window. It was a notice of an auction that was to take place the following week at the Hôtel Drouot.
“What is it?” asked Madeleine. She craned her neck forward and mouthed the words as she read them, before stopping and looking at me with eyes wide.
“It can’t be,” she said, leaning against the glass, her hands shielding the sides of her face as she scanned the interior of the store. “And yet…” She gasped, drawing back and putting her hands to her mouth. “There,” she said, pointing to a table on the other side of the window, upon which were a number of volumes on display stands. “There on the right, the small volume. Do you see it?”
“Yes.” It looked innocuous enough—a slim volume bound in dark red leather. I studied it at length. The title and author’s name were embossed on the cover for all to see: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire.
“I can’t believe it,” said Madeleine, but when I asked her what she couldn’t believe, she didn’t reply. Instead, she fell into a silence that continued until we reached the cemetery.
The previous afternoon, as the air raid sirens wailed, I had flung the derringer over the cemetery wall into the back section of the cemetery, which, like the older Israelite section on the other side, is reserved for Jews. Here, the family crypts are covered in stones and engraved with names like Cahn and Meyerbeer. This was where we now headed, scouring the weeds between the plots until I found the gun lying atop a grave. I opened the bullet chamber. It was empty. I was standing there, gun in hand, when Madeleine suddenly approached, wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me languidly on the mouth. “Drop the gun into my pocket,” she whispered into my ear. I folded my arms around her waist and, kissing her, did as she asked. At that moment, an old groundskeeper holding a rake and a shovel sauntered by, whistling tunelessly. When he saw us, he changed direction and wandered off. Madeleine pulled her head back and looked at me as if trying to memorize my face. Her dark eyes were so near mine I could see my reflection.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, pulling away and blushing. “I forgot myself.” My heart beating wildly, I pulled her back and kissed her again.
We set off, hand in hand, toward the exit we’d passed through the previous evening, which already seemed a distant age. On Rue Froidevaux, Madeleine stopped before a Morris column to read a government ordinance:
EXPATRIATE GERMANS LIVING IN FRANCE
You must report immediately to the nearest police station. Bring no more than one bag containing your daily essentials. Disobedience of this order will incur the maximum penalty.
By order of the Ministry of the Interior, 18 May 1940.
“You must leave,” she said. “You can’t turn yourself in.”
“I know, but where would I go? My papers aren’t in order. I can’t leave France. I don’t have an exit visa. I don’t have money.”
“How does one get an exit visa?”
“You apply at the Ministry of the Interior. But my application would be denied. I don’t have a release certificate from the internment camp. They let us go without them so that we wouldn’t be granted exit visas. That way we can’t leave.” I gave Madeleine a fatalistic smile. “I’m like you. I have nowhere to go.”
She curled her arms around my neck, closed her eyes, and kissed me again. Even if at that moment I had been magically wired the money I had been waiting for and granted every piece of paper I needed—a release certificate, an exit visa, a real passport (not the Nansen substitute that served only to mark me out as a dubious exile), a ship’s boarding pass, a Portuguese transit visa, an American entrance visa—I doubt I would have gone anywhere.
The Auction House
MADELEINE AND I NEVER discussed how long she would stay. She just did. To me, every moment we were together was a gift, a stay of execution. Ambushed by love, I succumbed to it without thought to my survival. It was a love devoted entirely to the present, without a tomorrow, and thus entirely of its time. I should have been at the railway station with my black suitcase, camping out on the platforms with the crowds, waiting for a place on a train headed south. Only I didn’t want to go.
The writers, artists, publishers, intellectuals, and other natural enemies of the Nazis, in those last few weeks of the Third Republic, adhered to two opposing schools of thought about how best to survive: there were those who opted to leave and those who preferred to stay. To leave—provided one had the wherewithal—was to abandon an entire life, to embrace exile, to choose to be cut off from everything that was familiar, to risk destitution. And yet to stay was to risk, once the Germans arrived, internment, interrogation, torture, even death. Every time I saw someone I knew, when I bumped into Arthur or Fritz on the stairwell, for instance, or a friend in the street, or if I came across the postman or my landlady, we discussed the matter: stay or go? Go or stay? I was in the remain camp. I felt I was faced with two different kinds of suicide, and in the face of this choice, my decision felt arbitrary and therefore inconsequential. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my adopted city. I was too old to adopt another. And, in any case, if worst came to worst, I had sixty-four capsules of morphine, enough to kill a horse. They’d accompanied me everywhere since I’d left Germany seven years ago. Death would be easy. Painless. Blissful, even.
But now, having met Madeleine, I found my thoughts on the matter changing. I was still in favor of staying, only now it was because I wanted to, not out of despondency and torpor. Over the following week, we spent most of our time in the apartment, or walking the streets of Paris like tourists, living on cheap red wine from Languedoc, Salomé cigarettes, and rationed bread, in a state of profound contentment. The little world we spontaneously created between us felt more real than the outside world, which at any rate was falling apart. The greatest of our pleasures, in that time, was to tell each other stories. Madeleine overcame my natural reserve by peppering me with questions about my childhood, travels, the people I’d known, the books I’d read, and, above all, my dreams. Madeleine’s stories were of an altogether different nature: she continued recounting the tale of the albatross, a story that spanned generations and continents. Her stories never lasted more than an hour or two, with occasional questions from me to illuminate some obscurity or clarify some uncertainty, before her energies withered and she began to apologize, saying she could go no further, she was spent. She would curl up, lay her head on my shoulder or my chest, and fall asleep. She was like a cat that way, asleep more often than she was awake. While she slept I would take out my gray notebook and write down everything I’d just heard. I didn’t want to forget a single detail, and yet, even so soon after the telling, there were so many I could already not recall.
And a curious thing—I stopped waking in fright at night. Within days of meeting her, I noticed I’d slept through the night for the third time in a row. With the end of my nightmares, a great and ancient burden was lifted from me.
The only thorn in the happiness we shared was Madeleine’s fixation with the auction of the Baudelaire manuscript the following Monday. She was desperate to acquire it or, rather, for me to acquire it on her behalf. Of course, I wanted to see the Baudelaire manuscript for myself. I wanted to touch it, to hold it, to read it, if possible, in part if not in whole. I was a bibliophile, and as such I had obsessions of my own. Chief among them, coinciding neatly with Madeleine’s, was Charles Baudelaire. A new story by the great poet—the idea made my heart beat faster. I peppered Madeleine for specifics about it, and she indulged me by describing it in loving detail: a story in four parts, told in the first person. She’d even memorized the first sentence. She made me write it down so I could check it at the auction: As I write these words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. I would attend the auction, alone, and buy the manuscript on her behalf. Why alone? She wouldn’t say, other than that all would be revealed in time. How would I pay for it? Again, she wouldn’t say—money seemed to be almost an abstraction to her. She seemed to think that, if all else failed, I could simply steal the thing.
It was when Madeleine was making no sense at all that I loved her the most. From the start, she suspected I didn’t take her tales as seriously as she did, and when she sensed her words were bumping up against a wall of incredulity her lips would quiver with hurt and her dark eyes glisten with tears, but she never lost her conviction or her composure. I must simply trust her, she kept saying, and so I did, or at least I pretended to. To disbelieve Madeleine was to risk losing her; to believe her was to risk losing myself. And so I devised a way of loving her without being ashamed of myself: I believed and disbelieved her at one and the same time.
The only time we were apart was in the evenings. Paris was not the glittering jewel it had been before the declaration of war. A dusk-to-dawn blackout meant the city of light was plunged into darkness. That was when Madeleine, who lolled about indolently during the day wearing one of my shirts, would spring to life, put on her black silk dress with red hibiscus, apply mascara to her lashes and red lipstick to her lips, and disappear without explanation. Again, I found this feline quality deeply seductive. When I asked where she was going, she kissed me tenderly and told me it was best I didn’t know, but that she would be back, in the early hours of the morning, and that I shouldn’t wait up for her. But I couldn’t help myself. I would stay up awaiting her return, unable to read or write or do anything other than pace to and fro in my room, in agonies of worry. Eventually, I would go to bed and close my eyes, mind whirring, until in the wee hours the door would creak open and she would slink in, smelling of cigarette smoke and alcohol, undress, and curl herself up beside me. She was small, and our bodies were a perfect fit, even for a single mattress. At sunrise I would wake and there she would be, sitting in the armchair, naked, reading Baudelaire, smoking a Salomé, the contours of her body streaked with rays of sunlight, and, seeing me awake, she would recite what she was reading.
Come, handsome cat, come on my flaming heart lie;
Sheathe the claws of your paw,
And let me plunge into your handsome eyes,
Where metal and agate alloy.
Then we would head out into the streets for our morning walk.
The German war machine rolled on, delaying its arrival in Paris by picking off the remnants of the French and British armies, cornered against the English Channel. The southbound traffic on the boulevards thickened, the traffic in the other streets thinned, and every day more shops were shuttered.
The following Saturday afternoon, Arthur knocked on my door. Madeleine was dozing on my bed, so I stepped out onto the landing. I presumed he wanted to inquire about our traditional Saturday-evening poker party, which had entirely slipped my mind, but instead he told me he was leaving. His well-heeled English girlfriend had managed to buy a car and they were driving down to Bordeaux. “There’s room for you too, if you want to join us.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“The French have pretty much capitulated, you are aware of that, aren’t you?” he said, seizing me by the arm. “The Germans will be here in a week or two.”
I hesitated, feeling foolish for throwing away this lifeline, an opportunity for which so many others would have willingly paid a fortune. “I’m not ready.”
“I see,” he said, momentarily downcast before perking up again and slapping me on the shoulder. “Well, we’ll see each other again sometime, I’m sure.” We shook hands and he was gone, dashing down the steps three at a time. I went back into the apartment to see Madeleine, lying on my bed, turn her head sleepily in my direction.
“Who was that?” she asked.
I crossed the room, sat on the side of the bed and squeezed her hand. “No one.”
That day and the next, she finished recounting the tale of the albatross. The nearer she was to the conclusion of her story, the harder it was to ignore the chasm of belief that divided us. The saga’s denouement was a first-rate paranoid delusion, in which Madeleine’s fantasies were so thoroughly entangled with the real world that it was hard to imagine her ever extricating herself from the web. She seemed to believe that Gabrielle Chanel, better known as Coco, a high-society dressmaker who lived at the Ritz Hotel, was also President of the Baudelaire Society, and that the two of them were enmeshed in a decades-old rivalry. She was convinced Chanel wanted her killed, and that the auction of the Baudelaire manuscript was somehow a part of her plot, with the manuscript as the lure that would entrap her. By the time she finished her story, I was so concerned by what I’d heard I couldn’t return her gaze. She must have sensed my despair.
“Why don’t we try it?” she said.
“Try what?”
“Crossing.”
I gave a heavy sigh. “I don’t think that would be wise.”
“Why not?”
I’d never challenged her about her beliefs—what purpose would it have served? There were worse—she wasn’t a Fascist, after all. I had friends who believed in a god, in an afterlife, or in Stalinism—why couldn’t I tolerate Madeleine’s beliefs?
“Well, for one thing, I don’t think you’d want to end up in this body.” I pointed to myself. “I’d clearly be the one with the most to gain, but it wouldn’t be fair on you.”
She let out one of her long, throaty chuckles. “I don’t want to end up in your body either. We would cross back.”
“That’s possible?”
“Of course. I would see to it.”
“I thought crossing was a one-way affair.”
“Most of the time, for me, it is. But there’s more than one kind of crossing. There’s the blind crossing, where afterward you have no idea what just happened. Then there’s the wakeful crossing, where we cross in such a way that at each moment you are wholly aware of everything that is happening.”
She was beginning to frighten me. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
“Are you worried about ending up a woman?” she teased.
“I would have no problem being a woman.”
“That’s what you think.” She smiled and tilted her head a little. “So what do you say?”
For days now, I’d been wrestling with this, until now, hypothetical dilemma. On the one hand, I figured a failed crossing might pull her back to reality, but on the other I worried she might not be able to handle it if her elaborate fantasy-world was exposed as a fraud, that she would react badly and I might never see her again. But at that moment I decided the charade could not continue a moment longer, and that were I to refuse her invitation I would be complicit in her delusion. We were both lying on the bed. I had my head propped up on a pillow while Madeleine lay on her back. We locked eyes. I couldn’t help but feel a little appalled that I had allowed myself to do this, but within a few moments I felt my body begin to tingle all over with pleasure. This, Madeleine had told me, was the first stirring of the soul, which all people naturally feel when looking into the eyes of another. She believed the ability to cross was latent in everyone, only the teaching of it had been lost. This, she claimed, was why looking someone in the eye was such a powerful, and occasionally dangerous, act, because even the untrained soul stirs when gazes meet. Now, staring into her eyes, I preferred to think of it simply as love. What sorrows had she endured in her life, I wondered, a life about which, for all her stories, I still knew very little? I thought of her as one of those people defeated by hardship and solitude who conduct one-sided conversations on the street, loudly berating someone who exists only in their imagination. And so, looking into her eyes, tingling all over with pleasure, I was all at once flooded with tenderness for this woman, and for her woundedness. Her tales were merely a cover, a disguise, a front. Underneath them was a deeply, perhaps irretrievably, mislaid soul. The sadness of it overwhelmed me, and the image of her blurred, and I looked away.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I’m distracted. I was thinking about the auction tomorrow.”
Later that evening, Madeleine dressed and left the apartment as always. Before leaving, she gave me an exceptionally tender kiss. I thought she was trying to repair the unspoken rift that had emerged between us, but the next morning, when I woke and noticed she wasn’t lying beside me, I understood what it had really meant. She’d been saying goodbye. But she’d left me a gift. Lying on the bedside table was her derringer.
I don’t intend to recreate the agonies I suffered that morning. Suffice it to say I didn’t leave the apartment for my usual morning walk, and in the throes of anguish I lost all sense of time. I had to hurry to the Hôtel Drouot on the other side of the river, carrying 873 francs in notes and coins—the sum total of my funds—which jangled ostentatiously in my trouser pockets, taking the Métro instead of walking, as I preferred to do, because round-ups were easier to avoid above ground than under it. The second-class compartment was lightly sprinkled with passengers, as if it were a Sunday rather than a Monday.
Stepping through the arched corner entrance of the Hôtel Drouot, I entered a hushed, red-carpeted, high-ceilinged world that whispered promises of aesthetic pleasures. I’d attended many auctions here, always as a spectator. Each time I visited this elegant bazaar of all that is precious and exquisite, I felt a familiar heady rush. Room 10 was located up the stairs. There were barely a dozen people in the large room, including the auctioneer, Bignon, and his assistants, waiting glumly for the clock on the wall to strike two o’clock so the auction could begin. Bignon stood on his podium wielding his gavel like a judge, dressed in a fine dark suit, thinly disguising his contempt at the dismal turnout: a few middle-aged onlookers, peppering the empty seats alone or in small clusters.
I’d wanted to arrive early. It was the custom, before an auction, for the items listed in the catalog to be displayed for inspection. There was only one item of interest to me, but as I didn’t wish to draw attention to myself, I feigned interest in several others. I flicked through a first edition of Mallarmé and pretended to study some Daumier lithographs before turning my attention to the object of my real desire, the red leather-bound notebook lying open on a bed of blue velvet: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire. I had to put on a pair of white cotton gloves to handle it. The manuscript had been bound in peau de chagrin, with gold-leaf embossing on the spine and cover. Inside, the yellowing pages were filled with the distinctive curlicue of the poet’s own handwriting. I read the first few lines and my heart began to palpitate with that excitement known only to collectors when they are within reach of a rare, once-in-a-lifetime prize: As I write these words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief (these two words were underlined) as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. Exactly as Madeleine had remembered—word for word. I read on. Yet nothing I have written has ever been so true. Paradox, all is paradox. I skipped ahead a few pages and found the dinner party scene, exactly as described. So Madeleine had not been imagining things. She was intimately familiar with the manuscript. I continued turning the pages, reviewing the chapter headings—“A Disgraceful Episode,” “A Touching Reunion,” and so on, just as she had described. Just then, chimes began to echo throughout the building as dozens of clocks waiting to be auctioned in adjoining rooms rang the hour all at once.
“I’m sorry, sir, the auction is about to begin.” I looked up. A man in a sky-blue frock and white gloves was reaching for the book—one of the auctioneer’s assistants. If I pocketed the book and ran out of the room, I calculated, I’d never get away with it. Instead, I would end up in prison, no place to be when the Germans arrived. So I handed the book back to the assistant and found a seat. Suddenly I desired that book with my entire being, as if all the love I had felt for Madeleine was now transferred to the object before me, as if somehow Madeleine had become that book. But what chance did I stand with 873 measly francs to my name? Under normal circumstances, a manuscript of this rarity would not be cheap. Perhaps the invasion had chased away the serious collectors who would normally have dropped a small fortune, without a second thought, on such a rarity. In any case, if I were, by some stroke of luck, to snare the jewel, my destitution would be a small price to pay.
The auction began with a brief introduction by Bignon, after which he started up his consoling, monotonal patter, reminiscent of a priest’s Latinate incantations. Against this stream of rapturous descriptions and figures hopping ever upward, like goats up a mountainside, three assistants buzzed to and fro, ferrying and displaying each item in turn, keeping a meticulous record of its commercial destiny. But for all their efforts, a discernible torpor presided over the occasion. Bignon’s voice betrayed little enthusiasm. The bidding was sporadic and many of the objects were passed in.
“Now we come to the last item in the catalog, undoubtedly the drawcard of today’s proceedings,” said Bignon as one of the assistants proffered the Baudelaire manuscript as an altar boy would the Eucharist. “More than a mere curio, this is a work of genuine rarity and literary significance: a short story, previously unknown, written in Baudelaire’s own hand. The handwriting has been authenticated by the expert appraiser Monsieur Jacquenet. It appears to have been written at the end of Baudelaire’s life, in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Baudelaire was, as we know, the first French admirer and finest translator. The reserve price is two thousand francs.”
My stomach sank. I was already out of the running. There were no bids, however, so I thought I might still stand a chance. Bignon’s face was stoic. He repeated the price, gavel hovering in the air, and all seemed lost until he spied something—a raised finger belonging to the old man standing by himself in the row in front of me—and the fall of the hammer was postponed another moment as Bignon’s voice barked, “We have two thousand. Do I hear two thousand, two hundred and fifty?” I studied my competitor jealously: he was hatless and bald, grizzled and bent forward, dressed despite the weather in an outmoded, shapeless trench coat. His profile was vaguely familiar—I must have seen his face before—but where? There was another lull and another last-second bid. Again I looked around for the culprit: this time my attention fell on a thick-necked man in an expensive-looking suit at the back of the room. The two bidders continued the rally two or three more times before the old man’s tenacity carried the day and the man in the suit relented. The gavel struck the lectern at last, marking the manuscript’s sale, the auction’s end, and my own abject failure.
I followed the successful bidder in the trench coat to the front of the room, where the purchasers had gathered to settle their accounts and collect their trophies. I overheard him spell out his name to one of the auctioneer’s assistants: V-E-N-N-E-T. The Baudelaire manuscript was the only item he’d purchased. When he turned toward me, I saw his full face for the first time, and again sensed an untraceable recognition.
One of the assistants tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you have something to collect?”
I shook my head.
“In that case, please make way for the buyers.”
I went to the back of the room and smoked a Salomé while I waited for Vennet. Where had I seen that face before? An image of a riverside bookstall down by the wine market came to mind. Was he a bouquiniste? Having put the manuscript in a brown leather satchel, Vennet left the auction room. From a distance, I followed him as he descended the stairs and exited the building. He set off in the direction of the Rue de la Grange Batelière. I noticed, walking a short distance behind, that he was also being followed by not one but two separate men: the thick-necked fellow in the expensive suit who’d bid against him during the auction and another man, thin and bespectacled, wearing a gray homburg hat, whom I hadn’t previously noticed. From what Madeleine had told me, I’d expected one pursuant—an employee of the Baudelaire Society—but not two. When the bookseller turned right into the Passage Jouffroy, his two pursuants quickened their steps and also disappeared into the arcade.
Against the cool, blue shade of the street, the interior was dazzling. Sunlight streamed in through the glass roof, ricocheting off the pale mosaic floor and the display windows of the shops lining both sides of the arcade. Unaware he was being tailed by three men, Vennet had gone into an antiquarian bookstore. The two other men were pretending, not very convincingly, to study the displays of nearby shops. I stepped into the shop where Vennet was talking to the bookseller, showing off the manuscript he’d just purchased. Remembering what Madeleine had told me, I realized he was in some kind of danger, although I couldn’t say precisely what kind. I wanted to warn him without revealing myself. Speaking to him was out of the question, on account of my accent, so I took my notebook and pencil out of my shirt pocket and scribbled a note: You are being followed by two men. Your life may be in peril. Hide the manuscript and watch out for yourself. I tore the paper from the notebook, folded it, tapped Vennet on the shoulder and handed it to him without uttering a word, face averted. I didn’t wait to see his reaction—as he opened the note, I slipped out of the bookshop, hiding my face from the two men with my hat, then turned and began to run.
Behind me, I heard Vennet stumble out of the shop and yell, “Hey! Hey there! What is the meaning of this?” I continued running, the coins in my pocket jangling like a tambourine as I did, to such an extent that I had to hold my hands against my thighs to keep them quiet. I darted across the Boulevard Montmartre and into the Passage des Panoramas, without looking behind me to check if I was being pursued. I weaved around some window-shoppers, ducked left into the Galerie des Variétés, and left again, up a narrow stairwell, three steps at a time until I reached a door at the top. I entered a softly lit room where a stout woman in her fifties sat smoking from an opera-length cigarette holder behind a Second Empire desk.
“Bonjour, Madame Yolande,” I wheezed, puffing, my every heartbeat the thrust of a dagger in my chest. “I’m glad to see you’re still open, despite everything.”
“Bonjour, monsieur, good to see you again,” replied the madame. “We’ve never been busier. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes,” I panted, “all is well.” I bent forward to catch my breath. “I just … ran into someone … I didn’t want to see.”
“Have you brought trouble with you? You know we don’t like trouble.”
“No trouble, madame, no trouble at all … Room twelve, please.”
“Room twelve is Simone’s room, monsieur. As you know, Simone sees customers by appointment only, without exception.”
“Simone, yes, of course, it slipped my mind, my apologies. What about Room Eleven?”
“Room Eleven is Paulette. Is it Paulette you wish to see?”
“Yes, Paulette. Thank you.” Madame Yolande looked me up and down with narrowed eyes before shrugging her shoulders and handing me a key. I paid the usual sum, adding a tip for the madame. In return, she gave me the slightest hint of a smile, signaling that while she disapproved of my behavior, I could count on her discretion.
Crouching so that I wouldn’t be seen from below, I made my way down a corridor with doors to the rooms on the left and windows on the right overlooking the arcade. I opened the door to Room 11 and stepped into a consoling hush. I left the door slightly ajar and peered through it onto proceedings downstairs.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” I heard Paulette say from over my shoulder. “I haven’t seen you in such a long time.”
“Bonjour, bonjour, dear Paulette,” I replied, still peering through the gap in the door. The arcade below was as still as a postcard. There was no sign of Vennet or his pursuers, only a lady choosing a magazine at the newspaper kiosk and some youths inspecting a tobacconist’s window. I closed the door and locked it, turning around to face Paulette. She was reclining on an uncovered bed with one raised knee, wearing only a black negligee, silk stockings, and a great deal of makeup. A brocaded lamp glowed in a corner and from an old phonograph player warbled a violin and a guitar. The room smelled of perfume and hashish. “Pardon the subterfuge,” I said, taking off my jacket and hat and placing them on a stool by the phonograph player. Approaching the bed and sitting on its edge, I reached out and brushed the dyed blonde hair from Paulette’s face to better see those blue-gray eyes of hers, which had so bewitched me once upon a time. Now they had no effect at all.
“What can I do for you today?” she asked.
“Just keep me company.”
“I see. Nothing more?”
“If someone knocks at the door, I shall kiss you. But otherwise, just keep me company.”
She reached beside her and took up a pack of cards. “In my experience, nothing soothes a troubled heart better than a game of double solitaire.”
“I know it well.”
The Palace of Justice
WHEN I RETURNED TO the apartment that evening, I half expected Madeleine to have returned somehow, to be lounging on my bed, wearing one of my shirts, smoking a Salomé. Instead, its emptiness struck me like a blow to the stomach. I thought I could detect a faint aroma of sandalwood, and I sniffed various things—the pillow, the sheets, a towel—in search of a more tangible sense of her presence. I wanted to tell her that she had been right, that the auction had gone exactly as she had foretold, that I had done what she had instructed me to do, that I ought not to have doubted her. But I could only speak to the Madeleine in my mind. That imaginary Madeleine was very much alive—I found myself talking aloud to her, continuing our long conversations—but there would be no touching her, caressing her, holding her. I had a feeling that, this time, she wouldn’t be back. At least she had left me a keepsake to remember her by.
I stroked the cold, metallic contours of the derringer as if they were Madeleine’s own flesh. I knew exactly why she’d left it behind. We’d talked about it. She was asking me to do something on her behalf, something unconscionable. She wanted me to commit a crime—to murder someone, to be precise. And not just anyone; she had asked me to murder Coco Chanel. There was no point asking why, it was all part of her paranoia—otherwise known as the tale of the albatross. Of course, there was no question of my doing it. Even had I wanted to, where would I find bullets for a derringer?
A letter had arrived by pneumatic tube and been slipped under my door. It was from Fritz, who had spent several nights camping on a platform at the Gare de Lyon in the hope of securing a seat on a southbound train. He’d bought two tickets for a train leaving the following morning, and the second ticket was mine if I wanted it. But there was never any question of taking up the invitation. I was too deeply involved in this affair with Madeleine and the manuscript.
I spent a sleepless night, haunted by memories, and dawn came as a relief.
On my habitual morning walk, I went to the station, skirting the Montparnasse cemetery, which had yet to open. The memory of our meeting—barely more than a week ago, and yet already an age—was almost too painful to bear. The Gare de Lyon was swarming with unhappy, disheveled Parisians, many of whom had been here for days, hoping to leave before the arrival of the Germans. When I found Fritz he was standing in a long, unmoving queue, waiting to board a steam train—even decommissioned steam locomotives had been brought out of retirement for the exodus. All around, entire families were splayed on the ground, surrounded by their baggage and possessions—umbrellas, flower pots, chickens, coffee-makers, birdcages, sheets, curtains—awaiting their turn to leave on the next train, or the one after that. I saw Fritz from a distance, but we didn’t speak until we were quite close, so as not to be overheard speaking German in public and denounced. “Where’s your suitcase?” he asked. I told him I couldn’t leave, that he should give the spare ticket to someone else. He looked at me in disbelief. “Why?”
I looked helplessly at my old friend. “I’m still waiting for my American friends to wire me money.”
“I can lend you money, if that’s all it is. Have them wire it to Marseille.”
“There’s something else, a manuscript.” Listening to myself, I realized how foolish my words must seem to him. I didn’t want to mention Madeleine, whom he hadn’t met, and this reluctance bothered me. Was I ashamed of her—or of myself?
“A manuscript!” He couldn’t help but smile and shake his head. “You’re going to risk your life for a manuscript!” I shrugged, as if to say, there’s nothing to be done, I can’t go. He nodded sadly. “I see,” he said. “Well, if you change your mind, go to Marseille, it’s your best chance of getting out of France alive. Leave a message for me at the Hôtel Splendide.” There was a youth standing alone nearby in a cap and long shorts, looking forlorn. Fritz offered him the ticket and the boy lit up with happiness. We smoked cigarettes together until a whistle blew and the line began to move. One by one, people entered the carriages and hauled their suitcases aboard. The train vanished in a cloud of smoke and steam.
I left the railway station and walked toward the river and the Île Saint-Louis, then across the Île de la Cité to the Quai Malaquais. Despite the circumstances, some of the booksellers were opening their stalls, setting up their wares, tending to shelves, gossiping among themselves, smoking. Were it not for the evacuees streaming across the Pont Saint-Michel on their carts and lorries, it might have been any ordinary, sunny day. At the corner of the bridge, I recognized the pear-shaped figure of the bookseller Lanoizelée, wearing his customary round glasses and black beret. I’d been a customer of his for years; we trusted each other. We exchanged nods and said bonjour. I flicked through the detective novels on his shelves. I’d read most of them, some of them several times, but all the same I found a couple I thought I could bear to read again. “By the way,” I said, as if it was of no particular consequence, “have you heard of a bouquiniste called Vennet?”
“Vennet? Yes, he’s down on the Quai de la Tournelle, near the wine market. Sells vintage lithographs to tourists with a side trade in antique pornography. Are you after some racy pictures?” He showed me an illustration of a dark-skinned woman wearing only a boa constrictor. “Look at this—look at the detail. A real work of art.” I shook my head with a smile. “Maybe next time,” he said.
“There may not be a next time.”
“Oh, there’s always a next time.”
I continued walking upriver toward the Quai de la Tournelle. Away from the southbound boulevards, the sunshine and pre-invasion quiet lent every scene a summer holiday tone. Near the wine market, I found a woman in her sixties smoking a pipe. She sold romance novels.
“I’m looking for Vennet’s stall.”
“It’s just here,” she said, pointing to the next stall. It was locked shut.
“Do you know where I might find him?”
“He’s a popular man. You’re the second person to have asked after him.” She puffed on her pipe.
“Was the other guy big, thick neck, nice suit?”
“No, he was thin, pencil mustache, homburg hat. Came looking for Vennet yesterday afternoon.” A flash of panic shot through me. I was a day late.
“Where can I find Vennet? I’m afraid he might be in some trouble.”
She looked me up and down, sizing me up. My accent, I thought. I took a twenty-franc note out of my pocket and gave it to her. “He was closed yesterday too, but he came around as I was closing up. He seemed flustered, but I didn’t ask why. I don’t like to pry.”
“What did he do?”
Again she paused. I gave her another twenty francs. “He opened up the stall, rummaged around for a minute, then locked it up and left. He barely said a word, which is unlike him. He’s normally the talkative type.”
“Did you tell the other guy this?”
“He didn’t ask.”
“What did he ask?”
“He wanted to know where Vennet lives.”
“And where’s that?”
She looked at me without replying, puffing calmly on her pipe.
“Where does Vennet live, madame? His life may depend on the answer.”
“You’re German, aren’t you?” she eventually spat.
I took all the notes and coins I had in my pocket and gave them to her.
The address the old woman gave me was in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, one of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods. For centuries it had reeked with the stench of the tanneries that lined both sides of the Bièvre, the little stream that had since been covered over but still flowed under the streets, past the Jardin des Plantes and into the Seine. The neighborhood had long been condemned as insalubrious, and what hadn’t already been demolished was slated for the wrecking ball. But all that was forgotten in the light of the noonday sun. It was lunchtime and the narrow streets teemed with children—at least, those too old to have been sent to the country—immersed in countless self-devised intrigues. They seemed unworried by the impending invasion. Their parents had no country homes to flee to, and they would simply have to make do as they had always done. As I wandered in search of Vennet’s apartment, the heat, the interplay of sun and shadow, the white waves of bleached linen suspended overhead, the smell of frying onions from open windows, all combined dizzyingly with less tangible things—my worries, my sorrows, my fears—so that, more than once, I had to stop and put my hand against a wall to regain my composure.
Having found Vennet’s building, I groped my way up four flights of stairs in near total darkness, lighting matches to view the names written beside the doors. When I found Vennet’s place I knocked without reply. I tried turning the handle and the door swung open. I stood at the threshold for a moment before stepping inside. All was stuffy, gloomy—the smell of cigarettes and a human body. It was a single room much like my own, with a kitchenette in one corner. The curtain of the only window was drawn. Against every wall, stacks of books were piled waist-high. The middle of the room was strewn with more books, as if piles of them had been ransacked or knocked over in a struggle. I felt like King Kong standing in the middle of a ruined metropolis of books. There was a bed by the window with a body lying on the thin mattress, turned away from the door. I called out Vennet’s name but there was no response. Crossing the room with careful steps, I reached the other side, threw back the curtain and opened the window, breathing in the fresh air with the relief of a drowning man.
I went to Vennet’s side, called his name and shook him gently. The bed hadn’t been slept in. His body, lying on its side, was cool. He was fully dressed, in the same clothes he’d worn the previous day, minus the trench coat. He wasn’t breathing. In fact, rigor mortis had set in and at his chest his shirt was soaked in congealed blood. Blood had trickled through the thin mattress and formed a little pool of crimson under the bed. There were traces of blood on the floor, and a jet of it had squirted across the room as far as the opposite wall. I turned my attention to Vennet’s face. Where the eyes ought to have been were two voids underscored by tentacles of dried blood. His eyeballs had been removed. I turned away, stomach heaving, leaning against a wall to regain my composure. I thought of Madeleine. She’d warned me about this.
I heard a rustle behind me. I spun around to see, standing in the doorway, the thin, bespectacled man in the gray homburg hat I’d seen the previous day. “Looking for someone?” he said.
“I found him.”
“He doesn’t look in great shape.” The man stepped over some books and into the apartment. “I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“The auction, yesterday.”
“Ah yes, and afterward in the Passage Jouffroy. What did you say to Vennet that alarmed him so?”
“I gave him a warning.”
“You told him his life was in danger,” he said. “Rather prescient, wouldn’t you say?”
“A lucky guess,” I replied.
“Who are you and how did you come to be muddled in this business?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu of the Police Judiciaire.”
“You’re from the Quai des Orfèvres?”
“Indeed. Do you know it?”
“Only from pulp novels.”
“That’s a pity. They don’t do it justice. It really is worth a visit. In fact, why don’t we go there now? I have a car waiting outside.” He stood to one side of the doorway and beckoned to me. “You know,” said Massu, “they say you haven’t really seen Paris until you’ve seen the Quai des Orfèvres.”
“Who says that?”
“Everyone and no one.”
The black Citroën rattled across the paving stones of the Pont Saint-Michel, over the mercurial waters of the Seine flowing darkly below, through the stream of cars and carts fleeing southward. Beside me, Massu hummed tunelessly to himself. Meanwhile, I was nauseously remembering the cadaver I’d just seen, and Madeleine too. For Vennet’s murder corroborated the most improbable of Madeleine’s delusions: that someone at the Baudelaire Society—Coco Chanel, no less, or some hired proxy—was killing people, and gouging out their eyes, as part of some ancient vendetta between them that I could never quite understand. And if Madeleine’s tales were true, I was suddenly neck-deep in a sordid affair that I barely understood, in a city where I was persona non grata. What was worse, I was now in the hands of the police, the very people I most needed to avoid. Luckily, I’d left the derringer hidden in my apartment.
The police car lurched left onto the Quai des Orfèvres, swerving through an arched entranceway and heaving to a stop in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, headquarters of the Police Judiciaire, which investigated all of Paris’s homicides. In the middle of the courtyard a large fire was burning while several men stood by with trolleys. One of the men was stoking the fire, and from the shade of the early afternoon sparks rose into the patch of blue sky above. I was led inside, through a gloomy maze of corridors and stairwells to a room where I was fingerprinted and photographed. My notebook was confiscated. Then I was marched across the building, up more stairs to the top floor, through a commotion of voices, typewriters, and ringing telephones, and instructed to wait outside an office marked Brigade spéciale N° 1. Occasionally someone would enter or leave the office, and I would catch glimpses of a large smoky room filled with desks facing each other, each with a typewriter on it. Men milled about purposefully, or sat at one of the desks, typing with two fingers. There was a smell of burning paper mixed with tobacco and body odor. I must have sat there for an hour or two, fretting at this unexpected turn of events, smoking Salomés while my heart thudded painfully in my chest. Now that I was a guest of the judicial police, my main goal was to avoid ending up in the hands of the secret police. I was counting on the famous interdepartmental hostility of the French police. With any luck, I thought, I might still walk out of here a free man.
Finally I was ushered into a room labeled Bureau du Commissaire, a smallish office with a solitary porthole window overlooking the river and the Latin Quarter. There were shelves on three sides half filled with folders, which two men were loading up on trolleys to transport to another location. Massu was standing, leaning over his desk. His hair was neatly combed, the homburg hanging from a stand in the corner. He didn’t look up when I came in, but gestured for me to approach while instructing the other men to leave us. Pictures of Vennet’s apartment were fanned out on the desk in front of him. It had been photographed from every possible angle. There were shots of Vennet’s body, lying fully dressed on the bed in the fetal pose in which I’d found him. There was one photograph so gruesome I had to look away: a shot of his eyeless face.
Massu must have noticed me flinch. “Once seen, never forgotten,” he said. “Note the minimal bleeding from the eyes. No laceration of the epidermis inside or around the sockets. Eye injuries don’t bleed much, as a rule, but there is evidence of abrasion around the neck”—he pointed with his index finger—“indicating the victim’s head was immobilized. What does that tell you?”
“That he was alive when his eyes were gouged?”
“Precisely. The poor man was tortured.” Massu sat down in his deskchair and began stroking his chin. “But why?” I had no reply. He took a manila folder out of a drawer, opened it, and began scanning its contents with a raised eyebrow, emitting a series of staccato grunts. He seemed the kind of man who was never rattled, whose mind was always turning, whose slight smile disappeared rarely. “Tell me, monsieur,” he said, “what were you doing at the auction yesterday?”
“I was interested in the Baudelaire manuscript. I’m a writer, and something of a Baudelaire scholar.”
“Why did you follow Vennet afterward?”
“I happened to be walking behind him after the auction and saw that he was being followed by two people, one of whom was you, of course, although I didn’t know you were a policeman. But the other one was the man he’d beaten to the prize. It seemed suspicious to me. When I saw that he was in the bookshop, I went in to warn him that he was being followed.”
“After you fled the scene, Vennet took your advice and gave us the slip. So I was unable to protect him, which was why I was there in the first place. By the time I tracked him down he was already dead. So, in a way, if it wasn’t for your interference, Vennet might still be alive. Then, wonder of wonders, you turn up the following day at the scene of the crime. How does that happen?”
“I didn’t murder Vennet, which is what you seem to be implying.”
“I know. We checked your file. According to our records, you have lived in Paris only seven years. The origins of this crime are much older. Whether you know it or not, monsieur, you have stumbled upon one of the oldest cases of multiple homicide in the history of this marvelous city. And I believe you may be able to help us.”
“I will do whatever I can.”
Massu gave one of his little philosophical smiles. “Tell me, monsieur, how did you get tangled up in this mess? You shouldn’t even be in Paris.”
“I’m wondering that myself.”
“Have you seen the manuscript?”
“Yes, yesterday at the auction.”
“What did you make of it?”
“Well, I only looked at it for a few minutes, but nothing I saw suggested it was a fake. The handwriting appears to be Baudelaire’s, the paper stock seems old enough.”
“Have you read it?”
“I didn’t get time. I skimmed over the beginning—again, nothing appeared inauthentic.”
“I read it last week, at Jacquenet’s bookshop. I’d been waiting to read it for eighteen years. Let me tell you what is in it—this may interest you, not just as a scholar but as a human being. It is not a work of fiction. Baudelaire has written it as himself. It tells the story of his preparation for a transformation of the most unusual variety.”
Just as Madeleine described, I thought to myself. Much as I wanted to hear what Massu knew, I also intuitively felt compelled to keep everything I knew about Madeleine to myself. “A transformation?”
“Metempsychosis, monsieur—are you familiar with the term?”
“Of course, the transmigration of souls after death.”
“Precisely,” said Massu. “Except that what Baudelaire seems to allude to in this story is a transference of souls that occurs before death.”
“I see.” Massu was studying me closely. “Sounds like fiction to me.”
“Normally, I would tend to agree with you. But this case, which incidentally dates back at least eighteen years, blurs the lines between the real and the fictional. What do you know of the Baudelaire Society, or of its president, Madame Gabrielle Chanel?”
I’d been rather hoping he wouldn’t mention Chanel. By doing so, he’d made it impossible to keep pretending that Madeleine’s stories were delusions. Still, I thought, better to keep all this to myself. “Until recently, I’d never heard of the Society,” I replied. “The woman’s name rings a bell.”
“Let me fill you in. The Baudelaire Society is a relic of a bygone era, when literary associations were fashionable. At its height in the 1900s, it was considered the most prestigious such association in Paris, and therefore the world. In 1923, its presidency passed to Gabrielle Chanel, a young high-society seamstress. She is now the wealthiest woman in France, and is better known as Coco. Surely you’ve heard the name?” I nodded. Massu paused, as if weighing up what to say next. “Do you know what that smell is, monsieur? It is the smell of burning paper. You will have noticed, upon your arrival, a fire in the courtyard below. Currently, in the courtyards of government buildings all over Paris, paperwork is being burned. Entire archives are going up in flames. This is all the information anyone needs to gauge how the defense of the republic is proceeding. And knowing this would naturally lead you to wonder why, at a time like this, an overworked police commissioner should take such a personal interest in a case about a murdered bouquiniste. But this is no ordinary case. Vennet is the third victim I know of to have had their eyes removed when they were killed, and each time the Baudelaire manuscript was involved. The first was in 1922. I was a neighborhood policeman assigned to assist the investigation. The victim was an antiquarian bookseller. His eye sockets were empty, his eyeballs never found. When I interviewed the widow, she mentioned that her husband had been commissioned by a new client to sell a manuscript on consignment: a previously unknown story by Baudelaire. The manuscript had vanished. The client turned out to have been the Baudelaire Society. I went to pay the Society a visit—it is headquartered in a hôtel particulier on the Île Saint-Louis. The president at the time was Aristide Artopoulos. Strange fellow—he claimed to have no recollection of the book, or of the bookseller. Eventually the suspicion of guilt fell on the bookseller’s brother-in-law, a brutal alcoholic who owed the victim some money. He was charged, found guilty, and guillotined. I attended the execution—it was in the early morning, outside the prison on Boulevard Arago, and I remember thinking that the wrong man was being executed. But such is police life, and I put the matter out of my mind.
“A decade passed, during which time I rose through the ranks to deputy commissioner. Shortly after New Year in 1931, a suburban policeman called in a murdered body one morning, adding that the corpse was missing its eyeballs. When I heard this, my thoughts immediately returned to the bookseller, all those years previously. The victim’s papers were still on him—he was a Belgian industrialist and notorious playboy. He owned a superb library on the subject of his beloved Belgium. He’d told his friends at the Jockey Club the evening before his death that he was in Paris to purchase, for a handsome sum, a story written in Baudelaire’s own hand during his exile in Brussels. After dinner, he’d gone to the Chabanais, a high-class brothel in the second arrondissement where he was a regular. He left the Chabanais at four in the morning but never made it back to the Hôtel George V, where he was staying. His body was found in the Bois de Vincennes by two kids the following morning.
“The story made a bit of a splash in the papers before it was hushed up. Suspicions fell on a taxi driver with a gambling problem who’d picked up our Belgian outside the brothel. But I wasn’t satisfied. I sifted through the evidence and recognized an address scribbled in his notebook—17 Quai d’Anjou. The address of the Baudelaire Society. So I paid it another visit. By this time, Artopoulos was gone. Instead, it was presided over by a woman, one whose name was familiar to me: Coco Chanel. She’d known the man socially, she said, but knew nothing of his death other than what had been printed in the dailies.
“The taxi driver was found guilty and he, too, was guillotined at dawn on Boulevard Arago, and once again I attended the execution. I was convinced that another miscarriage of justice had occurred—only I had no evidence. I decided to delve into the archives, looking for murders that had involved the gouging out of the victims’ eyes. I found several. Hippolyte Balthazar, a psychologist who worked in the military asylum at the Salpêtrière hospital, was murdered in 1917. Balthazar, it turned out, had been a prominent member of the Baudelaire Society for seventeen years. Encouraged, I looked even further back. In 1900, on a train from Nantes to Paris, Édmonde de Bressy, founder of the Baudelaire Society, and Lucien Roeg, its secretary, were both found dead in their cabins, their eyes gouged out. In the same year, Gaspard Leducq, a captain in the merchant navy, was murdered in Le Havre, eyes also removed. He had been an employee of a shipping company owned by the Artopoulos dynasty. All of these homicides remain unsolved.
“Vennet’s death confirms my intuition: someone out there is killing people associated with the Baudelaire manuscript, and by removing the victims’ eyes they are doing it conspicuously, as if they want the murders to be noticed, to be connected. The common thread that links them is the Baudelaire Society. Which poses an interesting question: can a literary institution be guilty of the crime of murder?” Massu rose from his seat and walked over to the window. The water in the river below continued its dark, restless flow. “That is why, monsieur, we are not holding you here as a suspect: you’ve only lived in Paris since 1933. But you may be able to help us find the culprit. Perhaps it is the other man who was tailing Vennet yesterday.”
“The one in the tailored suit?”
“Precisely. I’d like you to find out his connection to the Baudelaire Society. Perhaps you could pay Madame Chanel a visit.”
“How do you suggest I do that?”
“That is up to you. But you would be appropriately rewarded.”
“I see. You want me to become an indicateur.”
“A time-honored tradition. You are at last becoming a true Parisian.”
“Just as I was thinking of leaving. What’s in it for me?”
“Name your price,” said Massu.
“An exit visa.”
“For the right information, it can be arranged.” His smile disappeared for an instant. “But the information would have to be very useful indeed.” He went to the door and opened it, signaling it was time for me to leave. “You would basically have to solve the mystery on our behalf. We are very stretched, as you can see.”
The interview was at an end. I stood and we shook hands. I was almost out the door when I remembered my notebook. It contained all the notes I’d made of Madeleine’s stories. “And my notebook? May I have it back?”
“Ah, the notebook. For now, we shall keep it—as a security deposit, if you like. Good day, monsieur.”
The Baudelaire Society
I WANDERED HOME slowly in the afternoon sun. Commissaire Massu’s story had left me in a daze. Even without referring to my notebook, it was clear that somehow his story and Madeleine’s dovetailed almost exactly—to such a degree, in fact, that they’d both asked me to run the same errand on their behalf. It seemed there would be no avoiding a rendezvous with Madame Chanel.
In the lobby of my apartment building I ran into the concierge, Madame Barbier, shuffling envelopes.
“The Germans may be coming but the bills must be paid all the same,” she said, speaking in the old country way, rolling her r’s. She approached me with a worried look. “What are you still doing here? Don’t you know it’s all over?”
I held up the copy of Le Temps I’d just bought. “The English are sending more troops, apparently, and the Americans may enter the war at any moment.”
“Well,” she huffed, “you’re quite the optimist. I don’t believe a word of it. It’s a veritable nightmare. When I think of my poor Jeannot…” Her son was a conscript. She lifted a crate by her feet and carried it to the building’s entranceway, where her husband was packing their belongings onto an old Peugeot. “We’re going to my aunt’s place in Vichy. There’ll be no trouble there. You should leave too, if you know what’s good for you.”
Inside my front door, the black suitcase was waiting for me like a faithful hound. But instead of picking it up and leaving, as I ought to have done, I lay down on my bed and started reading the newspaper. The headlines were upbeat, it was true, but reading in between the lines there was no denying Madame Barbier was right. The situation was worsening: Belgium routed, the French army outmaneuvered, and the British evacuating at Dunkirk. The government itself was leaving Paris for the relative safety of Tours. By concentrating on a total military victory in the north, I calculated, the Germans had delayed their arrival in Paris by a few more days. That, I figured, gave me just enough time. I wanted to get to the bottom of this affair—if there was indeed a bottom to get to. And if my plans went awry, there was always the morphine.
The next day, I sent a letter by pneumatic tube to the Baudelaire Society on the Quai d’Anjou, signing it with Arthur’s name and apartment number.
Paris, Wednesday, June 5, 1940
Dear Madame Chanel,
I recently acquired a previously unpublished work by Charles Baudelaire, a story entitled “The Education of a Monster.” The work is of enormous literary significance and prestige. I cannot guarantee its safekeeping in these troubled times. Given that the libraries are all closed, I would be grateful if the Baudelaire Society would consider accepting it with a view to assuring its preservation. As for obvious reasons I do not wish to send you the manuscript in the post, I am happy to bring it to the Society and give it to you in person at your earliest convenience.
Cordially, Arthur Koestler
I had no idea if Chanel had already recovered the manuscript from Vennet, but either way, I was betting she would take the bait. It wasn’t much of a plan, hardly better than a derringer without bullets, but it was all I had. I was racked by anxiety and doubt, excoriating myself for my foolishness, but once the letter was sent there was no going back. My motivations were several, each of them slight when considered alone but constituting an irrefutable argument when combined. First of all, I coveted the Baudelaire manuscript, and I figured I still had a chance of acquiring it. As a reader of crime novels, I had an interest in solving Vennet’s murder. I figured that if there was half a chance of acquiring the exit visa Massu had dangled before me, I might as well take it. But above all I wanted to verify Madeleine’s story, and visiting the Baudelaire Society was my best chance at certainty.
The reply finally arrived Friday around noon. When I heard the familiar tinkle of the postman’s bell, I raced downstairs, found the blue envelope, and tore it open: I was invited to meet Chanel at the Society headquarters the following Monday afternoon. I would have to wait another three whole days! What if the Germans were to arrive before then?
The weekend weather was summery and joyous. I continued to head out for walks at daybreak, wisps of mist drifting through the streets and across the river. Paris, in its state of suspended animation, was lovelier than ever. On Saturday, couples ambled arm in arm along the quays, here and there fishermen cast their rods into the river, and the bouquinistes tended to their stalls. All of these scenes were tinged with nostalgia, as if they already belonged to the past, while I began to seriously consider, for the first time, a future beyond the here and now: leaving Paris, making my way somehow to America or Argentina, starting again, making a new life. In every such snapshot of the life to come I was not alone—Madeleine was there by my side.
On Sunday, I woke to the sound of distant artillery fire coming from the east. All at once, the previous day’s idyll was forgotten and in the streets Parisians hauled suitcases to the nearest Métro station. I too ventured out, lumbered with notebooks and papers wrapped in string, to visit my librarian friend Georges. Weeks earlier he’d agreed to hide the book I’d been writing for so many years, a book that would now have to remain unfinished, at least for as long as the war continued. But it would survive in its hiding place, the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. It gives me a shiver of pleasure to know a piece of me is still there.
On my way home, I dropped in at the Café de Flore, which was full of writers and artists who’d gathered to speculate on the latest developments, as the radio wasn’t to be trusted. I ran into Tristan Tzara, who advised me to go straight to the nearest train station. Of course, I had no intention of following his advice. Passing the Montparnasse station on the way home, I noticed Republican Guards separating men fighting for train tickets in the forecourt.
Between my painfully thumping heart and the rumble of distant artillery, I slept little that night.
At noon on Monday, with Madeleine’s derringer in my jacket pocket, a leather satchel slung around my shoulder and a newspaper in hand, I took a seat on a shaded bench at the far western corner of the Île Saint-Louis. From here, I could survey everything happening on the cobblestoned street that ran along the riverbank, including anyone entering or leaving the Baudelaire Society. I’d brought the newspaper to hide behind, but after scanning the headlines—Reynaud’s latest appeal to Roosevelt, four spies executed, reports of poisoned milk—I folded it away.
The Baudelaire Society’s headquarters was the Hôtel de Lauzun, formerly known as the Hôtel Pimodan, where Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval had lived together, when she was his muse and he her protector and they were, in their own fashion, in love. Beneath and around me the river flowed silently, while above, in a slight breeze, the leaves of a willow whispered their secret language. The rumble in the east was constant now, putting the lie to the warm, dappled sunshine.
Shortly before two o’clock, a gleaming burgundy Delahaye cabriolet pulled up in front of the Baudelaire Society. The thick-necked man I’d seen at the Hôtel Drouot the previous week jumped out from behind the steering wheel and opened the rear passenger door. A lithe woman in a black dress emerged and disappeared into the building. She was too far away to make out her face, but even from this distance it could be no one other than Chanel.
Half an hour later, at the agreed time, with my right hand wrapped around the derringer in my pocket, I rang the bell at the Society’s entrance. It was opened by the same besuited thug I’d seen before who, if he was at all surprised to see me, didn’t betray it. Ushered into the entrance hall, I felt like I’d stepped into a recurring dream. The marbled staircase with curved cast-iron palings, the damask drapes, the frayed oriental rugs strewn over the mosaic floor tiles, the chandeliers, the mahogany furniture—it was a kind of museum dedicated to the moth-eaten pomp of the Second Empire. I was led down a corridor to an anteroom where I was instructed to await Madame Chanel’s arrival. The sense of déjà vu continued: every object—the velvet confidante on which I sat, the brocaded floor lamp beside me, the rug on which my feet rested, the Delacroix lithographs in gilded frames hanging on the walls—prompted chimes of recognition and dread.
The valet reappeared and announced that Madame Chanel would receive me. I followed him into the library, where two leather armchairs faced each other across a wide mahogany writing desk. Three of the four walls were entirely covered with books. I cast an eye over them. One wall was given over to every edition ever published of Baudelaire’s work, including in foreign languages. The other shelves were devoted to the secondary literature—books about Baudelaire: biographies, memoirs, criticism. All the volumes were uniformly bound in the same red peau de chagrin, with gold-leaf embossing, that had covered the Baudelaire manuscript at the auction. So about this, too, Madeleine had been right: “The Education of a Monster” had been in the Society library all along. Why was the Society going to such lengths to retrieve a book it had just sold at auction? The only possible explanation was Madeleine’s.
To be unable to trust one’s own mind is a rare and unenviable terror. And this was now the condition that took hold of me. All these corroborations of Madeleine’s stories were eroding the pillars upon which had rested, for four and a half decades, my sense of what was real and what was not. Trying to pull myself together, I continued my tour of the room. Hanging between two windows was a framed, tea-colored chart of the world, not as it is but as it had been known a century or more ago. Someone had drawn a line that curved from one side of the map to the other, tracing a circumnavigation of the globe that had started and ended in Marseille and included a stop in the Pacific, on an island too small for the cartographer to record, but which the holder of the pencil had marked and named as Oaeetee. Below the map, on a stand, stood a scale-model replica of a three-masted sailing ship called the Solide, sailing under a French tricolor flag—not the blue, white, and red flag that was approved in 1794 but the red, white, and blue flag introduced in 1790, shortly after the Revolution. The model’s craftsmanship was first-rate. The maker had reproduced everything, every sail and rope, down to the officers and crew. Some were climbing the rigging, others keeping lookout, and one was manning the wheel. A circle of men was gathered on the main deck, where a sailor was tied to the bulwark and—I leaned forward to better study the scene depicted—being flogged. His back was expertly striated with waxy scarlet streaks, while another crewman was standing near him with a whip in his hand. Again, everything was exactly as Madeleine had described. Between the books, the map and the model ship, not to mention the events that had led me here, this was the moment of my complete persuasion, my conversion, my Damascus moment. If I could have slipped out of the building then and there, without even speaking to Chanel, I would have gladly done so, even at the cost of finding the manuscript, for I now had the answer to my most pressing question: Madeleine’s story was verified. There was no longer any need to meet Chanel. But it was at that very instant that I heard the clipped steps of a woman in high heels approaching from the corridor outside. The door opened and Chanel entered the room in a puff of rhythm, perfume and light, approaching me with a smile that vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Her hand was glacial to the touch.
“A relic of the Society’s founder,” she said without introducing herself, looking down at the model ship with a frown. “A bit of an eyesore, really. I’m of a mind to donate it to some provincial museum somewhere and be rid of it.” She set off in the direction of a liquor cabinet camouflaged among the bookshelves. “Something to drink?”
“Bisquit Dubouché. You have a fine library. Who’s your binder—Meunier? Lortic?”
Chanel shook her head with a smile as she poured. “Guess again.”
I approached the nearest shelf, taking a book at random, examining the leather, the embossing, the filigree. “This is very fine work, reminiscent of Marius Michel, though more modern. There’s an artist’s temperament at play here.” I opened the book and held one of the pages open against the light of the windows. “My guess is…” And there it was, a spectral fingerprint: the binder’s watermark. “No, it can’t be. The expense alone…” But the quality of the work was beyond question. “Can it be that this entire library was bound by Legrain?”
Chanel approached me holding two glasses, one of which she handed to me, holding my eye as she did so. It was unsettling, locking gazes with this woman. She was no longer young, but an awesome power emanated from her, elegant and flinty at once, animated by a restless energy that could easily be mistaken for youth, and was even, perhaps, preferable to it. “Using lacquers by Jean Dunand,” she confirmed with a half-smile, sitting on the edge of the writing table. “Now you understand the value of the full collection. When I took the reins of the Society, I had it entirely rebound, to give it an aesthetic unity Baudelaire himself would have been proud of. It’s the finest collection of its type in the world. These volumes are for the sole and exclusive use of the Society’s members. There are books here of which there exists only one copy.” Her eyes sparkled proudly.
“Don’t you think outsiders also ought to be able to read them?”
“Not at all.” She smiled. “Now, to the matter at hand. Do you have the manuscript?”
So I’d gambled well: she had not managed to retrieve the manuscript from Vennet. It was still out there, somewhere, hidden by the old man before he was killed. And now my purpose was clear: I had to get out of here alive and find it.
“I don’t.”
Chanel blinked. “Then why are you wasting my time?” she said, almost growling.
“Until only a couple of weeks ago, that manuscript was here, nestled among all the other Baudelaire originals on that wall, bound by Legrain, like everything else.” I’d based my gambit on what Madeleine had told me, although I had no way of knowing if my arrow would hit its mark. Chanel looked at me with all the inscrutability of a casino habitué. She raised her hand, presumably to reach for the bell on the desk to call the valet. I plunged mine into my pocket and pulled out Madeleine’s derringer, pointing it in her direction. “I suggest you don’t ring that bell.” My heart lurched into another painful, stabbing gallop. Chanel took a sip of brandy, narrowing her eyes and studying me as if sizing me up for the first time. But she didn’t say anything. If her silence was calculated to be unnerving, it worked. But I’d long since passed the point of no return. “Why would you sell a manuscript, only to go to such lengths to retrieve it after it was sold?”
She did not reply, but smoked her cigarette calmly, keeping her gaze on me the entire time. I felt foolish, an impostor, playing a role for which I was ill suited. But, receiving no satisfaction, I decided I could only press on. “Why would you murder the man who bought it?” Again, no reply. To make matters worse, I was now blushing. The silence dragged out so long that I couldn’t bear it another second. “I think I know why. You thought you could take advantage of the impending invasion to try to tempt Madeleine out of her lair. And perhaps, if things had turned out a little differently, it might have worked.”
Finally, a response: Chanel smiled—a sly, barely perceptible smile. At the time, I couldn’t understand it. After all, she didn’t know that my derringer contained no bullets. “Ah, Madeleine,” she said. “Madeleine Pernety—or perhaps you know her as Madeleine Blanc. I should have known she would be mixed up in this. She is a most charming creature, isn’t she? So easy to fall in love with. Of course, as you can imagine, you’re not the first. You are neither the first to have fallen for her, nor the first to have been duped by her. If her story is convincing, it’s only because she’s rehearsed it so often. And sadly you are certainly not the first to have agreed to commit a crime punishable by death on her behalf. For what we are dealing with is a sadly deluded, and very dangerous, mind. Although I have been a victim of her delusions for a long time now—for as long, indeed, as I have been president of this Society—I am also aware that there are other victims. And among those victims are the men who fall in love with her.
“Madeleine is a woman obsessed. She is very good at recognizing obsession in others. And it’s easy to mistake her obsession for love, especially when one is craving it oneself. How long have you known her? I’d wager a few weeks at most. Am I right?”
Having just committed the sin of saying too much, I opted to say nothing at all.
“Your silence speaks volumes. Have you considered the possibility that Madeleine planned everything from the beginning? Or did you think you met by coincidence, like real lovers? A Baudelaire scholar meets a woman who promises him a rare prize—no, two prizes: her heart and a rare manuscript, days before its auction. That’s quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” She looked me directly in the eye. “Did she tell you you were Baudelaire in a past life? That she was Jeanne Duval?”
I was determined to say nothing. She smiled again, leaning back and drawing on her cigarette.
“Monsieur, I have been shadowed by Madeleine for almost two decades, so I should know a thing or two about her ways. In your own small way you are also a victim of that woman’s insanity. But at least we still have the privilege of being alive. Several others have not been so lucky.”
She took a sip of her drink. Again, I resisted the temptation to speak, which is easy to do when one is holding a gun at someone. I found myself admiring Chanel’s aplomb.
“Consider this,” she continued, moving around the writing table and sitting in the leather chair on the other side. “Consider what she is asking you to believe. She contends that it is possible for the soul of a human being to cross from one body into another. Monsieur, I don’t know you but I can only assume you are an intelligent man. I assume from your accent that you are German, probably Jewish. In your circumstances, it should not astonish you if your reason is taken hostage by an attractive woman. Being a German Jew at this place and time, you may be excused an old man’s folly. So I cannot hold a grudge against you, even though you are pointing a gun at me. Instead, I wish to appeal to your intellect. I am quite sure I can persuade you I have a rational explanation for everything that Madeleine has told you. You see, she was a member of the Society when I first joined it in 1921. She’d been a member for some years, rising to the position of secretary when Aristide Artopoulos was its president. Naturally, she assumed she was the heir apparent. Instead, when I joined, Artopoulos decided the Society would be better off with me as its president. In retrospect, it is clear that Madeleine was already lost in her fantasies—lost to reason and logic—even before my arrival, only it wasn’t apparent at the time.
“You see, Madeleine’s psyche is deeply scarred. She was a nurse during the war, and it destroyed her. Shellshock. She was one of those survivors of that terrible conflict who appear well but are secretly diseased, only her disease is one of the mind. Perhaps it was Baudelaire’s madness that drew her to him. And of all his writings, she identified most with ‘The Education of a Monster.’
“At some point, no doubt driven by a kind of primal guilt complex, she fused her own identity with that of the Édmonde de Bressy character described in the manuscript. And over time, she developed this elaborate backstory, piecing together fragments from a variety of sources, even the model ship you were studying when I entered the room. She became so entangled in these inventions of hers that she eventually decided, when Artopoulos accorded me the presidency, that I was her ancient rival, hell-bent not only on her destruction but on that of the entire world. Thankfully, at this point, she did not have a firearm, or my life might have ended then and there.
“So she quit—well, more accurately, she vanished, never to be seen again, taking the manuscript with her. And every now and then, she manages to coax some unsuspecting lover into doing her bidding, hoping that somehow she will be rid of me and will finally reclaim her rightful position as president of the Baudelaire Society.”
She rang the bell for the valet and stood. Suddenly I was glad the bullet chamber was empty. Had it not been, I would have found myself torn: in awakening my doubts about Madeleine’s sanity, Chanel had led me to question my own.
“Monsieur, you can put your gun away, you will not need it today. I guarantee you your safety. Out of pity. For you are nothing more than an innocent dupe. My advice to you is to leave Paris immediately. The Germans will be here in less than a week and they will come looking for you, I promise you. In different circumstances, I would send for the police right now. You are an unfortunate, but today you can consider yourself lucky. There are more pressing matters to attend to. Good day, monsieur. And good luck.” And with that she crushed what remained of her cigarette into an ashtray and walked out of the room as if she didn’t have another second to spare.
I did not put my gun away, as Chanel had ordered me to do. I kept that gun in my hand until Chanel’s man ushered me out of the building, my heart beating painfully, and even once I was alone on the street I put it in my pocket but kept my grip intact in case I was being followed. I walked along the Quais d’Anjou and de Bourbon, turned the corner and began walking toward the cathedral—slowly at first, deep in thought. Occasionally, one’s illusions are stripped away so suddenly that the mind is left spinning like a top. So it was on this occasion. What, precisely, had that meeting achieved? I’d arrived seeking certainty, one way or the other; within minutes, I’d settled on one kind of certainty, only for that certainty to be summarily demolished. I was no closer to solving the mystery of Vennet’s murder—nor that of Madeleine’s disappearance. And as for the manuscript, all I could be certain of was that the Baudelaire Society did not have it. I had been thoroughly outfoxed. That part of me that had always been ashamed of the thought of being in love with Madeleine was screaming at the part of me that still loved her, I told you so!
In the maelstrom of my mind, I tried reconstructing the events of the previous fortnight. Could it really be that Madeleine had chosen me as the target of her elaborate scheme? Had she deliberately led me to Jacquenet’s bookstore to entice me into her murderous game? Or had it been more intuitive, less calculated than that, the spell she cast over me? Whatever the explanation, how could I have fallen for it so completely? And if her love was counterfeit, why was my heart still aching?
I realized I needed to retrieve my black suitcase and leave Paris as quickly as possible. But to do that, I would need some help. With the rumble of the approaching conflict behind me, I walked hurriedly across the Pont Saint-Louis and the cathedral garden, past the cathedral, its windows hidden by sandbags, and across the empty square, cutting through the stream of southbound boulevard traffic, now peppered with military trucks and soldiers on foot also fleeing the onslaught, toward the Quai des Orfèvres. At the entrance gate of the Palais de Justice, a line of men were carrying boxes from the offices onto a barge. I asked the guard to see Massu but, after he’d made a call, he told me to come back the following morning. When I insisted on seeing Massu right away, the guard threatened to have me arrested.
I crossed the river and headed homeward down the Rue Danton. Away from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the streets were so quiet my steps echoed against nearby buildings. Shafts of golden light, speckled with flakes of dancing ash, pierced the afternoon shade, and the air smelled of burning paper.
When I neared my building on Rue Dombasle, Chanel’s Delahaye cabriolet was parked around the corner. There was no one in it. Thankfully, I’d signed my letter to Chanel with Arthur’s name and apartment number, directly above mine. At the foot of the stairs, I listened for noises. Nothing. I looked up. No sign of a human presence. There was no point being surreptitious, I decided—the staircase creaked—I must walk as any other man would normally walk. Only now I found myself asking, how do men normally walk? Feigning normalcy, I climbed the steps to my apartment and entered it. Knowing Chanel’s henchman would be listening, I left the door unlocked. I took off my shoes and, moving as quietly as I could, heart throbbing, I took my black suitcase, my papers, and what little money I had and left, descending the steps two at a time, suitcase, shoes, and all. I ran in my socks down Rue Dombasle, turned right at the Rue de Vaugirard and down the steps of the entrance to the Métro.
I spent the rest of the afternoon underground, mind whirring, shuttling between near-empty second-class carriages, making sure I wasn’t being followed, until I emerged at the Gare de l’Est around dusk. The sunset was a glorious affair that made a mockery of human intrigue. I knew of a sordid little workers’ hotel overlooking the canal where a German refugee might find a bed without having to show any identity papers. Other than two bored young prostitutes, it appeared to be empty. I climbed upstairs to the room I’d been given and collapsed on the thin mattress. The walls were damp and the plumbing gurgled and dripped, but at least I could hide here and plan my next move.
My room was on the third floor, overlooking the canal. Unable to sleep, I sat on the windowsill, staring at the crescent moon, listening to the rumble of the distant artillery and watching the flashes of light over the eastern horizon. In the darkness of the blackout, the stars sparkled on the water’s surface as brightly as they shone up above. I smoked one cigarette after another, going over the day’s events as if I were watching a film. There was no doubt about it: I’d been mesmerized by a master hypnotist—but who was the hypnotist, Madeleine or Chanel?
There were two things in particular that perplexed me: that sly, subtle smile that had appeared on Chanel’s face when I mentioned Madeleine, and the fact that she’d sent her man to Arthur’s apartment after the meeting. It took me half a pack of Salomés to figure out the puzzle, and when the answer finally came to me, I cursed myself. I’d made a grave tactical error. I ought never to have referred to Madeleine. Until I did, Chanel had not known what to say. It was only at the mention of Madeleine that Chanel had spoken. What would she have said had I not mentioned Madeleine—had I not given the game away? I would never know. But the fact that she had sent her man to find me after the meeting was itself a kind of clue. Of course, I’d pointed a gun at her, but had she been innocently aggrieved, she need only have called the police. The fact that she hadn’t suggested she had something to hide.
It wasn’t much to go on, but love thrives on ephemera: hunches, gut feelings, obscure clues are all the fuel it needs. Whenever the fragile fabric of a lover’s fantasy is undone by reality, all it takes is the merest hint of hope and its threads start knitting together again. Combined with what I’d seen—the manuscript, the scale model of the sailing ship, what Massu had told me—the memory of that smile punctured the certainty of Chanel’s argument. It introduced the element of doubt. And that faint glimmer of doubt was all that was required for the screaming voice of shame in me to subside, and for that other voice, the voice that hoped, that loved Madeleine, that spoke to her even now that she was gone, to make itself heard again. My first mistake had been to lose hope—to look away from Madeleine’s eyes at the very moment when I could have settled the question once and for all: were her stories true or not? Smoking Salomés in the darkness, there was nothing I wanted more than to find her again, to look into her eyes and discover their secret.
I woke from fitful sleep in a cloud of smoky light. The sky was smeared with an inexplicable orange fog and my nostrils stung with the smell of petrol. I checked out of the hotel and walked with my suitcase toward the Palais de Justice. Everyone on the streets was walking south carrying luggage. I’d done what Massu had asked, and even if I hadn’t learned anything of use to him, he owed me my notebook, at the very least, and perhaps I could still cajole a favor out of him.
The guard at the gate called for the Brigade Spéciale, then nodded me inside. Another guard searched me and confiscated my derringer. I was escorted to Massu’s office and found him on the telephone, stroking his mustache while listening to the voice at the other end of the line. There was a pile of blankets on the floor in a corner where he must have slept, and my notebook was lying open on his desk. He gestured to me to take a seat. “Very well, mon général. Consider it done.” He hung up and looked at me with a resigned expression. “The government has evaporated. Shops are being looted. The army is now in charge. And the Germans are only forty kilometers away. We expect their arrival any day now. Paris will be declared an open city.”
“Why?”
“Because there is no point defending it, it’s already lost,” he said.
“What is the orange fog?” I asked.
“The army is setting the petrol reserves on fire as it retreats.” He took my notebook in his hands, licking his index finger each time he turned the page. “Things are about to get very dangerous for you, monsieur.”
“They took my gun,” I said.
“You don’t have a license for it. Technically, we could have you arrested.” He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m a German—you could have me arrested for that too.”
“True. But what would it achieve? Your compatriots will be here soon enough. Thankfully for you, the gun was empty. Given the circumstances, we can let that go.”
“Will it be returned to me when I leave?”
“Monsieur, please, be reasonable.” He looked back at the notebook. “So this is what you write?”
“They’re notes for a book I hope to publish some day.”
“What is Shéhérazade?”
I wasn’t sure if he was being serious. “She’s a character in the Arabian Nights.”
Massu blinked. “I see. Why is her name written in your notebook?” He held the notebook up for my scrutiny, opened to the last of the written pages. There, in handwriting other than mine, was scrawled the word Shéhérazade.
“I’ve never seen it before. Perhaps you wrote it.”
“Now why would I do that?” He examined the word. “The Arabian Nights, you say.”
“Yes, it’s a medieval story cycle, in which the heroine marries a murderous king and saves her own life by telling him tales.”
“Is that so?” Massu drummed his fingers on his chin.
It could only be Madeleine who had written that word in my notebook before she vanished, but I had no idea why. I didn’t want to repeat the previous day’s mistake and mention her to Massu. I didn’t know what, if anything, he knew of her. The notes I’d written were incomplete. Her name didn’t appear in its pages. The conclusion to Madeleine’s tales—her own story, recounted to me the very day of her disappearance—was still unwritten. For now, it existed only in my head. After she’d gone, I hadn’t had the heart to so much as open the notebook, let alone write in it, which was why I hadn’t seen the clue she had left me.
Massu was waiting for me to say something. Fortunately, life had taught me the value of a poker face in a crisis. “It must have been written by my neighbor Arthur, during our last poker party. He suggested it as the title of a book I’m writing.”
“Looks like a woman’s handwriting to me.”
“Arthur is Hungarian. Perhaps it’s a Hungarian’s handwriting.”
“Where is this Arthur?”
“I believe he’s currently in Bordeaux.”
“Pity,” said Massu. “Although that’s where you should be.”
“Perhaps it’s not too late to leave.”
“The railway stations are crammed with crowds of people who agree with you.”
“I thought we had a deal.”
“Did you see Chanel?”
“I did.”
“What did you learn?”
“She doesn’t have it.”
“What?”
“The manuscript.”
“Monsieur, I’m a detective, not a scholar. I’m not interested in a manuscript. I’m interested in solving a series of murders.”
“Ah, well, I’m afraid I learned nothing of any use to you about all that.”
Massu sighed. “Well, your incompetence as an informer is more than compensated for by what I read in your notebook.” He slid it across the desk.
“They’re just fairy tales,” I said, stuffing the notebook into my jacket pocket.
“Oh, I doubt that. But tell me something. The story finishes during the last war. What has happened since? How does the tale of the albatross end?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t figured out the ending.”
“Well, if you do, please let me know. So that I can do what I can to protect whoever this Shéhérazade might be.”
“She’s not real. She’s a chimera. What about protecting me? I’m real. And you promised me an exit visa.”
“You haven’t been very helpful, I’m afraid. And anyway the rules of the game have changed. I can’t help you. I no longer have the authority. The army is in charge now.” He raised that eyebrow again, and added a half-smile. “But I will have my secretary draw up a laissez-passer and a ticket on the night train to Marseille for you, leaving the Gare de Lyon at eight o’clock tonight.” He picked up the telephone receiver on his desk and instructed someone to prepare the documents. At the end of the call, Massu stood and gestured to the door. “Marseille is your best bet. Ships are still sailing out.”
“Not without an exit visa.”
“I’m sure you can arrange a crossing in Marseille.” I studied Massu’s face, twinkling with irony behind that ridiculous little mustache. Here was a man who seemed to take amusement in the messiness of life—as close to a definition of happiness as I know. He walked me to the door and opened it for me.
“Oh, one last thing,” he added. “Shéhérazade is also the name of a nightclub near Pigalle.” Before I could say anything else, he shook my hand. “Goodbye, monsieur, and bon voyage.”
I heard him chuckle as the door clicked shut.
The Shéhérazade
“WELCOME TO THE SHÉHÉRAZADE!” boomed the old doorman from behind his silvery walrus mustache. He was the only sign of life on the otherwise darkened street. His Russian accent ricocheted off the paving stones and the walls of nearby buildings as he swung open the door to the nightclub. I stepped inside and down a flight of stairs into an Oriental fantasy world—part seraglio, part Aladdin’s cave—of arches, grottos, and drapes. A pall of tobacco smoke lent the light of the Arabian lamps an exotic haze. A solitary couple swayed on the dancefloor while on stage a gypsy band played, fronted by a singer in a long sequinned dress who waved her arms about in an approximation of languor.
“J’attendrai
le jour et
la nuit,
J’attendrai toujours
ton retour…”
She was accompanied by two guitarists and a double bass player. I removed my hat, sat at the bar, and ordered a calvados. This place had been fashionable once, I thought, looking around—in the heady years after the last war, the war to end all wars. When the calvados arrived I tipped the barman well and said, “I’m looking for Madeleine Blanc.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Sure you have. Oriental features, beautiful, in her forties. Any idea how I can get in touch with her?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Koahu.”
The barman stuck his head behind a swinging door for a moment and then attended to another customer. I settled down to drinking my calvados and watching the band. The waiters, dressed in Cossack uniforms, buzzed from table to table, under the watchful eye of the Russian maître d’hôtel.
“J’attendrai,
car l’oiseau qui s’enfuit
vient chercher l’oubli
dans son nid…”
While I waited, I sifted through the events of the day. After leaving the Palais de Justice, I’d walked down to the Quai de la Tournelle in search of Vennet’s stall. All the bouquinistes on this stretch of the river were closed. Having found Vennet’s stall, I inspected it from every angle. Like all the others, it was made of crate-wood and painted with forest green oil. It did not appear to have been forced open. I fondled the brass lock. I would need a hacksaw or, better still, a boltcutter, only where would I find one? By now, most shops and banks were closed. I made my way to the Métro with my suitcase. The carriages were emptier than ever. The effect was ghostly. I alighted at Pigalle, where the cafés and bars along the Boulevard de Clichy were shuttered. There were no tourists. I had little idea of where to find the nightclub, so I had to overcome my resistance to speaking with strangers. I approached two policemen who were plastering bills on a Morris column that usually advertised cabaret shows.
PARIS HAS BEEN DECLARED AN OPEN CITY
The military governor requests the population to abstain from all acts of hostility and expects it to maintain the calm and dignity necessitated by the circumstances.
By order, General H. Dentz, military governor
Mustering all my courage, I asked them where I might find the Cabaret Shéhérazade. They looked me up and down a moment—admittedly I must have been an odd sight, with my German accent and black suitcase, as if I were the vanguard of a different Wehrmacht from the one they were expecting. A day or two ago, I thought, they would have arrested me. But instead they pointed down the Rue Pigalle. A little while later—around noon, I guessed (the bells of the churches were not tolling)—I dropped my suitcase in front of a doorway and knocked. There was no response. According to a small sign by the entrance, the nightclub only opened at eight in the evening, which was exactly the time my train was due to leave. I sat on my suitcase, fished a Salomé from my pocket and lit it. It seemed I would have to choose between finding Madeleine again and leaving Paris for the relative safety of the south. I could almost hear Massu’s ironic chuckle. Had he put me in this position by design, as a sadistic practical joke or punishment for not being more helpful? I would never know. But between love and liberty, there was no doubt which I would choose. I made my way back to the hotel I’d stayed in the previous night and rented my room again. I spent the afternoon there, napping, smoking, rereading my notes, until evening, when I struck out again to find the Shéhérazade.
“Le temps passe et court
en battant tristement
dans mon coeur si lourd.
Et pourtant, j’attendrai
ton retour.”
At the song’s conclusion, the patrons took a moment from their drinking, smoking, gossiping, and giggling to applaud half-heartedly. The singer bowed her head in acknowledgment. A waitress approached her and whispered something in her ear. They both looked in my direction. The band followed the singer off stage, behind a red velvet curtain, and a few minutes later the singer re-emerged. She came to sit beside me at the bar. “Two more of those,” she said to the barman, pointing at my empty glass. She turned to me. “Were you followed?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“Did you come from your apartment?”
“I haven’t been to my apartment since yesterday. I’m staying in a hotel by the canal.”
“Are you signed in under your own name?”
“Of course not. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“Good. All the same, I can’t take you to Madeleine tonight, it’s too dangerous.”
“I’m sure the police have better things to think about.”
“Perhaps. But then there’s also Chanel’s people.”
“How is she? Where is she?”
“She’s been waiting. She expected you sooner.”
“Why did she go?”
“You should ask her that. In my opinion it was because you didn’t believe her.”
“I changed my mind.”
“She was counting on that.” The singer paused and gazed into her drink. “I, on the other hand, was hoping for the contrary. You will forgive a little jealousy on my part—we are rivals, you see. She didn’t tell you that, did she?”
“No,” I said.
“Ah, evidently Madeleine is not as trustworthy a storyteller as you might have imagined. And, believe me, I have been a far more faithful servant to her than you. But you…” A bitter expression stole across her heavily made-up face. “You are Koahu. You will always hold a special place in her heart.” She threw the rest of the calvados down her throat. “Never mind. There are more important matters to consider than our own sordid little romances. Did you see Chanel?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It all checked out.”
“Did you do what Madeleine asked?”
“What with? I had no bullets.”
The singer cursed under her breath. “Do you have the manuscript, at least?”
“No. But I know where it is. All I need is a boltcutter.”
She took a long breath. “Very well, I’ll organize to have someone take you to her. But not tonight. Tomorrow morning at ten. At Saint-Eustache, the church behind Les Halles. An old widow will be praying in the front pew. Kneel down in the pew directly behind her. When she leaves, follow her. From a distance. She’ll take you to Madeleine. And you’ll get your boltcutter. Whatever you do, don’t go back to your apartment. You can’t be too cautious. Chanel has enormous power, and anyone left in Paris right now is suspect, even these old White Russians here tonight.” She glanced around the room at the nightclub patrons, who were drinking and smoking as if invasion were a banality. “They’ll be volunteers in the Germans’ welcoming committee. They’ve seen a lot worse than this. They’re all hoping Hitler will invade Russia next and return their family estates to them.” She looked back at me with an expression of crushing sadness. “Tomorrow morning, when you go to Saint-Eustache, make sure you’re not being followed.” She stood. “Madeleine won’t leave with you, you know, if that’s what you’re hoping. She must stay here. In a strange way even she doesn’t understand, she must stay close to Chanel.” She shot me a glance that struck like a dagger. “She loves you, but she doesn’t need you. Not anymore.” She turned. “Drinks are on me,” she said to the barman, and without saying goodbye, she strode back to the stage, hips swaying, just as the other musicians emerged from behind the red velvet curtain and took up their instruments. She curled her hands around the microphone and began to sing. No one seemed to notice, let alone care. I finished my drink and left.
Another night in the hotel. I spent it in a fitful sleep, eyes closed but mind spinning like a motor. I woke famished—I hadn’t eaten since the previous morning. I headed out with my suitcase to find some food, into another morning of golden fog laced with the sting of petroleum. The rumble of distant artillery was louder than the previous evening’s. Outside the locked gate of the Gare de l’Est, an old toothless woman sold me a boiled potato, ungarnished. A vendor standing nearby was selling a newspaper I’d never seen before, L’Édition parisienne de guerre. I bought a copy. Retreat, panic—finally the headlines were coinciding with reality. It was almost eight o’clock—two hours until my appointment.
I walked down a hushed Boulevard de Strasbourg, rendered sepia by the smoke; it was as if I’d stepped into a Marville daguerreotype. Remembering the singer’s words of the previous night, I looked around to see if I was being followed. A figure in a black hat and cape, possibly a priest, was half a block behind me. I turned left into the Passage du Désir as far as the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. Every shop was locked and shuttered. I turned south again as far as the Passage Brady. The man in the black cape was nowhere to be seen. It occurred to me that I might thread together all the arcades on the way to Saint-Eustache—a good way to kill time and shake a tail.
I crossed the street diagonally into the Passage de l’Industrie and looked over my shoulder; my heart skipped a beat. There, stepping into the Passage Brady, was the figure in black. Was it just coincidence? I waited to see if he would reappear, but there was no further sign of him. I hurried on, left into the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, left again into the Passage du Prado, following its rightward turn until I emerged next to the Porte Saint-Denis, where the walls of the old city had stood in the time of Louis XIV. I pressed onward, sweating now in the morning heat, shoulders aching from carrying my suitcase, threading together the Passages Lemoine and Ponceau, dedicated almost entirely to Jewish textile merchants; next was Passage du Caire, the longest of them all; I turned back at Réaumur to Passage Basfour and Passage de la Trinité, hardly arcades so much as back alleys with their usual ammoniac stench; down to the neighborly Passage de l’Ancre; and finally through the stately Passages du Bourg l’Abbé and du Grand-Cerf, two of the finest arcades in the city, more luminous than ever in the golden light streaming through their glass roofs. The few passersby I came across seemed dumbstruck, walking as if underwater.
At the approach of ten o’clock I made my way to Saint-Eustache, quite sure that, if I’d been followed by the man in black, I had by now long since lost him. The mid-morning heat was becoming oppressive. It would soon rain. I stepped into the church as into a great cool grotto. Its interior was more somber than usual. The recesses of the stained-glass windows had been filled in with sandbags to guard against a bombardment that had never come. Flickering candles were the only light, and it took a few moments to adjust. I approached the altar. Every little sound, every footfall, echoed in the silence. Finally I spotted the widow, dressed in black weeds, her face veiled, kneeling in prayer in the front pew. I slumped into the pew behind her, overcome by exhaustion. A headache was sprouting behind my eyes. After a few moments, the widow stood and left the church. As I stepped outside, the sunlight blinded me. I took my suitcase and followed her from a discreet distance toward the slums of Beaubourg. She turned into Rue Quincampoix and then into an antiquaire on the corner. The shop’s shutters were drawn almost completely shut. The jiggle of a bell above the door announced my entrance. In the shadows at the back of the shop, I saw an open doorway and a stairwell behind it. I climbed it to the first floor into a room as full of antiques as the shop below. There was no sign of the widow. I thought I’d been left alone until I heard the rustle of a body beside mine. I turned and there was the widow, lifting her veil to reveal the face it had hidden, the face of Madeleine. She approached me without saying a word, curled her arms around my neck and kissed me with trembling lips.
“I’d given up on ever seeing you again,” she said.
“Why did you leave?” I said, kissing her neck, drinking in the scent of sandalwood.
“Because you didn’t believe me.”
“Do I need to believe you to love you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, darling. You must.”
We spent several hours lying side by side on an antique divan in the upper room of that little antique store, among Savonnerie carpets, Louis XV clocks, Pompeiian lamps, armchairs resting on feet of bronze sphinxes, porcelain japonaiseries encased behind pearwood vitrines, and candelabras that on closer inspection turned out to be coiled snakes.
“I want to try again,” I said.
“What?”
“Crossing.”
Madeleine hesitated. “You want certainty. You want to be free of doubt. But even if we cross, it won’t be enough. You’ll never be certain. It’s in your nature to doubt.”
“I need to try. I need to be sure.”
“Not yet. You need to rest. Your mind is racing. You’ll get distracted.”
“How can I sleep when you are here beside me?”
“Here’s how,” she said, and kissed me again.
I opened my eyes and there she was, lying next to me on the divan with one leg curled across my body, her head propped up on an elbow, looking down at my face, stroking my cheek with the back of her fingers. Other than a lamp lit in a corner of the room, it was dark.
“What happened?”
“You fell asleep.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I tried, but you were so tired, you wouldn’t be woken.”
“What time is it?”
She looked up. There were several clocks in the room. “Four.” She lowered her head onto my chest.
“So why is it so dark?”
“It’s four in the morning. Thursday morning.”
“Four in the morning! How long was I asleep?”
“Eleven, maybe twelve hours.”
“Well, at least I wasn’t woken by a nightmare.” I stroked her hair for a while until she raised her head.
“I want you to look into my eyes without getting distracted,” she said. “Do you think you can manage that?” I nodded, searching out her lips to kiss. “That means no kissing,” she smiled, pulling her head away.
“All right.”
“All that is required is the willing suspension of disbelief.”
There was something in her gaze that had not been there previously, a kind of openness. I returned it without equivocation, keeping my eyes locked on hers until they were the only thing I saw, those bottomless wells of love and sadness. We held that gaze without moving or speaking, losing all sense of time. Gradually, I began to feel germinating in me a tingle of joy that continued to blossom, spreading over my entire being until I felt myself starting to dissolve like an aspirin effervescing in a glass of water, as if every part of me that was solid matter was dissipating into the air, only instead of becoming nothing I was becoming something else, something rarefied and euphoric, pure existence. Every time my mind wavered, every time doubt threatened to puncture the precarious perfection of the moment, I nudged it back into that space of pure existence. At the very instant I seemed to have finally passed through the threshold of that purity, it began to recede, or perhaps it was I who began to recede, moving back into corporeality, contracting, solidifying, materializing, until I was once again peering into a pair of eyes, only they weren’t the dark eyes I’d been looking into moments ago but the ocean-gray eyes I’d been staring at in the mirror all my life. It was my own face I was now looking into, my own eyes, and this face of mine was looking back at me. This face leaned toward me and I felt my own lips, which were no longer my lips but another’s, brushing against my new lips, embracing with this new mouth, and the stubble of that other face, which was after all my own stubble, bristled against my soft new skin. The moistness of my old tongue flickered against that of my new tongue. Both bodies, the former and the current, the old and the new, took up that familiar rhythm, the gift and receipt of love, except that nothing was familiar, every sensation was novel and strange. I felt a presence entering me where once I would have entered. Tendrils of shuddering pleasure extended throughout this new body of mine from one end to the other, over and again, as we explored the limits of our bodies, until the body that had been mine for so long came to the natural resolution of its efforts and collapsed upon me, and deep inside I felt it release the expression of itself. We lay next to each other for some time, breaths intermingling, lulled into blissful rest, the light coming through the shuttered window brightening as a new day dawned. Then, looking into each other’s eyes again, we began the journey in the opposite direction.
When we had returned to the point of departure, Madeleine roused herself and sat up. “Now you know how it’s done,” she said, slipping on my shirt just as she had in my apartment. She walked to the window and swung the shutters open, letting in a waft of cool morning air. She leaned out and studied the sky. “It’s going to rain.” She turned and took the packet of cigarettes, lighting one.
“Why am I able to remember everything?”
“Because I made sure of it.”
“Can I do that?”
She sighed. “No. I wish you could. But you can’t. That’s why you need to write all of this down. You need proof. Evidence. Will you do that?”
I nodded.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“You must be hungry,” she said. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.” She disappeared for a moment, and naturally my first thought, upon being alone, was to wonder at what had just occurred. Something had happened—of that there was no doubt. I was even willing to call it a crossing. But what precisely was it? Had I been tricked somehow—or had I tricked myself? Was it possible for a mind to deceive itself thus? To be so malleable, so suggestible? I sighed. Madeleine had been right: I had my answer, but—just as she’d foretold—it wasn’t enough: my doubts were still niggling away at me, pushing me to know more, to understand, to be sure. But about love she had been wrong. I didn’t need to believe her to love her. I loved her now more than ever. That was an illusion about which I had not a shred of doubt.
She returned with a glass of water and a bowl full of black cherries. “It was all they were selling at the market.” I drank the water all at once and began devouring the cherries, the sweet dark juice exploding in my mouth with every bite.
“What happened with Chanel?”
“I went to see her,” I said between mouthfuls, “just as you asked. I couldn’t…”
“I know.”
“I had her, in a room, with the gun in my hand…” I raised my hand as if it were holding a gun. “But a gun without a bullet…” My fingers squeezed an imaginary trigger.
“I know.” She looked away. “Where’s the gun now?”
“Massu has it.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s with the police—the Brigade Spéciale at the Quai des Orfèvres. He knows about Chanel. He’s been keeping an eye on her for years. And he knows the tale of the albatross—although don’t worry, he doesn’t know anything about you. But he could be a friend for you, if you ever need one. It’s always useful to have a policeman for a friend. Just tell him I sent you. Tell him you know how the story ends.”
“I will.”
“And the nightclub?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“Is that where you went, every night, when we were together?”
“Yes. I worked there. Lately it has become too dangerous.”
“And the singer—do you love her?”
Right on cue, there was a knock at the door downstairs—two loud knocks followed by three softer, quicker ones. Madeleine rushed to the window and leaned out. “That’s her now.” She scurried down the stairs and opened the door. I heard the two of them murmur a few minutes before Madeleine returned alone, holding a boltcutter. She went to an armoire, pulled open a drawer, and took out a bundle of banknotes.
“There’s a train departing the Gare d’Austerlitz in a little under an hour,” she said, approaching me and pressing the money and boltcutter into my hands. “If we hurry we can make it.”
We walked through a drifting golden fog toward the Île de la Cité. The rumble of battle was very near now, punctuated by the occasional explosions of suburban petrol depots. Along the way we saw stray dogs and cats, freed by their fleeing owners and scrounging for food. We even saw a cow that must have wandered into town from the suburbs in search of pasture. At the Quai de la Tournelle, we stopped at Vennet’s bookstall. While Madeleine stood watch, I took the boltcutter. I was about to clamp its jaws around the lock when from around a corner appeared a mounted Republican Guard. Madeleine slid between me and the boltcutter, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me until the horse had passed, as if Paris were still a city where two lovers might embrace by the river. With my arms reaching around her, I squeezed the handles of the boltcutter and felt the lock give way. When the mounted policeman had disappeared, we opened the green wooden lid of the stall.
There it was, the leather satchel Vennet had been carrying as he ambled away from the auction house toward his own demise, not so long ago. I looked inside and gushed with relief to see the slim red leather volume with the words embossed in gold: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire. We set off again in the direction of the station.
As we reached the Gare d’Austerlitz, the first drops of rain fell from the orange sky. The station’s entrance gate was locked, and refugees were camped on the pavement. Taking a train ticket out of her purse, Madeleine spoke to a guard, who opened the gate for us. Inside, there were few people and even fewer signs of the tumult that, until yesterday, had reigned for weeks here. The only clue to that time of panic was the litter strewn across the lobby: a stray sock, a teaspoon, cigarette butts, a sheet of yellowing newsprint flapping in the breeze. It would be swept up before the end of the day and every trace of the great exodus would soon be erased. We walked past shuttered ticket counters onto a concourse strewn with more such detritus. Under the roof above, several canaries and parakeets were flying to and fro, enjoying the freedom granted by their departing owners. And on the furthest platform a locomotive to which several carriages were attached was hissing. I lunged forward, one hand carrying my suitcase, the other hand holding Madeleine’s, but then I felt her slip away. I turned to her. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn when we first met—the black one with the prints of red hibiscus.
“What’s the matter?”
“You have to go without me,” she said. “I can’t leave Paris.”
“But I can’t leave without you.”
“For you to remain would be suicide. But I must stay.”
I remembered the singer’s words at the nightclub. “Does this have something to do with…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“With Chanel? Of course. I must stay close to her. I am responsible for her, in a way. I have to follow her, watch her. I have to make sure she doesn’t do any more harm.”
“You’ve done everything you can.”
“And it hasn’t been enough. I have to finish what I started. It’s my duty. To make up for breaking the Law. She’s … my twin, my destiny.”
“I can’t leave you behind.”
“You must. You must get away. You must write down everything you know about crossing—everything I’ve told you, everything you’ve lived through yourself, and the manuscript too, you must include that. Make a book, a book about the crossing, a book that will remind you of who you are when you have forgotten. Once you’ve done that, you must make a crossing yourself. Then, when the war is over, when Paris is free once more, come find me. I’ll be waiting.”
She who had been so close to me only moments ago was now unreachably far away. Perhaps sensing my despair, Madeleine closed her eyes, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me repeatedly on my lips, my cheeks, my neck. “Promise me you’ll write it all down. Promise me you won’t forget.”
“I promise,” I said, in between kisses that tasted of sandalwood. I remembered something I’d been meaning to tell her. “There’s something you ought to know about Chanel—she knows your name.”
“How do you know?”
“She let it slip when we spoke.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Of course not.”
“What about your name?”
“As far as she knows, my name is Arthur Koestler.”
“Who’s that?”
“My old neighbor.” Madeleine nodded. I looked at her, drinking in her face, her mouth, her eyes. “When will I see you again?”
“If not in this life, then in the next.” We kissed one last, lingering time, until the shriek of a locomotive whistle shattered our union. She pulled back and her eyes were brimming over with tears. “You must go,” she said, as I took a handkerchief from my jacket pocket and wiped her eyes dry.
“Where will I find you?”
“In the cemetery, darling. I’ll be visiting Baudelaire’s grave every day, waiting for you.”
The locomotive shrieked again. I looked around. The platform was deserted other than a conductor waving at us to hurry. We ran to the furthest platform, the only stragglers, and reached it just as the train shuddered to life and began to creep forward. I stepped onto the railing with my black suitcase in hand and the leather satchel slung over my shoulder and turned to wave goodbye. She stood perfectly still, with her hands clasped in front of her. I waved until she was no more than a smudge of black and red in the distance, and then, reluctantly, I turned to go inside.
The train was only half full. Most of the passengers were well-dressed men—government officials, I suspected, railways administrators, perhaps, maybe some diplomats from countries hostile to the Germans, no doubt a sprinkling of spies among them, and a few of their wives, all making a last-minute exit on the last train to leave a free Paris. I did not speak to anyone for fear of betraying my accent. As the train made its way through the southern suburbs, the dusty window was streaked with thick, oily orange raindrops.
The Hotel Room
FOR THE NEXT day and night, the train advanced southward in fits and starts, hurtling forward for an hour or two, then inexplicably grinding to a stop at some tiny village or junction in the middle of fields. We were not strafed or bombed, and the journey had an air of unreality about it, as if I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming of a train journey in a landscape mysteriously emptied of people. It was only when we clattered through Nevers that I realized we were headed into the center of the country. All day and night, we continued in this stop-start way. Under the crescent moon, the train traversed high plateaus, and I could see miles into the distance over somnolent countryside. The thrum of the engine, the swaying of the carriages, and the ricochets of the tracks rocked me to sleep and back again several times. We passed villages I’d never heard of, forlorn little places with poetic names like Montluçon and Ussel, Brive-la-Gaillarde and Figeac. By sunrise the following morning we entered the outskirts of Toulouse, where many of the passengers alighted, but a porter told me through the window that the train was continuing south to Lourdes, in the mountains near Spain, and I remained on board. It was a place of pilgrimage, so I reasoned the locals would be more accommodating than most.
Lourdes was filled to bursting with refugees and Catholic pilgrims glowing with religious fervor. They’d come from far and wide to pray for France. I found a vacant room with a little writing desk on the second floor of a boarding house. From the window, I could see the spire of the basilica and the mountains. Within days of my arrival, the newspapers and radio announced that France was to be divided in two: there would be an occupied zone in the north and west, while the south and east would be a neutral zone governed from Vichy, that wedding-cake spa resort that would henceforth be the capital of the new puppet regime. I thought of my old concierge Madame Barbier and her husband, who’d gone there to flee the Germans, only now to find themselves surrounded by them. At the cinema, a newsreel showed footage of Hitler touring Paris alongside Albert Speer and others. The streets were sprinkled with people cheering hesitantly for the camera. Hitler stood on the Eiffel Tower and surveyed his new dominion. I had to look away.
I spent my days writing. I wrote everything that had happened to me since I’d first met Madeleine in the cemetery only weeks before and I transcribed my notes of her stories. It was a way of both remembering her and forgetting her. I avoided the company of others for fear of attracting attention to myself. Mornings, I wrote or visited the post office, the town hall, or the police station, applying for a travel permit to go overland to Spain or by rail to Marseille.
Afternoons, I wandered through the gloomy hills behind the town or down to the grounds of the basilica, where legions of sick and infirm pilgrims gathered, many in wheelchairs pushed by nuns, to drink the spring waters they believed would miraculously cure them. I avoided the news and the intrigues of my fellow émigrés. Every newspaper was a summons, every radio broadcast the news of fateful tidings, every knock at the door a policeman sent to arrest me.
In late August I was finally granted permission to travel by train to Marseille. A short distance from the terminus, I alighted the train to avoid a police check. I trudged across the scraggy limestone hills with my black suitcase and the satchel containing the manuscript until I came to an incline overlooking the city. It stretched out before me in the early morning light, cradled between white mountains and a turquoise sea. I walked on into town and caught a streetcar to the port, greeted by the city’s familiar perfume: oil, urine, and printer’s ink. Turned away from every hotel on the harbor, I scoured the backstreets and alleyways until I found a room in a dingy hotel overlooking the Cours Belsunce.
Marseille was a hive of deserters, outcasts, artists, philosophers, and criminals. Arrivals swelled daily. No raid, no decree, no threat of internment could keep them from coming. They came because it was the last French port from which ships were still sailing. The city was the bottleneck through which all had to pass. Conversations invariably revolved around the same themes: passports, visas, travel permits, bonds, port authority stamps, certificates, currencies, and lists. Each one of these themes had endless variations: real, substitute, and counterfeit passports; entry, exit, and transit visas; refugee, customs, health, and discharge certificates; old, new, and counterfeit currencies; police lists, passenger lists, prefectural lists. Everyone guarded their papers as if their lives depended on them, which was indeed the case, and all the while the authorities invented cleverer ways to sort, classify, register, and stamp us like sheep in an abattoir. One spent hours in a café hoping for some morsel of useful information, but rumors flew about so wildly it was impossible to distinguish truth from fiction. A whole day could be spent in a waiting room, the air thick with exhaustion, only for someone behind a counter to tell you to return the next day, the next week, or even, as August came around and government offices began to close for the summer holidays, the next month. Applicants would fill out endless forms, whisper among themselves, doze, or rehearse their stories for their interviews. A single slip-up—eleven photographs instead of twelve, for instance—and the entire chain of documents, each one with its own expiry date, could unravel.
At the Hôtel Splendide I found Fritz standing in the lobby one morning soon after my arrival and, though it had only been a couple of months since I’d last seen him at the station in Paris, we hugged as if reuniting after a long estrangement. Fritz told me Arthur was also in town, and the three of us went for a drink. It was a non-alcohol day, according to the wartime regulations, but the bartender added some schnapps to our chicory coffees.
“Whatever happened to that girlfriend of yours?” asked Arthur.
“She decided to stay in Paris,” I replied.
“Ah,” they both said, nodding their heads knowingly, and she was never mentioned again. Such stories were common.
Fritz and I were in the same boat: he was unable to procure an exit visa. Without permission to leave France, every other jewel—a Portuguese transit visa, an American entry visa—was worthless. Arthur had had all kinds of adventures since leaving Paris. His English girlfriend had managed to board a ship leaving Bordeaux for Portsmouth. Between them, they filled me in on the rumored fates of various friends and acquaintances: one had left for America, another had committed suicide by swallowing veronal in Paris, another still slit his wrists in a prison camp near Avignon. One poor fellow swallowed strychnine, and another disappeared from a camp in Savoy and hadn’t been heard of since.
Poised precariously between hope and despair, we settled into our temporary lives as the world we’d known became unrecognizable to us. The newspapers and radio became infected by a new kind of language. In the name of national renewal, they preached the virtues of collaboration and authoritarianism, the corruption of trade unions and treacherousness of the Jews. As France’s humiliation was deemed to be a moral failure, the remedy would be a moral revolution. The windows of Jewish shops were smashed. The words liberté, égalité, fraternité, which had recently adorned the entrances of state buildings, were replaced with a new trinity: work, family, fatherland. Labor camps became mandatory: every nineteen-year-old boy would have to work six months in a camp. Monthly food rations were reduced to a pound of sugar, half a pound of pasta, three and a half ounces of rice, four ounces of soap, and seven ounces of fats. It was impossible to put a telephone call through to Paris or send a letter there. Packs of officials roamed the streets day and night, throwing anyone they considered suspicious in prison. Without money for a bribe or a lawyer, anyone snaffled in one of these roundups was destined for a camp.
The American delegation at the Splendide granted me an American visa, but my efforts to procure an exit visa met with disappointment at every turn. I needed a certain stamp, and I didn’t have the certificate required to obtain it. I went through the motions all the same, hoping to be the beneficiary of an error, an oversight, an act of mercy. I joined the throngs waiting from morning to night at the Bureau des Étrangers. When, after a month, I received the final, definitive refusal, I staggered from the préfecture and wandered aimlessly until I reached the waterfront of the Old Port, entering a bistro simply to escape the blinding sun. I ordered oysters out of grief. They were one of the few things that were not rationed.
Even at night, the city glowed with a desert heat. Sundays, when the cafés and bars would close and the streets fell into somnolence, were the hardest to endure. The only relief from the heat was to swim in the clear, cold water off the rocks at the little port of Malmousque, one of us looking out for thieves at all times.
In desperation, Arthur and I tried disguising ourselves as sailors and boarding a ship. But our pasty skin betrayed us as the landlubbers we were and, when challenged for our merchant sailors’ tickets, the ruse was unmasked. We were lucky not to be reported to the police. Soon after, Arthur managed to get all his papers together; he left on a Thursday morning on a boat bound for Lisbon. Fritz and I went to see him off at the pier. “If anything happens to you, have you got something?” I asked. He shook his head. I gave him half of my morphine tablets. He skipped up the gangplank and, minutes later, the ship drifted away from its berth with a blast of its foghorn, in a cloud of fumes.
Madeleine was never far from my thoughts. Sometimes I would lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, thinking of her in her many guises, mulling over the riddles she’d posed. Remembering her last words, in my idle hours I would sit at a table in a café or at the rickety desk in my hotel room and I would write. The writing held me together. Over several weeks, I wrote out in full the stories she’d told me, trying to recreate the magic of that precious handful of days and nights we’d spent together. It was my way of being close to her. When I was done, I decided to keep writing. This time, I wrote my story, this story, which is after all only a humble story of a brief affair, one of countless such stories, of no consequence to anyone, perhaps, other than me.
After a month in Marseille, I ran out of options. All the doors had been closed. Unable to leave by sea, I decided to make my way to Portugal over land. The Spanish government had not yet closed the border to refugees from France and I had a Portuguese transit visa. I learned the wife of a friend was smuggling refugees across the border. In Lisbon, I hoped to board a ship bound for America.
I secured a travel permit to Perpignan. At the appointed hour, Fritz, who was still hoping to make it out on a boat, came to see me off on the overnight train from the Gare Saint-Charles. We climbed the hundred and four steps of the grand stairway that lead to the station. I was, as usual, carrying my black suitcase, which contained this manuscript. We farewelled each other, hugged, wished each other luck, made vague plans for a reunion in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time. Then he turned around and walked the steps back down the hill, disappearing into the crowd. Another friend, another farewell. I wasn’t sure how many more I could take.
I traveled to Perpignan with the photographer Henny Gurland and her son Joseph. From there, we traveled on a local train to Port-Vendres and met up with a fresh-faced young German woman called Lisa Fittko, who had taken it upon herself to guide people across the border. She said she would take us over the mountains to Spain on a track dubbed the Lister route, after a Republican officer who, with his men, had made his own escape, in the opposite direction, only a few years earlier. The two of us would do a trial run, she said, as she had yet to traverse the track herself. Together, we went to speak with the local mayor, who was sympathetic. He told us where to go and advised us to leave at dawn with the grape pickers. I knew I would be spending the night up there in the mountains.
It was still dark when Lisa knocked at my hotel room door, but I was waiting for her, fully dressed and ready to go. We joined the throng of grape harvesters climbing the trail leading up to the vines in the foothills behind the village. They gave us bread, cheese, and watered wine for breakfast. Soon enough, the track steepened in the dawn light and, as the sun finally appeared, we left the pickers to their harvest and kept climbing. As feared, my heart was barely up to the task of hauling a suitcase across a mountain. It was beating fast and each contraction was a spasm of pain. For every ten minutes of walking, I had to rest a minute. Lisa was most patient. Our slow progress afforded us the luxury of admiring the views. The world was bathed in a warm, golden glow. A steep bank of late summer clouds was gathering in the south. Behind us, France stretched out in splendor, and the white-fringed shore of the Golfe de Lion curved away to the northeast.
At times, the track seemed to peter out into nothing. Lisa would walk ahead and call out when she had located it once more. We finally reached the ridge of the mountain in the late afternoon. This was the border. We could clearly see the track that led down into Spain, to the border town of Portbou. As expected, there was no question of my going back to Port-Vendres. Lisa gave me her jacket to keep me warm and, with a wave of her hand, commenced the return to town to fetch the others. I watched her until she disappeared from sight and lit a Salomé to calm my nerves. The sun was already sinking in the west, the shadow of the mountains stretching out across the world. Once the sun was gone, the sky turned its various shades of blue, green, and pink. I spent a frigid night sheltering as best I could in a small copse of little pines, shivering with cold, straddling the border, wondering at the width of that invisible line between two countries. A border is nothing but a fiction—only one that holds the power of life and death over countless people. Still shivering, I wrote in the moonlight to pass the time. I was edging ever closer to finishing the story I had tasked myself with writing. When the moon set, it became too dark to write, so I sat there, contemplating the stars overhead to take my mind off the cold. As fatigue finally took over, they seemed to take the shape of an albatross, wings outstretched across the sky, curving from one horizon to the other.
THIS IS WHERE the story ends: at this writing desk, on this wobbly chair, in this damp hotel room, with its smell of countless men, their cigarettes and ointments and sorrows. The naked lightbulb above is buzzing. On the wall in front of me is a framed black-and-white picture of Franco, a balding man with a neat mustache wearing an overcoat with a fur collar. His expression is of calm certainty. Above the iron bedstead hangs a wooden crucifix.
I woke on the mountaintop this morning in a pre-dawn light and waited for Lisa and the others to meet me. An hour or so later I spotted them in the foothills: Lisa, Henny, and Joseph. It was mid-morning by the time they arrived, bringing bread, cheese, sausages, and water. After eating, we finally crossed the border into Spain and began the slow descent to Portbou. For the first time in weeks, I felt a stirring of hope. It didn’t last very long. We made our way to the police station, where we were promptly arrested.
We are late by a single day. Had we arrived yesterday, we would have encountered no obstacle. But only yesterday new orders were received from Madrid: all refugees arriving from France without a French exit visa are to be deported, even if they have transit visas for Spain and Portugal, even if they have entry visas for America, visas that have cost them immeasurable time and effort and money. As of yesterday it doesn’t matter how many stamps there are in your passport if it doesn’t have the one stamp that allows you to leave the country that doesn’t want you.
Tomorrow we will be escorted back to the border and handed over to the French authorities. All our efforts have been in vain. I will be thrown into a prison cell while my name is cross-referenced against innumerable lists, and eventually I’ll be sent to a camp.
The others in the group are being held in adjoining rooms. There are two men guarding us in the corridor outside—boys, really, foot soldiers of the Guardia Civil. The mayor has sent the village doctor to check us, although one wonders why, as tomorrow we will be sent to a place where our health can only suffer. The doctor is very young, possibly a recent graduate starting off his career in the provinces. As soon as he entered the room, toting his medicine bag, I sensed a certain contempt. It was in the sharpness of his movements, the curl of his lips, the curtness of his speech. I was writing when the door swung open without a knock, writing these very words (The others in the group are being held, and so on). When he saw what I was doing, he asked me in French why I was writing—not what but why.
“Because there is nothing else to do,” I replied.
He approached the table and picked up the piece of paper I’d been writing on—this very piece of paper you are reading. “What’s this?”
“A novel.”
“You’re writing a novel!” He scanned the words. “What’s it about, this novel of yours?”
I pictured Madeleine’s eyes. “I suppose, above all, it’s about love.”
“Love!” He smiled. “A romance novel!” He shot me a scornful look. “You are a foolish man, señor.” He lowered himself so that his face was directly opposite mine, only inches away. “A foolish Jew,” he added very slowly. I had nothing to say in reply. What can you say to such a person? “How can you waste your time like this, given the circumstances? Don’t you realize you’re going to die?”
“What else can I do?”
“Something! Anything!” he exclaimed, thumping the table. He took a stethoscope from his bag and put its rubber ends in his ears. “The time for novels is through, old man. This is a time for action.”
“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little,” I recited as I unbuttoned my shirt, “and that true reality is only in dreams.”
I felt the icy sting of the stethoscope on my chest. “What nonsense,” said the doctor.
“They’re Baudelaire’s words. They’re just as true now as they were when they were written, almost a century ago.”
“You’re an incorrigible Jew with a very sick heart. One more shock will do you in. You’re best off forgetting that romance novel of yours. It is useless to you.” He returned his stethoscope to his bag and took out a pump for testing blood pressure.
“I have thirty-two capsules of morphine in my jacket pocket. I intend to swallow them all, here, tonight. In your professional opinion, will it be a sufficient quantity to kill me?”
He did not seem shocked by the question. Rather, he considered it for a moment before replying. “Not immediately. You’ll lose consciousness first, maybe twenty minutes or half an hour after ingestion. But you won’t die for several hours.” He noted my blood pressure and put the pump back in the bag. “The nuisance of it is that they’ll send for me again in the morning when they find your body.” He closed the bag and paused. “Of course, I’d be more than happy to supervise the process, make sure everything goes smoothly. That way I won’t have to come back tomorrow.” My physician, I suspected, was a sadist, inwardly drooling at the opportunity to witness my death. “And I’ve never had the opportunity to observe the physiological effects of morphine overdose at first hand.”
“In that case, I’ll go ahead and take the pills now.”
“Wait,” he said. “I have to check on the other Jews in your group. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you wait until I’ve returned. I’ll bring a glass and a pitcher of water. It helps. I’ll be back in just a few minutes. Agreed?”
“Yes, I’ll wait. While you’re gone, I’ll finish writing my book.”
That snarl again. “Make sure it has a happy ending, like all good romance novels!” He stood, took his bag, and opened the door. Before closing it, he turned and, lifting a cautionary finger, added, “Don’t swallow a thing until I return.”
“No chance of that, doctor,” I murmured after he’d closed the door.
I’M SCRIBBLING THIS note in the hotel room while I wait for the doctor to return, anxious to finish this story before he reappears and I can begin swallowing the morphine I’ve carried for so long for just such an occasion. Yes, this is where it all ends. I’m very close now, I can feel it. These words will be my last. They will be the ending to this book. Of course, the prospect of an ending makes me anxious. My ailing heart is beating quicker than it ought. I think of Madeleine and my heart weeps and is consoled at once. The end of one story is merely the beginning of another.
Don’t swallow a thing until I return, he said. Rest assured, doctor, that I will follow your advice. I’ve noticed something about you. At a time when no one dares look anyone in the eye, you do so brazenly, with the certainty that your time has come, that your ideas have carried the day. So when you reappear, I will invite you to take a seat on the chair opposite mine. On my lap I will be holding this manuscript. When you are seated, I will give it to you and ask you to hold it while I take the morphine. Then, pills in one hand and glass of water in the other, I will swallow them calmly one by one. And as I wait for death to take hold, I will ask you a question.
“Doctor,” I will say, “will you grant a dying man one last wish?”
“It depends on the wish,” you will say.
“Oh,” I’ll say, “this wish is the simplest anyone has ever asked for. You won’t even have to get out of your chair.”
“Very well, what is it?”
“I would like you to look me straight in the eyes and tell me exactly why it is that you hate me so.”
THE END