The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  Jeannette’s relationship with Sylvain was based, like her father’s, on his friendship with her mother. All she knew was that Sylvain had first befriended Jeannette’s maternal grandmother in Paris, and then had befriended her child. Sylvain filled a certain space for the girl with no siblings, and when Ariane turned sixteen he became her ally at the balls, and her comfort when she felt ill at ease, which was often. She hung on his arm and, naturally, rumours soon developed that they were engaged.

  When Ariane turned eighteen and there was still no sign of a proposal, her father addressed Sylvain: he must either make clear his intent or put an end to his attentions. Sylvain was surprised, he said he was sorry, he had no intention of proposing marriage. After that, except for the odd sighting across rooms, Ariane and Sylvain did not meet again for several years.

  By a series of improbable coincidences, in the winter of 1901 Frédéric Molineu found himself sitting beside Monsieur Leclair at a dinner party in Fontainebleau, to which he had been invited at the last minute by a professor at L’École Normale. Their conversation took its turns and it emerged that Monsieur Leclair had known Frédéric’s wife Ariane as a young girl. Naturally, it occurred to Frédéric that there might have been some romantic attachment; but it seemed so physically unlikely—this large provincial man, his delicate young wife—that the notion was instantly usurped by the possibility that such a friend from her past, capable of reciting such happy memories, might provide some comfort to Ariane, who by now experienced every human interaction as though it were a violent scratch.

  Sylvain accepted the invitation to dine, and to Frédéric’s astonishment the effect was nearly immediate. Reunited with her old friend—who was twenty years older than her and had by now gained so much weight he could be taken for her grandfather—Ariane began to resemble her old self. Sylvain’s visits became a monthly event, and she continued to relax; she slept and ate well; she was once again that cheerful woman Frédéric had known in the early days of marriage.

  It did not last long. The patterns in Ariane’s mind could not, it seemed, be reversed, and little time passed before she fell again into darkness. No one ever knew the precise nature of Ariane’s bond with Sylvain Leclair. The only important thing was that even he was not capable of saving her.

  When Frédéric and Jeannette first moved south to Montpellier four years earlier, the vignerons’ unrest over the falling price of wine was a recent memory for the townspeople. During Sylvain’s visits to the Molineus he had not, they thought, made particular efforts to conceal his political activity, but nor was it something he discussed much, and if he did mention it they tended to imagine he was exaggerating for effect. As they settled into Montpellier, however, it became apparent that nothing was exaggerated, and that Sylvain was famous throughout the town for thundering to the front of the crowd at Place de la Comédie, where the syndicalists and royalists and Occitan separatists had all gathered to protest the fraudulent powder then swamping the market, which could be turned into wine with the addition of well water. And when Marcelin Albert screamed from the podium, Sylvain Leclair had roared back his slogans, and roused from the crowd the energy of a bonfire.

  Such open fever had not recurred since in Montpellier, but Sylvain was always alert to other kinds of contagion. Ostensibly, the war had settled the region with the double balms of employment and bereavement. But something else was boiling underneath. The unconscripted who feared censure were quick to denounce others, and public squares were rife with scraps of hearsay, transmitted from mouth to ear, mouth to ear, until in some warped fashion they were returned to the doorstep of the accused as a talisman of wrongdoing.

  It is hard to say just how the word first spread about Patrice Nolin. In all likelihood it was some indiscretion of his own, a passing remark, probably, that caught in the windpipes of a nervous patriot who proceeded to spread it around, until in the space of a single evening Nolin’s name was carried across town, and in the morning the whole of Montpellier was against him. And, naturally, Sylvain Leclair caught word of this on his morning ramble, and swiftly brought the facts as he could discern them to the house of the Molineus. Midhat had just left for the Faculty. Frédéric Molineu was about to follow when he saw Sylvain Leclair’s portly frame in the driveway, swinging his cane.

  “Good day Sylvain.”

  “Good morning. Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Nolin is gone. He came home from dinner, there were letters on his doorstep. He was scared, he left.”

  “Come in, what are you talking about. What letters?”

  “Thank you,” said Sylvain, brushing his feet on the rug. “There were three or four of them. Some were anonymous. At least one,” he grunted, “was written by Luc Dimon.” He shot a glance down the hall.

  “Luc?” said Frédéric. “What does he have against Patrice?”

  “Oh, you know. Traitor, this, that. German, selfish, all the rest.”

  “My God. Should I, do you think, visit him? Or, should we avoid …”

  “There isn’t time,” said Sylvain. He glanced again in the direction of the kitchen. “He and the girls were ready to leave an hour ago.”

  “You’ve seen them then.”

  “I passed by. I told him what I had heard.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “This, that. We’ll have to be very careful now. Shall we sit? I could do with a coffee.”

  “I—oh dear. We could do, I suppose,” said Frédéric. “Well, what is the time? My watch has stopped.”

  “Eight thirty.”

  “In fact, you know, I must go. I lecture at ten. I’m sorry, Sylvain, another time.”

  “What are you sorry for, my friend. Everyone is always walking over your hospitality. I suppose I am no less guilty. I’ll follow you out.”

  “Well, you know, thank you for telling me.”

  That was a lie: Frédéric was not lecturing at ten that day. He walked calmly beside Sylvain down the driveway to the road, but once they separated and he rounded the corner he began to march so fast that by the time he reached the department his collar was damp with sweat. He leapt up the steps two at a time, pushed through the first double doors, charged through the second, reached the last door with the frosted window, and unlocked it as fast as his shaking hands could turn a key.

  Everything was the same as last night. His desk drawer was still open, the pair of glasses from which he and Patrice had drunk stood together on the cabinet, bottomed with yellow cognac circles. He dropped his briefcase and began to assemble his papers. He opened drawers and pulled out pages, stacked them on the desk and flicked through. It was no use, he would have to take all of them. Even if they were in French—here, there, references to German philosophers, scattered all over the place. He snapped open two leather folders and slipped the papers inside as neatly as he could without bending the corners, collected his three most recent notebooks and an English translation of the Quran, and scanned the room one last time before running out again.

  Jeannette, meanwhile, had left the house for the convent. As usual she had taken her copy of Les Mystères de Marseille, but en route she also stopped at a newspaper stand to purchase a selection of dailies. There was one convalescent on the second floor of the convent named Albert who came from Béziers and did not have any legs, and who always asked Jeannette why she never read any stories that were true. The wound on Albert’s face was slow to heal, and some days it split open and wept pus, and he was constantly complaining about the position of his bed beside the window, which was so bright in the mornings he couldn’t sleep in. The doctors said he was too delicate to move, and anyway, most people would be fighting for that bed. Look at the view you have sir, they said, of the garden wall. Albert’s tone on the subject of true stories unnerved Jeannette because she could never work out if he was joking or sincere, though it was similar to the tone he used to complain about the bed. By now he had said it so many times that she decided to take him at his word,
if only so that he would stop repeating it.

  Between the pages of the novel she also brought the two slips of paper she had shown to Midhat that morning. The doctor’s diagnosis of her mother, and her mother’s own handwritten description of her symptoms. There was no time to look at them again, but she did not want to part with them. She squeezed the book for fear they might fall out.

  The low voices of doctors echoed on the stairway. Jeannette reached the second floor, shy as ever for her lack of a white nursing habit. The corner by the window where she usually sat was bright with daylight, and extra chairs had been brought from other parts of the ward. The men cheered as she approached. The bed nearest the window was bare, taut with a fresh sheet.

  “Where is Albert?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Third floor, they finally moved him.”

  “He’s still alive, don’t worry! Look at her,” said the one named Jerome, pointing at her from his pillow, “she thought he was dead.”

  A new convalescent sitting on one of the chairs in his pyjamas pinched his face and ducked his head with mirth.

  “Fine,” said Jeannette drily, as she sat beside him. “Do we want Les Mystères today? I also have the newspaper.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing with that, Mademoiselle,” said Jerome. “No newspapers, thank you very much. Give us the story.”

  “Fine, fine. Are you all ready? Bien. Chapter five, où Blanche fait six lieues à pied, et voit passer une procession … Blanche et Philippe quittèrent la maison du jardinier Ayasse au crépuscule, vers sept heures et demie.”

  She did not pay much attention to the words as she read them but she was a good reader all the same, and she turned the corners of each phrase with expert modulations in her voice, cued by certain words and elements of punctuation, as though she were playing a piece of music. The men were rapt, and even the nurses who came to change the bandages spoke in whispers and wound the cotton very slowly. On occasion Jeannette would glance up from the page to see faces propped around her like children, their lips falling apart.

  She left early in the afternoon. “Les braves” needed to eat—and also to sleep, the nurses said. The moon was already rising. She could not help it: before she even reached the house she opened Les Mystères and pulled out her mother’s note and, pausing at the corner before the drive, unfolded the paper in the dwindling light.

  Sometimes I feel I am getting larger and larger, and then at other times that I am shrinking. I am going both fast and slow. The cavity in my mouth is enormous, and I feel a great pressure.

  Sometimes I can smell death. Some people, I look at them, I don’t know if I smell it or see it or feel it. I feel it in my whole body. It is not totally bad. Some days have a particularly strong smell. I find myself wanting to keep them or I want to keep the feeling but I can’t and it washes over. It is like being turned upside down. When I feel it I think this is the real life, the not imitated and not performed. My marriage is a fact like a house I live in, these four walls. Frédéric is a house. That feeling is a reaction to something foreign. But then is that actually true? Because even a known thing can become unknown

  “Jeannette.”

  Midhat was running up the road. His eyes were wet and bright; his hair flopped loose from its oil. He whipped one large strand back from his face.

  “Jeannette. I saw you walking, I ran. I have been at the library. I have not found anything new. But,” he caught his breath, “I have a theory.”

  He was shining with excitement. She felt the urge to touch his hand, and although she did not, something of that impulse must have expressed itself because his face gave off an encouraged smile.

  “Shall we …”

  “Tell me at the house, not here.”

  They turned the corner and walked up the drive, and Docteur Molineu opened the door on them. His expression was grave.

  “I have some very sad news, mes petits.”

  Midhat noticed a letter in the Docteur’s hand, and with a falling sensation guessed what it was.

  “No,” he said.

  “Our friend Laurent is dead.”

  The letter was from Laurent’s mother. He had been killed in a bar at Ypres on his journey home. A drunken officer had mistaken him for someone else and stabbed him in the arm and the chest. Laurent had died quickly from severe loss of blood.

  The door still open, the three stared at the floor in silence. Molineu touched his daughter’s neck. Then he reached to pull the door shut and suggested in a restrained voice that they rest before dinner.

  Jeannette’s face was completely white. Midhat invited her into his bedroom, and she accepted without embarrassment, and sat in Midhat’s chair while he sat on the bed. Both faced the window, through which the last of the day erased itself from the garden. The cherub with its dry jug was stripped of detail as all the features of the landscape were unified in shadow, and the lamps of the interior turned the window into a mirror that reflected back their faces. There was his, the whites of his eyes gleaming, his body hunched on the edge of the bed. There was Jeannette’s. Her lids hung low.

  “We were children,” she started to mumble. Tears fell out of her eyes. “When we were children we used to pretend that we were orphans.”

  He could not reply. Very soon, he would feel unbearable pain. It was only a question of waiting.

  “We all wanted to be Cosette. Or La Petite Princesse.”

  The fact was, Laurent remained Midhat’s superior in every way. Laurent, whom he had started to resent, and even—yes, even to hate. And he had even—for a moment, only—wished Laurent would die. He squeezed his fists together and shut his eyes. But perhaps it was not the real Laurent he hated. Perhaps it was only the idea of him. The idea of a person who so exceeded him in virtue, as well as in intellect, and in manner and culture, and even in appearance. Laurent Toupin, his stoop, his blond mop and easy gestures. At the edge of these thoughts was the unmanageable fact that the man no longer existed. He could not face that just yet. He must think about Laurent alive.

  Jeannette was still talking, something more about orphans. What did she mean by it? Did she mean that Laurent had been like a parent? He could not face that yet either. He dared himself to picture a bloody corpse, a ruptured arm and chest. It was a horrible image, but it did not move him. Possibly it was difficult to believe in something he had constructed himself. Nothing yet could overpower the picture still beating in his mind: Laurent ahead on the garden path, trouser twisting around the knee, eyes half shut against the sunlight as he murmured some absurdity about human nature.

  Jeannette had stopped talking. Midhat spoke aloud, without control.

  “He was my friend!”

  Even the bitter sound of those words; he hated it.

  The gold watch occurred to him in the middle of the night. He woke to the sound of the windowpane rattling in its frame, and as he brought his cold arms under the warm covers his brain flicked awake. The watch. Lost, undoubtedly. He saw it in his mind’s eye, ticking away in the mud. The fragile casing blown off like the wings of a beetle, the heartbeat exposed. Then he remembered that Laurent was killed not on a battlefield but in a bar. He turned over in bed.

  In the morning, he was not sitting for long at his desk before he heard a knock on his bedroom door. Jeannette stood in the hall, face as white as it was yesterday. She reached for his hand and gripped it with her dry fingers. They did not say anything. He leaned forward and, gently, touched her lips with his. When he pulled away, her forehead crumpled and her mouth twisted open.

  The memorial service was held on Friday. The congregants gathered in an old dome-vaulted church with marble arches, dressed in suits and ties and austere gowns, the furlough soldiers in their blue belted uniforms. Midhat sat with the Molineus in the second pew below a large unlit chandelier. Ahead, plaster mouldings of saints and supplicants leaned out above the altar. Midhat did not listen to the service. He had caught sight of Laurent’s father as they entered: he knew
it was him because of his height and posture, although his hair was brown. But now the man was on the other side of the aisle, and there were too many heads in the way. Sobbing at the end of the same pew was a young blond woman who might have been Laurent’s sister, or his cousin, perhaps. Midhat wondered if they had found the watch on Laurent’s body, and if so what they had thought of it. Perhaps that Laurent had stolen it from a dead Turk; that he was a hero, and this was his booty. Heads bowed for the prayer. Beside him, Jeannette started to shake. He wanted to put his hand on her arm, but he restrained himself, lest he appear to be denying her the right.

  After the service, Midhat and the Molineus separated from the rest of the mourners to walk back home through the town. The end of the boulevard spread into a manicured square and above them a veering crowd of pigeons alighted on the bronze arms and head of Louis XIV. Out of nowhere, Docteur Molineu announced that they deserved a trip to the beach.

  “No question about it,” he said, voice rising as he steered them down the promenade. “Not one of us has left Montpellier all winter. Midhat has not even seen anything but the inside of his university! Ergo, a change of scene,” and he leaned out to look at their faces with an attitude of rebuke, “will be essential. Nothing good comes of being dreary. I don’t care what other people say about it.” He paused. “We mustn’t care. War or no war. It is not healthy to deny ourselves all the time. In fact, Laurent would probably quite like it if we went to the beach. I believe it is just the sort of thing he would prescribe. Was he not always talking about how much he wanted to travel abroad?”

  Jeannette sighed, and, unexpectedly, began to laugh. The skin on her cheeks looked tight with dried tears.

  “Do you like to swim, Midhat?” said Molineu.

  “I have been in the sea.”

  “You have been on the sea, certainly, but have you entered it voluntarily. Have you felt the cold salt crossing over your bare back. Because that is a completely different sensation.”