by Russ Rymer
It may have occurred to me that I wanted answers from Sahran and this would be a good way to get them. Or maybe I am getting too fancy about all of this, and the thing that really reached me was the thing that happened first: the fact of being held, if just for an instant and especially while upset—of being constrained by calm. That and the sensation, after so many flights on so many days through strange streets and empty rooms, of being brought up short and hard by something alive and by someone with warm hands. The car whispered smoothly toward the Invalides.
We cruised around the monument and on through rues and further rues until after half an hour we entered a shabbier outlying neighborhood of industrial apartment blocks and vacant lots patched with grass and pestered by windblown trash—the trash with its commercial colors at least not as sad as the sad, depleted grass—and surrounded with tumbledown fencing. One large lot was markedly more kempt and hopeful than the others, its chainlink intact, and, inside the fence, a concrete basketball half-court with a well-used net and a circle of concrete tables with concrete benches. The concrete wall behind this scene was painted with a colorful mural of happy butterflies and dancing glow worms and fantasy critters cavorting in a forest of giant flowers. We’d reached our destination, the second stop on our itinerary and the next stage of our separate missions: Sahran’s to deliver his parcel and mine to learn something new about Sahran. And we could talk, he’d said—and hadn’t we! I had, at least, compelled by Sahran’s interest, but his interest, while it warmed me, had the noticeable side effect of fending off my inquiries.
I got some basic developmental history out of him: he was thoroughly Parisian, third generation, tried-and-true and born-and-raised, though the way he spelled his name, without the e the French would append to make Emil Emile, betrayed his heritage. His great-grandfather, a Tripoli newspaper editor, had arrived in town in the 1890s to cover the Alfred Dreyfus trials for his paper. He was a charter Dreyfusard, and not just between the lines—the Arab and Muslim press of the time had weighed in strongly on the side of the beleaguered Jewish lieutenant and against French anti-Semitism, how things change!—but whatever his critiques and condemnations, he loved France the way Dreyfus did: enough to stay there, despite it all.
Down the decades, the family had suffered all the standard immigrant dislocations, but the cultural duality they experienced as crippling ambivalence was passed on to the great-grandson as ambidexterity: he could think as well in one worldview as another, as well with the e as without, and that’s what recommended him to his trade, about which I’d learned a little from Willem. Now I got the bulk of it. Sahran was a roving freelance troubleshooter, called in to mediate particularly intense (and therefore often particularly secret) flash conflicts between Muslim governments (and Muslim groups and individuals) and the pervading, impending West, efforts that whisked him off on sudden, and sometimes protracted, sojourns to desperate locales, from the Horn of Africa to the Balkans, from Morocco to Astrakhan Oblast, though he saw his interventions in less geographic terms. “It’s really quite simple,” he told me. “Basically, I’m a letter carrier between the abstract and the tangible,” those properties belonging to the Western and Islamic factions, respectively, especially in times of war. Americans preferred to fight at as great a remove as possible (“Someday, when they figure out how, they’ll fly their planes from a desk in DC”) and the Arabs at close quarters, even if close meant dying by the bomb that killed their enemy, there was nothing more tactile than that. Though the equation could work the other way, he stressed—witness the Muslim preference for abstract geometric patterns and calligraphy over representational (concrete) painting or sculpture—with the effect that after you’d been at this awhile and had spent enough time as a letter carrier between the two irreconcilable poles, you no longer really knew which was which.
Along with such elaborations, I received some helpful household hints on personal comportment, to wit: If you don’t want to be located, don’t place traceable calls from your local café to a hospital owned by an embassy. For the most part, whatever I learned about Sahran, I picked up indirectly. Maybe that was his method, I thought, to answer my doubts by showing me something of his life.
Just past the playground, we glided to the curb and stopped before the scowling entry of what appeared to be an old manufacturing mill, and Drôlet jumped out to open my door. I stepped from the car and waited by a wooden sign with a glow worm painted on it that was set on the sidewalk by the building’s steps. It was a lonely neighborhood. Some urchins rolled up on rusty bicycles, mute with curiosity. I was feeling inconsolable. Sahran and Drôlet walked back to open the trunk. The sign read ÉCOLE ISLAMIQUE DE JEUNES FILLES.
My disconsolation had its source. Our spiral through Paris, from one unfamiliar site to another, had exacerbated a more general vertigo induced by my flight through the grand apartment. Whenever I lost track of my whereabouts, my thoughts converged on a name: Bingham, the name that had leaped at me like a spider out of a book. And then my thoughts went to the person who owned the book, who drank tea and went to class and wore a lavender sweater, who penned letters in one apartment that were intended for a reader in the apartment next door, though none of the letters ever traveled directly, only via a subterfuge, through the adresse intermédiaire of a café a quarter mile away.
As I contemplated this infernal circuit, around and around and around, a spider’s image came to me. I felt I was being wrapped in silk, spun about like some hapless piece of prey. Throughout the afternoon motoring around with Sahran, my mind whirled in this vortex, stuck in the groove of a mantra: I must find this person; she was the knower whom I must find. It was a perilous quest, for the woman I hunted was a woman I couldn’t escape. Being with Sahran didn’t help matters. The seediness of the quartier around the Islamic school had revived my suspicions of him. I’d let them go dormant on the early part of the journey malgré moi, but with every mile out from the center of Paris, as the discord grew between the luxury of our ride and the deprivations surrounding it, my discontent resumed. Then Drôlet opened the passenger door, and instantly the hush of leather upholstery and the rustle of silk on cashmere as Sahran pulled his overcoat collar closed around his neck were swamped by an in-swarm of gutter cold and brick dank, and I thought, Why wouldn’t he? Why on earth wouldn’t he? How could a man with such outsize means, such exorbitant power in such a poor community, not be tempted to save his own life by buying someone else’s?
Our previous stop had offered up no such class disparity. We’d gone to an art museum. We’d arrived before its grandeurs as humble supplicants, if anything, going in via the servants’ entrance. We deserted the car (and Drôlet) in an unmarked, subterranean, brightly lit, and immaculately clean garage and then trudged through an immaculate warehouse with polished concrete floors and a bustling wilderness of office cubicles and then past an immaculate secretary and into the corner domain of a young woman whom Sahran introduced as Mademoiselle Curator Someone-or-Other, though, observing her empire, foolish me, I took her for an empress. He and she had some business to transact involving discussions of money and provenance and drying rates and the validity of certain receipts and appraisals and documents of authenticity, the results of which conversation left Sahran clearly cheered.
I occupied myself gawking at her office, which was baubled out with objets de prétention that even I could tell were extraordinary, and when the business was concluded, Sahran shook the empress’s hand and asked a final favor. Those were his words: “final favor.” Might he show Dr. Anselm the companion piece? Though he understood this might be far too much trouble, the building being closed today, et cetera, and maybe he should just come back later in the week.
But it’s no problem at all, Mademoiselle said, standing and smiling, and she begged his forgiveness that she couldn’t accompany us, as she was awaiting a call.
“D’accord! À bientôt!”
“Emil!”
“Yes,” he said.
“When can
we deliver . . . ?”
“But why?” he said. “I’ve brought the limo.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed, and launched off toward the warehouse, calling into the wilderness for assistance. We set off too, in a different direction. A guard took us through a back hallway and, with pauses to unlock doors and disarm motion detectors, into a room as vast as an airport terminal. Then he disappeared. The ceiling was all skylight, the floor a gloaming through which contorted figures romped, some pygmy-sized, others enormous, set about in a scramble that dizzied my perspective; we’d stumbled on a contest of terrible inequality, a tiff between giants and elves. The guard, wherever he was, must have reached the light controls, wherever they were, and the sculpture gallery sprang circuit by circuit into life.
“You’re doing me a great favor,” Sahran confided as we entered the collection. He stopped before a large nude, which he studied with full concentration and equal leisure before moving on to a big stone bear. He clearly had a destination and clearly was in no rush to reach it. “I have more old friends in this room than in any place in Paris,” he said. “Which means, any place in the world. My life has been saved by some of them, I would say.” I describe him as leisured, but I wouldn’t dare call it relaxation: Sahran wore a brown suit and a sedate tie, and he kept his jacket buttoned and his shoulders back and the silk knot tight to his collar. I found myself wishing I’d worn my better pants.
“Over the years,” he added. “Today, I wished for a private last moment among my friends, away from the crowds.”
I raised an eyebrow and touched my hand to my chest, an offer.
“Oh, n-no, no, no,” he stuttered, and clutched my wrist a second. “Not away from you. Please, I wouldn’t be here without you. You have sprung me in!” He would have been far too embarrassed, he said, to request this tour for only himself. “So now you see how you’ve been used!”
When we’d wandered through the galleries for more than an hour (the guard scurrying invisibly ahead to intercede with alarms and lights), we rounded a corner and stopped before a Gauguin, and then a painting by Pierre Bonnard, and another by Bonnard, and then, a few steps down the row, we came to a large oil portrait of a woman dressed entirely in black and wielding a furled black umbrella emerging from an exuberant, primitive forest, approaching us down a sandy path. We and she seemed headed for a direct confrontation, which I suspected she would win. There was a hedge of pansies by her dainty foot, and a mottled, deranged-looking cat, whose ball of yarn had rolled out onto the path. Emil stood before it awhile, then said, “I adore her. What do you think of it, Matilde?”
I said I liked the woman but wasn’t so sure about the artist.
“Then you’ll never be alone,” he said, for apparently a lot of people, generations of them, had found the crudeness of the painter’s representations . . . crude. “But we agree about Madame. I love her because of what she’s been through,” he said. “We don’t really know, because we don’t know who she was. But regard”—and he itemized the clues: the path that had brought her out of the wood and into the garden, out of the tangled thicket to a place where her thoughts, “her pensées” (her pansies) could be arranged so prettily, the clouds at her back, the umbrella she could now safely lower—“they speak of a tragedy survived.” He noted the woman’s left ring finger, with its large wedding band heavy as a halo. The finger was bent back so that, alone among the fingers of her hand, it disappeared from view beyond the knuckle, “as though it’s been amputated. Has a marriage been cut short? Is this her sorrow?”
He continued looking at her as though something were about to occur or be revealed. “They say the man painted only two full-length portraits,” Sahran said. The other was across town in the Musée Picasso, and he encouraged me to see it. It was of another woman in a black dress, “but she’s very, very different and quite honestly I can’t stand her. The painting’s nice, I just don’t like the girl.” And there was this one, whose career Sahran spelled out for me in meticulous detail, how it had been given to the Jeu de Paume gallery by one Madame Gourgaud, “née Gebhard,” he said, “widow of Napoléon Gourgaud, a baron who bought it during the Great Depression from the previous owners, who may have needed the cash on account of the times, though I can only guess.”
I commented that he certainly knew an impressive amount about the painting. Sahran nodded, insensitive to my sarcasm. “You know,” he said, “when he did a portrait, he didn’t start with a person and then fill in the landscape around her. He’d paint the landscape first. Yes! Incredible! Then he’d impose the person.” This despite the fact that the landscape was entirely fanciful, since the artist had never once gone to a jungle or seen such trees (let alone all the vipers and lions and desert Bedouins he most enjoyed depicting). The sitter was right there directly in front of the artist, Sahran said, yet he had to bring her forth out of an imagined setting. “She’s literally emerging. He’s deriving her from the scene.”
Derived from . . . imposed onto. I thought: Now, there’s a fine line, and I’ve been both. Sahran said, slyly, “How could you not like him?”
It struck me as a complicated question.
“Les pauvres!” Sahran said as we descended the stairs to exit. He paused at a landing to take in the view over the sculpture gallery, and I realized he was sympathizing with the artworks. “They must be freezing, poor things!” It was a very grand space, he said, as he supposed people preferred. “But so cold! Were you ever in the Jeu de Paume, in the Tuileries? Only four years ago, you could have seen these things there.”
I said that I hadn’t gone.
“A shame,” he said. “It was magnificent. I mean, it was not magnificent. Magnificent is exactly what it wasn’t. Everything was in the small old building that used to be the royal tennis courts, and the whole place was intimate and cramped, unglamorous; there was no distinction between the art and the people, they were all of them creatures of Paris. The light was yellow, like at a street fair, and the people would huddle, they would argue. They disputed with the paintings! Everything was ordinary. When you came up the stair and saw the van Gogh, you cried.
“At least,” he said, “I did. Every time. Now, when I come, I admire. Hélas!”
The drizzle ceased for a blessed minute as we parked in front of the school, and seeing the opportunity, Drôlet flung open the trunk and, with the aid of a man who had quickstepped out of the building, began extracting a large rectangular swaddle of white cloth. Its emergence seemed improbable, like a scarf pulled from a magician’s ear; the thing looked as big as a Ping-Pong table, and when they had it free of the car trunk, they whisked it inside and we followed. We must have appeared like pilgrims in a saint’s-day procession, following the mysterious, held-aloft icon as it led us down hallways to another office, one not at all like the office we’d just left. It had, for starters, another sort of empress. Madame Ralanou had an institutional matron’s imperial disposition, all black and white with a little bit of somber in between. But she was done up in Easter-egg pastels, pale blue headscarf, floor-length skirt, a blouse of eyeleted pink. Black, white, and pale, but her eyes were bold with primary mischief, and it was clearly her mischievous side that was pleased to greet her visitor. With an offhand gesture, standing behind her desk, she dismissed the package to the fringes of the room. “You always bring such trouble,” she said to Sahran. “When will you leave me alone?”
“Ralu, this you can’t shove in the corner. No, no, unwrap it. We must welcome it to its home. Is Odile in?”
“In? Of course she’s in. You cannot see her!”
“Come,” Sahran said to me, and, cheerfully violating the headmistress’s injunction, he beckoned me out of the office and down a dim hallway whose length was an experiment in sound: sounds gathered and sounds lost. The doors were ajar, and each classroom we passed spilled its hubbub into the common mix, and then there was a decrescendo until we approached the next door and the volume picked up again. Sahran seemed to navigate by the voices like a ship by the
rhythm of foghorns until we turned a corner and came to a room that emitted hardly any sound at all, one in which a woman was speaking into silence, speaking so softly we couldn’t hear what she said. Sahran touched a finger to his lips, and we stood peering in through the door.
There were twelve or fifteen students, teenage girls, sitting on blue benches, attentive. The woman glided among them as she talked, glided up and down the aisles with her arms swaying as she stroked the rims of her wheelchair’s wheels. She moved toward us, and then away, to the blackboard, and then again toward the back of the room, and at her closest I could see a round pleasant face with cratered eyes, their sockets apparently empty beneath eyelids sealed shut. Mid-aisle and midsentence, the woman stopped abruptly, paused for a scant moment, and then, as though she’d caught a scent on the still air, pivoted the chair to face the door.
“Emil?” she said, in a whisper. We had made not a sound; even now he seemed not to breathe. Regardless, she answered her question with an exclamation of certainty. “Emil! You’ve come!” and she slipped to us across the room in a single glide as simple as a stone’s flight and raised her face to his kiss, the round face under the hijab, the eyes closed permanently.
“I’ve brought someone for you to meet,” Sahran said, bending to her ear. “Are you able?”
“Wait for me,” she said. Maybe it was the expression that then crossed his face that I had been brought to see.
A nervous excitement filled Ralanou’s office. A celebration was set to commence. Or maybe celebratory overstates it. It wasn’t quite a jubilee. Some staff had gathered, and wax-paper cups had been set around and filled with fruit juice, and a tin of sugar wafers had been opened and the little stacks of cookies set out on a tabletop in their pleated cupcake papers. The source of the nervousness had been balanced on a mantel and leaned against the wall, a painting so recognizable in all its details—black dress, sandy path, pansies, umbrella—that my first reaction upon seeing it was that I had just been party to a heist. “They say he painted only two,” Sahran said. “But as you see, they were wrong.” It turned out, “as the appraisers have now been obliged to concur,” that the artist had done another full-length commission, one that might have been a sketch or study for the one we’d seen on exhibit. If it’s a study, I thought, it’s certainly a fully realized one.
