by Russ Rymer
“I’ve read it,” Sahran said.
That took me aback, I confess. I felt simultaneously surrounded and exposed, trapped in the moving car in the deepening dark and impending weather, maneuvering through the snarl of central Reims with a man who’d seemed to like me, or so I’d thought until I found out he’d vetted my dossier.
“So,” I said, aiming for a little bitter irony, sidestepping injury, trying for a stance. “Yet he deigns to accept me anyway!”
“Because,” Sahran said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wanted you because, not anyway. Because of the case. Because you quit your practice. It’s why I wanted you.”
Notre-Dame de Reims was a fortress of night when we arrived, its buttresses rising out of the low, yellow puddle of streetlight like the palisade of some terrible île des morts, its heights unseeable against a glowering sky. We dodged in through the transept doors, car to chapel across a moat of cold. A Mass was in progress. A smattering of congregants, or tourists more likely, speckled the pews before a droning sacerdote. A religion in remission is as mournful to behold as a religion ascendant is scary, and the opulent desolation of the scene unsettled me, obscurely. I felt I’d stumbled on a cluster of survivors of a plague.
“And they demolished a neighborhood to make this big enough to pack the whole crowd in,” Sahran informed me; so now he knew everything about the thirteenth century too. I was still unnerved by our malpractice conversation. But I didn’t speak. Neither of us spoke much at all, out of self-consciousness, not pique. Every step on stone echoed like the bang of a gavel, and I could hear my whispers slither up into the vaults to join a permanent sibilance, an incessant sly vesper of accumulated gossip that heckled our progress around the transept and back down the aisle of the nave. I’ve visited cathedrals in daylight, when the sun streaks in through the rose windows and the bus hordes gawk at the names chiseled on the floor tombs, tablets burnished by travel sandals to the brink of legibility—We read their monuments; we sigh—but here, tonight, as the votive candles glowed in their niches, ruby ranks of sins committed, sins confessed (they were the sole heat in the enormous room, a vast cold cavern of virtue warmed only by flickers of remorse), I felt the tables turned. How few our numbers, beset by these legions, these perished generations—and while we sigh, we sink; and are what we deplor’d. The sparse house was packed to overflowing.
In a while, outnumbered by the solitudes and jostled by emptiness and more chilled indoors than we would be out on the street, we cast our lot with the barometer and fled for a stroll around the block.
The barometer had betrayed us. A cold rain had started up. The cobbles were flashing with quicksilver gusts as though schools of minnows were pestering the surface from below. Sahran deposited me under a stone angel and dodged out to the car and returned with an umbrella, his arm outstretched to gather me beneath it. “Up for this?” he asked, and I assented. I didn’t want to get back in the car with our conversation still so uncomfortably unresolved, and the church had offered no respite. A walkabout, even a drippy one, seemed advisable, though there was little use conversing even away from the church. The cloister’s whisperings had crescendoed into the drumroll of rain on our umbrella, and when we rounded the corner behind the great church and spied the glowing marquee of an open pub, we made for it.
The interior of Le Chemin Vert smelled of yeast and old damp wool and sawdust and was predominantly dance floor, or what I took to be, though there was no band, and the jukebox and an old plywood upright piano were both blessedly silent; the piano didn’t even have a bench. A necklace of unoccupied tables was strung one deep along the walls. The crowd, such as it was, was convened at the room’s far end, plastered against the zinc in rough single file, standing (there were no barstools) like a police lineup run amok or a boozy reenactment of the Elgin Marbles.
Behind the zinc, a bartender patrolled like a priest behind a communion rail. He was doing a more prosperous business than his counterpart in the cathedral. He had a clientele and, from the looks of it, a faithful one. It was a local crowd. You could tell by the way the conversation paused as we entered, and the heads turned. But we weren’t a friend requiring greeting, and we weren’t the wind blowing the door open, requiring that someone traverse the expanse and slam it shut again, and so the heads turned back, and the hubbub recommenced. I made a note of it: we were less than the wind. But the place was warm and the warmth embraced me. Sahran shook out the parapluie and stashed it with our coats, and we fitted ourselves into the frieze and bellied up to the bar.
He was still brooding on the cathedral, and after we’d ordered some fermented and unprohibited hops (“Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Two, please,” he instructed the barman), he resumed narrating how the church was shelled by the Kaiser’s artillery in 1914 and everything in it set ablaze. You could still see the damage from the street if you stepped out and looked up, which was a nonstarter for me. I’d had my faceful of rain. To escape the long shadow of Big Bertha I drifted into an inspection of our companions at the bar. On the far side of Emil stood two men, similar in age (older) and disrepair (extensive), but of opposing physiques and demeanors, the one being carved of abiding stone and the other strung of wire. The first man was a monument of concentrated force and brooding solidity, his face rough as a quarry road and his voice like grit in a concrete mixer, qualities undoubtedly fostered by an infinitude of hand-rolled cigarettes like the smoldering stub now staining his fingers.
His companion was a flibbertigibbet scarecrow, a lanky imbecile who hopped in place in St. Vitus calisthenics whenever his friend spilled a gravelly word, grunting in response and keening wide-eyed from a mouth distended in a perpetual whistle. His hands jerked and glided in a spastic choreography whose exaggerations endowed them—and him—with an odd ceremonial stateliness, a psycho pomp and circumstance. Even at a bar none of whose patrons were much less shopworn, the two men made an exotic set, though I was the only one paying them any mind.
The drafts came, and Emil and I toasted each other for the second time that day. His prescription had elicited a brew called St. Hermes, which arrived in Trappist tulip glasses that had me feeling all the more serendipitous about our choice of location, as if we’d done much choosing. When I looked back over at Emil, I could see his complexion sombering, as though he’d held off crying until he had a beer to cry in.
“I have a favor to request of you, and it’s much more than a favor,” he said.
I waited—the inevitable needs no prompting—and he said, “Odile’s going to need you.”
“She has me, of course,” I assured him, softly. I patted him on the arm. “But the person Odile needs is Willem. He’s the best I’ve ever seen at what he does. He’ll make her right.”
“I know he will,” he said, inspecting a spot on the bar, his lip gnawing tight against his teeth. “But she’ll need you especially. Will you promise me something? Will you not let anything come between you and her?”
“Of course. What could possibly?”
“This kid.”
“Corie?” I said. “Corie’s okay.”
“Uhn,” he said, unconvinced. “She sounds like a brat, to tell the truth.” To which I insisted no, just smart and young, and he asked what my attraction was. “Do you know?”
I couldn’t consider the question without picturing the damage in her eyes and feeling her touch on the back of my hand. “I don’t,” I said. “Somehow I keep thinking there’s something she could tell me if I just knew what to ask. Like she’s a witness.” And as I spoke, and as I asked myself, A witness to what?, another’s eyes appeared to me, and the touch I felt was yours. “Or a messenger,” I said. “She’s like a for- tuneteller turned backward.”
“A survivor,” he guessed.
I nodded. “I see her injury . . .” Then I tailed off, but he picked up the thought and completed it. “And you think she can say what happened . . . You know what, though?” he said. “Everyone’s not built
that way. Odile is. She was scarred at birth. She was a survivor from day one. But what if your Little One’s the opposite? Maybe fate is pulling her, not pushing,” he said, and said it was a known phenomenon with political radicals. They might be motivated by some personal or historical injustice, but more often their grievances grew out of no bad history at all. “The hard core, terrorists, you search their pasts and you know what you find? Happy childhoods in Pleasantville.” If they were haunted by something, it was a something-in-waiting. Emil christened the syndrome pre-traumatic stress disorder. “What if this disaster in your Little One’s eyes is one on the way? Do you really want to be around for that? I wish you weren’t mixed up with her, is all, and for purely selfish reasons. I want you around for my sister.”
I said I understood, and I held up my palm to take the oath forsaking all competing complications, but he wasn’t going to treat the matter blithely. “Swear to me,” he insisted.
I heard his earnestness, and without even thinking But what of the letters we’re translating, what of our talks on rue Nin? I lowered my hand to his arm and squeezed it, a firm, steady grip, sincerity’s talons. “I promise.”
That relaxed him, and he cheered up a little. “You know that we’re twins,” he told me, and I said, “No!”—shocked. Close in age, I had guessed, but I hadn’t guessed this, and I confessed that I’d thought Odile was somewhat younger. “Sorry,” I said, and that got another laugh, this one rueful.
“By twenty minutes,” he allowed. They were minutes separating good luck and bad, between making it to the curb and getting caught in traffic, safe or in harm’s way. “She got the palsy, and so the blindness and the paralysis,” and somehow, as if that weren’t enough, the afflicted heart. Odile had had a whole life of health emergencies, he told me. She was handed all the curse in that way—such was her reward for letting him go first—while he received only blessing.
“Like your cancer, for instance,” I ventured.
That paused him. “So you know about that.” It was his turn to say it. I shrugged: of course. “Willem mentioned it.”
“The lymphoma,” Emil asserted, to be sure.
I said, “Right.” And he said that if you were going to get cancer, “get that one,” non-Hodgkin’s, hundred percent recovery if you catch it in time, “and they did.” He considered it a bullet dodged, and that was blessing enough. His good luck had deepened his debt.
Early in life, he told me, he’d made it one of his blessings to see Odile through her trials. And did so, until this one, when necessity was intervening, and it bothered him that, the way things stood, he couldn’t be around to help her navigate this ultimate peril, and it wasn’t a matter he would ever leave solely to Willem.
“You two are opposites, that’s why,” I offered. “Willem’s a cutter and you’re a diplomat, you prefer the talking cure.”
His head shook. “We’re not that different,” he said. “In that regard. He stabs. I manipulate. We’re both in the business of performing an evil to do the world some good. We’re like the general: we have to believe that the ends will absolve the means.”
“Then maybe you should have more faith in him,” I offered.
“Oh, well!” Emil exclaimed. “Hasn’t he enough in himself!” He enumerated: Willem’s faith in medicine, in his practice, in progress, in his ability to do good, “and to be good, as a consequence.” He had the secular man’s full faith in reason: rationality was Willem’s innocence. Which was exactly why Emil had hired him, he said, “because in the service of those delusions he’s made himself into someone who can help me. You see, I can be sure that he’ll help me, because you can get a rational man to do anything,” there being an excellent and reasonable argument to justify any particular act. It was something else all good diplomats understood, “that there’s no such thing as rational morality,” and I wish I’d thought to ask him, right there, what all this philosophy had to do with Odile’s surgery.
But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, for Emil’s graveness had lifted and, with a quaff from the tulip glass, he launched into another of his “toots,” about how morality defended on reasoned grounds always came down to self-interest—we should be good to others so they’ll be good to us in turn—but that self-interest was at best amoral. “At best. And that’s the catch.” You can’t base morality on amorality, he said. “The formula doesn’t add up.”
At any rate, for the surgery, he wanted someone who could slough off doubt, someone impervious to hesitation, and that was Willem. But when it came to putting his sister under and observing her journey and escorting her back and welcoming her home, he wanted someone else, an individual who knew the full consequence when something awful happened. Not abstractly and reasonably, but viscerally, and with a searing intimacy. “Someone fallen,” he said. “I don’t want anyone who has never faced the penalty. I want someone who has, and who’s taken it to heart.”
One time, after one of her girlhood surgeries, he told me, Odile had hit a snag coming back to consciousness. It wasn’t even a big procedure, though major enough to require general anesthesia, and she’d come through all of it fine until the end, when she seemed to be headed for a fate like Mrs. Singleton’s. For seven hours after she was wheeled into the recovery room, Odile had lain in a coma, on the bottom of the deep end of the pool, family and doctors huddled around her gurney like pallbearers, her vital signs steady but dire, and Emil only a kid himself, of course, but he thought he would go insane standing there small amid the helpless grownups, knowing his small sister was right beside him but that he couldn’t get to her to pull her back out of the dark. And then, mysteriously, the lines on the displays had budged a bit, and the beep of the monitor quickened, and deep inside her, Odile began her ascent.
No wonder the man was terrified. I listened to him describe all this, standing there at the wool-smelling bar in the Chemin Vert on a rainy night in Reims, and the look on his face brought to my mind a patient I’d once had who as he drifted off into his narcosis was overwhelmed by an event from earlier in his life (this so frequently happens), a day when he’d thought he’d lost his teenage son to a canoeing mishap on—what river was it?—the Broad. Canoeing on the French Broad River. The man’s expression as he relived those minutes, his son missing beneath the Broad’s brown current, was as spooked and stunned as Emil’s was now.
That was one thing that occurred to me. And the other—oh, Daniel, may I tell you this?—the other thing I realized, as I took in Emil’s tale and held his arm and witnessed his living torment and felt I was inside his skin, his mortal, his survivor’s skin, was that for the first time since I loved you, I was falling for someone, for someone else. That I might have a chance with Emil. The clamor of the bar had abated entirely, lifted like a ground fog, and the crowd had fled away and the air was silent as a séance and even his voice, Emil’s voice, was far, far away, the air full of light. My little swoon caught me so suddenly that I had to struggle back onto the path, had to swim back into the subject and the moment and get the room to resume again.
“I know what you’re saying, though, about Willem,” Emil was telling me when I’d made my way there. “He’s reliable. He’ll do what I tell him or tell me why not. He’ll do what he’s paid for and do what’s professional. And do it very well. And if Odile died, he’d review his procedures and make his improvements, and continue on his way a better doctor. He’d be demanding of himself. But he wouldn’t die with her. He’s too blameless.”
“Blameless?” I asked, but I was really just announcing my return and arrival, using my voice to assure myself I had one.
Emil repeated the word. “Look, Willem thinks that pain is an error to be fixed and that evil is an anomaly, a glitch in the great march of progress, and not something alive inside you that you can touch and feel, and fear. That’s not something you know unless you’re fallen, unless you’ve touched it.”
“And you have,” I challenged him, to hear myself.
His
rejoinder was sharp in its swiftness. “You have too.”
It was exactly then that the wiry imbecile appeared so close in front of me, stepped between me and Emil, his face peering directly into mine with those lidless, urgent, whistler’s eyes, and he reached over with a spastic finger and tapped me on the hand.
PART THREE
XV
BLOOD AND SNOW.
Push, pull. Blood and snow.
Push, pull. Again, I’m writing you—or maybe I should say: Boo, Daniel! A letter, my love, can you believe?—from Portbou, and if I’ve been silent these last couple of days, the incomunicado is all self-imposed, for I had written, of a sudden, all that I could bear to write, and had to stand at the window awhile to collect my wits and catch my breath.
I’m like the painter of Emil’s old painting, or at least I’m the way Emil described him: he’d get so overwhelmed by the extreme photographic presentness of the lions and tigers he was drawing that midcomposition and midbrushstroke he would flee from the canvas in terror and throw open the studio windows to gasp and wheeze until the menace had escaped into the atmosphere and his heart could quiet down. Never mind that to everyone else, his fanged menagerie was as toothless-pretty as a string of paper dolls, as my words must seem to you. With every pen stroke in my effort to depict these events for you and, through their depiction, to prepare to ask my question, behind each of these words lies a world of detail that I sometimes fear I’ve only imagined and whose imagining I fear I cannot begin to depict.
The more I try to straighten matters out and arrange them plainly for you to see, the more things tumble together in my mind, and my conversation with Sahran gets butchered into bits—Emil saying, “She sounds like a brat,” Emil saying, “The only way to make love last a lifetime is to cut the lifetime short,” Emil saying, “Haraam also indicates blood”—and then those bits get enmeshed with all this stray extraneous flotsam, some canoe trip a patient took with his son on the French Broad River, for Pete’s sake, and the relative, or was he, who bequeathed you a clarinet. The French Broad, you know, is in North Carolina, but that’s what I mean, the walls cave in. Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees. I’ve never been to North Carolina. My thoughts lie in rubble, and I find I need you more and more. The great orderly comprehension of things I so wish to present to you is something I think I’ll gain only on the day you reveal it back to me.
