Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  As Rouchard gave out his tale, I felt only impassivity, a muffled asbestos stupor immobilizing me against any reaction at all. It was a fearful peace; Rouchard’s conclusion bore down on me as inescapably as the truck that had flattened the luckless German photographer. My dinner mate, meanwhile, did not share my calm. His emotions skittered here and there as though he himself had lost control before his careening account. He’d nearly come to tears at one point. Now, concluding his rendition of the caper of the mistaken photographer, he erupted in seeming anger. “Don’t you find it preposterous!” he demanded of me, a muted yell. Daisy bumped, alarmed, beneath the table.

  “What?” I said.

  “The whole thing!” he said. “Understand, I am a lawyer. And at the same time, underneath, I still think of myself as something of an anarchist. And in either of those identities, I am offended by this story. A man steps off a sidewalk and is hit by a truck, okay. But that this accident would then spare the life of another man that morning, one who, as a result, goes on to witness a horror that would have affected the first man not at all but that compels the second to commit a heroic rescue of yet another human being who ultimately would not have been rescued at all if a step had been slower or the delivery wagon’s fender just a little to the left or the right or the windscreen not so dirty.”

  Or look at it another way, he said. “A beautiful woman sits before me in a restaurant in Paris, a woman whose life has been a good one and who has benefited many other lives and who would not be here, at least not with me, and who would not be at all who she is had the man who intervened in her life so improbably, so many years ago, not himself been improbably saved by the precise convergence, according to an exquisite coincidence of direction and velocity and time and inattention, of a delivery truck and a pedestrian going to work. Does this not disturb you? Oh, it does me, madame. For it tells me that life is either a thorough game of chance and the greatest of fates at the mercy of the merest whim, which leaves no room for law, or that the hand of Providence can reach out of the future to shade the wheel a centimeter and give a sufficient tap to the pedal, in which case my liberty is destroyed.

  “I leave you the choice,” he said, and he bent to comfort Daisy, who was beginning to whimper condolences. I stared at his stooped back—his gray suit coat bulged over the white tablecloth like a stone in a Zen garden—and felt grateful for the idle seconds that let my cognition catch up with the news. When he surfaced, his face was ruddy. “Where was I?” he said.

  XXI

  “YOU WERE ABOUT TO TELL me he didn’t go to Spain,” I ventured. A crazy toss.

  “Saxe?” Rouchard said. “Oh, but he very much did! But how did you know of Spain?”

  “Céleste,” I confessed. “She said he had contacts there but was caught in Bordeaux en route.”

  “Yes, well, Marseille,” Rouchard said. He seemed unsure which thread to pick up. “It was much more than contacts,” he said. By that summer, the Maquis, “my countrymen too, I must remember, we weren’t all collabos,” had established an underground railroad spiriting Jews out of the German-occupied zone, funneling them into Barcelona and the coastal cities of Italian-seized Provence. “Because Franco was like Mussolini, a dictator who resisted surrendering his Jews to Hitler. He’d already surrendered his pyrites and wolfram to the cause of German rearmament. Now the Führer wants his Jews as well? Ha!” So that’s why it made sense that Saxe might look to Spain for safe haven. “But that’s it, you see; that’s the problem. They arrested Saxe in Marseille, but Marseille is not on the way to Spain,” Rouchard said. “Not from Paris. Anyway, he wasn’t headed for Spain when they caught him.” He looked at me a long while, as though this were a call and response and the next line belonged to me. Then he said, “He was coming back.”

  Rouchard couldn’t tell me exactly what Saxe had done while in Spain or exactly how he’d done it, only that three weeks after he’d made his way south along the Côte Basque roads to La Bidassoa, he’d left Spain by another route, and that once back in France he’d followed the Mediterranean coast eastward with his companion to Marseille, “for now he was no longer alone.” He arrived in the port with a young child, a girl, whom he left with his Maquis contacts, specifically with the XIV Corps. “Do you . . .? No, of course not.” And of course Rouchard told me about the unit of the defeated army of the Spanish Republic that had regrouped in southern France as an anti-Fascist guerrilla force. The corps understood who the girl was; they’d of course have known of her parents. They placed her in the care of two American Quakers in Marseille embarking for Galveston on the freighter Champlain Ressuscité, via connection in Rabat.

  “And so, you see, I have many details, but no essence, beyond the basics,” which Rouchard’s French love of delineation divided into two equal parts: his knowledge that Saxe had gone into Spain alone and come out with a child, and his conviction, based on that knowledge, of Saxe’s motivation. Saxe had paid off his grief debt to the doomed children of the City of the Silent, Rouchard said, by finding a single Spanish child and saving her.

  “What you call his guilt,” I said. “Those children.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Rouchard replied. In Geneva, Madame Barayón had spoken of this subject and had recounted what Saxe had told her, that on that day, as he wandered through the prison, he’d endured a sort of regression. Surrounded with urchins, knowing what was about to happen to them, he felt himself a child again as well, one more foreign-Jew orphan no different than the others. Except for the essential distinction that they were being loaded onto transports or returned to their cells while he could turn on his heel and turn in his film and exit through the front door, detained only momentarily by official exclamations of gratitude and promises of prompt payment, “and I think the monstrous inequity of it—the caprice—must have overwhelmed him. Byron became that terrible, inconsolable thing, the child who survives.”

  Nevertheless, no; this wasn’t the guilt to which Rouchard had alluded. That was toward another child (and this part Rouchard had from Byron Saxe himself), the very child Saxe had rescued. Saxe knew there was a more rightful heir to the property he’d inherited, a proper resident for the house he refused to inhabit. But how to make restitution? He’d lost track of the girl, and the comrades who had arranged her passage had perished in the war. “So ultimately he did something inventive.” He drafted the legal system into the task—“Merveilleux! All of France a bloodhound! And me!”—by appointing the lost girl his heir and willing her both of his independent properties, the smaller one bought for him by his father and the larger one given him by hers, along with the endowment for permanent upkeep and maintenance, to which Saxe had attached a not insignificant obligation, “by the way,” that his heir must uphold the continued lifetime salary and support of one Céleste Marie Bowdoin.

  “Oh hell!” I exclaimed, and I felt a gush of relief, my consternations and bafflements chased away like humidity by lightning: finally, this saga had burst the bounds of credibility. “But—she loathed Saxe! Céleste. Loathes him! Anyway, Landers arranged her support.”

  “Umnnhhh,” Rouchard said, and the single drawn-out syllable presented a thorough legal rebuttal in its intricate and irrefutable entirety. “I recall,” he said. “She’s quite a dreadful Jew hater, isn’t she, our Madame Concierge. But however it may contradict her feelings, or ours, the truth is she owes her great good luck to a Jew. Again, I can only guess how this happened. But that’s not so hard, you see.”

  Just look at it, he said. “Byron’s in hiding half a year, more than half, in terror of being discovered and killed. And the whole of that time, who was on the other side of the wall, working among the killers, rubbing shoulders, conversing with them, but someone who knew exactly who he was.” And exactly where. “She could have made her life easier by turning him in, believe me, she would have been rewarded. And it could have cost her her life not to, as well.” Yet she didn’t betray him. “She’s an anti-Semite, true, but don’t forget”—and her
e Rouchard appeared to puff up a mite with pure native pride—“she’s a French anti-Semite.”

  And of course she didn’t tell Saxe that she was protecting him. “She would never! Pheh!” Rouchard expectorated rhetorically floorward. “But he had to have known. Of course. And later he knew to protect her in turn, just as silently. Here,” Rouchard said. “Here’s to Herr Byron Manifort Saxe.”

  He reached for the cognac, which at some unnoticed moment had arrived on our table, and raised a snifter. “To my comrade,” he said, and we clinked, and he said, “¡No pasarán!” and we clinked again. We both downed a slug of the brew. I could tell that for Rouchard, the nightcap was a receding tide, that he was waning now, along with his subject.

  “Something I don’t understand,” I said when we’d set down our glasses. I was desperate to catch him before he faded. “How would he have recognized this child? There was a letter, you said . . .”

  “ . . . which I haven’t seen,” Rouchard finished. “But it’s a good question and I have pieced together your answer,” and he nudged something toward me across the tablecloth. It was the envelope. I picked it up and popped it open—it wasn’t sealed—and spilled its contents out onto the table. There were only two items: a small steel key and a barrette. “Alba’s,” he said, of the latter. “Carlos had given it to her, and she put it in her daughter’s hair. If he’d seen it, he would have known. But only if their daughter might still be wearing it, of course.” I picked it up. It was lyre-shaped, and a lustrous mottled brown, and just as I seized it Rouchard reached out and captured my hand in his.

  “Something else too,” he said, “more indelible.” He drew my hand to him softly, as though intending to propose. “It seems that their daughter, Alena . . . Magdalena . . . had a scar,” he said, “visible on the back of her hand. Now, this I don’t know from Madame Barayón. I heard it straight from Byron. He told me how I should identify the person who would come to me. Yes, yes, I’d already noticed. But Madame Barayón explained the rest,” that Saxe had applied the same test, all those years ago, in Spain.

  “You know,” he said; he kept his hand on mine. “This man Saxe. I’m sure he was a terrible and flawed person in this way or that—isn’t each one of us? What he survived, one never really recovers from. He seemed to me broken, a shadow inside a shell. Maybe he was petty or mean, maybe he kicked the cat, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I will say that I’ve known some of the best of people in some of the worst of times, and I think this man may have been as moral an individual as anyone I have ever encountered. On top of all else, he has given me, too, a gift. He has dispelled a sorrow that darkened my life since the day I heard the news in Mauthausen. I believe he knew what he was doing. Certainly he could have easily gotten a much better lawyer than I am. But he knew how much I loved them, Carlos and Alba. I think he understood how much it would mean to me to raise a glass with their daughter.”

  Maybe it was those words coming after all the others that lofted me so irrepressibly home from the Marais, along the river and over the bridge, amid an astonishment so very great I was sure my joy would wash me right into the maw of reprisal. Standing in the apartment after the police had departed, I realized I no longer felt in jeopardy. Instead, I sensed all of my lifetime curses—Whatever you love, you will cause to be slaughtered—departing, deserting me. As though they’d been subdued by the visiting gendarmes and carted off in handcuffs to le clink. I watched from the window of the study as the little blue delegation clambered back into its cars, and the impression swept me that it was not the police who were leaving the scene—it was me. I was absconding, released, the long incarceration was over at last. I’d faced my comeuppance and found in it nothing to fear. There was to be no reprisal.

  The big cold world had turned out to be not so frigid after all. It wasn’t just that I’d found my birth mother—no, it was something greater: that I’d already, remarkably, been so long in her presence. My mind gathered up all the hours that Corie and I had lingered over Alba’s letters, letters from a stranger who turned out to be no stranger at all, a woman I’d dismissed at first, and then been drawn to, having no idea how deeply she belonged to me and I to her, that the events she described were as intrinsic to me as I was to those events. What other walls might prove to be permeable? What other untold stories were right now explaining my life? The question itself was another great gift from Alba: What other love was I overlooking, that might be right in front of me? My thoughts flew to Emil.

  I sauntered back through the apartment’s rooms, taking my leisurely time, testing my liberty with baby steps, getting accustomed to the odd gravity of this new planet, observing my surroundings with all the wonder of my very first visit. What I saw around me now wasn’t bizarre opulence but an old, old riddle pieced together and solved. I felt, as Rouchard had said, “La disposition, c’est complète,” and my contentment lacked only one concluding element, one last act before I could consider matters satisfied. My amble through Alba and Carlos’s rooms was my path to that appointment.

  It was a mystical assignation, and all the more vital for that. I felt the need to convene with two central parties to tell them the news, to convey my gratitude for my good fortune and theirs, to cement my new life with my new family, the agents of my delivery. Fortuitously, they both awaited me in the same place: Byron Saxe and Corie Bingham, the one spectral and embodied in the little spot he’d lived and conspired in, and the other very much corporeal, the translator he’d employed to advance this very moment, the young woman awaiting my signal that everything was okay. I’d been allowed a new life, thanks to them, or allowed to possess my old one at last, and there was no one I wished to celebrate with more than the woman who’d brought me so insistently, step by step, through Alba’s letters, to the threshold of my miracle.

  I reached the last of the grand rooms in a state of rampant anticipation. Untethered from dread, freed from reprisal, I felt excitement romp in my chest until, with my last few steps, I was afraid it might burst me before I could make my rendezvous. I whisked through the oval salon with my leisure cast aside and reached the secret panel with a whistling pulse.

  “Corie,” I yelled at the blank wall, and yelled again, because I couldn’t abide the wait, knocking even though I’d said I wouldn’t, “Corie, it’s me!” There was no answer, even to my several repeated cries, and premonition encased my heart. The panel hardly budged at first. I’d expected a weight on the other side, but not this resistance, and immediately I wondered if the obstruction weren’t greater than a shoe, might be some mortal bulk lying against the sill. I pushed harder, and the door budged inward with a sibilance of cloth on wood, the grudge of garments heaped against the door. The closet’s rods had been emptied.

  “Corie?” I called, stepping over the pile. No one was in the room. The chair at the table was overturned. Nothing else seemed out of place or ransacked or disturbed, but it was clear that a disturbance had gone on and that the friend I’d wished to commune with had departed. The door to the hall was ajar, and I ran out through it and spewed Corie’s name loudly down the staircase, her name spiraling down into darkness like water down a drain.

  I didn’t notice the other item of disorder until I walked back in and stooped to right the chair. I seized on it merely as something else to tidy up, a small leaf tossed by the whirlwind of Corie’s flight. That was before I saw what it was and surmised its role, the pink, fold-creased telegram announcing—and as I spread it open like an origami swan, it divulged its message all over again—the news of Alba’s death.

  PART FOUR

  XXII

  DANIEL, I’VE NEVER HAD an instinct for edges. Oh, in my work, of course. There I’m exquisite. I can take a body to the brink and back and never let him step over. I mean in life. Maybe because I lacked one of my own, one edge. Without a birth, a beginning, without a conception, I couldn’t conceive of an end, that’s true. Happily I dwelt in the middle regions. My story was deathless and my earth was round, you could sail and s
ail and sail it, and never sail over the edge.

  And so I think I just didn’t know what he was talking about, there beneath the trees beside the river, the sergeant in his dress greens crisp as matzo even in the rain, he’d come so far. The mortuary’s limousine waiting curbside, your coffin in the ground. I suspected he was not still in the service. But he had been, back when he met you, so he claimed. He was there when your transport set down in Tan Son Nhut, your company filing out, piling its gear in the shade of the great wing, while the noncoms who would escort you to your deployments rested on the grass berm and looked you over and placed their bets. Four or five of them, Daniel, relaxing, placing their bets. It’s what they’d do, he said, the officers. To while away the time. They had an instinct for the edge. They bet on who among you would make it out alive, and who would not.

  This is what he came to tell me, that you were fated, doomed. He had a term of art for it. The word he used was fey.

  He said that they got very good at it, at guessing, that if you had even a hint of the talent, you could develop it quite quickly in a war zone. They could usually tell, were right more often than not. They weren’t concerned with the great mass of boys, your comrades who would survive or not depending on luck and circumstance. Their game was played at the extremes, with the marked ones, those who were impervious and, especially, those who were fated, as he said you were, those who bore the scar, the fatal aura. The players spotted you immediately. You disembarked from the plane, Daniel, and before you’d even mustered out into your unit, before you could get your duffel off the runway, they’d pegged you: fey. Foretold.