by Russ Rymer
Several nights into this habit, I was aware of being followed. My initial alarm dulled quickly past worry, into acquiescence. I could spot no one around me who seemed to show an interest. I’d round the corner and hear my pursuer, or catch a glimpse at the edge of my vision, and turn to find only the echo of my steps, my own face in a shop vitrine. Still, it was there, a spectral watching. I remembered Corie’s conviction that a benevolent Alba haunted her. I recalled how I’d scoffed at the notion. Now I wondered if the same woman’s tragic ghost had shifted its attentions to guard her daughter instead. The company enabled my solitude, allowed my longest and darkest routes. I’d loop around the Panthéon toward the Jardin des Plantes or up toward the Observatoire to cross behind the Cemetery Montparnasse, the hour quieting into ever greater stillness, my overseer nearing until I could sense its presence behind my ear, ready to perch on my shoulder, and was afraid to look around.
Then I realized who it must be, that this must be Emil. The spirit was his, equal parts elusive and insistent. My nightly mission shifted from push to pull, avoidance to assignation. I went into the street not to seek, really—more to be sought, attended. And to ask. All those questions I’d had for Corie that were thwarted by her silence were satisfied by his. His calm confirmed me. Especially in the bleaker streets, where only he and I were about, I took my every agonized question and asked it of him outright, and let it sit as still in my mind as though I’d laid it on the sidewalk for him to gather up later as he passed. One by one, I set them down and left them there behind me.
On the ninth or tenth night of this, I wandered down by the Esplanade and across the river to stalk the grounds of the Grand Palais, then angled up toward the Madeleine. The night was a drippy one. The rain was more of a mist, though. I didn’t deploy my umbrella until I’d gratefully begun to tire and had turned back along a wide street through a placid, pretty neighborhood that felt close and intimate though its avenue was broad, the sidewalks lined with plane trees. I could smell the bark in the moist air. A slight breeze crossed the avenue and shook the raindrops from the branches above me, and I raised my umbrella against them, and maybe that’s why I didn’t see where I was at first, as I walked along, because the umbrella cut out the sky. The last time I’d been here, the sky was all there was of nature, though pierced by the beam and racketed by rotor blades. The ground had been buried beneath the crowd. My whereabouts didn’t dawn on me until I was at the steps.
It was so very quiet, where I stopped. The night was so quiet, the raindrops and the wind’s whisper were all I heard, as though my attention to these smallest sounds had drowned out the roar and the whistling. A marble plaque on the building entrance declared an institute, evidently eminent, apparently defunct. The glass doors had been painted black from inside, their iron grates chained and padlocked. The ceremonial steps ascending from the street were sodden with stray leaves. I set my foot on the bottom step and climbed.
When I reached the top, the portico was empty, except for a few empty wine bottles and the leaves. Whatever gas phantom had been chalked on its floor had been washed away by the rain. I turned and scanned the street as though I might find the multitude, but instead saw only the wide blank pavements, a picket of dark trees—or as though I might even discover myself amid the crowd, constrained by Drôlet’s arm, on top of a truck mired in the chaos like a mastodon in pitch. Instead there was only the vast prospect and the solitary silhouette, waiting at the bottom of the stair.
It faced me like a penitent, forlorn, ancient, resolute, the coat hood raised around a faceless shadow. The hood was the vacant hood of the cloak of the messenger who is himself the message. It stood so motionless, this figure, I was teased by the thought it might be my own reflection, cast from an upright mirage. At the same time, I knew in an instant who it was. I walked down the steps. When I reached her I held the umbrella over both of us, and with my right hand pulled her hood back, off her auburn hair. Her gold eyes stared into mine, taking me in, expressionless. We stood that way, silent. It wasn’t clear who wasn’t speaking, me or Corie.
“You were here,” she said, finally.
“I was here,” I admitted.
“You saw it?” she asked.
“I did.” The news rippled across her brow, and her eyes glanced away. Once again, I hadn’t told her something. Before I could finish with the “I’m so sorry,” she cut me off.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I understand it.”
There was another awkwardness.
“I’m surprised you come back,” I offered, and she shook her head vehemently.
“I hate this place,” she said. “I followed you.”
“Really,” I said.
“Why do you go out at night?” she demanded. “It isn’t safe, where you go.”
I told her I had some things I needed to think through.
She absorbed that, and guessed. “About him,” she said, and I nodded.
“You knew him,” she said.
I nodded again, and she considered, and then the wave washed through and her eyes seethed with that same sudden panic I’d seen in them before: panic for me.
“You know that he’s dying,” she said, urgently. “Do you know that? That’s what he said, that how was it I could want to die when he wanted so badly not to.”
She was tense with the necessity of having to ask if I knew. “He told me I mustn’t tell anyone,” she said, “that I was not to tell what we talked about.” I answered her question—“I know”—to ease her, but she wasn’t eased, just rigid as she let it all occur to her. It seemed to occur in stages. I watched her march through the logic step by step. As much as she couldn’t comprehend me, this child, she knew more about me than I’d ever know of her, already knew about Alba, and knew what happened to you, Daniel, and what that would mean to me now, under the circumstances, and knew that I’d been sick, suddenly, then suddenly well, and what that might mean too. It took her a minute, but she put it all together. When her eyes found mine again, they were filled with moisture and intense with anger, and she seemed about to speak. Then she seemed not to, and instead, almost as though to catch her balance, she reached up her hand and clasped it over mine, my hand on the hasp of the umbrella.
I smiled at her. “What do you say we get in out of this rain?” I said. She nodded, grateful. She recognized the offer—to set us both down gently. She accepted it, and we turned. A little ways down toward the end of the block, I said, “You really shouldn’t follow people around like that, you know.”
She glanced to see if I was really okay. I was. “You always worry me,” she said. “Ever since we met.”
“Why on earth?” I asked. She dismissed me instantly with an “I don’t know!” but then gave the question its thought. “Because you kept the bandanna?” she offered, sure but not quite, and then, more surely, “Because you didn’t even know what hurt you.” I thought to myself to ask her, Was she so confident she’d always know what hurt her? But I kept it for a future conversation.
I awoke the next morning to see that the rain had ended, and the lovely sky was a wash of lightest Dutchman’s blue. A fleet of gray clouds was scudding through, on its way to some other overcast. I was halfway to the kitchen when a thought stopped my steps, and I turned and went back for my purse. In the galley, Corie was already up and making tea. She asked did I want breakfast and plopped a second egg into the pot to boil beside her own. “I brought you something,” I told her. I fished Rouchard’s envelope out of my purse, the one he’d given me in l’Urquidi, and spilled its inventory onto the countertop. Big inventory: two items. I pulled Corie’s hair back and clipped in the little lyre barrette.
“Oh!” she said, appraising it with her fingertips, and then she walked out of the kitchen to the dining room, to the gilded convex mirror that hung on the dining-room wall. “It’s beautiful!” she yelled back. I watched the vapor rise from the copper pot, listened to the clacking of the eggs jostling each other contentedly. “Is it . . . ?”
“So what’s that?” Corie asked, nodding toward the counter. Beside the envelope lay the rest of Rouchard’s bric-a-brac.
“Mystery key,” I told her. “Mystery keys to forgotten doors. Life’s full of them.”
The eight minutes were up and the timer went off and I ran some cold water and cracked the eggs against the side of the sink and rolled the shells between my palms and peeled them. Corie stirred some pepper and salt together in a plate, and we carried our feast to the dining room and consumed it at the corner of the Biedermeier, dipping our eggs in the communal spice plate, sure the candelabra disapproved. We ate without talking much, lost to morning thoughts. I’d just stood up to gather the plates and bring some more tea when it struck me. It struck me like someone had cuffed my ears. I looked at Corie and saw from her gaze that the thing that had struck me had struck her too. Our thoughts had run convergent. “You don’t think . . .” I said, and her head bobbed.
I palmed the key. We left the china unwashed in the sink and went off through the rooms to Saxe’s closet. Corie went ahead to fetch a light, and I kicked some shoes aside. She was back right away, with the torchère already turned to its highest wattage, grasping it in both hands like a vaulting pole, tossing wild shadows around the ceiling. The closet squinted in the unaccustomed glare. Splinters still lay in the corners from my brief day job in demolition; plaster dust frosted the top of the little safe. The steel slid into the key slot with a stutter of tumblers, and with the first turn of my wrist, the heavy square door sprang eagerly off its moorings.
We sat there in front of it, Corie and I, blinking at each other. As though we weren’t quite sure what safecrackers did once they got the safe cracked. I reached and swung the door full wide. The crypt contained one item, a large wood letterbox. I dragged it out but didn’t open it right away, not squatting there on my haunches in the dust. If, as I supposed, its contents had not seen the light of day in years, they deserved the best daylight they could get. Corie moved the table to the window as I lugged the box into Saxe’s room, and I set it in the sun and pried open the lid.
The thing that came to view I took to be a miniature Chinese birdhouse, a square-cornered cube with two round holes in its façade and a little squat cupola on top. Then I saw that the holes were lenses, covered with a pince-nez of painted tin, and that the box was an ancient camera, differentiated from any of its type that I’d ever seen by its ornate cloisonné skin, for it was clad entirely, top and sides, in a herringbone of nickel and black enamel. I pictured it immediately on its sly tours of occupied Paris, dangling on a harness-leather strap from the shoulder of a fine Spanish suit. Beneath it was a stack of envelopes, and inside the envelopes were sheaf after sheaf of square photographic negatives encased in numbered plastic sleeves.
“Oops,” I said to Corie as I opened the first. She was busy pulling envelopes out of the box and froze midmotion, and I told her to be careful. “Just don’t lose their order,” I said, and (to placate me) she continued doing exactly what she had been only slower.
I held a couple of the plastic sleeves up to the window light, careful to obey my own instruction. I opened another envelope and looked through its array, and then another, witnessing through the acetate the lost world of a Franconia-born Jew during the era when he, Byron Manifort Saxe, was traveling around the south of Europe with his friends Carlos Perigord and Alba Solano Landers, and then the era to follow, without the friends, as his world spun from happiness to tragedy. The photographs were hard to make out in any detail, being in negative and given the cloud-spersed light, but I could see that some were cityscapes, and others portraits, and I kept up a stream of exclamations to Corie as I spotted anything interesting and she gratified me with a grunt or an “Oh, amazing,” once in a while, and once or twice stepped over to squint through the film. And then I came on a heavier envelope that disgorged a sheaf of not film but paper, a thick ream held together by a spring clip. The jaw of the clip had rusted into the top of the first page, branding a brown signature across the title, ילש הבושתה. “What in the world,” I exclaimed, and instructed, “Look,” and asked, “How’s your Hebrew?” but I was talking only to myself.
I had been for a while, I realized, for Corie had disappeared. Except that she was still right there, actually, standing in the window with her face buried in a leaf of blue paper. “What have—” I started to ask her, What have you found?, but she waved me to silence with a slow open hand and edged herself blindly onto the bed. The paper was obviously a letter, on aerogram onionskin, and she clearly was determined to read it through before saying a word about it. “From . . .” I started as she finished the first page and shuffled it behind a second, but I didn’t bother to conclude the sentence.
So I plunked down beside her, and watched her face, and waited. At one point she glanced over at me, as hard as though I were a stranger, then went back to reading. When she got to the end she didn’t move, and I had to speak to free her.
“It’s from Alba,” I said, and she nodded and shuffled the pages again and began with the salutation. “‘My dearest C.,’” she read.
How afraid I am for you. Things are becoming worse here & I’m sure there is worse to follow, but I’m not afraid for myself but for you, when you know what I must tell you, & terribly for our Alena. Wednesday I am to be baptized into the church. Voluntarily, they say, or, in the event I compel them to compel me, voluntarily by force. For them, this has become imperative. They’d hoped I would serve as a role model. Now that’s what they fear. I have become for them a living repudiation, and they are done putting up with it. This I sense. I cannot know exactly their plans, but I fear my immunity—my prominence—now only adds to my indictment, and will harshen my sentence, for they will devise a penalty to match their shame. I no longer think my conversion will spare me. My Eucharist may be meant as my last rites, a last humiliation to repay me for humiliating them. I have made my preparations & you must attend to this carefully. First of all, C., if anything does befall me you must find your way to your daughter. Not here, though. Get to Madrid. She will be on the mainland within a week. It’s how the system works. The mothers here have pieced together much of it, by now, & I have set down what I know on this separate sheet for you, which ferries are usually used & their arrival ports, & the orphanages where she is likely to be sent. They’ll keep her for a while, because there is such a glut of children and of course the customers prefer the newborns. But do not wait long. She is lovely & someone will want her. And my poor C., you do not even have a photo, but she will have my barrette & I have also to tell you that she bears a mark, a wound on her hand that is fresh and should be visible, it is as large as I was able to make it, may God and our daughter forgive me. That is what I have to tell you, to look at these details & make yourself a plan, my desperate hope is that you can find a way. Also, I must tell you, because you know everything about me & do not know this, that I do not ask God’s forgiveness mockingly, but in the most fervent way. They will not succeed this Wednesday in converting me to their faith but they do not know why. Because Maria Xavier won’t let me, true. I cannot betray her by accepting the thing they killed her for refusing. That’s one reason, but there’s another, simpler. I cannot convert because I’ve already converted. I have accepted their God, & it wasn’t they who led me to him; it was Maria Xavier herself, she is my saint as you are my confessor. For I saw what they did to her, & it was an evil of great consequence. I insist, with every ounce of hatred I can muster for what they’ve done, that their sin will not be meaningless. But this is where logic has led me, that whether the human race lives on infinitely or dies out entirely, & one or the other must occur, there is no alternative, in either case she will not mean anythin
g, her life, her death, mine, Alena’s beauty, the things we fought for—our lives’ significance means nothing without a presence outside our puny human sphere, a mind outside of time. I see this now. Our only worth, the meaning of any moral or immoral act, cannot exist solely within us. To exist at all we must be witnessed from beyond us. They tell me prisoners who have experienced torture learn to doubt God, and perhaps they do. For me it has meant the opposite. What I saw, God witnessed, that’s the only truth. Otherwise the importance of all I’ve seen was a passing joke, & all that I have done. And, oh, my C., the thing that I have done. I planned for it & saved up my cigarettes & didn’t give them away & when Sister Serafina offered me a light last week I came upstairs and used the first to light the others. I know the ceremony. In this I have experience. How not to douse them & what the burning smells like, & what sort of sore it will leave. When I had three going I clasped her to me with my gentlest arm around her neck and committed on my perfect girl the thing they’d done to me, & made it as bad as I possibly could and could stand to with her screaming. Was that all for a joke, my C., what this mother has done to her child? Something time will forget or diminish, so who cares? I say not. I choose the alternative; I demand to accept my consequence. And into my hell I will drag all these righteous. Only their God can avenge us on the proselytizers. Only a living & attentive God can attest to the weight of my hatred.
PART FIVE
XXVII
DANIEL, NOW YOU HAVE ALL that I’m able to tell you, though I can’t tell you at all what it means, or even exactly what’s happened, what I’ve been through, for I’ve been to a place that I’m helpless to describe. At the moment, I’m seated in my study at the partners’ desk. I’ve just come from Portbou. Passim says the forecast is for snow tonight, and I am glad, as though somehow that might make it easier, though it won’t. It will cover the grave, there’s my solace, but where the grave is I can’t know, and who will I share my solace with? Corie left this morning and I am afraid of not having her around to protect me against my mind, which dwells on Emil and cannot leave him alone, and I cannot decide what part is enormous sadness and what even larger part rage. She was so excited to go, my Little One. I saw her off at Charles de Gaulle with the flowered hijab draped around her neck and her russet hair held back by the tortoiseshell barrette that was the one thing Alba ever gave me. I consider it a fair trade: Corie gave me Alba. Anyway, I’ve kept the brown bandanna. Drôlet drove me home; he assures me I’m still on the tab. I wonder what he knows, but he knows enough not to tell me.
