The Travels of Daniel Ascher

by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

  WHEN HÉLÈNE CAME HOME FROM THE INSTITUTE the day after Daniel’s return, she found a note slipped under the door to her room: I arrived home from Tierra del Fuego yesterday, I brought you back a little souvenir. Come over one of these days, whatever time suits you, but I won’t be too flavorsome in the mornings because of the thyme difference, another one of his dumb word games. She didn’t like the thought of him climbing all the way up to her floor and, to be sure he didn’t come back, she decided to visit him the very next day.

  Daniel’s apartment was on the ground floor and had a separate entrance in the hallway. Hélène struck the lion’s head knocker for a long time before he opened the door. She’d visited his apartment only once, as a child, when she was eight or nine, and the place had felt like some sort of fascinating museum, full of things brought home from far-flung countries, things she could never have imagined ending up here. She remembered a rhinoceros skull with its bluish horn, Inca statuettes in terra-cotta, three grimacing African masks, a stuffed alligator on the mantelpiece in the living room, a tiger skin on the floor, with glass eyes and jaws open to show varnished teeth, but most of all, the thing that had kind of hypnotized her and her brother, the shrunken head of a Jivaroan Indian with long black hair and lips carefully stitched shut.

  There were probably more artifacts in the apartment now, but the tiger skin was shedding its hair, the rhinoceros skull was covered in dust, and the alligator above the fireplace looked like a big lizard. As a child she hadn’t noticed how untidy and dirty the place was, and now it just looked like an ill-lit shambles, cluttered with piles of books, papers, and half-opened maps.

  Daniel was wearing a poncho over his shirt, he kissed her exuberantly, you’ve grown again, she was taller than him now, come on in, I’ll make you a coffee, it’s coffee time. She didn’t really feel like it but followed him into the kitchen, the sink was full of dirty dishes, I’m really sorry, I didn’t have time yet to do the dishes, it was obvious they’d been waiting there since before he left. He put the coffeemaker on the stove to heat, and washed two mismatched cups, he hadn’t had time to buy sugar since he came home either, he’d do better next time, or actually he’d invite her to a restaurant, on a Sunday. She thought it wouldn’t be too much of a shame if he forgot.

  As she went along the corridor back to the living room, she caught sight of a detail she’d noticed on her previous visit but had forgotten. It was a large brown suitcase lying on the floor near the bed, a case so heavy that between the two of them she and her brother hadn’t succeeded in lifting it off the floor, they’d wanted to open it but their parents had called them back to the living room, it’s bad manners going into people’s bedrooms like that. She remembers picturing Daniel hunched under this weighty load as he walked the pathways of the world.

  The bookcase in the living room was so full you couldn’t have added one more volume. There was hardly any furniture, just a TV and a large desk, and fixed to the edge of the desk was a pencil sharpener with a crank handle. Books and atlases were piled up on the desk. An old Michelin map of France was open, cut across by a red line drawn in felt pen, and scattered with desk pads and notebooks filled with lists and complicated diagrams in which the words ferryman and boat had been circled. On the cover of a thick exercise book were a number of deleted titles, The First, The Last Voyage of, The Refuge of, Return to Home Base. Images of planets scrolled across the computer screen. A glass filled with finely sharpened pencils stood next to the screen.

  Daniel brought the coffee through to the living room and moved a pile of newspapers off the only armchair so that Hélène could sit down, and he himself sat in the desk chair. He was near the window and in that light she thought he looked even more tired than he had in the courtyard the previous evening. His hair was going white, he’d shrunk slightly, and he looked faintly ridiculous with his poncho whose fringes had gotten wet in the kitchen. He sat there looking at her in silence for a moment, his eyes alighting on her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, and she was a little embarrassed. It was the first time in her life she’d been alone with him.

  He asked jokingly whether she was finding it too windy up there in her crow’s nest, he inquired about her studies at the Institute of Archaeology, if he’d been able to study, that’s what he would have chosen, but he hadn’t even bothered to take his secondary-school exams. He didn’t talk about his trip, she was the one who ended up asking, so then, how was Tierra del Fuego. And all of a sudden, as if she’d set in motion some mechanical device, he became animated, he started talking faster, describing how his car broke down in the middle of nowhere, how his suitcase got mixed up with someone else’s on the stopover in Buenos Aires, he mimicked the Aerolineas employee falling over himself apologizing, lo sentimos mucho, gesticulating like a child, over the top, as usual. And yet, even at this point, Hélène felt something about him had changed, not just his graying hair, something more than that, perhaps his eyes, the expression in them. She struggled to finish her unsweetened coffee, it was so bitter.

  In the hallway when she was leaving, Daniel took his parka off its hook to retrieve something from one of the pockets, a small object wrapped in tissue paper, for you, a little souvenir, it was a stone, obviously, blood red with flesh-colored veining, a Tierra del Fuego agate. Then, at the very last minute, he almost whispered, you know, you remind me so much of my sister, and he closed the door very quickly. People often told Hélène she looked like her grandmother, especially her almond-shaped eyes. She knew Suzanne was Daniel’s favorite sister.

  7

  Wielding an Axe

  IT WASN’T ACTUALLY BOREDOM that had made Hélène give up on The Ferrymen of the Amazon. The scant chapter she’d once read, a dozen or so pages, had made her feel short of breath, stifling under some burden. The story began with a catastrophe: a twin-engine plane flying over the Amazon rain forest stalls and crashes into the trees. The pilot and two photographers are killed, Peter Ashley-Mill is the only survivor. Despite deep wounds to his arm and chest, he manages to find the strength, wielding an axe, to hack his way through the climbers and giant trees, not sure whether he will find any humans, or how they will receive him. Starving, hunched, and in pain, he battles on, sometimes resting his hand on the oozing wound close to his heart, under his torn shirt. When he is collapsing with hunger, he digs up roots. Even though the parrots taunt him, You’re going to die, Peter, you’re going to die, he holds on, determined to survive at all costs so he can report the tragic deaths of his companions. But overcome by exhaustion, pain, and fever, he loses consciousness. A huge anaconda eases down from a branch and slowly wraps itself around his body.

  She didn’t get any farther, but the story haunted her all through her teenage years, she still sometimes dreamed that she was fighting through a hostile jungle, plying her way through the tree trunks and climbers, digging into the ground to find roots, to no avail.

  WITH THE LATE OCTOBER RAINS, the students abandoned their outpost in the Observatory Gardens and withdrew to the Café des Facultés on the corner of rue Joseph Bara. Between lectures, they sat around a table in the cavernous back room, which was often almost empty in the afternoons. One day when all the others had left, Hélène and Guillaume found themselves alone together. He was trying to scoop the dregs of his hot chocolate from the bottom of his cup, and she sat watching him bring his spoon up to his mouth. That was when she admitted, you know, H. R. Sanders is my great-uncle. And she almost immediately wondered whether she’d done the right thing.

  The spoon stopped on the edge of Guillaume’s lips, he looked up at her, what, who did you say, yes, H. R. Sanders, he’s my great-uncle. He looked at her for a long time, scrutinizing her face, her hair, the collar of her jacket, as if looking for proof, a similarity between her and Peter Ashley-Mill, I thought Sanders was American, and as he said American, he spread his arms wide to encompass the great expanses of the Far West. I swear it’s true. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t mentioned it in the early days when they’d
all talked about The Black Insignia.

  Then, just as Jonas would have done, he said, go on, then, tell me what’s he like. She’d never had to describe her great-uncle, of course she could keep quiet about his eccentricities and his collar all askew, but if she was going to paint a flattering portrait she would have to borrow the words her neighbors had used, like brave, valiant, tireless, and she wasn’t up to that. She just explained that H. R. Sanders was a nom de plume, that his real name was Daniel Roche, Guillaume repeated the name, Daniel Roche, and she could tell he was disappointed, it was too ordinary, too sedentary. She had to give more details, for example telling him that he lived in the same building as her on rue Vavin, that it was Roche who’d lent her the garret room. Guillaume put down his spoon and ran a hand through his hair. At last he believed her, she was H. R. Sanders’s great-niece, he looked at her affectionately, almost reverently. Could he bring his Black Insignia books over to her place so she could ask him to write dedications in them, or even, he lowered his voice, could he meet him? She hesitated, these were two different, irreconcilable worlds, and the sight of Daniel Roche, kind of short and slight with his unkempt hair and his gesticulating, would do even less for Guillaume than his real name had. She said he was traveling, but Guillaume was already leaning over the table and kissing her cheek to thank her, as if she were the go-between for an enraptured lover.

  8

  The Black Insignia

  GUILLAUME WENT TO HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE over the long weekend at Halloween and picked up his twenty-three volumes of The Black Insignia, then he came and dropped them with Hélène in a big sports bag. It was the first time they were at her place alone. He looked out the window at the waves of gray rooftops glistening with rain, like an ocean seen through a porthole, you could even hear seagulls crying. Hélène pointed at the windows on the ground floor overlooking the courtyard, H. R. Sanders lived there.

  The books in the bag were definitely the same ones as on her brother’s bookshelves, but dog-eared and held together with tape, and they looked less intimidating in this state. Guillaume picked up the oldest, the most battered of all, on the cover was a picture of Peter bound hand and foot in a canoe and, at either end, an Indian paddling through the eddies and caimans of the Amazon. Why do the Carinaua suddenly drive Peter out, you know the author well, you must know why. She didn’t want to admit that she’d only read the first few pages, afraid he might lose that affectionate look he’d had in his eyes recently. She said I’ve forgotten why, it was so long ago, maybe he did something wrong, offended their moral code or their beliefs, but Guillaume disagreed. She would read it again, while the book was with her, before she handed the series over to Daniel.

  SHE KEPT PUTTING OFF THE MOMENT to introduce Guillaume to her great-uncle, persuading herself she should at least finish The Ferrymen of the Amazon, but the bag stayed zipped up in the corner of her room. The meeting happened without her, by chance, one afternoon in mid-November, when she was taking Jonas home after a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens and Guillaume was waiting in the entrance hall. When she came back downstairs, he’d gone, the door to the cellar was open, and she could hear voices drifting up. The stairs down to the cellar were badly lit, the switch didn’t work, she felt her way with her hands on the walls. Guillaume was down there, at the end of a long dark corridor, with the caretaker, Mrs. Almeida, and Daniel, who was training a flashlight on an electric meter; they were talking about fuses and cutouts. She’d never ventured into the basement, the place looked older than the building above, with vaulted ceilings, a beaten earth floor, and a musty, underground smell. The power cut was complicated, they’d have to call an electrician. By the time Hélène joined them, they were turning back toward the stairs, following Daniel, who lit the way for them. At one point, the beam of his flashlight lit up a side corridor whose walls were not made of the same stone but of cinder blocks, but just as Hélène stepped forward for a closer look, Daniel snapped the flashlight away and, finding she was in darkness, Hélène hurried to catch up with the others.

  When she reemerged into the hallway, Daniel was talking to Guillaume, who was leaning toward him and laughing very loudly. From the look of them you’d have thought they’d known each other for years. Of course they were talking about The Black Insignia, Guillaume was using exaggerated words like admirer, passionate, devoted. He remembered as a teenager going to a bookshop in Marseille where H. R. Sanders was meant to be doing a book signing, but he’d waited in vain, the event was eventually canceled, I’m so sorry, I must have been traveling. Guillaume went up to get his books from Hélène’s room and came back all out of breath from racing up and down the stairs so quickly. Seeing Guillaume with his enormous sports bag, Daniel started laughing, are they all in there, yes, all twenty-three, they’re all battered, I’ve read them so many times, I know them by heart. Daniel opened the bag and took out a few books, how wonderful, the broken spines, the stains and scars, it’s what every writer dreams of. He invited them both for coffee on the last Saturday of the month, he winked at Hélène, don’t worry, I’ve bought some sugar. Guillaume said goodbye to Daniel, calling him Mr. Sanders, Hélène nearly corrected him, but Daniel looked delighted and clasped Guillaume’s hand in both of his for a long time, until next time, my dear, my very dear reader, until next time.

  THEY WENT UP TO HER ROOM, and the corner where the bag had been suddenly looked strangely empty. They shared a packet of biscuits, and Guillaume broke several before they reached his mouth, his hands were shaking slightly, he was still all flustered from meeting the author of The Black Insignia. Hélène was lucky, he’d have liked a great-uncle like that, she nodded and said there’s something I have to admit to you, promise you won’t hate me, he put his hand on his heart, I promise. She’d never read Sanders’s books, she’d never got beyond the third chapter of The Ferrymen of the Amazon. Guillaume gulped down half a biscuit, you’re kidding, tell me you’re kidding, she shook her head, laughing so much it brought tears to her eyes.

  She really knew nothing about the books. She didn’t even know why the series was called The Black Insignia, some sort of death threat maybe, like pirates have, no, not at all, I’ll explain, the insignia is a talisman, a shamanic tattoo, it can protect you from danger but also help you cross into the hereafter. In the most perilous episodes in every book, the insignia reminded Peter he’d brushed with death and it had saved him, and it would give him the strength to continue his battle against the adversities and injustices of this world. It didn’t appear until the fourth chapter of the first book, he could tell her the story.

  They sat down on the floor facing each other, Hélène leaning against her bed, and Guillaume the desk. Sitting with his hands open as if he were holding the book, he started reciting the opening sentences, It was a very bad sign. The pilot was quite sure of it, the note of the engine had changed, and the plane was losing altitude. Hélène stopped Guillaume, he could skip the first three chapters and pick up the story where she’d left off, where Peter has passed out and is about to be throttled by an anaconda.

  An arrow drives through the snake’s head. Members of the Carinaua, a completely isolated tribe, save Peter’s life. They carry him, still unconscious, to the hut of their shaman, Yomi. When Peter comes around several days later, Yomi’s remedies have already healed his wounds. He finds his left forearm has been tattooed with a wide bracelet design of geometric shapes, as worn by all the men in the tribe. He regains his strength, the Indians teach him their language, and the old cacique Umoro treats him like his own son. And then all of a sudden, with no explanation, their faces harden, they blindfold Peter, bind him hand and foot on a canoe, and send him across the Amazon, which is as wide as an ocean. Umoro stands on the bank for a long time, bow in hand, full of menace, as if Peter might throw himself into the waters and swim back. The hero continues on his way, reaches a town, and discovers that he was believed dead. Doctors describe the way his wounds have healed as miraculous, a major pharmaceuticals company finances an e
xpedition to locate the Carinaua and their mysterious remedy. Out of love for mankind, Peter agrees to be their guide, but the team’s arrogance makes him change his mind and, when they’re close to their goal, he slips away to warn the Indians. As he draws near to the village, trying to remember friendly words of greeting in the Carinaua language, an arrow whistles past his neck and plants itself in his backpack.

  Guillaume looked up to read the effects of the suspense on Hélène’s face. She got to her feet, she didn’t want to hear any more.

  9

  A Block of Soap

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, Hélène spotted Daniel talking to the man from the hardware store on his doorstep on rue Bréa. Since Daniel’s return she’d often come across him in the neighborhood, he was never alone, perhaps drinking mint tea in the little grocery, or enjoying a Japanese beer with the florist in front of her display, or having lunch on a café terrace with a homeless person. He seemed to know them all, was on first-name terms with the shopkeepers, patted them on the shoulder, joked with them, he was almost always the one doing most of the talking, probably telling them about his latest travels. She felt he overdid it, as usual, gesticulating, making a fool of himself. She tried to make sure he didn’t see her but wasn’t always successful.