Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I live in that direction,” she said pointing to the right, toward an island in the middle of the river. “The spires you see just over the buildings, that’s Notre-Dame.”

  We walked across the Pont d’Arcole and over to Notre-Dame, then into the garden behind it and across the small bridge to the Île Saint-Louis. Elena had an apartment on the quai d’Anjou.

  “They say you live here,” she told me, “if you can’t decide between the Left Bank and the Right.”

  It was a small apartment, but adequate, with a tiny kitchenette and a separate narrow bedroom. It was stuffed with books, some of them in French, but most in English, most of them by Americans. Perhaps, even then, Quality was formulating itself in my sister’s mind.

  She had a small wooden desk where she kept her typewriter. From the window beside it, one could see the Seine flowing slowly by and beyond it the wall of graceful buildings that made up the Right Bank.

  “It’s very beautiful here,” I said.

  “Very different from New York.”

  “It’s not as gray,” I said casually. “It seems smaller. It doesn’t have New York’s … what would you call it? New York’s monumentality.”

  Elena nodded.

  “You don’t feel as dwarfed,” I added. “Paris doesn’t look as if it’s all about to fall on top of you, the way New York does.”

  Elena nodded again, rather listlessly, no more than polite under the barrage of my tourist’s patter.

  Finally I ran out of things to say. I could not hold back any longer. “Elena,” I said, “when are you coming home?”

  Elena removed her glasses and placed them on the desk beside the typewriter. “I don’t know, William.”

  “You’re not thinking of becoming a French national, are you?”

  Elena shook her head. “No. One does not become French the way one becomes American. You can’t just have some bureaucrat sign a paper, any more than you could become Jewish that way.”

  “So you will be coming back to the United States at some time?” I asked tentatively.

  “I really don’t know, William,” Elena said. Then she stood up and went into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of wine. “Shall we make a toast?”

  “I don’t mean to press you on this.” I smiled. “It’s just that we miss you, Elena. Especially me. I miss you.”

  “I feel the same way,” Elena said. “But I still have some thinking to do.” She uncorked the wine and poured each of us a glass. Then she lifted hers. “To a precious reunion,” she said.

  I touched my glass to hers. “Yes.”

  More than any place she had ever lived, Elena’s Paris apartment seemed fully to represent her. The walls were bare except for a few paintings, which she probably had purchased from some sidewalk exhibition. A radio sat precariously on a small table in one corner, and near the fireplace was a large wing chair, clearly too large for taste but just right for comfort. A lamp stood beside it, the bulb shielded by a plain white shade. Beside the chair was a square wooden box filled almost to the top with manuscript pages.

  I nodded toward it. “The new book?”

  “Something I’m working on. A novel.”

  “Set in Paris?”

  Elena shook her head. “Only partly.” She took a sip from her glass, glanced out the window, her eyes following a barge as it made its way down the Seine, then turned back to me. “There’s a darker side to nostalgia,” she said. “Remembering the unrightable wrong.”

  I had no doubt that she was referring to Elizabeth. Her face was not drawn or strained; nor did she seem particularly distressed by this sudden allusion to the unfortunate circumstances that had finally culminated in Elizabeth’s fall from the window.

  “Do you think about her often?” I asked, almost casually.

  Elena nodded. “I think about the situation, more than anything else. I don’t just think about Elizabeth, and I certainly don’t see that night over and over again in my mind. It’s not like that.” For a moment she searched for the words. “I think about the proper way something like this should be thought about. I’m curious about how the mind reacts to such circumstances. We tend to call such a response either guilt or indifference. But there’s a great deal in between those two.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I said. I took another sip from my glass, a gesture that seemed almost whimsical compared to the somberness that had overtaken my sister.

  She looked at me seriously. “How about you, William? Do you think about Elizabeth very much?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I’m not overcome by it. I suppose I feel, well, just a kind of general sadness, perhaps a sense of waste.”

  Elena was watching me steadily. It was the sort of gaze that had always made me uncomfortable, as if my sister expected more than I could give and felt a kind of sober regret that I was both so limited, which was one thing, and so unconcerned by those limits, which was quite another. Elena did not expect you to answer her questions, as Jason wrote in his memoir, but she expected you to share them. When you did not, she could not wholly conceal her disappointment — the marathoner’s regret for the short-distance runner.

  I took another sip of wine, dodging behind my glass like a thief around a corner. “Well, so you’re writing about Elizabeth, then?”

  “Not exactly,” Elena said. She seemed reluctant to go further. Finally she added, “But I think it has to do with Elizabeth, with certain questions her death brings to mind.”

  “Like what?”

  Again Elena hesitated. She glanced once more toward the window, but this time her eyes did not linger there. “Do you believe in God, William?”

  “No.”

  “When did you stop believing in Him?”

  ‘‘I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Our household was not exactly what you would call religious.”

  “But the atmosphere in Standhope was somewhat religious. Everyone believed in God.”

  “I guess they did. What are you getting at?”

  “Well, there must have been a moment when you suddenly said to yourself, as I did somewhere along the way, all right, there is no God.”

  “There probably was such a moment.”

  “Now, suppose something happened and you also came to say something else, if only inwardly, if only to yourself.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say, all right, there is no meaning.”

  I shook my head. “You’d have to turn away from that sort of conclusion, Elena.”

  “Because you couldn’t live with it?”

  “Not happily.”

  “I’m not talking about living happily. I am talking about living at all.”

  “Are you asking me if I think there is any meaning in life, Elena?” I asked. Then I laughed. “That question is so grand that it is juvenile, the sort of thing one hears in freshman philosophy classes.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Elena said. “But suppose you confronted a situation in which you had to be reborn morally, had to construct a moral world from the ground up. What would you rely upon to tell you what to do?”

  “Experience. Learning. Who knows?”

  Elena nodded. “All those things, of course,” she said. “But how would they be put together? What would be emphasized? Which perceptions could be trusted as being objective? Where, in the end, does the mind meet the conscience?”

  I wagged my finger at her. “You know, Sam warned me that the French air would get to you,” I said, “that you’d end up in some cloudy philosophical mist and never write another word an American could understand.”

  The lightness of my remark seemed to pull Elena up short, almost as if she had taken it as a form of gentle scolding, the old professor warning his bright young undergraduate student away from mighty themes. She straightened herself slightly in her chair and crossed her legs.

  “How is Sam, anyway?” she asked.

  “He’s so busy running the business of publishing that he hardly ever reads a book,” I said. “Miriam’s
the senior editor now, and Sam even tacked a vice-presidency to her title.”

  Elena stared at me silently. Her eyes had a way of moving over you, as if molding your features as she looked at them, like a sculptor’s fingers structuring the clay.

  “Elena,” I said, “I didn’t mean to be dismissive about the things you were discussing.”

  “That’s all right,” Elena said. She smiled. “Where would you like to eat tonight?”

  She never returned to the larger questions that were uppermost in her mind that afternoon and probably had been uppermost for quite some time. Instead we talked of Miriam and Alexander, Mary and Sam and Jack MacNeill. She even asked about Joe Tully. She did not mention her book again, and before we left for dinner that evening she gathered up the little box with its manuscript and tucked it into a drawer beneath her desk. I would hear no more of it until it arrived on Miriam’s desk almost two years later.

  We walked from Elena’s apartment to the Left Bank, and in the Paris twilight, she pointed out the sights: the offices of Gallimard, her French publisher; the cafés Hemingway had made famous, the apartment of André Gide, Rodin’s Balzac, standing in the open on a little island in the boulevard Raspail, as if it were of no more importance than a public fountain.

  “I think I love Paris,” I said.

  Elena smiled. “Julien says that all men love Paris but the Scots.”

  I turned to her instantly. “Julien?”

  “You will meet him,” Elena said, and added nothing else.

  She didn’t have to, for in only a few minutes we were all sitting in the small restaurant Elena had selected near the Odéon. He was tall and rather somber, one of Elena’s perennial older men, the only sort to whom, I think, she was ever really attracted after she had grown too old for Jack and for all his kind. He was wearing a plain dark suit to which he added absolutely nothing, not so much as a tip of handkerchief peeping from his pocket. He was almost entirely gray, but his face seemed somewhat younger, though plainly weathered, a bit by time, and as it turned out, a great deal by circumstance. To say the very least, he was charming, modest, soft spoken, his voice always whispery, as if insisting that no great importance should be attached to the things he said. He had a very slight French accent, but otherwise his English was impeccable. He even used the subjunctive correctly and was quite careful, even in conversation, that his infinitives not be split.

  His full name was Julien Tavernier, and he had been a journalist before the war. After the Occupation, his newspaper had come under the editorial control of the Germans. Under such conditions, he had refused to continue in its employment. A rival at the paper had been discreetly informed on him, and he had been picked up by the police. Though not particularly political, he had been suspected of Communist sympathies, and during the first few days of his detention he had been tortured.

  “It is an odd thing, torture,” he said, rather matter-of-factly, later in the evening. “You’re in a room, you see, and things are being done to you that are illegal. But since the mind is slow in understanding sudden changes in reality, you wait for some officer to enter the interrogation room. You know this will happen. You even know what this person will look like. He will be in uniform, with many medals. He will look about, scowling, and he will say; ‘What is this? This is an outrage! This is not Turkey, gentlemen, this is France! Release this man at once.’” He smiled and took a draw on his cigarette. “And do you know, this does happen. This man of dreams comes into the room; he is in uniform with the medals. He does look about, and he is scowling, and he says, ‘You are going too slowly. You must step up the procedure. We must have an answer from this pig by nightfall.’” He crushed his cigarette into the small glass ashtray on the table and laughed.

  Still later he spoke of his first marriage, which had been a disaster. “My wife and I did not care for one another,” he said, smiling delicately at Elena. “This made divorce thinkable. We did not have children, which made it relatively harmless. And we were not Catholics, which made it possible.”

  Through it all, Elena listened quietly, sometimes adding a comment of some sort, to which Julien usually gave immediate assent. Once she spoke at some length on the particular difficulties of expatriation, and Julien listened attentively, at times adding an opposing view, with the patience of the native before the alien’s distress. “Your complaints are quite subtle, Elena,” he said finally. “Usually Americans are most bitterly affronted by the harsh flavor of our cigarettes.”

  After dinner we found a sidewalk café and sat sipping drinks, while the traffic whirled down boulevard Montparnasse. Julien mentioned those more distant attractions which the fearful, nervous tourist might miss: Balzac’s house in Passy, the tombs of the distinguished dead at Père Lachaise. “You should not spend all your time in the Louvre,” he said. “It’s a great palace, but a poor museum.” He waved his hand. “And forget about Napoleon’s tomb. All that dark marble. It is appropriate for an megalomaniac but most unsuitable for a man.” He shook his head. “Walk the streets. There, you will find Paris.”

  It was almost midnight before we left the café. I expected to take a taxi back to my hotel, but Julien put his hand on my shoulder as we walked down the boulevard and brought the three of us to a halt. He looked at Elena.

  “Perhaps we should drive up to Montmartre,” he said. “See the lights of Paris from the steps of Sacré-Coeur.” He turned to me. “Would that please you, William?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then it shall be done.”

  It took only a few minutes to traverse the city. I sat in the back seat of the car and listened as Julien and Elena pointed out various attractions. Then we made our ascent up the highest hill of Paris and parked under the dome of the basilica.

  “You can see the entire city from here,” Julien said as he got out of the car.

  For a time the three of us stood staring down at the Paris lights. It was very quiet and it was very beautiful.

  “I once thought of Paris as changeless, as immortal,” Julien said softly, gazing out over the sea of rooftops. “And then the Germans came, and it was transformed into an evil city.” He looked at Elena. “It cannot be reclaimed now. Not after the deportations. It has lost its virtue. Even the light is different. The silver’s gone.”

  Then he turned quickly and walked back to the car. Elena and I remained on the steps of the cathedral.

  “He is an interesting man, Elena,” I said.

  Elena glanced anxiously toward the car. “I’m afraid for him.”

  I took her arm. “Come, let’s go back.”

  Julien smiled as we joined him. “Forgive my mood,” he said. “I don’t mean to be so dramatic.” He shrugged. “It’s just that coming over to the restaurant this evening I passed the Hôtel de Ville and all the flags were waving, the Tricolor, you know? It seemed so hollow. Everyone has forgotten what we did, we, the French, here and in Vichy. They have forgotten the collaboration, the roundups, the informants.” He shook his head. “We are a forgetful people, we French, don’t you think?”

  “Like everyone else,” I said. “The French are part of a forgetful species.”

  I glanced at Elena, then back at Julien. It could not have been more clear that they needed to be alone.

  “I think I’ll go back to my hotel now,” I said. I faked a yawn. “I’m not used to these late Parisian nights.”

  My symposium had provided accommodations at the Grand Hotel. Julien and Elena let me off in front, and Julien got out and shook my hand, while Elena remained in the car. “Your dear sister has kept me from brooding too much,” he said with a slight smile. “For this, I am grateful, you see?”

  I nodded.

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. “You Americans are better than I thought.” He continued to watch me seriously, his hand gripping my shoulder more tightly. “You are in Paris only a few days. That is too bad. I must go to Stockholm tomorrow. But perhaps you shall return to France one day, and I shall see you the
n, yes?”

  “I hope so, Julien.”

  He nodded. “Well, bonsoir.”

  I never saw Julien again. A year later, Elena provided the details in a letter designed to convey the minimum of emotion:

  I’m afraid this letter brings bad news. Julien died in his apartment a week ago. It appears to have been a suicide. The gas jets were opened. It was quick and painless, and I think it is very much what he wanted. He was so appalled by events surrounding the war that he found it difficult to separate himself from them. He entered what I would call a metaphysical loneliness. He called it “brooding” and liked to dismiss it as self-pity. But it was actually despair of the deepest sort, the kind in which there is no remedy by means of personal life. He lived in this dark cocoon. More and more in the past months, he could not get outside it. I tried to be of service. Possibly, I did not want to repeat any of the mistakes I made regarding Elizabeth. But I could not remake his country’s past, which is, I think, what would have been required if he were to have been saved. I know your impulse will be to rush to Paris to comfort me. That is not necessary. Julien’s death is very sad, but we had seen little of each other in the past few months. He had become increasingly remote, his isolation almost absolute. I can only think of his death as inevitable. I do not believe that death follows me wherever I go, or that everyone I touch turns suicidal. Such ideas are romantic and in the end suggest a grotesque sense of one’s own power and importance. I am well, and working steadily.

  In her biography, Martha reprinted this letter in its entirety. She saw it as emblematic of the icy state into which Elena had fallen since Elizabeth’s death. As Jason once told me, this makes good reading but poor analysis, and I think that if Elena’s letter can be said to suggest anything, it is the strength of character she had achieved at this point in her life. The letter reflects the meditative tone of a mind that had by then become infinitely enlarged by the act of meditation, a consciousness as repulsed by the melodrama of grief as it was, by nature, attracted to the sober contemplation of it. “When I think of Timon’s grave,” Dorothea Moore says in the final passages of Inwardness, “I do not think of its particularity. I do not think, There, below me, is my son, Timon, his features grotesquely altered by the opera of their decay. I allow no outward show to parody my inward grief, nor claim uniqueness for my loss, nor sound a trumpet to my guilt. Neither do I ask that all the world be reconvened into its primordial mass so that, beginning once again with the first light of that first explosive day, all that has come before could rearrange itself, twist and turn and wheel, and so at last, through lost millennia, deliver to my door this day a living son. Oh, Timon, I am sorry; but not alone for you.”