Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  After that, there were no more documents, let alone secrets of any kind. The case was dismissed.

  It wasn’t, then, until 1934 that Stavisky, after fleeing to Chamonix, picked up a gun at the end of a very long arm and shot himself. There then proceeded a general overhaul of the government ministers, many of whom were far too close for comfort to the nasty little affair. The right wing accused the left of murdering Stavisky in order to protect their own. In an effort to reestablish their integrity, Police Chief Jean Chappe was dismissed, further inciting the ire of the right, and directly causing the right-wing uprising of February 6, 1934—perhaps the most blatant abuse of police power the country had ever known.

  All of this on the price of a glass necklace.

  AFTER THAT, NO ONE seemed to know the man. Even, or especially, Stavisky’s well-positioned friends (the friends he had so conscientiously made precisely because they were so dependable in their continued refusal to embarrass themselves). If presented with a photograph, they could not recognize him. There was no paper trail of anyone having any involvement with him at all. The fake bonds, the advertising contracts, the business luncheons—these were all now otherwise accounted for. So that was the great mystery, in the end: the way Le Beau Sacha had been absorbed into his own story. That he disappeared, having taken on—like the Empress’s jewels—only the most imaginary value.

  As in the de Maupassant story of the same theme: the one about the poor woman, who borrows a beautiful diamond necklace from a wealthy friend, which, over the course of the evening she wears it, is either stolen or lost. She is, of course, forced to replace it, and at such tremendous cost that she and her husband spend the rest of their days indebted to the hockshop broker. Perhaps you remember by now (or, if you do not, will have guessed) that the story ends only after our unfortunate heroine encounters the woman from whom she borrowed the necklace and discovers that (though that woman is now, unwittingly, the proprietor of a genuine diamond necklace) the original had been made out of glass.

  We are always, perhaps—as the poet Maurice Bonheur would later reflect to Alden, at the height of the war—as in this story, fooled twice. But not as the story would have it: as though we existed outside the story’s frame and were able, therefore, to observe ourselves—our fortunes and misfortunes, whatever they may be—from that fixed distance. No, on the contrary. We exist very much within the story’s folds. We are (the poet said) both women at once; on the one hand, believing, and paying, for what is in fact worth nothing at all, and on the other hand—unknowingly, unwittingly—proprietors of that which is worth inestimably more than we ever could have guessed.

  —

  THEN —AS IT ALWAYS HAPPENS, WITHOUT ANY SEEMING PROGRESSION by which they might later have accounted for its passing—four years went by.

  IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1940; the tenth of June of that year, to be exact. A day in which—watching from the window of Jack and Paige’s second-story apartment as the clouds of an impending summer storm darkened the streets—Alden waited. For what, he could never later be sure. Most Americans he knew had left the city some months before. He himself had received an urgent telegram from the Judge at the beginning of January, when things began to look increasingly grim, insisting that he immediately resign his post and return home.

  Will make all arrangements, the telegram had assured him. Return on first available flight.

  Alden had let the telegram sit unanswered on the window ledge of his seventh-floor flat; then—very carefully one morning—he tipped it over the side, watching as it skittered down the gleaming metal roof and was lost.

  IT WAS ANOTHER WEEK before he sent a terse reply—stating simply that, as he could see no immediate reason for it, he had no intention of returning home.

  Sutton had applauded the decision. “You must tell me absolutely everything,” she insisted, every time she wrote.

  What he didn’t tell her was how often, now that the war had actually arrived, he regretted his decision. How often he thought wistfully after the Judge’s telegram—churned into mud by then, no doubt, in a neighboring courtyard somewhere.

  FOR WEEKS, JACK HAD been dead set on joining what was left of the French Army. They were still holding the line, just south of Chartres: Why didn’t Alden come along?

  Well, for one thing there was the notice from the embassy indicating that, if the Germans took Paris (as there was now every indication they would), both he and Jack would be expected to report to the office in Vichy—where U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt planned to immediately reconvene.

  Then there was Paige’s sister, who had been telephoning every day, urging all of them to join her in Châteaudun.

  Jack had scoffed at that idea. Sit out the war! he’d said, shaking his head in amusement and disbelief. You wouldn’t catch me dead! But he had not yet left to join the army, and Paige had not yet left to join her sister in Châteaudun. As usual, their conflicted impulses and desires held them in check. Even as the sirens screamed and the Stukas fell, and the people rushed, in every imaginable direction, into the street, they only continued to wait. Alden—having nothing to propel him, naturally, in one direction over any other—waited with them, feeling only (as he later recalled it) a sort of dull alarm, akin to boredom.

  All day they remained, smoking cigarettes, sipping vermouth (everything else having long ago been emptied), and watching out the window as the street roiled below. It was stinking hot. Paige wore only a light chemise over a pair of slacks she had rolled to the knee and it was possible to see, beneath it, her very large brown nipples.

  This is absolute madness, she said, for at least the fifteenth time that hour. If it wasn’t for the two of you I would be well out of this.

  Carol had already left, back to Ohio, by then. In response, Dick had barricaded himself (though not yet literally) inside.

  Oh, it’s my fault? roared Jack in reply. It’s still a free country, he said—though (he checked his watch with a dramatic flick of his wrist) I wouldn’t wait too much longer now—

  From there the fight escalated, until Paige wound up poised above Jack, wielding the nearly empty bottle of vermouth. His hands grasped around her thin wrists, Jack held her off easily, but still, it was Paige who seemed to maintain the upper hand, and in the end it was she who came out victorious. Alden did not recall later how the decision was made. The bottle was replaced on the kitchen table, a few scattered things were packed into bags; they were on their way.

  JACK HAD HIS ARIÈS, which he was very proud of, and they climbed in and revved the motor and began the slow push out of the city. They never got up any real speed, but they didn’t stop, either—if they had, they would have become hopelessly bogged down and never would have got started again.

  Everyone wanted a ride. They held up baskets of clothes or dishes, or sometimes, rarely, fistfuls of damp banknotes in offering.

  Américain! they shouted. It was always a mystery to them how the French always knew, but they did. Even at thirty miles an hour, or perhaps because of it, they knew: S’il vous plait! they cried. But they didn’t stop, and once they left the city limits they made good progress—arriving at Chartres just before dusk.

  —

  ANYONE WHO HAS EVER APPROACHED THAT CITY WILL REMEMBER THE two spires of the Notre-Dame; the way they rise up from the surrounding fields, as if from the very center of the earth. Everything else seems to spread from those two points in the landscape, flat and empty. It’s strange how that is: how the eye, when it fixes on something—just as it fixes on it, and indeed in order to do so—causes everything else to fall away. That the central point toward which the eye is drawn, whatever it is, in this way both creates and eliminates the landscape. Alden was thinking about that. About how, if he ever wrote a poem again, something he had not done in a long time, he would try to write something that expressed that idea in some way.

  How would it be possible to re-create it, he thought: the authority with which, in a single breath, the landscape absolved its
elf of mystery and assembled itself around the soaring spires of the Notre-Dame?

  A brief, unsettling lull between air strikes overhead only added to the effect. For a few moments, as they drew near the city, there was just the hum of the car and the low strain of the vehicles in front and behind them as they rolled, in a long train, through the ancient gates.

  Yes, how would it ever be possible to describe it? In a way that would not, that is, be just a transfusion of images, which (in accordance with the dimming of memory) could only ever, at best, be representative of— therefore, auxiliary to—the thing that it was? As Alden contemplated this, turning it about in his brain—the way that one might move finally past representation in a poem, if such a thing were possible, or if it could only be a matter of something like active intent? … of, that is, the desire to achieve such a thing, while the actual image or object was forced to remain forever absent from the page—another low rumble erupted from somewhere in the vicinity of the city center, as they continued their slow approach. This time the noise came as though from below them, rather than above—as though the earth had begun to crack open; as though in another moment, if they had looked down, they would have seen the ground open and yawning below them, and would have had no choice but to plunge below.

  ONLY THEN DID THEY realize that the city was on fire. They smelled it first, but then, as they parked the car and made their way along the river toward the cathedral, where Alden was sincerely hoping to find the Canon Delaporte, with whom he had a casual acquaintance, they saw it, too. A dull red glow across the line of the horizon.

  Alden knew the canon because of Emmett. It had been just before he’d left for Spain that the two of them had gone to Chartres to meet him—the leading authority on the cathedral’s stained glass. They had gone to view the pieces and hear what was known of their history. They spent hours in the church together, sketching the windows so they would remember them. Alden still had those sketches somewhere in his notebooks. He had an idea of someday starting a great poem cycle that would be somehow based on their meticulous structure: part music, part story, part science, part light. Now he thought about those notebooks in his abandoned Paris flat—he had not thought to take them with him—and wondered whether he would ever see them again. He found himself curiously ambivalent to the thought that he might not. It seemed an appropriate sacrifice. In fact, he hoped desperately in that moment that they might be destroyed utterly, in order that he himself might be spared. If—he pledged—he was indeed spared, he would start all over again; something truly beautiful this time. And though he felt a little doubtful and guilty about what, in the scheme of things, seemed a very cheap bargain, he did not know what else to ask for, or to offer in return, and by that time they were very near the church anyway, so he put the thing out of his mind and began to worry instead that the canon would have already fled the city, or that he might not recognize him—or care to help, even if he did—and any number of other small doubts and apprehensions also passed through his mind.

  When at last they reached them, they found the cathedral doors open but no one inside. The great arch of the ceiling as they entered struck Alden as far higher and the inside vaster and emptier than he remembered. This, he soon realized, could be attributed to the fact that where the stained glass had once been, only air now blew through the tall arched frames. On one of the gaping ledges a bird nested. The pews were still set up toward the back, but the labyrinth in the center of the cathedral had been cleared, and their footsteps echoed as they crossed it, resounding louder than they otherwise might have because of how empty the church—with the removal of the stained glass—had become.

  It was their luck that, just before they reached the back stairs, which led down to the crypt, they met the Canon Delaporte himself. He did not seem particularly surprised to see them, but neither did Alden detect any flicker of recognition—even when he introduced himself, reminding him of their acquaintance. In any case, the canon nodded solemnly when Alden spoke, and invited them to follow.

  In the crypt, thirty or so other refugees—including four postmen, who, like Jack, were intent on joining the French forces outside the city—had already gathered. The space was indeed, as the canon had warned, cramped, owing not only to the large number of refugees, but to the nearly one thousand packing boxes in which, as they soon learned, the great cathedral windows had been packed away for safekeeping— just as they had been during the aerial bombardments of 1918. Canon Delaporte had supervised the removal of the glass himself on that occasion, and for a second time had, he told them, preemptively ordered the removal of the glass in early 1939. Not one piece had been damaged in the process and the canon fully expected them to survive another war.

  DUSK HAD LONG SINCE settled, but down in the crypt everything was timeless and strange. Soon after they arrived, Jack departed in the company of three of the postmen in order to help collect food from the center —as well as to find out what he could about the location of the French troops, which he and the postmen intended to join the next day. Most of the shops in the city had been abandoned by then, their windows and doors blasted, so that finding provisions to bring back to the crypt was a simple matter of locating a vendor whose stocks had not been picked over too thoroughly by everyone else. But, only minutes after Jack and the postmen had left the crypt, the sirens again began to wail. Paige gave out a startled cry when she heard them, to which Alden responded by pressing his hand into hers.

  He’ll be all right, he said—too quickly. It would have been better if he’d paused a moment as if he’d really thought about it, he realized, too late.

  JACK DID NOT RETURN until many hours later. When he did, the postmen were not with him, and when he was asked about their whereabouts Jack only shook his head. He was pale as a ghost and clutched his arm tightly to his chest, not speaking. A full minute must have passed before finally he said: I’m hit. Then he just stood there, as before, staring around. There did not seem to be any blood.

  Let’s take a look.

  He held stubbornly on to his arm and wouldn’t let anyone touch it. That night, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, they left him alone. But by morning his eyes were rolling up in his head when he tried to look at anything straight, and finally he let the canon near. When the canon touched him on the arm, Jack screamed. It seemed improbable that a person could make so much noise. Especially down there in the crypt, where the air had become so rarefied and thin, his voice boomed out around them like it was ten or twelve men screaming instead of just one.

  Hush, said the canon. Get some iodine.

  We have none.

  Some rum.

  There’s none.

  Jack continued to scream. Finally, the canon managed to pry out the object that had been lodged in Jack’s arm, cleaned the wound as best he could, then wrapped it up in a piece of clean white cloth. He held up the object for Jack to examine.

  La coupable. It was a twisted piece of metal, no bigger than his thumb. Jack held out his workable hand and the canon handed the object to him.

  Later in the evening, with the help of some wine—the one thing of which they had plenty—Jack was feeling better and he told them of the confusion he had witnessed above. The two hotels, he said, were packed to overflowing. There must have been hundreds of people in the streets—camped out at the door to the Hôtel de France because there was no more room inside—shouting for those they had lost. Cows, pigs, and horses grazed aimlessly through the streets. There was still fierce competition for the loot that had not yet gone bad in the shops—and for some of it that had. One had to be quick, as it was all being snatched up by semi-organized gangs in order either to be distributed or sold. One man, posing as the manager of the Hôtel de France (the actual manager had abandoned the city some days before), was busy selling the entire contents of the wine cellar at twenty francs per bottle.

  War, said Jack, when he reported this, is the great equalizer. For twenty francs, one might have enjoyed e
verything from the finest cognac to the most undrinkable table wine tonight.

  AMONG THOSE WHO, IN the chaos, had fled the city was the bishop himself. The prefect, Moulin, showed up at the cathedral to share the news with the canon shortly after Jack’s return.

  The coward, he said. The rogue. Everyone is abandoning the city. Imagine. The senior doctor leaps into his car yesterday saying, Every man for himself. The bishop does not surprise me—but the doctor? With the hospitals the way they are, he said, full to overflowing? It is unforgivable.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING JACK LEFT WITH THE REMAINING POSTMAN TO join the French troops directly south of the city. Alden went along.

  It was nightfall before they found any sign of them: a ratty, disorganized unit of something less than fifty men. If they had not insisted upon it, no one would have believed they were still at war.

  A day later—the twelfth of June—the air sirens stopped working and there was no warning except the bombs themselves as they rained down on the city. For two days, then, with orders neither to advance nor to retreat, they watched from a distance as the city burned. Finally, the dark clouds, which had threatened for as many days—indistinguishable, above them, from the billowing clouds of smoke that rose from the burning city—broke, and a thunder and lightning storm drenched the fields.

  It was not until the sixteenth of June—the Germans just on the horizon—that they finally fled. For days there had been talk among the men of heading south, toward Spain (indeed, many French soldiers had already departed in that direction), but that was the direction from which the German troops were also arriving—it seemed like walking into a trap. It was Gilles Dupuis, from Bourgogne, a small man with a closely trimmed mustache and a nervous tic, which made his eye flutter when he spoke, who proposed heading west instead. Crossing over into Switzerland at Lebetain—a border area he said he knew well. Jack was too weak to go along. He held his side, which was beginning to stink under the bandage he refused to change, and said to Alden, You’ll do fine without me. I bet the Germans ain’t half as bad as hoofing it to Switzerland or Spain. So Alden went. Traveling west with Gilles and three other French soldiers, camping in the open air, and listening to the rattle of artillery fire in the distance as the Germans, behind them, slowly closed in.