Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  You see, for him, it is always the first time, she explained to Alden on the first afternoon they fell into step together and turned several circles around the pond in unison, before departing in their different directions—she to her grandfather’s house, and he to the OKW office at the Hôtel Lutetia. Each time, Marie-Claude said to Alden, it is my only chance. Over and over again, I have just that one—that single chance.

  AT FIRST FRANZ ECKELMANN had difficulty placing Alden within the drama he had made of his earliest days. Though he obediently withdrew his watery gaze from the facing window (the Eckelmann apartment was on the second floor, so there was never anything on any occasion to see there but the three facing walls of the neighboring buildings, their windows always blank and dark, but still Franz Eckelmann gazed with interest, as though he hoped to see something extraordinary there), his expression did not at first seem to acknowledge Alden at all, or the introduction that had just then—by Marie-Claude—been made. He looked at Alden in the same way that he had, just a moment before, gazed into the empty courtyard. As if his face were only the face of an opposing wall—his features the darkened windows that, at any moment, by some flicker of light (Franz Eckelmann kept his eyes trained on him intently, lest it be so), might reveal the contents of those unlit rooms. Might cast in shadow a significant shape—the recognizable form of a man inside— some proof, at last, that the world was indeed inhabited! A look of perplexed confusion followed: Franz Eckelmann’s eyes narrowed in accusation and alarm. But this passed quickly; some light had indeed been cast, not from within Alden, but instead from somewhere deep within Franz Eckelmann himself.

  Klein Felix, he said. And pressed his hand more firmly into Alden’s own. Then another sentence followed this greeting in German, which Alden did not understand. Later, Marie-Claude translated it to him as: You’ve grown tall.

  The strain that was evident on Franz Eckelmann’s face at that moment no doubt corresponded to the stretch of almost a full generation that his recognition of Alden as his young nephew, Felix, entailed. But it was a strain, and an apparent confusion, that was evidently also mixed with pleasure. Alden did not at all mind being “Felix” in that room. It made him feel close to the old man, and thus, also, to Marie-Claude.

  It was by powerful coincidence that several months later the real Felix arrived at Franz Eckelmann’s door. In fact, he was not Eckelmann’s nephew but his nephew’s son, also named Felix—a young man of twenty-one who had been stationed near Forges-les-Bains, just about forty kilometers outside Paris. Whenever he could arrange it after that first visit, he would come into the city and call on his great-uncle, Franz Eckelmann, whom he had never before had the opportunity to meet, and his cousins, Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Claude. So there were two Felixes that came and went in the Eckelmann house, each interchangeable for old Franz Eckelmann, according to Marie-Claude. This made them laugh, for Alden and the German soldier could not have been more different. Though Alden was, by comparison, rather small in stature, he had always prided himself in having a full head of thick dark hair; the German’s hair, so blond it was almost white, was already thinning noticeably at the crown. Also, when it came to personality, the German hardly had one. Marie-Claude reported back, whenever he visited and she took her obligatory stroll with him along the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Notre-Dame, that he was—as Alden had suspected—“just as stiff as he looks.”

  —

  WHEN MARIE-CLAUDE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, THE OIL LAMP ON HER bedside table had been knocked from its stand, lighting her bed on fire while she slept. She had woken to heat and to smell, but not to pain. Her father, François Grenadier, awoke to the same smell and rushed into the room to find his daughter’s bed ablaze with light. She was awake, her face frozen in the way that a much younger child’s might be in the moment after a fall, when—unsure whether to laugh or to cry— the child awaits the response of those around her. Based on this early reaction to pain and other stimuli, it would seem that emotional responses of any kind are only an effect produced by another effect. And just so, it was not until Monsieur Grenadier actually entered his daughter’s room—until he, with a look of horror that was itself both cause and effect, threw himself on his daughter’s bed—that Marie-Claude screamed.

  It was upon this scene that Marie-Thérèse entered—her husband’s and daughter’s faces (each reflecting the alarm of the other) illuminated by the flames, which still licked at the edges of the sheets where the weight of François Grenadier’s body had not yet succeeded in smothering them. So gripped by horror was Grenadier himself in those moments, he failed to notice that he held his daughter’s hand so tightly that one of its small bones was crushed. Indeed, this damage was discovered only several days later—on account of the more severe trauma suffered by the lower part of her body, where she had been badly burned.

  Yes, it was fear and not reason that had propelled Monsieur Grenadier. Though he had been trained as a chemist to respond to such emergency situations, he afterward claimed quite emphatically that at the moment he saw his daughter blazing in her bed every trace of prior knowledge escaped him. He had, he insisted, been quite empty of every thought and sensibility. At that moment, he said, it was as though he were hardly human.

  What is it that makes us human, after all? he would ask whoever had assembled on that particular occasion. But, nosce te ipsum—“know thyself”? My dear gentlemen, I can assure you that I did not know anything at all at that moment—much less “myself.”

  But Monsieur Grenadier, someone would respond, it is clear to me that the knowledge you had already over your lifetime acquired—all the traits and conditions of your being human—your education and training, for example, your sensibilities and affections—were so far ingrained in you that you acted based on all of those factors combined. What appeared to you as impulse was in fact a very complex combination of causes that contributed, as they continue to contribute, to your very specific and accountable behaviors and reactions. Even now as we sit in this room, it is clear that though we do not carefully consider each gesture, each expression, or even—much to our listeners’ disadvantage at times (a chuckle)—each word, they do not simply arise out of the ether. There is not simply: pain, simply: horror, simply: reaction, relief, or joy. All of these things are necessarily accounted for in a long chain of cause and effect whether or not we, at any given moment, can trace that lineage and speak for it with any confidence ourselves.

  Well, I am only telling you how it was, Monsieur Grenadier would say. I understand your reasoning, dear sir, and sympathize with your assessment—it is no doubt astute. However, I equally cannot give over the notion that in those moments I suddenly found myself outside of all categories by which we ordinarily seek to judge and understand the actions and reactions of men.

  But nonetheless, someone else would put in, you must admit that the course of action you followed was the correct one. It is quite simple to discuss the actions and reactions that exceed or fall short of what we commonly understand as “reasonable” when the result is one that neither exceeds nor falls short but instead corresponds directly with the effect we would most desire. Your daughter was saved! Your instinct— whatever exempted you from your rational senses—transferred to an action that you would (had you had all of your senses in order) have equally arranged. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss either question, whether or not you actually found yourself outside your senses at all, and whether or not instinct or impulse in a sane man can truly be considered separate from his reason, without verging into the metaphysical.

  Perhaps we should ask the wife, someone else would interject.

  Ask the wife what? the wife would say, turning from her conversation at the opposite end of the room.

  A toast! someone else would cry.

  To impulse over reason!

  What’s this? a hunchbacked physicist would ask, blowing his nose. A gathering of monkeys?

  No! the botanist would cry. Simply an artists’ convention!


  With that, the conversation would invariably turn to the company’s divergent assumptions about, and reactions to, contemporary art, which they felt it was their duty to keep abreast of. Breton’s Poèmes Objets were a favorite topic, and Marcel Duchamp—who had recently returned quietly to the art world after ten years of playing chess, and from whom everyone was wondering what they could expect next. The company was divisively split on their reactions to the works of these artists, and many other things.

  I can’t quite see what it’s all about, Monsieur Girard, a physicist, would say, for example, regarding Breton. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if after a time we discover that it’s all been a childish prank; that one way or the other, like usual, we’ve been had.

  Wait a minute, now—Monsieur Bernstein, the alienist, who had a great interest in matters of the subconscious, would say. How is one in a situation like this “had”?

  Well, quite simply, Monsieur Girard would reply. If you buy a piece and go to the trouble of hanging it in your hall, and then it comes out later that the whole thing has been a complete joke—

  But it is still seriously hanging in your hall, is it not? Bernstein would return seriously. Or even if not, even if it is only hanging there as a bit of a joke you have with yourself, what separates the seriousness with which you take that little joke from the prank of the artist who mocks you?

  Are you not referring—I’m sorry to interrupt—someone else (a young man, who had not yet made a name for himself in any field) would pipe in—you seem to be referring only to the cultural response of the work, and not the work itself. You are thus considering, if I am not mistaken, and as per our previous conversation, the effect of the work on the viewing public and the faddish response we seem now to so encourage in the arts—serious art being sadly relegated to the academy. Isn’t what needs, the young man would continue, on the contrary, to be discussed, the veritable cause; just like any good science, isn’t that—the serious pursuit of a cause—also the true purpose and function of art?

  —

  MARIE-CLAUDE HAD BEEN SO BRUTALLY BURNED BY HER CHILDHOOD accident that, though in all other respects she recovered quickly, the skin of her lower left leg never healed. The first time Alden saw it—when, after months of serious attentions, she finally accompanied him to his little room on the Rue Auguste-Comte (once again on the seventh floor), and slowly, very slowly, he was permitted to undress her—he found the skin of this region of her body to be as smooth and raw and undeveloped as though it had never been touched. It was she who—before she permitted Alden to press on with the satisfactions of his own desires—lifted her skirt to reveal the damaged limb. As she did so, she looked neither at him nor at her own body, but toward the ceiling, as if in prayer. She hardly breathed in those moments. The muscles of her throat stood out, tense and distended, and Alden even thought he detected in the corners of her eyes two standing tears. They were not tears of sadness or selfpity, but instead of tremendous exertion—as the tears that might stand in one’s eyes after being forced to hold a heavy object for a very long time, or strain in a singular direction against an opposing force. It was, that is, a purely physical strain Alden detected at that moment, and so it was with the attitude of one relieving another from a heavy physical burden that he approached her. No, there was nothing tender in their initial contact as he knelt and began to touch the damaged regions of her body, at first tentatively, with the tips of his fingers. Indeed, the skin was so smooth there that it hardly appeared to be human flesh at all—or to have anything to do with human beings (just as François Grenadier had argued for his own part in rescuing his daughter from the flames). It seemed, if it were possible, to be hardly object, even.

  All this was apparent to Alden as his hands touched that skin, then as he leaned in to place his lips upon it, not—at first—with the tenderness of a kiss, but instead in the way that a child might test the frozen metal of a pole with his tongue. Lured, that is, not by any sense of his own exemption from physical laws, and neither from danger, but by the purest curiosity. It was with this most innocent of human sentiments that Alden approached the damaged regions of Marie-Claude’s body, and relieved her, at least for the short time he held the limb in his own hands, of a physical burden he had not, until that time, had any knowledge of. There was nothing between them in those moments but a pure and perfect physicality, and with what relief did they relent to it! The relief a machine must feel, say, as it falls, for the first time, into the regular rhythms for which it has been made.

  After that, Marie-Claude and Alden could not be separated long. The period of time before they had encountered one another (when Marie-Claude was still only an atmospheric pressure as Alden circled closer toward her along the garden’s outer path, and no contact was certain) became increasingly difficult to imagine. But, just as between two objects drawn together by a magnetic pull, it would have been impossible to express their relation at that earlier time in terms of desire—at least for one another. As tempting as it might be, that is, to attribute the pull by which two people are eventually drawn together as the cause of contact once it has been made, it simply cannot be so. It simply cannot be toward any one person, or object in itself (still as yet unimagined, unknown) that another is driven—but toward desire itself. It must be, therefore, that the realization of any desire in actual contact is made possible only by its continued impossibility. In many ways, Marie-Claude and Alden maintained—even as they fell into the inevitable rhythms their contact produced—that impossibility. Even when Alden sensed beneath him all the muscles of Marie-Claude’s body contract in a spasm of what he could only imagine to be the fullest contact between her body and his own, something remained between them: the physical objectness of their bodies, that greatest impossibility of all. Even, that is, as he sensed the pleasure of her body in his own, and as his own pleasure quickened and finally released itself, so that the two pleasures became—for a brief moment—one, he did not feel as though any contact had been made. It was as if he accompanied himself out to the furthest reach; that he was his own nerve standing erect at its outermost end—that final, inherent limit every body maintains in order, if nothing else, that it not absorb itself into other bodies and other things. He would cling to Marie-Claude’s perfectly shaped shoulders, refusing even when she began to adjust herself beneath him (having realized, suddenly, that for some time now she had been arranged uncomfortably) to release her, and it was as though he were clinging not to her but to a body that had only referential value. It was not that he did not love her—it was just that something always remained between them that made it impossible for him to actually feel he was not merely clinging to the outer and extraneous regions of a body that would always remain to him unfamiliar and unknown.

  Well, perhaps he did not love her. He believed he did, but it was difficult to be sure—not ever having had any particular confidence in the definition of the word, or any sense then or later of the correct and most accurate proportions of what it was he either felt or did not feel in proximity to Marie-Claude as they—spent—lay like stilled locomotives in each other’s arms. As those arms became again what they had been all along: mere physical facts, disentangling themselves from the contact they had only, as if inadvertently, made.

  IT WAS NO ACCIDENT, perhaps, that it was around this period of time, a few months after he met Marie-Claude (by now having abandoned their garden strolls, they would ritually mount the seven flights of stairs every afternoon, instead, to Alden’s narrow flat, Marie-Claude in the lead) that the pattern Alden had some time ago detected in the American newspapers took on for him an even more unmistakable form. At first it was gradual. As a developing photograph: the details emerging slowly against a background that remains (necessarily) blurred and grayed. As he continued to scan the news daily, circling the names of major political figures and sites of battles that had already occurred, hunting for clues—something shifted. Now it was not just certain words and phrases that stood out for him—whole image
s began to appear before him in sharp relief.

  And yet still he was no closer to understanding why—or detecting in them any meaning.

  It became even more difficult after this for Alden to conceal what he found in such a way that whatever it was might easily (by another; at a time and location he might always remain ignorant of) be reconstituted in its original form. Even from the beginning it had never been a simple matter of rearranging coded words according to a pattern that could be repeated exactly the same way every time. It would (Alden was quite sure—especially given the environment in which he worked, and his colleagues’ very particular expertise) take only a quick glance at something like that to know that something was up— then only a few concentrated hours after that, at most, before anyone who cared to would know exactly what was. If, however, it was never suspected that the words Alden assembled were code at all, it followed that the code itself would be that much more difficult to break. It was for this reason he had first hit—back in the spring of ’41—on the idea of creating out of the material he discovered a series of original “poems.” A decision he later had cause to regret—not only on account of how difficult each poem, in itself, was to achieve, but also on account of a further difficulty he hadn’t even anticipated: for every poem he wrote he was additionally required to keep track of an appropriate “key.” (In order to appear as a genuine poem, and not merely garbled code on the page, it was, of course, essential that whatever he wrote abide by a certain internal sense and logic, which could only continuously shift and change.)