Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  Sylvie thought everything about the evening coalesced like a well-orchestrated piece of music. But at some point her sensitive ear picked up a discordant note which she couldn’t pinpoint. Noticing her silence, the photographer turned to Sylvie and asked about her favorite composer. She hesitated, clearly taken aback by the question, one you would address to a child; so many people mistook shyness for stupidity. The conversation paused, ready to flow around her hesitation like water around an obstacle. She murmured that it was hard to single out a favorite, but she was drawn to the Romantics—Chopin, Schumann, Schubert.

  “Schubert,” said Odile, catching the last word, “oh, that is all finished, the young people think only of jazz.”

  Berthe struggled down the stairs with a large copper turbotière, and when she lifted the lid, the aroma of shallots and bay leaves filled the air. Julien reached over to refill her glass, but misjudging the distance, he spilled wine on the fine linen tablecloth and Sylvie noticed for the first time that he was blind in one eye. Odile quickly sprinkled salt on the stain, but Isabelle said, “Oh, don’t bother, both wine and heirlooms improve with age.”

  “Heirlooms,” said the playwright, “that’s the trouble, people want precious old things handed down to them, they won’t take a chance on something original.” An aggrieved flush spread over his face, from which both hairline and chin receded as far as they could without actually disowning him.

  Odile said, “I’ve told Arsène I’ll back his play if no one else will.”

  “What’s it about?” someone asked.

  Arsène, who had waited all evening for this moment, swallowed his food hastily and pushed away his plate. “It’s called Intolérance en trois actes. Act One: Toulouse, 1761. The curtain rises on a bare stage. A young man’s body hangs from the rafters, an old man clings to the corpse. A crowd gathers, someone shouts, ‘The father did it.’ Jean Calas is arrested and tortured. He insists to the end that his son’s death was suicide, but they hang him for murder all the same. Scene ii. A spotlight comes up on a dark corner of the stage. Voltaire is writing his challenge to the judges to produce their secret evidence or confess they condemned a man based on nothing but the yell of brutes. Thanks to Voltaire, the dead man’s name is cleared.”

  People murmured politely, although the story was familiar to everyone. “Wait, wait,” the playwright said, raising his hand. “Act Two: Paris, 1895. The curtain rises on a courtyard at the École Militaire. A soldier is stripped of his rank, guilty of selling military secrets to the enemy. Scene ii: Dreyfus, in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, writes to his wife: Darling Lucie, when they find the real traitor I shall return vindicated to France and to you. Scene iii: Again, a spotlight on a darkened corner, where Zola is writing his famous J’accuse. Dreyfus is also cleared.”

  Arsène stopped to wipe his shining forehead and sip some wine. Nobody said a word. More than fifty years later, the heated emotions surrounding l’affaire Dreyfus had not cooled. Not only were the national schisms between right and left deeper than ever, but family breaches caused by the “affair” had not yet healed. Wherever did Odile find these tedious young men?

  People were shifting in their seats, and the playwright’s voice rose to compensate for their flagging enthusiasm. “Act Three: Île d’Yeu, in our own century. A white-haired prisoner says his dying wish is to be buried with his troops where they held the citadel at Verdun. But it seems the country has forgotten the first war, they talk only about the second and throw le handshake with the Führer in his face. Pétain pleads, ‘O you writers who defended a Protestant draper and an Alsatian Jew, will no one speak for a Catholic patriot?’ The stage goes dark. This time, the spotlight comes up on me. ‘Yes, Maréchal,’ I say, ‘me voilà.’ ”

  A stunned silence followed his allusion to the Vichy anthem that schoolchildren were taught to sing during the Occupation, still painfully fresh in people’s minds almost two decades later. The playwright took a deep breath to launch into an impassioned defense in the final scene, but before he could utter another word, the photographer drawled, “Perhaps, my dear Arsène, you should change the play’s title from Intolérance to Intolérable. Pétain was no innocent, and if you will allow me to say so, you are not exactly Voltaire or Zola.”

  Taken aback at the hostility, Arsène looked at Odile. In a low voice she said Julien’s sister died at Auschwitz. She didn’t need to say more, everyone knew Pétain’s role in sending the Jews off to certain death. Arsène muttered that he meant no offense, he had no idea Isabelle’s husband was not a Frenchman but a “foreigner.”

  At that, Julien rose to his feet and very deliberately turned his back on Arsène. The playwright’s face reddened. He looked around the table but no one would meet his eyes, except Sylvie, who stared at him with grave amazement. Arsène appealed to her, “A truly original work always seems shocking at first, doesn’t it, look how the audience jeered Stravinksy on the opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps.”

  All eyes were on her, and though Sylvie turned pale, she did not hesitate. “Shame on you,” she said, “shame on you!”

  Julien drew in his breath. Sylvie looked as if she might faint, and he took a step toward her. But then Isabelle also rose and drew her arm through Julien’s. “Shall we go upstairs for coffee?”

  Still shaking with emotion, Sylvie marveled at how adroitly Isabelle had managed to both stand with her husband and extricate her guests from an embarrassing situation. La classe.

  It was late by the time they finished coffee, and Sylvie would have to run now to catch the last metro. Docteur Gouffroy and his wife offered to drop her home, and Julien Dalsace lit his pipe as he walked them to the car. Sylvie breathed in the aroma of tobacco mingled with the scent of roses. She had never imagined a street in Paris could be so fragrant.

  Once I came back into the house, Isabelle threw up her hands. “Well, tonight was a disaster. First the awkwardness with Sylvie, and then that deplorable scene at the table.”

  I replied drily that it wasn’t Sylvie who created the scene.

  “Oh, Arsène’s just as bad, I grant you, hard to imagine why Odile parades him around, he’s the worst of the lot so far. She’s getting less fussy about her lovers, and about her appearance, for that matter, it’s shocking how she’s let herself go.”

  I thought how hard it was to live up to Isabelle’s exacting standards. But I did not wish to discuss the evening further, Arsène had raked up too many painful memories. Clara was never far from my thoughts, but tonight had put me in mind of her husband. Bernard had joined the Résistance and been caught. No doubt he was tortured, and keeping silent under those circumstances was heroic; but so many others had kept silent out of cowardice or opportunism when they should have spoken up. It sickened me to hear Arsène whitewash the hard truths of those dark years, disguising complicity as patriotism and expecting the audience to applaud.

  Finally Isabelle asked the question I knew would come sooner or later. “And Max?”

  “I turned him down.”

  “How could you!”

  I knew she was disappointed, she had her heart set on my taking over as director of the department. It would allow her to shine in the official role of hostess, more fitted for it than Sabine Gouffroy, who had used a knife for the turbot instead of a fish fork, just the kind of slip that Isabelle would notice. And although she wouldn’t mention the directorship again, I knew her pique would go underground and that “How could you!” would resurface in other ways.

  Isabelle shrugged. “In any case, the evening was already ruined.”

  I could not fathom what had left her so disgruntled. Surely not the lack of white asparagus, or the awkwardness caused by Sylvie, or even Arsène’s appalling play. No, something had struck a deeper nerve, and suddenly I realized what it was. Isabelle considered it ill-bred to make a scene, but still she had felt herself shown up by Sylvie. “Shame on you!�
� It would have been the merest nothing for Isabelle, so sure of herself, to have rebuked Arsène. But for Sylvie to be the lone voice at the table to utter those words was an act of extraordinary courage.

  Long after Julien had already left his wife for her, Sylvie was mortified to realize how thoroughly she had misread the dinner, a misreading that was to affect the rest of her life. Still, that night lingered in her memory like a banked fire whose coals she would stir again and again for warmth, even though she now knew her presence at the table was accidental; she hadn’t been invited to dine, but merely to play for the guests. Isabelle’s surprise, the scuffling activity, the thirteenth chair jammed around the table—everything finally made sense. The only discordant note in that well-orchestrated evening was herself.

  At the time, I thought it was a night like many others. Charles and Alexandra played a duet before going back to their Tintin comics. Isabelle locked away the silver and went up to bed while I stayed in my study, looking over notes for my lecture. But I could not rid myself of the memory of Arsène as he was leaving, taking out his ill humor on Odile. He grumbled that her friends had cut him off before he could explain that Pétain’s people had made a pact with the Nazis, they could have Jews who were stateless as long as they kept their hands off French Jews; remarkably enough, only five percent of Jews who were French were killed in the camps, compared to ninety-five percent from other countries.

  That astounded me more than anything he had said earlier. “Only five percent!”

  They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But those who falsify it condemn us all. “Only five percent!” Arsène’s claim that French Jews fared better in the death camps is merely a sleight of hand, a legerdemain. Because if you tally among the dead the thousands whom the Vichy government had first stripped of their French citizenship, then in fact ninety-five percent of French Jews also did not survive.

  When the survivors straggled home—so few, so pitifully few—I was stupefied by their vacant eyes, their blackened teeth, the numbers tattooed on their emaciated arms. But what struck me most was their silence. It made for uneasy consciences. Overnight there wasn’t a single collaborator to be found, as if the entire city during occupation was one heroic underground.

  What might be a figure of speech elsewhere is literally true here: We stand on a yawning pit. Riddled with caves and quarries and cellars, the city’s aging bones are brittle as a confectioner’s gauffrettes. Some years before a revolution shook France to its foundations, there was a premonitory collapse when a sinkhole opened up on these streets. While shoring up the city’s crumbling hulks, a visionary architect seized the opportunity to create the catacombs, a subterranean metropolis as grand as anything aboveground, and when the overcrowded Cemetery of the Innocents disgorged its rotting contents, a hollow city was ready for the restless skeletons. So no one knows better than we that however deep you inter them, the dead do not stay buried.

  When the sealed envelope fell from Julien’s desk, Sylvie’s heart had beat faster. A message from beyond the grave! Every secret crackles with electricity, but this one seemed doubly charged, as if Julien’s death had galvanized it into a life of its own. Yet she hesitated to open something not intended for her eyes; it seemed indecent to violate the secrets of the dead.

  Even though Julien’s work meant that he dealt with people’s most intimate disclosures, he seldom spoke of his own great sorrow, and Sylvie had respected his reticence, the fiercely proprietary nature of his grief. She knew only the tragic outlines of the story, that as a young doctor Julien was invited to work with Ernest Jones in London; it was the chance of a lifetime, to turn down Freud’s great disciple would be like saying no to the master himself. With both their parents dead, Julien had worried about leaving Clara alone in Paris, but there was no particular reason to fear for her safety under a Jewish prime minister, and small appetite among the French for another war. Even after Léon Blum fell and the new government’s appeasement policies failed, people were not unduly alarmed when Germany attacked, regarding it as a drôle de guerre, a sham war; Parisians continued to flock to the opera and whistle lighthearted airs from Carmen. The mood darkened under occupation, but Julien knew his sister was safe, married now to a gentile and living with Bernard’s devoted aunts. Sylvie couldn’t imagine the blow it must have been for Julien to learn that despite everything, Clara and her daughters had been rounded up during la grande rafle of 1942.

  The fact that Julien had escaped a similar fate felt like both a blessing and a curse. Survivor guilt, Freud labeled it, that endless self-reproach. Mercifully, Freud had not lived to hear that his sisters, too, had died in concentration camps the same year Clara perished at Auschwitz.

  Julien said that whenever he dreamt of his sister, it was always as a child, vivacious, carefree. “She loved nothing more than playing hide-and-seek among the vines, calling out in her sweet piping voice, Come find me, Julien, come find me. And waking or asleep, I feel I’m looking for her still, I’ve never stopped looking.”

  Sylvie did not have the heart to probe further. What good would it do to reopen the wounds of the past?

  But now the discovery of the folder seems uncanny, as if something long hidden has come to light, some unfinished business connected to Julien. Convinced she’s been entrusted with an important message, she hurries down a familiar street to deliver it, dimly aware that the street sign is wrong, it can’t be rue de Bièvre, which is remarkably short and straight, but she continues to run down the long and twisting road, at the end of which the streetlamps stop and darkness begins. All at once she notices the mingled aroma of roses and tobacco and turns her head eagerly, but she’s alone on a deserted street. She wakes up with her heart pounding and tries to grasp the remnants of the dream, but they’ve dispersed stealthily, like pickpockets on a train. All but one. The letter, being real, does not vanish.

  Yet Sylvie cannot bring herself to open the sealed envelope, to look through the checkbook. It’s not decency that holds her back but dread. What if it concerns herself? Is there a new will, as Isabelle suspects, or something much darker? In any case, the discovery has raked up all her old insecurities.

  Like the time with Alexandra, all those years ago. Sylvie had overheard her complaining to her father, and Sylvie knew without hearing the words that it was about her. Julien’s daughter hadn’t forgiven her and made no secret of the fact that she thought Sylvie lacked birth, breeding, beauty, so unlike Isabelle in every way, how could he leave them for her! With the unerring cruelty of children, Alexandra had struck where Sylvie was most vulnerable, aware that in Isabelle’s world she was only the daughter of a housemaid.

  Her friend Fabienne always scolded Sylvie for letting the brat walk all over her, but Sylvie said she was too harsh on Alexandra, the child was only eight, and naturally she was upset.

  “My poor Sylvie, you’re even more naïve than I thought. Read Bonjour Tristesse sometime, you’ll see how this ends. The little monster wants you dead so she can have her father back.”

  Sylvie had laughed off her friend’s warning, reminding herself that Julien chose to be with her, thankful to find happiness, as he put it, in the autumn of his life.

  “Not autumn,” she had corrected him quickly. “It’s still midsummer.”

  Seeing the look on his face, she would have willingly sacrificed the years between them to grow old with him. Julien had left the house on rue de Bièvre for her sake; if only she could do something equally bold for him!

  But there’s nothing she can do for him now. If the children were here, they could decide together, but she’ll have to wait till they return. How thankful she is that somehow they had made it through that rocky patch, that the children are still in her life. But they won’t be back till September, and the summer stretches endlessly before her.

  For Will, the days are slipping by much too soon. He’s making scant progress on the manuscript his ed
itor is impatiently awaiting. And well she might, she’s practically a coauthor at this point, the only page free of her corrections is the title page: Shakespeare and “The Whirligig of Time” by Willoughby Taylor.

  He looks up as Alice asks him a question. She’s leaving for her French class, hoping to improve her language skills. As it is, she says everything in the present, making it hard to carry on a conversation for any length of time, especially with her limited vocabulary. What is sensible skin, she wants to know; whatever it is, she probably has it, there isn’t a square inch of her that isn’t sensible. Will says it’s another of those words the French call faux amis, false friends; sensible is not sensible at all, it means sensitive.

  “Well, that lets me out, then.” Alice goes up to the kitchen window and exclaims, “Merde, il pleut!” The present tense is perfectly appropriate for once.

  The rain starts up in earnest and Will murmurs, “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day, And make me travel forth without my cloak.”

  Just like him, Alice thinks, spouting poetry instead of helping her look for an umbrella. She finds one, finally, in the hall closet. “Shakespeare,” she says on her way out, and Will nods approvingly. As if she’s one of his graduate students, Alice thinks. He still hasn’t figured out that it’s her standard answer, and she’s right nine times out of ten.