Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  Will pours another cup of coffee and returns to his pages. In theory it was a grand idea—to revise his manuscript on the legendary street where Ford Madox Ford published The Transatlantic Review—but he’s discovering that what should work in theory is quite another story in practice; just like the minuteries that en théorie are timed to keep the lights on till one reaches the next landing, but which frequently switch off halfway up the stairs. Scribbling notes in the margins, he thinks never in his life has he sat in more uncomfortable chairs, straight-backed and spindly. Perfect for the French, who always sit erect, but they make no allowance for the sprawl of American limbs. Gingerly he tilts the chair back to read through what he has written, when out of the corner of his eye he sees a movement on the terrace. The rain has stopped and a tiny orange bird is flitting around the balcony, pecking at crumbs. Will runs to get his camera, and when he returns, the bird is in the kitchen, hopping about on his papers. Hardly daring to breathe, Will presses the shutter. With an alarmed chirp, the bird flutters in the air for a moment, then streaks out again. Will leans out of the window but feels the iron railing shift beneath his weight and quickly steps back. He must remember to warn Sylvie about the rotted window frame.

  Just then he hears music through the dividing wall and realizes it’s Sylvie at the piano. He comes out to the landing to listen and is struck by her playing, brilliant— no, more than brilliant—sublime. Seeing her door ajar, he creeps closer and peers through the crack. Coco bounds up and wags his tail, but immersed in the music, Sylvie remains oblivious of his presence.

  Since she first learned to play, Sylvie has drawn solace from an invisible listener whose presence steadies her in a world where she so often feels an outsider. That familiar presence had calmed her as she performed on the night of the dinner at rue de Bièvre; but, alert to the slightest disturbance in the atmosphere, even then she had sensed a distant storm.

  After that night, Julien avoided her and Isabelle remained aloof. Better that way, Sylvie had thought, kinder to keep her at a distance from a world she could never enter, a life she could never inhabit. And if she minded, then more fool she. Better to focus on Alexandra’s trills. Like this, Alexandra, liquid, flowing, don’t tack it on like a frill, weave it into the fabric. She nodded at Alexandra, see, like this, a hand trailed in water, and then the lovely undulating bit, a gondola rocking gently. As the low rippling notes of the barcarolle built to a swell, Sylvie drew up from their depths obscure yearnings, inarticulate desires. Her thoughts turned wistfully to Isabelle, lucky to have all this, her children, her husband. Sylvie imagined Julien bending to kiss that beautiful face, but what flashed into her mind was his lips on her own, and her cheeks burned as she played the final octaves.

  Alexandra jumped up to embrace Julien, standing silently in the doorway. “Papa,” she said, “you’re home?”

  Startled, Sylvie glanced up and met his eyes before she had time to mask the emotions which the music had stripped bare. With a rush of love she thought, I know you, I have always known you. She had played for him so long in secret and he had listened so long concealed.

  Shaken to my core, I went that evening to my study and looked at my papers without taking in a word. At the dinner table, I ate without tasting anything. In bed, my tossing and turning woke Isabelle, who wondered if I was coming down with the flu. I threw off the covers and went downstairs, where I opened a window and heard a bat’s high-pitched squeak in the deep silence of the night. Roses in luxurious bloom released their perfume into the air. I pulled a branch closer, inhaled its fragrance, the petals velvety against my face. Deliberately I crushed the branch in my hand until a thorn pierced my skin and blood oozed into my palm. I thought ironically of what I might put in my case notes if one of my patients had spoken of this self-inflicted wound. In the kitchen I bandaged my hand with one of Berthe’s immaculate white towels. It stanched the bleeding, but my hand continued to throb as I went back to bed.

  Even when I closed my eyes, all I could see was a slight girl with a steady gaze, no different from the throngs of young women coming out of the metro or walking by on the street, not a face one would pick out in a crowd. But her appearance seemed beside the point, I was drawn so strongly to her spirit. Sylvie was half my age, it was unsuitable, unseemly, it didn’t make sense. But the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, I thought wryly, and the fact remained that illogical as it might seem, I had fallen in love with her.

  Still I hesitated to say the words that would end my marriage. When I had returned after the war, it was to a changed Paris, where I felt dispossessed at once of family, friends, and country, and it was Isabelle who had sustained me through that dark homecoming, had made a life here again seem possible. If I was unhappy with Isabelle, surely it was no one’s fault but my own. And as for happiness with Sylvie, it was a remote possibility based on nothing but an unguarded expression on her face.

  For weeks I wrestled with myself in silence and Isabelle put my abstraction down to work; she saw my professional success as a credit to herself. I wondered when it was that her passion for me had changed to possessiveness, she spoke of “my husband,” or “the father of my children” as she would talk about her paintings: “my Daubigny.” Indeed, my absorption in my work helped me to avoid looking too closely at the state of my marriage, but on the night of the dinner things suddenly came into sharp focus when I observed Isabelle, certain of always being in the right, criticize our child in front of others; and then Sylvie, shy and unsure of herself, rose to shield the girl from further humiliation. For some reason, that juxtaposition crystallized the situation for me, and when I was seated next to Sylvie at dinner it struck me suddenly that in a couple of years I would be fifty and I wanted more from life than merely going through the motions.

  Abruptly I left my study and went into the drawing room. Isabelle’s head was bent over her needlework, and I thought there was still time to retreat, to reconsider. But then the words were out, creating their own hard reality.

  “Moving out?” Isabelle was silent for a moment. “You’ve taken a mistress?”

  I stared at her in astonishment. The word seemed so incongruous in connection with Sylvie. No, I said, I had not, but surely Isabelle had sensed it, too, that emotionally we were already living apart.

  “Look, you don’t need to justify it, I won’t interfere with your amusements. Just rent a place for her until it’s over.” Her voice was steady, though her hands trembled as she folded up her embroidery.

  If only it were a question of amusement! I felt as if something momentous had happened, something terrible.

  “Please don’t exaggerate, men your age go through this all the time, it’s banal. Who is she? Someone I’ve met?”

  “Sylvie,” I said quietly, knowing how she would react. And indeed she physically recoiled, as from a blow.

  “Sylvie! Don’t be absurd.” After twelve years to leave her for that common girl, how could he! Her voice shook now with mortification. “Leave if you must, but there’s no question of divorce, the marriage will end only when one of us dies.”

  As if death ended anything. Clara had been dead for more than fifteen years and I tried not to dwell on her fate, mindful of Nietzsche’s warning: When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. But sometimes, when the steam rose from a plate of choucroute, it would carry me back to my mother’s kitchen in Alsace. From there I could see the neat vineyards, the ruined châteaux on the hill, the landscape I visited faithfully in my dreams, like the storks returning there year after year to nest on the chimneys. Little Clara would run out of the house to welcome the birds, amazed they had found their way back from Africa. As the storks circled over the roof, their outspread wings seemed to shade her face like a benediction. Yet Clara was murdered. Why?

  Unanswered questions: the enduring legacy of the dead.

  Away in London, I had been shielded from the naked horro
r of the roundups in Paris. Only later did I painstakingly fill in the details. A July night in 1942. Footsteps turning into rue des Rosiers, then up rue Elzévir. The peremptory knock on the door. Relief at the sight of French uniforms. Not Germans, thank God, not the Germans. The little girls, roused from their sleep, staring at the gendarmes in their living room.

  Why did they give the enemy even more than they had asked for? For the love of God, why hand over the children?

  The abyss did not answer. But I kept asking, all the same.

  No, death did not end the conversation, it just made it one-sided. And you had to live as best you could in that great shadow, to glean what happiness still remained.

  When Sylvie arrived one Thursday for Charles and Alexandra’s piano lesson, Berthe told her that madame had taken the children out. Sylvie asked if she should wait and the maid shook her head. Madame left a note for you, she said. An apology, thought Sylvie, but when she opened the monogrammed envelope and pulled out Isabelle’s card, she was stunned by what she read. Seeing her expression, Berthe asked if she was unwell, would she like to sit down. Sylvie shook her head and walked out in a daze.

  I regret to inform you your services are no longer required. That was all. Not a word of explanation, not even a signature. Dismissed as abruptly as if she were a servant caught stealing. She was still humiliated and resentful when she received a message from Julien a few weeks later, asking her to meet him at his office. Sylvie had half a mind not to go. For the life of her, she could not figure out why she had been treated with such contempt.

  It had revived a memory from her childhood that even after all these years still made her cringe: another long-anticipated evening followed by abject humiliation. She’d been so excited about attending one of Madame Wanda’s musical evenings, though her mother warned her to be as quiet as a mouse and not stir from the kitchen. But Sylvie had no wish to venture out of the servants’ domain with its warm and fragrant ovens, the laughing banter of the staff as they went about their tasks. Her mother grumbled that les riches liked to have the kitchen a long way from the other rooms to keep out the smells of cooking, but when she carried the tureens down the drafty corridor to the table, Monsieur always complained that the food was cold.

  The chef, deftly fashioning pâte d’amande into petit fours, said, “Open wide, chouchou,” and popped pieces of bright green marzipan into Sylvie’s mouth. “Nothing but the best for Madame,” said the cook, “she did all right for herself, didn’t she? A penniless émigrée and look at her now, dripping with diamonds and tout Paris crowding here for her candlelit soirées. What she spends on candles could feed an entire village for a month, but they can afford it, can’t they? Monsieur’s factories profited from the war, made him a fortune.”

  Ewa shot him a warning glance as Monsieur’s valet came in; Pierre was known to carry tales, he could get them both dismissed. Pierre lifted an eyebrow at finding Ewa’s daughter in the kitchen, and Sylvie cringed at her mother’s obsequious smile, at her voluble excuses. But after Pierre left, Ewa defended Madame, with whom she felt a kinship despite the difference in their stations; as Poles, they were both outsiders in Paris, and she always made it a point to refer to the countess by her Polish title: “Monsieur may have the money, but it’s not for him that tout Paris comes, it’s for Hrabina Wanda. She’s the one who has class, real class.”

  The cook laughed as he stirred the sauce, watching it like a hawk. Lifting the saucepan off the flame at the critical moment, he said, “I never met an émigré yet who doesn’t claim a title, but la comtesse certainly married up, that’s one way to climb the social ladder—horizontally.” There was general laughter, and then the servants got busy with their tasks; once the music was over, they’d be on their toes till midnight.

  Sylvie heard snatches of distant music every time the kitchen door swung open and it was like an old friend beckoning her closer, inviting her into an enchanted world whose existence she had never suspected. Ignored by everyone, she crept down the chilly corridor and hid behind the curtained doorway to listen, so lost in the music that she didn’t see Monsieur till he stood directly before her, his monocle flashing with anger.

  The kitchen seemed miles off, and fright kept her rooted to the spot. She stammered out words of apology, but they stuck in her throat, and to her everlasting mortification she threw up chunks of marzipan on the floor. She hung her head in shame as he looked her up and down with distaste, then turned on his heel and shut the door.

  That humiliation rose in her throat again as she pushed open the great wooden portal of Maison Chenizot and walked through the first courtyard to one that lay beyond, and hesitated in front of a door with a plaque that read: Docteur Julien Dalsace. What could he possibly have to say to her now, what explanation could he offer for her abrupt dismissal?

  Waiting for her to come in, I cautioned myself not to put too great a stock in happiness.

  I knew storms did not threaten a blighted field, thieves kept away from a burgled house, and I’d imagined myself safe from further misfortune after what happened to me during my youth in Alsace. I had raced my schoolfellows up the hill to their fortified church, where they pushed open the wooden door and swarmed inside while I followed them warily past the colorful frescoes of St. Hune and the old organ where the schoolmaster played for both Catholics and Protestants at their separate services, always the music of Bach, which he said belonged to no denomination but to all the world. I read the German inscription chiseled into the great bell: When you, O Christian, hear me ring, To this church yourself do bring. I had never seen the bell up close but would recognize its sound anywhere, as much a part of the landscape as the ruined châteaux.

  Once we were outside again, my schoolmates vaulted over the cemetery wall dividing the Catholic and Protestant dead while I gazed down at the peaceful scene of the village with its half-timbered houses. Then I felt the first blow. I spun around in shock to see them rushing at me, they had planned it all along and I had suspected nothing, certainly not this concerted assault. I heard their ragged breaths as they punched me, saw their familiar countenances transformed into something unrecognizable. A boy kicked me hard in the back, another picked up a rock, and then I no longer heard their hoarse cries, no longer saw their hateful faces, blood filled my eyes and stopped my ears.

  But my scarred and sightless eye was a price I would gladly have paid to keep Clara safe; bitter irony that my parents had moved the family to Paris for safety, only to expose her to greater danger. Alas, security is always an illusion, often imperiled, easily shattered. As with my marriage: “safe as houses” until it was struck by lightning. My love for Sylvie was a sudden bolt out of a clear blue sky, a coup de foudre that lit up my life while cleaving it in two.

  I had moved from the house at rue de Bièvre across the river to quai d’Anjou, no great distance but a decisive step all the same. It allowed me to take the same path along the river for my work at the Salpêtrière Hospital, and to return through the Jardin des Plantes with its long allée of chestnut trees to Île Saint-Louis and my private practice at Maison Chenizot, where I waited that evening with a strange hopefulness.

  I had meant to prepare the ground, to feel Sylvie out. But when I saw her, the words came out without preamble: “I’ve left Isabelle.”

  She stared at me. What had possessed me to take such a step, to walk away from the house at rue de Bièvre? “Everything was so perfect,” she said, “like a picture.”

  I smiled at that. A fair description of my life with Isabelle, it was picture-perfect. But the picture was une nature morte, a still life, with every beauty except breath. And then by chance Sylvie was seated beside me one night and now my happiness depended on her being there always.

  The color fled from her cheeks as she understood my meaning. “How they must hate me,” she burst out. “All three of them. And one day you’ll regret it and you’ll hate me, too.”

/>   I did not say “never,” I knew the word was not to be found in the vocabulary of human emotions. Regret was unavoidable in any case, whether I left or whether I stayed.

  Sylvie thought how impossible it would be to compensate me for what I had left behind. Didn’t I realize we came from different spheres?

  I said I did not see that as an obstacle, if my age was not.

  But she shook her head, she knew better; even as a child she had sensed the unbridgeable chasm between our worlds. Looking at her earnest, troubled face, I thought it might be kinder to let her go, with time her love for me would fade like a pressed flower, to be taken out and sighed over occasionally.

  But I could not let her leave. Yet how could I ask her to stay, she was not a woman of the world like Isabelle or Odile, but a girl of bourgeois upbringing, so very young, and of course, her shyness complicated the case. I smiled ironically at the word “case,” the professional in me not entirely displaced by the lover.

  “Could you do me a favor? Help me choose a piano for the children. I want them to continue their lessons on the days they’re with me.”

  “Of course,” she said, “of course.” She saw it as a means of making amends, however pitiful, to the children, to Isabelle.

  We visited various piano makers together and I watched closely as Sylvie rejected the Bösendorfer (“too unctuous!”) and recoiled from the Schimmel’s stentorian clarity, but was immediately taken with the discreet charms of the Pleyel. While she listened to the tones and voices of the instruments, I listened only to her. All this time, I made no attempt to touch her, parting with a brief handshake, and if I invited her for a cup of coffee or a drink afterward, I did not bother with commonplaces about the weather or the latest headlines in the papers. Since conversation was such an ordeal for her, let it at least be worth her while.