by Lewis Desoto
She carefully placed the clarinet on the table and fetched her cigarettes from the kitchen counter, lighting one before going across the room and lifting a photograph from the wall. “Winter of 1944. A bitter winter.” She placed the picture in front of me. “France had been liberated by then—we’d heard that through the grapevine—and we were full of hope, knowing that the Allies were striking towards Germany. At night you could hear the bombers overhead, hundreds of them, invisible in the blackness, just that drone that seemed to go on forever, like the sound of some great beast in anger. We listened for it every night, wanting to hear it. Hoping. But then the Germans launched a big offensive in the Ardennes and it seemed like they were going to be successful and we would never be freed. Young people today look back and it seems to them that the end of the war was inevitable. But not to us, not then.”
I looked down at the photograph. It was faded, but I could make out a hall full of women, all dressed in the same drab uniform. A few looked at the camera, but most had their attention directed towards the front of the room, faces rapt, concentrated, some with eyes closed.
“They are listening,” Lorca said. “Not to the bombers. To music. You can’t see the musicians. We are just off-camera. Our little quintet: Jeanette, Betsie, Michelle, Brigitte and myself. They were all better musicians than I was. Especially sweet Betsie. I don’t even have a photograph of her.” She shook her head. “More is the pity.” She took a deep inhalation from her cigarette and let the smoke out in a slow trickle.
“It was shortly after I had arrived in the camp that I heard the sound of a clarinet in the barracks. Like a nightingale in a place where no birds sang. It was Betsie’s music. The Nazis considered themselves cultured, you know, so they had allowed her to keep her instrument when they rounded her up. After hearing the music I sought her out. She introduced me to Jeanette. The five of us formed a little chamber music group. I remember that we used to practise in the latrines. The acoustics were good in there. I suppose you could say that our music was created in the stench of shit.”
She leaned over and stroked her fingers across the photograph. “The commandant of the camp gave permission for us to entertain the other inmates on Sunday evenings. That is what the people in the photograph are listening to: a quintet of starving and cold women playing music for a few hundred other cold and hungry women. The day we gave the concert—you see it in the photo—it was bitterly cold. Many of us had pulled the straw from our mattresses and stuffed it into our shoes so that the blood would keep circulating. I remember that the hall smelled of damp wool, smoke from the stoves, unwashed women and despair. But they listened! We could not comfort those poor women, or feed them or warm them, but we gave them beauty. And maybe hope too.”
She took the photograph from my hands and studied it. “We were lovers. Betsie and I. As much as you can be in a barracks with a hundred other women. Does that shock you?” Without waiting for a reply, she crossed the room and replaced the photograph on its nail, taking a moment to straighten it.
“Betsie was a great talent. She would have become a great musician.”
“She didn’t survive the war, did she,” I said.
She shook her head. “In February I became very ill. I didn’t want to go to the infirmary because sick people had a habit of not coming back. The SS arrived in the camp one day, like dogs from Hell in their black uniforms and the death’s head badges. They came round to the barracks with a list, culling out all the Jewish women. I was in my bunk with a high fever, barely conscious. When my name was called, Betsie stepped forward and raised her hand. I never saw her again.”
Thrusting her hands into her pockets, Lorca went to the door and opened it, letting in the night smells and the soft breath of the ocean. An owl called. “The thing is, Betsie wasn’t even Jewish. If it were possible to will yourself dead, I would have died. I wanted to die. I carried her name until we were liberated. But I gave up music. I was dead inside.” She sighed and shut the door. “And when we came back to Paris, I tried to kill myself.”
She turned and held up her hands towards me, wrists outward, showing the scars I’d noticed earlier.
“Jeanette DuPlessis brought me here. To heal. Eventually I met Betsie’s older brother, Armand. We mourned together. And we healed together.”
It took a moment for what she’d said to sink in. “Armand is Betsie’s brother?”
She nodded. “It’s possible to love in many different ways, and to love many people. But sometimes in love all you end up with is a heart broken into pieces.”
It was said gently, but it seemed a warning.
She came back to the table and stretched out her hand, caressing the clarinet. “So you see, Leo, I have some debts, some obligations. I promised myself, and I promised the spirit of Betsie, that I would make something of her music. Out of that place of darkness and suffering and death I promised that I would make something beautiful.”
She rearranged the sheet music and raised the clarinet to her lips. She began with a little two-note trill, like a bird calling, like a name, repeated and held until it seemed she would have no more breath. The waves came next, a soft rhythm, like the breaths a child takes when it sleeps. Not a lament now, but a lullaby. She played simply, without gestures or embellishments or flourishes. It was the sound of the island I heard. But so much more. There was no hesitation, no falsehood, just de l’obscurité à la lumière, from darkness to light.
Her music spoke all that words could not express, of the past and the future, her heart and my heart and all the beating hearts that make up the world. My eyes welled as I listened, as I looked at her, but my tears were not bitter.
When it was finished there should have been silence, but the notes seemed to linger, to permeate the room, and only gradually to fade, until just a memory remained, contained in the other sounds that now flowed back: the sea below the house, the soft whisper of a breeze, the sputtering of the candle, my own breath.
She stood holding the clarinet lightly, a faraway expression on her face, her gaze on the window, and beyond. “There you have it,” she said, as if speaking to someone else. “A nocturne, for lovers.”
We sat on in silence. I watched her face. She was smiling slightly.
I thought, not for the first time, about the title of the piece, Nocturne for Lovers. I had wondered if those lovers could be Lorca and myself. At other times I thought of the two figures in Asmodeus’s painting, the lover and the pilgrim. But it was more than that. There was Armand Daubigny, and there was Betsie, and there was Claudine and Piero and Tobias. This music was for all of us. All the promises kept. For the lovers, for beauty, against time and against death.
At last, she spoke. “You know that I must leave you.”
“No.” I pushed up from my chair and was at her side. “No, Lorca. I know that you love me. I feel it.”
“Yes,” she said, placing the clarinet on the table, “but we are two wounded hearts. We love each other out of pain.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.” I took both her hands in mine and turned them over, pressing my lips to her wrists, kissing the scars.
“My whole life as a musician has been leading to something, Leo, and I need to know if this is it. It’s different for you.”
I understood what she meant. I had found something. I had begun to paint again. And there was Tobias. And this island. I realized that I could not imagine leaving La Mouche, at least not now.
“My music needs other people for it to be real. It needs to be played and to be heard for it to be alive.” She looked up at me. “I owe it to Betsie.”
I nodded. There was no other answer. She owed it to herself, too, and in time, I thought, she would realize this.
She touched my lips with her fingers, and then kissed me for the last time.
CHAPTER 34
SHE LEFT ON THE MORNING TIDE, ON A DAY WHEN the flat sea glittered with shards of blue light and the Stella Tilda drifted away from the pier, hardly seeming to m
ove, just becoming smaller and smaller as it slipped out of the harbour. She stood in the stern leaning one hip on the rail, wearing a leather jacket and her black hair blowing loose, pale-faced, beautiful and grave, looking back to the small group of people on the quay—Père Caron, the storekeeper Martin Levérrier, Victor and Linda from the hotel, all waving. I had not seen Tobias all day, but I knew that she would have made her farewells with him.
I stood a little apart from the others, my eyes fixed on her face as the vessel glided away from the island. When she raised her hand in a final adieu, I lifted mine too, holding it in the air. As the boat passed the last headland her arm dropped and she faced away.
I remembered the day she had first come to the chapel and seen “Love and the Pilgrim.” The day she had suggested I make a new painting, the day I first drew her portrait. The day I first kissed her. She had quoted Keats to me as we stood looking at those two lovers reaching for each other: “ … do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love …”
I remained there with my hand held out, continuing to watch until I could no longer make her out, until the boat was just a fleck of colour on the wide blue sea. The pulse of the engine came faintly across the expanse for a time, and then that too disappeared, leaving only the slap of the waves against the stone quay.
I remembered her parting words on that faraway day. Don’t have any illusions about who I am, Leo. Or what I can be. As I lowered my arm, two sharp notes from a whistle broke the stillness. Two notes marking a departure, calling a name that was already in the past. Then two more notes, a different name, a summons. I looked up.
On the ridge above the harbour stood a small figure. He lifted his arms and stretched them out—echoing that gesture from another place and time, before our lives would intertwine. I turned away from the wide empty sea and walked up to meet him.
I had no illusions. But I had love. And hope had been restored. This was not the end of the world, not the last place, after all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A BOOK IS NEVER THE WORK OF JUST ONE PERSON. Many talented and dedicated people at HarperCollins Canada have made invaluable contributions, and I thank them for that.
I am extremely grateful to my editor, Phyllis Bruce, for her wisdom and her patience on the long journey. Her contribution is immeasurable.
Thank you to Allyson Latta, who brought in a new broom at the end and wielded it with a perceptive touch.
Thanks to my agent, Hilary McMahon, always a fan and supporter.
The Canada Council for the Arts helped along the way with a grant.
Till min livskamrat, Gunilla Josephson.
About the Author
LEWIS DESOTO was born in South Africa and moved to Canada as a teenager. His first novel, A Blade of Grass, was an international bestseller and an International Book of the Month selection. Longlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the novel was also a finalist for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. An artist as well as a writer, DeSoto authored a biography of the painter Emily Carr. He lives with his wife, the artist Gunilla Josephson, in Toronto and Normandy, France. Visit him online at www.lewisdesoto.com.
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Copyright
The Restoration Artis
Copyright © 2013 by Lewis DeSoto.
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EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 978-1-443-41587-3
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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