Édmonde sat beside me and took my hands. ‘My dear Charles, do you think I have never asked myself the same question?’ I looked up at her. She had lifted her veil. The ugliness of her face was once again on full display, mocking my suffering and the anger it had spawned. ‘All I am asking you to do is live. And all she wants to do is die. She has told me herself.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s pregnant – and not for the first time. She had to give the first child away to the nuns, which is where I found her – imprisoned in a convent laundry. She didn’t even get a chance to hold her child before it was taken away. Since then, she has been riven with despair, and tried to kill herself more than once. The same thing will happen this time. But since it is her second time she will now be sent to a workhouse. Her child will grow up in an orphanage. She doesn’t want that. She wants her child to grow up lacking for nothing.’
‘How did you get her out of the convent?’
‘I told the prioress that I was seeking to raise up in society a fallen girl, that I would train her and educate her to eventually become my personal secretary. The prioress believes Mathilde is a lost cause, to which I replied that a lost cause is exactly what I’m seeking.’
‘And what have you told her about the nature of the crossing?’
‘Everything.’
It is ten minutes to two o’clock in the morning. I am lying in a bed in an upstairs room of Namur’s only inn, exhausted, barely able to hold my pen, surrounded by empty bottles of laudanum and sheets of paper upon which I have scrawled by candlelight the last of this, the finest and truest tale I have ever recounted. Édmonde is in the next room. We will meet with you tomorrow at the same splendid church where we met today. Édmonde reassures me that I am able to cross, that the power is in me even if I can’t remember. All I have to do, she says, is look into your eyes for a few minutes. Soon enough, a feeling of frothy joy will overtake us, she says, and the crossing will take place naturally, effortlessly. If, when we meet tomorrow, nothing of the sort happens, then I will simply have been deceived by a prankster or a lunatic. But if a crossing does take place, if events do transpire as Édmonde has foretold, then this story will stand as the testimony of it, so that if all you remember of your previous lives is in your dreams, then this story will serve you, dear girl, as both reminiscence and evidence of the man you once were.
Charles Baudelaire, Namur, Belgium,
Thursday, 15 April 1865.
{256}
City of Ghosts
The Cemetery
SHE STOOD IN front of the poet’s grave, smoking a cigarette, lost in her thoughts, in the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a brilliant May afternoon in Paris – not today’s Paris, vanquished and humiliated, but the city as it once was, only a short time ago but already far distant and forever lost. She wore a black silk dress printed with blooms of red hibiscus. The skin of her bare arms was golden, her raven-black hair curled into a chignon. It was nearly closing time, I remember. I was walking past her along the cemetery alley, headed for my apartment. I glanced at her without slowing – although perhaps, if it is at all possible, there was a flicker of hesitation, a hint of desire, a fleeting urge to stop, to approach her, to ask why she was standing there in front of this particular grave, a grave I myself had stood before many times, on this sunny and too-warm weekday afternoon in May. The sky was a dazzling and pure azure. My tie was loosened and my jacket slung over my shoulder. The grave she was standing before was that of Charles Baudelaire, the poet to whom I had, in a way, devoted the best years of my life.
It was Monday, 27 May 1940 – not even four months ago, and yet it might as well be many years, an age, an epoch. Seventeen days earlier, after keeping the world in suspense for nine months, the Germans had finally launched their invasion of Belgium and France, sending their tanks through the Ardennes forests, circumventing the famous Maginot Line, crossing the Meuse River before the French could destroy the bridges – or had the French defence been sabotaged by traitors, as many believed? In a little over two weeks, the Germans had pinned the armies of three nations back against the English Channel. Boulogne and Calais were cut off, and Dunkirk was next.
I had stopped reading and listening to the news. I should not have been there to begin with, in that graveyard. I should have already left Paris. I was a refugee, after all, a Jew, an ex-German. My papers were not in order. They were substitute papers. The nearer the Germans advanced, the more danger I was in. For several weeks, a black suitcase had stood upright behind the entrance door of my apartment, a reminder that I ought to go, to vanish. But one wearies of vanishing acts. I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I tried not to think about it. I was in a state of denial, preoccupied more with the past than the present. For years, I had been working on a book that remained unfinished. It gave me an excuse to stay, to keep wandering these streets I knew so well, forever dawdling, in secret communion with the phantoms of the past, ready to join their ranks, to become another spectral presence in this city of ghosts. If that was not enough, there was no shortage of other, more mundane excuses: the imminent arrival of a telegram, an application for a visa, a request for a letter of recommendation, the chaos at the railway stations. And at the very moment when there could be no more excuses, I was about to be granted another, in the form of this woman. She would, for a time, be my alibi, my reason to stay, to surrender to the city and be swallowed into it, once and for all.
After the declaration of war the previous September, the city’s libraries and museums were closed, their collections packed away in crates and sent to storehouses in the country, as were the artworks and artefacts in the museums, leaving the palaces of art and learning standing darkly empty, like, in certain ports, hulks that have been stripped of their fittings and are permanently moored. I’d spent the last several years burrowing into those libraries, writing a book about this city, a never-ending book in a constant state of expansion, a book that grew faster than it could be written. Now that the libraries were closed, I began to contemplate the possibility that my book would never be published.
And so, stripped of my work, I began to live a kind of floating life, setting out every day for long walks in my adopted city, the city I’d come to know and love more than the city of my birth, which I knew I would never see again. The war did not come straight away, of course. By day, during those nine months, the gears of the great machine of Paris continued to grind as they always had. The signs of war were subtle: bread rations at bakeries and restaurants, blue shade-cloth covering the streetlights, dry fountains, sandbags piled around statues and buildings, posters on billboard hoardings with the latest ministerial diktats. Those who could returned to their villages or, in the affluent western neighbourhoods, to their country estates. Those who stayed behind – those, that is, with nowhere else to go – seemed, after nightfall, infected by a fever of pleasure-seeking. The ten o’clock curfew was not enforced, and the indigo darkness served only to heighten the sense of the carnivalesque. Despite the dimness, rarely had the café terraces been so crowded, the brothel mattresses squeaked with such abandon, or the wooden floors of the bals-musettes trembled so lustfully with the thump of dancing heels.
I walked endlessly, in those nine months, all over the city, through neighbourhoods new and old, opulent and threadbare, and even, occasionally, through the makeshift slums of the Zone, where the city walls had stood until only a generation ago, and out into the bedraggled suburbs. In the hush of early morning, the mist that laced the streets might have been mistaken for ghosts risen from the catacombs under my feet, piled floor to ceiling with the bones of millions of the city’s dearly departed.
My walks would lead me more often than not to the river, that quicksilver vein that curves across the city’s breast, with its twin islands – the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis – as its centrepieces. I liked to amble along, fossicking through the green bookstalls that have lined the Seine for centuries, manned by the bouquinistes, those riverside
booksellers who tend doggedly to their modest treasures in sun and rain. If there was a glue that held together the sheafs of my existence during those months of the drôle de guerre, it was that cheap printer’s paste used in the manufacture of railway-station paperbacks, which dries and cracks prematurely, shedding the pages it binds as an animal sheds its winter fur. For when I was not walking the streets of the city, I read pulp novels bought several at a time from the bouquinistes. I raced through them in the evenings, lying on my bed in my little apartment, avoiding the propaganda on the radio and in the newspapers as much as I could. There was something consoling about these jigsaw-puzzle stories, steeped in melancholy, seesawing pleasantly between the familiar and the new, in which criminals and detectives faced off against one another in lurid intrigues of passion, revenge and misanthropy. Each one was an expert enquiry into the byzantine machinations of the French police, the same machine I myself was so keen to avoid.
I was a fugitive at a time when there was an oversupply of fugitives. After the declaration of war, all Germans, even ex-Germans, had been required to hand themselves in to the police. We were dispatched to makeshift internment camps in the countryside. I’d spent most of the previous winter sleeping on concrete in a school gymnasium in a desolate corner of Normandy, surrounded by Germans. All my adult life I’d suffered from night terrors, and so in the camp I slept during the day and stayed up at night, smoking and playing cards with the insomniacs, for fear of waking the entire dormitory with my screams. Finally, when it was clear there’d be no winter invasion, we were released. Nine months later, when the Wehrmacht finally invaded, German expatriates were once again ordered to surrender themselves. But this time I was determined not to give myself up so easily.
The key to staying out of reach of the secret police was to go out walking at dawn. For some reason, the Sûreté Nationale conducted its round-ups before breakfast. I also resolved to avoid speaking to strangers for fear that my accent would betray me, thus depriving myself of one of life’s great pleasures. There is no hiding an accent. No amount of effort or care or practice can ever rid one of it. Outside my circle of friends, every sound that came from my mouth was a possible self-betrayal as a boche, a chleuh, a fridolin. Two friends lived in my building on Rue Dombasle: Arthur, a Hungarian journalist, and Fritz, a surgeon I knew from Berlin who now earned his living performing illegal abortions. For a price, the landlady was prepared to overlook certain discrepancies in our paperwork. We played poker together on Saturday nights. Sometimes I would have coffee in one of the cafés where German émigrés gathered to swap fragments of information. It was tempting to believe that, with enough of these scraps, one might weave a kind of protective blanket around oneself, but the information was unreliable, and these dens swarmed with spies and informants.
Often, at the end of my long walks, I would return to my apartment through the Montparnasse cemetery. It was an island of tranquillity in an ocean of chaos. Here, I was beyond danger’s reach, as if I’d stepped out, for a moment, of the city’s hall of mirrors. I was a giant in a miniature city. The graves, grand or simple, tended or abandoned, depending on the fortunes of those buried inside them, were miniature buildings that lined its miniature avenues. From the main entrance on Boulevard Quinet, I’d turn right into the Avenue du Boulevard, past the old Israelite section (the cemetery’s ghetto), and turn left into the Avenue de l’Ouest, where, buried in the family crypt a little way up the incline between the mother he loved too much and the stepfather he loathed, lay Charles Baudelaire. There were always flowers on the tombstone left by the poet’s admirers, as well as little notes: a few lines from one of his poems, or an original poem imitating his style, opening a trapdoor into a secret universe of longing. I’d continue walking uphill along the Avenue de l’Ouest to the rear cemetery wall, re-entering the tumult of the city through a narrow gate in the corner.
As for the woman standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave, she was, for now at least, still a stranger. But it wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. The first time had been the previous winter, soon after my return from the camp, when she’d been wrapped up in a great double-breasted coat. The second time had been only weeks before, when the linden trees were budding. And now on this third occasion, standing motionless in exactly the same place, in exactly the same pose, at exactly the same time of day, puffs of blue-grey smoke drifting away in the golden light. Everything about her suggested a tightly wound, fiercely protected stillness. Deep within herself, she seemed unaware of the existence of anything except the grave before her – oblivious to passers-by, oblivious to the twittering of birds and rumble of distant traffic, oblivious even to what loomed overhead, a steep bank of violet clouds crowned by an aureole of sunlight.
I passed near enough to detect a faint scent of sandalwood and continued up the incline without stopping. Other than the two of us, the cemetery was empty. There were no funeral processions, no bereaved family members paying their respects, no sightseers or pilgrims in search of resident illuminati, not even a gardener tending to the plants. The emptiness brought out the secret heartbreak that lurked in every direction. Love is fleeting, regret is eternal, read the inscription on one of the tombstones. Midway between the grave and the rear gate, I turned to see if she was still there. She hadn’t moved. When I reached the gate, I took another look over my shoulder. She was gone. I stopped and, after a flicker of hesitation, turned back, determined to follow her.
In between gravestones, I caught a glimpse of hibiscus: she dashed towards the centre of the cemetery, down the Avenue Transversale. We must have made a strange sight, she slinking between gravestones, I trotting along the parallel path by the cemetery’s back wall further up the hill, stooping behind a crypt every now and then to peer through the marble forest between us. But the cemetery was otherwise deserted, and there were no witnesses to this curious dance.
I had to hurry to keep up with her. I kept my head down, catching another red and black flash of her from afar. She darted to the next crypt and looked about her as if checking to see if she’d been followed. Pursuing women in this manner was not something I had ever done before. Why now? Curiosity, of course. Perhaps also out of the anxious boredom of those days. But I remember realising I was enjoying myself. She scurried across the circular clearing at the centre of the cemetery, where an angel stands disconsolate on a plinth inscribed with the word Memory, and disappeared behind a thicket of headstones. I stopped and surveyed the scene. No sign of her. I approached the place I’d last seen her, where the Avenue de l’Est meets the Avenue Transversale. Still no sign of her. She’d disappeared. I scanned all around, my heart thudding in my chest, my eyes squinting in the sun’s glare. I hadn’t been to this part of the cemetery before. On my left stood a marker of mottled grey and pink marble. Engraved in gold leaf on the plinth were the words La Société Baudelaire, below which were the following names:
Édmonde Duchesne de Bressy, 1845–1900, founder and president
Lucien Roeg, 1866–1900, secretary
Hippolyte Balthazar, 1876–1917, secretary
Aristide Artopoulos, 1872–1923, president
I felt a presence behind me and heard the click of the catch of a gun being released. I turned and there she was, the woman I’d been following, pointing a small gun at my chest.
‘Who are you?’ we both asked in unison, then stood glowering at each other in silence. The hand that held the gun trembled slightly. The features of her face, the face of an elegant Asiatic woman in her forties, were unadorned and severe.
‘Why are you following me?’ she asked. ‘What do you want from me?’ She, too, spoke with an accent. The music of her speech, the rhythms of it, were organised differently, but I could not say precisely how. Being a foreigner means not just speaking with a foreigner’s accent, but being unable to recognise the accents of others.
‘I saw you standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave and . . .’ She didn’t react. I felt as if I were dreaming the situation rather t
han living it. ‘I, too, admire him.’ She appeared very fierce and very fragile at once. ‘I’ve seen you before, and I was curious . . .’ Realising I was not making much sense, I turned my attention to the weapon pointed at me – a Remington derringer, a popular choice for a certain kind of lady. Only my adversary did not appear to be that kind of lady. She did not seem accustomed to brandishing a weapon. She held it with both hands, its barrel wavering a little, and had she fired it she may have needed to shut her eyes to do so. ‘You look as if you’ve never shot a gun in your life.’
‘Don’t tempt me. What is your name?’
‘My name is –’ But I stopped. Since the start of the war, I’d made it a rule not to give out my name unless it was strictly necessary. A Jewish name, combined with a German accent – at times like this, such things lead to trouble. ‘I’m a . . .’ But this tack suddenly seemed just as hopeless. What was I, in fact? In the shadow of war, to be a writer seemed the most frivolous, absurd thing possible. But if I was not a writer, what was I? An ex-German, a Jew, an exile, a bachelor, a scholar, a flâneur, a drifter, a failure – all these were equally true and untrue. ‘I’m an admirer of Baudelaire. That’s why I was following you. I took you for a kindred spirit.’
‘You couldn’t be further from the truth. I am most decidedly not a kindred spirit.’
We heard a whistle from a distance. Behind the woman, a groundskeeper turned into the alley further down the hill and walked in our direction. ‘Don’t turn around,’ I said, ‘but there is a gardien approaching us.’
The woman tucked her firearm into a pocket in the side of her dress.
‘Monsieur, madame,’ said the gardien, ‘you heard the whistle. I’m afraid it’s closing time.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, mumbling to hide my accent. I pointed in the direction of the rear gate. ‘This way?’
Crossings Page 5
