Paris Twilight

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A moody, sumptuous debut novel set in 1990s ParisMatilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York to be part of a surgery team in the winter of 1990, as manifestations against the First Gulf War are raging in the streets. Even as her concerns mount over the shadowy protocols surrounding the planned heart transplant, and even as she falls in love with the Arab diplomat in charge of those protocols, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious Paris apartment and a trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweep her through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past.As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery, the enigma that has haunted Matilde’s life. In the end she is left devastated, liberated, and, for the very first time, herself. * *Paris Twilight grapples with the meaning of love, the sin of suicide, and the mystery of family in a masterful fiction debut, a dizzying tale of personal transformation.About the AuthorParis Twilight is his first novel.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.II’M NOT SURE HOW to explain this, why I am writing to you, you of all people, and writing to you now, except for the simple circumstance that the rain has chased me into this place and does not appear to want to let me go, and here in my confinement all I can find in my purse to occupy me are a pen, a nail file, a piece of paper: prisoner’s tools. I’m ignoring the file. Daniel, I need a witness, and there’s no one else to turn to. Can you imagine how many witnesses we have lost by now, you and I, how little sense it all makes, those ancient awful dramas, with no one around to remember how splendid they were? Oh, how I have hated you! And now you are back on my mind because of the Brahms. And before that, I suppose, the train ride in from the airport. It was snowing. The winter this year was précoce, as they call it here, and that afternoon was too. With the flurries and the overcast, the day seemed hours ahead of itself, and reminded me of that other train ride, so long ago, when we had decided to go back into New York despite the blizzard, the fields and the Connecticut estuaries slipping by us, the snowflakes curling bright against the windows, your head in my lap. I see now, sitting in this dreary-day café, how unmoored I was becoming even so early on, just off the plane, with the onrush of dark and the RER hurtling me toward city where I have none of the things I know to grab on to to keep my mind from wandering. So, of course, the Brahms and the train. And also, I confess, I’m emboldened by the knowledge that whatever I set down here you will never read, that I will never know your thoughts. Such comfort! You see, Daniel, that after all, you have left me safe at last.It was a Thursday, that afternoon when I got in. I deserted the train at Gare du Nord, and, having pushed out with the crowd onto rue de Dunkerque, I was tempted to try to walk it, even with the weather, but I had the bags, and I didn’t want to arrive all soggy and sad and middle-aged in some terrible cold, grand lobby. They were putting me up at the Clairière. Anyway, my day was hardly over; they’d scheduled me for an evening meeting, which I dreaded, if only because Willem would be there, and I was nervous about seeing Willem. So I caught a cab, shards of war news on the radio as we swerved our way through town. In the deserts of Arabia, Western armies were gathering to drive Iraqi legions from Kuwait. From the news accounts emitted from the dashboard, the first pitched skirmishes were being fought right here.   L’Hôtel la Clairière de l’Armistice, when we reached it, was as monstrous as I’d imagined it would be, one of those push-pull places full of servile staff and imposing décor, all this uncomfortable comfort, walnut and crystal and that grotesque white furniture trimmed in gilt that always reminds me of dental work, or naval uniforms. My room wasn’t ready, of course. I dumped my bags on the concierge, and the martinet at the check-in desk (his humility had been honed to a murderous edge) scrutinized my passport and refused my credit card — “Déjà reglé,” he sniffed. Already settled. It was almost as an afterthought (though with a world of forethought devoted to his gesture) that he handed me the message, just as a voice behind me boomed, “Mademoiselle.” I stuffed the envelope into my purse with the luggage receipt.   The accent was clearly Anglo, and I responded with all the mademoisellian coquettishness my fifty years could muster. “Why, sir,” I said, “you flatter me.” I meant it as a quip, but really I was bracing myself. It’s a reflex. Whatever was approaching, I wanted a stance to handle it. Of course, at the same time, I knew exactly who to expect, whose familiar Anglo accent I was hearing, and I turned and we embraced. My first thought was My, he’s prospered! do you remember what a skinny guy Willem used to be? — and then immediately I was reminded of my own prosperity and grew self-conscious. After a few seconds of squeezing the life out of me, he held me out at arm’s length with locked elbows and a hand on each shoulder — why do men of a certain stature think women enjoy being grasped like a lectern? — and gave me the expression: you know, this tight-lipped side glance full of rue and fondness that’s supposed to add up to the gaze of enduring love. “My God, you haven’t changed a bit,” he said, intoning, and I shot him my expression of enduring dismissal, and he said that, well, we could head out whenever I was ready.   I checked myself over in my mind — was my travel attire really presentable? My travel face? — and I heard myself babbling that he really hadn’t needed to pick me up at the hotel, I could easily have caught a cab, that we could leave right away, why not, since I couldn’t check in yet. We stepped out under the porte-cochère and he helped me into the back of a long, dark Mercedes that slid up to the curb and gave the driver a destination. I thought: His first honest sentence. On the way down the boulevard, he ventured another, more quietly. “Thank you for doing this, Matilde.”   “You’re very welcome,” I said, and, after a while, “I don’t call a paid month in Paris much of a sacrifice.”   “It’s an exorbitant amount of time,” he said. “Maybe five weeks, we still don’t know.”   “Well, I told you when you called, you’re not exactly dragging me away from anything.”   He looked at me slightly mystified, as though I had answered a question about something else.I had thought the ride would be a short one; that’s generally how things work in such arrangements, proximity being at a premium. But we headed down the boulevard to the highway and out of the city center into the neighborhoods of some inner banlieue. The traffic, at first, was more clotted even than I remembered it, even for late on a weekday afternoon. Willem leaned over the seatback to inquire. “Les manifestations,” the chauffeur answered — he was an Algerian, Willem would later inform me, whose name was Drôlet — the protests “contre la guerre.”   The snow flurries had abated, and as soon as we escaped the city, the roads cleared of other cars. A small village flashed by, and another and smaller one, and then we were on a winding country avenue passing the walls of enclosed estates, until finally the Mercedes turned up a pea-gravel driveway that led through the lawns of a large old chateau. Former chateau. It was a hospital now. There were no indicators of such, no glaring emergency bay, no Quiet signs lining the road or speed bumps on the drive, and no name on the art-nouveau beveled-glass door, but it was irrefutably a hospital. With a little practice, you can smell them a mile away.   There was a small lobby inside the beveled glass, but no public waiting room and no records window staffed by admitting nurses, only a stocky, efficient, daunting woman in a silk dress and sensible heels sitting behind a table who half stood when the door opened and then relaxed when she saw Willem and nodded us wordlessly toward some double doors. The doors gave a click when she reached beneath the table, and we went through into a hallway.   Inside, things were brighter and more antiseptic, but hardly less sumptuous. Willem felt my gaze on his cheek, or sensed my raised eyebrow, and said — did I imagine he was chuckling a little? — “Come along, you’ll see,” and we caught an elevator up to the top floor, the floor you needed to use a key for the elevator to reach, which Willem produced from his key ring, and then he ushered me down another hallway into a small, book-lined conference study where a dozen or so men were milling about, eating little sandwiches and sipping coffee. As we entered, a quiet fell, and all of them simultaneously moved to put down their plates.   “Hello, gentlemen,” Willem said as we bustled in, and he steered me past the crowd to a man standing out of the light and modestly apart, and introduced us.   “Professor Anselm,” the man said to me, softly. “I’m honored.”   “Mr. Sahran,” I said back, hoping I’d caught the pronunciation right. He was a trim man in a quiet suit, shorter than me and maybe younger, late forties or so, aristocratic in his bearing and with an extraordinary limpid gentleness in his gaze, though it was the sort of gentleness you would never want to cross. I took him to be a consul or envoy — he was one of those men tightly coiled within their composure whom you rarely run into anymore outside the foreign service, but what on earth (I reminded myself) did I know about the foreign service? I couldn’t help feeling that if he was honored, I was obscurely in peril.   “We are very grateful that you are able to take this on,” he said, and his eyes probed mine for an exploratory second. “I trust you had a nice trip? Your accommodations are acceptable?” he asked, and when I answered the rhetorical pleasantry with a rhetorical nod, he answered my answer with a little smile. “Good,” he said, and it was understood that some contract had been efficiently negotiated and signed.   “Well, Dr. Madsen, I leave all this to you.” Sahran shook Willem’s hand, and then mine again, with a slight, qu...