Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  PARIS

  IN THE

  PRESENT

  TENSE

  A NOVEL

  MARK HELPRIN

  Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present.

  In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

  In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2017 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  or write to us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2017 by Mark Helprin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer

  ISBN 978-1-4683-1477-9

  For Julian Licht, Jules Hirsch, and Francine Christophe

  With thanks to William Winston – Poet, Critic, Friend

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I.

  RISING AND ALOFT

  Air France 017

  Paris in Recollection

  The Insurance Salesman Armand Marteau

  François Ehrenshtamm, Philosophe

  This Jack Person

  Writing a Jingle in Saint-Germain-en-Laye

  Jacqueline at Sparta

  The Past Upwells

  The Policeman Is Your Friend

  A Million Swimming Pools

  Amina Belkacem

  A Thousand Lawyers

  Lights Corruscating Through the Dusk

  Touching Down

  II.

  BLOOD WILL TELL

  DNA

  Cathérine and David, François

  Jacqueline’s Photograph

  1944

  The Music Lesson

  III.

  Loyal à Mort

  The Sun Comes Out for Armand Marteau

  Spring Fire and Smoke

  As Light and Warmth Put France at Ease

  If, at Its End, Your Life Takes on the Attributes of Art

  The Patient, Barely Alive, Had Collapsed on the RER

  Élodi, Jules, Duvalier, Arnaud, and Nerval

  Élodi Alone

  August

  Amina

  On the Grand Terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye

  About the Author

  Jules Lacour was born in 1940, while his parents were hiding in an attic in Reims. His mother prayed that he would not cry, he seldom did, and in the four years that followed neither he nor they spoke above a whisper. That was the beginning of a long story.

  I.

  Rising and Aloft

  Air France 017

  A DISINTEGRATING AIRFRAME offers little in the way of second chances, and because this sometimes happens, taking to the air tends to heighten one’s awareness of that which has come before and that which may come yet. Though travelers convince themselves that statistics watch over them, tension flows through airports like windblown clouds, and as an aircraft rises to 13,000 meters those within it may be drawn to assess what they love and what they hope for in the time left.

  And when autumn weather on land may be pleasantly crisp and permissive of wearing a suit in perfect comfort, the North Atlantic is deadly cold and unforgiving. Swells that normally run at three or four feet can easily rise to ten or more, and even as freezing wind draws long lines of foam across the wave crests at thirty knots it isn’t called a storm. Delicate airplanes constructed of a million discrete parts fly far above such cold and dark seas for hours as meals are served, movies screened, telephone calls made, and lights turned down while passengers sleep under soft wool blankets. But should the plane break up in the air or crash into the waves, death will have its way most horribly. Surprising for most, but not for all.

  A huge, dark-gold, reddened sun had almost set. Manhattan’s skyscrapers and tenements, painted in flame on their south and west sides, stood in impenetrable shadow on their north and east faces. And in business class on Air France 017, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle – who, before they became airports, knew one another and were in power at the same time – a window seat awaited Jules Lacour, who found it, settled in, and assessed his quarters with less enthusiasm than they were supposed to elicit. Low walls that curved to provide privacy and call attention to their design allowed him to see the procession of boarders passing through: tourists and Egyptians, Philadelphia housewives and graduate students, a baby or two, but mainly, in the business and first class cabins, jaded men of affairs who an instant after taking their seats opened newspapers, laptops, or spiral-bound books full of tables and charts. That is, if they were not engaged in cell-phone conversations projected with the stiff self-importance that was their oxygen.

  The flight wasn’t full, it had boarded quickly, and traffic on the runways was such that the crew wanted to pull from the gate as fast as possible to be slotted-in for takeoff. As the plane was pushed back from the terminal, Manhattan came into view from the Battery almost to Hell Gate. The palisade of buildings was pitch black on its eastern face, but light from the sun side broke so hard upon steel and glass that its coronas roiled over the rooftops like waves breaking over a sea wall.

  Although it was for him the scene of bitter defeat, Jules Lacour could not hold his own failure against a city that – unlike Paris, but like life – was beautiful both in spite of itself and as the sum of its ungainly parts. Manhattan was a gift not of form but of light and motion. From a distance or on high the persistent sound that rose from it, a barely audible hum that never ceased, might have been the whispered stories of all its inhabitants, even the dead. He couldn’t dislike New York, no matter the petty injuries and humiliations he had suffered there because as a foreigner he could neither fully understand it, nor fight the way it fought, nor speak the way it spoke. Nor could they speak the way he spoke. They didn’t even say his name correctly, pronouncing Jules indistinguishably from the English word jewels.

  He never quite got used to this, as in French the S was silent and the J pronounced “zh.” They did almost alright with Lacour, coming close to the second syllable’s cooor, and not quite making it, but Jewels
drove him crazy, as if every time someone addressed him they called him Bijoux. Not that Jules’ English was that precise – he had a strong French accent – but no one in America seemed to know how to pronounce any foreign word.

  And apparently no one had ever heard of anything either, and Jules Lacour was so constantly explaining references and allusions that eventually he gave up. De Gaulle? Churchill? Renoir? Winslow Homer? Cavafy? Not a chance. Set (invisibly when it was off) in the bathroom mirror, a hotel television nearly scared him to death when he accidentally turned it on and saw Mick Jagger staring back at him. On the same machine he witnessed interviews with American beach-goers who thought that in 1776 America had won its independence from California, that the moon was bigger than the sun, that you could take a Greyhound Bus to North Korea, that Alaska was an island south of Hawaii, and that the Supreme Court was a motel in Santa Monica. How could the United States have become so rich, powerful, and inventive? Or, rather, how long could it remain so?

  RAISING THE RPM of its enormous engines, the pilots smoothly and slowly moved the Airbus forward. Ailerons and flaps were exercised at a stately pace as spoilers popped up like prairie dogs and then retreated. The deep harmonies and a slight treble weaving amid and yet overwhelmed by the bass said that despite the immense power already evident, the turbines were still at rest, with the counterpoint of bass suggesting that they were yearning to come up full. Music even of this kind was everywhere the bearer of messages from an unreachable but always beckoning place out of which perfection spilled easily and without limit.

  In his deepest despair – when his wife died, when his only grandchild was diagnosed with leukemia (the reason he had come to America) – Jules Lacour might still hear music arising from unexpected quarters: from the rhythms of steel wheels on train tracks, though this was now rare in France after the joints in the rails had been bridged by welds; from the clickings of elevators moving in their shafts; the unpredictable harmonies of traffic; wind in the trees; the workings of machines; and water flowing, falling, or surging in waves. Even in desperation, music would sound as if from nothing, and wake him to life. He was a cellist, and could never have been anything else. The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched.

  After a steady roll, the plane reached the end of the runway and stopped before final check and permission to take off. The stewards and stewardesses, who as if they had no sex were now called flight attendants, had taken their seats facing backward and at their charges, whom they surveyed unobtrusively. The plane almost pivoted, the tip of the port wing tracing an enormous arc as the tip to starboard backed up as carefully as an intimidated animal. The engines were pushed to full. Just as he had as a young soldier in a troop transport rising on a course for Africa, as the plane sped down the runway and lifted off, Jules forgot his troubles. The war in Algeria had ended so long before, that, when asked about it he would simply say, “That part of my life is now a museum.”

  They rose with great speed and the mounting force of gravity. Off to the right, Manhattan sparkled, its shadowed side gleaming with uncountable lights. These were mainly white and silver, but some blinked red at the tops of smokestacks and masts, or made the illuminated triangles and summit caps of skyscrapers green, gold, or pale blue. The sun had fallen into New Jersey, which was now nothing more than a burning red rim.

  Soon they gained enough altitude to catch a glimpse of a thin line of molten silver – the Hudson – which dropped away as they banked northeast into the night and continued to climb, now more steadily, with less roar. The cabin lights came up. The flight attendants undid the buckles of their seatbelts and stood. The clicking of aluminum sounded two full bars. With a minor adjustment it could have been the opening and theme of a Flamenco. Jules gave it rhythm and orchestration until, for him, but only for an instant, it filled the cabin. When the music stopped, its gifts returned whence they had come.

  THE GENIUS OF the designer notwithstanding, it had taken millennia to fashion the tailoring of an Air France stewardess’ uniform, every line and angle of which knew with affection the beauty and charm of her body and the loveliness of her face. The richest possible navy fabric opened gracefully at the neck as if in love with the complex anatomy it complemented. It was almost impossible not to be struck by the brilliant red bow at the waist, the slight bell at the hem of the coat, and the perfect fall of the cloth. Principles as intricate and mysterious as any in the seven arts were present in the cut, a rich simplicity being the secret not only of French fashion but perhaps of France itself. At their best, the dress, the coat, the maquillage, were there to call attention not to themselves but to the woman they graced, just as the architecture of Paris, the pattern of its streets, its garlands of trees, and the design of its gardens – every cornice, rail, lamppost, and arch – were there not to call attention to themselves but to be part of a chain of beauties leading to unseen realms. Not dissimilar to the composition of a painting, the deft placement of words upon a page, or music unfurling through the air, a golden proportion enlivened the flow of the cloth as it moved with her.

  From within the off-white eggshell of his seat/bed, Jules observed the stewardesses as they moved throughout the cabin. Even if plain, they were beautiful. The scents of the cosmetics, different from those of perfume, and, to him, more exciting, suggested an almost theatrical preparation. The beginning of the flight was a stage for these women. When expectations were greatest and the passengers most awake, they were at their peak. Tentatively separated from loyalties and attachments by the fact of travel, the speed with which land was left behind, the potential for disaster, and having risen into what for most of human history had been called heaven, many of those on board, witness to this play of light and motion, imagined a new life with someone encountered like an angel far above the earth. Though economists, executives, and bureaucrats might have seen it differently, this was an influential effect of business travel.

  A stewardess approached Jules, bent gracefully, and, addressing him in English, asked what he would prefer for dinner. Because he had been in America for weeks and was lost in how she held herself and how she spoke, he answered as he was addressed. At first they failed to recognize one another’s accents, but with his perfect pitch he soon heard in her English the telltale markers of their native language, in which he then spoke to her. Had he been younger he would have fallen in love. She was beautiful in her way. He hadn’t seen it at first. Then he did. So even though he was not younger, he did begin to fall in love, for a moment, a minute or two, and in an afterglow when she left. Then he resisted, as had she by the time she bent to speak to the next passenger. Jules would often fall in love this way, intensely and briefly with women who justly deserved it and often elicited it. But these infatuations would quickly lead to his deep love for Jacqueline, who was now gone.

  “I THOUGHT THIS wasn’t allowed,” he said to the stewardess when she came back. He pointed to a knife on the tray she had just placed before him. The reading light made the silverware gleam.

  Rather than give a formal answer, she shrugged her shoulders, which lifted and lowered the beautifully cut collar along the curve of her neck. “The doors to the flight deck are impenetrable,” she said. “There may be sky marshals; and although no one ever seems to think of this, the other passengers also have knives on their trays, and there would be more of them than there would be terrorists.” His expression acknowledged her point and that he hadn’t thought of it. She smiled, turned, and disappeared up the aisle.

  He turned his attention to the food. He always ate lightly and suspiciously when in the air. There before him on the plate was a square of some kind of fish, which looked like a piece of yellow pastry. He hardly drank alcohol at all and never when flying, but now made an exception of a split of Pol Roget, studying the bottle as he ate, rather than staring at th
e partition. The label was admirably modest: some graceful penmanship set against a plain white background. Unlike other brands, Pol Roget was bereft of shining foil at the neck. Champagne was made to go with sparkling and reflected light, and there was no gleam from the bottle itself. But the reading lamp illuminated the bubbles as they rose in undulating silver lines through a sea of gold.

  In this little thing and things like it – the perfect and complex ascent of the tiny orbs, all exactly the same size and flawlessly spherical; the uncountable molecules of air that with unvarying obedience to fluid mechanics kept the plane aloft across thousands of miles of ocean; the fuel that burned without a hiccup; the turbines that spun without flying apart – life’s secrets were beyond calculation or understanding. Not merely the three-body problem, not merely physics, but rather the faithful consistency of nature. The light was invariably precise as it shone upon the tiny, reflective spheres in the Champagne, moving exactly according to universal laws. Just as the plane was held miles high by air that even in the light was invisible, so the most discrete effects betrayed the most fundamental truths.

  After the Champagne and before he knew it, the tray had been removed and the cabin lights dimmed. Somewhere over the sea, ignorant of how many hundred kilometers they were off Halifax or in how many hundred Iceland would be directly north in the darkness, Jules Lacour put his seat back a quarter of the way, checked his watch, and looked out the window. The cabin had grown quiet and the stewardesses had retreated. Standing in an alcove, illuminated from above and framed in black, they spoke softly and sometimes laughed. Most of their work was done until morning. Perhaps the one he liked was thinking of him.

  Of the seven hours and twenty minutes of flight, almost six hours remained – six hours in which to think of how to plan revenge, save a life, and give his own. With stars all around, the plane split a path through the night, rising and falling more smoothly than a boat on a gently rolling sea.