Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  Paris in Recollection

  ROWING ON THE SEINE is difficult and can sometimes be dangerous. The current is strong, especially after heavy rains when the water is high and the river can run so fast a good oarsman fighting the flow as best he can stays in place or finds himself moving backward. Barges that are anything but nimble, bateaux-mouches, motorboats driven too fast by men who have had too much wine, and semi–submerged tree-trunks, pallets, or winter ice threaten the narrow and delicate single shells. Add to that the whirlpools, bends, abutments, and unforgiving walls past which the water is inflexibly channeled, and it isn’t a rower’s paradise, especially if you’re old.

  But having rowed on the Seine for the sixty years since he was fourteen, Jules hadn’t lost his touch. Long experience gave him an almost perfect knowledge of the eddies, ricochets, and fast water of the course as it wound past bridges and islands, and barges tied to the embankments. Nonetheless, he was a little afraid each time he went out, because although everyone flipped over now and then, his balance was uncanny, and never once having gone in the water he didn’t want to mar a perfect record of more than half a century. But more than that, he felt stalked by probabilities. If he did lose his balance, without having done so ever in his life, would he know what to do? That he was an excellent swimmer was irrelevant. He might panic if the water were cold, his heart might stop, he might be crushed by a speeding barge.

  Not this day in August, a few months before he knew he was going to go to New York, when he glided in on the current to a perfect landing at the dock. Had anyone seen him on the river, glistening with sweat in the August heat, he could have been mistaken for a muscular athlete in his late forties or early fifties. It took work, a lifetime of discipline, showing up when miserably cold and rowing or running through snow and sleet, never eating quite as he might like, and losing precious hours he might have spent in furthering his career. But Jules had resolved from early on, even before he knew it, that until the day he died he would be strong enough so as never to be unable to defend himself.

  The shower in the rickety boathouse, a barge illegally moored to the embankment, had a floor of eucalyptus planks so saturated with fragrant oil that it neither rotted nor grew slippery. Though the stream of water was thin and the austerity of the boathouse difficult to exaggerate, he didn’t need luxury. He wanted neither an elegant locker room nor a stand piled with thick newly washed towels, nor a Mercedes waiting for him outside, but only to know that, refreshed and clean, he could sprint up the stone stairs to the street and be not even slightly out of breath.

  After Jacqueline died he had clung to routine: rising; breakfast; the walk to the RER A; transfer at Châtelet Les Halles (rough and dangerous); the RER B to Luxembourg/Boul-Miche; passing through the portals of the old Sorbonne and noting with appreciation their ancient form; then, later, in the hideous new facilities at Clignancourt in the northeast of Paris; the start of class; music in the presence of young people animated by energy, vigor, and struggle; lessons and critiques in which he was carried away by the mystical reach of sound; then punishing exercise on the river; wonderful relief as he walked through the city; the train back; shopping; dinner; reading; practice; reflection; memory; prayer; and sleep.

  Taken together, these were the metronome of his life, and he was comforted by their steady procession, like the ticking of a clock, that eventually without fail would bring him to the woman he had loved for most of his life. But today would be different. Because the rhythm of the days that would see him along and bring him to her was imperfect, marred by his weakness and his will to live, today he would arrive later than usual in Saint-Germain-en-Laye because he was going to seek solace not in music or in memory or in a synagogue or church, but in something quite different. He was going to do the impossible. He was going to see a psychiatrist, in Paris, in August.

  THERE WAS ONE left, anyway, in the Villa Mozart, three flights up in a building so quiet that to walk into it was like becoming deaf. His waiting room had sea green walls and Empire furniture of mahogany and cherry. Jules had hardly had time to sit down when the doctor appeared. A short, bearded man with glasses – the fashion after Freud – he stood at the soundproofed door to his office and looked at his prospective patient, who was older than he was, though not by much. Despite the fact that he was one of the few psychiatrists present in the city in August, Dunaif’s prestige in the profession was legendary. Ignorant of that, Jules had found him in the telephone book, his fourteenth call.

  Dunaif stood in silence, studying Jules as one might study a painting. People see so many other people that they look at faces without seeing them. But so much is written in the face – of the past, of truth, hope, pain, love, and potential – that each man or woman deserves a Raphael, Rembrandt, or Vermeer to see and express it.

  What did Dunaif see? He supposed that the man standing before him, like so many – but here it was carved to an unusual depth – carried within him and would not abandon the life of the past, his love of those who had come before, a store of vivid memories, and, not least, the wounds of history. A smart, brave, and defeated old man sitting in front of the doctor, reticent as he might be, was more interesting than listening to the sexual travails or career disappointments of a twenty-eight-year-old.

  After a few minutes, Jules asked, “Do I come in there and speak, or do you just stand in the doorway and stare at me?”

  Gesturing with his right hand sweeping toward the interior, Dunaif invited him in. Two portes-fenêtres facing the street were open, their white gauze curtains moving patiently in breaths of summer air. Three times the size of the waiting room, the office was full of books – on three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, stacked on tables and his desk – but still spacious and open. Before the building had been divided into smaller apartments at the end of the war, this had once been a family’s main reception room.

  “Do you live here?” Jules asked.

  “Upstairs,” Dunaif said, settling into his chair. He interlocked his fingers and tilted his head a little, keeping his eyes leveled upon Jules as if to say, what have you to tell me?

  Not quite ready to open up, just as in music the first movement is often quiet and tentative, Jules proceeded gradually. He said, “You seem to be the only psychiatrist now working in Paris. What kind of psychiatrist, no, what kind of Frenchman, would be in Paris in August?”

  “I don’t like the beach,” Dunaif said. “That is, when everyone is on it. And this is what I do. In August the city is quiet and beautiful in its desertion. Although the young residents stay on duty in the hospitals, someone senior has to be on call to guide them.”

  “Why is there no one waiting? Your secretary? I saw a receptionist’s desk.”

  “She and they are all somewhere else. Paris shrinks as they take with them everything they think they’re leaving behind. On the Côte d’Azur the men play tennis as if their lives depend upon it, and the women look at each other’s handbags. It’s just like Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Everyone’s at the beach but me and you. What about you?”

  “I STOPPED GOING to the beach when my wife died. We used to go to what were then, anyway, the empty Atlantic beaches north of the Gironde. Unlike the rest of France, I’m not afraid to swim in the surf. Helicopters would hover and demand through their loudspeakers that I return to shore. One landed once, and the police tried to give me a ticket. I protested that swimming in the ocean could not be a crime, but evidently it can be. They demanded my papers, which I didn’t have of course, because I was in my bathing suit. They asked my name so they could write the summons. When I said Aristide Poisson, the cop almost hit me. They looked toward the helicopter, but the pilot moved his head from side to side to say, no, they were already fully loaded. Then they flew away. It was like a dream.”

  “Yes,” said Dunaif. “I had a patient yesterday who had exactly the same dream.”

  “A common phobia,” Jules answered in the same spirit, “helicopters catching you in the sea.”

&
nbsp; “Go on.”

  “About the beach?”

  “About anything.”

  “About anything,” Jules repeated, looking down.

  “Anything that occurs to you.”

  “All right. It’s a shock, and I don’t like it, that when I pay monthly, quarterly, or even annual bills, and when I wind the clock each week, I’m absolutely sure that I’ve done it the day before, not seven, or thirty, or a hundred and twenty days before, but yesterday, as if no time had passed. When writing the year 2014 on a check – do young people even write checks anymore, go to the post office, or read newspapers? It doesn’t look like it – I feel like I’m in a science-fiction novel. Sometimes I date my checks ‘nineteen fifty-eight,’ or ‘nineteen seventy-five,’ and then cross it out, amazed to write the present date, staring at it like an African tribesman or an American Indian brought as a curiosity to the London or Paris of the seventeenth century. Such a creature, kidnaped from his home, would, no matter what its difficulties, long for his tranquil past. And in the Old World, new to him, his touch would be forever numb, his hearing muted, his sight betrayed and blurred. Whatever the beauties around him, only home – lost over a seemingly infinite sea – would be really beautiful.”

  “I understand,” Dunaif said. “So let me ask what it is that keeps you in the past and prevents you from living fully in the present?”

  “Guilt.”

  “I’ve heard of that.” The psychiatrist was a Jew, and knew that Jules was as well. “This is France, after all. Devout, well practiced Catholics come here to confess. Those who are lapsed come to confess that they haven’t confessed – quite a confession. Jews, who have no confessors, are the champions of self-revelation, but telling me your sins, real or imagined, won’t wash them away. My job is not absolution but understanding.”

  “I know. That’s why I don’t think you, or anyone for that matter, can help me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Dunaif leaned forward compassionately – if this is possible, and it was. “Tell me.”

  “Rationally or not, I feel responsible for the deaths of many people and even animals. When someone close to me dies, I think that because I couldn’t save him I’ve killed him. It’s not logical, but it doesn’t go away.”

  “This started when?” Dunaif asked.

  “With my parents. During the war. I didn’t save them.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Four and a half.”

  “I have my job because the life of a man or a woman is forged in the wounds of infancy and childhood. You think, that was then and I can’t go back and fix things, and of course you can’t. But look at it another way. Now you, a grown man – I dare say, if I may, an old man – are blaming a four-year-old, who happens to have been you, for the inability single-handedly to defeat the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Vichy police, the collaborators …. Would you blame a four-year-old who was not you?”

  “Of course not, but you’re wrong. Love is absolute. It can’t be measured, or contained, or truly analyzed. It’s the one thing that you hold onto as you fall into the abyss. When you love, you experience a power close to that of the divine. And, like music, it enables you so far to transcend your bounds that you can’t even begin to understand it. So when you love, as a child loves his parents or a parent his child, you suffer the illusion that the limitless power you sense can save them. It can’t. I know, but my soul doesn’t, and it makes me want to die so I can share their fate.”

  “Hamlet jumped into Ophelia’s grave. But then he jumped out.”

  “And so do I, figuratively, each time. But let me go on. It hardly ended there. Louis Mignon and his wife, Marie, saved us, for a time. I stayed with them in Reims until I was seven. Then I went to live with cousins in Paris. At the station, Louis and Marie embraced me. They cried. I cried. And Louis tried to press a coin into my hand, ‘Pour chocolat,’ he said. But I refused to take it. I was a little kid, a very confused little kid, and I thought that by refusing the gift I was expressing my gratitude. He was deeply hurt, and two weeks later he died. I know I didn’t kill him, but you see?

  “The next was a dog, my dog, Jeudi. After I was sent to Paris I was bullied a lot in school – no parents, a Jew who stuttered in the accent of Reims, a child whose unhappiness brought forth a thousand blows and a lot of blood, literally. One day when I was coming home after taking a beating, she ran to greet me. She loved me, and I loved her. Because I had no parents, she was everything to me. But that day, for no reason, I hit her. I’ll never forget the sound when she cried out. Sometimes I dream it. Why did I hit her? I know now but so what? Normally I would have taken her in my arms. Her tail was wagging, she was just excited to see me, but I hit her, hard. She’s long dead. At times, when I think of that, I come to tears.

  “It doesn’t end there. I had a cousin, twenty years older than I was, a hero who had served with the Free French. He was tall, he had a beautiful girlfriend, and they would take me to amusements and on long walks. Young people in love sometimes have a kind of practice child. That was important to me, because I wanted to be exactly like him. I was always unhappy when he left, because, frankly, the relatives who took me in Paris didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I don’t blame them. I was a difficult child. But he saw through that. They had a little garden in which there was a hose for watering the plants and the grass. I played there, or brooded. One day in late September he had to leave, and a taxi was waiting to take him to the station. He came downstairs and into the garden to say goodbye to me. He was wearing a beautifully tailored suit. What did I do? Because I didn’t want him to go, I sprayed him with the hose. He got soaking wet and cold, but he had no time to change because he had to catch the train. I was scolded like a murderer, but he intervened and said it was all right. The way he looked at me told me that he understood and still loved me. Two months later he was dead from melanoma. What did I know? I thought he had become sick because of the chill. I thought for years that I had killed him. I know of course that I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

  “There were so many other occasions of that nature – pets that I had to put down, animals that I accidentally ran over, even a dove that I stepped on as I was coming out of my barracks before dawn. But there are two that loom very large. The time is passing, so I’ll tell you those quickly.”

  “Don’t worry about the time. You can come back.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “If it’s a matter of economy …” Dunaif began. For him, the ability of a patient to pay was not paramount.

  “It’s not that.” Jules paused for a moment before he went on. “I said two more, but it’s possibly three. That’s the problem.

  “The first was in Algeria in fifty-eight, on the northern sector of the Morice Line. I was a draftee of eighteen. I had good luck, because I served in the mountains, far from the cities. Our job was to prevent infiltration from Tunisia, of which there was a great deal. That was more straightforward and less morally difficult than most everything else in the war. We were soldiers fighting soldiers who came from abroad to participate in the civil war for which we had come from abroad as well. So, in a sense, we were even.

  “I had hoped to be a musician in the army, playing at the Élysée or in parades, but there was no place open for the cello, in marching bands the piano translates to the glockenspiel, and the glockenspiel positions were filled as well. So I ended up on Djebel Chélia, in a pine forest at two thousand meters. It was beautiful there in the middle of nowhere, with snow in the winter; views, from high outcroppings, of hundreds of kilometers; wild horses on the plains below; and heavy, steeply sloped forests.

  “Our base was surrounded by mines and wire, and we would patrol the few roads in armored vehicles, which, though rarely, were sometimes attacked. It was a quiet sector, because infiltrators preferred to travel away from the mountain itself, and other units would come into contact with them before they got to us – mostly.

  “I
loved being in such a place – or would have had it not been for the war – which made me long for home in the same way that one can long for a woman: the deep desire that can be felt, physically, throughout every part of the body. Evidently a lot of people don’t experience that, which is too bad.

  “Though I had determined to die before I killed an innocent, it was not from idealism. I hate idealism. It was because I couldn’t possibly do to anyone what had been done to my mother and father, as simple as that. But there were no civilians anywhere near us in those mountains, where the green of the pines was as deep as the blue of the sky, and I thought I’d escaped that kind of test, which is more common in war than most people imagine.

  “I was much stronger than I am now ….”

  “You seem fit for your age,” Dunaif said.

  “Maybe, but when I was young I had volcanic energy in surplus and overflowing. So I volunteered. For what? I was already there. But we were vulnerable. During the day, you could hear our vehicles from a kilometer away, and at night you could not only hear them but see their arc-light on top, probably from a hundred kilometers distant. Their ineffectiveness wasn’t a danger just because the enemy might have hidden and subsequently passed through, but because he might have massed to wipe out our small post. Not for any strategic reason, really, but just to kill us, take our weapons, enjoy a small victory.

  “I went to my commander and laid this out for him. He was one of those people who at the expense of everything else will take any route to his own success. At the end of my strategic essay – I was a young private – he said, ‘What do you recommend, patrolling without armor?’

  “‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Two or three men at a time, going out lightly armed, silently, waiting in ambush.’

  “‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do exactly that, according to your design. Arm yourself as you wish, go when and where you want, hunt in the forest.’