Paris in the Present Tense Read online

“‘But I thought you would put me under a sergeant,’ I told him.

  “‘Oh no no no!’ he said. ‘You’re in command.’

  “‘Me?’

  “‘You.’

  “‘Of how many men?’

  “‘One. You.’

  “‘I can’t take anyone else?’

  “‘No. It’s possibly a good idea, but I won’t risk others. I relieve you of all duties except what you propose. You’ll do that and only that from now forward. Twelve hours in the forest every day, whether in the light or in the dark is up to you. Take the armament you need. Obviously, for what you propose, because we don’t have the new ones, one of our radios would be too heavy. So be sure to include a flare or two in case you make contact and need help. You’ve come up with a good idea. Let’s try it.’

  “I’d spend twelve hours on my patrols – in daylight, at night, or in combination, setting out, for example, at zero three hundred and returning at fifteen hundred, armed with a submachine gun, six magazines of ammunition, two grenades, a pistol, and a bayonet. Depending upon the season, I carried a water bottle or two, chocolate, and bread. It was most difficult in the snow, sometimes impossible, but the snows were rare and would melt fast. And because the enemy knew less of snow than we did, it suppressed his movement better than if we had had two armies rather than just one.

  “Nothing happened, until it did. I was patrolling around the mountain in daylight. This was so long ago – fifty-six years now – that although I remember the smallest pertinent details, I don’t remember the season. But it must’ve been either late fall, winter, or early spring, because I know I was wearing a sweater. I’m certain of that, because I have a memory of the images. Our uniforms were brown, as for most of the country that was the best camouflage, but up on the mountain the one good thing our commander did was get us green fatigues. I could stand in the trees, and if I were still, because the boughs in many places were so dense, you would never see me.

  “Although at that point I hadn’t run into any infiltrators, I was always alert, especially when I moved, which is when one is most vulnerable. Waiting for someone to pass offers an inestimable advantage. When you move, you announce your presence in sight and sound. I moved cautiously and intermittently. It was a beautiful day, under a blue sky, with a breeze. The ground was quite dry. I had my customary armament, the submachine gun in my hands not quite ready to fire (in case I fell). I was unhappy that day probably because of some argument with other soldiers or officers. There was a lot of resentment and frustration.

  “I would move, then stop to look and listen. A few meters, then a few minutes of motionless silence. During one of these pauses I thought I heard whispered conversation. It was hard to be sure that it was not the wind. As I readied the gun, my pulse raced and for a moment it was deafening as blood pounded through my arteries. But I let myself calm down, and moved forward a step or two at a time. Straight ahead, I saw through a mass of pine boughs the shape of two people, their clothing illuminated brightly in the sun. That was stupid. In the woods you have to avoid pools of light. They were talking in low whispers.

  “I scanned all around. The last thing I wanted was to be shot or knifed by others whom I hadn’t seen while my attention was focused elsewhere. After a while, I was satisfied that the two who were talking were the only ones present. I don’t know how long it took, but I moved toward them very slowly, making no sound, until I was on one side of a thick pine and they on the other. One of them was an old Arab, armed with a pistol holstered on a Sam Browne belt. The other was a girl of about twenty, French, at least European, with blue eyes and blond hair. She was wearing a black-and-white checkered kaffiyah draped around her neck, the way so many young people in Paris do now. The image will never leave me. I was eighteen. The moment I saw her I not only desired her, I actually fell in love, and it knocked all the fear out of me. How crazy can you be at that age? I don’t know, because I think I could do it now.”

  “Falling in love?”

  “Yes, even with someone who wants to kill me. The Arab was sketching a map, the girl drawing a picture of our base. Both would point up at the fortifications, comment, and make adjustments to their work. This was in a military area that was clearly off-limits. I knew they were the enemy, but I couldn’t see her as that. I can still feel my attraction to her.

  “They were so absorbed in what they were doing that they didn’t see me until I was right in front of them. I didn’t do anything special, I just walked to where they were. Then, when they saw a French soldier, his submachine gun pointed at them, two meters away, their shock and fear bled into sadness and despair. But the old man was clever and experienced, and his despair vanished when he saw how I was looking at the girl.

  “At the same moment that I commanded them, in Arabic and then French, to put their hands in the air, he rose, pulling her up and ahead of him. Though she was still shocked and scared she held tightly onto her pad and pencils. This all happened quickly. He drew his pistol, slowly raised it, and pointed it not quite at me. I took aim at him as best I could, but she covered most of his body. They began to walk backward, occasionally almost tripping.

  “Though she was distressed, she was not a hostage. I followed, my finger on the trigger, as it had to be. I was afraid that if I tripped I would kill both of them, and I couldn’t see where I was walking, because I couldn’t take my eyes off them for even a second. Again and again, I commanded them to stop, but they wouldn’t. I wanted to shoot him. He was armed, a spy, disobeying my order. But they were moving, all I had was a fairly inaccurate submachine gun, and the only target was a portion of his head.

  “Not only had I resolved to die myself rather than kill an innocent, but although she was hardly an innocent I loved her. I was as unhappy that I wouldn’t get to speak to her as I was unhappy that they were getting away. I followed for a while, but then I let them go. To have shot them would have been horrible. I knew what it would be like to see her dying on the ground. Even him. I couldn’t kill them.

  “You can imagine how distressed I was as I walked back to the post, not at all cautiously, debating whether or not to report it. I did report it and was punished: two months in military prison. Prison was rather difficult, to say the least. But that was nothing compared to what followed, and what has stayed with me ever since.

  “While I was imprisoned, the outpost was attacked in force. They came by routes through the forest that had been carefully mapped, undoubtedly by the old man and the girl. Who she was I never knew. French? A colon? A German, Swede? I was uneasy from the start about what I had done or not done, but in the attack five soldiers were killed. Some had been my friends, my age or close to it. Their lives stopped in nineteen fifty-eight, or early fifty-nine, I’m not exactly sure. It was much warmer there, and as I’ve said, my memory of the seasons is confused. Am I not responsible for their deaths? Perhaps they would have died in the attack anyway, even had there been no intelligence, but I can’t say that I’m not to blame.

  “Sometimes I think that this tendency I have, my sense of causation and feeling of responsibility, is as absurd as when a musician I knew banned me from his car because the right, rear tire blew while I was sitting in the right, rear seat.”

  “Especially when absurd,” Dunaif said, “emotions point the way. To get to the burial chambers in the pyramids you have to follow the most twisted, illogical paths. Nothing you’ve told me is illogical in context, and what you’re telling me obviously needs to be told.”

  “It weighs upon me and always will. Before I sleep and when I wake are the worst. And there are others, but I don’t want any of them not to weigh upon me. It would make the sin worse.”

  “The sin?” Dunaif asked.

  “If not sin, failure. Terrible failure.”

  “I’m struck,” said the doctor, “by how strongly each of these reinforces the others.”

  “I should have died a long time ago, but I’ve kept on living.”

  “The year in which you bel
ieve you were obligated to die was …?”

  “Nineteen forty-four.”

  “That has almost surely lent its power to the others, and why you haven’t described it – perhaps you can’t – except to summarize it, as if it happened not to you but to someone else.”

  Whatever reaction this solicited was not visible to the psychiatrist. It puzzled him. Jules just went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I’ve told you, or you can deduce from what I’ve told you, how strongly and quickly I fall in love. Whether it’s a fault or not I don’t know, but I have friends who’ve never fallen in love, and I wouldn’t want to be them. When I met my wife, I fell so hard I thought I’d gone insane. She died four years ago.

  “She was sixty-six, in excellent health, and looked at least fifteen years younger than she was. Though perhaps it was vanity or illusion, both of us felt as if we were in our thirties. When we were young, we could walk fifty kilometers a day in the mountains. Even the summer she died, we crossed the Pyrenees, we swam in freezing-cold streams. My God, if you had seen her in the nude you would think she was thirty. Men of my age – I suppose I’m too old now, so I’d have to say men not quite as old as I am – have mistresses and affairs. They want life. That they seek a younger woman is a biological compulsion even if they don’t know it, something which, by the way, does not detract from their just appreciation.

  “I would never have done that, but also I had no need to. She was beautiful and lithe until the end. The illness struck without warning, just as if it had struck a younger woman. We were old enough to be prepared in the abstract, and had thought about and talked about one of us dying before the other, but even at sixty-six and seventy it seemed remote. That must happen a lot these days, when old people, sometimes as fit as soldiers, are then, like soldiers, surprised by death.

  “We were on the terrace and about to eat. Everything seemed perfectly fine and normal. Suddenly she doubled over with pain in her abdomen. Something like that happens sometimes, if rarely, so she said just to let her lie down. But after half an hour it was so bad I had to carry her to the car. When she got in, she wept. I’m sure she was thinking that she would never come back to the house. That’s when I felt a terror I hadn’t felt since I was a small child. A terror like that of falling. The first time I jumped from a plane, in the seconds before the static line opened my chute, it was that kind of all-possessing fear.

  “It was late enough in the evening so that I tore across Paris all the way from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where we live, to La Pitié-Salpêtrière. I knew it was serious. I didn’t want to waste time and referrals, and our doctor practiced there, as Jacqueline and I were both at Paris-Sorbonne and had lived in the Quartier latin. Now the hospital … what can I say? It’s for the poor and suffering. You feel it. But our doctor was there. He’s unsurpassed. The physicians at La Pitié-Salpêtrière have a constant stream of hard cases, so they’re truly expert. But I’ve always thought that I should have taken her to Switzerland, to some gleaming, quiet, expensive place – unhurried, modern, where the walls are clean even on the outside, which at La Pitié they certainly are not. But at La Pitié it’s like battlefield medicine. You get the feeling that anything you bring them they’ve seen the day before and the day before that.

  “And they have, but she never did come back to the house, she never rode in a car again. Everything – her walk to the gurney in front of the emergency entrance, the last time she was under the sky, the last breath of outside air – was the last. She tried hard to get me to go home, but I stayed up with her all night. By noon the next day, the diagnosis came in. They said it was cancer of the pancreas.” Here, Jules paused to compose himself. “And they recommended that she go to a hospice.

  “We said, no, treat it aggressively, experimentally. Fight. They’d heard this so many times before, and I hated their expressions as they tried to explain to us that it was hopeless. How did they know? They aren’t God. They acquiesced: which they will if you press hard enough. And in the next few days I pulled every string I could. Granted, I don’t have many strings to pull. I’m just an adjunct in music. Whatever powers I have are not practical. Still, we did have the best doctors and they were as aggressive as we had begged them to be. Not so much Jacqueline. She was half gone, resigned. She was by then frighteningly ethereal, tranquil, unburdened, and of a beauty far more delicate than I had ever seen, perhaps because she was vanishing. It was almost like evaporation. I felt her substance fleeing from her, literally rising, as if she were half in another world or had sworn allegiance to a comforting power of which I knew nothing and could not see. I felt her moving toward it and abandoning me, like transpiration, like snow sublimating in the sun. And I couldn’t stop it.

  “They operated on her for eight hours. They’d told me that it would be at least four, likely six, and that I shouldn’t just sit in the waiting room. Too hard, they said, distract yourself. So I walked. There’s the little park there, and miles of corridors. You know the name of the park?”

  “I’ve walked through it many times, but I don’t.”

  “Parc de la Hauteur.

  “A psychologist must have told them that yellow, creme, and beige promote health and equanimity. Yellow like sunshine. It’s everywhere there. The awnings, shades, and panels of Oncologie Médicale, Division Jacquart are yellow. I went to the Seine. Every time I heard a train whistle in the rail yards of the Gare d’Austerlitz between the hospital and the river, I took it as a sign and a prayer.

  “And in quiet, hidden places, I did pray. My style of prayer is my own. The Mignons were Catholics, so I sink to my knees, bow my head, and hold my hands like Jeanne d’Arc – like someone, it occurs to me now, about to be executed. And because I’m a Jew I daven. That’s how I prayed. I prayed for my wife, whom I loved like no one else. Against a wall of the rail yards I prayed so hard I trembled. A garbage-truck driver saw me. An African. He stopped the truck because he thought I needed help. Then he saw that I was crying, and he put his arms around me and said, ‘No no, everything will come right, everything will come right.’ I wouldn’t have done that to a stranger near a rail yard. Who’s the better man?

  “I returned to the hospital, in the dark. The operation was to have started in the morning but there had been emergencies and it was delayed. At nine they came to me. There wasn’t much left of me by then. Two of them burst through the doors, their operating gowns open and trailing in the breeze of their forward momentum, their masks dangling.

  “They were smiling. A miracle. ‘We made the most thorough exploration we could,’ one of them said, ‘and did quite a few biopsies on the spot. We’ll have to wait a few days for absolute confirmation, but we’ve found nothing. It seems that Madame Lacour has pancreatitis, from which there is no reason that she will not recover.’

  “Everything changed as I imagined her recovery. I would do the cooking. It would still be warm enough in September to eat on the terrace. By Christmas we would be swimming in a tropical sea. I thought of Polynesia and determined to spend the money. You know, in that hospital city there are banana trees flanking some of the streets on the eastern side. Right out of Africa or South America, what do they do in the snow? Perhaps the point is that they survive when everyone would think that they would not. Probably that’s too subtle, but I got it anyway, and all I could think of was bringing Jacqueline to some warm, breezy, sweet-smelling place with blue-green water. I’m not good at vacations. It’s hard to pry me away from Paris, my work, and my routine. I had deprived her of a lifetime of vacations because I was always worried about money and the things I had to do. I’m one of those people, you see, who have perfect attendance records and precise schedules. I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten an appointment or not completed an assignment. What good is that now?

  “For two weeks, she recovered in the hospital, but she was never herself. The operation had caused major trauma and damage, and she couldn’t eat. Then she began taking liquid meals, and strengthened. I set up everything at home so as to car
e for her. My prayers had been answered. I would keep her close from then on. We would go to the South Seas, we would sit on the terrace, and she would wear her straw hat, because she didn’t like the sun on her face – an aversion that made her skin seem like that of a much younger woman. I, on the other hand, well, look at me.

  “The evening before she was to be discharged I ate the dinner she couldn’t eat, while she had her dinner through a straw. The doctor had said that when home she could start on rice cereal and gradually proceed back to normal. Having been in the hospital for so long, she was weak but no longer confused. In the days after the operation she had imagined that a wall of her room was a vertical front of agitated green seawater with whitecaps and swells, and that dolphins were leaping from it and falling back – horizontally, as if gravity went sideways rather than up and down. This pleased her. I tried to disabuse her of it, hoping to bring her back and keep her. I didn’t want her floating away from me again even if on an exquisite vision. That was a mistake. I should have let her go to the ocean, and I should have been pleased to go with her as far as I was able.

  “I had rowed that day. It was my only break. I wanted to keep up my strength, because I felt that we were as much under attack as if we were soldiers in a besieged outpost or sailors in a storm. So I worked hard to keep things going at home and stay healthy. What if I had gotten sick as well? In early September the temperature was perfect, and the water, although not still, had been smooth. When the water is smooth and dark and the current is fast you feel as if you’re floating through the air. Especially if the breeze is right and things are quiet, with at best only distant traffic sounds, it’s as if you’re in another world. I was elated that she was coming home.

  “At about eight-thirty in the evening I got up from the chair by her bed in the hospital and began to gather my things. I wanted to get home to finish preparations for her return. Our bedroom had always been austere. We only slept there, rather than, as some do, using it as a retreat. But Jacqueline would be spending a lot of time in it, so to surprise her and make it comfortable I bought a Persian carpet (because she had always disliked the coldness of the parquet), a comfortable chair with an ottoman, an adjustable reading lamp, and one of those big flat televisions. I hadn’t yet mounted the television and was somewhat anxious about it because it weighed about forty kilos, so I would have to make sure the bracket was screwed to the studs, and I’ve never been good at locating them in the wall.