Staring at her, I dared her to look at me so I could show my displeasure, but she did not. I closed my Sennelier sketchbook and put it back inside my silk bag.
As the music filled the cavernous space, it also reverberated inside of me, the chords making my bones and my insides thrum. When Julien was inside of me, I felt like this, and as I sat there on the cushioned pew, I experienced the same surge of excitement his touch engendered. I was alive. I might not have wanted to be, but I was. The cool blood that used to run through my veins was always hot now. A small look, a gesture, was enough to ignite me. And it wasn’t just Julien who could spark me. In Moreau’s class there were several men who appealed to me. Of course I did not approach them. I tried to keep from even looking at them, but sometimes one would say something or move a certain way, and I’d feel that throb deep inside me and know.
I wondered if it was blasphemous to think such thoughts in shul. Certainly it was brazen.
The cantor ended his song, and the silence alerted me to the rabbi leading us in a prayer, followed by him speaking of the sad occasion that had brought us all there. As his words droned on, staid and expected, I imagined painting this scene: the black-robed, dour rabbi; the upturned faces of the mourners; the shafts of colored light filtering through the stained glass; the glinting silver and gold accoutrements and ornaments.
Moreau was a master at painting this kind of opulence. I didn’t want to copy him, though. Nor did he want me to. There were so many students who did nothing but that. Rather, he had been urging me to find my own painterly vocabulary. I hadn’t yet, but every day it became clearer to me that, once I learned the language of color and line, shadow and shine, I would paint the mystical world that we live in. The penumbras, the mysteries, the secrets behind the obvious. Everything that lay just beyond sight.
In my lap, my fingers twitched as I imagined squeezing yellows and browns and greens onto the palette. Dipping my brush into the luxurious colors. Stroking them onto a canvas just waiting for their embrace.
I longed to paint the faces of the mourners with their angels hovering above them and with the ghosts of their dead looking down on them, wanting to comfort them if only they knew the magical pathways to reach them.
The angels and ghosts were recognizable to me, and yet the people in the pews were strangers. How was that possible? I should have at least thought some of them looked familiar since many of us were related.
After the service we climbed into one of the waiting carriages and set off for the cemetery where my great-great uncle would be interred in what Grand-mère told me was the family mausoleum.
The idea of seeing this edifice excited me for some reason, and I sat perched on the edge of my seat in anticipation. With us were two of Grand-mère’s cousins, elderly sisters who didn’t stop gossiping about family the whole ride. They paid me little heed. They were far more caught up in the drama of how Max had died, in his lover’s bed, and the way he had—most fairly, they thought—left his estate. Only enough to his wife for her to subsist. And why? She had been carrying on an affair de coeur with a married woman, a famous English writer, and the doctor, for all his brilliance, found his wife’s flagrant sexual escapades embarrassing.
“A male lover,” one of the cousins said, “wouldn’t have bothered Max a bit. But a woman? Well, that implied far too much about him.”
As we walked through the rows of graves at the cemetery, I began to see things that could not be there. Or perhaps I was just composing a horror painting in my mind’s eye and, because of my grief, believed I was seeing it.
The people beneath the graves, skeletons wearing shrouds, were celebrating our arrival. A burial wasn’t a sorrowful occasion for them. Welcoming a loved one to the underworld was a happy event. Most of the ghouls’ faces were largely intact; only bits of flesh had rotted away to reveal bone.
One ghoul, who I somehow knew was Max’s first wife, even though no one had mentioned he’d been married before, stood apart from the pack. She had lustrous black hair and glowing blue eyes that dripped pearl tears that pooled at her feet as she joyously waited for the father of her babies to join her.
Small children who had died far too early scampered up to her, stealing the pearls, stringing them on sinew they pulled from their bones so they could make wigs of them. Soon all the imps were wearing elaborate hair dressings of pure white or pink-tinged pearls. The scene shone with their glow.
The graveside service was long, and when it was over, I hoped we would leave hastily. I wanted to return home so I could sketch out my vision, but my grandmother insisted we stay so she might introduce me to the rabbi, Jacob Richter, another of my cousins.
“I am so sorry for your recent loss,” he said. “Your father and I were very close growing up. I loved him like a brother.” Taking my hand, he held it to his chest. For a moment, he gazed into my face as if searching for something.
Then he frowned.
My grandmother never missed an expression, a gesture, a mood, or a fleeting thought that passed over someone’s face.
“Is something wrong, Jacob?” she asked.
He ignored her and leaned closer to me. “Have you been well, Sandrine?”
“Well?”
“Since coming to Paris, how have you slept? Have you been having disturbing dreams?”
How did he know? I’d told Julien about the dreams but not that they’d returned.
I backed away a bit so that it seemed the rabbi was pulling me. I let go of his hand and stumbled.
“You’re in touch with a troubled spirit, aren’t you?” he asked. “She’s showing you her realm. We must find out why.”
“No, no . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“The dreams you are having may not be yours but hers,” he said, in such a low voice I wasn’t sure my grandmother could hear him.
I sensed he was trying to be compassionate, but he was frightening me, and I just shook my head. “No, no.”
My grandmother spoke. “Since Sandrine’s father so recently died, whatever disturbance you sense is her grief.”
“Is your father’s passing all that is troubling you?” he asked me. “Or is there something else?”
“Do the souls here today stay here? Are they trapped here?” I asked the question that had been bothering me.
“What are you talking about, Sandrine? You sound mad,” my grandmother exclaimed.
“It’s all right, Eva,” the rabbi said to her. “Her question makes sense to me.” He looked back at me. “You know, it’s forbidden for women to study the Kabala.”
“I never studied the Kabala. I just want to know if the souls are trapped here.”
“Are you saying you haven’t read it?”
It was as if a door inside my mind opened and information came flooding in. The way it did when I painted. One moment I would be looking at a white canvas, and the next I would see an entire composition in my mind.
“I haven’t read it, no. My father did, and we discussed certain parts, but nothing about what I’ve seen here today.”
“If you would like, we can meet to talk about what is troubling you,” he offered.
“Her father died, that’s what is troubling her.” Grand-mère seemed determined to assign her own meaning and explanation to my conversation with the rabbi.
Ignoring my grandmother, the rabbi continued to hold my gaze. “Have you been finding new interests?”
I said nothing, but my grandmother answered: “She’s sketching.”
Part of me wanted to laugh. Of all the things I was doing, sketching was the most benign and least radical.
“Are you feeling things with more intensity?” the rabbi continued his questioning.