But he just watched her as she disappeared among the ordered ranks of closely cropped trees and the long banks of flowers in the August sun. She was gone. Everything was silent except the wind rising from the east and curling over the battlement-like retaining wall of the Grand Terrace. Wood smoke came from beyond the vineyard. A little girl with blond hair raced ahead of her parents, crossing the circle of grass. They followed, the father holding an infant who squinted in the sun, before this family disappeared as well.
A distant church bell rang, and when it did, as if right before his eyes, he saw its whitish-gray metal. Things don’t vanish, he thought. If they exist once, they exist forever. Nothing is lost. It’s all somewhere, permanently engraved on the black walls of time. He took a few breaths, and as his much needed courage began to return, he set off to find them.
ALTHOUGH THERE WAS not even a single cloud, it seemed to him as if there had been a stroke of lightning in the sun and a clap of thunder in the clear. Suddenly, and as if from nowhere but the past, he felt utter fearlessness and resolution. As a soldier, he had come to know the courage that comes on the heels of anxiety. Always anxious before a patrol, when he took his first step into the darkness he accepted death, and from that point forward he left all fear behind and experienced a lightness and joy as if he were invulnerable.
Morning heat had driven everyone from the long path, and he was alone as he watched the trees shimmer in the sun. From memory and as if to match his excitement came the allegro of the Third Brandenburg. As it twinned with the heat and light, he began to run. He would run faster than a man of his age could run on a hot day and remain alive. He would force it upon himself as if he were fighting for life. At first, things came wonderfully clear. The years of the fifties and sixties became images that, like the petals of peonies, fell suddenly and easily and almost at once, still white and unmarred but now littered on the grass.
Although he had not bidden it, he was grateful for this music as a perfection of art and a summation beyond the power of reason. Music had been the oxygen that had kept him alive. He hadn’t become a great musician or a great composer, either of which would have diverted him from the essential task of his life. But he remembered, he never flagged, and he had lived for more souls than his own. As he ran, the music gathered everything he knew and had known in his life, and everything seemed to turn in a massive whirlwind of red and silver light.
Then the red and silver, which seemed to him like a lion of fire, the sun’s leaping corona, or a city burning but not consumed, turned to gold, and, somehow, this was France in all its history, rising like a sun. As in massive forest fires after which come years of young and tranquil green, the golden air and light that floated above the combustion were a promise of the silence and peace to follow.
The running became more and more difficult. Though he tried not to slow, he was forced to, and, as he slowed the music changed, as he had always expected, to the Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren. Now his mother and father were close, Cathérine would have a chance, and Luc might be healed. It had been Jules’ duty and obligation to stay with his mother and his father, Philippe and Cathérine Lacour – when he said their names it brought them close – not because of sense, law, or logic, but to follow the illogic of love. Now at last he would go where he was always supposed to have been.
As he ran, the red and the black crept forward from the periphery of his vision until it enveloped him and he was blinded. He lost touch with his body. His senses were almost gone when he heard himself crash against the white stones on the path and felt them, for a moment, cutting into his left cheek. He lay there, knowing that at the last he might have, as he had been told, thirty seconds more, thirty seconds when all threads were braided, all feeling risen, all memories recollected not in detail but in sum, in a miraculous density, in a song too great to be heard by the living.
Events that would not be suppressed rose from the dark and broke the surface to pull Jules Lacour back to the place he had never really left. Here, in balance with all he had seen since, was what he had always longed for. Wanting in equal measure both life and death, he would cross over easily and unafraid from one to the other, finally at peace as he had not been since the first and last time he had heard his father play the Sei Lob and, as riddle and solution, it had been impressed upon his heart, waiting for his life to come.
As it had for Amina, a cool breeze arose. It traveled up the hillside, over the vineyards, and across the path where Jules lay. When it got to the forest it gently raised the canopy of leaves, and then relaxed. The last thing he heard, when supposedly there was silence, was the distant music of Paris – the sum of footfalls, the sound of engines, of horses and bells, of voices, laughter, water flowing, the movement of traffic, the wind in the trees. Sound lifted from the streets, from the procession of the Seine and the roll of the hills. Sound that was filtered and shaped by the form of little things such as a rail or a cornice, sound that was made by the wind sweeping down a wide avenue. These ever-present and underlying sounds, of which he had been aware from his earliest infancy, these forgiving sounds that now were strong and overpowering and came from the interweaving paths of the living and the dead, were music as beautiful and compelling as the masterpiece of life itself.
And so it was, that day, when a detail of history finally came to rest in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the music of Paris bathed the city in a rain of gold. Jules was free and gone, but the music remained – sonatas, symphonies, and songs present even in silence, waiting to be heard by those who might stop long enough to listen on their way.