“And yet you’re not afraid or bitter.”
“We have what was denied to them. We would betray them were we not happy to be alive. It’s nothing less than an obligation – to see as they cannot see, hear as they cannot hear, feel as they cannot feel, taste as they cannot taste, love as they cannot love.”
Nineteen until August, Jacqueline doesn’t know what she will do. She has always been a superb student. She will have her choice. He wonders if she is too good for him, too subtle, too deep, too regal, certainly too beautiful. Men will be smitten with her throughout her life, she will always have her choice of whom to hold, and she’s very young now.
The news vendor is right. His is the best if least pretentious restaurant in Athens, and he has tossed away his profit to give them a whole bottle of retsina, which they finish as they eat, and which brings them even closer and puts them more at ease.
“My friends left,” Jules informs her, “because the sister of one of them has cancer. They sold their car and flew back. They’re cousins.”
“My girlfriend left to go back to Venice, where we went out with two Italian boys who only want to have sex with English-speaking, French, Teutonic, and Scandinavian girls. She doesn’t know that, but she’ll find out.”
“I’m paying for a double room.”
“So am I,” Jacqueline confirms.
“If we combined?”
“After less than a day?”
“I wouldn’t take advantage. I wouldn’t even try.”
“Everything has happened as fast,” she says, “but this is different. I know it is. And I trust you, I much more than trust you.”
“Of course. You should. I have such high regard for ….”
“Shhh!” she says. “I trust you more than not to ‘take advantage’. I trust you in everything. And it would be highly stupid and wrong if we didn’t make love. I’m not that quick. Absolutely not. I’m very old-fashioned and guarded, and always have been. But not now.” She rises.
In the pension they consolidate their things quickly. The management is cooperative, and ten minutes after dinner, at around ten o’clock, they are sitting on one of the beds in what was hers and now is their room, the door locked, the neighborhood quiet, the air sensuous.
Jules embraces her, and the sides of their faces touch as they hold close. Perfectly content, they remain in one another’s arms for a very long time. He is in love with her delicacy and hesitation, and she is in love with his. They fear only that it is an illusion that will not last, but it does, and it will.
IN SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE, yet another train sounded its horn as it crossed the Seine, tooting as if it were part of a model railroad, and Jules awakened. In memory he has been to Sparta many times, and although Jacqueline is gone, she is still there in the reddening sun as he saw her the first time, somehow still alive, more alive and vivid, with each day that passes, than even the present. Everything he loved, he loved in her.
The Past Upwells
IN THE FORTRESS in Algeria and the forests around it, the young soldiers had learned that everything was at risk every hour of every day. As it had been for most of mankind since the beginning, and continued to be so in regions of pestilence, famine, and war, life was tenuous and unprotected. For Jules, this was not a revelation, and yet throughout his life the dangers had been primarily episodic – in infancy and early childhood during the war, during the late forties and early fifties in severe illnesses just before the dawn of truly modern medicine, then in Algeria, in France when the Algerian war was brought home, and, in a minor way, during the crisis of ’68.
In regard to even the most protected and stable lives in the protected and stable West, a car crash, cancer, or a child gone missing, to name just a few of many catastrophes, gave lie to the general assumption of safety. Jules lived, nonetheless, like everyone else, in the illusion of security that modernity affords to advanced nations. He understood the absurdity of his minor complaints, and yet despite what he knew and had experienced he could not put them in their place: clothes at the cleaners not ready; the Métro hot and crowded; a cold rain soaking him as he rowed; receiving a wildly inaccurate and impudently demanding bill; the sink leaking; a dog wailing all night.
Irritations like these would vanish in the face of illness and death – when Jacqueline died, when Luc became ill. And it was happening slowly (true, he had a special sensitivity) as French Jews felt the fear and darkness of the thirties rolling in, differently this time, but in some respects a close copy of its early phases. He fought as best he could, but the more he planned the more he realized he was not in control. Had he not gone to the George V and been engaged purely by luck? And had he not discovered only in the rhythm of swimming the song that might help to pull his family through?
All this was so, but the day after the theme had come to him on the air over the water, the stakes were raised, and whatever remained of the illusion of control was completely shattered. For in the morning of the day he would record the song, send it off, and row happily on the Seine, he would (entirely against his wishes) begin to fall in love. And by nightfall, violence would change what was left of his old age.
THE TEACHING OF music was spread all over the city. Because Jacqueline had always been based in the Quartier latin and Jules had started there, he had made a tremendous effort to stay in place after his faculty was moved to Clignancourt. Long before that, when the Conservatoire National was moved to the Cité de la Musique, he stuck like a limpet to his tiny office in a quiet building in the Sorbonne. But to teach he had to fly almost from one extreme of the city to another, in traffic, dodging trucks, speeding by endless litter and explosions of graffiti in the weed-choked allées that paralleled the busy highways.
To record his thirty-two bars, he had to go to the Conservatoire in the Cité de la Musique on the eastern side of Paris. Arriving in mid-morning, he was able to round up half a dozen violinists, two violists, and a student to act as engineer. It would take only half an hour. But he was in need of another cellist, and none was about. As he handed out the music to his little improvised orchestra, half of whom had been or would eventually be his students, he said, “We need another cello. Is anyone around? We really shouldn’t go ahead without it.”
“élodi,” said Delphine.
“Who?”
“élodi. She’s not yet in the program,” meaning the joint program with Paris-Sorbonne in which all of Jules’ students were enrolled. “She just came up from Lyon. I saw her a minute ago and she has her cello. She’s a little strange.”
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say, and it’s hard to express, but she’s tense yet disconnected. You’d think that she’d grown up in an old house, all by herself, with just books.”