“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 believe 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.