Only when Philippe and Cathérine had collapsed, hidden by the sides of the half-track, did Jules speak. It was the first word he had ever said not in a whisper, and it was so loud that it echoed from the fa?ades across the street. “Maman!” he cried.
At this, Marie dropped her head, and shed quiet tears. A soldier came and tried to pull Jules away from her. She resisted. Jacques and Louis joined her. The soldiers had rifles and were too close to fire, so they used them as clubs and beat everyone down. The Mignons fell to the ground and waited to be shot. Jules staggered toward the half-track. As if to prevent the four-year-old from damaging the armored vehicle, one of the soldiers – who had killed many children already – took a quick step after Jules and used the butt of his rifle to smash the back of his head. Jules saw the ground rushing up at him, and then, before losing consciousness, felt the left side of his face hit the pavement.
After the major had shot Philippe, he kept watch up the street, pistol in hand, as if nothing had happened around him. Just as the soldiers remounted their vehicles, pointed their rifles at the Mignons, and waited for the order to fire, the major saw an American tank on the boulevard pass the gap at the end of the street, stop, and slowly backup. “Go!” he ordered. “Drive!”
The engines started, the soldiers dropped behind the armor plate of the half-track, and the SS detachment, still carrying the bodies of Cathérine and Philippe, sped out as the turret of the American tank rotated to aim its gun. The tank fired one round before the targeted vehicles turned onto the boulevard at the other end of the street. The shot hit the second command car, blowing it across the boulevard, but the way was then made clear for the half-track to round the corner, following the lead car. The tank rotated its turret back and continued in the direction in which it had been going.
Marie dragged herself to Jules and pulled him to her again as Louis tried to rise to his knees. “Is he dead?” he asked his wife.
“No,” she answered, the blood from Jules’ left cheek soaking into the front of her dress as she cradled him, “but how can he live?”
The Music Lesson
HE DID LIVE. Although all his life he wanted to follow his mother and father into realms of which he had no fear if only because they were there, and by sharing in their defeat to know, honor, and love them well, he lived intensely and deeply even so. Music kept him steady on course. Its magic clarified existence, stimulated courage as if from thin air, and illuminated that which could not be understood except in the language of music itself, and of which, when the music ceased, the only remnants were the conviction and desire such as one has when longing to re-enter a dream.
Whether or not the rhythm and syncopation of music matched the pulse, the atomic and subatomic timing within the body, or the symphonic motion of countless electrons in every nerve, channel, and cell, its wavelike melody and narrative elevated all things. Without this, Jules, when he was young, would not have been able to go on. So he sought it out, he studied hard and practiced until he bled, and it saved him.
Through the fifties and into the sixties, when a lucrative career and glory were possible in classical music, his fellow students worked for fame and riches. Moved by ambition – some so much so that they worked harder than he did – they went further. In his field, Fran?ois did the same, rising to the position of someone respected by his peers and sought by every facet of journalism, even Indonesian TV. Jules was left behind. When whatever talents he could proffer had opened opportunities to rise, he froze, unable to perform in public. He associated the joy of success with betrayal of his mother and father, and as if to be true to them in their darkness as, he imagined, they moved through eternal space, he failed time after time.
But just the music was enough. It made a quiet existence better than that which was royal or rich. Every step and misstep brought him closer to them and made him loyal to all who had come before. Though it never succeeded completely, music promised that sin and suffering might be washed away.
OTHER CITIES HAVE been or in time will be liberated, but the nature of Paris is such that when it was liberated in 1944 its beauty swelled as if fed by an artesian stream the Germans had been unable to stem. By coincidence, fashion, or the lack of dyes in wartime, the women of Paris at the Liberation were dressed mainly in white. In their simple white dresses as they marched at the forefront of crowds in celebration, they were like angels. At the Liberation, the impure were made pure, and people who had never experienced happiness suddenly came to know it.
Paris after the war was the creation of Paris before and during the war, and little of the stress and emotion was lost or forgotten. So when Jules was a boy, first in Reims and a few years later in Passy, he was living as much in the war as after it. He always remembered, and often would recall, how at eighteen and brimming over with energy and invincibility – before his induction, before the pine-covered mountains of Algeria, before the experience of exiting an aircraft in flight – he rode on a summer day upon the rear platform of a bus on the Boul-Miche, one of those buses that seem to have been part of Paris forever and to be destined to last just as long, but did not. If you were young and agile, you hopped onto the back as they were moving, and smiled at the angry conductor – if he was there to catch you – who then gave you a cardboard ticket after you had paid up.
Jules had just been conscripted and was saying goodbye to the Quartier latin and a way of life he had closely observed but never embraced, as had for example Fran?ois, who without inhibition gave himself over to study while surrendering his body to wine, tobacco, and frenzies of the intellect. On the bus, Jules looked down the boulevard as the traffic made clouds of almost-sweet diesel smoke. It was hot, and the overarching limbs of the trees swayed slightly in the wind. Nineteen fifty-eight – everything seemed possible.