Halfway down the drive, Armand Marteau turned back to wave to Jules, who was still watching him from the doorway.
NOW THAT JULES knew approximately the time of his death, he felt truly free for the first time in his life. Although he didn’t believe that he would actually come to see his parents, Jacqueline, or the Mignons, he took the greatest comfort that he had ever experienced, in knowing that by following them, he would be like them. He didn’t look forward to death, but he was happy that it would come, if it would – according to his plan – when he was straining at his utmost, flushed and red, in the sun, and in the open air. On the path above the Seine, in the heat of summer, he could hit the gravel hard and go down fighting.
In the time remaining, he had Paris past and present, with colors and light, and layer upon layer of sound and music drifting over the whited city like the smoke of spring fires.
As Light and Warmth Put France at Ease
AS LIGHT AND WARMTH put France at ease, winter elided gracefully into spring. Cathérine thought her father had lost his mind. Because she hadn’t enough strength left to pity him, she was frightened instead. David counseled patience, but she had none to spare and would lash out at Jules when she felt he was acting crazily. That he was insistent and unrelenting convinced her only the more that he was out of his senses. When she begged him to see a psychiatrist he laughed, and said, “I saw one. He was riding in a bus around and around the Rond Point. Or maybe he was chasing a hamster in the pet store, ‘round and ‘round on the wonder wheel.” After he said things like this he would laugh like a crazy person. It rather shook her confidence in him.
Luc had stabilized but not improved. The prognosis remained the same. Cathérine couldn’t bring herself to banish her father from the house, but every time he came she wanted to strike him physically, because he brought information about clinics in Switzerland and the United States – in Boston, Baltimore, Ohio, Texas, and Minnesota – and information from the Internet that covered real estate, climate, schools, immigration, banking, etc. It enraged her.
“If you’re going to be so stupid as to show us real estate ads for these places, why is every house over two million Euros? We can’t qualify for a visa to live in these countries, or even afford to visit, and the course of treatment wouldn’t be covered in any one of them. Why? Why?” And then as often as not she would break down in tears, and despite the fact that he was the cause of it she would go to his arms as she had when she was a little girl. Her hair was still red – many shades lighter than her mother’s deep auburn – and she still had the freckles common to both Celts and Jews, although no one knew why.
“Make these plans and be ready to go,” he said authoritatively.
She pulled away, took in a long breath, looked at him in frustration and astonishment, and replied, “It’s cruel of you. We don’t have the money. You don’t have the money. Is Shymanski going to give it to us?”
“No.”
“Then, what? You don’t have secret wealth. Did the grandparents have diamonds? Are you going to rob a bank?”
“I just think that you should plan on taking Luc to one of these places, living there as he gets treatment, and – because of the situation here – staying. In the middle of August.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Have everything ready to go just in case. Promise.”
“We don’t have the time!”
“You have the time.”
“False hope.”
“Cathérine, I respect you greatly, but I’ve seen much more than you have. I know more. There are things in the past and in the present that I absolutely cannot tell you. You’ll have to trust me. Why would I hurt you?”
So Cathérine did as he asked, but it hurt to fly up in such a dream when her bonds held her so tightly to the ground.
ALTHOUGH JULES KNEW that in regard to Luc, Cathérine, and David he was anything but mad, he admitted to himself that in regard to élodi, quite apart from his now damaged relation to Jacqueline, to whom he had remained loyal nonetheless and whom he would always love no matter how painful it might be; quite apart from his morals, ethics, and concern for the girl herself; apart from his contempt for professors who fell in love with their students; apart from his strong suspicion that a single kiss would shatter not only the illusion but that all feeling on his part and any on hers, if indeed she harbored any, would cruelly vanish, leaving as punishment emptiness and a sense of sin; and apart from the unseemliness of it, his knowledge of his failing body, and his rapidly approaching death; apart from all that, he loved her – inappropriately, wrongly, foolishly, and hardly knowing her. He had touched her hand, once.
Though on one level he thought he was suffering a delusion or perhaps a fall into schizophrenia, in his mind élodi had somehow fused with the city, the low, gray and white, undulating city that over a long history had fallen as softly and soundlessly as a blanket across its rounded and submissive terrain. Like the women who had led the surging crowds at the Liberation, at whom he had stared in photographs as a child, hoping and believing that they were angels who could make whole what had been lost and that they might bring back his parents, whose bodies had never been found …. Like the women in white at the head of jubilant waves on the streets of Paris in the shock of freedom, élodi appeared to him in white as well, suspended above the ground, her form and presence indistinguishable from music in the same way that pure energy, which is not matter, is what matter is made of. It was as if she flew, as if she were with him even when she was not present, the angel he had once hoped for. It was a sad thing, because he knew that, as much as he might want to, he would never ask her, so early, to share the burdens of age.
SPRING, HOWEVER, IS the season of benevolent surprises. The air is soft, the soil is warm, colors bloom in the sunlight, and the world is again like a garden, though when night falls winter comes halfway back. The alternation of rich, warm days and cold nights sparkling with stars is like a declaration that everything is possible but nothing is promised, that what is given will be reclaimed.