AT HOME, THE QUIET and stillness were oppressive. He wanted to write a symphony, to sleep with élodi, to be with Jacqueline. He so much wanted to live, and he so much wanted to die, but the conflict would resolve itself, because, without fail, he would do both.
The symphony, a full, over-spilling cadenza on the theme of the Bach Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, had to be written, as a homage and in the face of the barbarism that neither for the first time nor the last assaulted the West. It had to be written, with need of neither name, nor credit, nor claim, to complete a song that was started in Reims at the Liberation. Jules had needed his entire life, event after event, test after test, failure after failure, finally to understand that he had been meant to do this from the time his father had played the last note, and that, if he did, somehow, without explanation, beyond reason, there would be enough justice and love in his life so that he could finally let go.
He could allow neither the necessity of obtaining the money for Cathérine and Luc to block the writing of the piece, nor the writing of the piece to block the necessity of obtaining the money. And he would be perfectly happy to write it not for audiences, the world, or posterity, but only and simply for élodi. He was unsure that he could compose something worthy and vital enough to bear the weight intended to appeal to a beautiful young woman with most of her life ahead of her. And given Damien Nerval, if indeed that was his real name, it would have to be physically untraceable to Jules himself.
On the lowest level of the bookshelf was a neatly stacked half-meter pile of paper: odd groupings of bond, graph paper, letterhead, and musical notation pads. It had accumulated since the Lacours had moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And near the bottom of the stack, wrapped in yellowed, partially disintegrating cellophane, were two hundred pages of music paper he had bought in the sixties. He pulled it out. It was slightly jaundiced but not disintegrating. He put it on the desk, from which he pulled the wide, shallow, center drawer. Several bottles of ink had been sitting there since he had stopped using fountain pens long before. He took out a bottle of navy blue, dated 1946, to see if it had dried. It hadn’t. Although almost seventy years old, it was perfectly liquid.
He opened the leather box that was the sarcophagus of his Mont Blancs, seized what once was his favorite, a type from before the war and before he was born, and found that the point was encrusted with the ancient residue of the same ink that had survived in its heavy Mont Blanc glass bottle. At the hot water tap after ten minutes of filling and emptying the reservoir and wiping the nib with paper towels, Jules had given himself the means to find shelter many years back in time, there to fulfill a task that when he was young he had felt but could not identify. Paper, ink, and pen had been waiting. They knew nothing of what had happened in the years between.
SOMEONE WHO ALWAYS ate alone in restaurants, preferred rabbit in beer, dressed in shiny black silk, was as bony and tall as a chain-link fence, and took stairs with aggressive rapidity preceded by the stiff-legged hop that midgets have when they begin to ascend a ramp, would, perhaps not surprisingly, be named Damien Nerval. Who could tell if he had become the man he was because his name was Damien Nerval, or, because of the man he was, he had changed his name to Damien Nerval from something like “Mouton de Bonheur”. But, for whatever reason, he was the man he was: hostile, intimidating, hateful, tortured, and yet obsequious – his studied way of putting prey off guard. He was able to exist because most people want to avoid confrontation, and he always gave them a prescribed way to do so – a narrow exit they could take only if they left behind exactly what he had come to obtain. But he had never encountered someone quite as damaged and devoted as Jules Lacour.
Jules Lacour, whom Nerval assumed had neither much testosterone, time, nor muscle tone left. A music teacher. A hospital patient, barely alive, a man who collapses on the RER. He would be quick work. Nerval, at forty-five, the sweet spot between strength and experience, was backed by the great, indefatigable, trillion-dollar machine of Acorn, a dispositif with neither soul nor conscience but rather a thousand lawyers and a good many laws that over the years it had cooked up in legislatures all over the world. Jules Lacour could not make a credible stand against such combined powers. And yet professionals take nothing for granted, and Nerval was nothing if not professional.
Jules had thirty years of experience beyond Nerval’s, and much else, not least the spirit of the survivor who believes his duty is to die. He had lived his life in an alternate moral dimension: that is, where day in and day out love and loyalty forge the soul into a steel capable of resistance unto annihilation. More than a decade before Nerval’s birth, Jules had been, summer and winter, a soldier in the mountains of North Africa. He had been immune to the terror of death since the age of four. In his child and the life of his grandchild he had a devotion that drove him on. Since infancy, he had been fighting with God in an argument that surpassed the demands of prayer or interrogation. And though he loved much, he feared little, and had always met superior power, its arrogance, and its self-enjoyment, with a direct challenge and a rising within that fed upon and strengthened itself.
In the days before Nerval showed up, Jules studied medicine. It wasn’t hard, as the way he planned the encounter meant that he would decide how it would proceed, not Nerval, who would have no inkling of the advance preparation. So when Claude nervously announced Nerval, Jules was pleased even if it meant another twenty Euros gone.