Paris Twilight (34 page)

Just look at it, he said. “Byron's in hiding half a year, more than half, in terror of being discovered and killed. And the whole of that time, who was on the other side of the wall, working among the killers, rubbing shoulders, conversing with them, but someone who knew exactly who he was.” And exactly where. “She could have made her life easier by turning him in, believe me, she would have been rewarded. And it could have cost her her life not to, as well.” Yet she didn't betray him. “She's an anti-Semite, true, but don't forget”—and here Rouchard appeared to puff up a mite with pure native pride—“she's a
French
anti-Semite.”

And of course she didn't tell Saxe that she was protecting him. “She would never! Pheh!” Rouchard expectorated rhetorically floorward. “But he had to have known. Of course. And later he knew to protect her in turn, just as silently. Here,” Rouchard said. “Here's to Herr Byron Manifort Saxe.”

He reached for the cognac, which at some unnoticed moment had arrived on our table, and raised a snifter. “To my comrade,” he said, and we clinked, and he said,
“¡No pasarán!”
and we clinked again. We both downed a slug of the brew. I could tell that for Rouchard, the nightcap was a receding tide, that he was waning now, along with his subject.

“Something I don't understand,” I said when we'd set down our glasses. I was desperate to catch him before he faded. “How would he have recognized this child? There was a letter, you said . . .”

“ . . . which I haven't seen,” Rouchard finished. “But it's a good question and I have pieced together your answer,” and he nudged something toward me across the tablecloth. It was the envelope. I picked it up and popped it open—it wasn't sealed—and spilled its contents out onto the table. There were only two items: a small steel key and a barrette. “Alba's,” he said, of the latter. “Carlos had given it to her, and she put it in her daughter's hair. If he'd seen it, he would have known. But only if their daughter might still be wearing it, of course.” I picked it up. It was lyre-shaped, and a lustrous mottled brown, and just as I seized it Rouchard reached out and captured my hand in his.

“Something else too,” he said, “more indelible.” He drew my hand to him softly, as though intending to propose. “It seems that their daughter, Alena . . . Magdalena . . . had a scar,” he said, “visible on the back of her hand. Now, this I don't know from Madame Barayón. I heard it straight from Byron. He told me how I should identify the person who would come to me. Yes, yes, I'd already noticed. But Madame Barayón explained the rest,” that Saxe had applied the same test, all those years ago, in Spain.

“You know,” he said; he kept his hand on mine. “This man Saxe. I'm sure he was a terrible and flawed person in this way or that—isn't each one of us? What he survived, one never really recovers from. He seemed to me broken, a shadow inside a shell. Maybe he was petty or mean, maybe he kicked the cat, I wouldn't be surprised. But I will say that I've known some of the best of people in some of the worst of times, and I think this man may have been as moral an individual as anyone I have ever encountered. On top of all else, he has given me, too, a gift. He has dispelled a sorrow that darkened my life since the day I heard the news in Mauthausen. I believe he knew what he was doing. Certainly he could have easily gotten a much better lawyer than I am. But he knew how much I loved them, Carlos and Alba. I think he understood how much it would mean to me to raise a glass with their daughter.”

 

Maybe it was those words coming after all the others that lofted me so irrepressibly home from the Marais, along the river and over the bridge, amid an astonishment so very great I was sure my joy would wash me right into the maw of reprisal. Standing in the apartment after the police had departed, I realized I no longer felt in jeopardy. Instead, I sensed all of my lifetime curses—
Whatever you love, you will cause to be slaughtered
—departing, deserting me. As though they'd been subdued by the visiting gendarmes and carted off in handcuffs to
le clink
. I watched from the window of the study as the little blue delegation clambered back into its cars, and the impression swept me that it was not the police who were leaving the scene—it was me. I was absconding, released, the long incarceration was over at last. I'd faced my comeuppance and found in it nothing to fear. There was to be no reprisal.

The big cold world had turned out to be not so frigid after all. It wasn't just that I'd found my birth mother—no, it was something greater: that I'd already, remarkably, been so long in her presence. My mind gathered up all the hours that Corie and I had lingered over Alba's letters, letters from a stranger who turned out to be no stranger at all, a woman I'd dismissed at first, and then been drawn to, having no idea how deeply she belonged to me and I to her, that the events she described were as intrinsic to me as I was to those events. What other walls might prove to be permeable? What other untold stories were right now explaining my life? The question itself was another great gift from Alba: What other love was I overlooking, that might be right in front of me? My thoughts flew to Emil.

I sauntered back through the apartment's rooms, taking my leisurely time, testing my liberty with baby steps, getting accustomed to the odd gravity of this new planet, observing my surroundings with all the wonder of my very first visit. What I saw around me now wasn't bizarre opulence but an old, old riddle pieced together and solved. I felt, as Rouchard had said,
“La disposition, c'est complète,”
and my contentment lacked only one concluding element, one last act before I could consider matters satisfied. My amble through Alba and Carlos's rooms was my path to that appointment.

It was a mystical assignation, and all the more vital for that. I felt the need to convene with two central parties to tell them the news, to convey my gratitude for my good fortune and theirs, to cement my new life with my new family, the agents of my delivery. Fortuitously, they both awaited me in the same place: Byron Saxe and Corie Bingham, the one spectral and embodied in the little spot he'd lived and conspired in, and the other very much corporeal, the translator he'd employed to advance this very moment, the young woman awaiting my signal that everything was okay. I'd been allowed a new life, thanks to them, or allowed to possess my old one at last, and there was no one I wished to celebrate with more than the woman who'd brought me so insistently, step by step, through Alba's letters, to the threshold of my miracle.

I reached the last of the grand rooms in a state of rampant anticipation. Untethered from dread, freed from reprisal, I felt excitement romp in my chest until, with my last few steps, I was afraid it might burst me before I could make my rendezvous. I whisked through the oval salon with my leisure cast aside and reached the secret panel with a whistling pulse.

“Corie,” I yelled at the blank wall, and yelled again, because I couldn't abide the wait, knocking even though I'd said I wouldn't, “Corie, it's me!” There was no answer, even to my several repeated cries, and premonition encased my heart. The panel hardly budged at first. I'd expected a weight on the other side, but not this resistance, and immediately I wondered if the obstruction weren't greater than a shoe, might be some mortal bulk lying against the sill. I pushed harder, and the door budged inward with a sibilance of cloth on wood, the grudge of garments heaped against the door. The closet's rods had been emptied.

“Corie?” I called, stepping over the pile. No one was in the room. The chair at the table was overturned. Nothing else seemed out of place or ransacked or disturbed, but it was clear that a disturbance had gone on and that the friend I'd wished to commune with had departed. The door to the hall was ajar, and I ran out through it and spewed Corie's name loudly down the staircase, her name spiraling down into darkness like water down a drain.

I didn't notice the other item of disorder until I walked back in and stooped to right the chair. I seized on it merely as something else to tidy up, a small leaf tossed by the whirlwind of Corie's flight. That was before I saw what it was and surmised its role, the pink, fold-creased telegram announcing—and as I spread it open like an origami swan, it divulged its message all over again—the news of Alba's death.

 

 

 

 

D
ANIEL, I'VE NEVER HAD
an instinct for edges. Oh, in my work, of course. There I'm exquisite. I can take a body to the brink and back and never let him step over. I mean in life. Maybe because I lacked one of my own, one edge. Without a birth, a beginning, without a conception, I couldn't conceive of an end, that's true. Happily I dwelt in the middle regions. My story was deathless and my earth was round, you could sail and sail and sail it, and never sail over the edge.

And so I think I just didn't know what he was talking about, there beneath the trees beside the river, the sergeant in his dress greens crisp as matzo even in the rain, he'd come so far. The mortuary's limousine waiting curbside, your coffin in the ground. I suspected he was not still in the service. But he had been, back when he met you, so he claimed. He was there when your transport set down in Tan Son Nhut, your company filing out, piling its gear in the shade of the great wing, while the noncoms who would escort you to your deployments rested on the grass berm and looked you over and placed their bets. Four or five of them, Daniel, relaxing, placing their bets. It's what they'd do, he said, the officers. To while away the time. They had an instinct for the edge. They bet on who among you would make it out alive, and who would not.

This is what he came to tell me, that you were fated, doomed. He had a term of art for it. The word he used was
fey
.

He said that they got very good at it, at guessing, that if you had even a hint of the talent, you could develop it quite quickly in a war zone. They could usually tell, were right more often than not. They weren't concerned with the great mass of boys, your comrades who would survive or not depending on luck and circumstance. Their game was played at the extremes, with the marked ones, those who were impervious and, especially, those who were fated, as he said you were, those who bore the scar, the fatal aura. The players spotted you immediately. You disembarked from the plane, Daniel, and before you'd even mustered out into your unit, before you could get your duffel off the runway, they'd pegged you: fey. Foretold.

That's what he came to tell me. He'd thought I'd want to know. That it had been, as Odile said to Corie, not an accident, but fate. I guess you and I were different that way. You fell so quickly off the end of life, and I crashed through the center of mine. But you don't have to drop off the edge of the earth to drown, Daniel. “Death inhabits you,” Maasterlich assured us, and didn't it, Daniel, didn't it, for happily I drowned where happily I dwelt. If you were fated, does that mean I was too?

“It won't be your undoing, though.” Maasterlich again. “Life will.” And wasn't it. Last lecture, semester's end, the creaking old hall packed to its rafters. Even his detractors had come to gawk. They couldn't pass up a show, and the finale of Introduction to Surgical Practices had earned its reputation for providing one. No one knew what the old man would say except that it would surely be whatever was on his mind. He'd titled his peroration (vapor trail of chalk through the chalk cloud) Systole/Diastole, but I've long ago rechristened it (neuronal trace through clouds of recollection) Silence v. Silence, or Maasterlich's Musical Mystery Tour.

Everyone, he was sure, had warned us, the professor said, smacking his pointer rhythmically against the flank of the lectern, how a doctor must deaden his mind against the constant prospect of death, “the way a soldier does, even though that can be a dying in itself.” He was right, for they had. They'd warned us to steel ourselves, warned us how sometimes we'd see death coming but wouldn't be able to stop it, how that particular trauma would take its inevitable toll on our spirits, “or, what will take a worse toll, you'll even cause it someday, and kill the patient you're trying to cure,” Maasterlich said, but that was okay, because it was all a part of the fight. We'd elected to earn our daily bread by daily going head-to-head and toe-to-toe with mortality, “and if you do that”—a
whack
with the pointer—“and suit up every day for the battle”—
whack
—“once in a while”—the pointer fell silent—“you're bound to lose. Because your enemy is implacable and huge, is profound beyond all knowing,” too dark, too mysterious, too big, too silent for anyone to fight against it and prevail.

“And isn't it all such crap!” he declared and we'd known it was coming, this wasn't September anymore, when we still might be gulled into the misimpression that this man was swayed by his own svelte logic. We knew the drill and its penalties by now, knew that his every stroke was a windup for the whack. So cheerfully we girded ourselves and greeted it when it came. “Crap!” Maasterlich repeated. “Oh, everything they say you'll see, you'll see. But a surgeon afraid of death is an undertaker for the living,” embalming his patients prematurely against their certain rot. “That's not medicine.” It especially wasn't surgery. “Every good surgeon I know is romancing life, not ‘contesting death,'” and the distinction should guide us. “What you're setting out to do, it isn't war,” Maasterlich said, though war and its opposite were oft confused. “It's worship.”

Worship: “the highest form of fear” by the old man's definition, “and the truest worship is awe to the edge of terror.” The thing worth fearing isn't death, because death is not profound, not meaningful, is “not even much of a mystery. It's the only thing we know enough about,” Maasterlich said, and then he got to his question.