Revolution (6 page)

10

A
irports should all belong to the same country. The country of Crappacia. Or Bleakovania. Or Suckitan.

They all look exactly the same. No matter where you go in the world, when you land, it’s all asphalt, weeds, and dead coffee cups. We arrived at Orly and waited an hour for our suitcases because the baggage handlers are on strike. Then we got in a cab. Now we’re stuck in the Monday night rush on the A106 near Rungis—rhymes with grungy—outside Paris. But we could be in Queens. Or Newark. Or hell.

“
Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go

I wanna be sedated.
”

“Can you stop, please?”

“
Nothin’ to do

Nowhere to go

I wanna be sedated.
”

“Andi …”

“
Just get me to the airport

Put me on a plane

Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane—
”

“Stop!”

Dad pulls out my left earbud so I have to stop pretending I can’t hear him.

“What?”

“I’m trying to make a phone call!”

My singing pisses him off. The Ramones piss him off. My guitar is taking up too much room on the seat between us and that pisses him off. Everything about me pisses him off. My heavy hand with the eyeliner. My hair. The metal. Especially the metal. It cost us fifteen minutes at Logan’s security gates when we were already late. I set off the detectors half a dozen times. I had to take it all off. The studded jacket. The skull belt. Bracelets, rings, and earrings.

“You going into battle, hon?” the security guard asked me as she watched it pile up in a plastic bin.

I walked through again. More beeps. Dad was fuming. The guard patted me down. She felt under my arms. Looked inside my socks. Ran her fingers around the collar of my shirt.

“What’s this?” she asked, tugging on the red ribbon around my neck.

I didn’t want to take it off but I had no choice. I pulled it over my head and handed it to her. Then I stepped through the detector again. No beeps. I glanced at my father, thinking he’d be relieved I’d finally made it through. But it wasn’t relief I saw. His whole face had shifted. Like plate tectonics.

“You have that?” he said as the guard handed the key back to me.

He reached for it, but I quickly put it over my head and dropped it inside my shirt—a dad no-fly zone.

“I didn’t … I didn’t know you had that,” he said. “How—”

“From his clothes. It was in his pocket.”

“I looked for it. I thought it was in my desk.”

“He took it back.”

“When?” His voice was a whisper.

“After the Nobel.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer.

“Andi …
why?
”

“Because you’d found your own key to the world.”

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever. Truman turning to wave at me for the last time. My mother collapsing in the detective’s arms. And now this one: My father standing by the X-ray machine at airport security, sagging and limp, like a puppet whose strings have been cut.

We made the boarding gate in time. It was an early-morning flight. I listened to music and slept. He worked.

“Can we call Mom?” I ask him now as he finishes his call.

“No. I’m sure you remember what Dr. Becker said.”

I sure do. We were in his office yesterday morning. After we said goodbye to Mom. We left her in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed, sedated. She was wearing a pink hospital-issue sweat suit. She hates pink. Almost as much as she hates sweat suits.

I asked Dr. Becker for the number of her room phone so I could call her from Paris. He said the rooms didn’t have phones.

“So how do I call her?”

He gave me a standard-issue mental-patient smile then said, “Andi, I think it’s unadvisable—”

“Inadvisable.”

The smile slipped. “I think it’s inadvisable for your mother to take calls for a few days. Perhaps in a week, when she’s settled in and has accepted her new surroundings. I think you’ll agree with me that it’s in her best interest.”

But I didn’t agree. With him. With anything. I didn’t agree with the needles and pills. I didn’t agree with the peach walls. The floral curtains. Or the picture on her wall. I especially didn’t agree with the picture.

“You have to take it down,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The picture. The one that’s bolted to the wall of her room. The cottage with the purple sunset. It’s nauseating. It’s a mind-numbing, middlebrow triumph of mediocrity. Where’d you get it? Paramus?”

“Andi!” Dad barked.

“Do you know what she looks at all day? Do you know what’s taped to the wall where she works? Cézanne’s
Still Life with Apples
, Van Gogh’s
Blue Enamel Coffeepot
. His
Still Life with Mackerels—
”

“Stop it right now,” Dad said to me. Then to Dr. Becker, “I’m sorry, Matt, I—”

“Take it
down,
” I said, my voice cracking.

Dr. Becker held up his hands. “Okay, Andi. If you would like me to take the picture down, I will.”

“Now.”

“Damn it, Andi! Who do you think you’re talking to?” Dad shouted.

“I can’t do it right now,” Dr. Becker said. “I need maintenance to do it. But I give you my word that it will come down, all right?”

I nodded stiffly. It was something. Some small win. I couldn’t protect my mother from Dr. Feelgood but at least I’d saved her from Thomas Kinkade.

The traffic jam gives a bit. We pick up speed and a few minutes later, we’re on the outskirts of Paris. The road to the city is lined with shabby stone houses, used-car lots, falafel dens, and hair salons, their signs all shining garishly in the dark.

“It might do you good, you know,” my father is saying as we hit the Boulevard Périphérique. “It might take your mind off things.”

“What might?”

“A change of scenery. Paris.”

“Yeah. Sure. My brother’s dead. My mother’s insane. Hey, let’s have a crêpe.”

We don’t talk for the rest of the ride.

11

“L
ewis! You cantankerous wretch! You dusty old fart! You drysouled, Bunsen-brained, formaldehyde-soaked bastard!”

It’s not me saying that. Though I’ve wanted to. On numerous occasions.

It’s my father’s friend G—a round man in yellow jeans, a red sweater, and black glasses. He’s a rock-star historian. Oxymoronic, but true. He wrote this mega-bestseller on the French Revolution. It scooped up all the major prizes. The BBC made a series out of it. Ang Lee’s doing the movie.

G and my dad met at Stanford when they were grad students. His real name is Guillaume Lenôtre, but Dad calls him G because the first time they met, he called him Gwillomay. Then Geeyoom. And then G limited him to his first initial.

G’s speaking to us in French. My father and I speak it here. I learned it as a child. Dad’s still learning.

“My word! And who is this—” G’s eyes travel over the leather jacket, and the metal, to my hair. His cheery voice falters. “—this stunning Visigoth? My little Andi? All grown up and dressed to fight the Romans.”

“And everyone else,” my father says.

G laughs. “Come in! Come in!” he says. “Lili’s waiting for you!”

He leads us through the door, locks it, then ushers us into a long, badly lit courtyard crammed full of architectural salvage—marble columns, cornices, horse troughs, streetlamps, a fountain, a dozen decapitated statues.

“Are you
sure
this is the right address?” I’d asked my father when our cab pulled up outside. We’d driven deep into the eleventh arrondissement, well east of the city center, and had ended up in the middle of nowhere. I looked out the cab window and all I could see were two giant iron doors flanked by high stone walls. They were covered in graffiti and plastered with tattered posters touting car shows and strip clubs. The place looked abandoned. Across the street there was a body shop, a dingy Greek café, and a place that makes heating ducts. Nothing else.

“Number eighteen Rue St-Jean. I’m sure this is it,” Dad said as he paid the driver. “G told me it was an old furniture factory. He said he only bought it a few months ago.”

Dad found a battered buzzer hanging by its wires and pressed it, and a few minutes later G was unlocking a small door cut into one of the giant iron doors and kissing us on the street.

“This looks like the end of the world,” Dad says now. “Like the set for some apocalypse movie.”

“It
is
the end of the world, my friend! The eighteenth-century world. This way!” G says, leading us inside a tall stone building. “Straight back to the stairs. Come, come, come!”

He hurtles ahead of us. The ground floor, which is just one cavernous room, is filled almost to the ceiling with boxes and crates. A narrow path runs down the middle of it. I’m careful not to bump anything as I walk along.

“This is all still uncataloged,” G says, patting a crate. “The second floor is more organized,” he adds.

“What
is
all this?” Dad asks.

“The bones of old Paris, my friend! Ghosts of the Revolution!”

Dad stops dead. “You’re kidding me. This is all yours? I thought you had a couple boxes of the stuff.”

G stops, too. “I had fourteen storage rooms, all stuffed to the rafters, and then this place came on the market a year ago and I knew immediately it would be perfect. So I bought it and moved the entire collection here. I have sponsors now, you know. Six French firms and two American. Two years—three at most—and we’ll break ground.”

“For what?” I ask, wondering what he can possibly be planning to do with all this stuff.

“For a museum, my girl! One dedicated entirely to the Revolution. Here in this old factory.”

“Here?” my father says skeptically, taking in the cracked windows, the rotting wood.

“But of course. Where else?”

“Central Paris, maybe? Where the tourists are?” I offer.

“No, no, no! It must be here in the St-Antoine!” G says. “This was the workers’ quarters, the very heart of the Revolution. From here came the rage, the blood, and the muscle that propelled the struggle. Danton argued in the Assembly, yes. Desmoulins shouted in the Palais-Royal. But when the politicians needed something done, upon whom did they call? Upon the furies of the St-Antoine! The factory workers, the butchers and fishwives and laundresses. The wretched, angry poor. And so it must be here, the museum. Here, where the people lived and struggled and died.”

This is how G talks. Always. Even when he’s not filming for the BBC.

Dad nudges him aside to get a better look at something behind him. “Is this what I think it is?” he says, lifting up the edge of a tarp.

“If you think it’s a guillotine, then yes,” G says, throwing the tarp back. “It was found just a few years ago in an old warehouse. I’m incredibly lucky to have acquired it. There are very few left from the eighteenth century. Look how efficient the design is—a bit of wood, an angled blade, that’s all. During the old regime, nobles sentenced to death were beheaded. Commoners were hanged, which could be a good deal more painful. The revolutionaries wished for equality in all things—even death. Beggar, blacksmith, marquis—no matter their rank, all enemies of the republic met the same end. One that was thought to be quick and humane. This particular example, it appears, was put to heavy use. You see?”

He points to the front of the machine. The wood underneath the place where the victim’s head was held is stained rusty brown. Looking at it, I wonder if the people whose heads this thing sliced off thought their deaths were quick and humane.

“At the height of the Terror, many hundreds were guillotined in Paris alone,” he says. “Many on mere accusation, without a proper trial. Blood ran in the gutters. Quite literally. The executions were a grand spectacle. Refreshments were sold. Spectators vied for the best vantage points, and—”

“Guillaume!” a voice calls from someplace above us. “Stop giving lectures and bring our guests upstairs. They are tired and hungry!”

It’s Lili, G’s wife. I recognize her voice.

“Right away, my love!” G shouts back.

We walk up to the second floor. G unearths things from crates and boxes as we go. He shows us revolutionary flags, a huge banner with
The Rights of Man
printed on it, and an ancient coat of arms with a red rose, pierced and dripping blood, at its center.

“This dates from the fifteenth century,” he says. “It’s the coat of arms for the counts of Auvergne. It hung in the family’s château until the Revolution, when the last count and his wife were guillotined for defending the king. ‘From the rose’s blood, lilies grow,’ the Latin says. You see? The rose drips its blood on the fleur-de-lis, the white lily, symbol of the kings of France. The powerful counts of Auvergne were always loyal to their kings, fighting for them, sometimes giving their lives for them.”

We climb up past the third floor—which is Lili’s studio—to the fourth, carried along by the smell of garlic, chicken, and a wood fire. Lili’s waiting for us on the landing. She kisses us, and as my father and G go inside, she kisses me again and hugs me tightly. I hug her back. She’s wearing two rumpled sweaters. Her black hair is gray with marble dust. She ushers us inside their home—a huge loft on the top floor of the old factory.

“I was so happy when Lewis called to say you’d be joining him!” she says. “He says you are going to work on a school project while you’re here. How exciting!”

“Yes, it is. Very exciting,” I lie.

She asks about my mother, and when I tell her what’s happened, her eyes well up. They were roommates at the Sorbonne, Lili and my mother. She took my mom to a party at G’s flat one night. My father was there. It’s how my parents met. I’ve known Lili and G my whole life.

“Oh, my poor Marianne,” she says now. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve and hugs me again. She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d’Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness. Lili asks me how I’m doing and I tell her fine. She holds my face between her strong sculptor’s hands and says, “How are you really?”

“I’m fine, Lili. Really,” I say again, forcing a smile. I don’t want to go into it. I don’t want to start crying in her foyer. All the traveling’s made me tired and numb and I want to stay that way. It’s easier. I ask her where to put my jacket. She tells me to keep it on. The furnace is temperamental and the fireplace only does so much.

She says that dinner is still an hour away, and hands me a tray with glasses and a bottle of wine on it. I head over to my father and G, who are sitting a few yards from the big open kitchen at a long wooden table. I pour wine for them but they’re sorting through papers and photographs and don’t even look up.

“The trust will allow us only the tiniest piece for testing,” G is saying to my father. “Only the very tip. About a gram in total.”

“One gram for three labs?” my father says, looking concerned. “Brinkmann and Cassiman are okay with this?”

“They have to be. We get what we are given. No more.”

Dad didn’t tell me much about the work he’s doing. Just that G is involved with some kind of historical trust and that he asked him to come to Paris to do some DNA tests for them. Which is kind of overkill if you ask me. Like asking Stephen Hawking to explain how a pulley works.

G and Dad continue to talk work, so I check out the loft. As I look around, I have to pick my way past boxes and crates, marble busts, a stuffed monkey, a wax mannequin, a collection of muskets standing upright in an old barrel, and a huge clock face. I see a wreath made of hair, painted tea chests, shop signs, glass eyeballs, and a cardboard box tied with a ribbon.
Last Letters of the Condemned, 1793
is written on it in old-fashioned script. I open the box and carefully lift a letter out. The paper is brittle. The handwriting is hard to read. So is the old French.

Farewell, my wife and children, forever and ever. Love my children, I beg you, tell them often what I was, love them for us both.… I end my days today…
.

I pick up another:
My last linen is dirty, my stockings are rotting, my breeches are threadbare. I’m dying of hunger and boredom.… I shall not write to you anymore, the world is execrable. Farewell!

And a third:
I do not know, my little friend, if it will be given to me to see you or to write to you again. Remember your mother.… Farewell, beloved child.… The time will come when you will be able to judge the effort that I am making at the moment not to be moved to tears at the memory of you. I press you to my heart. Farewell…
.

God, what a bummer. I can’t read any more so I put the letters back, close the box, and keep poking around. There’s a toy guillotine on the floor, complete with executioner, victim, and victim’s papier-mâché head staring up in shock from a tiny willow basket. A pair of blue silk shoes with jeweled buckles stands on a shelf. Banners of red, white, and blue, faded and torn, drape one wall.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
, they say, and
Long Live the Republic
. Men and women with powdered hair stare at me from gilt frames. There’s a painting of Louis XVI’s execution and a horrible cartoon of a man hanging from a lamppost, his feet kicking in the air.
A Traitor Dances the Carmagnole
, the caption reads. Old books are piled on tables and chairs. A skull grins from the top of a cabinet.

These things are not quiet. They’re restless. Looking at them, I can see the fishwives of Paris marching to Versailles, singing and spitting and yelling for bread. I can hear the crowd cheering at the king’s execution and the patter of blood dripping from his neck. I reach up and touch the edge of a tattered banner and wish I hadn’t. It feels dusty and dry, like ashes and old bones. It feels contagious.

I want to get away from this stuff but I can’t; it’s everywhere. I head back to the table, catch my foot on something, and stumble into a crate, whacking my knee. Nobody notices. Lili’s cooking. Dad and G are still talking work and wouldn’t notice if the roof fell in. I’m hopping around, rubbing my knee, and then I see what I tripped over—a long wooden case—the kind guitars come in.

There’s a swirly pattern on the surface, all leaves and vines, but pieces of the inlay are missing and the finish is dull and stained. A leather strap is wound around it. I bend down on my good knee and see that the case doesn’t close properly. The prong’s stuck down inside the bottom part of the lock.

I unbuckle the strap, ease the lid open, and catch my breath because I’m suddenly looking at the most beautiful guitar I’ve ever seen. It’s made of rosewood and spruce with an ebony fingerboard. The rosette and the purfling at the edges are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ivory, and silver.

I touch it lightly. Run my fingers over the wood. Trace the edges. I strum the strings and two of them break.

“Ah! You found the guitar!” G says, looking up from his papers.

“I … I’m really sorry, G,” I stammer. “I shouldn’t have touched it.”

“Nonsense! It’s amazing, isn’t it?” he says, coming over. “It’s a Vinaccia. See the name inside the case? They were made in Italy in the late seventeen hundreds. They’re very rare. Very expensive, too. The lock is silver. It’s jammed, unfortunately. Louis XVI owned one of these. There’s a painting of him holding it.”