Now a new music, not what he had intended, arose in apposition. Sometimes they played at the same time and he could hear them both, but then one would overcome the other. Opposed to the Sei Lob that would take him from life was a Couperin piece he had always loved. It was music he had associated with Paris as time motionlessly passed through it: Les Barricades Mystérieuses, and indeed they were. It was supposedly a play on virginity, but the power of the music elevated it far beyond such things.
The harpsichord is a very strange instrument. It plucks and stops, attacking its sonorousness at each note by refusing to let the note sustain and fade. In that sense, it refuses death – by jumping, as if from one ice floe to another, to a new note and a new life. It can sometimes be stilted, but if done right the chain of sound becomes as beautiful as the sparkling of stars. The Couperin exceeded this in that it was like a continuous waterfall of golden light so promising and overwhelmingly bright that it could startle even someone about to die. As it and the Bach closely contended within him, Jules had a compressed, comprehensive, detached, but nonetheless deeply emotional view of all his days.
HE WAS SURE HE would never see Amina again, and that she had been only a test of his willingness to exit. He was old enough and experienced enough to conclude that he had exaggerated her qualities, that, because he was now separated from reality, this was his affair alone, and that the salvation he saw in her and hoped was mutual was merely something he had manufactured to keep himself alive. Luc was failing, and had one more, slight chance. Jules had to try to save Cathérine as well. Perhaps France would not go the way it had once gone. But though his intellectual appraisal told him it wouldn’t, it had happened before, it had happened in history, and it had happened to him. The insurance, dearly purchased, was to give Cathérine and Luc what he had been unable to give his mother and father. Amina was life’s last emissary, but he would have to leave her behind. He didn’t know her, and would never see her again. He hoped she would simply fade away.
The day after they met was the last day of cool weather, and in the morning, in a gentle and insistent shower of cold, thin raindrops, Jules had gone to the pool to see if swimming five kilometers might kill him. He thought that giving up the ghost as waters swirled around his strokes and his attention was taken up in the rhythm and exhaustion of the swim would be easier than running in the heat until he died. But several hours after entering the water he emerged feeling, if a lot more tired, as healthy and powerful as a young man. As Jules left, his nemesis the guard said, “Are you training to swim La Manche?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“The lifeguards were talking about you. They almost got to the point where they were taking bets as to when you would get out.”
“Actually,” Jules said, “I’m going to swim to Peru, but it won’t be that far, because instead of going around the Horn I’m going to take the Panama Canal. Or maybe the Suez. I haven’t yet made up my mind.”
In Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a tiny alley, unknown to almost everyone, that right-angles from another tiny alley off a narrow cul-de-sac that as it proceeds becomes entirely residential, and because of this has little foot traffic. To get to it you would have to veer off a fairly quiet commercial Street into a narrow way, walk past a travel agency, an estate agent, and a lawyer’s office, continue on past the blank walls of the back of a school, make a right down another narrow street, with only the featureless school walls on either side, until at the end, half hidden, is the covered Passage Livry. If you dared follow it – because it looked like it would lead only to a back courtyard full of refuse bins – you would discover that it opened to a little garden with a fountain, teak benches, pebble paths, and a small bar and tabac run stubbornly and un-economically by a very old man who kept at it even after the municipality built a garage that closed off his little square from a busy street that had then been quick to forget that he remained.
There are many hidden courtyards in France. It might be said that the whole country and its culture is a form of architecture that protects private life. Almost all of its large buildings surround an interior garden as delicate as the stone walls around it are strong. Jules had discovered this one only after being present late one night when the proprietor of the bar, having had too much to drink, fell down on the street and bloodied his nose. Jules took him home, at first unbelieving that he was being guided correctly. Then, for thirty years, he had returned fairly regularly, often with Jacqueline, and Cathérine, who would play alone at the edge of the fountain.
And after they were gone he would go there to sit in the garden, read the newspaper, and enjoy a complet. Now he did so again, and due to the great swim he felt perfectly fine about having two brioches, two croissants, and a cup of scalding chocolate with whipped cream floating on top like Mont Blanc. It was the last time he would enjoy such things, for the next day the sun would be blazing and the temperature was predicted to surpass 35°C. That day, he would run until, in the battle he had always sought, he would bend time and loop back to the unfinished business of 1944.
But at present it was cold, and despite the steaming chocolate he was beginning to get a chill as he ate and tried to read a story about drilling for gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Jews had found gas and oil offshore. The Turks would try to take it from them. The Syrians would try to take it from them. The Lebanese would go to court. Hizb’Allah would attempt to blow it up. Such a nice windfall, and a fight to the death to keep it.
In the fading periphery of his vision, he saw something over the top of his newspaper, and lowered it to see directly. A woman was walking around the perimeter of the square, checking the few house numbers, looking for something. She walked like someone who is irritated, stopping and starting, unsatisfied. Jules took in a breath, and thrust his head slightly forward as stupidly as a pigeon, because it was Amina.
He jumped up suddenly and ran to her, thinking on the way that soon he would have to apologize to a stranger. In his early life and sometimes even of late he had often rushed toward people when he thought that they were his father, his mother, or Jacqueline. But he had always managed to catch himself. He would look at his watch, snap his fingers, and turn around. Still, the breathless shock of thinking he had caught sight of them, none of whom had aged, was something that would take half an hour to dissipate. Rushing toward this woman, he didn’t have to snap his fingers, feign looking at his watch, or turn, because it really was Amina.
After she had joined him at his table, doubling the old man’s customers at a stroke, she saw that Jules seemed suspicious. “I didn’t track you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she told him. This amused her.
“Of course not. I didn’t think that.”
“It is extremely unlikely that in all of Paris and environs we would end up in this little place at the same time, but I was at the estate agent around …” she twirled her left hand and index finger as if stirring something “… the corner. And he said there was a listing in, or, rather, off, the Passage Livry.”
“You’re moving here?”