Chapter 40
What They Find
Seymour can hear the grunts of his pursuers as he stumbles into the gloomy cover of the first trees, wasting precious breath – each possibly his last – calling for frail and perhaps unborn Helen to rescue him. He flounders forward through the knee-deep confusion of decaying branches. Brambles tear his face. A giant spider web blinds him. He trips on a root and pitches forward into stunning encounter with a tree-trunk. Clasping it, he sinks to his knees in the rotten branches. The guttural jubilation behind him fades and so does the light above him. The smell of rot is the last sensation he holds onto before he sinks into blackness.
When Seymour emerges, he’s still on his knees, embracing, but embracing the protective iron corset of a curbside sapling instead of the great tree that had nearly brained him. The roar of traffic is in his ears instead of his pursuers’ murderous jubilation. He understands that the drunken transfer technicians had snatched him forward in the nick of time.
Brushing ancient spider webs out of his eyes, expelling rotten air from his lungs, Seymour pulls himself erect. He wipes blood, red, not gray, off his face. The passersby are dressed in mid-century fashion. Mid-century Renaults and Citroëns rattle past. He limps over to the newspaper kiosk for confirmation. In the headlines of the France-Soir of June 5, 1951 the Chinese are still counterattacking in Korea, the Viet Cong infiltrating in Indochina.
Seymour takes a few steps forward and finds himself once again at the corner of the Rue du Regard as at the first trial run, but everything steady and sharply focused, blue sky and friendly sunshine this time.
Even so, a born worrier to the day of his death and resurrected that way, Seymour advances cautiously, fearing that at any moment those buildings will start buckling, the sun blow-torch him, the shade deep-freeze him, the peaceful mackerels in the fish shop loom at him like sharks, jaws agape. So he stares down at the sidewalk. There’s no marelle scrawled on it, a positive point, but he’s prepared for the sidewalk to fissure and swallow him up.
Buildings, sun, fish and sidewalk behave normally. Seymour walks on until the golden horse head registers in the corner of his eye. He halts and turns, facing the porte-cochere. He advances his finger slowly and presses the button. The door clicks free. “Yes, I know what will happen now,” he says out loud as he reaches out, expecting to be snatched back to starting point, the way it had happened the first time out.
It doesn’t happen this time. He’s able to push the door wide open. He steps over the metal threshold into the courtyard of her building, finally, after all that time.
Helen props herself up painfully in the double bed in the big hotel room with light blue walls and pictures of soaring birds. At the same moment that she notices the imprint of a head in the pillow next to hers, she hears, thinks she hears, in meaningful English, “Helen! Helen!” but maybe, in meaningless French, “Hélène! Hélène!” the young man’s voice muffled by the closed window and drawn drapes. She resists for as long as she can and finally gets up and goes over to the window, noticing only then that she’s naked and strangely feeble and aching in every joint.
She struggles with the drapes and pulls the window open on opaque white fog. There’s no sound for a minute. Then the young man’s voice floats up from the invisible street below, repeating either “Helen” or calling to some unknown wrong “Hélène” and in that case the young man is also unknown and wrong. Now unintelligible words come to her: English or French? She chooses it to be English and thinks: he wants the wallet, but I won’t throw it down and have him vanish again. “Come back up!” she cries, but the fog distorts her voice to a squeak.
She hobbles painfully into the familiar big blue-tiled bathroom. On one side of the washbasin lies a rectangular object twisted and crevassed with age and next to it, two balls of fuzzy white mold. Just as she perceives her image in the mirror, her hair white like the decayed spat-out pills and her appalled face, twisted and crevassed with age like his wallet, she hears booming feet, taking the steps three by three, tireless, flight after flight.
He’s reached her corridor. Helen totters out of the bathroom and looks about but can’t locate clothing to cover her decrepit nudity, can’t locate the key to lock the door against his vision of it. Hearing his approaching footsteps, she pushes against the table to barricade the door. She hasn’t the strength. She drags a chair over and clumsily jams it beneath the doorknob.
The footsteps have stopped. He must be standing in front of the door, reaching for the doorknob. The flimsy chair won’t keep him out. She huddles in the corner close to the open window.
“I’m Hélène, not Helen,” she tries to cry in French. “You have the wrong room.” Her cry is an inaudible squeak.
She thinks she can see the doorknob turning.
Three right turns and now Louis trudges straight on, as instructed, in search of something vital he can’t remember. By this time, the accelerating spin of his mind has flung out one by one almost all the elements of his original quest. He’s lost the river, the bridge, the church spire, the Embassy, and what all of these secondary things lead up to, the flower shop and his darling. All he has left is the yearning to find a sloping street and run down it toward obscure but tremendous joy.
But the street he’s been enjoined to follow (who by and why?: now he loses that too) gradually starts rising, keeps on rising through neighborhoods of growing squalor and stench, taking him away from that mysterious happiness that clearly lies in the opposite direction.
Louis lets himself down on a bench and waits for the dizziness to stop and for memory to seep back. Instead, the whirl accelerates and he loses more things: what this foreign city is and what he’s doing in it and finally who he is. All he has left is the knowledge that joy lies in the opposite direction, in a neighborhood of calm elegance. This street with its garbage-cluttered gutters and disjointed paving stones can’t possibly lead to it.
Still, he gets up and resumes the imposed path past decaying tenements and disused sooty factories with tall brick chimneys and smashed windows, confused by the din of hammers on metal, the clopping of hooves, the thunder of great barrels rolling down cobble-stoned alleyways. He passes dumping grounds with rag pickers’ hovels and picketed goats browsing rare grass among broken bricks and bottles. Now heavily mustached hip-booted men poking and raking knee-deep in a narrow shallow stinking canal which Louis can’t know is actually a river, the Bièvre, subterranean for most of its course through Paris.
In a sordid courtyard a bearded old man in a bowler hat is cranking out wheezing sour music from a hurdy-gurdy. Next to him a tiny ragged woman sings raucously, of love it must be, because she clutches the area of her heart regularly with an ecstatic gap-toothed smile.
Louis goes past them and encounters a pockmarked old woman with wild waist-long white hair. In the crook of her arm lie withered flowers she must have salvaged from a nearby garbage heap.
“Des fleurs, des fleurs, Monsieur, Achetez-moi mes belles fleurs!”
At the sight of those flowers, with the love lament going on behind him, it all comes back to him; the slope to the river, the bridge, the view from it of the spire of the right church, the way from the church to the Embassy, the way from the Embassy to the street with fresh flowers in the windows and his sweetheart inside. All of that lies downhill in the opposite direction. The irascible old man could only have purposely misguided him.
He leaves the street, turning down a sloping alleyway.
Then, turning a corner, miraculously, no need for the river, the bridge, the church, the Embassy, there it is, calm and elegant: Louise’s street.
Finally, after all that time, Seymour stands in the courtyard with an unfamiliar gray cat staring at the armless blank-eyed Roman goddess in the shop with the sign Moulage d’Art, and the bikes leaning against the scaly walls between the picture framer’s and the plumber’s and a bronze-caster.
Bronze-caster? Seymour doesn’t remember a bronze-caster in that 1951 courtyard.
And where is her father’s tailor-shop? Isn’t the bronze-caster where the tailor shop had been? He crosses the courtyard, careful not to trip over the disjointed paving stones. That hasn’t changed.
The concierge’s lodge is familiar too. The hinged door opens, though, on an unfamiliar face. Where is Madame Maurice, the shapeless old concierge? This one is middle-aged and skinny with a snapping-turtle mouth, washed-out blue eyes and sharp cheekbones. She has a feather duster in her hand.
“Vous cherchez?” she says, professionally suspicious like all Parisian concierges. She looks blank when he says: “Mr and Mrs Laurier.” He has to spell the name. She says there’s no Laurier here, he must have the wrong building. She begins to close the hinged door. No, he says and gives her the number: Seventy-one. The wrong street then, she retorts. He gives her that too: “Number Seventy-one Rue du Regard.” Snappish: “I’ve been here thirty years and there’s never been anybody named Laurier in this building.”
The wrong concierge closes the little hinged window. Back turned to him, she starts dusting an unfamiliar bouquet of plastic flowers.
Seymour sneaks past and spirals up the gloomy cabbage-smelling staircase to the fourth floor and the familiar dark varnished door. He knocks and waits. Knocks and waits and finally tries the knob and pushes the door open and enters the gloom of the empty apartment.
Not a stick of furniture. Not even a single lightbulb. The gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece is gone, a memory of it in the form of a pale square on the dingy wall. The floor creaks as he advances in dimness from room to room. In her bedroom the slats of the closed shutters censor sunshine to faint lines on the dusty floor.
Seymour returns to the living room. He tugs at the window, shoves the shutters open and looks down at the courtyard with the bronze-caster that usurps the place of her father’s tailor shop. From the window across the way, an out-of-tune piano accompanies a sour contralto. He recognizes Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.
To the Distant Beloved.
At that corny ironic stage trick Seymour revolts against the role he’s been forced to play in this third-rate theatre of cruelty and the absurd, the unimaginative expressionistic setting of the dusty empty apartment, not to mention all of the rest of it in the Prefecture: those endless corridors and the sadistic tunnel, the tantalizing year wheeling about endlessly in the window.
In a Beethovenesque gesture of defiance (equally corny), Seymour leans perilously out of the fourth-story window and shakes his fist at the sky, at the cruel, absurd and absolutely untalented Author/Producer/Director/Set-Designer and shouts: “Goddam you! Give me Marie-Claude, goddam you!”
With that unprecedented gesture and cry of defiance, it all collapses, as though he’d smashed the flimsy stage setting to bits.
The piano breaks off on a corny dissonant chord.
The spotlight sun fades.
The street setting fades.
An die ferne Geliebte, never so distant, never so beloved, fades.
In atrocious pain, Seymour Stein starts fading too.
What’s left of him before the open window realizes that this isn’t another time-transfer but total extinction. He clutches at the idea that his imminent void is somehow connected with the void of the apartment and that if he can fill that void behind he’ll stave off the void ahead.
He squeezes his eyes shut and combats extinction with a rage of memory.
He remembers the gilt-framed mantelpiece mirror, down to the very patterns of the tarnish. Remembers the black marble mantelpiece beneath the mirror with the perfectly centered bronze lion dying nobly and on each side of the lion the late 19th century family photographs and remembers those stark unsmiling ancestral faces, all of them, and there, yes, his sweetheart at eleven, veiled in Confirmation white like a tiny prepubescent bride.
Behind his closed lids, he goes on abolishing the void, his own and the room’s.
He remembers the massive cherry-wood table set for dinner with his chair and his personal napkin in the wooden ring and above the table the complicated oak chandelier with three thrifty low-watt candle-shaped bulbs with artificial wax-drops on the white holders.
Remembers the cylindrical waist-high stove with the pipe running into the lowered iron curtain of the fireplace and alongside it the metal tray with old newspapers and kindling wood and the battered coal-pail.
Remembers the pattern of the lace on the windows and the faded wallpaper repeating a shepherd blowing into a flute beneath a weeping willow.
Remembers her father’s oil paintings massed on a wall from floor to ceiling. In stupefying total recall, standing before the window, eyes shut, he summons up every one of those uninspired rural scenes.
The task of mental resurrection completed, Seymour Stein opens his eyes.
The windowpanes, minutes ago starkly blank, are now covered with lace, the familiar pattern. To make sure it’s real he touches it. Through that real lace he stares at the courtyard below and sees her father’s tailor shop where the imposter bronze-caster’s workshop had stood. The cat, no longer gray but correctly black, is sitting before it.
In his joy, Seymour relaxes his tremendous mental effort. The courtyard goes glaring blank like a movie screen with the film broken in the projector. He feels that he’ll go blank too unless he counterattacks with memory again. He does. The courtyard returns after what seems like a second of absence. But outside time isn’t inside time because the black cat is gone and one of the bikes too and shadows have shifted.
The lace is back on the windowpanes so the rest of the apartment must be back too. Seymour turns around and yes, the 1951 apartment is there, maybe fewer paintings on the wall and the photo of his little darling gone from the mantelpiece and the wall-paper brighter, but otherwise practically identical to his memory of it.
He hears a key turning in a lock and the front door opening and closing. Soft footsteps in the corridor approach the living room.
In the doorway stands a little girl of seven or eight with thin graceful bare arms and a school satchel on her back and now wide-eyed and stepping back as he approaches and casts himself on his knees before her, having recognized his darling and he understands the missing photograph of her in white Confirmation veils four impossible years later, and the missing later oil paintings and the rejuvenation of the wall paper.
Not the early fifties but the mid-thirties, another trick on both of us. O Marie-Claude, don’t be frightened, it’s me, it will be me, Seymour, in fifteen years, I’ll never leave you then.
He reaches out for her.
Her scream and “Momma! Momma!” is cut off, the room is cut off. Seymour’s personal screen goes glaring blank again.
Louis steps into the street, her street, no doubt about it. There, at one end, the church with stone demons pitchforking naked stone sinners above the entrance. At the other end, the square with the green bronze general with raised sword. Her flower shop, he knows, stands between a toyshop and a corset shop. Approaching, he recognizes them too, but not what stands between them.
He wants to step away but can’t help approaching the not flower shop with the ornate legend POMPES FUNEBRES which he doesn’t understand but does slowly understand what he sees in the window: crosses of all sizes, marble angels, porcelain flowers, bronze wreathes, black marble plaques with names and birth and death dates and short phrases he doesn’t comprehend except for recurrent topsy-turvy “regrets éternels.”
Bewildered, he turns to the flanking shops, wanting to ask what has happened to the flower shop. In the toyshop rows of porcelain dolls lie in their open boxes with staring eyes and he can’t enter. In the other shop, stands a massacre of headless, armless, hourglass-shaped corseted dummies and he can’t enter.
He returns to the other, wrong, shop. He wants to enter and ask, but he sees in the window, somehow fixed in the stone, sample photographs of the beloved departed, the old man with drooping mustaches, the solemn child, and there, that third photo, with the date 1881-
1901: that smiling face, that name graven in the speckled granite for all time.
Again she tries to cry in French. “I’m Hélène, not Helen. You have the wrong room.” Again her cry is an inaudible squeak. The footsteps in the corridor resume for a second and then she hears a knock on the neighboring door, the door opening, a young woman’s cry of joy, the young man’s exclamation “Hélène!” the door closing and soon her shameless love-whimpers that clamped ears can’t keep out.
Finally, to put an end to it, Helen (laying no claim to the name Hélène) starts crawling over to the fourth-story window wide open on white fog, crawls nearer and nearer.
An hour of street after wrong street, aching ankles, aching heart, and then the idea occurs to Margaret: a map of Paris to find the right street. She finally locates a bookshop on the other side of the Avenue Mozart. She waits, alongside a well-dressed white-bearded old man, at the pedestrian crossing. When the traffic light changes, she steps off the curb.
The light is green but suddenly a big low-slung black car hurtles toward the red light, impossible at that speed to brake to a stop.
Margaret tries to run. Her left high-heel twists. She catapults forward. Her bleeding palms, outflung, catch the old man in the small of the back, propelling him out of the path of the swerving car. Sprawling, she replaces him in the fatal spot. It could easily be taken for a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, instead of the consequence of a defective heel.
The black car is upon her.
Louis can see his warped reflection in the window of the unbearable shop, hunched and trembling for the first time in his two lives. That too is unbearable. Scenes of past valor come to him. It’s as if he hears a distant bugle commanding his body to stop trembling. He admonishes that disgraced image of himself:
“This ain’t her street. That ain’t her. That ain’t me. That old man was the devil. Her street can’t be up this high. It’s down by the river. Can’t fool me.”
He straightens up, walks away from the street and goes down an avenue toward the river. Four times, in different arrondissements, he encounters the street with the toyshop and the corset shop and between them that other shop. He walks past the street each time, never once breaking into a run. Finally he reaches the right river, the Seine. He walks with dignity to the middle of the bridge and starts scanning upstream for a spire. It’s then that he’s pulled into darkness.
Seymour returns from blankness fleeing down the staircase and behind him a thunder of pursuing feet with voices clamoring his infamy. “The child! Little Marie-Claude! Monster! Stop him!” At the foot of the stairs, blocking the way out is the butcher with a cleaver. Seymour trips and sprawls. They are upon him.
His screen goes glaring blank and then starts darkening.
Darkening, darkening.
Seymour Stein makes no effort to resist extinction.