Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (29 page)

It is so kind of you to listen
to me. But Boris is awake. I must go.

Ruth, saying nothing, eyes
wet, wants to hug Nadia. But even after these revelations she feels something
in the younger woman holding her stiff and apart. Only her own brimming gaze
affirms the peculiar connection that Ruth herself feels with this strange
Russian woman: as though they were mirrors of each other, as though Nadia in
all her scarcely imaginable intimate losses represented for Ruth a kind of
destiny, though she has never lost and God willing never will lose a child, or
a lover, only her mother, she thinks, her mother. Something of mother here, she
realizes, watching Nadia go, something reminds me of her. She knows something I
don’t know, that’s the feeling I’ve had my whole life.
Secrets,
my mother’s secrets, and Nadia’s.
Somehow the capacity
to retain the feeling of a secret, though she has apparently disclosed all.

Her own phone buzzes.
Time to go.
The sun is brilliant overhead. There are
mothers, mothers everywhere, pushing strollers, holding tiny people by the
hand, waiting patiently at crosswalks, wiping stains from little mouths. What
did she mean, is it somehow American to have children, crazy thought, but it’s
true, there’s a kind of blind optimism or denial or expectation in these
parents, some domesticated wild hope for a life lived that’s entirely
potential, unrealized, golden glowing and embodied in these little animals that
will grow into disappointing humans like the rest of us. I am no different. But
there are times, more and more, I look at Lucy, small as she is, and see the
truth. She is already far from me, it’s her job,
someday
she’ll be gone entirely, even if she calls every week, even if she lives in the
house next door, even if she chooses to care for Ben and me in our decrepit old
age, spooning soup into my quivering mouth and looking at me with adult pitying
eyes. I have lost her. I have lost the dream.

When she gets home there’s another letter. She takes
it upstairs and puts it, unread, with the others. There is still a little time.
She opens her laptop and writes.

I awoke in hospital. Not
myself
wounded, but tucked uncomfortably into a green plush chair at the bedside of a
figure in white. For a moment I remembered nothing, saw nothing, felt myself
only to be alone with death or something like death, something still and
watchful, commanding if not reverence than at least the silencing of irrelevant
thoughts. Be present with your breath, it said. Then I saw the body was a man’s
and not a woman’s and I remembered, in a single unfurling flash, hours or days
before, out in the street, pushing through the trailing crowd, searching, where
they might be, thinking about police brutality, some of it confirmed and
witnessed—the wounded beaten in their stretchers or while handcuffed to
hospital beds—and wilder rumors, of students disappeared to secret detention
centers, bodies tossed in the Seine, the persistent story of a young man, a
boy, run over deliberately by a CRS van, and then backed over to silence the
screams, only the crush of bones on pavement audible. Practically hearing it,
on a side street now back from the surge, all the shops and houses shut up
tight and dark save for one, the little used bookshop on the Rue des Anglais
with its metal shutters down but one door open, spilling light onto the street,
still open as it had been throughout the month the rest of Paris had taken as a
forced holiday, stores opening and closing seemingly at random, sugar
shortages, no gas, metro stoppages, no trains running out of town, going
everywhere on foot or on a bicycle, for weeks now we’d sustained ourselves
selling books we no longer read, no longer needed to read, for school like
normal life in the city was indubitably out, the trash uncollected, sidewalks
impassable, everyone student and bourgeois alike used the center of the street
to get around. All the poetry we need, Charles said, is in the streets and in
our blood, the language of youth. Charles with his usual quick thoughtless
charm had befriended the owner, a heavy-jowled widow whose feeling for print
was entirely mercenary, and yet not untouched by a certain piety, for it had
been her husband’s shop, her husband who had gotten his fool self killed in the
Resistance, or so she’d tell anyone who asked—guillotined by the Gestapo she
said, not without a certain relish, drawing two fingers across her throat,
cigarette trailing smoke like the ghost of his martyr’s blood. She was a
pensioner with modest needs, she insisted, she kept the store in her husband’s
honor, he had loved the students, had been one himself, would surely have
become a professor at the university after the war, except—
snick
. And as she said this she
would be assessing your stack of books with her deceptively slack yellow eye,
and then quote you a price at least fifty francs less than the books were
really worth, and yet the shop was convenient to our flat and she always paid
cash on the spot. I never saw anyone buy anything there, only sell; she must
have had a mail-order business or perhaps she was truly the martyr to her husband’s
memory she claimed. At any rate, Charles won her over, did her little favors,
never complained about her sharp dealings, and now in the street I saw them
through the metal shutters in the window looking out, and when I rapped on the
grating I saw Mme. Rossignol hand her key to Charles, who opened the door and
unlocked the gate and let me in.
A dozen meters off the
endless crowd surged by, the new old crowd, our parents’ crowd, supplemented by
thick-necked brush-cut youths of another order than the slim-hipped
revolutionaries who had seemingly driven all other species out of the ecosystem
of the Rive Gauche.
They weren’t even from Paris, Charles muttered, full
of conspiracies; the Gaullists had bussed them in from the most benighted
corners of the Republic for the express purpose of cracking heads, and the
government would get no blood on its hands. Your sort of people, he said to me
suddenly. No offense. I
mean,
the sort you grew up
with. The sort you ought to be.
Peasants.
Creatures of false consciousness.

You know, M said, smiling
slightly.
Americans.

She had gotten somewhere a
cut on her forehead, a superficial abrasion really, and it made her seem less
rather than more vulnerable. The blood had fled her cheeks and her face was
hard and angular. She wore black from neck to toe, except for a striped
scarf—it belonged to Charles—that she’d knotted Windsor-style, so that she
looked androgynous and natty. Charles’s blood was up. We must act, he said. We
have to find our brothers. Counterattack.

Mes pauvres enfants,
Mme. Rossignol said,
looking at Charles, his fine blond glow. She was standing as always at the high
counter—there was a low stool behind her that she rarely sat upon, for when she
did
she
and her authority vanished, inviting
shoplifters. The store itself was narrow and claustrophobic with its high
shelves crammed with a cacophony of medical textbooks and artists’ anatomies
and a complete set of Balzac and a reprint of the first French edition of
Darwin’s
L’origine
des espèces
and a dozen copies of the first volume of
Capital
(no sign of the second or
third) and the poetry of Baudelaire and
Germinal
and near the top shelf, in
the back, all in a row, the most recent acquisitions, shelved three deep, books
from the denuded flats of ourselves and the revolution. When it’s all over
we’ll have to buy them back, I thought, and then Mme. Rossignol will turn the
profit she’s been dreaming of. But it was blasphemous to think so, and I
glanced quickly at Charles and M as though they had heard my thoughts. The bell
over the door rang. M had run out into the street and Charles, after a moment’s
gape, had run after her. Mme. Rossignol and I stared at each other, stupefied,
like sailors in a ship abandoned by its captain.

They’ll be killed!
she
said at last, as though reporting the verdict of the
highest authorities.

I ran after them, pelting
down the alley piled high with trash, empty boxes, bits of rubble, past the
naked stumps of trees that had gone for barricades, past boarded and
blacked-out windows like so many mouths of broken teeth, toward the end where
light and darkness mingled and the bodies were surging past. The chant
Vive De Gaulle! Vive la
France!
thumping
and thundering, felt more than heard, shaking
me out of the private dream that had grown to include the world and my friends.
At the end of the alley was a black knight, a man on a great dark horse, his
uniform absorbing all the light, a glint where eyes should be, a rock to break
the human wave. M had seized the reins and was shouting up at him, her face
white, tendons on her throat standing up, Charles also shouting, reaching his
arm across her, to grab the reins himself or to protect her or simply in
reflex. He had never looked more beautiful, his light overshone M’s completely.
I wanted to hear what they were saying, screaming at each other, Charles and M
and the horseman, but only heard the chant
.
Vive la
France.
And as Charles pushed M back, snapping her grip, the horseman raised
his baton and brought it down with astonishing speed, hard and forceful, onto
the top of Charles’s head. I heard the crack. And his face twisted upward
toward the sky, uncomprehending, the blood starting to flow. And M on the
ground,
and his body covering her. The horse reared up
against the crowd, the bridges, the sky, a figure of ancient power, something
atavistic coming to claim the City of Lights for its own. I felt his silhouette
over me, like I felt the crowd chanting. And then the clap of iron hooves, and
the crowd surged, and he was gone. We were in the mouth of the alley, M and I,
alone with Charles and the blood matting his hair and trickling through our
fingers and onto the street.

Charles. You thought you
understood love. But to love is to look, and you never once opened your eyes.
No need to look when everyone looks at you. And you look out at everyone and
see only masses and theories and most of all yourself. Your women, Charles,
your women showed you everything, there was nothing left to the imagination,
because it was your imagination they wanted to test, and you failed. Remember
the poster, Charles, the one I helped to print and you helped to write?
I take my desires for
reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
.
A
lover’s creed.
But what is it you desire, dear Charles? Can you give it
a name?
Revolution?
Power?
Or
simply not to go on with things as they have been, not to go on with
yourself
? Yours is the heroism of the suicide, whose only
faith is in the blankness that will come after blowing yours and everybody’s
brains out, certain that nothing will remain:
après moi, le neant
. You love nothing but the
new. And that’s why in spite of yourself, in spite of your broken skull, you’ll
live on to pass your exams, choose a career,
marry
. It
takes the love of others to keep your powder dry. But we are drifting away.

Where was she? I remembered
her leading the way after I hoisted Charles on my back, darting in fits and
starts through the streets, trying to avoid further contact with cops and
crowds, running for the hospital.
His dead weight on my back.
M looking back at me, her mouth set in a line, her eyes alive with fear, two
little flames in a field of ashes.
Body of Charles, the burnt
blunt blur of a second head on my shoulders.
Limp,
leaden.
His blood soaked through my nylon windbreaker, through my shirt.
I don’t remember anyone else in the streets, just a few parked cars and the
weird gray light of the sky reflecting back at us the lights of the city we
dimly remembered from the days before the riots, the lights of shops and billboards,
the city as it had given itself to me in the first days: lights running up and
down, peering out from the exposed skeleton of the Eiffel Tower, the spotlights
throwing the facade of Notre-Dame into shadow like an African mask, or the
spooky reactionary light that bathed the smooth dome of Sacré-Coeur, day and
night. It was an endless stagger, not quite a run, M leading the way, reaching
a white hand back toward me and me reaching out toward it with my free hand,
never quite touching, silent running, blankness, sound returning only when she
ran up the stone steps of the ancient building,
l’hopital
, and pulled open the outer
door and held it for me, us, sweat burning my eyes, I registered with a glance
once more her face, cast down and away, as I passed through the doors into the
light-filled hum of the gray-green corridor, calling for a doctor, blundering
through chairs, up to a hole in the wall behind which a middle-aged woman in
white sat writing, looking up appalled at the bloated gasping giant filling her
window, and the ruined face of Charles slack and expressionless. I held him in
my arms now, like a child, an offering. And it wasn’t until a noise came to
answer the roaring in my ears, two identical orderlies with black
grease-streaked hair easing my burden from me, directing me to a chair, Charles
flying away on a gurney to triage and surgery, other patients and attendants
now manifesting around me, holding magazines and books, looking at me
curiously. I heard the ringing of phones and the names of doctors being paged
and the resumption of small talk (a elderly woman in the chair directly behind
me talking slowly and patiently and loudly, as though to a deaf person, to the
much younger man next to her about the holiday she’d taken last winter in Martinique—her
son, grandson, a stranger, who knew?)—as I say, it was only then that I
registered M wasn’t there. Perhaps she was smoking a cigarette on the steps to
calm her nerves? But when I stepped back out through the doors there was no
sign of her. Two men in white stood next to an ambulance sipping Styrofoam cups
of coffee and I came down to them gesticulating. No.
A girl?
No. They’d just arrived. They were between calls. A quiet night, they said.
Quieter than they’d had in a long time.
They were exhausted,
really. Yes, they had sympathized with the students at first, especially when
the cops started cracking heads. But enough was enough. De Gaulle had called
elections, what more did
they
want? He was the man for
a crisis, even now. He stood head and shoulders above the opposition. That
little Jew, what was his name, one said to the other. Cohn-something, his
companion replied.
The chubby little redhead.
Give it
a rest, why doesn’t he. Give us all a rest.