The Metropolis (39 page)

“Not at all.” He shook his head. “Do you?”

“Not at all,” she admitted. “But I don’t want to sit here anymore, either.”

“We could go for a little walk,” Martin proposed. “I could use a break.”

Maria followed him out of the ballroom and into a long hallway, the quiet reverberation of which made her melancholy, and she paused.

Martin wrapped one of her arms around his shoulder as she steadied herself against the wall. “I thought you said nobody could tell when you were drunk.”

“I’m just really fucking tired,” she murmured, but already the
touch of her hand on his and her arm around his back electrified her, even as she felt her eyes start to tear. “And thanks to you I’m really fucking sad, too, even though I just found out about the biggest break of my career.”

She had already told him about her acceptance into the young artist program and everything that implied. “Don’t blame me,” he said with a smile. “I don’t trust anyone who thinks happiness is ever more than fleeting.”

It was a gesture of resignation that she never failed to find charming in men who attracted her, so that, when he turned to face her, she could not resist placing her hands on his shoulders, only a few inches from a real hug, and then, when he showed no resistance, closing the gap. Nor did she object when, in return, his hand on her back went from a gesture of reassurance to something more, which led her to grip him a little tighter, which he reciprocated, so that she felt inclined to nuzzle a little at his neck, where his beard gave way to an afternoon stubble, which left her no choice but to kiss him.

“I wish we had somewhere to go,” she said.

“What about in there?” he suggested, nodding at an adjacent door.

“It looks like a utility room,” Maria said. “I bet it’s locked.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Martin said and reached over to push down on the lever.

The door gave way, and Maria cried out—a scream, really, but a very controlled one—in surprise and triumph, after which she followed him into a small supply room, so they were alone in the dark. As soon as the door clicked shut, she grabbed hold of him, an action he did not so much resist as envelop as he fell into her and brought them both to the floor, along with a cascade of toilet paper rolls that strangely never seemed to land. She felt nothing, really, except an odd, blissful heat, until she heard sobs and realized that
they were her own. This grief—along with the understanding that Martin shared it—increased her desire, so that she pulled at his shirt and kissed him harder than she had ever kissed anyone, until she was sure her teeth had turned to dust and she tasted blood. Completely immune to any pain, real or prospective, she did not stop as he unhitched his belt and pushed his pants down while she did the same with her dress and underwear, which she left hanging on one ankle, just above a black leather pump she did not bother to remove. She twisted around on her back, and they attacked each other like starving animals. They heaved and flailed, so what they did seemed less and less like fucking than like some strange ritual of initiation Maria both wanted and did not want to stop. She was beneath and above him at the same time, surrounding him as he surrounded her, melting into him as she lost her vision and spun away from this dark room toward some disembodied space. When they were done, she returned to her body and cried new tears of relief and—somehow—resurrection, as if, it occurred to her, she had just clawed her way out of a coffin.

PARIS, 1870. Waking up in the diffuse light of dawn, Lucien realized he had been asleep only a few hours. Still shaken by the nightmarish visions he had suffered, he could not believe he had not died from the vaccine. The beating of his heart and the heavy, humid air moving into and out of his lungs confirmed he had not,
and as he slowly flexed his fingers, he felt oddly relieved; whatever else had happened—and he was not yet prepared to think about the consequences—the grief he had brought with him to Paris a few weeks earlier had been stripped away, exposing a core of resolve where before there had seemed to be nothing but despair. He crawled a few feet over to his father, still supine on the floor. While it was unbearable to think that Guillaume would never again laugh or smile or even distractedly examine a flower, Lucien’s sense of loss was tempered by the knowledge that his father had died in a manner of his own choosing, with no doubts and fully aware of the risks; his death was the culmination of decades of work, and Lucien could appreciate why he had done it.

He held his father’s hand and was reminded of what this hand had done for him, not only in his childhood but over the past month, when Guillaume’s work had inspired him in unexpected ways. He explained all of this in a low, hesitant voice, pausing here and there to allow space for his father to respond, as though engaged in a final conversation. He promised to carry on as they had discussed, in the service of truth and discovery, and as he spoke, he realized that—unlike before, when he had expected to die—he meant it, knowing he needed this kind of structure—and ideally, meaning—in his life going forward; to return to the state in which he had existed following Eduard’s death would be disastrous, whether he lived for one day or one century. At the same time, he continued, in the event his father could hear him—and in spite of everything, smiling through his tears—there would be limits to what Guillaume should expect; there was no point in pretending, for example, that Lucien would ever be a scientist, or any kind of scholar, at least in the traditional sense. “
Aime la vérité, mais pardonne l’erreur,
” he offered as he closed his father’s eyes, which seemed to confirm the official passage of these famous words from one generation to the next.

…

L
UCIEN WENT TO
the garden, where he cleared a plot and spent several hours digging. After gently rolling up Guillaume’s body in a blanket, he brought it downstairs to clean and dress. He retrieved his mother’s wedding ring, which, along with his father’s, he placed on a chain around Guillaume’s neck. As Lucien carried his father outside, he began to consider for the first time what it might be like to live for two hundred years, and how long it would take before he knew if the vaccine was working. Though he still tended to believe that he had merely survived, and would continue to age like anyone else, he felt a tremor of fear about confronting such a vast unknown. Not willing to reflect too deeply on what in either case could not be undone, he allowed his fear to pass through—or at least around—him, as if he, too, were an island in the Seine. As he kissed Guillaume’s cheeks and put him into the earth, under the indifferent posture of the trees and flowers, there was a part of him that envied his father his perfect death, but this, too, he refused to consider for more than a second, knowing that he could no longer imagine his own.

A
FTER SPENDING MOST
of the next twenty-four hours in a deep, exhausted sleep, Lucien emerged from the apartment and realized the Île was almost entirely deserted. Closer to the Île de la Cité, he found a small militia of servants left behind by the nobility to guard the mansions; from one of these men he learned that the emperor had been deposed and a new republic formed. As shocking as this news was—Lucien could not remember a time when Louis-Napoléon had not ruled France—of more immediate concern was the news that Prussia, still intent on destroying the new French government, had sent troops said already to be within striking distance of Paris, which meant Lucien would not be able to leave. Venturing into the city, he saw bands of
men parading up and down the boulevards, guns and knives in hand; he went to the train station, where all passenger cars had been replaced by cargo trains filled with wheat and other foodstuffs rushed in from the provinces, and finally to the Bois de Boulogne, where like something out of a strange dream, he saw herds of cattle wandering aimlessly through the flower beds and stands of forest.

Less than a week later, the Germans arrived and promptly formed a giant noose around Paris; wires were cut, so that nothing penetrated this barrier except a few hot-air balloons, released from the highest hills of Montmartre. Bombs rained down, and the cafés and theaters went dark; statues were covered in burlap sacks, and even the arcades remained empty after a shower of glass fell on a group of pedestrians and sliced them to pieces.

As the months passed, Lucien became demoralized, not only on account of those wounded and killed or otherwise suffering from the siege but also his sense that the city was giving in to a collective longing for death, the very thing he had turned his back on. In the lapping waters of the Seine, he heard the hushed whispers of the condemned and starving, begging for a dose of the poison hemlock that continued to grow in Guillaume’s garden. He took to wandering the streets, mostly at night, where even in a starving city, some of the shadowed doorways and twisting passages in the old sections of the Left Bank led to underground cafés and dance halls. When the city seemed most deserted, Lucien heard strains of music but could not always determine if they came from under his feet or from in his head. Strings and harps seemed to cascade down over the darkened streets from the black sky above, and he heard a soft, maternal voice warning him to be careful.

On one such night—in an underground club off the Boulevard St.-Germain, not far from his old theater—he recognized his old friend Gérard Beyle in a group of men, all wearing the red armbands
of the Communards. They greeted each other warmly, and Lucien invited Gérard to visit the Île. The next day he learned that Gérard’s two children had died during a flu epidemic more than five years earlier, after which his wife had left. Lucien relayed some of what had happened to him over the same period, and for a while they sat in silence, which seemed to make the tragedies they had just described feel very far away. Succumbing to nostalgia and affection, Lucien reminisced about their former jobs at the St.-Germain and the years they had spent carousing around Paris, and remarked how strange it was to realize that he now was older than Gérard had been at the time. While Gérard was willing to indulge him in these memories, and even smiled a few times as he recalled certain details that Lucien had forgotten, he was less willing to romanticize this period of his past, explaining that it had been marked by a cynical disbelief in everything.

“You were so wise,” Lucien protested. “Everything you said about love was true.”

“Perhaps.” Gérard shrugged. “But while love was everything to you then—what were you, sixteen or seventeen?—it was already past for me.” He paused and considered Lucien with a grimace. “You’ve suffered—we both have—but let me play the elder again and say that if you can’t find something to believe in—and I’m not saying it has to be the communes, but hopefully it won’t be the monarchy, or even the republic—your life will be very long and tedious.”

O
NE AFTERNOON IN
March, Lucien noticed a pause in the shelling, followed by a series of triumphant cries and shouts. He ran outside and crossed the bridge to the Île de la Cité, where thousands had congregated, kissing and hugging, so that the city appeared to have been conquered by a bedraggled army of hobos. Looking out over the masses, Lucien realized that not a tricolored flag could be seen
in a frothing sea of red: the city—just as Gérard had predicted—had been taken over by the radicals of the commune. Lucien found a spot in an alcove of one of the fountains at the Place St.-Michel from which he could watch and cheer. As far as revolutions went—and like every Frenchman, Lucien had been extensively schooled in both the concept and the reality—this one was not so bad. As night fell, lines of old women paraded past, sweeping brooms in time to a band of brass players, who in turn were followed by painters and sculptors who had fabricated a giant float out of old scrap metal and paper flowers. There were dancers and singers in sequin suits and laborers and factory workers, while prostitutes celebrated the new age by offering their services for this one night only at a 50 percent discount.

As the morning light crept into the eastern sky, Lucien remained asleep in the fountain, oblivious to the thud of soldiers—the French national army—marching through the city gates. He woke up to witness the soldiers advancing into the sleeping crowds, where they plunged bayonets into those at their feet and fired bullets that ripped off the heads of those who stood up groggily to protest. He watched helplessly until the wave passed, after which he crawled down from his hiding spot; as he edged along from doorway to doorway to make his way back to the Île, he continued to hear the harsh whisper of flames and gunshots, interspersed with screams and the shattering of glass, all of which—like the splintering crack of a human bone—did not need to be experienced to be recognized as grotesque sounds of war.

Near the river, he turned a corner just in time to see Gérard and several of his comrades trying to block the Pont d’Hiver against an advancing column. The soldiers took the bridge without engaging the communists so much as marching right over them. Lucien sprinted ahead, arriving just as the soldiers reached the other side, leaving Gérard wounded and gasping; blood seeped from all over his body. Lucien placed his hands under his old friend’s arms and as
bullets flew dragged him out of harm’s way to a sheltered spot under a stone balustrade. His mind raced as he tried to decide what to do; he repressed an urge to protest the injustice, to stand up like a vengeful deity and wipe his city—his country—from the face of the earth, to protest this last shred of belief—the one he had always held in the fundamentally good nature of his fellow countrymen, the one that would have prevented him from ever believing, had he not seen it himself, that they could kill each other by the thousands—being ripped away, seemingly forever, after everything else he had endured.

He rested Gérard’s head in his lap and tried to comfort his friend. Though Gérard seemed too stunned to talk—Lucien was not sure he even recognized him—the pace of his breathing became less frantic, and his moans subsided. As he held him, the rough texture of Gérard’s shirt reminded Lucien of the first time they were together at the St.-Germain, and he thanked Gérard for having been so kind to his younger self. He also thanked him for teaching him that the city was a different kind of theater, and finally for these past few weeks, when Gérard had helped Lucien negotiate a loneliness that he suspected could be appreciated only by those whose parents and lovers were already dead.