The Paris Key (22 page)

Angela, 1983

A
ngela introduces Xabi as a friend, nothing more. Dave does not believe her; the suspicion and worry are clear in his blue eyes. But Angela wants them to meet him, to know who he is.

Part of her expects them to fall in love with him, just as she has.

She enlists Pasquale's help. Pasquale does not approve, either, but she is French; she has seen a great deal. She has a more complicated perspective on love and loyalty than does Dave.

“Let's have one night together,” Angela begs. “Just one night. We'll go out and hear music, dance, enjoy. I've always wanted to do that with you. Please, just this one night.”

When Angela had come to Paris with Jim for their honeymoon, Dave had suggested just this: that they all go out and enjoy the Parisian nightlife. But Jim was not one for dancing and music; clubs were too loud, too expensive, too frivolous. He loved strolling the museums and gardens during the day, but he would have been happy to be in bed by ten every night.

Pasquale intervenes. So Dave says yes.

They all meet at Philippe and Delphine's house for
apero
. Philippe and Xabi get on well, and Philippe takes him down to the cellar to pick out a bottle of wine. They are down there so long Angela goes down after them.

She finds them in a storage room, looking through an ornate grate in the floor.

“What is that?” she asks.

Philippe laughs. “A route to
les souterrains
; we used it during the war. Can you believe it?”

Xabi stands back, watching her, saying nothing as she gets on her hands and knees to look at the little trapdoor beyond the grate.

“This is a route to the underground?” she asks.

“
Mais, bien sûr.
Of course. During the war, this saved many lives. Because of this, you see, I could hide the people and if the soldiers search the house, they can escape.”

“But . . . you keep it locked, right? So someone won't find it from the tunnels, and come into your house this way?”

“Who would do such a thing?” asks Philippe. “I can't imagine who, or why. It is not like in the war, when we needed such secret routes.”

Angela glances up at Xabi. His eyes, intense as always, are on her. Studying, assessing.

“I think you should lock it,” Angela says. “Just in case.”

“Okay, no problem,” says Philippe as he replaces the grate, stands, and rubs his hands together to wipe off the dust. “But enough of this! Now is the time for
apero
and music and good friends! Take it from an old man, both of you,” he says, looping his arms through theirs and escorting them out of the room: “Evenings like this—with good wine, good music, good friends—they are what life is all about.”

T
he Métro was easy and fast. But Genevieve decided next time she would ask Catharine how to travel by bus, so she could see the sights. It was befuddling to pop up from the underground, almost like a groundhog emerging from its dark lair.

Paris was huge and, with the exception of Montmartre, mostly flat. If you couldn't see the Seine or the Eiffel Tower, it was difficult to orient yourself. In Oakland, Genevieve always knew her basic compass points: the hills to the east, the ocean to the west. But in Paris? Which way was which?

Here at the base of Montmartre, the neighborhood was more working-class, less full of tourist attractions than the Marais, which surrounded the Village Saint-Paul. Farther up, topped by the glistening white basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, was the famous hill of artists; Montmartre was where Picasso, van Gogh, Renoir, and so many others had lived (cheap, back in the day) and painted and fomented the artistic revolution of Impressionism, which would challenge the entrenched dominance of the European art elite. Genevieve remembered tiny winding cobblestone streets full of shops and cafés and, mostly, artists with their portable easels: selling portraits and landscapes and cityscapes of all kinds.

Her cousin Catharine's place was nowhere so interesting: she lived on a nondescript street in a nondescript 1950s building, a few blocks from the base of the butte. The shops were not fancy—corner grocers and tobacco shops—and several signs were written in Arabic as well as French.

Genevieve translated the little plaque beside Catharine's doorbell:
JUNGIAN
-
INSPIRED
DREAM
INTERPRETATION
AND
COUNSELING
.

Catharine answered the bell within seconds, buzzing Genevieve in. Genevieve stepped into the apartment house foyer and spotted her cousin standing in an open doorway down the hall.

Catharine was plumper than the average Frenchwoman, and today she wore a cream cardigan with a pastel spray of embroidered flowers on one shoulder, over a boxy blue T-shirt, along with a dark skirt and sensible walking shoes. Genevieve wasn't exactly a fashion plate herself, but such lack of panache was striking in a woman born and raised in Paris. Here, even working-class housewives had a certain je ne sais quoi. Catharine, on the contrary, seemed almost American in her lack of élan.

But in one way she was a true Parisienne: She smoked like a chimney.

After hellos and a tobacco-scented double-kiss greeting, Catharine invited Genevieve to step inside. “You see, this is where I do my work.”

The front room was set up with a large sand table in the middle. Built-in shelves at the back held hundreds of little figurines: people and animals and mythical creatures of all sorts. And objects: tiny bags of money and little houses and diminutive bathtubs.

“I think you didn't believe I would make a living from my vocation. No one did. But here I am—the sand table is very illustrative. It reveals many things. I have many clients.”

“I'm glad for you, Catharine. This is great.”

“Please, have a seat.” Two comfortable armchairs sat on an angle around a small round coffee table. “And if you are moved to play with the sand table, well, that is what it is there for. I will interpret for you.”

“Thanks,” Genevieve said as she took a seat. “Maybe later.”

“How are things in the
village
? How do you get on?”

“Things are great. The neighbors send their regards. They miss you.”

Catharine didn't respond. She took a long draw on her cigarette, then got up and opened the window. Genevieve took a deep breath, thankful for the fresh air.

“Oh! I brought you something from America. Not much—you probably don't even care about
Star Trek
anymore . . .”

Her cousin sat up, intrigued, as Genevieve pulled the bundles out of her backpack. Catharine opened the plain brown packages to reveal a stack of comic books and laughed her husky laugh.

“
Mais, c'est magnifique!
I love them, thank you! It is, what do you call . . . a ‘guilty pleasure,' right?”

“Exactly,” said Genevieve with a smile.

“I know people think it is silly, but to me the
Star Trek
always promoted peace and harmony, mutual understanding. There is nothing wrong with this, is there?”

“Not at all.”

“My father always told me that these were the beliefs of the United States. Of his home. Perhaps less so when the later problems happened, with Vietnam and all of that. Still, he never stopped missing it, you know. So the gifts of barbecue sauce and corn bread, perfect! Always he talked about moving back to his country, but this was impossible.”

“But . . . I thought he stayed because he loved Paris so much.”

“Oh, he did love Paris,” she said with a nod. “He did, but you know my father; I think he would love anyplace. He loved life, so he loved wherever he was. You should have heard his dreams! So optimistic. But he never stopped missing America, and Miss-iss-ipp-i.”

The word Mississippi tripped clumsily on her tongue. Even among French speakers fluent in English, the Native American names were difficult: Oklahoma and Minnesota and Mississippi.

“Then why didn't they move back?”

“My father was afraid everyone would see my mother as a . . . how do you say? A . . . well, my father always said ‘the n-word.' He said you weren't allowed to say it.”

“The . . . ‘n-word'?”

“You Americans,” Catharine said, a cloud of smoke muting her words. “How do you react so strongly to a mere word? It is a word, not a bomb.”

“It harkens back to a traumatic, disgraceful time.”

“We've known our fair share of those here in France, too. You don't see us banning the word ‘Nazi.'”

“Nazis were the perpetrators, not the victims.”

“‘Dirty Jew,' then.”

That one made Genevieve wildly uncomfortable as well. Like so many students, Genevieve had read
The Diary of Anne Frank
in middle school. Genevieve remembered, at the time, studying her classmate, Marvin Zimmerman. He was the only Jewish person she knew well, and she had wondered: If the Nazis marched into the classroom right then and there, and they all kept their big traps shut—even Richie Aguilar, who didn't like Marvin because he beat him in the long jump—how would anyone be able to see it in him? And if he managed to blend in, who would have been the first to break, to betray him? Probably Richie. He was a real weasel.

On Genevieve's long walks through Paris she had seen numerous brass plaques. They weren't all street signs or homes of literary figures. Some of them were remembrances from the war:
FORTY
SOULS
TAKEN
FR
OM
THIS
CORNER
,
9
MAY
1943, WITH THE COOPERAT
ION
OF
THE
VICHY
GOV
ERNMENT.
A sign over an elementary school entrance read:
11000
ENFANTS F
URENT
DÉPORTÉS
DE
FR
ANCE DE
1942
À
1944
ET ASS
ASSINÉS
À
AUSCHWITZ
PARCE
QU
'
ILS
ÉTAIENT
NÉS
JUIFS
.
NE
LES
OU
BLIONS
JAMAIS
.
Which meant:
11000 children were deported from France from 1942 to 1944 and killed at Auschwitz because they were born Jews. We will never forget them.

Genevieve found it stunning that the French were willing to make this history public, to keep it alive. She tried to imagine similar plaques in the United States:
Here the U.S. Cavalry massacred forty-seven souls, children among them, because they inhabited ancestral land rich with mineral deposits.
Or,
Here, sixty-two humans were sold as slaves in a disgraceful combination of commerce and inhumanity, their only crime having been born African
. Would a person be able to walk a single mile without seeing every tree, every block, studded with such declarations?

“I am thinking the fear of this word is related to your guarantee of happiness, but I am not certain how,” Catharine said, bringing Genevieve back to the conversation at hand.

“Sorry?”

“You have a constitutional guarantee to happiness, right? That's . . . what is the word? Incredible. This is it.
C'est incroyable.
I've never heard of such a thing; one cannot guarantee happiness.”

“Incredible or not, how is that related to the use of such a hurtful word?”

She shrugged, smoked. “As I said, I have not quite figured this. It is just a hunch.”

“And just FYI, it's a guarantee of the
pursuit
of happiness, not happiness per se.”

“Ah. This is interesting.”

“You French are pretty funny, too. A chain-smoking psychic?”

“I am not a psychic. I'm a dream interpreter. More a therapist than a psychic.”

“That makes the chain-smoking even worse.”

Catharine just laughed and waved off her cousin's concerns with an angular hand.

“Okay . . . so back to what you were saying,” Genevieve said. “Why did your father fear your mother would be called a . . .”

“Go on. You should practice.”

“No, thank you. I think we're going to leave this one filed under cultural differences.”

“
Un ‘nègre,' en français
. Is that better? You'd rather speak in French?”

“No, my French is still lacking, I'm sorry to say. I'm afraid I might miss something. But why was he afraid of that?”

“Truly, you are asking me this? Because she is. As am I.”

“You are . . . ?”

“Black.
Noir.
Nègre.
Whatever you want to call it most delicately. My grandmother is Algerian; didn't you know this?”

“I thought . . . I only heard about her father, the artist.”

“My mother's father was French, but her mother was Algerian. She was raised here with her family, but she is from Algérie.”

Genevieve studied her cousin, the deep olive-tone complexion, the ample mouth. In her mother Pasquale's features it was even more pronounced, now that she was looking for it.

“Here it is not the same thing, I think,” Catharine continued. “We have a different relationship to this race issue. My father always tells me, ‘In America, if you are a little bit of something others consider ‘other,' you are that thing. This is why Josephine Baker comes here to France, so she can be something other than just . . .
une nègre
all the time. She wants to be known as a person and an entertainer, not just by the color of her skin.”

“I always thought Dave fell in love with a Parisienne—your mother—and wanted to stay and help with the restoration efforts after the war.”

She nodded. “I believe this was the story he shared with his American family. And it is not untrue. But, Genevieve, why do you look so down? It was not to hurt anyone, this story. Don't you know we all tell stories, and those stories are never finished until we leave this earth. Now that he has passed, my father's story ends like this: an American in Paris to the end of his days. Tell me your dreams, Genevieve,
ma petite cousine
, and we will help tell your story.”

“I think for now I'll settle for lunch. I'm starved.”