Quartet for the End of Time (57 page)

By the time Alden had come within range and could observe her more closely, she turned suddenly so that now instead of heading toward him she was walking in the same direction—counterclockwise around the outer garden path. She was a good twenty-five meters or more ahead of him, though, and because it seemed somehow gauche to hasten his step, he slackened it instead, and, rather than following the outer path in its most straightforward route, as he would have ordinarily done, he took the long, circuitous paths instead—dipping sometimes into the far corners of the park before reemerging on the main track once more. All this time he kept an eye on her as best he could—terrified she might not complete the circle and thus be lost to him forever. But she continued around the path, just as he had hoped, and soon was directly behind him. When he sensed her presence there (how attuned he was! He could almost feel the shape of it, and therefore the diminishing distance between them, as she continued to approach), he slackened his pace still more. Subtly—so it would not seem unnatural if he were to pick it up again as she fell in by his side. And before long, that was just what she did. As the distance closed between them, he quickened his pace infinitesimally—and they fell into step.

M
ARIE-
C
LAUDE WAS TWENTY-THREE YEARS
old in the fall of 1943; she still lived with her parents on the Rue de Vaugirard, where she assisted her mother with the care of her elderly grandfather, Franz Eckelmann, who had once been a celebrated German chemist—most famous for preempting William Ramsay's discovery of noble gases (a feat for which he never received the credit he was due). He had come to Paris from Berlin in 1893 at the age of thirty and married a French girl, who had died shortly after their only daughter (Marie-Claude's mother, Marie-Thérèse) was born, so that—aside from the help of a few peripheral aunts on the child's mother's side—he was obliged to raise the girl more or less alone. During the Great War, he had been commissioned to
work on the development of a powerful mustard gas, and it was his lengthy exposure to these chemicals that Marie-Thérèse now blamed on the deterioration of his mental faculties—although the more common opinion was that Franz Eckelmann had simply become old.

Marie-Claude's father, François Grenadier, had also been a professor of chemistry at the university where, after the Great War, Franz Eckelmann himself had been established. He had in fact inadvertently introduced Grenadier to his daughter one evening. If it were not for the birth of Marie-Claude, his complicity in the affair would have been something the chemist very much regretted, because—while Marie-Claude was still a young child—Grenadier abandoned the family to follow a celebrated American chemist, with a particular interest in the “development” of his younger male colleagues, back to the United States.

By the time Alden came to know Marie-Claude, she lived only with her mother and aging grandfather. Franz Eckelmann had lost most of his memory; he had, in effect, wound himself back to the earliest years of his childhood. For the most part, then, Franz Eckelmann lived in the same world in which he had lived in the Berlin of 1873, when he was ten years old.

F
RANZ
E
CKELMANN
'
S FATHER HAD
owned a small printing shop. On weekends and school holidays he had worked in the shop with his father and his sister, Marta—who was ten years older and still unmarried. Often, when they would return from the press, their hands stained black with ink, Franz Eckelmann's father would joke that they had indeed been “marked” by their trade. But he was not always so lighthearted. He was anxious for Marta to marry, so she could discontinue her work in the shop, and Franz was forbidden to go to school with the “mark” of his father's trade on his skin. It was for this reason that he was permitted to help only on weekdays and school holidays, and that once, when he had blotched his hands badly, he was kept home from school until the stain faded away. Of Marta, Franz Eckelmann's father demanded only the lightest tasks wherein she would run the least risk of staining her hands,
and when she did stain them (as often she did), he would set her to scrubbing them in the sink for hours. It was very little use, however; only time itself would get rid of the stain, and it became a generally held belief in the household that Marta was deliberately setting about to stain her hands in order to absolve herself from the duty of marriage. Whether this was true or not would have been difficult to say. Marta never admitted as much, and a year later, when Franz was eleven years old, Marta did in fact marry. How she came to be betrothed to Oskar Schmidtt, three years her junior and the son of the butcher, who suffered from such debilitating shyness that he was always kept at the back of the shop, was a great mystery. But there was no reason to object to the arrangement, as odd as it was; the Schmidtts had a long-standing family-run business and could sufficiently provide for Marta and their three sons, who were afterward born in quick succession: Georg (named after Mr. Eckelmann), Reiner, and little Felix.

After that, it was just Franz and his parents who lived together above the print shop and just Franz who helped out his father, when he could. Marta had been “marked,” after all, by a different fate.

It was the time directly preceding his sister's departure from the Eckelmann household that Franz now recalled in detail, casting all of the people who now surrounded him (his daughter, Marie-Thérèse, granddaughter, Marie-Claude, and later even Alden himself) as players, and, with resilient patience, converting the information of the world around him in 1943 so that it did not jar with the reality of seventy years prior. Marie-Thérèse performed the role of his mother, and Marie-Claude, his sister, Marta. Because Franz Eckelmann (who was for all intents and purposes, remember, only a boy of ten) saw his sister's departure from their family home as a personal betrayal, he would chide Marie-Claude endlessly for it. When, on occasion, she gently reminded her grandfather that she was not her Aunt Marta, whom she had never met, but his granddaughter, Marie-Claude, a look of such utter confusion would cross poor Franz Eckelmann's face that Marie-Claude would instantly regret having said anything at all. She would smooth the wisps of white hair, which still clung to his temples
over his gleaming skull (which, though it had lately fallen into disrepair, still concealed the mind of a genius), and say, It's all right, I'm right here. I'll never leave you. And for a few minutes—until she was needed elsewhere, to fetch tea, slippers, pick up the groceries, the mail, or go (her one luxury) for her solitary spin around the Luxembourg Gardens—all was as it should be in Franz Eckelmann's world. But when she went away and returned—even for a short time, a span of a few minutes only—the painful memory of Franz Eckelmann's abandonment would return once again and need to be, once again, and in the same fashion, assuaged. Marie-Claude became adept at this, so often did the scene repeat itself.

You see, for him, it is always the first time, she explained to Alden on the first afternoon they fell into step together and turned several circles around the pond in unison, before departing in their different directions—she to her grandfather's house, and he to the OKW office at the Hôtel Lutetia. Each time, Marie-Claude said to Alden, it is my only chance. Over and over again, I have just that one—that single chance.

A
T FIRST
F
RANZ
E
CKELMANN
had difficulty placing Alden within the drama he had made of his earliest days. Though he obediently withdrew his watery gaze from the facing window (the Eckelmann apartment was on the second floor, so there was never anything on any occasion to see there but the three facing walls of the neighboring buildings, their windows always blank and dark, but still Franz Eckelmann gazed with interest, as though he hoped to see something extraordinary there), his expression did not at first seem to acknowledge Alden at all, or the introduction that had just then—by Marie-Claude—been made. He looked at Alden in the same way that he had, just a moment before, gazed into the empty courtyard. As if his face were only the face of an opposing wall—his features the darkened windows that, at any moment, by some flicker of light (Franz Eckelmann kept his eyes trained on him intently, lest it be so), might reveal the contents of those unlit rooms. Might cast in shadow a significant shape—the recognizable form of a man inside—
some proof, at last, that the world was indeed inhabited! A look of perplexed confusion followed: Franz Eckelmann's eyes narrowed in accusation and alarm. But this passed quickly; some light had indeed been cast, not from within Alden, but instead from somewhere deep within Franz Eckelmann himself.

Klein Felix
, he said. And pressed his hand more firmly into Alden's own. Then another sentence followed this greeting in German, which Alden did not understand. Later, Marie-Claude translated it to him as:
You've grown tall.

The strain that was evident on Franz Eckelmann's face at that moment no doubt corresponded to the stretch of almost a full generation that his recognition of Alden as his young nephew, Felix, entailed. But it was a strain, and an apparent confusion, that was evidently also mixed with pleasure. Alden did not at all mind being “Felix” in that room. It made him feel close to the old man, and thus, also, to Marie-Claude.

It was by powerful coincidence that several months later the real Felix arrived at Franz Eckelmann's door. In fact, he was not Eckelmann's nephew but his nephew's son, also named Felix—a young man of twenty-one who had been stationed near Forges-les-Bains, just about forty kilometers outside Paris. Whenever he could arrange it after that first visit, he would come into the city and call on his great-uncle, Franz Eckelmann, whom he had never before had the opportunity to meet, and his cousins, Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Claude. So there were two Felixes that came and went in the Eckelmann house, each interchangeable for old Franz Eckelmann, according to Marie-Claude. This made them laugh, for Alden and the German soldier could not have been more different. Though Alden was, by comparison, rather small in stature, he had always prided himself in having a full head of thick dark hair; the German's hair, so blond it was almost white, was already thinning noticeably at the crown. Also, when it came to personality, the German hardly had one. Marie-Claude reported back, whenever he visited and she took her obligatory stroll with him along the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the
Notre-Dame, that he was—as Alden had suspected—“just as stiff as he looks.”

—

W
HEN
M
ARIE-
C
LAUDE WAS SIX YEARS OLD
,
THE OIL LAMP ON HER
bedside table had been knocked from its stand, lighting her bed on fire while she slept. She had woken to heat and to smell, but not to pain. Her father, François Grenadier, awoke to the same smell and rushed into the room to find his daughter's bed ablaze with light. She was awake, her face frozen in the way that a much younger child's might be in the moment after a fall, when—unsure whether to laugh or to cry— the child awaits the response of those around her. Based on this early reaction to pain and other stimuli, it would seem that emotional responses of any kind are only an effect produced by another effect. And just so, it was not until Monsieur Grenadier actually entered his daughter's room—until he, with a look of horror that was itself both cause and effect, threw himself on his daughter's bed—that Marie-Claude screamed.

It was upon this scene that Marie-Thérèse entered—her husband's and daughter's faces (each reflecting the alarm of the other) illuminated by the flames, which still licked at the edges of the sheets where the weight of François Grenadier's body had not yet succeeded in smothering them. So gripped by horror was Grenadier himself in those moments, he failed to notice that he held his daughter's hand so tightly that one of its small bones was crushed. Indeed, this damage was discovered only several days later—on account of the more severe trauma suffered by the lower part of her body, where she had been badly burned.

Yes, it was fear and not reason that had propelled Monsieur Grenadier. Though he had been trained as a chemist to respond to such emergency situations, he afterward claimed quite emphatically that at the moment he saw his daughter blazing in her bed every trace of prior knowledge escaped him. He had, he insisted, been quite empty of every
thought and sensibility. At that moment, he said, it was as though he were hardly human.

What is it that makes us human, after all? he would ask whoever had assembled on that particular occasion. But,
nosce te ipsum—
“know thyself”? My dear gentlemen, I can assure you that I did not know anything at all at that moment—much less “myself.”

But Monsieur Grenadier, someone would respond, it is clear to me that the knowledge you had already over your lifetime acquired—all the traits and conditions of your
being
human—your education and training, for example, your sensibilities and affections—were so far ingrained in you that you acted based on all of those factors
combined.
What appeared to you as
impulse
was in fact a very complex combination of causes that contributed, as they continue to contribute, to your very specific and accountable behaviors and reactions. Even now as we sit in this room, it is clear that though we do not carefully consider each gesture, each expression, or even—much to our listeners' disadvantage at times (a chuckle)—each word, they do not simply arise out of the ether. There is not simply: pain, simply: horror, simply: reaction, relief, or joy. All of these things are necessarily accounted for in a long chain of cause and effect whether or not we, at any given moment, can trace that lineage and speak for it with any confidence ourselves.

Well, I am only telling you how it
was
, Monsieur Grenadier would say. I understand your reasoning, dear sir, and sympathize with your assessment—it is no doubt astute. However, I equally cannot give over the notion that in those moments I suddenly found myself
outside of all categories
by which we ordinarily seek to judge and understand the actions and reactions of men.