The World at Night

He had tried-he thought he’d tried, he remembered it that way. She had, too. But they drifted. A day came, and whatever had been there before wasn’t there anymore. Another Parisian love affair ended, nobody could really explain it, and nobody tried.

They angled away from the river, into the 7th Arrondissement, toward Passy, hurrying across the Pont de Solferino, where white snow spun over the black river and the wind sang in the arches of the bridge. “Jean-Claude?” she said, and he stopped.

She looked up at him, there were white crystals of ice in her eyelashes, frozen tears at the corners of her eyes, and she was shivering. “I think I need to rest for a moment,” she said.

They found a little shelter, in the shallow portal of an ancient building. She burrowed against his chest. “How can there be nothing?” she said plaintively. She was right, the streets were deserted, no bicycle cabs, no people.

“We’re halfway,” he said.

“Only that?”

“A little more, maybe.”

“Jean-Claude, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Is there really a movie? Or is it, you know.”

“A movie. Hotel Dorado, we’re calling it. For Continental, maybe. Of course like always, it’s pure air until the great hand from the sky comes down and writes a check.”

“I wondered. Sometimes, I think, men want to run their lives backward.”

“Not women?”

“No.”

Not women? Not ever? It was warm where he held her against him. Slowly he unwound the long muffler, ran it under her chin and around so that her ears were covered.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”

“Shall we start out again? Sooner we do …”

“Listen!” she whispered.

A car? She canted her head, held the muffler away from one ear. He could hear only the hiss of falling snow, but then, faintly, a violin. And then a cello. He looked up the side of the building, then across the street. But the snow made it hard to locate.

“A trio,” she said.

“Yes.”

He looked at his watch. Oh, France! 3:25 on the morning of Christmas, in an occupied city, three friends determine to stay up all night and play Beethoven trios-in a cold, dark apartment. She looked up at him, mouth set hard as though she refused to cry.

Rue de Grenelle, rue Vaneau, tempting to take Invalides, but better to swing wide of the Ecole Militaire complex. Military and security offices had been there before and they would still be in operation, with new tenants. Plenty of Gestapo and French police in the neighborhood. So, find Grenelle again, and take the next small street, less important, in the same direction.

They never heard the car until they were almost on top of it, then they hugged a wall and froze. It was a Citroen Traction Avant, always a Gestapo car because the front-wheel drive worked on nights like these, with chains on the tires. It was idling-perfectly tuned, it hardly made a sound-the hot exhaust melting the snow behind the rear wheel. Through the back window they could see the silhouette of a man in the passenger seat. The driver had left the car and was standing in front of an apartment building, urinating on the front door.

Casson held his breath. The Germans were only fifty feet from them. The driver had left the Citroen’s door ajar, and the passenger leaned over and called out to him. The driver laughed, said something back. Banter, apparently. Taking a piss in a snowstorm, that was funny. Doing it on some Frenchman’s door, that was even funnier. Jokes, back and forth, guttural, thick, incomprehensible. To Casson, it sounded as though somebody was grinding language into broken words that could never be used again. But, he thought, they are in Paris, we are not in Berlin.

The man at the doorway started buttoning up his fly, then, as he hurried toward the car, he said the words “rue de Vaugirard”-an island of French in the German sentence. So, Casson thought, they were going to the rue de Vaugirard, to arrest somebody on Christmas Eve. Citrine’s hand found his, she’d heard it too.

Suddenly the car moved-backward. Casson pressed frantically against the wall, Citrine’s hand closed like a steel claw. Then the wheels spun, caught, and the car drove off down the street. The Germans hadn’t known they were there, they were just making sure they didn’t get stuck in the snow.

An hour later, the apartment on the rue Chardin. There was no heat, and Casson preferred not to turn on the lights, often faintly visible at the edges of the blackout curtains. They shed their outer clothes in the bathroom, hanging them over the bar that held the shower curtain so they could drip into the tub as the snow and ice melted.

“Bed is the only place,” he said. He was right, they were both trembling with the cold, and they climbed into bed wearing their underwear.

At first the sheets were as cold as they were, then the body heat began to work. She took a deep breath and sighed, coming gently apart as the night’s adventure receded.

“Are you going to sleep?” he said.

“Whether I want to or not.” Her voice was faint, she was barely conscious.

“Oh. All right.”

She smiled. “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

He couldn’t-he ached for her.

She sensed what he was going to do, moved close in a way that made it impossible. “I can’t, Jean-Claude. I can’t. Please.”

Why?

As though she’d heard: “You’re going to think a dozen things, but it’s that I can’t feel that way again, not now. If we were just going to amuse ourselves, well, why not? But it isn’t that way with us, you get inside me, that’s no play on words, I mean to say it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If it wasn’t a war, if I had money. If I just had it in me, the strength to live …”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just me, Citrine.”

“I know. I know you-you fuck all the girls.” But the way she said it was not unkind.

And even before the sentence ended, she was slipping away. Her breathing changed, and she fell asleep. He watched her for a time. Strange, the way her face worked, she always looked worried when she slept. Sometimes her breathing stopped, for a long moment, then it would start again. She dies, he’d thought years ago. She dies, then she changes her mind.

They woke up in the middle of Christmas Day. The snow had stopped. She wrote the name of a hotel on a scrap of paper, kissed him on the forehead, said “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” and went out into the cold.

29 December, 1940.

He left the office at six-thirty. He had a little money now, from Altmann, and a secretary. A cousin of his named Mireille, from the Morvan, his mother’s side of the family. She was a dark, unhappy woman with three children and an eternally useless husband. She showed up just about the time the money did, so he hired her-it was simply life’s way, he figured, of telling you what you ought to do.

The coldest winter of the century. The price of coal climbed into the sky, the old and the poor got into bed with every scrap of wool they owned and there they found them a week later. German soldiers flooded into Paris, from garrison duty in Warsaw and Prague, and Paris entertained them. Are you tense, poor thing? Have a little of this, and a little of that. England wouldn’t give up. The submarine blockade was starving them, but they had never been reasonable, and they apparently weren’t going to be now. Well, the French would also survive. More or less.

Out on the street, Casson pulled his coat tight around him and turned toward the Metro station at avenue