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  Paulhan! The eyes. That air of being constantly astounded. Such an odd bird. She loves the English language. Loves its words and phrases, and this one slips naturally from her. Odd bird. And bird is exactly the word for him. But what kind? She ponders this a moment, then it hits her. An owl, that’s it. Wise, but wild.

  She is already looking forward to their next meeting. The very thought stirs things in her body and heart. Arouses her. But to what? Certainly not romance as the world understands it: the stifling cage of marriage. The doll’s house of husband and wife. She’s been there and will not go back. She’s been a wife. Borne the bruises of being beaten. Felt her heart torn out one moment and tamed and domesticated the next, to the point that she forgot why she ever married in the first place and started to forget who she was. The only good thing to emerge from her marriage, at what now seems to be an absurdly young age, was her child. She looks back on that woman in a kind of wonder now: how naïve and trusting she was; familiar but puzzling. The way old selves are.

  Different name too. For Dominique is not her true name. That woman was called Anne. She stands in the lane pondering her birth name, as if remembering an old school friend. Anne Desclos. Names are good like that, you can reinvent yourself with a new one. Old friends are forced to look at you differently, and new friends have never known anything else. After emerging from the wreckage of that marriage, she needed a new start and a new name.

  She feels like Dominique. Did from the moment she adopted the name. Loved the ambiguity of it. Still does. A name that straddles the sexes. A new name that brought a whole new sense of release and freedom. As though a wrong had been set right. Or a bureaucratic error, somewhere in the depths of the Ministry of Names, had been corrected. From the moment she became Dominique, Dominique Aury, she felt like her life was starting again. Or perhaps not even starting again, but simply starting.

  Suddenly, there is laughter. Laughter like music. Rippling through the air, a piece of street opera. The kind of laughter that could be notated. It seems to bounce off the walls of the buildings around her and at first she has trouble locating its source.

  The laughter has faded from the young woman’s lips when Dominique sees her, but her face is radiant in the fading light. A young woman dressed in a summer frock. Striped, blue, buttoned at the front. Bare legs, sandals. Simplicity. Perfect simplicity. The music of her laughter still in the air.

  It dawns on Dominique that she knows this young woman. She is one of her students from the afternoon class on French literature. An average student, nothing remarkable. Until now. Agnès, Dominique silently intones, what on earth are you doing? And Dominique is so intrigued, so enthralled by the spectacle, that it is only now that she turns her attention properly to the man in front of her student.

  A German soldier. It is a jolt. And for a moment she doesn’t know what to think. He has taken his helmet off, and rested his rifle on the footpath. And the thought occurs to her that he might be in the process of reverting to whatever he was before he became a soldier: an artist of some sort, she’d like to think – a musician, a piano tuner, perhaps. Whatever he may have been, he now seems to inhabit some uncertain state, in the midst of a kind of impromptu demobilisation. The two of them declaring a separate peace. He has laid down his rifle on the footpath before this young woman. His hair is blond or brown, she can’t be sure in the fading light. The same fading light that makes the two of them so daring or just plain reckless. He is no longer just a pair of eyes with a nose and jaw jutting out under his shell. No longer a cockroach soldier; he has reassumed human form. And just as the laughter was operatic, he too could be any number of operatic heroes at this moment. Could have stepped from the mythic tales Dominique read as a child: stories of knights and maidens, heroes and heroines. All tragic in the end. Of course. But not before knowing something exquisite. He could be any of these characters, about to burst into some lover’s lament. His hands are resting on Agnès’s thighs, and Dominique sees that he has partly unbuttoned the front of her frock. And it is this, she concludes, that was the cause of the young woman’s sudden outburst of mirth: the casual audacity of it all, the consent of laughter. This reckless surrender.

  With the furtiveness of the accidental intruder, Dominique quickly leaves them to it in their corner of the laneway: her student’s eyes uplifted into the smoky twilight; a stray grey cat casually sniffing the rubbish bins before slouching away.

  She emerges from the labyrinth of lanes into the expanse of the boulevard Saint-Germain once again. From café tables on the footpaths, young men – some in uniform, some not – who could have been anything before the war, stare at her as she passes, Dominique catching the eye of one then another, here and there, as she moves along the street. All of them – Dominique, women, men and soldiers – inhabitants of this hazy time, the blue hour, that is neither day nor night, blurring the distinctions between everything.

  * * *

  Posh. This is the English word that always comes to her when she looks upon her parents’ apartment. Val-de-Grâce. It’s a well-to-do part of town, rarely mentioned in tourist books and brochures in those distant days when tourists came to Paris. The only tourists now are German soldiers on leave: officers with their wives cloaked in furs or trailing expensive perfume in this newly conquered playground, before returning to Berlin or Frankfurt or wherever they return to with all their plunder.

  In the time it has taken to walk from Saint-Germain, night has fallen. Once, the apartments would have been lit up well. Now, they’re dark. She steps into the moonlit communal gardens, bushes inclining towards her along the pathway as if in greeting, inquiring about her day like servants from an era that has now been blown away.

  She turns the key in the lock. The apartment is empty. She pauses by a photograph of her parents on the mantelpiece. It was taken a long time ago when she was a child, living with her grandmother in Avranches. They were visiting. Her father, all hugs and kisses. Her mother, a cool embrace as if to correct the excesses of the father.

  Her mother and father. How did they ever conceive? He, a ladies’ man. Snappy dresser. Bit of a dandy. And warm. Her mother, born to be a nun. Dominique sighs.

  Her cat, black fur shining, stretches on the sofa, slips soundlessly onto the floor and ambles towards her, brushing against her leg.

  ‘Shadow,’ she says, bending down to pat her, ‘did you miss me?’

  The cat found her, like all cats. Came flying in through the window one afternoon during a downpour, drenched and spiky. And the name came straightaway: Chat-d’eau, which quickly became Shadow. For she is black like a shadow. And now Dominique calls her cat in two languages: whether it is the one or the other depends on her mood.

  Shadow flicks her tail, looks up at Dominique with a cold eye, ignoring the question, giving nothing away, and strolls to her bowl with that air cats have of doing you a favour. A mystery, giving every impression that at any moment she just might slip out the window as easily as she slipped in. Dominique always leaves the window half open and watches now as Shadow, the cloak of her fur bristling in the cool evening air after having dined lightly, disappears into the night.

  Through an open door Dominique imagines she sees the dome of her father’s head in his study, at his desk, surrounded on all four walls by books in English and French. This study is so synonymous with her father it is almost impossible to look at it without seeing him there, and imagining that he actually is in his chair and, spotting her, on the point of rising and greeting her.

  She runs ghostly fingers over his bald scalp, just like she did when she was five, fifteen and thirty, for he has always been bald and she never could resist running her fingers over the shiny dome whenever she was with him in his study, books all around them, a private universe of stories. Forbidden to most girls, but not to her. Against her mother’s wishes, for she distrusts books – especially the books that she knows her husband has in his collection – as much as she distrusts the flesh.

  She drops h
er satchel, the same one she has had since school, on a chair and ambles through to the study, vacated for now – for her parents are in the country with her son – but with her father’s presence everywhere: scribbled notes, pens, a magnifying glass. A permanent dint in the leather armchair where he sits. An ashtray from New York. Old copies of Punch. But it’s a particular corner of the library she drifts to, the corner where one afternoon, at fifteen, she had the place to herself and was drawn to a locked cabinet she was intrigued by.

  Like Alice, she was curious. And the more she stared at the cabinet, the curiouser and curiouser it became. Alice was tall, Alice was fifteen, Alice would not be denied. And taking a deep breath, with the desire to know and the dread of knowing, the guilt of the robber and the right to rob all swirling round in her as if she had drunk of the secret potion of curiosity itself, she reached out and to her amazement the door opened for her. And she couldn’t help but feel it opened because it was ready to be opened.

  The musty scent of books locked away for years poured out into the air. Leather-bound, hardbound, paperbacks – they stood side by side, the lettering of their titles glittering on their spines. And like some tomb robber breathing the air of the pharaohs, she knelt before the cabinet scarcely daring to move or disturb the scene. She knelt there almost in a gesture of prayer, as she would in some solemn chapel, until her thighs and knees ached, mesmerised by the books’ titles: The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Justine, The Wayward Head and Heart, The Sofa: A Moral Tale, Clarissa, The Decameron, Dangerous Liaisons . . . The list of titles went on and on, and at a glance she could tell that these were no ordinary books.

  Part curious Alice, part robber plundering her father’s private things, she stared at the tantalising prospects in front of her, telling herself she had no right. But also telling herself that if they were never meant to be read, then the door would never have been left unlocked.

  Muscles quivering, she leant forward, reached out and plucked a volume from the stack: the tale of the Portuguese nun. Amazed that it had not turned to dust in her hands, she opened the book as if it were some sacred text. She barely knew what she was reading. She knew the words, but not their meanings. Not the way they were written here. It was a code, it had to be. A secret language, of a secret society. Only revealed to the initiated. But how to become one of the initiated?

  Not that she phrased it like that then, that came later. But she knew it instinctively anyway. And she knew that one day she would understand, that all would be revealed. But on that first day she knelt, lounged or sat cross-legged as she devoured the tale, scarcely knowing what she read.

  She returned to her father’s library again and again after that, whenever she had the place to herself. It became a world unto itself, a place where the rules of the outside world did not apply. Where things sacred and things profane existed side by side. Maidens waited in convents for something they only knew of as love, fell at the feet of deceivers and strangers and revelled in their fall, were ‘taken’ only to be abandoned, eventually choosing the dagger or poison to the shame of the fallen woman, while at the same time ascending to some lofty, gold and glittering heaven where the ruined were taken in and their sins absolved: a place where nuns were raped and ravaged and both screamed to God for rescue and revelled in His will; a place where monks, friars, priests and bishops whipped themselves nightly for their impurity, yet night after night submitted in blissful surrender to it. A place to which they were all dragged and yet took themselves willingly. And as if in the thrall of some beast with its beauty trapped inside, straining for release, she could not take her eyes from the pages of these books. They transfixed her, the hours spent poring over them dissolving into timelessness; the distance between the blessed and the brutal as thin as communion wafers. The library not so much a private chapel of the sacred and profane as a private cathedral containing all things human: the savage and the sublime in equal measure, and equally mesmerising. She absorbed it all.

  Eventually, one day, she was done. There was nothing left of this world to lose herself in. And even though she couldn’t, if pressed, explain the coded language of the books, she felt it. Her body was her guide, her dictionary. Her mind followed. And as much as she knew that one day the two would converge, she knew she had also been introduced to the wisdom of the body and would always hold in the highest regard the things the body knows.

  And it was on that last afternoon, while she lingered, sitting on the floor of her father’s library, a little sad, holding the last of these fantastic tales in her hands, that she looked up to see him suddenly there. He had come home from work, whether early or at the usual time, she can’t remember. But there he was. And he saw the opened cabinet, saw the book in her hands.

  He nodded to her, holding his briefcase, and after a few seconds in which she sat in frozen anticipation of what her fate might be, he simply said, ‘Well, I see you’re off to a flying start.’

  That was Anne, fifteen years old in the distant year of 1921. She grew. Married. A child came along. The marriage ended. Then Anne became Dominique, and Dominique now looks at the ghost of her young self, in the middle of the floor, absorbing her father’s words in the same way she had absorbed his cache of forbidden books.

  The next day her father sat her down at his desk and told her that the library was hers. Always had been. There would be no forbidden books. He then added that if she was going to read such books, she ought to know just what was going on in them, or they would make no sense to her at all. And it was then, equipped with drawings and diagrams of the male and female body, that he gave her a lesson in exactly what happened in those books, and all those coded words were revealed in their clinical, everyday ordinariness. And even as he spoke she longed for the time, only the day before, when they were full of mystery and her body was her guide, and these words were far from ordinary but charged with an astonishing power that they would never have again.

  Now she knew what happened to the body at those moments of ‘possession’ or whatever other coded terms were employed by the authors. She not only understood, she could picture it. And there were times when picturing it – what her father called ‘the act’ – that, in its brutal ordinariness, it seemed far more bizarre and frightening than all the violence and madness of the tales themselves.

  As her father folded up his drawings and diagrams, the lesson over, Dominique marvelled again that her parents had ever got together. A mother who hated the flesh and was quick to call any book that touched upon the life of the body ‘smut’. And a father who was precisely the opposite: not just a ladies’ man, she gradually came to conclude, but a man who loved women. And women, she could plainly see even back then, loved him for it.

  She leaves the library and wanders into the kitchen where she chews vaguely on bread and sardines. We have oysters today, Camembert and Langres, she can hear the jolly café host proclaiming. And as she lies back on her bed, dimly aware of voices in the communal garden where two people are stumbling about in the darkness, she dwells on what they might be doing now. All of them: the jolly host, the German officers, Agnès and her soldier. And Paulhan!

  As much as she would like to imagine him in the forest, his true habitat, she knows he will be at home, not so far from where she is now. With his wife. His sick wife, whom he tends to and for whom he cares. Both of them – Jean and Dominique – coincidently residents of this part of the city, Val-de-Grâce. The fantasy of flight, of them both being fellow creatures of the forest silently and secretly acknowledging each other, is her last thought before closing her eyes.

  2.

  It is a month after their first meeting, the same time of day, late in the afternoon, autumn succumbing to winter. The streets are cold, the café is warm. She has compiled her list of religious poems together with extracts from the devotional books of the saints and written the introduction he requested. All done quickly, which is the way she works.

  Jean is thumbing through the pages she has given him, glancing
over her introduction with the practised eye of the publisher, taking in the essentials in one continuous sweep. And while he does, she has ample time to study him. The suit, the tie, the vest, might all sit well on him: Jean Paulhan, solid citizen, pillar of the literary community. But there is, she is sure, another Jean Paulhan underneath it all, and not far beneath.

  And it is while she is contemplating this that he suddenly looks up and catches her scrutinising him, looking into him with candid curiosity. She’s been caught out, but instead of looking away she follows her intuition and continues staring at him. She doesn’t try to hide it. Risky. A gamble. He may take offence, he may not. But she doesn’t think he will. And she’s right. He receives her stare, holding it for the moment. He’s done this before. She too. She is practised at it, or would like to think she is. It began as a game, but she soon discovered she was a born hunter. Loved the hunt itself as much as the outcome. As a younger woman she made a point of catching men’s eyes in cafés, railway stations and restaurants: a way of testing herself and testing them. Testing life. It was rare that anything came of it, for most men, she found, she could stare down. It was only the fellow creatures she locked eyes with. Just as she is right now with Jean Paulhan. And he holds her stare, possibly taking it as some sort of declaration – or possibly just waiting for her to say something.

  ‘Is it what you want?’ she suddenly asks, indicating the manuscript.

  He nods. ‘It is. It is, indeed.’

  ‘I know it hasn’t taken me long. But don’t think I dashed it off carelessly. It’s how I work.’

  He strikes a pose, as if for a photograph. His way, she concludes, of gathering himself.

  ‘I like a quick worker. I’m one myself,’ he says, and it’s hard to tell if there’s an implied other meaning to the remark. ‘Don’t change, don’t change anything,’ he says, and again it’s hard to tell if there aren’t levels of meaning here: practical advice, with the hint that he might just as easily be talking about her as much as her writing; the suggestion that he likes exactly what he sees.