25 I’LL SEARCH FOR YOU IN THE RAIN
25
I’ LL S EARCH FOR Y OU IN THE R AIN
They understood each other with a look. It came with the job. The violinist Imtold Lefebvre—always one eye on the score, the other on the conductor—was used to living with his sights set sharp. He and Samuel Bardollet knew right away they’d go back. They decided on their next goal as soon as Imtold mentioned he’d passed by the German bookstore on the outskirts of the Sorbonne, as soon as he explained it’d reopened under the name “Rive Gauche” and that people came and went like nothing had happened.
“Should we do it again?”
“Why not?”
“We’ll blow that bookstore up as many times as they reopen it. Who do these rats think they are?”
Bardollet didn’t leave the house much. Just for the essentials, and that was it. Even when he dared go out, he refused to wear the damn symbol identifying him as a Jew. Before taking a wrong step, he calculated the risks, planned the route, and as lanky as he was, he tried to go unnoticed and not give anyone the opportunity to become suspicious. No longer with a salary from the factory and having to hide at home for the past two years, Samuel had converted the dining room into a modest and rudimentary workshop where he forged bread ration tickets. Not even the experts could tell the difference. Later, he’d leave, a package tucked under his arm, sell the cards on the black market, and return to his shelter. It was a matter of survival. Imtold, despite his nickname, guarded his roommate’s secret. He didn’t tell anyone. They were risking too much.
“Once we blow up the bookstore again, maybe we should do something with Maurice Chevalier,” Bardollet said, the parts of the explosive device laid out before him like an unsolved puzzle.
“The singer? What’d he do?”
“I can’t stop hearing him on Radio Paris.”
“Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est allemand.” Imtold sang the lyrics the resistance had invented using the traitorous radio station’s signature tune. He continued. “Chevalier is already one of them. I think he spends the whole day at the radio station. He sings live. Maybe we should punish—”
Bardollet raised his hand to stop his friend from saying anything else. “We twist the cable this way, right?”
Imtold lowered his face to look at it closely. With his expression of ignorance and his demeanor that of a slacker, he was like a medical student faced with his first patient in the operating room. “I wouldn’t know how to do it, Samu. You’re the expert.”
“The thing is, I don’t remember right now if—”
“You make sure it doesn’t explode before we want it to, dammit.”
“I can think of more heroic ways to die in the middle of a war. Do you think we moved this one last time,” Bardollet said, pointing to a red wire, “underneath the other one?”
“How would I know?”
“If this explodes here, you’re right. We won’t appear in the history books.”
“We won’t even appear in some amateur novel.”
“Don’t make me laugh, dammit. This is fragile.”
Samuel Bardollet handled the bomb with a gentle touch. Slowly, he put two and two together. He was much less doubtful than he seemed.
“When do you want to do it?” Imtold asked.
“Tomorrow,” Bardollet responded, concentrating and not looking up. “We said tomorrow, right? Once they close the bookstore. Do you have a concert?”
“Rehearsal. For Rimsky-Korsakov.”
“A Russian?” asked Bardollet, surprised. “They let you play Russian composers?”
“The conductor is good with those lowlifes. You know how Delphin Moureau can be ... Slick as an eel. He knows how to stay in everyone’s good graces.”
“And the Kartoffeln want to show they’re not bad people, that life is normal here. They may be sons of bitches, but they’re clever.”
“So, tomorrow?”
Imtold extended his hand so Samuel could shake it.
“We’ll do it again,” he said, with the courageousness of brave men. In response to the gesture of complicity, he shook his hand slowly, careful not to incite an unexpected detonation.
“I hope it will stop raining by then.”
“Of course, I hope so too. I hate running down the wet cobblestone streets.”
A naked poem. The treasure chest. The infinite moment. The hand game. The light of dreams. The voice of a man. Sine qua non. A party in a forest. Choosing a lipstick. Dressing as a fairy. Repeating your name twice in a row in different intonations. The smell of wet grass. Watching, silencing, loving. I’ll search for you in the rain. Every word, a star.
Margaux had written fifteen ways of knowing you were in love in her yellow notebook. Every day she saw Damien and spent time with him—however long it was, she enjoyed it until the last second—she would lock herself in her room afterward and express her feelings that day. She put the way he made her feel through a filter, and after she sifted through the essence of it, she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote in beautiful handwriting. She wanted to keep it short. If it could be said in three words rather than four, then so be it. But she felt so much with so much passion, and everything was so novel that sometimes it didn’t come out right. In their every-other-day meetings since that first kiss, they’d pushed the oboe to the side. Everything was fire and laughter. Margaux’s parents, unaware of what was happening in their house, continued to pay the young teacher. The boy charged them the same fee because of what they would’ve said and also so as not to raise suspicions. Seven francs and an apple. What more could you want? There were days, though, when the couple became so excited while talking that Margaux curled up on Damien’s lap to kiss him. Then, they didn’t even end up opening the case. The days on which they set up the oboe and placed the reed to play had started to run dry.
“Can I read it to you?” she said, taking the intimate notebook out of her drawer.
“Read what?”
“What you inspire in me. Every time I see you, I write down my thoughts.” She opened it up to a specific page. “Or would you rather read it yourself?”
“No, no.”
“Ready?” Margaux let a silence fall between them.
A naked poem.
A treasure chest.
She read it aloud slowly.
The infinite moment.
Damien savored every concept. He guessed at what had inspired every image. Sometimes, he nodded his head like he had correctly ascertained where his beloved Margaux’s feelings came from, the girl who had shaken him to the point that he didn’t know where north, south, his head, and his heart began.
“Now it’s your turn.”
“What is?”
“To say what you’re feeling.”
He looked at her tenderly. Then, seconds later, he scrunched his nose. He didn’t want to improvise with any metaphors, or be short and corny. He didn’t dare to. He grabbed his oboe, softened the reed with his lips, and let the music rescue him. His eyes closed shut, and he played with all his heart. The melody was a sea of calm. Margaux also closed her eyes to allow herself to be transported. Once he finished his solo, they synchronized their return to reality.
“What was that? It’s so beautiful.”
“It’s a gift.”
“For me?”
“For both of us. We just started rehearsing Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade , and I love it. This is the second movement; it’s a treat for the oboe player.”
“Yeah, I heard that.” She was entranced. “It’s beautiful. It draws up visions of distant lands.”
“Listen to these notes,” Damien said, before he repeated the beginning. “It’s a musical trip, right? The bassoon draws its musical theme from Prince Kalandar, and then the oboe enters and responds to it this way. It’s the same melody as the bassoon’s, but it has a fresher sound, more colorful.”
“You’re always one for ‘more.’”
“Playing it makes me happy. I’m in dialogue here with the harp, you should hear it.”
“It sounds peaceful.”
“You recognized that. Wonderful. It’s beautiful with a whole orchestra.”
“How nerve-racking, everyone concentrating on you in that moment. I’d die. Of embarrassment, I mean.”
Damien played the whole melody again. Then, he interlaced it with his passages from other movements of One Thousand and One Nights . “This is Sinbad’s boat,” he explained. “Here, I play with the flute, clarinet, and the cello.” He instilled all his enthusiasm in his descriptions. “But in the third movement, I overlap my voice with that of the violas, and I promise it’s extraordinarily beautiful. It’s the moment for the young prince and princess.”
“It’s the two of us.”
“Not exactly. I hope we have a better ending.”
Margaux snatched the instrument out of his hands and placed it carefully on the bed. She sat in front of Damien and kissed each of his eyelids.
“Your eyes are so beautiful I could poke them out,” she teased.
“Yours are even more so, Margi.”
“Now ... now can I tell you that I love you?”
“I’m sure it can’t be as much as I love you.”
“How can you say that?” She kissed him playfully all over his face. “How can you say that, Dami? I’ll always love you more than you love me.”
“How can you measure that love? By the two times you say my name in different intonations?”
“Don’t laugh at me, you idiot.”
“I’d love to hear you say my name in different intonations ...”
“For the sake of your vanity?”
“Out of curiosity.”
“Well, you’ll have to hold on, big head.”
Their lips. Their mouths. The scent. Watching, silencing, loving. They were there for a while. First on the chair. Then, they moved the oboe and lay on the bed. The game of hands. Slowly, Margaux unbuttoned his shirt. From top to bottom. She took her time ruffling the hair on his chest. Her slender finger played with it. She liked trying new sensations slowly.
“What are you going to write when I leave today?” Damien asked, his torso naked.
“I have to think about it.”
“Can I write it for you?”
“In my notebook?” She suddenly wasn’t sure if this excited or saddened her.
He sat up and searched Margaux’s dressing table for a piece of paper on which he could write his prediction. Using a pencil, he wrote down a word, folded up the paper, and placed it beneath her pillow.
“Open it when you go to bed tonight. We’ll see if it’s the same word you write in your notebook.”
“Are you betting it will be?”
“If you guess correctly, it’s eternal love.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m a man of my word.”
“Give me a hint.”
Damien thought about it. “It’s a single word. Just one.”
That evening, Margaux used up a whole candle, her notebook at her side, waiting to fulfill the test of distilled love. Finally, when her parents insisted she go to bed because she had school in the morning, she made her decision. She dipped her pen in the black ink, and, using her best calligraphy, she wrote down a single idea. A unique word. The essence of the day. After, nervous to reveal the correct answer, she ran to put her hand under the pillow. She found the paper Damien had written on. She opened it. A single word.
Scheherazade.
The same word she’d written in her notebook. Scheherazade. Eternal love. She’d won.
“Go to sleep, Margaux, please,” her mother shouted from the next room.
In the morning, on her way to the Galeries Lafayette, Michelle sought shelter under a doorway. Her umbrella wasn’t enough. The wind turned it inside out, and she was soaked halfway up her calf because of the deluge of water that was falling. Angry thunder made the streetlamps and facades tremble. Its hoarse echo enveloped everything. There was the feeling that each thunderclap groaned closer and closer. But the storm couldn’t last all morning. As much as the black sky fought to remain, it ended up surrendering. It knew well enough that riots don’t last more than fifteen minutes in Paris. You just have to be patient and wait. She stayed there, glued to the doorway, watching how, right before her very eyes, the raindrops created bubbles in the puddles. Once the storm calmed slightly, she continued on to work, careful not to slip.
“Twenty minutes late, Mrs. Dutronc.” The floor manager, the nasty “Monsieur Mustache,” was waiting for her, his finger on the face of the clock.
“What could I do? In a downpour like this.”
“Dry off and change, and don’t let this happen again.”
“Shut up, idiot,” she murmured, careful to ensure he couldn’t hear her.
She put on her blue uniform, fixed her hair, retouched her lipstick, and went to her floor. There was a strange silence between Marthe, Nathalie, and Marion that was an unsettling novelty.
“Good morning,” Michelle said.
Practically no one responded. Why on earth were their faces so serious? Yes, she’d arrived late. One day. She didn’t see why it was such a big deal that they had to treat her so coldly.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Can you tell me why?”
They continued looking at her with disgust. Just in case, so they knew she wouldn’t be walked all over, she said, “We’ve all been late before, and that’s no reason—”
“What’s this?” Marion interrupted her.
She threw the magazine in her hands on the glass counter, open to an exact page. To shake off all the anger directed at her, Michelle pounced on top of it with an open hand, like she was trying to kill a fly. Her eyes could not avoid the picture in the magazine.
“It’s Margaux!” she blurted with the spontaneous happiness of seeing her daughter on the family bike, photographed beautifully in black and white.
Marthe, Nathalie, and Marion looked at one another and exchanged an offended look as if to say, “She’s making fun of us.”
“We already know it’s your daughter. That’s why we’re asking you, Michelle.”
“What’s she doing here?” Marion asked.
“You’re about to tell us you didn’t know,” Nathalie said incredulously.
“Know what?” Michelle was still astounded. “That she’d appear in this magazine? I didn’t even know she’d been photographed.”
“She didn’t tell you, your own—”
“My daughter? No.”
“Do you expect us to believe that, honey?”
Michelle couldn’t stop looking at the picture. She recognized the jacket, the hat, and her daughter’s sincere smile. Margaux was truly splendid. She knew, without a doubt, when the photo had been taken. Two Sundays ago. She had no idea, though, who could have taken it. She didn’t think Damien had a camera. And if he did, she believed even less so that he’d dare take it out on the street. If he were seen with it, it’d be taken from him, and as prudent as he was, he would never risk it.
She looked up from the magazine and saw her three coworkers, with whom she’d never had problems, looking at her with anger in their eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asked defensively. “Yes, it’s Margaux. I think she looks very beautiful.”
“But don’t you see where the picture has appeared?” In a fit of anger, Marthe closed the magazine and thrust the cover in her face. “ Signal , the Nazi magazine.”
“What’s your daughter doing here posing for the Germans?”
“I don’t know anything about it ...” Michelle’s shoulders shrank with every accusation. “Do you really think ... It must be a misunderstanding. Margaux isn’t involved in any of that.”
Marthe laughed falsely and spoke like Michelle wasn’t there.
“Who does she think will believe that?”
Nathalie addressed her directly, fixing the lapels on Michelle’s blue uniform in a maternal gesture, and after, as calmly as she could, she asked the question that had been burning inside her for a while. “Let’s see. Your husband didn’t have to go to the front. Now your daughter appears in this German magazine, and who are you? A spy?”
“Please, Nathalie, how can you say that? Stop making up stories. I think everything must have an explanation.”
“No!” Marthe interrupted her. “Some things don’t have explanations. Or justifications. Because these sons of bitches killed my husband, and I don’t know where he ended up and maybe I’ll never know. And because Marion—this woman standing directly in front of you—because her husband was recruited to the war only two months after they got married, and she’s never seen him again ... and you, the Dutroncs, strolling around Paris as if nothing is happening.”
“We knew there were things going on ... We knew you had the ration card for big families. People are going pale with hunger. Our meat portions have gotten smaller. Meanwhile, you have double the rations of milk and meat. Grifting for two whole years. Calling in favors from the Germans.”
“What did you do it in exchange for, Michelle? Did you think we didn’t notice?”
“We’re not stupid.”
“This is just what we were missing. Now your daughter acts like a model for them.”
“The bicycles. People used them to flee into exile, and you use them to pose nicely in front of that trash.”
“Here.” Nathalie angrily ripped out the page with the photo and thrust it to her. “Take your daughter.”
“Collaborators are disgusting. Dis-gust-ing.”
Michelle begged for mercy, overcome by another storm that could carry everything away.
“Would you listen to me for a second?” she said, her lips trembling.
“No.”
“But—”
“We said no!”
Marthe’s spittle landed directly on her cheek. Michelle was so shocked she was late to react. Once she wiped it off with her sleeve, a thread of tension led her to hold Marthe’s hard gaze inches away from her.
Michelle collected herself. “You should apologize. For what you’ve done and said.”
“On top of—sorry, what ?”
In a furious rage, Marthe lunged at her. She scratched Michelle’s face, and Marion and Nathalie had to hold back her arms to stop her. Meanwhile, Michelle curled up on the ground and covered her cheeks with her hands to protect herself so they wouldn’t continue fighting her and because, just like the scratches, their accusations of selling out to the conquerors hurt. She hid, because deep down, she started to doubt whether the Dutroncs were doing something wrong. Her three coworkers suddenly thought they were traitors. Who else thought that? Truth hurts, but this was all a lie. The Dutroncs, she and Ferdinand, did all they could, like so many others. She, a spy? They didn’t do anything but serve, stay quiet, and obey.
“What’s going on in here, ladies?” The manager with the wilted mustache broke them up. “For the love of God ... What must our clients think?”
“But no one’s come in all morning,” Nathalie responded unenthusiastically.
“Work and be quiet, all of you. And you.” He pointed at Michelle with his chin. “Do us the favor of washing your face.”
Michelle grabbed the page with the picture, and looking at the floor, she headed to the dressing room in the employee bathroom of the Galeries Lafayette. She inspected her wounds closely in the mirror. It came to her quickly—when they asked her at home about the scratches on her cheek, she’d say a cat had attacked her on the street. In the shriek of the storm, a black cat had emerged out of nowhere, jumped on her, and ruined her day.