What the Light Touches

35 A HAPPY SONG PLAYS

35

A H APPY S ONG P LAYS

“Those months went by quickly. Damien had performed the concert wearing his striped uniform from Buchenwald, and the gesture caused a certain kind of uproar. The name Damien Devère ended up coming out in the newspaper. The brief article explained an unusual event during which the oboist of the renewed Pierné Orchestra appeared to be playing while wearing the striped pajamas, just a few weeks after the liberation of the concentration camps. The same review, which we cut out and saved somewhere, complained of two things: that there wasn’t a picture of the event, and that the same musician had difficulty finishing The Prelude of the Afternoon of the Faun on account of ‘some inopportune coughing attacks’ impeding him from playing his instrument.

“We didn’t care. The ‘inopportune coughing attacks’ the newspaper critic had noticed came and went depending on the day, but we didn’t pay any mind because Damien seemed not to care either. He took it all in with a silent resignation, like collateral damage as part of his passage through hell. One example of many.

“Those months, as I said, went by quickly, with everyone around me, my pregnancy, the birth of our daughter. It was a girl. édith. She was born with ten fingers and ten toes. She was healthy, and, when she opened her eyes, it seemed like she liked us. What else could we ask for? I chose the name, Damien was in agreement, and we wanted my father to be her baptismal godfather.

“I hardly remember anything from those first weeks and months with édith at home. Only the nebulousness of joy remains, but I was so young, I knew so little, and everything was so new; between the breastfeeding, the crying, caring for any illnesses, entertaining her, and the washings, my life was dedicated to édith. Lucky for me, Damien was always there; he spoiled mother and daughter, and we told everyone he was the father. And oh hell, was he. We gave her his last name, édith Devère, so there was no doubt.

“Damien started weakening when winter came, though. He was left lifeless. The coughing got worse, at all hours. His health got even worse. He sweated at night, he had chills, and the growing pain in his lungs was oppressive. He didn’t want to worry us and insisted he didn’t want to be a burden, but there were whole days he didn’t get out of bed. He simply couldn’t. When it seemed like he was a little better, he’d begin to cough blood, and then I’d make him go to Dr. Bonnet, the old family doctor, who had a portrait of de Gaulle in his office.

“The doctor looked him up and down. He examined him. He put his ear against his back, he looked into the whites of his eyes, he said his breath smelled like old wood, and he immediately said that sea breezes would be good for him. Dr. Bonnet had screened Damien, and before Damien could button up his shirt, the doctor recommended a remedy that had to cure him: the Mediterranean.

“‘For your lungs, the Riviera would be better than Paris,’ he said with the credibility of a white coat and a serious voice. He suggested more than anything that we not wait until the summer. ‘I can’t think of anything better than sunbathing during winter in C?te d’Azur.’

“He said it with a twisted face that I didn’t know how to interpret. Young as I was at the time, I didn’t see the signs of the bad months to come.

“‘And pills?’ Damien had asked.

“‘Believe me. Try the sea breeze. It’s the best remedy. You’d do well in Sainte-Maxime, for example.’

“The doctor’s rush made me anxious to leave.

“We went down to the coast by train. We saw France through the window at full speed. It was a day full of travel with édith, a stroller, and suitcases that Damien struggled to drag along. When I took them from him, he said, ‘Let me do it,’ dry as his cough was. We settled into a hotel that was recommended to us. Maybe it was the only option. At the time, it smelled new and like wallpaper. The room had a crib for édith, which we were one of the first to use, if not the first. It was the Centrum Hotel, a name with less fame than the nearby beaches, which immediately helps you ingratiate yourself to the seafaring population. Sainte-Maxime was, at that time, a city without tourists. After the war, there were only fishermen. In the wintertime, there were barely even cats.

“We were comfortable for the first few days. It seemed like Dr. Bonnet’s advice was the oil the lamp needed. Damien coughed less, he felt better, and he wanted to go out. We took small walks by the sea at sunset. We let édith play in the sand and covered her hands and feet. We sat next to her, watching her, and aside from stopping her from putting her little fingers in her mouth, we let her be.

“‘She looks like you.’ I liked that Damien said it one afternoon while we listened to the sea. ‘The way she lifts her head, looking curiously from side to side. It’s like everything interests her.’

“édith was quick, clever. Nosy, I guess, like all kids who discover they’ve ended up in a world of beautiful things. They like the waves, the birds, the trains, the dogs, toy cars, rag dolls, crusts of bread to lick, the moon, which has its own song. On the other hand, sounds and nasty men with unibrows scare them.

“Our daughter—I never said it out loud—also had something of Damien’s. I knew it felt impossible, but he would put her on top of him and talk to her and stick out his tongue and make her laugh and shake her and sit on the ground to play with her and tickle her. Even if only from all the time they spent together and the loving things he said to her, édith picked something up from him. His mannerisms.

“Damien came back to life in Sainte-Maxime. It seemed permanent. We entered December hopeful he was on a good course. He was cheered by the thought that Dr. Bonnet had suggested an effective way of holding off the sickness—damn tuberculosis—that had eaten away so many of his friends who’d managed to escape Buchenwald alive.

“A couple of days before Christmas, though, the inopportune cough came back. Damien suddenly spent entire nights without sleeping again. The nightmares of the concentration camps, which he couldn’t escape even for a single night, and the pain in his lungs caused by the coughing overlapped with the sunsets and sunrises to create a new torture.

“For Christmas, on the twenty-fifth itself, something sad happened, as if holidays always marked when big things would happen. It had been a year to the day since I had told my parents I was pregnant. A year later, I lived another event in silence. The hotel prepared us a festive meal served on beautiful trays atop a linen tablecloth. Damien, who wasn’t hungry, practically didn’t eat. We went up to the room after because édith was more comfortable napping in her crib, and he said he wanted to lie down because everything hurt. He said it, but he didn’t do it. I saw Damien suddenly grab the oboe case. I don’t know how long he’d gone without opening it. Since we’d arrived at Sainte-Maxime, he’d left it on a wardrobe shelf and hadn’t looked at it anymore, as if it didn’t exist. Then it did. He took out the instrument, put it together, went out in a coat to the terrace, and I thought, now he’ll play . I watched him from inside, through the window, with the door closed and the curtain open. Outside, he was looking at nothing and holding the oboe in his hands. He didn’t even bring it to his mouth. I tried to imagine what was happening and slowly opened the door without making any noise, then went out with him onto the terrace. I leaned to put myself level with his eyes. He was crying. He smothered his sobs as much as he could. He tried to control his breathing. I kissed him and I said, ‘Damien, we’ll make it through.’

“He didn’t say yes or no. He simply didn’t respond. After he wiped away his tears, he passed me his oboe.

“‘Play a happy song, Margaux.’

“That sentence. I hear him say that one sentence he said to me on the balcony of our hotel room in Sainte-Maxime, every day of my life. ‘Play a happy song.’ As if it were easy in the moment. What should I play for him now? I thought. What can I play that will cheer him up, that I know by memory, that wouldn’t beat him down any more than he already was? I would put the oboe to my mouth and something would play. The duck’s rhythm from the melody of Peter and the Wolf emerged, in the form of the happy high notes that signaled the duck managing to become revived.

“Despite my nerves, and despite feeling like I was exhausting the last of my willpower, I thought it came out good enough. He didn’t clap. The person who had been my teacher and was my love didn’t applaud. He did something better. Damien grabbed my hand, and, as he caressed it, he said words I didn’t want to hear in that moment but that, with time, I recorded in my heart.

“‘You’ve made my life better. With you, it’s all been worth it. Thank you for letting me be the father of your daughter.’

“Is it possible to say anything more profound to someone?”

There was a silence in Mamie Margaux’s room. Neither her grandmother, nor she, nor Roger were in any condition to say anything. A nurse knocked at the door and entered with two cookies and a glass of milk with a dash of coffee, then left with a friendly greeting none of the three had heard.

“Mamie,” Barbara said. “The Sainte-Maxime hotel is where you took me when I was little ...”

“Yes, the Centrum.”

“The summer my mother was sick, you took me to the town and the hotel you’d been to with Grandfather?”

“I had never returned.”

“But ... it must have been torture.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Very difficult, Mamie, for the love of God.”

“It wasn’t easy. But I had to go back. No, no ...” Mamie raised her finger like she was in class and knew the answer. “I did it for me. I needed to remember it. It had been years since he’d died, and the memories had begun to fade for me—his voice, the touch of his skin. What will we do if our experiences blur, I thought. Your mother was sick, you were a little whirlwind that had to be distracted, and your house wasn’t a place for jokes. We went down from Arles to Sainte-Maxime and settled into the Centrum Hotel, which was more run down than it’d been the first time I visited, and we were fine ... or not?”

Barbara didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The two met, simultaneously, at an emotional summit.

“Yes, yes. It was the best summer of my life. You let me do anything, I had you all to myself, and I don’t remember what—I don’t know. I was little, but I didn’t notice if you were sad.”

“We grandmothers don’t allow it. And when there are problems, even less so. We always play happy music. The more the mess, the happier the face.”

“But”—Roger dared to open his mouth—“I don’t want to insert myself when no one is asking, but ... the nostalgia?”

Mamie smiled. She liked questions coming from him. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear from this strapping man who’d settled into her granddaughter’s life.

“Roger is right,” Barbara cut in. “You took me to play in the sand and eat ice cream, through the streets of Sainte-Maxime. You had to live all of that ... and I didn’t notice anything.”

“Nostalgia is like salt. In small doses. If you use too much, it’ll take you to the next destination in no time.”

She stirred the glass of milk and took a sip. She was left with a white mustache over her lip.

“Mamie ...” Barbara was thinking about what she’d learned. You never know everything about your family. And if you don’t know everything, you know nothing. “You went there to test yourself.”

“To remember, let’s put it that way. To test myself?” Mamie had to think about it. “I won’t say no. To overcome it, if it’s even possible to somehow move on from the life and death of a man you fell in love with. The sediments of memory ... They’re always there, I guess. You’re too young to know. Memory learns to domesticate itself over the years. Memory returns until it completely leaves. Did I tell you that Anine isn’t in her right mind?”

Barbara knew Anine was Mamie Margaux’s friend from the room next door—the hunched woman who had picked up the habit of asking everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. But it wasn’t the time to talk about anyone who wasn’t Mamie, who was rewriting Barbara’s life at a steady pace. Barbara wanted to point out how much her grandmother must have suffered, having to act like she wasn’t sad, but for whom, inside, everything was turning.

“Look, Mamie, let me say it. I simply can’t believe you were so stone-like. You must have put a lot of energy into pretending to be happy with me all the time. Surely, come on.” Barbara turned to face Roger, looking for an ally. “I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to believe it.”

Before Roger could say anything, Mamie took a short sip of her milk, curled her lips, and lowered her head to make a confession.

“One day, I did break. A day you don’t remember. A day I got goose bumps while we were on the beach, and you’d noticed. You even asked me, ‘What’s wrong, Mamie?’ and I didn’t say anything and simply acted like a mosquito had bitten me because I didn’t want to worry you. And I began to scratch my arm with so much force it made you laugh, so then I laughed, and we ended up running through the sand from mosquitos that didn’t exist.”

“You’re a clown.”

“So what happened next with Damien?” Roger asked, not wanting to lose the thread.

“For the New Year, Damien had an idea. He didn’t have the strength to endure the bells ringing at night, édith was too little, and we agreed to stay in the room and act like it was any other day. But he had the idea to celebrate another way. We left the hotel and went to the shore to wait for midnight. It was a stormy day, and a cold wind was coming in from the sea, along with some welcome rays of sun. Damien and I took off our shoes. We also took off édith’s booties. I held the girl in my arms, and, as we neared the water, Damien took my hand. We put our feet in the cold, damp sand and proceeded up to where the undertow settled. The water barely reached our ankles. Damien began to count the waves. Every time one reached us, we jumped a little. At first, the ritual took me by surprise. The second time, he forced himself to lift his feet off the ground. The third time, he managed to do it imperceptibly. On the fourth, édith laughed with our jumps. On the fifth, we were a happy couple. On the sixth, Damien sang them out loud. The seventh was coming with furious foam. On the eighth, I jumped to splash his pants. On the ninth, in the absence of the bells, came waves we would remember eternally. On the tenth, we said ‘I love you.’ On the eleventh, Damien looked at the horizon with a concentration that made it seem like it was saying something. The last wave ... ‘Welcome to 1946.’ The year your grandfather died.”