Days Between Stations Read online

  He went directly to a village called Wyndeaux, without deliberation or question. He would always wonder why later. Avril received the telegram: “Start production here. Send company.” Several days later, he stood on the station platform at dawn; a crowd of villagers was already beginning to gather. The train arrived out of the mist, its windows filled with actors and cameramen and technicians, production assistants and creative consultants, writers and researchers and set designers and costume designers, musicians to provide the appropriate mood for the actors during particularly dramatic scenes (these musicians would be dispensed with shortly: Adolphe would provide the mood himself, not second-rate violinists). The passengers seemed to the townspeople like foreigners transported from another time; even the train had a reflective metallic sheen in which were caught images of the future. As the train drew to a sleek halt, the film company poured from the doorways and there was a bustle of activity like the village had not seen, the crowd surging into the city with crates and props and costumes, arcs and tripods and light bridges and mattes and the American Bell and Howells, right past Adolphe Sarre, who was mistaken by all for another village son. He watched them move by, impressed and awed himself: Avril, he thought, didn’t get all these people off the backlot of his studio. He followed them on down the town’s main road, listening to the laughter and excitement. The next day, from behind the city’s fortified gates, he sent for her.

  She left Paris like a fugitive in the dead of night, taking a carriage to the Gare de l’Est. Snow was on the tracks as the train moved south. The next morning, as the train pulled into the station, she watched from the cabin window. She had heard he was a young man, back from the war with the rest of the troops only a year earlier. She read in the papers how he lay in a coma in a hospital ward some time before the Armistice; nothing was known of his birth or family. The truth just never occurred to her.

  The train came to a stop, and she pulled her one bag from the rack and maneuvered down the aisle of the car. She stepped from the door into the snow and saw no one; above her was an old sign with peeling green letters that read WYNDEAUX. She trudged slowly across the platform toward the building, pulling the bag behind her. When she got inside, she heard, behind her, someone call her name.

  She turned to him. He stepped from behind a beam and she saw a blue light through the window cast across his face. For a moment she just watched, the expression in her eyes quizzical, then both suspicious and wondering. Adolphe, she finally said. She shook her head, and then wondered why, how, she could not have remembered. Adolphe de Sarre, her mother had called him.

  He stepped forward and took her bag. He stood there a moment, his smile slightly sad. He didn’t seem the same as she remembered him. She realized he wasn’t supposed to. Let me take your bag, he said, after he already had.

  She was not that much different, she was not that much older. She’d done all her growing and changing that morning she was eight years old on the bidet. They walked in silence to the hotel, and he showed her to the room. From her window she could see much of the city to the south: the castle walls jagged and massive, with grisly ramparts and parapets immediately beyond which was the sea. Boats docked along the wharfs just outside the walls, and there were cafés and small dives where the sailors drank at night; lanterns hung in the windows. The ramparts were blue, everything in the city was blue, because the wind blew the salt from the sea across the city; iced and hardened, everything turned blue. On the other side of the city was a forest, and the trees hung pale blue and heavy with salt.

  Months later, both of them would wonder, when they were alone or silent together, if all along they had intended to make happen what did happen; it seemed clear to Adolphe that he must have. He knew he hadn’t forgotten anything about the rue de Sacrifice. She, on the other hand, would have forgotten the rue de Sacrifice for anything; she would have forgotten Paris for anything, even for making a picture. She didn’t care that much about making pictures; she had only made the one a couple of years before, when she was spotted by a producer who came to Number Seventeen one night. She told Adolphe this but nothing more, except that nobody could know she was in Wyndeaux, and if it was announced in Paris that she was to appear in this picture, and was in Wyndeaux filming it, she would depart immediately, she told Adolphe, for either the Alps or the Pyrenees. If he would keep this secret, she would do what he wanted; it didn’t matter to her.

  The blue was so subtle that she often sat staring at the sheets, the pages of books, the ceiling above her, trying to decide whether they were really blue, or whether the color had so permeated her vision that she was the one who brought the blue to everything she laid eyes on. Within four days of her arrival, even as the company was still preparing for production forty-eight hours away, she sat in the middle of the night staring at the blue; it awakened her. It had been on the backs of her eyelids and on the film of her pupils, and when she rolled over and put her mouth to the pillow, she tasted it. The texture of it was thick like cognac, but the taste was of metal. She sat up and put her head in her hands, clutched the blanket to her chest, and looked through the shutters of the window to the sea and the lights of the boats. She didn’t notice, when she called him, that he was there immediately, as though he’d been sleeping outside her door. He pulled her to him and it was only about ten minutes later, so fixed was she on the blue and the shutters and the sea, that she realized he was inside her. Afterwards, with the lamp burning on the writing table, the blue didn’t seem so bad; and when she stared into his hair she didn’t see the blue at all. She asked him about it, and so he talked about the blue light on into the night, that he had seen it right off when he first arrived, and thought he could use it. He asked if she remembered the light of his room at Number Seventeen, how the room had its own light; that was the way it was here, he said. She hadn’t really noticed the light, and he was secretly disappointed. Perhaps she sensed this when she asked why he’d wanted her to make this picture. He told her he had seen her face in the trees on the Champs-Elysées; what he didn’t tell her was that he still remembered, had never gotten out of his mind all the time he lay blind among the wounded during the war, how she laughed when Jean-Thomas took her. Adolphe knew he would never forgive the way she laughed, that the laugh itself was a violation of his memory and vision of her; and so he would use that too, like he would use the light of the village. A woman who laughed that way could kill Marat, he told himself.

  They always slept together like that afterwards, she clinging to his unblue hair and he wondering if it was the light that had brought him to Wyndeaux. But he didn’t really think so.

  One night they walked out past the village gates along the water and the boats. They could hear the sounds of the bars on one side and the water lapping against the hulls of the other side. There was a deep blackness toward the direction of Spain, framing a house on the hill at the end of the beach, which shone even in the night and stole Janine’s heart. Will we live in that house someday? she asked Adolphe; and the night was the color of night, not blue—until they came to one café in particular. It glowed the same blue as the village, only more intensely, as though the blue light of the entire village could have emanated from this one café which hummed and throbbed like a generator. When Janine pulled back, Adolphe pulled forward, his arms in hers, and explained that if they went into this café perhaps she wouldn’t be afraid of the blue anymore; but at the door he touched the knob hesitantly, as though it might give off a charge.

  The café’s interior was like a huge lantern, the walls curved and opaque, shivering with malevolent shadows. At the tables around the room sat perhaps two dozen ancient sailors with full white beards and gleaming white pipes. There was talking and laughing but all of it low, almost hushed; and the way each sailor nodded his head at another’s story was very slow and deliberate, and the smiles took forever to form, and even then were never realized fully. On the tables behind the bar were the bottles. There were wine bottles, brandy bottles, whisky bot
tles, cognac bottles—hundreds of them around the room, lining the walls, on the floors and stacked in corners, rolling to and fro by the feet of the sailors; and all of them, even the ones that appeared discarded, were corked and secured. Inside each and every one burned a blazing blue. All burned so brightly that the entire room was cast in blue. When Adolphe and Janine entered, a number of heads looked up; many of the sailors just went on talking. Adolphe whispered something to Janine; she turned to hear him better; and then saw he was gone from her side. She looked all around her, then back at the sailors in something of a panic. One of them called to her, and someone gave her a glass of brandy. She would have thought it was going to be blue as well, but it was the light brown of brandy. The sailors went on talking; and she was going to leave but the secondary conversations dwindled to nothing and the attention of the room was turning to a very old sailor, perhaps the oldest of them all, who wore a wreath of ivory around his shoulders and had the longest fingers Janine had ever seen. He was taking each bottle, uncorking it slowly, and then raising its mouth to that of a large empty cognac bottle with a long neck. This bottle had no blue whatsoever, until the old sailor seemed to pour into it the blue of the other bottles. He did this with all the bottles, pouring the blue light of each one into the one cognac bottle until, after several minutes, the old sailor cried out, warning all those in the room that the glass might shatter from its livid heat. The old sailors just laughed as though they’d seen this trick before. But Janine was caught up by it, mesmerized, and the ancient sailor saw she was; he turned to a very young sailor sitting by him—a boy really, and the only one in the café—and winked. To her amazement, Janine saw it was Adolphe, in a blue and white striped sailor’s shirt. He winked back, and the old man stepped forward to Janine and presented her with the cognac bottle. He told her to go ahead and take it, it was cool now and she could touch it. She held it before her, and with a gasp of wonder, saw that inside the bottle were two blue eyes. They blinked at her.

  All the sailors laughed and started hitting the tables. She looked up at them and laughed back. She looked at Adolphe but he wasn’t there; and then she had another drink of brandy, and another. She was feeling drunk and wonderful when she realized Adolphe hadn’t come back, and went out to find him.

  Adolphe had been out by the water waiting. He didn’t know why he left the way he did; but when he had gone into the café with Janine, suddenly something seemed too close—suddenly whatever had drawn him to Wyndeaux was too imminent. It must be the light, he said to himself. He was considering returning to the hotel alone when she came up behind him in the dark, tickling his ear. She laughed when he turned to her. “Yo ho ho,” she said.

  “Are you a pirate now?”

  “You can make a pirate movie next,” she said. “Or make Marat a pirate. With an eyepatch.” She tugged at his shirt. “I so liked your little sailor suit.”

  “My little what?”

  She laughed. “Look, Adolphe. He gave me the bottle. You went away so quickly you didn’t give me a chance to show you. How did he do that?”

  He looked at the eyes in the bottle. They blinked at him.

  “I mean, I know they can’t be real eyes. But it’s a wonderful effect.”

  He led her back to the hotel, as she laughed and babbled on about eyes and sailor suits and how she was sure he’d be a superb sailor if he wasn’t a movie director. Once or twice, she seemed groggy as though she would fall asleep on him; and, crossing the last of a series of bridges that led to the city’s walls, she stumbled and the bottle landed in the water. Adolphe reached down from the bridge but the bottle drifted just beyond his fingertips, and headed out to sea. “My bottle,” Janine said plaintively. They watched it go. “Goodbye,” she murmured, and then was lost in his arms.

  That season in Wyndeaux, the war that had consumed the world only two years before was but a rumor. History leapfrogged the village most of its thousand winters: the Black Death that seared across the middle of the fourteenth century, eliminating a third of its inhabitants and swallowing up whole towns, never whispered its name in Wyndeaux. If it was true that the plague halved time itself, slicing away the Middle Ages from the Modern, then Wyndeaux was left stranded on the other side, its gargoyles and belfries sighting no demons and housing no prophets, its fortress garrets repelling no invaders, its steeples unbloodied and its corridors providing refuge from no cataclysm. The town remained anonymous to the English who captured the coast from Louis VIII: Wyndeaux persisted French. Remained ignorant of both Catholics and Huguenots in the late sixteenth century: Wyndeaux persisted in its own private zealotry. Remained inviolable before Richelieu’s siege in the seventeenth: Wyndeaux persisted unconquered. The revolution passed virtually unnoted, Bonaparte was a name of no interest; and in another two decades’ time from this particular point, as Vichy spread German U-boats from one port to the next, Wyndeaux would persist hidden, enveloped in the curtain that world events could never lift.

  The people of Wyndeaux, then, had stayed resolutely untouched and unimpressed with the rest of the world right up to the moment the movies came to their village. Avril Productions and La Mort de Marat wreaked a bedazzled and virgin havoc. Almost effortlessly, Wyndeaux was transformed overnight, its own facades mingling with newer, more disposable ones, its own scenes clashing with ones shot through with looking-glass light. The film company became a community within a community, and then as the days passed, the communities mixed like uneasily flowing colors—the garish and stunning trickling through the muted and dimly blue. The townspeople felt overrun and threatened until, to their own horror, they found themselves feeling privileged and exhilarated instead, leaning from the windows and stepping from the doors where they’d peered suspiciously at the outset. The company itself, in the meantime, was waiting.

  They still weren’t certain who they were waiting for. Sometimes, at night, in the window of his hotel, he could be seen standing and watching over the city; he appeared quite young and had wild black hair—slightly arrogant and terrified. Occasionally someone would say he saw the young man walking the docks late at night with a blonde on his arm. The guess was this was Adolphe Sarre. Directives were issued daily through associates. No shooting had yet begun. Like the rest of the industry back in Paris, many of these professionals were skeptical. Night after night they could see him pull the curtain of his window aside and just stand there looking out, a small light burning somewhere behind him. The company began to question if they were going to make a film at all.

  Then one day Erik Rode received a summons to Sarre’s room. He arrived at the room to find the black-haired young man standing in the corner; he knew the young man as Jean-Baptiste Bernard’s former assistant. Adolphe didn’t greet Rode or shake his hand. They exchanged no pleasantries. Adolphe hid in the shadow of the corner as though afraid to step into the light. After several silent moments he blurted from out of the dark his dissatisfaction with the work Rode had done for Bernard. He told Rode the film had no depth and that everything looked flat. He stopped and Rode just waited, brows arched. Adolphe shuffled his feet a bit; he held his arms folded, as though he was chilled. I’m sorry, he began again.

  Rode interrupted him. “Monsieur Bernard wanted to shoot everything at high noon,” he said. “That kind of direct light will flatten everything out. The man didn’t know much about pictures.”

  Adolphe asked whether it was possible to shoot either earlier in the day or later, and Rode said this was just fine with him. He said that shooting about seven-thirty in the morning or five in the afternoon would give the kind of three-quarter light the director wanted for his exteriors. It would also leave the middle of the day, or even night, for shooting interiors. Do you know what I want? said Adolphe.

  “I’m not sure.” Rode waited. “Do you know what you want?”

  I’m pretending I do, Adolphe answered. Then Adolphe and Rode talked a long while. Rode told the director that other than the cameraman, the two key people in translating to film what
the director wanted were the art director and film editor. Rode recommended a Dutchman who had worked as an art director on several recent German productions. The Dutchman turned out to be available and arrived within a week. After discussing the picture Adolphe and the Dutchman both came to the conclusion that their sets and mattes weren’t right. They determined to reconstruct new sets according not to real life proportions but rather “the proportions of the mind,” as the art director called them. Consequently a lot of the detail material the research team had come up with in the interest of authenticity was thrown out; a strict reality was binding and, in a sense, less real than an illusion which communicated more directly to the audience’s emotions. Moreover, because of the way Adolphe wanted to light the film, whole surfaces of the mattes weren’t worth completing at all—they would only be cast into shadow later.

  The film editor turned out to be a young American woman from New York who had apprenticed with a couple of D. W. Griffith pictures, as well as directors like Rex Ingram and Maurice Tourneur. Working with Tourneur had brought her to Paris, and like everyone she was intrigued with what was already becoming a sort of dubious, even notorious Marat legend. She came to Wyndeaux about a month after the picture had already begun shooting. She learned what the other professionals had already found out—that Adolphe had a good idea what he wanted after all. Years later Rode would tell people that Sarre knew nothing about movie-making but everything about making movies, because he didn’t make movies as such: “He filmed,” said Rode, “his dreams.” His eye and his instincts were right. He had a feeling for throwing foreground figures into shadow while sharpening the focus of the background, creating a riveting effect in the process. Adolphe didn’t do this by using complicated lighting but rather by simplifying the lighting—using one or two lamps instead of six. Adolphe also saw the effect of this without ever looking through a camera; and in fact he refused to look through Rode’s camera: he seemed to have a contempt for and fear of men’s machinations. It was clear even to Rode, who understood little else about Adolphe, that the young man viewed things from a different place on the abyss, where the view was dimensionally altered and schematically dialectic; and that if Adolphe ever paused long enough to look at all of it through a lens, he would lose the vision. For this reason Adolphe needed his technicians desperately: yet he was reassured, for instance, that Rode still worked with a hand-crank camera rather than the modern motorized ones; that his editor disdained the new animated viewers and instead cut the film in the hand, holding it up to the light. Within six weeks of shooting—a time frame in which many films were completed—there were still weeks of work ahead of them. Yet Rode and the others felt the young director was onto something.