Days Between Stations Read online

  Essentially, Varnette was explaining that his father had brought Janine’s mother from Tunisia, having bought her in an auction; and that since the mother was property of the father, the daughter was as well. And that since the father was now dead and had left everything to the son, both women belonged to him. The mother, Varnette said, was still in the private brothel on the rue de Sacrifice. The daughter he had come for now.

  You’re talking about slavery, Adolphe said to Varnette. Nobody has slaves anymore.

  Everybody, answered Varnette, has at least one slave.

  Varnette completed his proposition. He went on to say that he wasn’t interested in physically trying to wrest the girl from Adolphe; it would be much easier for Adolphe to deliver the girl over to him. He conceded that going to the police wouldn’t do; this left Varnette to deal with the situation in the way that suited him best, which was to buy back what was already his. Sometimes, he smiled almost sheepishly, one simply has to buy back what one already owns; after all, Adolphe had the upper hand since he had the girl. Adolphe asked if Janine was Varnette’s wife. Of course not, said Varnette. She’s my sister.

  He went on with his plan. He knew Adolphe was filming a picture, and Varnette was ready to place a great sum of francs at Adolphe’s disposal. Adolphe was mortified. Sitting there listening to Varnette brought back to him all the things he felt when he lived on the rue de Sacrifice; he wanted to tell Varnette that he was sorry the fall from the third floor window hadn’t killed him. He quietly got up to walk out. Varnette also stood, still charming and deferential, said he understood Adolphe’s reluctance, he could easily believe a man would want to keep a girl like Janine (how many faces light the trees of the Champs-Elysées?), but would Adolphe at least do himself the favor of taking Varnette’s card—upon which Varnette wrote where he could be reached in Paris—and let him know just in case, by some chance, he should change his mind. Adolphe stuffed the card in his pocket and left, out the cabin, from the car, past the two who had escorted him.

  When he had gotten beyond the station, Adolphe believed then that his victory over Jean-Thomas was now complete. Moreover, this was a triumph for everyone who had despised Jean-Thomas at Number Seventeen. On the way back to his hotel his thoughts turned to the picture, and he imagined wonderful scenes, saw them across the streets and walls and in the windows before him as if they were projected through his eyes.

  Two days later he received a wire from Avril: “Pathé withdrawing completely. Stop production.”

  A letter from Avril followed the next day. It enclosed a press clipping from Le Figaro announcing the halting of production on La Mort de Marat. Avril made no attempt to mask his bitterness toward Adolphe. He wrote that the young director had “arrogantly squandered the opportunity of a lifetime,” convincing the studio, through Adolphe’s own “clandestine and egocentric” manner in making the movie, that in fact the movie would never be finished. Adolphe’s first decision was to not let his company know. But when rumors spread throughout the village, he was forced to go before them, amassing them in the old theater where they had shot the assembly footage. He implored them to stay with him and help him finish the picture. He implored them for ideas on how to raise the money to finish the picture. His company was dedicated to him and to the movie; but they had questions as to how much more there was to shoot, how long it would take, how much it would cost—exactly where he still planned to go and how far he wanted to take them. When he evaded these questions, someone pointed out that the big scenes, ones that would have to be shot either on a studio lot or in Paris, had not even begun to be filmed.

  He felt it all unraveling; he saw himself losing everything. He knew only one thing and that was he couldn’t lose his picture, he would do anything to save it. He told all of them he would raise the money, and then he wired Pathé begging for another six months and the money for the big scenes: he offered to let them see what he had so far if that would placate them. He received no answer from Pathé. He wrote Avril. He received no answer from Avril. He wired every other studio in Paris, and failing to receive answers from them he wired studios in Berlin and Rome. He received wires from them expressing interest in Marat and wishing Adolphe the best; but alas, no money. He wired Griffith in America. Griffith wired back that he remembered Adolphe’s picture vividly, that he had awakened many mornings after seeing it with the picture’s faces in his mind; he hoped Adolphe would finish the picture, he hoped Adolphe didn’t mind Orphans of the Storm, Griffith’s own film of the French Revolution; but, said Griffith, he was having his own problems, making a picture now about the American Revolution, and Griffith could offer only the observation (meant, perhaps, to be ironic) that since he had had such success with the French Revolution, perhaps the French director would have better luck with the American Revolution than the American director was having now.

  And in the course of this, Adolphe avoided Janine, looking at her longingly and with resentment, which she took to be his frustration over her new pregnancy.

  One long black night Adolphe took the train to Paris.

  Nothing about Jean-Thomas’ manner had changed at all; still courteous and charming, he was not smug or gloating. There were things Varnette had to understand, said Adolphe; and Varnette listened calmly. I need Janine in order to finish this picture, said Adolphe. Without her there is no picture; without the picture there is no agreement to be made. So you would have to give me the money now, with the understanding that I would turn her over to you when her role is finished. I cannot be held accountable should she leave you again, Adolphe went on; you’ll have to be responsible for keeping her once you’ve gotten her. Finally, she’s pregnant. It’s my child. We already have a son. I would like the boy sent to me when he’s fifteen years old.

  Varnette listened intently and then pulled from the drawer his checkbook. You’ll have to finish filming Janine’s part immediately, he said. How soon can you do it? It’s hard to say, Adolphe answered. I’ll give you funds for the next six months, said Varnette, as well as arrange for a studio lot in Paris. We can begin work constructing the sets for the scenes you need to do here. I have to build a Bastille, said Adolphe. A huge Bastille, bigger than life, one that towers over the people in the streets, one that seems larger than it actually is. It must have very long spires, and very deep cells, and it must remind a person how trapped he can feel.

  The following day the Paris newspapers announced that a private French corporation had agreed to finance the completion of the picture, and that in exactly one year and one day, the Paris Opéra would premiere La Mort de Marat vue par Adolphe Sarre. Two days after that story appeared, appeared another, reporting that the uncompleted film had screened to an artists’ club in Montparnasse attended by the cream of Paris’s cultural vanguard, and the reception had been astounding; film makers and writers and visualists of various media were quoted as saying Adolphe was making the greatest film ever, one that would catapult film decades forward much as Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had done. Sarre, the newspapers stated, returned to Wyndeaux in triumph.

  In triumph, he sat on the train like a dead man, staring out the window into the dark. From the station he walked back to the hotel alone, in the early hours of the morning, to find Janine waiting up for him. She threw her arms around him when he arrived. She curled herself up next to him and pressed her face against his chest. They went to bed and later in the night he got up to sit in the window, in the corner of the room, pulling his coat around him. He stared at the walls, watching in his mind the images he’d shown the artists of Montparnasse; and when those images ran out he watched the ones he knew he would film next. The siege of the Bastille, the execution of Louis the king and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, dogs licking the faces that dropped from the guillotine to the ground below. When he saw the hanging bodies of the September Massacre, he knew every body would have to be Charlotte Corday’s; from the window of the hotel he saw the small dangling bodies in all the other windows of the vill
age. There in the room he concocted more elaborate techniques for his picture. He split the frames in two, three parts, then nine, then twelve; he considered altering the entire film to give it a three-dimensional effect, which he knew he could do, since he had discovered long before that dimension was only another illusion, that everything was flat after all. As the film progressed toward an end, it would swing farther and farther in its shifts between extreme close-ups of faces and epic vistas of history, until the rhythm was intolerable.

  As the days went by he began adding to the script more scenes for Charlotte, to the confusion of his cast and crew; the joke circulating the company was that the film would be renamed La Mort de Charlotte. A month went by and then two, and he began receiving wires from Varnette. I need her a while longer, Adolphe would reply; and when another two months passed the wires became more impatient, threatening. The company began to have the feeling Adolphe was stalling. Meanwhile, her pregnancy notwithstanding, he took to making love to Janine more violently; and one night she realized a camera was running just inches from her face as they did it. I trust you, Adolphe, she kept saying, clinging to him; and he said to her, looking at the ecstasy of her expression, That is the look I want, for the moment when you murder Marat.

  That was the scene they shot over and over. Two more months passed, and now there was no more time: the wires from Varnette were ominous: the Bastille set was ready and he wouldn’t commit any more money without the return of the girl: he accused Adolphe, accurately, of prolonging the completion of the deal. Moreover, Janine was now visibly pregnant at six months; the murder scene would have to be shot in extreme darks and lights, and another week or two it would be impossible to hide her condition without shooting everything from the neck up, which just wouldn’t do, since murder is an act of the body, or at least the hands. All day Touraine sat in the bathtub, head wrapped in a towel. Repeatedly Adolphe called his stagehands to bring more hot water, since he wanted to catch the steam rising from the bath. Repeatedly Adolphe ran Janine through the scene, demanding more of her, turning the scene more and more violent until by the twentieth take she was beginning to break down. You murder so gracefully, Adolphe hissed at her; I know you’re not really so meek. Repeatedly she poised herself above Touraine and raised the knife; repeatedly Adolphe called upon her to invest in the act something strange and more twisted. Finally he decided Charlotte should kiss Marat first; he even considered having Charlotte make love to him in the bath. Someone suggested to Adolphe that it probably didn’t happen that way; Adolphe replied he wasn’t concerned with the “accepted view” of history. History was his and it was what Adolphe said it was; and if he determined that Charlotte raped Marat in the bathtub before murdering him, then that was how it happened. When someone else on the set said perhaps this would seem a bit melodramatic, Adolphe exploded, screaming that, all right, Charlotte would not rape Marat, Charlotte would not kiss Marat, but Charlotte must kill Marat with more passion than Janine was giving the scene; and he showed her as she began to cry: he placed the knife in her hands and brought it high above her head, and brought it down aimed for his own chest. And only at the last moment did she pull back the knife, her wide eyes fixed on him, all the crew fixed on him—there was an audible gasp when he brought the knife in her hands toward his own chest, like the gasp that greets a man who has wavered and nearly fallen from a tightrope, very high up.

  They finished the scene and he stumbled out like the dead man who had ridden the train from Paris; that night the crew celebrated the end of its work in Wyndeaux, while Adolphe sat saying nothing, talking to no one. Janine sat by him, watching his face. Finally, after she had asked what was wrong too many times for him to bear, he took her hand and they walked down the wharf up to the hotel where he told her to pack. We’ll go to Venice tonight, he said, together; we’ll spend a few days by ourselves and then you can remain there while I finish the picture in Paris, and I’ll return to you. Excitedly she packed her things and dressed Jacques. It was only when he was pulling her and their son down the street that she realized he hadn’t packed anything; he kept looking for a light. A light off a window, or by a street, or from the moon. One light close at hand through which the two of them could run and never come back. But there was no light, only the blue, and then the train station. Varnette was waiting.

  She didn’t see him there with his henchmen until they were only feet away; and then her mouth opened and she caught a small cry with her hand. She looked at Adolphe, incredulous, and then back at Varnette, in his long beige coat, staring at her. Adolphe, she said. She took her hand from her mouth and put it on his neck. Adolphe, she begged.

  He stopped. His face was convulsed and hot. He was breathing heavily, never looking at her but looking ahead. “You laughed,” he finally said. “You laughed that night.”

  She looked in his eyes, trying to get him to look at her. “What night,” she murmured.

  “The night he had you. That night in Number Seventeen.”

  For the life of her, she could not remember. She could only remember being in a kind of shock, and if she laughed it was hysteria; but she could not remember.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What does it matter. Whether you’re with this brother or that brother.”

  She narrowed her eyes, searching his. “Brother?” she said. She looked over her shoulder at Varnette, and then back at him. “Brother?” Adolphe stared at her blankly. She said, “You’re not my brother. Did you think she was your mother? She wasn’t your mother. Your mother left you by the Seine. No one ever knew your mother.”

  He just looked at her. He began to form a question on his lips, his eyes began to register what she’d said, when the two men came and took her and the child. They pulled them away from him, and then Adolphe looked past them to Varnette and the private car behind him. Varnette barely glanced at Janine. Janine continued to watch Adolphe, beseeching him. Varnette smiled a small smile and licked his lips. “I will finalize our financial arrangement tomorrow, monsieur,” he said. He turned slightly, and then added, “For a man who doesn’t believe in slaves, you’ve done rather well. Particularly considering that, when was it, five years ago? You nearly killed me for her.” The two men pulled Janine aboard and then Varnette followed; and as the train pulled out of Wyndeaux, Adolphe Sarre heard her calling him from far down the tracks.

  He continued to stand there long after the train was gone. At dawn he left the station. He walked back the same streets he had come. He couldn’t be sure whether what he saw was the same blue light or the break of day. All the windows where he had looked before were black and dull, and he couldn’t bring himself to look in the faces of those who were already out and about. Nobody called to him as he walked past, though everyone in the village knew him; in a stupor he seemed to stumble into things on his way to the water, past the gates of the city, the vines of the walls hanging in the archways and brushing his forehead as he rushed forward. He passed the cafés and bars. Finally, when the sun should have been breaking over the woods behind him, when the wind brought the smell of the vineyards kilometers away mixing with the smell of the ocean salt, he came to the wharf’s edge, amidst the houseboats docked in rows and the bridges that linked with the land. He stopped and stared to the west and the overcast sky that had the flat tone of metal. At that moment he was thinking of when he was a boy living in Number Seventeen, and the early hours like these when he would prowl the house, lurking around the slumbering courtesans, and how by the doorway he always heard the sound of the falling blocks from the ice truck in the street. He waited for the light of the sun to blister the water. Staring at the water, he waited for one splash of blinding light on the surface. At that moment, when he saw that light, then he would dive through once and for all. If, at the close of the war, he had decided there was no point in going beyond what he saw, if he’d decided what was behind the screen was no different from what was before it, he nevertheless believed now that it couldn’t be more terrible, it couldn’t m
ake him feel more detestable, because at least the barbarism would not be his own; and perhaps, in leaping from the dock, his arms pointed sharply in front of him, and in slowly gliding through to the other side, he would emerge as nothing, as though he never existed—which was all that he wanted right now. He stood there waiting for it to open up to him but it did not. There was no light on the water. There was only, curiously, his own reflection; he saw himself standing on the deck of one of the houseboats. When he looked up he saw himself, in a blue and white striped sailor’s shirt, open the door of the boat’s cabin, and disappear inside.

  One morning in Montreal, a small boy named Fletcher Grahame was staring at the Saint Lawrence River from the study window when his father accidentally fired the flintlock. The antique gun went off right behind his head. As the sound rose in his ears to become the sound he would hear off and on the rest of his life, the roar of the river matched that sound and the two became inseparable for him; long after that he would hear the crack of the flintlock whenever he gazed too long at the water’s ongoing flow. At that particular moment Fletcher turned to see himself in the mirrored panel of the room’s corner, and the way his face formed a series of anguished concentric circles that became more constricted as the sound grew more unbearable. He was not to forget the way he looked then. Moreover, all the expressions of all the people in his father’s paintings, propped in easels around the room, transformed with the boy’s own expression, until it was clear to the boy (he was a serious boy, not fanciful or irrational) that the flintlock’s report had seared all of them; all the faces in all the paintings looked as though they couldn’t stand the ringing in their ears. His father just stood there in the red coat he always wore when he painted or thought of himself as a painter, staring at the hot gun in his hand as though a ghost had spoken to him. A huge hole smoked in the upper wall, torn by the blast of a pistol that had not been fired in a hundred years. Fletcher’s father set the gun back on the shelf and backed away from it, expecting the epiphany to simply vanish; and when he saw the expression on his son’s face he began to sob with the child, out of horror as plaster fell from the wall’s wound.