Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [HELPRIN, MARK]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781468314779
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Jacqueline’s Photograph

THOUGH OFTEN DIVERTED as the streets connected and meandered, Jules went on foot all the way west to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, dreading the moment he would arrive home, except that he knew the many hours of walking would make sleep easy when otherwise it would have been impossible. Were he not continually moving through fresh air and light he would have no escape from fear and despair, as only the walking put off his nausea and helplessness.

Months before, as if the war there were not enough, huge mudslides had made whole villages in Afghanistan disappear in a trice. It was the kind of thing, like ferry sinkings, that appears regularly in the newspapers, eliciting a second or two of abstract sympathy before the reader goes on to news of sports, business, and celebrity. Grief for one person is almost unbearable. Grief for hundreds or thousands is beyond the capacity of the emotions. So such things glance only briefly against them before they migrate to the faculty of reason.

But in May, just after the mudslides, the newspapers published a picture of an Afghan woman – her entire family, her house, her village, as the newspaper said, “lost to the earth.” God knows how many infants and grown sons and daughters had already been taken from this woman, and now she had nothing. She was pictured kneeling on endless bare ground with not a feature left where once had been the village where her life had unfurled. She was dressed in red and purple flowing around her in profusion, hiding everything but her face.

Because her skin was as cured, brown, and creased as old leather boots, it was impossible to tell if she were thirty-five or ninety. Beneath her left arm she cradled what a Westerner might have thought were bath mats. Upon closer inspection, Jules realized that they were enormous flatbreads, all that was left to her. Where would she go? How would she live? You could tell from her expression, particularly from her eyes, that she expected not to live. Jules understood only too well that this was the ever-present foundation upon which rests all that is done to remain above it.

As he neared home he found that, despite the walking, nausea finally overtook him in direct proportion to the fading of his hope. What if François, like Iago, had hated him all along, and Jacqueline was innocent? This proposition, which he excitedly presented to himself, brought no relief. Was François justly punishing him for having fallen in love with Élodi? Or was François projecting upon Jacqueline his own promiscuity and transgressions – of which she would be innocent.

Or was Jacqueline, in what Dante would have called “her second age,” when she had risen from flesh to spirit, reprimanding him for having turned away as if he thought that, her mortal life finished, her good had died with her? That we can merely sense the soul and prove it only by beauty and indirection allows it the possibility of life when all the things that can be proved are gone, and now it seemed that they were.

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