You return to your mother when she calls for you, and she bends down and inspects your shoes. Then she lifts you, a squirming five-year-old…taking in, as mothers do, the measure of you in this moment, the heft of you in her arms.

  * * *

  —

  In Ovid’s poem, the version of himself that Narcissus falls in love with is both insubstantial—‘a mere shadow’—and a real entity with all the qualities of a self. Narcissus sees himself, his true self, outside of his own body. Those of us who have come through these last few months also know what it is to fracture. One day you live in the familiar world and the next you are carrying your meagre allotment of things and the landscape is changing and your legs are heavy as stone, and you are squatting to shit on the side of the road next to a mattress and a jumble of clothes someone tipped off their cart weeks ago. And then you are walking up to a farmhouse outside a village where all the men have fled and the women are wide-eyed and fearful. And in this spate of days and weeks, the old life becomes the dream. Neither is more real than the other, except that one is the above-water version, and the other has been pulled under—one is the face of a man who no longer recognizes himself; the other is the face of a man submerged.

  Bernard and I left the country house near Gien a few hours after the girl was shot. When no one came for the chickens or for us, we snuck out a secondary door on the far side of the house nearest the shed and the barn. We thought that if we could get the bikes from the shed, we could walk them to the woods after dusk and then ride out onto the road. The house no longer felt safe. I went first, moving across the yard, avoiding the sight of the girl, clasping my briefcase in my arms. I told Bernard to wait. In the shed, I took the woman’s bike and wheeled it to the barn. This was the span of space where I expected a bullet would kill me. The stench in the barn was shocking. There were six horse stalls along the wall and no horses visible. They had probably been shot, or died of thirst or hunger if no one had time to free them. A swarm of flies buzzed violently. I turned and saw Bernard standing behind me with the man’s bike. He retched at the smell and a semblance of the eggs he’d had for lunch slopped onto his knees. I covered my nose with the palm of my hand. It must have been around five or six p.m.—ludicrous shafts of afternoon sunlight came in through the barn’s doors, some of the flies buzzing up and down in its vents. I saw the brown shoes first, then his trousers and grey sweater stretched at the neck; and her swollen legs, her skirt resting above her knees, her blue blouse torn. There were bullet holes in their foreheads: her hair matted, his beard thick with blood. He was staring straight out the stall door, and our eyes almost met as they had when I’d stared through the glass at his family photograph. The dark-haired boy was huddled in the corner, in a knit vest and navy trousers, his face against the stall wall. The blood on his back was black and tarry. What had this family done? Refused the Germans entry? Refused to open their house up? Some small act of protest? Or maybe they’d tried to run.

  How long would I have stayed there, looking, if Bernard had not yanked my arm, pulled me back into the world we were moving through? I had slept in this boy’s bed, pressed my face into his pillow. I had worn this man’s coat, taken his unoffered hospitality. I had run my finger over the spines of his books, eaten the preserves this woman had made. I had waltzed and laughed in their living room. I had a thought, then—a certainty: that what I had seen would create inside me another person…that the man who would soon exit the barn and walk toward the woods would not be the same man who’d entered it.

  * * *

  WHEN I ENTER SUZANNE AND Bernard’s room, Bernard is standing by their basin washing his hands, an empty breakfast plate beside him. Suzanne tells me she wants to follow Philippe’s advice and bribe Estévez, even though we agree that Estévez has given no indication that he’s susceptible. It’s a move in a game of chess—a game where we always seem to be outwitted. Bernard says we should go along with Philippe’s suggestion—‘What do we have to lose?’—and so he casts his lot in with Suzanne and the money being lent to us. Suzanne is wearing her brown dress. She has softened her hair and applied lipstick. She could be any woman on the streets of Paris before the war, except for the fact that she’s carrying a belt of money around her waist.

  ‘I think it’s best if I meet Estévez alone.’ She smiles as she says this, but her expression is fragile and only serves to make her appear more vulnerable.

  ‘Don’t—’ Bernard says, but can’t voice the rest of it. I know he is remembering how Estévez looked at her, like a pig at a trough.

  ‘The money is enough,’ Suzanne assures us, and she smiles again and pulls on a pair of leather gloves I’d forgotten she had. Gloves that transport me to more civilized times, to my mother leaving for dinners, to my aunt at the end of my twelfth birthday dinner buttoning up each loop along her wrist before stepping outside, to Salomé one night in winter shuddering in a cab because her hands were so cold and allowing me to slide my woollen gloves over her pale fingers.

  And so we let Suzanne do it. It’s daytime, after all: a day with the absurdity of sky and beach and families walking around on a Sunday, and the church opening its doors.

  From the balcony, Bernard and I watch Suzanne walk down the passeig. We see Alejandro’s cap, how he waves at her and the cabo who has come for her. The bay is sparkling, though the sea beyond the headlands is choppy, dark blue. Bernard disappears into the closet and comes back with a bottle of Spanish brandy. The look of surprise on my face clearly delights him. ‘It’s helping with my congestion,’ he says.

  ‘Alejandro?’ I ask.

  ‘The widow,’ he replies. ‘Though she’s a better haggler than you’d think.’

  I take two chairs and move them toward the balcony while Bernard plucks the cork out of the bottle and pours two measures of brandy into the water glasses on his nightstand. When he sits down he says, ‘Try not to think about it. Suzanne’s smart. And she’s done better than most.’

  I try to think of ‘the most’ to whom he’s referring. The woman in the chateau south of the Loire? The one who fed the Germans lunch when they came knocking, and whom he’d painted using her son’s watercolours?

  ‘What does a man like Estévez want?’ Bernard asks. He crosses his ankles and my gaze falls onto his scuffed shoes. ‘Money or power?’

  I laugh half-heartedly. ‘You don’t think that these two things are the same?’

  We talk about Olivier. The fact that visas from Marseilles were cancelled could mean the Germans know that someone is forging visas there, forging every document—for Olivier had managed, through a contact in the Vichy government, to get copies of almost every new form the Germans invented. In his studio there were safe-conduct passes, transit visas, exit visas—all of them used as sparingly as possible and only in the direst situations. He even had a prescription pad, so that medicine could be procured from any pharmacy still operating; he did everything, it seemed, but passports.

  ‘A man like Estévez wants Olivier,’ I say. Estévez is, after all, the Commissioner of Information—a man stuffed between a desk and chair in Madrid, and a man who must occasionally rouse himself to come up to the border areas in a show of solidarity with his German guests. What does Estévez care about émigrés or refugees coming out of France if they keep going all the way to the ports of Lisbon? He has his own problems here, he is still sweeping up his own messes. He strikes me as a man who likes money and food and women, who likes the way other men look at the sleek lines of his automobile when it pulls up to a restaurant, who enjoys how his coat hangs off his shoulders as the driver opens his door.

  ‘But does he want Olivier more than the money Suzanne’s offering him?’ Bernard asks.

  This is a question neither of us can answer.

  While we wait for Suzanne, we talk about Paris. Now that Bernard thinks he is about to move forward—or at least go back to France in order to try this manoeuvre again—he’s nostalgic: he reminisces about the dancer he liked to watch at Le Gerny, the weeks he spent painting at the slaughterhouses at La Villette. He’s thinking, it seems, mostly of subjects for his work. This annoys me.

  ‘What would you miss most?’ I ask.

  He raises his chin.

  ‘On this earth, I mean.’ I gesture to the swath of sea and sky before us.

  He takes a swig of brandy. ‘Kissing, I think.’ Then he laughs. ‘Do you remember your first? How it felt? My first was—’ He stops and leans forward, remembering it. ‘Do you know this painting called L’Apparition? It was going around Paris three or four years ago? In it there’s a man, a painter, dressed in rich colours, his little foot on a precious stool as he paints…and over his shoulder this angel has appeared, all muscle and feather on a cloud. And everyone who sees this painting—even your Salomé, as I recall—thinks it’s about art and holy visions…but I saw the painting and I thought, no, that artist is looking at the angel’s massive cock. Well, my first kiss was like that, like some sort of bodily revelation.’

  Bernard stands up and takes a cigarette from the bedside table. I can’t see how many he has left. ‘And you, professor? What would you miss most?’

  It’s strange, this question, because I feel like I should have already tread these thoughts—but I haven’t. I have sensed my own death so palpably, felt it walk with me since yesterday, or the day before, perhaps even since the farmhouse near Gien, yet now I feel that all the answers I could construct, all the memories that grounded me, are insubstantial—like bridges one can no longer cross. And so, to cover my embarrassment, I describe a day trip: walking up to a medieval hilltop town from an Italian lake. The surprise of the exertion. In my telling, I’m a young man—in my thirties—arriving at the edge of the town just as dusk is settling. I joke about the want of nothing more than a good bed. But under my narration, I’m thinking of what it means to be loved. To love. Under my description of the blanket of stars and the hotel owner of La Terrazza naming a price that gave me no pause on account of my flagging legs, I am thinking that no experience in this world matches being seen by someone who loves you, and that this, these exquisite moments, are what I’ll miss. Just as I feel this fully, I stop talking, and Bernard reaches out and grabs my hand.

  I stand up, light-headed. I see that Bernard has smoked his last cigarette—a gesture that seems both defiant and optimistic. He does look stronger today. For the first time I notice a hint of his curls coming back, and this makes me happy. Under his breath he is humming a song I don’t recognize. Despite everything, he looks like a man at ease. When I think back on all my years in Paris, all the weekly gatherings at the café, Bernard does not figure as largely in my memory as he should. He was on the outside of the circle. He was the one who would appear out of nowhere, bringing an extravagance: the invitation to Salomé’s in Vienna, a ticket for a play, a day at the races where, flush from some commission, he paid for all of his friends’ bets. I tried to talk to him once, on the road out of Paris, about Narcissus. This was back when I was fooling myself into thinking Narcissus was a small part of my work on the Metamorphoses and not, somehow, the central thing. Bernard listened politely, which was typical of his disposition, though I don’t think he understood me. Perhaps it’s because he’s a painter. In his work, transformation is a given: the one who sits for their portrait becomes the one who looks out through the paint. But I’m starting to think that this notion of transformation is too simple. Too simple because transformation requires a then and a now; a linear understanding. Some might say we are moving forward but I would say we have regressed—we have gone back to the place we have been before, we are standing again at the foot of our own barbarity, our wreckage. Where Bernard and Suzanne see a chain of events, see possibility, I see the same repeating catastrophe: the violence behind us, the violence yet to come. I would like to do something about this, but I find myself helpless. I am caught up in the swell of an idea: that I do not want to live to see the things I think others will see.

  Still, I believe that small gestures matter. This is why I go back again and again to my pen and paper; to you, Pia. And it is why I have tried to look with such attention at the world—yes, to find something, or someone, to save me; but also to find someone, or something, I can save.

  I walk over to the basin by the wall and take Suzanne and Bernard’s jug in my hands. I ask Bernard if I can borrow it to wash up. He says, ‘Of course.’

  In the washroom closet down the hall I splash my face and rinse the jug and fill it with water from the tap. I squint in the little square mirror hanging from a hook above the sink and I see the heavy circles under my eyes, the folds of my flesh, the pallor of a man who is ill. I picture Suzanne with her skirt up around her hips and Estévez behind her thrusting and then I shake the image from my head, close the door and go back to my room.

  * * *

  PIA, THERE’S ONE MORE version of the Narcissus fable I’ve been turning over in my mind. It was translated from Greek into French by an abbess in the twelfth century. It’s called the Mytilene manuscript, and it tells of Narcissus’s mother, Liriope, a nymph who was taken forcefully by the river god Cephisus. A god who ‘wrapped her in his powerful stream, imprisoned her in his currents and ravished her forcefully.’ This is rape. And it means that Narcissus was a child born of violence.

  Echo is considered more wholly in this version, too. We are reminded she once had a body and a voice and that she could speak as she liked about the world. The Mytilene manuscript suggests that not being able to state how you feel or what you see is a kind of torture.

  There is one more distinction in this version. The Mytilene manuscript, rather than show Narcissus wither, has him take his own life.

  Within a spring; he wept for his beauty.

  Then the boy shed his blood and gave it to the earth…to bear.

  The tablets have no taste, almost no residue, which makes me worry they won’t do the work I want them to do. I ask myself to name this work, and the word that comes to mind is erasure. All morning I’ve flirted with the idea that I’m not human anymore—that if I try to report what I’ve seen, the path that lies ahead, I’d choke on the words as my mouth tried to form them. I think of the blind seer Tiresias prophesying of Narcissus, He will live a long life as long as he doesn’t come to know himself. I take off my shoes and I feel my vacancy. I loosen the top button on my shirt and I feel my vacancy. I picture my cousin Leonie, her white breasts and pert nipples, the mouse I bashed with a log, my brother with his mouth slung open after being spoon-fed, Salomé straddling me on her blue sofa, the dead girl amongst the chickens; I picture the father, mother and the little boy in the stall out back of their house, and I feel my vacancy. It’s like being impossibly empty and impossibly full at the same time.

  My briefcase and my money are in the closet with a note for Bernard. I will not apologize. Perhaps he’ll take the work that I’ve been doing on Ovid and make something of it, place it in the right hands. But if my ideas are lost, so be it.

  If anything, I regret not having a new thought about bridges and forms—which my thesis adviser demanded of me. I tried. For a while I thought I had it—the idea of signifying things, material stories, how the past abides in traces—how the wear on the stone steps of one bridge gathers the soles of a century. But when I left Paris these thoughts receded, and other concerns came to the fore, and it felt quaint to imagine that in some other life of mine I’d stood in wonderment before a piece of architecture. But how else do we remember? Even our stories are stuffed with things.

  What I now think I have missed is the idea of time welling around and through those things we use to order the world—the bridge that brings order to space, that brings a geometry of relief to two verges of land while also holding time, making time—even the gap between you and me, Pia—perceptible.

  I was told to expect hallucinations. And slowly, even with my eyes closed, they come. The square of light from the balcony becomes a sky through which a bird flies. And the shadow by the closet becomes the doctor who gave me the pills, though he refuses to come toward me. The bed is a boat lightly bounding on a sea. I hear a knock on the door and even though I know it’s a fleeting figment I say, to whoever is out there, ‘Come in.’

  And then, in the corner of the room: a girl in a tree, laughing! Then a wave of warmth that is Salomé, and then another, more innocent one, that is my mother. I reach out to touch her sad face. Then suddenly I am in Saint-Germain at the café and having great ideas and these ideas are like sparks in my brain and someone has ordered a wine I haven’t tried—a Baron Philippe de Rothschild!—and I’m really tasting it: the degree of sun on the grapevines, how it was garrotted, the soil of the valley it came from, the trace of spice and pepper on its dark fruit like a ghostly outline. And here is Gaston looking at my face as if I take everything too seriously…and again I see him walk across the street to pick up a napkin that the wind has sent to the nearby hedge, how as he comes back to us he’s waving that white flag overhead. And I see you, Pia, with your pert, smart face. You as a girl and you as a woman. And even though I’m alone I feel strangely held by you, through the far side of the mirror, as if you’re saying I will see you to the last.