The Same River Twice (2 page)

Odile hadn’t considered herself committed to this trip until Thierry received their train tickets from the American, an hour before departure, and in her rush to reach the Gare du Nord a number of practical matters had gone untended. In particular, she’d failed to get a phone call through to her husband, Max, who was in New York visiting his daughter from his first marriage. After trying twice to phone him from Paris, she realized that her return ticket would get her home before Max anyway, and she set aside the idea of the call without ever quite meaning to abandon it. This lapse now unnerved her. Although it was not their habit to give daily account of themselves, Odile was troubled by her negligence, and she wondered what it might portend. At a time like this, she told herself, I can’t take anything for granted.

She woke hours later to the sound of Russian voices raised in song. When she switched on her reading lamp, she saw that Thierry’s berth was undisturbed, and after a moment’s thought she got up and left the compartment.

Their dinner companion had succeeded in spending his rubles at the Smolensk station and now, at one end of the carriage, spilling into the corridor, a party was in progress. Open cases of vodka and Georgian champagne, jars of Caspian caviar, smoked sturgeon in folds of brown paper: the boy had resolved that if he was to arrive in Paris destitute he might as well make the most of it. Half a dozen passengers had joined him in a mood of dutiful excess.

She found Thierry sequestered between cars, a champagne bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other. There was a glow about him, a halation that went beyond the ordinary flush of someone drinking alone on a homebound train. Fleetingly, Odile was confused. This very scene, she realized, had played out before her eyes on some other occasion, in some other place.

“Do you know,” asked Thierry, “what they say here about someone who goes after things methodically, searching out the facts one by one?”

She accepted the bottle he offered and took a cautious sip. Her sense of déjà vu, if that’s what it was, shimmered out.

“They say, ‘He stalks the shit, but not the bear.’” Thierry nodded gravely. “The shit, but not the bear. This is incredible.”

Though realizing that he was less than sober, she put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as the train lurched violently to one side. “Come back to the compartment with me, Thierry. It’s late.”

“Ah, Odile.” His gaze settled on hers, amusement flitting across his thin features. “Tell me, did you ever get through to your husband?”

“Yes, yes. Everything’s fine.” The ease with which she produced this lie troubled her, but she couldn’t think about it now. “Thierry, please. Come get some sleep.”

“He’s jealous, of course. I expected that.”

Odile rolled her eyes but said nothing. Outside, fifteen feet away on a parallel track, the Moscow-bound train roared by, its horn blaring in a Doppler slur, and for several seconds the din engulfed them.

When next he could make himself heard, Thierry said, “About customs, Odile. I’ve been thinking: why put us both at risk?”

She stared at him. “What happened to
merci, bon voyage
, we’re on our way?”

“All that still holds. I have total faith in whatever has been set up, okay? But if there are other precautions one can take …”

Watching him raise the bottle to his lips, she began to doubt that it was his first. “I’m listening,” she said.

“When we fill out the customs declarations, why not have one of us claim all five bags, the other just personal effects. We tell them we are traveling separately, for baggage inspection we split up. So in the event—the very unlikely event—that something goes wrong, they have only one of us to execute.”

Odile flared her lips unhappily. “This is new. I don’t like it.”

“If you don’t like it, we won’t do it. But you do see the logic?”

“No,” she said. “Which one of us claims the bags?”

His eyebrows raised, Thierry drew deeply on his cigarette and flipped it away. “Obviously a man is better suited to the situation, so by good sense and natural law I am selected.”

She had to conceal her surprise. Five days with him had led her to the opinion that Thierry rarely strayed far from the precincts of self-interest.
Where he could, she believed, he avoided his share of hazard, and Odile now grew wary of both him and his proposal. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Are you going to get all the money, too, since you’re taking all the risk?”

“Don’t insult the hero, my dear. Duty requires concentration.” He seemed to be taunting her, and laughed. The train slid into a curve that sent him staggering, but he caught himself on the handrail. “We’ll split the money as before, naturally.”

“Macho posturing. That’s all this is.”

“I told you: if you don’t like it, we won’t do it.” Bracing himself against the door to the next carriage, he suddenly grew formal. “Now,” he said, “a toast.”

“No more toasts, Thierry. Come on.”

“To the bear!” he proposed, lifting his bottle to her. “To the bear and not the shit!”

In the end, Odile had to enlist the help of the Russian vocalists in getting him back to the cabin, where, with a final declamatory snort, he toppled onto his couchette and passed decisively from consciousness.

THE TRAIN MADE STOPS
irregularly throughout the rest of the night, sometimes at stations attached to towns but also at others set seemingly alone amid low, rolling hills. Later the terrain flattened out into floodplain laced with streams, luminous in moonlight, and later still the plain gave way to marshland.

At daybreak, wide awake in her seat by the window, Odile washed her face with bottled water, brushed her hair and pinned it up. Watching Thierry sleep made her own wakefulness painfully acute, and she examined him now with the pinpoint attention of someone given only minutes to construct a life-saving device from common kitchen utensils. In fact, her husband’s first feature film contained exactly such a scene, flashes of which now fired off unbidden in her mind. Her earlier episode of déjà vu, riding between cars with Thierry, had left her unpleasantly quickened.

When the train entered the outskirts of Brest, she woke him up. He was wretched and poisoned, ill-disposed to talk. She put on lipstick and perfume. He changed his socks. Ten minutes later they rolled to a grinding stop at the Brest station, just a river’s width from Poland, and they descended with their bags and all their fellow passengers into the frigid morning.

Built in the Stalinist style of the 1950s, the station was more mausoleum
than depot, with a big arched entryway and a cavernous hall into which they now passed unspeaking. Here was ruin. The chandeliers that had once lit the hall today hung twisted and dark from the blistered ceiling. Plaster peeled away from the walls in sheets, doorways were boarded up. But as their eyes adjusted to the dim light, Odile and Thierry saw that the hall also held a large crowd of would-be passengers, elbowing one another and pushing forward in quiet struggle while militiamen with pistols looked on.

“Stay here with the bags,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He shook his head in disgust and seated himself on the suitcases, now grouped in shadow just inside the hall.

Edging into the crowd, Odile was surprised and then dismayed by the vehemence with which these people besieged the ticket window. When she saw the object of their maneuverings—a lone gray-haired woman writing out each ticket by hand—she changed course, cutting across the throng to enter an adjacent hall, as large and dim as the first.

Here two lines of passengers waited mutely before tables on which X-ray machines sat idle for want of electricity. These were the customs officers’ stations. Behind one, a uniformed man sat reading a newspaper; behind the other, his colleague stared off into space. They were waiting to be relieved, and neither gave any sign of noticing Odile as she took two declaration forms from a third table and started back.

In her absence, Thierry had willed himself to life and with unsound energy was loading the suitcases onto a flat-bed trolley. Odile had no idea what he hoped to gain by claiming them as his own at customs.

“Listen, Thierry,” she said as he heaved the last of the bags into place, “it would really be much better if I were the one to take them through.”

He blinked, said nothing.

“A woman attracts less suspicion, especially when the inspectors are men. And of course there’s always the insultingly simple male ego to work with.”

A smile flickered across his face and was gone. “We could flip a coin.”

“No need. I’ve already made up my mind.”

He seemed about to protest but instead gave her a long, appraising look that made her flush. In the end he shrugged. “If you like,” he said.

They filled out their customs forms accordingly. She took the trolley, and they split up without ado. Just as she was about to plunge into the crowd, some stray instinct made her look back over her shoulder. Thierry was smiling a real smile then, a private smile marking a private victory.

She would have plenty of time to think about it.

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, two days ahead of schedule, Max Colby flew into Charles de Gaulle. The visit with his daughter had not gone smoothly, and a project of his, now come unexpectedly to crisis, required his attention at home.

He took the RER into town, sharing a car near the back of the train with some Algerian youths. None of them was older than fourteen, and they were dressed international style, in baggy pants, logo warm-up jackets, and loose-laced sneakers. Glancing at Max uneasily, the oldest-looking boy produced a plastic freezer bag. One of his friends squeezed a tube of rubber cement into it. As they passed the bag around, each fitting it over his nose and mouth for a couple of breaths, the boys grew animated. Their lustrous eyes were the color of ripe olives.

From the Gare du Nord, Max took the métro under the Seine and southeast to the thirteenth arrondissement, where he and Odile lived in a small pocket of winding streets and cul-de-sacs that had inexplicably escaped urban renewal’s clean sweep of the area in the 1950s and ’60s. Made with materials recycled from the Paris Expo of 1900, their building was a two-and-a-half-story mews, laid out so that twelve ground-floor studios, each with an interior staircase leading to living quarters above, faced one another across a narrow cobblestone courtyard, at either end of which stood century-old chestnut and maple trees. Designed as low-income housing for artisans and artists, the mews remained a modest place, with
almost half the studios retaining their original dirt floors. Max and Odile rented two lightly renovated units on opposite sides and ends of the cobblestone walk. They lived together in one of them; in the other Max maintained a film studio. Inexpensive though this arrangement was, they sometimes had trouble paying the rent.

“Odile?” he called once he let himself in. Upstairs, the bathtub faucet was running full force.

Most of the ground floor was set up as a workspace for Odile, who designed clothes for a limited but adventurous clientele. She worked alone by preference, doing all the sewing herself, and sometimes months elapsed between completed designs.

As he climbed the stairs Max called out to her again, but the pounding sound of water continued unabated. In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of vegetable juice and flipped through his mail, absurdly hoping that a note from his daughter—some conciliatory token—had managed to precede him across the Atlantic. His visit had been an ordeal for them both. Adolescence had lately descended on Allegra like a malevolent wind, stripping her of her childish clarities and swathing her instead in furious black silences that he was not invited to understand. She avoided his eyes, shrank from his touch, and found excuses to remove herself from his company. Toward the end of his stay, when he asked her to a friend’s screening, she’d actually stomped her foot at him in rage. “Movies are just another kind of
lie
!” she had shrieked, shocking him thoroughly. He had always been truthful with her about the divorce. It shamed and angered him now to have imagined that the truth alone would suffice.

The water in the bathroom stopped. Max stood by the window skimming the previous day’s
Le Monde
for stray items of the sort that sometimes ended up in his films—a butterfly scourge in the Dordogne, a ballerina poisoned by her dentist, illegal immigrants arriving by parcel post—but today there was nothing for him, and he tossed the paper aside.

Simultaneously the bathroom door burst open, and in strode a tall, rangy woman in her twenties, naked and oblivious, shedding water athletically in all directions as she toweled dry her tangled ink-black hair. Rachel, an American expat and frequent guest of the household, stood six feet tall in bare feet.

“Rachel, it’s me,” he said so as not to startle her. “Max.”

“What?” She snatched her glasses from the kitchen counter and peered through them, her eyes dark blue and fathomless. “Yikes! It
is
you.”

“I finished up a couple days early.”

“Well, way to go, Daddyo!” She pranced over to deliver a welcoming embrace, then, recalling that she was naked, wrapped herself somewhat belatedly in the towel. “Have a good time?”

“Ah, you know.
Comme çi, comme ça
. Where’s Odile?”

“Haven’t seen her. I’m just here for hygiene and such.” She lived with her Dutch boyfriend, Groot, on a decrepit houseboat docked nearby on the Seine. Odile had extended them bathing privileges within an hour of meeting Rachel, almost a year ago. “You get your mail?”

Deciding to defer the phone messages, he wrote a short note for Odile, nodded goodbye to Rachel, and left.

Max had long had it in mind to film Rachel. She was all limbs and unexpected angles, and she moved with a recklessness that might have been merely awkward were it not for her scale. With it, though, she was an event. He half expected her, on some sunny afternoon, to take a long, straight run and lift up into the air like a late-developing seabird. The right scenario in which to explore these kinetic rarities hadn’t yet revealed itself, so his demeanor with her was frequently one of irritated speculation. Maybe she had to be her own film.